Good morning, Bulletin readers. The Trace is taking a brief holiday respite, so today’s edition of the Daily Bulletin will be the last of the year, though we’ve got one more weekly wrap-up in the chute and will email you installments from our 2019-in-review package as those go live over the next several days. Thank you for your loyal readership. We’ll see you in another decade: regular Bulletin service resumes on January 2, 2020.
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WHAT TO KNOW TODAY
NEW from THE TRACE: The most memorable gun violence journalism of 2019. We may be the only newsroom dedicated to full-time coverage of gun violence, but we’re glad to share the beat with talented and dedicated journalists from other media outlets. In 2019, our counterparts broke new ground with stories that illuminated hidden dimensions of the crisis, captured its human costs, and dug into interventions that could prevent shootings and save lives. Today, we continue a Trace tradition: compiling a list of the stories produced by journalists in other newsrooms that we admired the most. You can find them here.
Thirteen people were shot at a commemoration for a gunshot victim in Chicago. Four of the victims were critically wounded by the barrage of bullets fired by two gunmen at a house party on the city’s South Side shortly after midnight on Sunday. One person has been arrested for illegal possession of a firearm. The gathering was in honor of a 22-year-old man fatally shot during an April carjacking. It was the most people wounded in a single incident of Chicago gun violence since 2013. Also this weekend: Eight people were shot, one fatally, outside a banquet hall in Minnesota. Seven people were shot at a hookah lounge in Baltimore. Seven people were shot, one fatally, in a drive-by shooting at an apartment complex in Mississippi. The big picture: This year to date, there have been 404 mass shootings in which four or more victims have been injured or killed. That’s the highest total recorded by Gun Violence Archive since it started keeping track in 2014.
Federal gun violence research funding gets Trump’s signature. The $1.4 trillion spending package signed by the president on Friday includes $25 million for studies of gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. It’s the first time in more than two decades that federal funds have been pledged for that purpose.
Sellers of high-capacity ammunition magazines face repercussions for skirting New Jersey’s ban on the devices. State Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said that Florida-based Elite Aluminum and 22Mods4All ignored cease-and-desist letters he sent earlier this year ordering them to stop selling high-capacity magazines to residents of New Jersey, which has outlawed the accessories. “These lawsuits serve as yet another warning to the industry: Hide the extent of your unlawful sales from our investigators, and we will see you in court,” Grewal said.
A gun rights group is mounting a legal challenge to Pennsylvania’s new ghost gun crackdown. On Friday the California-based Firearms Policy Coalition filed a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania State Police, which received guidance from the state attorney general last week to treat unassembled ghost gun kits as firearms.
The Texas police officer who shot a woman in her Fort Worth home was indicted for murder. Aaron Dean tendered his resignation days after he shot Atatiana Jefferson, 28, while she was playing video games with her nephew on October 14. He was arrested soon after and freed on bail. On Friday, he was indicted by a grand jury. “Justice was served on that part, but I know we got a long way to go,” Jefferson’s mother said.
DATA POINT
Our country has recorded 14,808 gun homicides this year, according to one unofficial count, surpassing last year’s total with a week remaining in 2019. — Gun Violence Archive
