When you think law enforcement will arrive in time . . .

Home invasion victim sexually assaulted while on phone with 911 operator, waiting for officers to arrive.

A California women was sexually assaulted, while on the phone with the 911 operator, waiting for law enforcement officers to arrive, responding to a call of a home invasion. Police response time: 7 minutes.

Following the assault, the woman was held hostage, with a gun pointed to her head, while on-scene officers negotiated with her assailant.

The suspect, Demetrius Trussell, was charged in San Diego Superior Court with 18 felonies.

CHICAGO MAYOR CALLS FOR FEDERAL HELP TO FIGHT VIOLENT CRIME – After snubbing President Trump’s offer 18 months earlier

3,411 shootings occurred in 2021, a 9 percent increase from last year

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/586706-chicago-mayor-calls-for-federal-help-to-fight-violent-crime

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) is calling for federal officials to help her curb gun violence in the city and target its root causes.

In a speech on Monday, Lightfoot urged U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to utilize agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to address illegal firearms and for more prosecutors to bring criminal cases, according to The Chicago Tribune.

“Keeping you safe is my priority — not one of, but the first and primary priority,” Lightfoot said to the citizens of Chicago. “I wake every morning with this as my first concern and I push myself and all involved to step up and do more and better because we cannot continue to endure the level of violence that we are now experiencing.”

See Mayor Lightfoot’s earlier answer to preventing shooting deaths in Chicago (https://wordpress.com/post/ingaugeofpolkcounty.com/15788) September 29, 2021.

The mayor also requested that judges in Cook County stop releasing people charged with violent crimes including murder, aggravated gun possession, sex crimes, illegal gun possession and kidnapping on electric monitoring, the Tribune noted.

The solutions proposed by Lightfoot, none of which are new strategies, were reportedly criticized as “regressive” and “clearly unconstitutional.”

Cook County Public Defender Sharone Mitchell told the Tribune the mayor “diagnosed the very real root causes of violence, the solutions were textbook policymaking based on fear.”

“The mayor’s regressive proposal calls for the pretrial detention of thousands of people who haven’t been convicted of anything and the plan could only be achieved by exploding the population of Cook County Jail in the middle of a pandemic,” Mitchell said.

Lightfoot’s speech comes as Chicago police data indicated that 3,411 shootings occurred in 2021 as of earlier this month, a 9 percent increase from last year.

Polk County, Florida – 2nd mass murder in 4 weeks

3 people are deand and not a single shot was fired.

Workplace violence ends in 3 deaths

3 people are dead in a workplace violence incident in Polk County, Florida and not one shot was fired or one gun was used.

Deranged man beats and stabs co-workers in Davenport, Florida.

3rd victim dies after angry co-worker’s rampage

Sun, October 3, 2021

DAVENPORT, Fla. (AP) — Authorities said Sunday a third victim has died following a violent attack where an angry electrician wielding a knife and baseball bat killed three co-workers and injured another at the Florida home they shared.

Polk County Sheriff’s officials said electrician Shaun Runyon got into the argument with his supervisor Friday, punching the man and fleeing the job site. He returned to the Davenport home he where he was temporarily living with his co-workers Saturday and beat one man to death while he slept, killed another man on the front porch and chased another victim into the street, beating him badly with a bat, Sheriff Grady Judd said.

A fourth victim suffered critical injuries and later died at the hospital. Another man, his wife and their 7-year-old daughter escaped unharmed. Authorities did not release the identities of the victims.

Runyon and seven co-workers and their families were living at the home rented by a Pennsylvania company, J & B Electric, Inc.

It’s unclear what prompted the fight between 39-year-old Runyon and his supervisor Friday, but Sheriff Judd said he confessed.

He was charged with three counts of first degree murder and one count of aggravated battery. It was not immediately clear if he had retained a lawyer to comment on the charges.

Runyon fled the home, turning up hours later at the home of a random Lake Wales couple, wearing bloody clothes and telling them he’d been raped, according to the sheriff.

Judd said the man discarded his bloody clothes at the home as they urged him to go to the hospital where he was later taken into custody.

CHICAGO’S ANSWER TO SHOOTING DEATHS – Install ‘Bleeding Control Kits’ around the city

Yes, this is for real. It is not a joke.

