This story was co-published with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. On December 31, in the waning hours of 2025, the Washington Post reported on an internal ICE document that concerned the agency’s “wartime recruitment” strategy, or rather its attempt to expeditiously swell its ranks of deportation officers. The memo, according to the Post, had in mind a pool of ideal candidates who lead a “patriotic” lifestyle and have an interest in “military and veterans affairs,” “physical training,” “gun rights organizations,” and “tactical gear brands.” The memo’s logic was easy enough to understand, since what it described, if you read between the lines, was an informal paramilitary that was waiting to be tapped. Over the last month—as a violent federal occupation has unfolded in Minneapolis, where veteran immigration agents brutally killed two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti—both the memo and the new recruits it would draw into the fold began to take up outsized space in my mind. For a long time now, the gun rights movement has been animated by the promise of a violent reckoning, a sentiment nurtured by the groups that represent it and Republican politicians, who seek to channel a wild, truculent energy into votes and profits. It seemed the promise was being fulfilled in Minneapolis, like the fatal denouement of a production that had one harbinger after another. > “Any mission, any condition, any foes, at any range.” During the 2016 election cycle, when as a reporter I attended my first National Rifle Association annual meeting, I began to see that the promised reckoning could not be delayed forever. At the convention, in Louisville, Kentucky, there was the tradeshow floor, akin to a medieval arms bazaar and containing some 520,000 square feet of guns and tactical accessories. There were seminars covering “Defensive Shooting Skills Development,” “Methods of Concealed Carry,” “Current and Emerging Threats,” and “The Bulletproof Mind For The Armed Civilian.” And there was a line of some 7,000 people, leading into an arena called “Freedom Hall,” where there would be speeches by the emerging Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, and Mark “Oz” Geist, a member of the Benghazi diplomatic compound’s security team that had come under siege in 2012. Three middle-aged white men stood in line in front of me making confident assertions about Barack Obama and “government cover-ups.” One informed the others that Obama, still president, had purchased a “$10 million mansion in Saudi Arabia,” where he and his family would flee after leaving the White House to “evade charges.” Trump would of course chase him down, the man assured everyone, while the United States reembraced frontier justice and flourished under his rule. The line then moved inside, 7,000 people took their seats, and the Republican presidential candidate promised them: “I will never let you down.” Based on the ecstatic response from the crowd, it seemed to me that the message Trump had transmitted was about power—raw power—and who would wield it during his administration.   Going back to at least the early nineties, when President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was in office, gun rights organizations, led by the NRA, and various prominent Republicans pushed an argument for the Second Amendment that was disguised as a historical one. The right to bear arms, they said, was intended to be unfettered because its purpose was to provide citizens with the means to fight a tyrannical government that had turned against its own people. Federal agents, under Clinton, were “jack-booted government thugs,” according to a notorious fundraising letter signed by former NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre. These thugs, he said, had the power to “take away our Constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.” It was often implied that such arguments, which grew in prominence during Barack Obama’s tenure, applied only to the Democratic Party, which posed a vague yet persistent threat to “freedom,” while the Republican party would preserve it. Republican values were antithetical to tyranny, whereas Democrats were inherently tyrannical, and therefore any actions taken by the former were in service of saving the country from the latter. In 2016, while sitting in “Freedom Hall,” I began to feel a sense of alarm that I’d never before felt. Under Trump, this contingent would feel it had permission to act against the enemy. The carrot that was dangled during each election cycle—in fundraising pitches by gun rights groups and the sale of military-style firearms to civilians—was finally being fed to the horse. There would be no more “couch commandos,” as gun industry executives referred to their most enthusiastic customers in the years after 9/11. This was the period in which soldiers were in American streets, and the industry, en masse, had seized on a marketing opportunity to blur the line between soldier and civilian.  What the industry was selling was theatrical participation, the thrill of COSPLAY, except the props were real. “As close as you can get without enlisting,” one gun company, in 2010, boasted as it advertised its “semi-auto only version of the U.S. Special Operations Command’s newest rifle.” “Any mission, any condition, any foes, at any range,” said another manufacturer about its latest assault weapon. In the ad it was equipped with a scope and propped on a tripod, as if intended for a sniper, which of course was the point. Companies were selling military-style weapons with a “combat-proven design,” that provided “versatility on the range or during patrol,” and were a symbol of “bravery on duty.” To enhance the feeling of a simulated combat experience, manufacturers of AR-style firearms cut product placement deals with video game designers. An executive at the gun company Sig Sauer told authors Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, who co-wrote the book American Gun, that featuring the weapons in games was tantamount to “seed planting.”  Buying a gun had become a way to serve at home, and serving at home came to mean preparing for Democratic tyranny. In 2015, for instance, while Obama was still president, the Pentagon prepared for a training exercise across the American Southwest called Jade Helm 15. It was here that the performative, paranoid politics of the right during the Obama years reached something of a fever pitch. Conservative bloggers and commentators created widespread hysteria by alleging that the exercise was a veil for imposing martial law, confiscating firearms, arresting dissidents, and taking over Texas. The state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, called on the Texas State Guard to monitor developments. It was “important,” he said, that Texans know their “rights” and “liberties” would not be “infringed.” The last word did not seem like an accidental allusion to the Second Amendment. For conservative elites, the preservation of power requires giving those beneath them a taste of it, without actually surrendering anything substantial, such as higher tax payments. In the meantime, they have created a shadow army, empowering them not with wealth but with the alluring prospect of crushing their opponents. A few months after the 2016 NRA convention, Trump said at a rally that Hillary Clinton “wants to abolish” the Second Amendment. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” he went on. “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.” Trump for much of his career had been the paragon of vapid wealth, but unlike other leaders of the right who came before him, he was signaling that he would take the army off standby, out of the realm of theater, and move the violent plot forward. The 2020 anti-lockdown Covid protests were a stark indicator of the new paradigm under Trump, who directed blame for restrictions toward Democrats such as Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer. After state lawmakers voted to extend her state of emergency, a large group of men carrying assault rifles packed the Michigan Capitol rotunda and attempted to barge into the legislature, where a line of police guarded the doors. They screamed in the faces of the officers, who looked on impassively. > The lurid fantasy at the heart of the gun rights movement is playing out, but > the leading roles, as they were previously imagined, have been reversed. As the year wore on, Trump told the Proud Boys during a televised presidential debate to “stand back and stand by.” His loss to Joe Biden then set into motion the January 6 insurrection. Oath Keepers stashed an arsenal of weapons at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia. One member imagined a scenario in which “millions die resisting the death of the 1st and 2nd amendment.” A week later, a middle-aged white man named Ian Rogers, a California resident and proud NRA member, was arrested with his best friend for planning to attack the state’s Democratic headquarters. He owned roughly 50 firearms, including four illegal automatic weapons, and had stockpiled 15,000 rounds of ammunition. Writing to me from prison last year, he said that the Democratic Party was “the greatest threat facing the United States today.” He went on, “Just as Rome was brought down by enemies within, we have such traitors amongst us now,” adding, “These people fundamentally hate the country and they will do anything to impose their vision on the nation.” Now, in Minneapolis, masked federal agents, dressed as soldiers, have fatally shot two American citizens. Both were victims of an occupation, in which the Trump administration has unleashed a savage campaign of terror against civilians. The lurid fantasy at the heart of the gun rights movement is playing out, but the leading roles, as they were previously imagined, have been reversed. The party in power is not a Democratic regime, but a Republican one, prompting accusations of hypocrisy against gun rights organizations, who have had little to say and have not called on their followers to face down tyranny in Minneapolis. Following the merciless second killing, of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, federal officials, led by Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, concocted a false narrative alleging that Pretti had murderous intentions. Pretti had a sidearm on his waist, and they shamelessly pointed to it as evidence, even though the gun was holstered, he was legally carrying it, and agents shot him after they had removed the weapon.  Officials also tried to argue that, owing to the firearm’s presence, Pretti’s death was justified. This assertion presented an existential quandary for gun rights organizations, which have spent decades working to dismantle carry restrictions. One by one, the groups issued statements about how a holstered handgun did not give law enforcement the right to kill a person. That was the wrong message, the groups said, but the tyranny of the occupation itself was treated as legitimate. Gun Owners of America stated that “the Left must stop antagonizing @ICEgov and @CBP agents who are taking criminals off the streets and play a crucial role in protecting communities and upholding the rule of law.” The NRA similarly declared, “For months, radical progressive politicians like Tim Walz have incited violence against law enforcement officers who are simply trying to do their jobs.” What is happening now, in other words, is a reminder that the argument about government tyranny was always a canard. Beneath it lurked what was really at stake, which was the right to assert control through force. Over and over, conservatives and Second Amendment stalwarts have claimed that right as their own, with Minneapolis being the latest example. The story they have told for decades is a binary one—good versus evil. In that framing, they are righteous and have but one job: Vanquish the enemy. Hold power. Save America. The same day Pretti was shot, video surfaced of federal agents pointing their weapons at civilians. “It’s like ‘Call of Duty,’” someone could be heard saying, referencing the blockbuster military-style video game series. Since then, Trump has suggested he will deescalate in Minneapolis. But whatever happens, the players have had a taste of the real thing, and there’s no going back.

As US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has drawn a lot of attention for promoting pseudoscience and disproven theories, especially on vaccines. He is using that playbook on another major public health issue: gun violence, which remains the leading cause of death for kids in America. When it comes to school shootings and other mass shootings, here’s what RFK Jr. wants you to believe: It’s not the guns, he argues, it’s the pills. The fringe theory that antidepressants can cause people to turn violent has been around for decades, focused primarily on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, which are the most common class of these drugs. But extensive research by mental health and violence prevention experts has found no credible evidence that antidepressants cause or contribute to mass shootings. As I wrote recently, the history of how this failed theory gained attention online is also telling: > The generalized claim that SSRIs can make people violent—and that they > supposedly gave rise to the shootings epidemic—traces in part to an > unscientific anti-Prozac campaign in the 1990s from the Church of > Scientology and gained some traction in online forums after the Columbine High > School massacre in 1999. Disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who helped > create a miasma of lies claiming that the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook > Elementary School was faked, has also peddled the theory. > > > > Proponents of the SSRI theory use anecdotal, often unconfirmed details about > shooters’ health histories to argue causation. But multiple studies from > experts in psychiatry, law enforcement, and public health show that the theory > has no merit. Data on shooters spanning more than a decade from the FBI’s > Behavioral Analysis Unit has been used specifically to examine the claim that > psychiatric drugs are at the root of school shootings; independent > researchers concluded from the FBI data that “most school shooters were not > previously treated with psychotropic medications—and even when they were, no > direct or causal association was found.” In the above video, I show how RFK, Jr. has been using his top government post to continue spreading the failed theory—a misinformation campaign in which he makes at least a half dozen false or misleading claims about guns, psychiatric drugs, and mass shootings.

