Featured Story
The proportion of Americans living in a household with a firearm has dropped over the last 30 years, according to a new RAND study. An estimated 30 percent of the decline was associated with demographic changes. [JAMA Network Open]
Shooting
Since the Israel-Hamas war began, antisemitic and Islamophobic episodes have surged nationwide. As The Trace’s Jennifer Mascia reported last year, that includes bigotry-fueled gun crimes: Per data from the Gun Violence Archive, in the first two months of the war, there were at least four gun-related bias incidents in the U.S. thought to be motivated by the conflict.
Perhaps the most high-profile of these was the shooting of Palestinian students Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdel Hamid, and Tahseen Aliahmad in Burlington, Vermont, the weekend after Thanksgiving. The three had grown up together in the West Bank, The New York Times Magazine reports, where they regularly passed through military checkpoints manned by soldiers with long guns and the threat of violence from Israeli forces loomed large. In 2021, Hisham and Kinnan, the children of American citizens, came to the U.S. to attend college; Tahseen joined a year later, after a Canadian visa rejection forced him to make new plans for higher education.
Thanksgiving in Burlington was a reunion for them — somewhere that was supposed to be safer than home. All three were shot in the attack, and though they survived, Hisham was paralyzed. Months later, they’re grappling with the attack and the state of hate in America. The New York Times Magazine has more.
What to Know Today
After a 2023 mass shooting at a mall in Allen, Texas, a podcaster asserted that the U.S. would rank near-last in a global gun violence ranking if data from Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and St. Louis were removed. That claim doesn’t hold up: Excluding gun homicides from those five cities would decrease the national rate from 5 deaths per 100,000 people to 4.5 deaths per 100,000 people, which isn’t enough to shift the U.S. to a lower ranking. [PolitiFact]
In Tallahassee, Florida, a nonprofit partnered with a local Ford dealership for a measure to prevent thefts of firearms from vehicles. They created a keychain with a simple message for gun owners: “Remember to lock your cars.” [Tallahassee Democrat]
U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez, a San Diego-based judge with a history of ruling against gun regulations, ruled that a roughly 100-year-old California law banning the possession of club-like weapons violates the Second Amendment. In 2021, prior to the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, Benitez upheld the law on the grounds that it qualified as “longstanding.” [San Diego Union-Tribune]
How did presidents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries feel about guns? Firearms law expert Andrew Willinger examines the personal gun ownership and political actions of those in the White House from the Civil War through 1932. [Duke Center for Firearms Law]
TikTok Shop, the social video app’s e-commerce feature, appears to be facilitating the sale and distribution of firearm accessories, including illegal conversion devices, in violation of company policy. [Media Matters]
Archive
How Many Guns Are Circulating in the U.S.?: We attempt to pin down a central — yet elusive — data point in the conversation around gun violence. (December 2023)