Chicago installing ‘Bleeding Control Kits’ around city amid gun violence

THE HILL – BY REMA RAHMAN – 09/29/21

Chicago has begun installing “Bleeding Control Kits” across the city under the new Safe Chicago program amid an increase in gun violence.

The city will install 426 Bleeding Control Kits in 269 Chicago buildings, including City Hall and Chicago Public Library locations. Each kit can treat up to eight victims.

Every kit comes equipped with a tourniquet, gauze, shears, gloves, and an instruction manual on how to best use it in instances of “life threatening bleeding emergencies” that can result from falls, penetrating injuries (such as stabbings), gunshot wounds, and more.

Announced earlier this month to coincide with National Preparedness Month, the program was launched by the Office of Emergency Management and Communications and the Federal Emergency Management Agency in partnership with the Chicago Fire Department, Chicago Police Department, and Assets and Information Services.

However, it has received renewed attention addressing gun violence following the release Monday’s updated crime stats from the Chicago Police Department.

As of Monday, Chicago has reported 2,688 shootings, an 11 percent increase from this time last year, as well as 602 homicides, marking a 4 percent increase. The data does not specify the homicide causes of death.

Pandemic gun violence surge was not linked to rise in gun sales, study finds

New Study Delivers a Kill Shot to Another Anti-Gun Narrative

Research suggests looking at role of job loss, economic change, closure of schools and community organizations and civil unrest

The Guardian – 2021-07-09

Gun homicides surged across the United States during the coronavirus pandemic, in the same year that Americans bought a record-breaking number of guns.

But some of America’s leading gun violence researchers have concluded that what might seem like an obvious cause-and-effect – a surge in gun buying leads to a surge in gun violence – is not supported by the data.

Through July of last year, there was no clear association between the increase in firearm purchases and the increase in most interpersonal gun violence at the state level, according to a new study published in Injury Epidemiology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

A peace march 6 March 2020 in Oakland to showcase the impact of Oakland’s lifesaving gun violence reduction programs.

The findings suggest that “we need to be looking at other factors, like job loss, economic change, the closure of schools and community organizations and nonprofits, and civil unrest,” in order to understand last year’s increase in gun violence, Julia Schleimer, the lead author of the new study, said.

There did appear to be some association between the increase in gun purchasing and an increase in domestic violence gun injuries in April and May, but that correlation might also be explained by other factors, including increased substance abuse or the decreased access to domestic violence support services during the early months of lockdown, Schleimer said.

The results of the new study are an unexpected addition to the fierce political battle over how to explain last year’s estimated 25% increase in homicides, which experts say they expect will be the worst single-year increase in killings since the 1960s. While official government data is not yet available, experts are projecting that the US saw an additional 4,000 to 5,000 homicides nationwide in 2020, and the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive recorded nearly 4,000 additional gun homicides last year compared with 2019.

Even though the homicide rate across big cities remains close to half of what it was in the 1990s, some politicians have used the single-year jump in killings to paint Democrats and the Biden administration as soft on crime, using an old political playbook of stoking anxiety over crime and violence in order to win elections.

Joe Biden has responded by focusing on firearms access and calling for new gun control laws, as well as supporting increased funding for police and community violence intervention programs.

The findings of the new study from the state-funded Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, do not fit tidily into either of these partisan political narratives. While the new study raises doubts about a correlation between last year’s spike in gun purchases and the increases in shootings, it doesn’t address the underlying risk of easy access to guns in the US, Schleimer said.

While official government crime data is not yet available for 2020, roughly three-quarters of US homicides annually are committed with guns, and experts estimate nonfatal shootings injure 100,000 people a year, often leaving survivors with serious, life-altering injuries.

There is a large body of research demonstrating the correlation between gun access and increased risk of gun injury, Schleimer said, an association that is particularly clear when it comes to the risk of gun suicide. The increase in shootings during 2020 may have been driven by Americans who already owned guns before the pandemic, not by the people who bought guns for the first time last year – but that does not mean that gun access is irrelevant, she said.

At the same time, the lack of any clear correlation between what the researchers estimated as 4.3m additional firearm purchases nationally from March through July 2020, and a 27% increase in firearm injuries over that time, suggests that other factors besides gun access and gun control laws deserve more attention, and more research, Schleimer said.Advertisement

“There are a lot of strategies that can address some of the more social determinants of violence,” Schleimer said, including supporting violence interrupters and other community-based violence intervention programs, and focusing on economic policies that might help reduce gun violence, which is deeply correlated with poverty and concentrated disadvantage. “There’s some good evidence on youth summer job programs and young people’s risk for violence.”