“She behaved horribly.” That’s how President Donald Trump described Renee Good, the 37-year-old woman who was repeatedly shot and killed by an ICE officer on Wednesday, roughly one mile from where a police officer murdered George Floyd nearly six years ago. Speaking to the New York Times, the president then pushed the spurious narrative that Good had run over the officer, prompting him to shoot. “She didn’t try to run him over,” he said without evidence. “She ran him over.” The remarks are consistent with the administration’s impulse to defend, often with cruel vociferousness, the conduct of ICE officers as they detain, terrorize, sometimes with gunfire, and then brag about it. But its perpetuation by the president and his allies, now that a woman in Minneapolis is dead, is taking on new levels of impunity. “This vehicle was used to hit this officer,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters in New York on Thursday, where she had been addressing ICE operations in the city. “It was used as a weapon. The officer felt like his life was threatened.” As federal agents stood behind her, Noem appeared unmoved as reporters repeatedly referred to the multiple video angles that have essentially proven the outright falsehoods of the administration’s smear campaign. As for Good, who, by all accounts of those who knew her, was an exceedingly kind woman, Noem continued to charge her with “domestic terrorism,” just as Stephen Miller did on Wednesday when news of the shooting was only just unfolding. Together, the administration’s pervasive and reflexive disdain for facts—what can literally be seen without dispute—and the reflex to taint a woman now dead, crystallize a new level of ugliness for an administration that shamelessly admits: Violence is us. > Domestic terrorism. https://t.co/070fSKR8iX > > — Stephen Miller (@StephenM) January 7, 2026

This story was originally published by bioGraphic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 1987, wildlife veterinarian Mark Pokras was in his office at Tufts University in Massachusetts when a colleague from New Hampshire called. “I’ve got a dead loon here,” she said. “If I bring it down to you, can you tell me how it died?”  Understanding what’s killing wild animals is often the first step to saving them, and over the course of his career, Pokras has necropsied everything from whales to hummingbirds. Yet this was his first loon—in part because common loons (Gavia immer) had only recently begun repopulating New England after being nearly extirpated by 300 years of hunting, pollution, and habitat loss. European settlers so disliked these “ill-shap’d” birds that nature writer Henry David Thoreau described his neighbors on Walden Pond in Massachusetts shooting them just for fun. By the early 1900s, common loons—which winter on the coast and spend summers nesting along inland lakes—had disappeared from their breeding grounds in Massachusetts and much of New Hampshire, and been reduced to a fraction of their former abundance elsewhere in New England. Places with names like Loon Pond didn’t see nesting loons for more than a century. With the banning of DDT and the passage of the US Clean Water Act in the 1970s, however, loons began returning to the region, and people came to see them as symbols of a recovering wildness. The birds’ red eyes and geometrically patterned black-and-white plumage are instantly recognizable, but loons are most beloved for their long, tremulous vocalizations. In the same way that a train whistle symbolizes the freedom and loneliness of travel, loon calls have come to represent a specific, nostalgic kind of northern wilderness: piney woods, the clean smell of a lake, perhaps a rustic cabin tucked away on shore. Flannel shirts, bug spray, an early morning fishing trip. Scientists say that smell is the sense most strongly connected to memory, but for people with a connection to such lakes, there’s nothing like the sound of a loon to conjure an entire place, an entire feeling. Some locals can identify individual birds by the sound of their voices. Pokras witnessed loons’ rebranding firsthand. As a kid in the 1950s, he remembers occasionally seeing and hearing loons while canoeing with his dad, but loons were no more or less popular than any other wild animal. Today, homes across northern New England display loon flags and loon mailboxes, and gift shops sell loon blankets, loon sweatshirts, loon wine glasses, and nearly any other item you can imagine with a loon on it. Maine residents can get a license plate featuring a loon, and one New Hampshire resident told me that people who grow up there often get one of three tattoos: the state area code (603), the state motto (“Live Free or Die”), or a loon. She chose the loon. Pokras doesn’t have a loon tattoo, nor any other tattoos for that matter. But he’d become enchanted by loons while volunteering to rescue seabirds after a series of oil spills in New Jersey, and when his colleague asked if he’d necropsy a dead loon on that otherwise ordinary day in 1987, he readily agreed.  Cutting into the bird, Pokras discovered that it had suffered from lead toxicosis, more commonly known as lead poisoning. Loons eat pebbles to help digest food in their gizzard, and this one may have mistaken a lead sinker left behind by a fisherman for a pebble, or perhaps eaten a fish with a lead sinker in its body. In Pokras’s X-ray, the sinker showed up as an unnaturally round ball amid a mess of partially digested fish and shellfish. After the bird ate it, the lead would have leached toxicants into the bloodstream, causing impaired vision, gastrointestinal distress, neurologic issues, and ultimately death. “This is weird,” Pokras remembers telling his colleague. “We’ll probably never see this again. But if you ever find another dead loon, give me a call.” > “This is weird. We’ll probably never see this again. But if you ever find > another dead loon, give me a call.” That sentence changed the trajectory of his life.  Today, Pokras and his colleagues have necropsied nearly 5,000 dead loons, mostly from New England. Other scientists and veterinarians have necropsied more from across the species’ breeding range, which extends across most of Canada and the northern United States. In nearly every place—from the Maritimes to Minnesota to Washington State—lead poisoning is the leading cause of death for adult loons in freshwater habitat. A loon that ingests a single 28 gram (1 ounce) lead sinker left behind by a fisherman will likely die in two to four weeks. The late poet Mary Oliver witnessed this loss. In a poem titled “Lead,” she wrote that “the loons came to our harbor / and died, one by one / of nothing we could see.” In an era when many species are declining because of multipronged, seemingly intractable problems, the solution to protecting loons is relatively straightforward. Anglers simply need to swap their old lead jigs and sinkers for tackle made from tungsten, steel, tin, or bismuth. Given loons’ immense popularity, you might think that would be an easy sell. But although conservationists have tried educating the public for decades—and although Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts have laws regulating the use and sale of lead fishing tackle—lead is still responsible for around 25 to 30 percent of loon deaths in most states and provinces, and until recently, nearly 40 percent in New Hampshire. Why? The answer, at least in the United States, is entangled with gun rights. I