NEW YORK — Murders are down to a 40-year low in New York and Chicago. Yet homicide rates are on the rise in Baltimore and Detroit — and dramatically so in New Orleans. In that variance is a positive story about cities' successful attack on crime and gun violence, but also an alarm about rising gang-related and youth violence, particularly within the African-American community. Across the US, the incidence of intentional killing is still relatively low compared... (GunPolicy.org)

Washington, D.C., filed its brief today to the U.S. Supreme Court defending the city's ban on handguns, after a major shake-up of its legal team on the eve of the filing deadline in the high-stakes case. The District's ban was struck down last spring by an appeals court decision, which was the first in the nation to use the Second Amendment to strike a local gun-control law. It will be the first time in 70 years that the high court will hear a Second Amendment case,... (GunPolicy.org)

WASHINGTON — The Second Amendment's provisions protecting the right to keep and bear arms apply only to the federal government, not the 50 states and the District of Columbia, lawyers for the nation's capital argued Friday in a written brief to the U.S. Supreme Court. The district is seeking to preserve its three-decade ban on handgun possession after a federal appeals court ruled in March that the ban is an unconstitutional infringement on an individual's right to... (GunPolicy.org)

WASHINGTON — Only the U.S. government — not the 50 states and not the District of Columbia — is subject to the Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms, lawyers for the district told the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday in a bid to keep a ban on handguns. The district is seeking to preserve its three-decade ban on handgun possession after a federal appeals court ruled in March that the ban is an unconstitutional infringement on an individual's right to keep and... (GunPolicy.org)

A tip that a man was carrying a gun led cops to a suspected arms merchant and a massive arsenal of weapons in his Queens apartment, authorities said. Seven rifles, an automatic machine gun, bullet-resistant vests and more than 28,000 rounds of ammo including armor-piercing bullets were part of the haul. Suwei Chuang, 36, was pulled over on Gold Street in lower Manhattan at 8:45 p.m. on Wednesday. A search of his car turned up a bulletproof vest, an assault rifle... (GunPolicy.org)

A schoolboy has been shot dead by a fellow student at a school in India's Madhya Pradesh state, police say. The two boys, one aged 15 and the other 13, were students of a village school in Satna district. The older boy has been taken into custody, police say. He used his father's locally made crude gun in the assault, police said. Last month, a 14-year-old boy was shot dead by two classmates at a school near Delhi. Incidents of gun crime at Indian schools and... (GunPolicy.org)

NASSAU, Bahamas — The continued cooperation between the United States of America and its law enforcement agencies, other gun manufacturing countries and CARICOM, is critical to the region's ongoing efforts to combat the illicit trafficking of firearms across the region, the Bahamas Minister of National Security 'Tommy' Turnquest said last month. Turnquest said the illegal gun trade has created a "black market" for the sale of firearms in the Caribbean. That "black... (GunPolicy.org)

Acting D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles has selected former acting U.S. solicitor general Walter E. Dellinger to defend the District's handgun ban in a high-stakes Supreme Court case. Dellinger, now with the private firm of O'Melveny & Myers, had been working on the handgun case with a team of more than a dozen lawyers under the direction of D.C. special counsel Alan B. Morrison. Nickles fired Morrison late last week, however, in what Morrison has called a... (GunPolicy.org)

NEW YORK — The Republican and Democratic candidates running for president have largely ignored Mayor Michael Bloomberg's anti-gun questionnaire despite his stated desire to influence the national debate on the topic. None answered the questionnaire that Bloomberg's anti-gun coalition released on Dec. 9 and paid $22,200 to publicize last week in full page newspaper ads in Iowa and New Hampshire. Bloomberg spokesman Jason Post said no candidate responded by the Jan.... (GunPolicy.org)