It made sense that politicians and other public figures would point to the increase in gun buying in 2020 as a potential reason shootings had increased last year, Schleimer said.

But, she said, “Our findings, from this current study, in this particular context, are not supporting that.”

The new study has several limitations, including the complexity of factors that might have influenced gun violence during 2020, and the lack of official data on both gun sales and gun injuries. The researchers estimated gun sales using federal background check data, and relied on shooting incident data collected from media reports by the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive.

Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy, said the study followed “rigorous statistical methods,” and that it raised interesting questions about whether the increase in gun violence might be more closely connected to some Americans’ willingness to carry their previously purchased guns during the pandemic, rather than a spike in first-time gun purchases.

It was possible that in some states, many of the additional gun sales in 2020 went to people who had already owned multiple firearms – meaning that the surge in sales did not necessarily contribute to an increase in the overall prevalence of gun ownership, Webster said in an email.

“Data from Chicago and some other cities suggest that we have seen a sharp increase in illegal gun carrying,” he wrote. “The role that guns are playing in the increased levels of homicides may have more to do with increases in illegal gun carrying than with the number of incidents in which people buy guns legally, especially in the short-term.”

In general, Webster wrote, the relationship between gun ownership and the increased likelihood of a shooting depended a lot on who was acquiring the gun. “In places and among individuals who are particularly low risk, more guns may have little impact on rates of lethal violence, but in places and among individuals of high risk, gun ownership can greatly increase risks of lethal violence,” he wrote.

Schleimer also cautioned that it’s possible that there might be some connection between gun purchasing and gun violence in 2020 that was masked by other factors the researchers were not able to measure or control for.

“Last year was such a unique year in many ways, and the context was continually evolving, and there were a lot of factors changing all at once, both locally and at the state level and nationally in the context of the pandemic and social and civil unrest,” Schleimer said. “That really complicated what we were able to do analytically.”

To examine the possible link between gun sales and shootings, the UC Davis researchers looked at trends in gun purchasing, and gun injuries, across 48 states, and then examined whether there was a correlation between the number of additional guns purchased and the number of additional gun injuries during the spring and summer. They controlled for a range of state-level factors that might influence the number of gun injuries, including stay-at-home orders, coronavirus cases and deaths, unemployment, measures of racial tension and civil unrest and seasonal variations in rates of gun injury.

While an early analysis from the same researchers, looking only at March through May, had found a correlation between increased gun purchases and gun injuries, their final analysis did not find any clear pattern between how many additional guns were purchased in a state through July 2020 and how much of an increase the state saw in non-domestic violence firearms injuries. The study did not analyze gun suicides or suicide attempts.

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WEAR ORANGE – ‘Gun Control Weekend’

Nikki Fried, Florida Commissioner of Agriculture: “I’m proud to work with Everytown for Gun Safety . . . “

The Florida Department of Agriculture has partnered with Everytown for Gun Safety.

Nikki Fried is ordering Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services buildings to light up orange this weekend to support gun violence awareness.

Wear Orange Weekend runs Saturday and Sunday. Friday was also National Gun Violence Awareness Day.

The department is illuminating the historic Mayo Building located across from the Florida Capitol, as well as the department’s Tallahassee Regional Licensing Office, where the department processes concealed weapons permit applications.

Nikki Fried is bathing her office building orange to raise awareness of gun violence.

“With so many lives lost to gun violence in the Sunshine State and around the nation, it’s important to send a message: we remain determined to see common-sense gun violence prevention reforms enacted to protect our communities,” Fried said. “As the lives of children, parents, friends, loved ones and fellow Floridians have been cut short by firearms, we will stand strong to demand change that honors their memory.”

“I’m proud to work with Everytown for Gun Safety to mark this occasion, which I hope will lead to reflection, persistence, and long-overdue action on gun violence.”

Fried proclaimed Friday, June 4, as Gun Violence Awareness Day in Florida in a proclamation on behalf of the Florida Cabinet.

The key department buildings are lit orange in a partnership with Everytown for Gun Safety, America’s largest gun violence prevention organization.