Guns: how much longer will it take ....

YBOR CITY, Fla. — Two people were killed, including a 14-year-old boy, and 16 others injured in a shooting in Ybor City.

Tampa's Police Chief says one person is in custody in connection with the shooting, identified as 22-year-old Tyrell Phillips, and is facing second-degree murder charges.

3 Palestinian students were shot in Vermont -
Civil rights groups call for close look at motive

Three Palestinian college students were shot in Burlington, Vermont, on Saturday evening,
prompting calls from civil rights organizations and the victims’ families for authorities to
look into possible bias by the attacker.

The 20-year-old men are all receiving medical care, according to a Sunday news release
from the Burlington Police Department. “Two are stable, while one has sustained much more
serious injuries.”

The students were walking on Prospect Street while visiting a relative in Burlington for
the Thanksgiving holiday when “they were confronted by a white man with a handgun,”
says the release.

US breaks record for most mass shootings in single year after weekend murders
Country has had 38 mass shootings – in which at least 203 people have died – so far this year, passing previous high of 36

A series of murders over the weekend have propelled the United States to a grisly new record: the most recorded mass shootings in a year.

Two attacks on Sunday occurring within a couple of hours of each other in Texas and Washington state were the year’s 37th and 38th mass shootings. Authorities believe a murder-suicide was responsible for the death of five family members in Vancouver, a suburb of Portland, Oregon, just across the border in Washington, while in Dallas a 21-year-old with a previous aggravated assault charge shot five people in a house, including a toddler.

It is the highest number of mass shootings in any year since at least 2006, breaking the previous record of 36, reached last year.

Another attack occurred on Sunday in New York City, when a 38-year-old man stabbed four of his relatives – including two children – as well as another woman and two police officers before they shot him. That was the country’s 41st mass killing of 2023, according to an Associated Press database.

At least 203 people have died this year in mass killings, defined as incidents in which four or more people have died, not including the killer. The FBI uses a similar definition.

Despite the media attention they attract, most mass shootings do not happen in public spaces, with at least 26 of this year’s 38 happening in private homes or shelters, according to the Washington Post.

Different groups count mass shootings and killings in different ways. Some, such as the Gun Violence Archive, include events in which multiple people are shot regardless of number of deaths, and so report much higher figures. Its tally for the year is 630 mass shootings.

Mass shooting deaths dropped in 2020 during the Covid pandemic to 21, but have since rebounded to a new record.

The Fourth of July long weekend was overshadowed by 16 shootings in which 15 people were killed and nearly 100 injured.

But the deadliest attack of 2023 happened in Lewiston, Maine, on 25 October when an army reservist murdered 18 people in a bowling alley and a bar. Previously the year’s worst attack had been in January when a man shot 11 people in Monterey Park, California, with a semi-automatic rifle during a Lunar New Year celebration.

Such data, in the rare instances it has been publicly released, has illuminated the pathways through which legally manufactured and lawfully sold firearms are obtained by criminals.

The City of Baltimore is suing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for blocking access to data on guns used to commit crimes — information it said was essential for targeting gun violence and identifying sellers who flood the city with weapons.

In a lawsuit filed on Monday, the city’s lawyers argued that the A.T.F. had adopted an overly narrow interpretation of legislation enacted in 2003 by congressional Republicans, at the urging of the National Rifle Association. The law blocked public access to gun trace data collected by the federal government on weapons recovered at the nation’s crime scenes.

The so-called Tiahrt Amendment, named for its sponsor, former Representative Todd Tiahrt, Republican of Kansas, prevents the use of federal funding to release information on traces logged in the federal firearms tracing database — amounting to a blackout on public disclosure.

A spokeswoman for the A.T.F. did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The bureau’s lawyers are skeptical that the legal challenges to the Tiahrt Amendment will succeed in appellate court, according to officials with knowledge of the situation.

Local police departments have access to trace information but are often reluctant to share it with local governments. The A.T.F. — despite President Biden’s promise to improve access to firearms data — has flatly refused to publicly release information that could identify manufacturers, gun sellers and the federally licensed dealers most likely to sell to criminals or straw buyers.

“We actually need all the data,” said Mayor Brandon M. Scott, who added that the information was particularly critical for identifying gun retailers outside the city, in adjacent Baltimore County and elsewhere, whose weapons often end up being used to commit crimes in Baltimore.

