Good morning, Bulletin readers. In today’s roundup: Calls for comity in the gun debate from a corporate suite and a Republican legislative office, a gun scare at a North Carolina school, and an FYI from the feds to gun dealers and law enforcement on the forthcoming rule change on bump stocks.
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WHAT TO KNOW TODAY
Police arrested an armed man in a school cafeteria. Police are trying to figure out how the man was able to enter a North Carolina high school on Monday with a backpack filled with bullets and two handguns, which he pointed at officers before he was detained.
Law enforcement agencies and gun shops are getting a heads up on the bump stock ban. A Minnesota TV news team obtained a copy of a memo circulated by the Department of Justice laying out new details about an upcoming reclassification of devices that allow semiautomatic weapons to approximate machine guns. According to the memo, anyone with a bump stock will be required to discard, destroy, or surrender it within 90 days of the rule going into effect.
Five dozen Dick’s Sporting Goods employees resigned over its post-Parkland limits on gun sales. The departures were among a total workforce in the tens of thousands. Ed Stack, the company’s CEO, offered a window into the internal fallout during a Wall Street Journal panel. Stack said he would be willing to hire back an ex-worker who quit in protest, then went on Fox News to talk about it. “It’s OK to have differing views, as long as you can have a rational, cerebral conversation about it,” he said.
The black man killed by police at a mall in Thanksgiving was shot three times in the back, according to an independent autopsy report released Monday. Emantic “E.J.” Bradford, 21, was a gun owner who witnesses say was steering people away from the scene of the shooting. “We believe based on this forensic evidence that this officer should be charged with a crime,” a lawyer representing Bradford’s family said.
A gun-owning Republican legislator will push for a red flag law in Tennessee. Steve Dickerson is a state senator from West Nashville. “As a lifelong Republican, gun owner and avid shooter, I respect and know the importance of the Second Amendment. I also know reducing gun violence in Tennessee will require leadership from people with a variety of backgrounds,” he wrote in an op-ed explaining his intentions.
Gun sales were down in November. The FBI’s background check figures, considered a simple proxy for gun sales, show a dip last month. November’s checks fell by 9.8 percent compared to last year, when Black Friday gun sales set an all-time record. This year, gun sales on the day after Thanksgiving fell by more than 10 percent.
An NRA instructor in Ohio was arrested for forging concealed carry training certificates. Police say the man issued the documents without actually providing training. Ohio requires gun owners to demonstrate their shooting ability before they can carry a firearm in public. Dozens of other states don’t: As The Trace reported in 2016, in more than half the country, you can carry a concealed gun without proving you know how to shoot one.
A domestic shooting spilled into the entrance of a Kansas hospital. After firing on a man and a woman, police say the gunman chased the victims through Kansas City, Kansas, and into the entrance of the University of Kansas Medical Center, where he shot the man again. He then shot and killed himself. The attack appears to have stemmed from a domestic dispute. Both victims were treated at the hospital. The man was in critical condition, while the woman was expected to survive.
ONE LAST THING
The club no parent wants to join keeps growing. Hundreds of grieving parents across America sent a child to school one day and never saw her or him again because of a bullet. Some of them have formed a bond, and their efforts to comfort each other are the subject of a Time magazine cover story.
“When you lose a child violently and publicly, there’s an outpouring of support at first,” says Sandy Phillips, who lost her daughter Jessi in the 2012 movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado. She says the support of other parents who have had similar experiences can be especially helpful after the attention fades. “Once the vigils are over and the media is gone, that’s when things get really bad. The world moves on, and you don’t.”