meet up with Mark Pokras on a green, humid summer morning at the headquarters of the Loon Preservation Committee (LPC), a nonprofit based near Lake Winnipesaukee, the largest lake in New Hampshire. Though he retired from Tufts in 2015, Pokras facilitates an interorganizational effort to study loons and drives from his home in Maine to LPC’s wood-shingled building a few times a year to help run a summer research fellowship for graduate students. Today, two Tufts students, Brynn Ziel and Khangelani Mhlanga, are preparing to necropsy a female loon who had been brought to a wildlife rehabilitation center earlier. The loon had been alive but emaciated, with a length of fishing line emerging from her sinuous neck. Unable to save the bird, staff euthanized her, then sent her frozen body to LPC for examination. Now, the body is splayed on a stainless steel grate above a large, shallow sink, like the kind that might be used for dog grooming. The loon’s organs—esophagus, gizzard, liver, intestines—glisten in the fluorescent lights, and the interns’ nitrile-gloved hands are smeared with blood. Ziel uses forceps to pluck pieces of shellfish from the gizzard, while Mhlanga works on severing the head. The loon is surprisingly large up close—about the size of a goose. The digits on her webbed feet look like long, gnarled human fingers topped with black nails. Pokras occasionally chimes in with an observation, and Harry Vogel, LPC’s senior biologist and executive director since the late 1990s, looks on from across the room. We’re two hours into the necropsy, and the frozen bird is starting to thaw. The room smells a bit like roadkill. “They’re a lot prettier on the outside,” Vogel comments. “I’m biased,” Mhlanga says, “but I think they’re pretty on the inside, too.” The interns continue disassembling the bird’s internal architecture in silence, then Mhlanga pulls out a fishing hook as long as her finger. “Huh,” Pokras says, examining it. “This is the CSI part—the detective work…I’m looking at this and asking, ‘Is that the reason the bird is emaciated?’” Wildlife veterinarian Mark Pokras and Tufts University veterinary student Khangelani Mhlanga necropsy a female loon with a length of fishing line emerging from her neck. Krista Langlois Fishing hooks aren’t typically made of lead—it’s too pliable—so the team doesn’t suspect lead poisoning. Perhaps the hook inhibited the animal’s ability to hunt or swallow, leading to starvation. Still, the necropsy is valuable because it contributes to an ongoing record of the lives and deaths of New England loons across five decades. When Pokras first realized the scope of lead poisoning while necropsying loons in the 1990s, he imagined the problem would be solved relatively quickly. After all, once Silent Spring author Rachel Carson publicized the harm that DDT was causing to birds and other wildlife in North America in the 1960s, legislators and the general public mobilized against the agrochemical industry and worked to ban DDT in much of the world, saving the lives of countless birds and ensuring that springtime still resonates with their songs. Yet efforts by LPC and others to educate anglers about the dangers of lead tackle and convince them to switch to non-lead gear hardly moved the needle. And by the time conservationists took their work to Congress in the late 1990s, hoping for a federal ban, it was becoming harder to pass environmental legislation. Voters in the US were increasingly divided by party lines, and politicians were increasingly influenced by a powerful group: the National Rifle Association, or NRA. As Pokras and his colleagues were spreading the word about the dangers of lead fishing tackle in the ’90s, it just so happened that other conservationists had begun noticing that piles of guts contaminated by lead bullets and left behind by hunters were poisoning scavengers, like bald eagles and California condors. (The US Fish and Wildlife Service had banned lead shot—a type of ammunition used for bird hunting that consists of a spray of small pellets rather than a single bullet—for hunting waterfowl in 1991, but other types of lead bullets were still used for hunting larger animals, and continue to be used today.) Conservation groups across the country began lobbying for a federal ban on lead bullets. And the NRA responded in force. As one NRA website currently states: “The use of traditional (lead) ammunition is currently under attack by many anti-hunting groups whose ultimate goal is to ban hunting.” But how did the fight over lead bullets thwart efforts to regulate lead fishing tackle? Many hunting and fishing organizations have ties to the NRA, and they maintain that any effort to regulate tackle will open the door to regulating ammunition, and that any effort to regulate ammunition is an assault on Americans’ gun rights. “One of the unusual things about lead is there are very few other toxic materials that have a huge public lobby in favor of them,” Pokras says. “You don’t see a lot of members of the public out there campaigning [for] more DDT or neonicotinoid pesticides. But with lead there’s a huge, wealthy, politically influential contingent supporting it.” When Pokras retired in 2015, he had decades of data showing that lead fishing tackle was killing loons, along with some 7,500 peer-reviewed scientific papers that unequivocally show the dangers of lead for wildlife. When I asked why he continues to necropsy loons to amass new data despite this preponderance of proof, his answer is concise: “We haven’t solved the problem yet.” Lead—an element found not just on Earth but throughout the solar system—has always been attractive for human industry. The earliest known case of metal smelting can be found in 7,000-year-old lead beads found in Asia Minor. The Roman empire produced 72,000 metric tons of lead at its peak, much of it was used to make vessels for eating and drinking and pipes for moving water; the word “plumbing” comes from the Latin word for lead, plumbum. And lead has been harming people and animals for nearly as long as we’ve used it. Lead seeping from a Greek mine was already polluting the environment some 5,300 years ago, while an Egyptian papyrus from 3,000 years ago depicts a case of homicide by lead poisoning. Still, lead remains popular, used in everything from car batteries to computer screens. Global lead production increases annually, with more than 4 million metric tons (some 10 billion pounds) mined or extracted through recycling in 2024 alone. Before traveling to New Hampshire to seek out loons, I’d met with Elaine Leslie, the retired chief of biological resources for the National Park Service, at her home in rural southwestern Colorado. When Leslie was leading the Park Service’s biology department in the early 2010s under Barack Obama’s administration, she helped enact an internal ban on lead ammunition in all US national parks and preserves. Hunters and gun advocates weren’t thrilled—“I got death threats,” Leslie tells me matter-of-factly—but the US Fish and Wildlife Service followed suit by banning lead ammunition in certain national wildlife refuges, and began making moves toward a more comprehensive ban. The state of California also banned lead bullets in condor habitat in 2007, eventually followed by a statewide ban. For a while, it seemed as though scientists and conservationists were making progress. But when President Donald Trump took office in 2017, his administration largely reversed the Park Service’s ban on lead