“By limiting our ability to deploy effective public safety strategies, the Tiahrt Amendment put forward by N.R.A.-backed politicians and Congress is jeopardizing the lives of residents not just here in Baltimore City, but across these United States of America,” Mr. Scott told reporters on Tuesday in announcing the lawsuit.

In the filing, the city singled out three crimes where access to trace data was necessary: the killing of Izaiah Carter, 16, who was gunned down in March near his school in East Baltimore; the death of Maya Morton, 23, who was caught in the crossfire of a shooting while driving with her two young children in January; and a gunfight at Carver Vocational-Technical High School in October that seriously injured two teenagers.

In 2020, President Biden campaigned on a promise to repeal the Tiahrt Amendment. But those efforts have faltered, and a push to insert a repeal in the bipartisan gun bill passed in 2022 was unsuccessful.

Gun rights organizations and gun manufacturers have lobbied intensively to block legislative attempts to roll back the amendment, arguing that the effort is a political stunt to “name and shame” law-abiding federally licensed dealers whose guns inevitably wind up in the wrong hands.

But the trace data, in the rare instances it has been publicly released, has illuminated the pathways through which legally manufactured and lawfully sold firearms are obtained by criminals.

From 2014 to 2020, six small retailers in South and Northeast Philadelphia sold more than 11,000 weapons that were later recovered in criminal investigations or confiscated from owners who had obtained them illegally, according to an examination of Pennsylvania firearms tracing data by the gun control group Brady, the most comprehensive analysis of its kind in decades.

The report’s conclusions confirmed what law enforcement officials have long known. A small percentage of gun stores — 1.2 percent of the state’s licensed dealers, according to Brady — accounted for 57 percent of firearms that ended up in the hands of criminals through illegal resale or direct purchases by straw buyers who turned them over to people barred from owning guns.

A similar dynamic exists in cities like Baltimore and Chicago, which have no legal gun dealers in their jurisdictions. The purchasing activity migrates to adjacent areas, or to nearby states where firearms can be easily trafficked in the trunks of cars.

Gun violence in Baltimore has dropped somewhat in the past two years, and this year homicides are on pace to fall below 300 for the first time in nearly a decade. But it still remains one of the most dangerous cities in the country, and many of the weapons used to commit crimes there are transported from other localities with looser gun laws — made easier by its central location on the I-95 corridor.

City officials estimate that 60 to 70 percent of the firearms used in crimes originated outside Maryland’s borders from 2017 to 2021.

The purpose of the lawsuit is to zero in on “trends of how crime guns enter communities,” said Alla Lefkowitz, Everytown’s litigation director, who helped draft the complaint.

“Are one or two gun stores responsible for most of the crime guns in a city — or is it coming from a more disparate source?” she asked. “Are most crime guns coming from in state or out of state? What are the most popular crime guns? This database is a very powerful tool.”

• Abrielle Baldwin, 23, was shot and killed on Christmas Eve in Largo, Florida

• Police have charged her brother Damarcus Coley, 14, over her death

• Another brother, Darcus Coley, 15, then came out the house and shot and injured Damarcus: both brothers, sheriffs said, were known to carry guns all the time

• The family had been arguing over Christmas presents, with the 15-year-old saying his 14-year-old brother was getting more generous gifts than he was

California, Illinois and Colorado among states implementing ‘red flag’ laws after US ends 2023 with more mass shootings than days

New gun safety laws are taking effect in several states around the US on 1 January after the country ended 2023 with more mass shootings than days.

States including California, Illinois and Colorado are starting the year by implementing extreme risk protection orders, more commonly referred to as “red flag” laws, as a means to prevent further gun violence. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there were 655 mass shootings in the US in 2023.

Wayne LaPierre resigns as leader of the NRA

New York Attorney General Letitia James in 2020 filed a lawsuit to dissolve the NRA,
claiming the organization violated laws for non-profit groups and took millions for
personal use and committed tax fraud. The case is set to go to trial on Monday.

the top NRA rat is abandoning ship...

Quote:

Wayne LaPierre resigns as leader of the NRA

New York Attorney General Letitia James in 2020 filed a lawsuit to dissolve the NRA,
claiming the organization violated laws for non-profit groups and took millions for
personal use and committed tax fraud. The case is set to go to trial on Monday.

(cnn)