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WHAT TO KNOW TODAY
Cincinnati joins the 2020 list of cities with multiple mass shootings in a single day. In all, during a 90-minute span early Sunday morning, gun violence claimed four lives and caused at least 17 injuries in the Ohio city. In one of the incidents, two people were killed and nine others were wounded at a late-night gathering in a park; another left one person dead and three others injured in the Avondale neighborhood. Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis have also had days with more than one mass shooting this year, The Cincinnati Enquirer notes. Across America, there were nine mass shootings over the weekend, including a domestic rampage in Michigan that left four people dead.
Another person was shot over a coronavirus restriction. A security guard at a gas station in St. Louis opened fire on three men who attacked him after being told to comply with the city’s face mask mandate. We’ve spotted at least 13 shootings related to infection-avoidance mandates, leaving at least two people dead and nine people wounded. You can find our tracker here.
Armed protesters faced off at Confederate monument. Far-right militia members and Black counter-protesters armed with assault-style weapons gathered outside Stone Mountain Memorial in Georgia, where several heated arguments ensued. City officials had denied a permit to an Arkansas militia that intended to demonstrate at the memorial itself, and the park was closed when the group insisted on rallying anyway. Police made no arrests.
Federal monitoring overlooked far-right involvement in civil unrest. BuzzFeed News obtained internal emails and intelligence reports that circulated within the Federal Protective Service, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, during the first weeks of this summer’s protests. The hundreds of pages of correspondence and briefings contain only one mention of white supremacists, related to a Washington, D.C., protest. BuzzFeed notes that while the feds extensively attempted to track protest networks through social media, agents appear to have largely ignored the threat posed by armed “boogaloo” believers, some of whom have called for committing violence at Black Lives Matter demonstrations to incite a second civil war.
NRA loses lawsuit over gun shop closures. A federal judge dismissed the organization’s challenge to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s executive order shuttering gun shops in March to curb the spread of Covid-19. New York was one of a handful of states to declare firearms retailers nonessential businesses. The judge pointed to case law that bars associations from bringing actions on behalf of members, and ruled that the National Rifle Association had failed to identify an injury that the executive order had inflicted upon it.
White Georgia state trooper who shot Black motorist charged with murder. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation charged Jacob G. Thompson, 27, in the killing of Julian Edward Roosevelt Lewis, 60, earlier this month. Lewis had gone to the store to get a soda for his wife when Thompson pulled him over for a broken taillight. Lewis, who has been fired from the force, said he opened fire because he thought Thompson was going to drive into him. Thompson’s family wasn’t alerted of his death for several hours.
California researchers to study root causes of gun violence. A team from the University of California, Los Angeles, will map shootings by trauma center zones in the city and link gunshot injuries to social determinants of health in an effort to better understand the factors that leave some populations at greater risk of victimization. The project is one of seven to receive financial support through the latest grants from the state-funded University of California Firearm Violence Research Center. Another will look at how outreach workers with the successful Advance Peace model sustain themselves while doing their work.
DATA POINT
At least 40 people were shot in a 48-hour stretch in New York City starting from Friday night to early Sunday. [PIX 11]
