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WHAT TO KNOW TODAY
NRA scandals and legal battles may have cost the gun group $100 million. That’s the figure used by Wayne LaPierre in a recording of a January board meeting obtained by NPR: “The cost that we bore was probably about a hundred million dollar hit in lost revenue and real cost to this Association in 2018 and 2019.” Last week, Will Van Sant unearthed court filings alleging that the National Rifle Association spent $54 million on legal fees for its outside counsel alone over the last two years. Don’t miss: Our guide to every known investigation into the NRA.
Chicago announces $6 million for violence prevention programs. The funds will be used to expand street outreach services in the 15 neighborhoods that have experienced the highest levels of violence in the past few years. An additional $1.5 million will go toward victim support services. The Mayor’s Office said Tuesday that street outreach groups “have historically lacked city funding support.” As we’ve reported, gun violence prevention work in Chicago has relied heavily on private funders in recent years.
The Washington, D.C., Police Department is now the city’s only federal gun licensee. District resident Charles Sykes had held that distinction since the Supreme Court struck down the city’s gun prohibition in 2008. There are currently no gun stores in the nation’s capital, so Sykes acted as the sole authorized go-between for city residents and dealers in other states. After he quit last month, the Metropolitan Police applied for a federal firearms license so it could facilitate transfers. City officials hope to find another private dealer to take over the role, The Washington Post reports.
NEW FROM THE TRACE
Child access prevention laws are increasingly proven to protect kids from guns. That’s one of the major findings in an exhaustive review of gun policies released today by the RAND Corporation. The new report, a follow-up to one published in 2018, assesses the effectiveness of 18 gun laws. Child access prevention policies, which allow authorities to criminally charge adults who grant children access to firearms, emerged as the most effective. Contributor Melinda Wenner Moyer has the story.
More from the RAND study: How many Americans own guns? The question is essential to our understanding of gun violence — but reliable data on the subject is scarce. Included in the new RAND report, however, is a synthesis of existing research on state-level gun ownership. The resulting analysis fills in the details of a trend whose contours were already known: The prevalence of gun ownership has declined in virtually every state over the past several decades. Daniel Nass explains RAND’s methodology — which one gun violence researcher described as “comprehensive and statistically sophisticated” — and created some visuals from the data here.
DATA POINT
There were 21 homicides in New York City in the last two weeks, according to the NYPD, more than twice as many as the same period last year. A professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice attributed the uptick to the “super-heated environment” of the pandemic, but added that overall levels were still low by historical standards. — New York Daily News
