What to Know Today
Power outages in North Carolina county caused by “intentional” damage by firearms. About 45,000 people in Moore County lost power over the weekend after two substations were hit by multiple rounds of gunfire in a “targeted” attack on Saturday, according to Sheriff Ronnie Fields, who called the perpetrators “cowards.” The FBI is joining the criminal investigation into the outages. According to the utility provider’s outage map, at least 33,000 people were still without power on Monday morning.
In Uvalde, lawsuits concerning massacre stack up. The city is suing District Attorney Christina Mitchell for not handing over bodycam footage of the Robb Elementary School massacre, saying that without the video investigators are unable to determine if the city needs to take disciplinary action against Uvalde Police. Last week, survivors of the shooting filed a $27 billion class-action lawsuit against the city, the school district, law enforcement agencies, and individual officers, while the family of a fourth-grade victim filed another wide-ranging suit.
Alex Jones files for personal bankruptcy. In documents filed to a Texas court on Friday, the right-wing conspiracy theorist and InfoWars host estimated his assets to be between $1 billion and $10 billion and his liabilities to be the same amount. The Chapter 11 filing comes months after Jones’s media company, Free Speech Systems, also filed for bankruptcy — and after Jones transferred millions as damages for Sandy Hook families appeared imminent. Political powerhouse: A decade after the Sandy Hook massacre, the victims’ families are at the forefront of a new political force in America.
Seattle rejects plan to use ShotSpotter. The City Council decided not to fund a $1 million proposal to pilot the controversial gunshot-detection system, after other cities identified issues with the technology. In a phone interview with Axios, Seattle City Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, chair of the budget committee, referenced a report out of Chicago that showed ShotSpotter was unreliable and possibly dangerous to communities of color. As The Trace reported last year, a growing body of evidence suggests ShotSpotter is ineffective.
Oregon gun regulations could be delayed. Measure 114, a ballot initiative that narrowly passed during the midterms, is scheduled to take effect December 8. But a federal judge will decide this week whether it should be suspended while a challenge to its permit-to-purchase mandate and ban on high-capacity magazines plays out in court. According to The Oregonian, gun sales in the state have surged since the vote.
Data Point
21 percent — the increase in gun homicide rates in counties that used ShotSpotter in states with right-to-carry laws, between 1999 and 2016. Counties that used ShotSpotter in states with permit-to-purchase laws saw a 15 percent reduction, suggesting that the technology has no significant impact on gun homicides or arrests. [Journal of Urban Health]
