Guns & America

The small town of Craig, Colorado, sits on a winding river in a wide valley in the rural northwest corner of the state. Wild horses roam the wide open landscape, as do herds of elk. The area is a sportsman’s paradise.

“Craig, Colorado, is one of the elk hunting capitals of the country and the world. Most people have a lot of hunting rifles,” explains Damon Hatfield, who lives in Craig and works at the local coal mine. “I think almost every home in Craig would have a gun in it of some sort.”

The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has set the stage for a historic shift in the court’s makeup and could significantly change how the court views any given gun law in relation to the Second Amendment.

This article is part of the Guns & America explainer series. You can read other entries here.

In late May, a Waffle House employee in Colorado was shot and wounded. The reason? A patron allegedly grew angry after the employee told him to wear a mask, according to multiple reports.

Gun violence prevention found the spotlight like never before at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. It’s the latest sign that what was once considered a controversial, third-rail topic has become a core issue for the Democratic Party.

Democratic nominee Joe Biden is seen as a centrist, and this year’s DNC was clearly designed at least in part to woo Republicans disenchanted with President Donald Trump.

This article is part of the Guns & America explainer series. You can read other entries here.

Over the past several years, the problem of police violence in the U.S. has garnered worldwide attention: the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and Walter Scott in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and George Floyd in May 2020, among others.

The recent wave of civil unrest against police brutality after the killing of George Floyd highlights the increased militarization of American law enforcement — including for officers on college campuses.

Steven Weiss was protesting in front of the Multnomah County Justice Center. It was June 19, three weeks into near-nightly protests against systemic racism and police violence. Those protests routinely culminated each night with police resorting to violence to disperse hundreds of nonviolent protesters.

Gun sales continued to mushroom in June, apparently due to a confluence of Joe Biden’s surge in polls, the spread of COVID-19, and ongoing protests against police brutality and racial injustice.

Americans bought 2.4 million firearms in June, according to industry estimates from Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting. That is a 145% increase from June 2019. Handgun sales make up the bulk of those estimates and increased at an even higher year-over-year rate of 178%.

This article is part of the Guns & America explainer series. You can read other entries here.

In cities like Denver, Detroit and Chicago, summer jobs programs are a key strategy in youth gun violence prevention. But this summer, the pandemic is forcing many cities to scramble to move these programs online while dealing with budget restrictions.

States with the most restrictive combination of three gun laws saw an 11% reduction in firearm deaths over three decades, according to estimates from a new study by the RAND Corporation. The three laws identified by researchers were child access prevention laws, right-to-carry laws and stand-your-ground laws.