WUSA: DC to track firearm injuries with new dashboard. “DC Health has launched a new data dashboard to help keep track of firearm injuries at emergency rooms across the District. ‘Firearm Injury Surveillance Through Emergency Rooms’ (FASTER) data is unique because it pulls from the hospital’s discharge diagnosis codes instead of mandatory physician reporting.”
Tech Transparency Project: YouTube Leads Young Gamers to Videos of Guns, School Shootings. “YouTube’s algorithms are pushing boys interested in video games to scenes of school shootings, instructions on how to use and modify weapons, and even a movie about notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, according to a study by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP).”
Rolling Stone: Twitter Bots Are Promising Cheap Guns to Anyone Using the N-Word. “When Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he made it clear that eradicating spam bots was a top priority. But his strategies on that front have produced, at best, mixed results. Moreover, in recent months, some users have been plagued by a type of spam that directly violates Twitter policy: automated replies from accounts offering guns for sale.”
TechCrunch: Hackers steal gun owners’ data from firearm auction website. “Hackers breached a website that allows people to buy and sell guns, exposing the identities of its users, TechCrunch has learned. The breach exposed reams of sensitive personal data for more than 550,000 users, including customers’ full names, home addresses, email addresses, plaintext passwords and telephone numbers. Also, the stolen data allegedly makes it possible to link a particular person with the sale or purchase of a specific weapon.”
WAMC: Ft. Ticonderoga acquires major collection as it prepares for 250th anniversary of American Revolution . “Fort Ticonderoga has acquired a private collection of more than 3,000 objects, including over 200 rare firearms, as the historical site prepares to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the American War for Independence.”
Illinois News Bureau: New database catalogs police shootings in Illinois to improve accountability. “The Systematic Policing Oversight Through Lethal-Force Incident Tracking Environment project, called ‘SPOTLITE,’ identified more than twice as many police-involved shooting incidents than previously reported by the Illinois State Police, for a total of 694 lethal force incidents involving 734 civilians from 2014-21. Nearly two-thirds of those incidents occurred in Cook County. SPOTLITE includes any incident when police use firearms – including those with nonfatal outcomes – as well as any other use of force that results in a death.”
CNN: How a tiny nonprofit with no full-time employees became the foremost tracker of gun violence in America. “Yet for all its influence in providing that data, the Gun Violence Archive is remarkably small-scale. The organization is funded almost entirely by a single octogenarian donor, has no office space or any full-time employees, and is led by a bushy-bearded Kentucky gun owner who sold several of his firearms to help launch the group. That this bare-bones organization informs the highest levels of power underscores the startling lack of timely, standardized data on American gun violence.”
Virginia Department of Health: Virginia Department of Health Launches Firearm Injuries in Virginia: Emergency Department Visits Dashboard. “Today, the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) launched a new data dashboard on firearm injuries in Virginia showing the number and rate of emergency department (ED) visits from 2016 to 2022. The dashboard shows firearm injury data by year, health district, age group, sex, and race/ethnicity across Virginia.”
Associated Press: Personal info on California gun owners wrongly made public . “The California Department of Justice on Wednesday acknowledged the agency wrongly made public the personal information of perhaps hundreds of thousands of gun owners in up to six state-operated databases, a broader exposure than the agency initially disclosed a day earlier.”
ProPublica: Google Says It Bans Gun Ads. It Actually Makes Money From Them.. “For roughly two decades, Google has boasted that it doesn’t accept gun ads, a reflection of its values and culture. But a ProPublica analysis shows that before and after mass shootings in May at a New York grocery store and a Texas elementary school, millions of ads from the some of the nation’s largest firearms makers flowed through Google’s ad systems and onto websites and apps — in some cases without the site or app owners’ knowledge and in violation of their policies.”
The Guardian: Meta banned firearms sales. Why are they still available on Facebook and Instagram?. “Meta policy since 2016 has banned the ‘sale or use of weapons, ammunition or explosives’ between individuals, including ‘firearms parts’. However, the study from Media Matters for America, a non-profit tech watchdog group, shows users of Instagram and Facebook can buy materials from unregulated sources to build high-powered, automatic weapons in just a few clicks.”
Washington Post: Facebook’s ban on gun sales gives sellers 10 strikes before booting them. “Facebook prohibits gun sales on its service. But buyers and sellers can violate the rule 10 times before they are kicked off the social network, according to internal guidance obtained by The Washington Post. The policy, which has not previously been reported, is much more lenient than for users who post child pornography, which is illegal, or a terrorist image on Facebook, which prompts immediate removal from the platform.”
NBC News: Trans woman’s photo used to spread baseless online theory about Texas shooter. “Social media users and trolls on 4chan, Twitter and Facebook are using Sam’s photos and images of at least two other transgender women to spread the baseless theory that the shooter was transgender. In some cases, they have created collages that place the women’s photos alongside images from an Instagram page believed to have belonged to the shooter.”
WLS: New Illinois State Police map plots every reported expressway shooting since 2019. “Illinois State Police have launched a new tool to battle expressway shootings. The new interactive map plots out every reported shooting on every Illinois expressway since 2019. It provides details on the locations, timing and whether there were injuries or deaths linked to the shooting.”
Route Fifty: Gun Violence Has Soared During the Pandemic, a New Study Finds—But the Reasons Why Are Complex. “In a new study, we found that the overall U.S. gun violence rate rose by 30% during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic compared to the year before. In 28 states, the rates were substantially higher between March 1, 2020, and March 31, 2021, compared to the pre-pandemic period from Feb. 1, 2019, through Feb. 29, 2020. There were 51,063 incidents of gun violence events resulting in injury or death in the United States in the first 13 months of the pandemic compared to 38,919 incidents in the same time span pre-pandemic.”
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