bullets. (Rangers must still use non-lead bullets when dispatching an injured animal.) It also restricted the agency from spending money on research, education, or other efforts to reduce lead impacts to wildlife and people. Such pushback is bolstered by gun advocates who claim there’s no research proving that lead has population-level effects on wildlife. In the case of California condors, they say, California’s lead ban hasn’t reduced mortality rates, so the lead in condors’ blood must be coming from a different source. (Scientists say it’s because condors regularly cross into states like Arizona and Nevada and eat meat left by hunters who used lead bullets.) Critics also claim that non-lead ammunition is more expensive, which used to be true but is becoming less so. And they allege that non-lead ammunition is less effective—another argument that has been disproved in peer-reviewed research. Still, the backlash against regulating lead at the federal level has only grown in recent years, with federal legislators introducing bills to protect hunters’ and anglers’ right to lead tackle and bullets. California remains the only state with a complete ban on lead ammunition. Sitting in the shade of her porch sipping iced tea, I asked Leslie, a wildlife biologist by training, if the science showing the dangers of lead to animals is well established. She let out an incredulous laugh. “There’s so much peer-reviewed science out there,” she said. “There’s study after study.” > “Those are the very top of the iceberg. Grizzly bears are impacted. Coyotes > are impacted. Ravens are impacted. Any animal that eats another animal can be > impacted.” For months after our meeting, Leslie sends me those studies by email. Research has shown lead poisoning in doves, whooping cranes, eagles, owls, and many other birds. And as Leslie points out, those are only the animals that are monitored. “I mean, those are the very top of the iceberg,” she says. “Grizzly bears are impacted. Coyotes are impacted. Ravens are impacted. Any animal that eats another animal can be impacted.” While not every animal that absorbs lead dies from it, the bioaccumulation may lead an animal to become sluggish or disoriented and get struck by a car or fly into a power line it would have otherwise avoided. Lead poisoning, Leslie says, is an underreported issue. While most animals killed by lead poisoning encounter the element from bullets, loons are predominantly killed by lead fishing tackle, which is theoretically less contentious to regulate—especially in progressive regions like New England. That’s why, beginning in the early 2000s, loon conservationists turned their focus to state-level laws. They also kept their efforts to ban lead tackle separate from efforts to ban lead ammo, in the hope that it might be an easier pill for lawmakers to swallow. New Hampshire became the first to ban certain types of lead fishing tackle in 2000, and subsequently strengthened its laws to become some of the most stringent in the nation. Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maine followed, though the details differ so much from state to state that education and enforcement remain challenging. “We thought great, problem solved,” says Vogel, the LPC director. “But then we realized the problem was not solved.” Today, even after the bans have been in place for years, LPC continues to receive loons each year who have died of lead poisoning. Vogel and his colleagues initially thought this was because the birds were swallowing old lead sinkers buried in the muck at the bottom of lakes. But after necropsies demonstrated that the months when most loons died of lead poisoning coincided with the months when freshwater fishing was at its peak, the team realized that the deaths came from current use. Fishermen were still using—and even purchasing—lead sinkers and spinners. Back at the LPC’s headquarters on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, Pokras shows me a lead lure that he picked up at a fishing store in Maine a few weeks prior. “This is actually a good thing,” Vogel chimes in, with characteristic optimism. It means conservationists don’t have to figure out how to remove old tackle sunk at the bottom of lakes. If they can just figure out how to keep new lead tackle from getting into the environment, the benefit to birds should be almost immediate. And fortunately, they’ve found a promising solution. After the interns finish taking samples of the dead loon’s organs to send off for testing, they seal what’s left of the body in a heavy-duty trash bag for disposal at the local dump. As they wrap up, I head upstairs to the education center and gift shop. A recording of loon calls plays softly, and educational exhibits share information about loons, including the fact that they can dive to depths of 60 meters (200 feet) to hunt for fish, and that their name comes from the Swedish word for clumsy, lom—a nod to loons’ notorious ineptitude on land. On one wall, a taxidermied loon appears to be suspended mid-swim in a glass case, its neck stretched out and its webbed feet splayed behind it like propellers. Affixed to the glass is a placard: “This loon died after ingesting lead fishing tackle.” A table below displays a jar half full of lead sinkers: “This small Mason jar contains enough lead fishing tackle to kill every adult loon found in New Hampshire!” Nearby, a wooden bowl carved in the shape of—you guessed it—a loon holds non-lead tackle that visitors can take home for free. Brochures urge people to earn credit for more new tackle by turning in their old lead gear. This is part of New Hampshire’s pioneering lead tackle buyback program. LPC gets generous donations from loon lovers, and along with support from the state’s department of fish and game, some of that money becomes $20 vouchers to sporting goods stores given to people who turn in lead tackle. Banners and flyers publicizing the lead buyback program are displayed at waste transfer stations, government offices, shops, and community lake associations, and Scouts can earn a badge for collecting lead tackle from their community. Since its launch in 2018, people have dropped off nearly 80,000 pieces of lead tackle; in 2024 alone, 78 kilograms (172 pounds) of lead tackle were turned in, marking a 119 percent increase over the prior year. Maine has taken the work a step further—in addition to buying tackle from individual anglers, the conservation nonprofit Maine Audubon buys stock directly from merchants, keeping lead tackle off the shelves and helping stores comply with newly tightened state regulations. For loons, the combination of legislation, education, and buyback programs seems to be working. Lead poisoning is no longer the number one killer of loons in Maine. And in New Hampshire, lead-related deaths dropped 61 percent between the late 1990s and 2016, and fell another 34 percent since then. “I suppose you could see New Hampshire as a leader,” Vogel says, “But that’s also driven by necessity. The problem was the most severe here.” Vogel is optimistic that states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Washington—all of which have significant loon habitat—will one day follow suit, along with his home country of Canada, where 94 percent of common loons breed. Canada already bans lead tackle and ammo in national parks and wildlife areas but allows it elsewhere. Resistance to a Canadian national ban seems to come from a more basic reluctance to change, rather than