Alabaman appealing 55 year sentence for burglary death: graphic image of young black boy with blue background

Alabaman is appealing 55-year sentence for participating in a burglary ending in teen friend’s death by police

By |

LaKeith Smith, under Alabama’s felony murder law allowing prosecutors to charge a person considered an accomplice to a crime, was faulted for his friend’s death. No evidence that the teen fired or possessed a gun was presented during the trial. Smith, now 23, should never have been in that group of boys, his mother said, making trouble with them. He also should not be serving a 55-year sentence in a maximum-security prison...

Guns in school: Hand gun and biiks sitting in open black backpack

School gun case sparks debate over safety and second chances

By |

Most gun incidents in and around campuses are more like Oak Park than Uvalde. They're not planned large-scale shootings, or active-shooter situations. More often, they're smaller altercations that escalate when someone has a gun at or near a school, a game or other event, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, which tracks incidents from the last five decades.

Gun violence survivors in separate cities: man in black hoodie and glasses in front of fence with gun violence signs on it

In separate cities, hard hit by gun violence, gunshot survivors fight against firearms

By |

The backstories of Sakran and Pep couldn’t be more different. But their survivor stories drive their activism about the public health threat that gun violence poses and prove what some of the most alarming news headlines increasingly suggest: Almost anybody, almost anywhere, is a potential victim of gun violence.

Public heath strategists tackle New Orleans gun violence: two Black cops looking at crime scene beyond yellow tape

Public health strategists tackle New Orleans’ gun violence

By |

Mayor LaToya Cantrell last year launched the Office of Gun Violence Prevention. That office funds and evaluates efforts to especially reduce gun violence among youth — 15- through 24-year-olds nationwide accounted for most of a prior decades’ surge in firearm-driven homicides — and has partnered in an effort largely lead by public health professionals who are tackling the problem as more than merely an issue of crime and punishment.

What happened after Minneapolis removed police officers from schools

By |

By September 2020, 11 new unarmed public safety support specialists, many with law enforcement-related backgrounds, were in place and on the Minneapolis Public Schools payroll. Two years and one pandemic later, initial data and interviews with students and staff suggest that fewer Minneapolis students are being punished and, consequently, missing class for suspensions or other punishment.

When students bring guns to North Carolina schools: gun falling out of backpack on top of yellow book

When students bring guns to North Carolina schools

By |

West Charlotte High School had let out only minutes earlier when, hearing gunfire, school officials ordered an immediate lockdown and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officers swarmed the campus. That incident, the week before Christmas break 2021, was the ninth time a gun had been found at one of Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s most troubled public schools since the start of the school year.

ghost gun rule: hands holding a picture of child in baseball uniform

New ghost gun rule unlikely to stem violence amid thriving youth gun culture

By |

Ghost guns — so-called because they are nearly impossible to trace — are sold in parts and assembled by the buyer. Until recently, they were not classified as firearms, meaning there were no background checks and dealers didn’t have to be federally-licensed.

That has opened the door for traffickers, teens and people with felony records to get ghost guns.

Juvenile sentencing: One hand is raised and grasping a wire fence.

Opinion: Teen shooters should be judged as teens, not adults

By |

Few among us are oblivious to the suffering that results from certain crimes committed by youthful offenders. As researchers and citizens, we agree that those who harm another person must be held accountable. However, the immaturity of a young person must be considered in meting out an appropriate punishment.

A person's brain must be fully developed before it can be discerned whether that individual will continue to offend or was just a child who make a horrible mistake.

A red button near the ginger hole of a gun controls the black trigger

Critics link lax gun storage to accidental shootings involving youth, mostly in the South

By |

After running toward the sound of a gunshot that still haunts her, Marentha Sargent watched her 14-year-old, Adrienne Lambert, bleeding from the chest as she collapsed. Moments earlier, the 14-year-old son of Gene Roessler, Sargent’s friend, had ejected the magazine from Roessler’s gun, pointed its barrel at Adrienne and pulled the trigger. The boy didn’t realize, according to police records, there was a bullet in the chamber of his father’s handgun, which he’d grabbed from the kitchen table of their suburban Houston home while the adults were in the garage watching football on TV.

Gun violence survivor campaign: Black man in jeans, a gray winter jacket and navy baseball cap on backwards stands on sidewalk in front of s 2-story oldr home holding a white human skull with large section of bone missing on right side.

At home in Arkansas and globally, shooting survivor campaigns against gun violence

By |

Between Jan. 1, 2022 and April 25, 2022, Little Rock, Ark. — the 24th most violent of 65 cities, according to the FBI's most recent data — counted 24 homicides. That compared to 21 homicides during the same period in 2021, according to the Little Rock Police Department’s most recent count. A disproportionate number of those murders involved guns, continuing a trend. Blacks — mainly males — accounted for all homicide victims under 30 years old in Little Rock.