Guns & America

After a mass shooting, people and resources pour into the community to help victims and survivors cope. As these incidents continue to unfold, the grim infrastructure that springs up around them is growing larger and more sophisticated.

Timira Hopkins knew her boyfriend was angry that she had stayed late at her grandmother’s house one day in March 2014, instead of being at home waiting when he got off work.

She had seen him upset before — often, even. His rage would routinely erupt into acts of violence, leaving her with black and blue bruises across her face. He sometimes threatened worse.

WARNING: This story contains graphic descriptions of domestic violence that some readers might find disturbing.

On an unseasonably warm July day, Lionel Irving gets up from the sofa on his front porch to hug his 16-year-old niece Queenie who is just getting home from a summer program called Self Enhancement, Inc.

“She just came from a college tour,” he says. “That’s our star.”

Queenie visited Tulane University in New Orleans. Lionel sees education as the most important thing for helping young people improve their lives and he gets visibly excited when he talks about Queenie’s success.

In the last few weeks, Democratic presidential candidates, Congressional leaders, and even the President, have been proposing various gun control policies to curb gun violence in America. But a recent study from the Journal of Rural Health shows that certain firearm laws are more effective at reducing violence than others, depending on if you live in an urban or rural area.

Money flowed into Colorado politics earlier this year when hardline gun rights supporters attempted to recall a state representative who supported Colorado’s extreme risk protection order law (ERPO), a controversial piece of gun legislation. But now, two months since that effort failed, the ability to trace where some of those funds came from and how they were spent is limited by Colorado’s campaign finance laws.

Wednesday night, thousands of El Pasoans streamed into Southwest University Park, for a community memorial to honor the 22 victims of the mass shooting that took place just over a week ago, on Aug. 3.

Upon entering the city’s minor league baseball stadium, visitors were greeted by a group of therapy dogs who traveled from Nebraska to provide comfort.

While the circumstances of every mass shooting are unique, the perpetrators of the recent shootings in Ohio and Texas fit into a consistent storyline: white men with access to guns committing violence in the name of real or perceived grievances.

The shooter suspected of killing 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, is a 21-year-old white man who reportedly uploaded a racist internet post before the attack.

Losing a loved one to gun violence is a life-changing event, one that happens in the U.S. nearly 40,000 times a year. Some surviving family and friends go to support groups or grieve behind closed doors. But one group of mothers in New Haven, Connecticut, is working to take their healing to a new location: a botanical garden dedicated to the thousands of victims claimed by gun violence across the country.

Following back-to-back mass shootings over the weekend, Democratic presidential candidates have sharply criticized President Donald Trump, blaming his policies and sometimes racist tone for emboldening violent white nationalists.

Following the shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, which killed at least 31 people, lawmakers started to point to one factor that could have contributed to shootings: violent video games.

Here’s the problem: They don’t.

Among the popular gun policy proposals raised in the aftermath of shootings like those in Sandy Hook, Parkland and now El Paso and Dayton, the call for “red flag” laws has become a common refrain.

But like universal background checks and closing the “gun show loophole”, “red flag” laws aren’t self-explanatory.

The internet forum 8chan went offline Sunday after San Francisco-based security company Cloudflare announced it would no longer provide services for the site.

8chan is an online forum popular among white supremacists, neo-nazis and misogynist groups called incels. The most vitriolic is the /pol/ board, a political forum where users often encourage acts of violence.

Every time there’s a shooting in the United States that leaves multiple people injured or dead, a few things happen in reaction. Public officials express their condolences, there’s often a call for legislative action. And reporting begins to come out referencing how many similar shootings have taken place that year.

A new study says that fatal shooting cases are getting measurably more attention from police than non-fatal shootings. But one expert thinks giving fatal shootings more attention might not be the most efficient way to combat gun violence.

Fatal and non-fatal shooting cases often start the same way: A gun is fired; someone is hit.

But if someone is killed by those shots, the case gets handed off to the police department’s homicide unit.

Gun policy is back on the democratic debate stage in a way it hasn’t been in decades. But are the candidates’ proposals likely to save lives?

Daniel Webster directs the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, and he’s happy that for once, these issues are getting some campaign attention. But he’s also really hoping voters demand proposals based on evidence.

A fund administered by the RAND Corporation is awarding nearly $10 million dollars to researchers across the country to study gun violence, injecting new funding into a topic that has seen relatively little attention from the scientific community over the past two decades.