Featured Story
Police violence is often framed as an urban problem, but a new investigation revealed that county sheriff’s officers, who act as the primary law enforcement agents in America’s rural areas and towns, are three times more lethal than city police. An analysis of nearly 10 years of federal data showed that, while more people overall died in encounters with city police, deaths in encounters with county sheriffs occurred at a much higher rate. In many cases, small-town officers face little accountability for deadly violence. [CBS News]
In Guns We Trust
Today’s twentysomethings came of age with the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, which killed 20 first-graders and six adults. As Gen Z reaches adulthood, they have reinvigorated the gun safety movement, helping to build a national effort to combat gun violence — which for the first time in decades appears to be making meaningful progress.
In the final episode of “Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust” — a podcast produced by Long Lead and Campside Media in collaboration with The Trace, and distributed by PRX — host Garrett Graff examines the toll gun violence has taken on Gen Z, whose lives have been defined by school lockdowns and active shooter drills unimaginable to previous generations.
What to Know Today
A massive leak of Mexican military intelligence revealed U.S. gun shops and buyers tied to 78,000 firearms recovered at crime scenes south of the border, and which types of weapons are being trafficked. Three of the top purchasers were linked to the ATF scandal known as “Fast and Furious,” a bungled gun trafficking investigation that took place from 2006 to 2011 in Arizona. [USA TODAY]
Two years after 19 children and two teachers were killed in the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, several victims’ families filed lawsuits against Daniel Defense, the manufacturer that produced the shooter’s rifle; Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook; and the company behind Call of Duty, a video game featuring Daniel Defense weapons. The lawsuits accuse the companies of marketing semiautomatic weapons to the Uvalde shooter before he was 18. [The Texas Tribune]
Four years ago, the U.S. went through a national reckoning on policing after officers killed George Floyd in Minneapolis and fatally shot Breonna Taylor inside her Louisville, Kentucky, apartment. But since racial justice protests erupted across the country in the summer of 2020, many calls to pass reforms have stalled or been replaced by “tough-on-crime” approaches. [NBC News]
The National Rifle Association has a new CEO: Doug Hamlin, who ran for leadership on a reform platform, was elevated to the job last week in a 35-31 vote by the NRA board. Hamlin’s election could indicate a new direction for the scandal-plagued NRA, and comes after the organization and former chief executive Wayne LaPierre were found liable in a New York civil corruption trial. [The Reload]
In 2014, Chin Rodger’s son killed six people in a hate-fueled stabbing and shooting rampage in Isla Vista, California. In the decade since the massacre, Rodger has grieved the loss of her son and the pain he created for so many others, and joined the effort to prevent similar violence in the future — most recently by sharing previously unreported case evidence and details of her son’s life in the hopes of providing a clearer understanding of his attack. [Mother Jones]
Texas Governor Greg Abbott granted a full pardon to Daniel Perry, the man convicted of murder for shooting and killing veteran Garrett Foster during a racial justice protest in 2020. Abbott had promised to pardon Perry since his conviction more than a year ago, but was unable to do so until the state Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended clemency earlier this month; experts on the workings of the board say the pardon recommendation, which included restoration of Perry’s firearm rights, was highly unusual. [The Texas Tribune/Texas Monthly]
Nearly all members of the Republican Attorneys General Association last week joined a brief urging the Supreme Court to quash a lawsuit by the Mexican government alleging that a number of U.S. gunmakers were aware their firearms were being trafficked into the country. The move came two months after Smith & Wesson, one of the companies named in Mexico’s suit, gave $15,000 to RAGA, apparently its first donation to the group. [The Salt Lake Tribune]
Data Point
27.3 — the number of civilian deaths per arrest in incidents with sheriff’s offices, per 100,000, in 2022. That number was fewer than 10 for police departments. [CBS News]
