Our weekly Top Five feature offers big stories or views from the past week with policy and legislative implications.
“Charleston loophole” on guns still not closed, The Atlantic, June 16, 2016
Writer Jeremy Borden, once a reporter in South Carolina, outlines how “the next Dylann Roof” can still buy a gun because a federal loophole on background checks still hasn’t been fixed. An excerpt:
“Last summer, the story of Roof’s dead-end background check helped expose a loophole that annually allows upwards of 3,000 persons deemed too risky to own a gun to acquire a firearm via so-called ‘default proceed’ sales. … Federal legislation that would close what is now known as the “Charleston loophole” has gone nowhere. To date, the bill has not even received a hearing.”
“My big sister was gunned down in Charleston one year ago,” NPR, June 18, 2016
Former N.C. State Sen. Malcolm Graham of Charlotte describes in this report how he feels a year after his sister, Charleston librarian Cynthia Graham Hurd, was killed in the Emanuel AME Church shooting in Charleston. He paints a moving picture of his sister and closes with this:
“I see Cynthia every day because she’s on my cell phone screenshot. There was a picture of her that an illustrator did for the alumni magazine at the College of Charleston where she worked part-time, and it’s a beautiful picture. I saved it as a part of my screensaver. So every time I pick up the phone to make a call, there she is, with me everywhere I go.
“We may be back here again soon. Not in Charleston, not in a church, but somewhere in our country someone is going to experience some type of pain simply because of the proliferation of guns, and the Achilles heel of our country, racism, that we can’t seem to get past. So we got to not just forgive and forget, but we have to remember to continue to fight for those things that make our society better today than it was yesterday.”
State employees, teachers, state pay more to shore up pension system, The Post and Courier, June 22, 2016
State employees, teachers and municipal employees in the state retirement system will have to pay 0.5 percent more of their salaries to the state to shore up the state pension system. State employees will get something of a break due to a 3.25 percent pay increase this year , although it is now effectively a 2.75 percent increase. Teachers and municipal workers take it on the chin, though, with someone earning $50,000 a year having to shell out $250 more to the state retirement system.
Study finds three police officers per day arrested nationwide, Washington Post, June 22, 2016
A recent study conducted by Bowling Green State University reports that police officers are arrested at a rate of about 1,100 per year, or three a day, across the United States.
Asian population is fastest growing group in nation, state, The Post and Courier, June 22, 2016
Although the Asian population makes up 2 percent of the state’s population, it has more than doubled in the past 15 years and is expected to continue.
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