fear of losing gun rights, along with the fact that loons are so abundant in Canada that preventing lead poisoning feels less urgent. Europe, meanwhile, is far ahead. The European Union, Norway, and Iceland already ban lead in all wetlands, and the EU is considering a proposal to ban lead from all fishing and hunting gear. Denmark already has a complete ban, and the United Kingdom will enact one beginning in 2026. With the necropsy complete, I follow Vogel and Ashley Keenan, LPC’s field crew coordinator, to a small motorboat docked on Lake Winnipesaukee. The southern part of the lake bumps with party boats and Jet Skis, but these northern reaches are quieter, scattered with islands and ringed with coves where dark sweeps of pine forest feather the shore. Ashley Keenan, field crew coordinator for the Loon Preservation Committee, checks on a loon nest on an island in Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. Krista Langlois Vogel and Keenan are tracking this year’s loon chicks. Unlike ducks and many other waterfowl, loons hatch only one or two eggs per year and don’t typically reproduce until they’re six years old, making population-level growth slow. Out of 32 nesting pairs of loons scattered across Lake Winnipesaukee’s 179 square kilometers (69 square miles) in the spring of 2025, 12 chicks had survived as of August. The figure is slightly below average, although survival rates fluctuate. (One year, 23 chicks survived, Vogel tells me; a few years later, only three did.) During Keenan’s last patrol, the eggs in one nest perched on a tiny island hadn’t yet hatched, and today she’s trying to find out if the chicks have emerged. Keenan steers toward the island, cuts the motor, and jumps into the shallows. She aims her binoculars at a cluster of lichen-splattered boulders. We wait in silence. Nothing. “Goddamn it,” she says, climbing back into the boat. One egg might still be there, but there’s no sign of the second egg or a living chick. She guesses it was picked off by a predator, perhaps an eagle. Vogel speculates that unseasonably hot summer weather contributed to the lower-than-usual survival rate. Loon parents who need to cool down by going for a swim must leave their eggs unguarded, opening them to predation or overheating under the blazing sun. Although common loon populations are holding steady or even growing slightly across their range, loons are increasingly susceptible to the impacts of climate change, as well as avian malaria, shoreline development, and collisions with recreational motorboats. And this region—one of the first in North America to be settled by colonists, and still one of the most densely developed on the continent—echoes with stories of species that have disappeared, from mountain lions to American chestnuts. People here know that survival is never guaranteed, and that keeping common species common requires effort, sacrifice, and care. For loons specifically, it means keeping as many adults of reproductive age alive as possible. “This is probably the most intensely managed species in New Hampshire,” Vogel says. “And despite that, we’re still having trouble maintaining reproductive success.” Just then, a white-haired woman in a kayak approaches our boat, waving her arms. “I’m just trying to find out what happened to my baby loon,” she calls out. Her name is Dotty Wysocki, and she’s been watching nesting loons near her summer cottage here for three decades. “We name ’em and everything,” she tells me in a thick Boston accent. “We really get involved. I’m constantly looking for them.” Wysocki tells us that she saw a newly hatched chick alive earlier in the week but hasn’t spotted it since. When Keenan affirms that the chick is likely dead, Wysocki lowers her eyes. She wishes she could have done more; when she was younger, she and her friends used to watch the chicks in four-hour shifts to scare off eagles and other predators. At the end of her poem about lead poisoning in loons, Mary Oliver wrote: “I tell you this to break your heart / by which I mean only / that it break open and never close again / to the rest of the world.” As Wysocki paddles away and Keenan starts up our motor, both seem dispirited, perhaps even a little heartbroken. But their concern for the fate of this one tiny chick nonetheless fills me with hope. It’s the kind of love that can save a species, and indeed, the only thing that ever has.

Four days after a shooting at Brown University killed two students and wounded nine others, neither the shooter’s identity nor motive is known. But that hasn’t stopped internet sleuths from insisting that they know who did it. Now, powerful influencers are amplifying their claims. Almost as soon as the shooting happened, conservative influencers were quick to blame the shooting on “leftist activists”—but as the days wore on and the details were still sparse, they latched on to a more specific narrative. By Tuesday evening, social media accounts began noting that Brown University had scrubbed the pages on its website that had referred to a third-year student who used they/them pronouns and was involved in pro-Palestine organizing on campus. It wasn’t long before internet sleuths went to work, even deploying AI gait monitors to attempt to match the grainy footage that exists of the shooter with the student in question. Early Wednesday morning, an account with the handle @MadeleineCaseTweets claimed in a widely circulated tweet that the shooter’s physical attributes closely matched those of a third-year student at the university. The account, which has 27,000 followers, also noted that the third-year student was involved in “activism” and included a photo of the student speaking into a bullhorn and wearing a keffiyeh, a checkered scarf often used as a symbol of solidarity with Palestine. Those claims only added fuel to unconfirmed rumors already circulating that the shooter shouted “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” before opening fire. It didn’t take long for a who’s who of powerful conservative influencers, including far-right activist Laura Loomer, podcasters Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, and feminist-icon-turned-Covid-conspiracist Naomi Wolfe, to take the narrative and run with it. “In the video below, notice how he holds his hands behind his back in the surveillance video released by Providence, Rhode Island, police yesterday,” wrote Loomer. “This is common in Middle East culture, and witnesses said it sounded like the shooter was speaking Arabic, in addition to screaming Allahu Akbar!” Other accounts on X have taken the rumors further still, calling the university itself “extremist” and baselessly suggesting that a professor of Palestinian Studies was also involved in the attack. In a press conference on Tuesday, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said there were “lots of reasons” that a university would take a page offline. He strongly rebuked the internet sleuths and influencers who were spreading rumors. “It’s easy to jump from someone saying words that were spoken, to what those words are, to a particular name, that reflects a motive targeting a particular person,” he said. “That’s a really dangerous road to go down.” In a statement, Brown University echoed those concerns, noting, “Accusations, speculation, and conspiracies we’re seeing on social media and in some news reports are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous for the safety of individuals in our community.”

