Top Story
San Jose, California, has no data on whether its estimated 52,000 gun owners have complied with an ordinance requiring them to obtain liability insurance since the rule went into effect on January 1. The city hasn’t issued any citations for violating the mandate, which works on an honor system, nor has it collected any of the “harm reduction” fees that the ordinance requires gun owners to pay annually. [San Jose Inside]
Context: It was never actually clear that San Jose’s plan would work as advertised.
From Our Team
Auto sears are “flooding our communities,” ATF Director Steven Dettelbach said Tuesday in a call for immediate action to address a surge in crimes involving the small devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire like machine guns.
Speaking virtually to a gun violence prevention forum in New York City, Dettelbach cited a recent agency report that found a shocking increase in recoveries of auto sears and other machine gun conversion devices. The ATF data backs up previous reporting from The Trace and VICE News, which found auto sears — which are cheap, easily installed, and difficult for law enforcement to detect — were involved in dozens of shootings by extremists, mass shooters, and drug traffickers.
What to Know Today
When a man with a replica gun fired eight rounds in San Francisco’s Schneerson Jewish Center, nobody expected it to make the news — just another alleged hate crime in America, congregants thought. Now, after footage of the shooting went viral, the synagogue’s community is trying to recover, and reckon with a country awash in hate. [Los Angeles Times]
New York Mayor Eric Adams mixed religion and politics in a speech delivered to the city’s faith leaders, saying at one point that “when we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools.” Many New Yorkers were baffled by the mayor’s comments. [Gothamist]
A Proud Boys member testified that the group was willing to use violence to prevent Joe Biden from taking the presidency, if it came to that, at the seditious conspiracy trial against Proud Boys leaders for their roles in the January 6 insurrection. [Courthouse News]
St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter reissued calls for greater firearm restrictions in response to shootings at two separate celebration of life services this weekend — and the face of the state’s gun rights movement admitted that this might be the year the Minnesota Legislature passes long-stagnant reforms. [CBS News Minnesota]
Philadelphia says its gun violence intervention initiative helped decrease shootings among participants by as much as 50 percent, city officials announced Tuesday. The program offers social services to groups of young people at risk of becoming involved in gun violence. [The Philadelphia Inquirer/City of Philadelphia]
Data Point
570 percent — the increase in the number of machine gun conversion devices the ATF recovered from 2017 through 2021 over the previous five-year period. The agency collected 5,454 such devices in that time, up from 814 in the prior five years. [ATF National Tracing Center]
Get the Bulletin in your inbox. Sign up for our newsletters here.
