What To Know Today
Senate budget appropriators earmark $60 million for gun violence research funding. The Senate Appropriations Committee released its draft government funding bill for Fiscal Year 2023, and the bill for the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services includes $35 million for the CDC (an increase of $22.5 million from last year’s enacted level) and $25 million for the National Institutes of Health (an increase from $12.5 million last year). The allotment for gun violence research matches what the House Appropriations Committee released in its own recent funding bill. The Senate bill also includes $100 million for a CDC grant program to support community-led violence intervention programs and $50 million toward community-based violence prevention programs at the DOJ, funding priorities that were likewise reflected in the House draft bill. From The Trace: After a two-decade freeze on federal funding, the CDC and NIH in 2019 began backing dozens of studies examining gun use and access. The first studies are nearly here, but researchers say that the field still has a lot of catching up to do.
About a third of people killed by the police since 2015 were fleeing at the time. That’s according to figures from Mapping Police Violence shared with The Guardian, which documented more than 2,500 cases of people running away, driving away, or otherwise attempting to flee when an officer fatally shot them or used other lethal force. That amounts to an average of one such killing per day. Officers were charged in 50 cases, or about 2 percent of the total. Nine officers — or 0.35 percent of cases — were convicted.
Democratic bill would task FTC with investigating gunmakers for advertising practices. New legislation from Representative Tom Malinowski of New Jersey and Robin Kelly of Illinois, would direct the Federal Trade Commission to file a report to Congress that identifies any gunmaker ads designed to appeal to people under 18, that imply or encourage the illegal use of guns, or that feature assault-style weapons. The bill also asks the FTC to make and enforce rules to address deceptive or unfair advertising practice in marketing guns. The bill comes after CEOs of several gunmakers appeared before a House committee and defended their businesses against accusations that their companies help fuel the U.S. gun violence epidemic.
Seventeen Republican state AG’s filed suit against President Biden’s ghost gun rules. The suit is the latest action against the ATF’s finalized rule that cracks down on privately made, unserialized guns. The rule, set to go into effect on August 24, updates the ATF’s definition of a firearm to include so-called unfinished or split receivers, making such components applicable to federal gun restrictions under the Gun Control Act and subjecting ghost gun kits — which include unfinished firearm receivers — to background checks by federal firearm licensees. The AG’s suit is asking a federal court to block the rule from going into effect and comes after a similar challenge from gun rights groups.
Data Point
85 percent and 77 percent — the respective increases in the gun suicide rate among young Black men and young Black women between 2013 and 2019. In February, we observed a similar trend based on CDC data. [Journal of Suicide Research]
