What to Know Today
One of the suspected shooters at a Philadelphia high school football game had a felony record. State law allowed him to buy ammo anyway. Four days before a group of people opened fire on teenagers leaving a JV football scrimmage in Philadelphia’s Roxborough neighborhood, killing a 14-year-old, one of the people charged in the shooting purchased $132.84 worth of ammunition with cash — despite a felony conviction. It wasn’t illegal for the gun shop to sell him ammo, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, thanks to Pennsylvania’s lack of state laws requiring background checks for ammunition purchases. Though people convicted of felonies are federally prohibited from purchasing ammunition, ammo sales in most states are not subject to the same regulations as firearms themselves, according to the Giffords Law Center, and no federal laws require a background check to buy ammo.
Alleged Stockton serial killer arrested. Police on Saturday arrested a man suspected to have shot and killed five people in the Northern California city in recent months. The man is also suspected of killing a man in Oakland in April 2021, and wounding a woman in Stockton one week later, the Associated Press reported. Police say the man was “out hunting” at the time of the arrest.
Tennessee appellate court rules public housing landlords can’t prohibit tenants from possessing guns. The decision by the Tennessee Court of Appeals last week was the result of a lawsuit by a tenant evicted from his home after a public housing authority discovered that he kept a legal handgun in his residence, Tennessee Lookout reported. The court ruled that public housing developments do not fall under the Bruen “sensitive places” exception to gun bans. The aftermath: Bruen is reshaping gun laws across the U.S. We’re tracking the effects of the decision here.
Jamaica bans music and TV broadcasts glorifying gun violence. The ban, which also bars broadcasts that purportedly lionize drug use and scamming, is meant to combat the “impression that criminality is an accepted feature of Jamaican culture and society,” the government said. Artists have criticized the measure, the AP reported, saying that it cuts off the part of the population most affected by gun violence and that the government should instead address the root causes of violence. Jamaica had the highest murder rate in the Caribbean and Latin America in 2020 and 2021, according to Insight Crime.
Five killed in shooting in Raleigh, North Carolina. A gunman shot seven people, five fatally, on Thursday in the Hedingham neighborhood of northeastern Raleigh, The News & Observer reported, the deadliest shooting in the state so far this year. After a standoff, police took the suspected gunman, a teenager, into custody with life-threatening injuries. In the shooting’s aftermath, civil rights and gun safety groups called on local and state officials to invest in community violence intervention strategies and pass a red flag law.
Mexican officials say Texas’s gun laws allow cartels to stockpile guns. Despite the high levels of violence in Mexico, there’s only one store that can legally sell guns, The Guardian reports, and in recent years it was selling fewer than 40 firearms per day. Meanwhile, Texas currently has no laws requiring a license to purchase high-caliber weapons, meaning that it’s relatively easy for cartel members to purchase guns and then sell them in Mexico at triple or quadruple the price. Alejandro Celorio Alcántara, legal adviser to the Mexican Foreign Affairs Ministry, estimates that half a million guns are purchased legally in the U.S. and trafficked into Mexico each year. Last week, the Mexican government filed a lawsuit against five gun dealers in Arizona, alleging that they have knowingly participated in trafficking guns across the border.
Data Point
5 — the number of states that require a background check to purchase ammunition. No federal law requires a background check to buy ammo. [The Philadelphia Inquirer]