On Saturday, a gunman opened fire on the campus of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, killing two students and wounding nine more. The shooter escaped, and students sheltered in place overnight as authorities tried to track down a person of interest who had appeared in a low-quality security camera video. One suspect was apprehended, but on Sunday, authorities released him. On Monday, the shooter still had not been identified or apprehended—but that didn’t stop a host of conservative influencers from insisting on social media that the perpetrator must have been a disgruntled leftist. Why? Because one of the two victims, 19-year-old Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama, was president of the campus Republicans. (The other was identified as Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an 18-year-old freshman from Virginia whose political beliefs thus far have not been reported on.) Cook’s tragic death was enough to whip the conspiracy machine into high gear. Early Monday morning, Elon Musk reposted to his 229 million followers a since-deleted tweet blaming the left for the shooting. He commented, “The murderous indoctrination needs to stop now.” The theory about the targeting of Cook seems to have gained significant traction from an X account with the handle @AutismCapital, which announced to nearly a million followers that “the police explicitly claimed it was likely a targeted attack to [Cook’s] family and that when he came in the room he looked specifically for her first before he fired?” The post didn’t mention that there has been no credible reporting about the shooters’ motive or his actions before he fired the first shot, only rumors on social media. After this, Katherine Boyle, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, reposted that tweet and added her own thoughts in a post to her 95,000 followers: “Now young men and women like Ella know they can be killed for their political beliefs on a college campus, even if they’re not provocateurs or influencers or public officials, just normal young people participating in a student club.” Shaun Maguire, a partner at the firm Sequoia Capital with 295,000 followers, also retweeted the post from @AutismCapital, commenting, “To the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and now to the tragic murder of Ella Cook, it’s impossible to shake the feeling that we’re not getting the truth fast enough from law enforcement and our media … when it doesn’t fit their narrative.” Far-right influencer and Trump favorite, Laura Loomer, tweeted to her 1.8 million followers, “Jewish and Christian conservative students and faculty targeted at Brown University and they want you to think western civilization isn’t under attack.” She also repeated an unconfirmed rumor that the shooter had shouted “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” before opening fire. Vickie Palladino, a conservative New York City councilwoman, posted to her 38,000 followers, “Very clear now that the attack at Brown was perpetrated by a leftist activist and targeted Republicans. The people who openly celebrated Charlie Kirk’s murder en masse and faced exactly zero consequences for it have been emboldened to kill more conservatives.” The tweet has since been deleted. Raw Egg Nationalist, a British far-right influencer, put his own spin on the leftism-run-amok theory. He implied in a post to his 309,000 followers that the shooting occurred because the left had not been sufficiently punished for conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s murder. “I hate to say it, but it’s true: Charlie Kirk’s murder has shown the left they can get what they want by killing right wingers,” he wrote. “They killed the most important young right winger in America, a surrogate son to the president, at basically no cost to themselves. Just one person arrested. No reprisals or even real threat of reprisals. Of course, there are going to be more murders.” Another unproven narrative making the rounds was that the attack was an act of antisemitic terrorism because the venue was a study session for a popular lecture class that happened to be taught by a Jewish professor. “Prof Rachel Friedberg, whose class at ⁦@BrownUniversity⁩ was targeted last night by a shooter, taught at Hebrew University and advised the Knesset on immigration to Israel, among other credentials,” Naomi Wolf, the feminist writer turned Covid conspiracy theorist, posted to her 489,000 followers. “I wonder who the shooter was and what could have possibly motivated him?” In response to the shooting, President Trump offered only a few terse words. “Brown University, great school,” he said. “Great, really, one of the greatest schools anywhere in the world. Things can happen.” Meanwhile, Trump took to social media to opine about the murder of film director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, which occurred the day after the shooting at Brown. The president baselessly suggested that the Reiners’ progressive politics contributed to their untimely deaths. The murder was “reportedly due to the anger [Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial. “He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump.” Reiner’s son Nick, who has struggled with drug addiction, was arrested on suspicion of murder on Monday.

Phillip Abram, a Jewish Bondi resident, places flowers at a growing memorial near Bondi Beach following the Bondi Hanukkah terror attack.James West/Mother Jones

At least 15 people were killed, and more than three dozen were hospitalized, in a shooting at Australia’s famous Bondi Beach in Sydney on Sunday in what the authorities are calling a terrorist attack at a Jewish holiday celebration.  One gunman has been killed and a second suspect is in custody and in critical condition, police said.  The attack comes amid a surge in antisemitic violence in Australia, home to the largest proportion of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel. It is Australia’s worst mass shooting in three decades, a rare occurrence in a country with one of the lowest rates of gun-related deaths in the developed world. “This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia said, adding, “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian.” At about 6:45 p.m. on Sunday, police began receiving reports that multiple people had been shot. “The gunmen emerged from a small silver hatchback parked by a footbridge near the beach and began firing into the crowd celebrating Hanukkah,” according to The New York Times.  Emergency workers transport a shooting victim on a stretcher after an attack at Sydney’s popular Bondi Beach. Mark Baker/APMark Baker/AP A video showing a bystander—identified by Australian media reports as Ahmed al Ahmed, a 43-year-old Sydney man—tackling and disarming an assailant has gone viral. “That man is a genuine hero,” Chris Minns, the premier of the state of New South Wales, said, “and I’ve got no doubt there are many many people alive tonight as a result of his bravery.” Mal Lanyon, police commissioner for New South Wales, said there were also two improvised explosive devices found at the scene that were “active,” the Times reported. He described them as “rudimentary” and “fairly basic” in construction. Police offices around the world, from New York to London, said they would increase security presences in their cities following the attack. “We are deploying additional resources to public Hanukkah celebrations and synagogues out of an abundance of caution,” the NYPD said in a statement, adding that they “see no nexus to NYC.”  A rabbi lights a menorah during a vigil outside the Australian High Commission in central London, following the terrorist attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia on Sunday. James Manning/PA Wire/APJames Manning/PA Wire/AP The rise in antisemitic attacks in the country began after the October 7, 2023, massacre and the onset of Israel’s war in Gaza. In May 2024, one of Australia’s largest and oldest Jewish schools in Melbourne was spray-painted with the phrase “Jew die.” In a series of incidents in October 2024, a Jewish‑owned bakery in Sydney was defaced with antisemitic graffiti, two men set fire to a brewery near Bondi Beach, and a kosher deli was deliberately set on fire. The attacks continued in 2025. One of the most serious incidents occurred this past July, when about 20 worshipers attending a Shabbat dinner at the East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation “were forced to evacuate through a rear exit after a man poured flammable liquid on the front door and set it alight,” as reported by Time.  These incidents, according to Daniel Aghion, the president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, are at “a level that we’ve never seen in the more than 30 years that we’ve been monitoring and collecting data.”  According to The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, the Bondi Beach shooting is the deadliest attack on Jews in the diaspora since the October 27, 2018, attack at the Tree of Life building in that city left 11 people dead. This past October, two people were stabbed to death at a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur. Sunday’s shooting is the deadliest in Australia since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, which claimed the lives of 35 people and wounded 23 more. As the New York Times detailed, following that shooting—in which a gunman killed 12 of the victims in just 15 seconds—the countryessentially banned assault rifles, many other semiautomatic rifles, and shotguns. Authorities alsoimposed mandatory gun buybacks, melted down as many as 1 million guns, and imposed new registration requirements and restrictions on gun purchases.  Over the next two decades, there were no mass shootings in Australia. In an investigation published this past August, the Guardian warned that the gun landscape in Australia was shifting. “Gun numbers are on the rise,” the investigation noted, and, while the per-capita number of gun-license holders has gone down, “there is now a larger number of guns in the community per capita than there was in the immediate aftermath of the [Port Arthur] crackdown.”  Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, said on X that one of the people killed in the attack, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, had deep ties to the neighborhood of Crown Heights. Mamdani called the attack a “vile act of antisemitic terror” and said it was “merely the latest, most horrifying iteration in a growing pattern of violence targeted at Jewish people across the world.” The Hanukkah celebrations at Bondi Beach on Sunday were being hosted by a local chapter of Chabad, a global organization based in Brooklyn. An invite to the event highlighted free donuts, crafts, face-painting, a “Grand Menorah Lighting,” music, games, and ice cream. Schlanger organized the Sydney celebration, according Chabad. This is a developing story.

