Featured Story
When Texas Governor Greg Abbott granted a controversial and highly unusual pardon to Daniel Perry, the man convicted of murder for shooting and killing veteran Garrett Foster during a racial justice protest in 2020, it offered a glimmer of hope to domestic violence and human trafficking victims with criminal records. Abbott said he’d pardoned Perry because he’d been acting in self-defense, and many abuse survivors with convictions have sought clemency for the same reason. But despite a specialized application for survivors, the vast majority have not received pardons. Just last month, a woman who said she’d been acting in self-defense when she killed her abuser was denied. [Houston Chronicle]
From The Trace
When Otis Ryans was robbed at gunpoint inside his home last summer, it didn’t initially make the news in Philadelphia. No shots were fired, and Ryans walked away physically unscathed. Emotionally, however, Ryans was traumatized — and his attacker, a co-worker at a grocery store, wasn’t arrested until that October, after he’d robbed two other people at gunpoint.
Situations like Ryans’s inspired District Attorney Larry Krasner to start Philadelphia’s first-ever Prolific Gun Offenders Unit. Its mission: prosecuting repeat, violent gun offenders with prior arrests or felony convictions. In other words, people who are wanted for crimes involving guns that are not specifically homicides. In his latest story, The Trace’s Mensah M. Dean explains how the unit works, the crimes its lawyers are targeting, and the logic behind its formation.
What to Know Today
A man who was caught carrying a gun near the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month was arrested in Chicago on Monday after police spotted him near the Democratic National Convention site. Later, during a traffic stop, officers found him with a handgun, “multiple loaded magazines,” and a police-style radio. The man, who holds a concealed carry license in Wisconsin, faces a misdemeanor gun charge. [Chicago Sun-Times]
Howell, Michigan, is a city with historic ties to the Ku Klux Klan and where white supremacists held a hateful demonstration as recently as last month. During a visit to a sheriff’s department there on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris, his opponent in the race for the White House, held office during “a 43 percent increase in violent crime.” Though violent crime spiked early in the pandemic, data shows it’s been dropping and is currently near a 50-year low. This year, there are signs that murder is falling faster nationwide than it has since at least 1960. [Detroit Free Press/The Guardian/Jeff Asher]
In Georgia, a Democratic state senator is trying to reframe gun safety as a bipartisan issue about protecting children. During the first meeting of an exploratory committee on safe firearm storage, Senator Emmanuel Jones emphasized that he is not seeking to discuss “a gun deal,” but rather measures like tax incentives, education campaigns, and safe storage requirements in homes with young kids. [GPB/Associated Press]
U.S. Representative Jared Golden tends to stand apart from his fellow Democrats. In Congress, he sides with Republicans more often than anyone else in his party, and instead of traveling to Chicago for the national convention, he’s stumping back home in Maine. The fissure, however, could be part of a reelection strategy: Golden’s opponent has accused him of “flip-flopping” his position on firearms after the mass shooting in Lewiston last October, when Golden apologized for previously voting against gun reform and reversed his opposition to a ban on assault weapons. [NBC]
Police in a Philadelphia suburb say that a local Republican official fell victim to “swatting” — a term for falsely reporting an emergency to elicit an armed police response — hours after he endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential bid during a CNN appearance. In response to an anonymous email claiming that someone had a “gun to my head” and listing the official’s address, Upper Merion Police Department officers appeared at his home with guns drawn. [Philadelphia Magazine]
Archive
In America, Accidental Shootings Among Children Occur Nearly Every Other Day
A reader asked us how often a child unintentionally shoots another child with an unsecured gun. Here’s what the data says. (June 2023)
