Good morning, Bulletin readers. A scathing report suggests that Florida’s post-Parkland school security mandates are facing considerable hurdles to implementation. That story and more in your Monday roundup.
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WHAT TO KNOW TODAY
Police made an arrest in connection with the Jersey City shooting. The man’s contact information was found in the pocket of one of the perpetrators of last Tuesday’s mass shooting. He was charged Saturday with being a felon in possession of firearms, including three AR-15-style rifles. Authorities did not reveal his connection to the shooters. Meanwhile, The New York Times has a harrowing tick-tock of the rampage, which authorities believe was motivated by hatred of Jewish people and law enforcement authorities.
Panel bashes Florida schools’ safety failures. A grand jury convened by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis to measure the implementation of post-Parkland, mandatory security measures issued a report finding that some school staffers trained to be armed guard have been pulled from the program because of “defects in their backgrounds.” The grand jury further concluded that “squabbling between local and regional stakeholders” and inadequate funding has hindered schools’ preparedness for responding to potential threats.
The world’s largest private security company has lost track of 640 guns in the last decade. London-based G4S employs 5,700 security contractors throughout the United States. Its armed guards lose an average of one gun per week, according to an investigation by USA TODAY and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Several of the firearms have been subsequently used in crimes. Even though G4S is a federally licensed firearms dealer, it has not faced accountability from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives when its guns go missing and become crime weapons.
Gun owners lined up for a buyback near the site of one of this summer’s mass shootings. A buyback on Saturday in Gilroy, California — where 16 people were shot, three fatally, at the annual garlic festival in July — netted hundreds of handguns and rifles and dozens of assault-style rifles. Police paid out a total of $47,000 for the weapons, but several participants said they weren’t doing it for the cash. “The money meant nothing compared to the thought of the guns ending up in the hands of the wrong person,” one said.
The brother of a Sandy Hook victim helped the local football team clinch a high school state title on the massacre’s anniversary. Seven years after the school shooting, the Newtown High School football team claimed the trophy on Saturday with a winning touchdown pass in the last seconds of the game. Ben Pinto, whose brother, Jack, died in the 2012 shooting, plays linebacker for the team, which finished the season undefeated. “We knew we had to bring it home for our town,” one of the players said.
Hundreds of students in Wisconsin staged a walkout to protest gun violence. Teens from 12 high schools across the greater Milwaukee area rallied on Friday to draw attention to the gunfire claiming the lives of their peers and lawmakers’ reluctance to pass stronger gun laws. “The government would be acting different if they were the ones coming to school every day worried that ‘I might not go home today’ or ‘what if this is the last time I see my sister?’” one teen told the Journal Sentinel. That same day, two boys, 15 and 17, were fatally shot in Milwaukee.
DATA POINT
At least 14 kids under 18 have been fatally shot this year in Wisconsin, half of them in Milwaukee. — Gun Violence Archive