Though it was hardly a national focal point of the 2025 elections on Tuesday, Maine became the twenty-second state to adopt a “red flag” law for regulating guns, with the approval of nearly 59 percent of voters. Starting in January, Maine will allow families to petition a judge to remove firearms temporarily from a family member who appears to pose a threat to themselves or others. It’s a notable development in a state with a strong gun and hunting culture, where even the Democratic governor, Janet Mills, opposed the measure.   The new policy stands as a clear response to the devastating mass shooting that took place in Lewiston, Maine, in October 2023 at the hands of a profoundly troubled man, whose worsening condition had long alarmed those around him. As I reported previously: > Army reservist Robert Card, the 40-year-old suicidal perpetrator who killed 18 > people and injured 13 others at a bowling alley and a bar on October 25, > displayed numerous warning signs far in advance. His erratic behavior going > back months included complaints he was hearing voices, angry and paranoid > claims about being smeared as a pedophile, punching a colleague, and > threatening to shoot up the Army base where he worked. Some of his family > members and supervisors sounded the alarm. After a two-week stay and a > psychiatric evaluation in July at an Army hospital, Army officials directed > that Card should not possess a weapon or handle ammunition. Despite the fact that people close to Card felt he was becoming dangerous, they had little possible recourse; at the time, the state had a weaker “yellow flag” law in place that allows only law enforcement to seek removal of guns—and only after the person of concern has been given a medical evaluation. As Card’s case showed, though, that is a high bar to taking action. A few weeks before the massacre, as I further reported, “the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office, which had communicated with family members and Army authorities since May, attempted a wellness check at Card’s residence.” Unable to locate him, they alerted other agencies that he was “armed and dangerous” and should be approached with “extreme caution” based on his reported behaviors.    In other words, opportunity for intervention at an earlier stage of Card’s downward spiral, flagged by family members and others, was already gone. An investigation later published by the New York Times revealed that Card had suffered from serious brain injury connected with his military service. As red flag laws have spread throughout the country in recent years, research in California and beyond has shown that they can be effective for preventing suicide and mass shootings. (A majority of mass shootings culminate with the perpetrators ending their own lives.) California led the way with the policy in the aftermath of a 2014 mass killing near University of California, Santa Barbara. During my recent two-year investigation into that notorious case, violence prevention experts at the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office told me that in the decade since, the state’s red flag law has become “a key tool in a lot of, if not most of, the threat management cases that we’ve worked.” Evolving policy nationally on gun regulations and violence prevention remains a mixed picture, particularly since Donald Trump returned to the White House. He quickly issued executive orders aimed at rolling back years of progress on red flag laws, “ghost guns,” and more, and he has gutted key violence-prevention programs within the federal government. Some Republican allies of Trump at the state level have moved in a similar direction, including in Texas. That state has suffered several of the worst gun massacres in recent memory, from a Walmart in El Paso to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, but nonetheless, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the state GOP’s Anti-Red Flag Act into law in June. In stark contrast to Maine’s new policy, the use of such violence-prevention strategies—once backed even by Abbott himself—is essentially no longer an option in Texas.

Conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was shot in Utah on Wednesday, officials said. Kirk, 31, was speaking at Utah Valley University in the suburb of Orem, about 45 miles south of Salt Lake City, when he was shot. Videos circulating on social media appeared to show Kirk being struck in the neck while he was sitting on a stool addressing an outdoor crowd. Kirk’s condition was not immediately clear. FBI Director Kash Patel said in a post on X that agents will be dispatched to the scene. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said he was being briefed by law enforcement, adding, “Those responsible will be held fully accountable. Violence has no place in our public life. Americans of every political persuasion must unite in condemning this act.” Kirk is the founder of Turning Point USA, an organization that tries to get young people into conservative politics. He is a close ally of President Donald Trump and spoke at the Republican National Convention last summer. Kirk is married and has two children. Officials on both sides of the aisle, including Trump and Vice President JD Vance, condemned the violence and called for prayers for Kirk. “A great guy from top to bottom. GOD BLESS HIM!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Dear God, protect Charlie in his darkest hour,” Vance wrote on X. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whose husband was a victim of political violence, wrote on X: “Political violence has absolutely no place in our nation. All Americans should pray for Charlie Kirk’s recovery and hold the entire UVU community in our hearts as they endure the trauma of this gun violence.” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.), who hosted Kirk on his podcast earlier this year, called the shooting “disgusting, vile, and reprehensible.” Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Penn.) wrote on X: “The attack on Charlie Kirk is horrifying and this growing type of unconscionable violence cannot be allowed in our society.” Information on a suspect or whether anyone else was injured was not immediately available. Spokespeople for the university and state police did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones. This is a developing story. Check back for updates.