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A few weeks ago, I worked on a story with my colleague Jennifer Mascia reporting the troubling fact that in 2020, gun homicides surpassed the 45,000 threshold for the first time. It was one of my first stories as The Trace’s new data editor and exactly the kind of important, data-driven analysis I came here to do.

But my study of the CDC data on which that was based started me thinking about firearm homicide’s other half: the people who use guns to take their own lives. These deaths regularly account for about 60 percent of gun-related deaths per year.

So Jen and I started following the data there. It was unsurprising, if grim, that older, white men who live in rural areas have the highest rates of gun suicide. But once we scratched the surface of the data we found something particularly alarming: The greatest growth in firearm suicide rates over the last decade was among young people, especially people of color. In the last decade, we found, the firearm suicide rate more than doubled among Black, Latino, and Asian teenagers, while it increased by 88 percent for Native Americans and 35 percent for white teens.

And then there was this: From 2019 through 2020, an American teenager took their life with a gun every seven hours on average.

There is another unique characteristic of this type of suicide among children and teens, which is that most are not allowed to legally buy firearms and almost always get access to guns from home.

Once we had analyzed the data, our next question was: Why?

We spoke to many people in the dedicated community of researchers — many of whom are Black, Latino, or Asian themselves — who have been working on just this question for years. But it has been an uphill battle persuading their institutions and funders that teens face unique pressures and stressors, as well as cultural and financial barriers to getting help, that require similarly unique interventions.

I grew up in Nebraska and Kansas, where guns were ubiquitous. Looking back now, I think about how many of the young people I knew faced mental health struggles and how much these firearms, improperly stored, could have placed them in danger. Now, those same friends have teens of their own, and I worry for them.

Often in journalism we talk about impact. Sometimes this is a policy change or an indictment. I hope that this story will have a different type of impact: highlighting interventions that might save a young person’s life. — Olga Pierce, data editor
WHAT TO KNOW THIS WEEK

After the pandemic began, Philadelphia neighborhoods with high levels of drug and police activity saw the highest upticks in shootings, according to researchers at Temple University. The authors focused particularly on the drug connection: “Our findings illustrate the salience of drug market activity as a factor that contributed to increasingly more gun violence over the pandemic, and suggest there may be something particularly disorganizing about drug markets that make neighborhoods already at high-risk for firearm victimization even more vulnerable.”

23 states with “stand your ground” laws saw 8-to-11 percent increases in monthly rates of gun homicide between 2000 and 2016, according to a new study from Oxford University researchers.

The three Georgia men who were previously convicted of murder for fatally shooting Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia two years ago were convicted this week on federal hate crime charges, a verdict that carries another potential life sentence.

A man who shot five people, one fatally, at a Portland protest last weekend was charged with murder, attempted murder, and assault. The suspect idolized Kyle Rittenhouse and had embraced more extreme political views in recent years, his roommate said.

A report from the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform concluded that at least 500 identifiable people annually drive 60 to 70 percent of shootings in Washington, D.C. — and likely no more than 200 individuals at any given time. “Their violence is predictable and therefore it is preventable,” David Muhammad, the executive director of NICJR, told DCist.

California legislators introduced a bill to enforce the state’s assault weapons ban by letting private citizens sue gunmakers, similar to Texas’s controversial “heartbeat” abortion ban. Legal experts told us last month that the two laws have several key differences.

Vermont’s Republican governor vetoed legislation that would have closed the so-called Charleston loophole that allows a gun background check to automatically proceed if it takes longer than three days to clear. He did say, however, that he’d sign a bill that would extend that period to seven days, instead of the 30 days called for in the bill. The Democratic legislature may make it moot by overriding the governor’s veto.

Denver is expanding a program that enlists mental health professionals to handle some nonviolent 911 calls instead of police. Related: A study of 911 calls in seven cities in North and South Carolina found that dispatchers are undercounting obviously mental-health-related calls.

Two Louisiana officers were fired and charged with manslaughter for shooting a man who wouldn’t get out of his car last week.

Andy Parker, whose daughter Alison was fatally shot along with a colleague while filming a live news report in 2015, created an NFT of the video footage to claim ownership of it in a longshot attempt to force tech companies to scrub it from the internet.
FROM OUR TEAM

Susan LaPierre hosted galas that had nothing to do with gun rights. The NRA covered entertainment costs. The NRA CEO's wife threw star-studded fundraising events for Youth for Tomorrow, a Christian charity whose board she led. Invoices obtained by The Trace show the gun group paid tens of thousands of dollars in production fees. The payments were never disclosed in the gun group’s tax filings, and raise fresh concerns over self-dealing at the organization. “That’s theft,” said James Fishman, a leading nonprofit law expert, when told about the payments. “Taking money that belongs to one organization and spending it on another, with zero benefit to the NRA.” Mike Spies has more on that story here.
IN MEMORIAM

Brandy Lynn “June” Knightly, 60, was fatally shot at a park in Portland on January 19. Knightly, a fixture of the local protest movement, was part of a group directing traffic at a demonstration commemorating Amir Locke and other victims of police violence. The alleged perpetrator, who wounded four others, had allegedly expressed hatred of left-wing protesters. Knightly, who went by June and also the nickname “T-Rex,” was remembered by her wife as a natural peacekeeper who had a knack for listening to others and forging compromise. “I remember June protecting students marching to get an abusive police officer removed from their high school,” the executive director of the Oregon chapter of the ACLU tweeted. A friend of 20 years, Kathleen Saadat, said Knightly “lived what she believed. That is hard to do.” Knightly, who was semi-retired and looking forward to a knee replacement, had survived cancer twice. Along with her wife, she leaves behind an adult son.
FROM THE ARCHIVES

Ten years ago today, George Zimmerman fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida. The shooting, for which Zimmerman was later acquitted, put the national spotlight on so-called stand your ground laws, which remove a person’s duty to retreat before using deadly force. Eight years later, the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia reignited the furor over such legislation. Unlike in the Martin case, the perpetrators of that incident were convicted of murder. But as J. Brian Charles pointed out in an article in May 2020, the original prosecutor in Arbery’s case initially declined to charge the three killers due to Georgia’s stand your ground law. J. Brian wrote about how the Arbery case spurred activists to resuscitate a national campaign to reverse the policies that they say put people of color at risk.
PULL QUOTE

“We cannot afford to wait for a stagnated Congress to take action; instead, we implore your Administration to use the authority of the office to reverse this deadly trend.”

— An open letter from 43 gun reform advocacy groups, including Brady and

Pizzoff libturd! (author, not OP)

@ the title of this thread

What guns?

First they take your guns.

but i dont have any guns???