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WHAT TO KNOW TODAY
NEW from THE TRACE: Gun violence left a mark on his childhood. He says people like him should lead efforts to reduce it. The shooting of a friend in high school forced Marco Vargas to acknowledge his own gun-related trauma from his youth. After his freshman year at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Vargas turned his anti-violence vision into a reality with the launch of the South Central Leadership Academy. It employs Vargas and one or two other young leaders to teach more than a dozen local student gun violence survivors to become activists. The program was so successful that Vargas received funding to expand to three other cities. Ann Givens writes about his efforts here.
A growing U.S.-U.K. handgun pipeline. In the United Kingdom, where private handguns are banned and gun violence is low, the largest share of illegal firearms comes from the European Union. But The New York Times reports that British investigators have discovered an uptick in guns smuggled from the U.S., including hundreds last year. “Weapons that don’t matter in the United States, because America deals in millions, routinely have an enormous impact in the U.K., because of the extraordinary scarcity of handguns,” said one small-arms expert. “Dozens can have an enormous impact on British crime.” Experts also fear smuggling could worsen as a result of post-Brexit border tightening and the Trump administration’s efforts to relax rules on gun exports.
A slain youth activist’s Chicago high school voted to remove school officers. The school council vote came right after a tribute to Caleb Reed, the 17-year-old who was fatally shot earlier this month. Reed, who was an organizer with the group VOYCE, found his activism after being detained at a school event for not having an ID. “This is an important and poignant victory, as we will be saying our final goodbyes to Caleb tomorrow at his funeral,” said a high school grandparent and meeting participant. More from The Trace: We wrote about Caleb’s work, including a project to study trauma therapy as a means for reducing gun violence, in last week’s edition of the The Canon.
Also in Chicago: A protest highlights a generational divide on the South Side. On Tuesday, a coalition of youth activists demonstrated outside a police station in Englewood over the police shooting of a 20-year-old in the neighborhood two days before. Block Club Chicago reports on the tensions between neighborhood residents and some of the protesters, many of whom came from elsewhere in the city. “We have to stop letting outsiders come into our community and antagonize our police. Now our police are bitter with us. We’re not gonna have it,” said one neighborhood activist. For its part, one of the youth groups that helped launch the protest — GoodKids MadCity, which has members from the community — said it left the demonstration because of “aggressive agitators.”
The Annapolis office of The Capital Gazette newspaper is closing. The paper’s parent company, Tribune Publishing, cited a series of cost-cutting measures that affected several of the papers under its ownership, including The New York Daily News and Orlando Sentinel. A mass shooting at the Gazette in 2018 left five people dead. The event prompted its move to the current location, which was the subject of a TIME documentary last year. “It’s not just an office,” tweeted reporter Danielle Ohl, alongside images of memorials to the attack’s victims.
DATA POINT
54 percent — how many homicide victims since June in Columbus, Ohio, were under 25. At current rates, the city is on pace for its deadliest year on record and police say the average age of victims has dropped from 37 to 24 in a year. [The Columbus Dispatch]
