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NEW from THE TRACE. The NRA owes the IRS $ 3.4 million in taxes and fines. The revelation comes via documents filed in the weapons group’s bankruptcy proceedings – and suggests the organization is facing additional scrutiny by the IRS. The tax authority filing shows that more than $ 1.1 million of the sum owed by the weapons group is an excise tax on payments made by the NRA between 2014 and 2018. Nonprofits may be subject to excise taxes as a penalty for prohibited transactions, a former IRS attorney told us, although bankruptcy filings fail to explain why the NRA was affected by the levy. Will Van Sant has the ball.
Police shootings have sparked outrage – but this federal agency is worse. According to a study by the Marshall Project and the USA TODAY Network, the US Marshals Service and its local task forces shot 177 people, 124 fatally, between 2015 and the end of 2020. On average, Marshal forces shot people at about twice the rate of comparable police departments (particularly Houston and Philadelphia). The research attributed the difference in part to the federal agency’s relatively acceptable standards of use of force and lack of accountability: no members of the task force were prosecuted during the five-year period investigated by the journalists.
????Bookmark it????: Crime and Law Enforcement Trends, Visualized. The Criminal Justice Council’s non-partisan policing task force has just released a brief introduction to the trendlines that inform the debate on police and criminal justice reform. Some results should arouse the interest of Trace readers:
- The national murder clearance rate fell by 11 percentage points between 1987 and 2018.
- From peak levels in the early 1990s to 2019, the proportion of violent crimes reported to the police fell by 52 percent.
- The number of officers murdered in the workplace decreased from 74 in 1987 to 48 in 2018.
Maryland lawmakers are overriding the governor’s veto to fund street-level violent interventions. The vote means the state will allocate $ 3.6 million annually to the Maryland Violence Intervention and Prevention Program Fund, which provides financial support for strategies to reduce gun violence in the community. Democratically controlled lawmakers also voted to overturn Republican Governor Larry Hogan’s veto of a bill that will extend background controls to private transfers of rifles and other long weapons.
He was arrested with an arsenal of weapons on his way to DC. The government says he threatened to kill Democrats. Prosecutors announced charges against a 71-year-old Pennsylvania attorney who was arrested at a gas station the day after Joe Biden’s inauguration for allegedly carrying two handguns, an AR-15 and “a large amount of ammunition”. The indictments allege that the man threatened to “assassinate Democratic senators from the United States with the intention of obstructing and / or taking revenge on them for the performance of their official duties”. Beat more of extremism: The federal prosecutor’s office found what they are saying is further evidence that members of the Oath Guard militia planned in advance to attack the Capitol and disrupt the confirmation of Joe Biden’s election. Five other members of the far-right Proud Boys were arrested on charges of conspiracy related to the uprising. And in Dallas, a white supremacist who promoted racist violence was accused of illegally selling a gun to a criminal.
The House Democrats presented a package of arms reform laws. New York Representative Carolyn Maloney revealed the measures, which include stricter penalties for arms trafficking and straw purchases, background checks on private sales at guns exhibitions, and the FBI’s requirement to keep records of the national criminal background checking system for at least 90 days. The way to new federal gun laws leads through the Senate. Despite the youthful majority of Democrats, prominent members of the caucus told Jennifer Mascia that they see a handful of reforms that could happen.
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39 percent – The proportion of Republicans in a new poll who said violence might be justified “if elected leaders fail to protect America”. That’s 31 percent of the Independents and 17 percent of the Democrats. [Survey Center on American Life]