euronews: This report tallied the human and economic toll of gun violence in all 50 states. The cost is staggering.

U.S. teens and young adults, ages 15-24, are 50 times more likely to die by gun violence than they are in other economically advanced countries, according to the 50-state breakdown.

In 2017 — the year of a mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 58 and injured hundreds — nearly 40,000 people died from gun-related injuries, including 2,500 school children, the report said, noting that six in 10 gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides. [...]

Rural states, meanwhile, have the highest rates of gun deaths and bear the largest costs as a share of their economies. Nationally, the cost of gun violence in the U.S. runs $229 billion a year, or 1.4 percent of the gross domestic product, the report said. [...]

The report noted, however, that the economic toll of gun violence is difficult to measure because of a decades-old federal prohibition on funding for research into the problem. Since 1996, Congress has added a little-known amendment to spending legislation that prohibits the use federal funds to advocate or promote gun control. While lawmakers clarified the provision in aspending package last year, stating that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can conduct research on the causes of gun violence, no money was allocated for such research. [...]

It also found economically deprived areas outside of rural America are also hit hard. About 7,500 African Americans die from gun violence every year, the report said — making it 20 times more likely that a young black male will die by a firearm homicide than a white peer.

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Associated Press: Racist, anti-gay student flyers challenge Wyoming district

In the capital of the state known for the 1998 murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard, school officials have worked to respond to the spring incident. They’re holding community meetings and plan to hire a “diversity and cultural awareness” counselor while providing additional employee training. [...]

Others aren’t so confident the Cheyenne school district is up to the challenge. The new approach to student bullying and harassment sounds good, but “only time will tell if it’s upheld,” said parent Abby Kercher. [...]

Parents and students report a long history of anti-gay and racist harassment at McCormick that continued through the rest of the school year. Some students kept violating a ban on Confederate flags by displaying the images on their computers, said Kercher’s daughter, 14-year-old Ashlynn Kercher.

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The Huffington Post: One Of My Son’s Killers Claimed 'Gay Panic' Made Him Do It. Never Again.

The shocking reality is this: The so-called “gay panic defense” is only explicitly banned in three states – California, Illinois and, as of this month, Rhode Island. In the 20 years since Matt’s death, just these three states have made the move. And, of course, Wyoming, where he was killed, is not one of them. As a further slap in the face, Wyoming, along with four other states, still doesn’t have a hate crime law of any kind in place.

But recently, two members of Congress ― Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Joe Kennedy, both of Massachusetts ― have offered a countermeasure to those attempting to use the “gay panic” excuse. Their legislation, the Gay and Trans Panic Defense Prohibition Act, that would ban the use of the defense in federal court as a legal justification for anti-LGBTQ violence. [...]

Right now in Massachusetts, a local teen is claiming “gay panic” motivated him to allegedly hold a man hostage for days, beating him while shouting anti-gay slurs. In Texas recently, a light sentence given a man prosecuted for stabbing a neighbor to death raised concerns that the “gay panic” defense had come into play. [...]

Most legal professionals actually advise against it. The American Bar Association, which in 2013 unanimously approved a resolution calling for an end to the use anti-LGBT panic defense in court, sent a letter to Markey expressing its support of the proposed legislation: “These defenses have no place in either our society or justice system and should be legislated out of existence.”

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Vox: How gun ownership became a powerful political identity

If only gun owners had voted in the 2016 election, then Donald Trump would have won every single state save Vermont. If only people who don’t own guns had voted, then Hillary Clinton would have won every state, save West Virginia and maybe Wyoming.

SurveyMonkey, which conducted the poll reaching these conclusions, found that the voting divide between gun owners and non-owners was starker than divides between white and nonwhite Americans, between working-class whites and the rest of the nation, and between rural and urban voters. “No other demographic characteristic created such a consistent geographic split,” the New York Times’s Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy write.

That doesn’t mean that gun ownership is more important in explaining American political behavior than race or class or gender. But it does mean that gun ownership has an extremely strong correlation with conservative, pro-Republican voting. [...]

“Few people realize it, but the Ku Klux Klan began as a gun control organization,” UCLA law professor Adam Winkler writes in Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. “After the Civil War, the Klan and other violent racist groups sought to reaffirm white supremacy, which required confiscating the guns blacks had obtained for the first time during the conflict.” He notes that a century later, in the 1960s, politicians turned to gun control measures to “disarm politically radical urban blacks, like the Black Panthers.” [...]

The gun gap could just be an artifact of other demographics. For instance, we know that for a whole host of historical reasons, black Americans overwhelmingly vote for Democrats and whites mostly vote for Republicans; whites are also likelier to own guns, so the gap might reflect racial differences. Same goes for partisan gender gaps (women are more likely to be Democrats and less likely to own guns), rural/urban gaps, and so forth.

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