• Active shooters caused nearly 750 casualties in 2017

    More Americans were killed or wounded by active shooters in 2017 than in any year since the Federal Bureau of Investigation began keeping track. All told, nearly 750 people were shot in 30 incidents, according to a newly released FBI report. The shooters were of different ages, from different places, and motivated by different grievances. But all were men, and all acted alone.

  • 3D printing of weapons: A threat to global, national, and personal security

    Additive manufacturing – also known as 3D printing — could benefit military adversaries, violent extremists and even street criminals, who could produce their own weapons for use and sale. As this technology further develops, and without proper controls, violent actors might be able to replicate more sophisticated weapons systems, print lethal drones, and even produce jamming devices or cheap decoys that disrupt intelligence collection.

  • Shareholders force U.S. biggest gunmaker to report on the risks of gun violence

    Shareholders on Wednesday voted to require firearms manufacturer Sturm Ruger to complete a report on the reputational and financial risks posed to the company by gun violence. Sturm Ruger, which makes more guns annually than any other American company, must produce an assessment by February 2019. To create the report, the company will monitor incidents of violence involving its products and examine efforts to research and manufacture safer firearms.

  • Keeping Big Data safe

    NIST has announced the Unlinkable Data Challenge, created to help the public safety community conduct research using data gathered with personal digital devices and taken from large databases such as driver’s license and health care records. Much of this data includes personal information that can be used to identify its source. Exposing this data risks those individuals’ privacy, but the inability to share it impedes research in many fields, including thwarting crime, fighting fires and slowing the spread of epidemics.

  • Stricter gun control could prevent violent men from killing their partners and themselves

    Researchers draw on ten years of data on intimate partner homicide to determine the role guns play in murder-suicides. The researchers say that men who use guns to kill their partner are also likely to commit suicide. Those planning to commit suicide are not deterred by severe penalties, and therefore the most successful way of preventing such homicides is to restrict gun access to batterers.

  • Stolen guns not an important source of guns used in crimes

    Only about 1 percent of all gun transactions in the United States are thefts, and there is no evidence that theft is an important source of guns to those who use them to commit violent crimes. This and other evidence challenge the popular belief that crimes are mostly committed using stolen weapons.

  • The dark possible motive of the Toronto van attacker

    Like other Canadians, I was horrified upon learning of a van attack along Toronto’s famed Yonge Street this week. Struggling to make sense of it, my first question was: “Why?” As it turns out, the attack was possibly a disturbing reprise of a similar massacre, targeting mostly women and perceptively “sexually active” men in the California community of Isla Vista in May 2014.

  • World’s biggest DDoS-for-hire service taken down

    The administrators of the DDoS marketplace webstresser.org were arrested on 24 April 2018 as a result of Operation Power Off, a complex investigation led by the Dutch Police and the UK’s National Crime Agency with the support of Europol and a dozen law enforcement agencies from around the world. The webstresser.org was considered the world’s biggest marketplace to hire Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) services, with over 136 000 registered users and 4 million attacks measured by April 2018.

  • Exposure to domestic violence costs U.S. government $55 billion each year

    The federal government spends an estimated $55 billion annually on dealing with the effects of childhood exposure to domestic violence, according to new research. The results of a study on the national economic impact of exposure to domestic violence showed higher health-care costs, higher crime rates and lower productivity in children as they aged.

  • Rapid rise in mass school shootings in U.S.

    The Columbine High School mass shooting occurred on 20 April 1999. More people have died or been injured in mass school shootings in the United States in the past eighteen years than in the entire twentieth century. During the twentieth century, mass school shootings killed 55 people. Since the start of the twenty-first century there have already been 13 incidents of mass school shooting, in which 66 people have been killed.

  • Waco: how the siege became a symbol of government oppression

    A 51-day confrontation between the FBI and the Branch Davidians – a small offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists – came to a tragic end outside Waco, Texas on 19 April 1993. Controversy still rages over whether the Davidians started the fire in order to commit mass suicide, or if it was the FBI’s assault which was responsible for the inferno. Researchers have described the siege as a “critical incident” – an event that highlights and exacerbates existing fault lines in society. “Waco” has therefore become cultural shorthand for expressing tensions within American politics and culture.

  • The deaths of 76 Branch Davidians in April 1993 could have been avoided – so why didn’t anyone care?

    Throughout the 6-week ordeal near Waco, Texas, media coverage of the ATF raid and FBI siege depicted the Branch Davidians as a cult with David Koresh exercising total control over mesmerized followers. It was a narrative that federal law enforcement agencies were happy to encourage, and it resonated with the public’s understanding of so-called “cults.” The story that has emerged is much more complex – and makes one wonder if the tragedy could have been avoided altogether.

  • Webhose takes aim at the Dark Web

    Fans of the popular TV show “Mr. Robot,” which dives deep into the world of shady hackers and the Dark Web that lurks beyond its better-known counterpart, take note: An Israeli startup is serving notice that the hidden is now visible and even your bitcoins won’t shield you from the long arm of the law.

  • Spike in London murders can’t be reversed by New York-style police crackdown alone

    A spike in murders in London that saw more people killed in the city in February and March than in New York, has provided newspapers with some sensational headlines. Of the more than 50 murders to have taken place in London so far in 2018, the vast majority are the result of knife crime. While comparisons between murders in New York and London make for a good story, simplistic headlines based on one-dimensional readings of statistics can be seriously misleading.

  • The Baader-Meinhof gang dissolved in 1998 – but some members are still on the run

    Future members of the Red Army Faction – aka the Baader-Meinhof gang — committed their first known attack on 2 April 1968, when two Frankfurt department stores were hit with arson. The RAF dissolved in 1998, but many questions are still unanswered. Three former members of the Red Army Faction are still on the run. A series of robberies in the late 1990s put the authorities back on their trail. These thefts served no apparent political goal: Their only purpose was to finance the fugitives’ lives on the run.