(NEW YORK) — Newly released research suggests four gun safety policies supported by gun owners and non-gun owners that could reduce overall gun-related homicides by 28% and gun-related suicides by 6.7%. One of the proposals alone, called closing the misdemeanor loophole, has the potential to reduce overall gun-related homicide rates by as much as 19% according to research.

Closing the misdemeanor loophole entails lowering the threshold of what crimes can disqualify someone from being able to legally purchase or possess a gun, such as violent misdemeanor crimes including assault, battery and stalking, which are currently excluded. According to the report, current federal law allows convicted criminals to purchase and possess guns as long as their crime did not rise to the level of a felony.

This policy would prohibit the gun purchase or possession of anyone who committed a crime involving violence or threatened violence, regardless of the level of the crime, according to the report. As of this year, only four states have violent misdemeanor laws in place.

While the misdemeanor loophole proposal could largely reduce violence, researchers told ABC News the four proposals are meant to work together and rely on one another to reduce gun violence deaths.

This policy could have been effective in preventing the recent shooting at the University of Virginia which left three football players dead, Dr. Michael Siegel, a researcher at Tufts University School of Medicine who authored the report, told ABC News in an interview.

The accused gunman had committed a misdemeanor gun violation in 2021 and made comments about possessing a gun in September and the university said it was aware of these incidents.

“If Virginia had a violent misdemeanor law in place like the one that we’re proposing, he would have been automatically disqualified from purchasing a gun or from from having a gun,” Siegel said.

The research — conduced by Tufts University School of Medicine and 97percent, a bipartisan group that conducts research with the goal of reducing gun deaths in America — aimed to find common ground between gun owners and non-gun owners. The research aimed to propose gun safety policies that would keep guns out of the hands of violent criminals, while still protecting law-abiding gun owners’ Second Amendment rights, according to lead researcher Dr. Michael Siegel and Matt Litman, the president of 97percent.

“It’s based on an extensive research process in which we carefully analyze the effectiveness of state firearm laws but in addition, we consulted with gun owners, which was very unique in trying to find out what their perspectives are,” Siegel said.

The policy proposals came together based on the analysis of gun owner and non-owner perspectives through surveys and focus groups.

The other proposals are creating a state-level permit system, implementing a revamped universal background check system, and creating a red flag law with due process protections.

Research suggests that creating a state-level gun-permitting system with two permits, a general one and a concealed carry one, could reduce gun violence. The report suggests that permits should be periodically checked using a universal background check system and only be valid for a set number of years.

Obtaining a state-issued permit to purchase or possess a gun would require state and local background checks, focusing on any history of violence, and a gun safety training course.

Currently, only 12 states currently require permits to purchase a gun, six of which are only for long guns.

By simplifying universal background checks, law enforcement can utilize state and federal databases to ensure a potential permit holder has not been convicted of a violent misdemeanor or felony.

Currently, only 11 states search state and local records and background checks are only conducted at points of purchase by federally licensed sellers. Private sellers can sell guns without a background check. The proposal suggests that background checks should be conducted at the federal, state and local levels as part of the process for obtaining a license.

The research also shows there is broad support for red flag laws that implement strong due process protections. These laws allow family members or law enforcement to petition a court to remove firearms from a person who is a threat.

Only 19 states have red flag laws, while only 12 states allow family members to petition a court for a protective order.

Research suggests that family members are the most capable of seeing and identifying warning signs, and they should therefore be able to utilize red flag laws for them to be most effectively used.

Research has shown that lawmakers who signed on to bipartisan gun control legislation, that passed earlier this year, are not paying the price for voting yes on that legislation because the legislation was very popular, Litman said in an interview with ABC News.

Litman further stated that the same stands true for these four proposals, which research shows are very popular with gun owners.

“With so many different laws possible and so many states going in different directions, there’s really no uniformity and it’s hard to set priorities. We feel that if we can get all the states working together on a smaller set of policies, that the chances of pushing this forward are greater,” Siegel said.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.) — As classes resume at the University of Virginia on Wednesday, a 22-year-old student is due in court for allegedly gunning down three classmates in a mass shooting on campus.

Two other students were injured in the shooting that unfolded on a bus as it returned to Charlottesville on Sunday night from a field trip in Washington, D.C.

The suspect, Christopher Darnell Jones Jr., was taken into custody Monday morning following an overnight manhunt. His arraignment is set for Wednesday morning at Albemarle General District Court.

The three slain students, Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry, were all members of the football team, University of Virginia President Jim Ryan said.

Jones was a running back for the football team in 2018, though he never played in a game. Virginia Athletics Director Carla Williams said Jones was a student beginning in 2018 and was a walk-on for one semester. She said “there was no overlap” on the team between Jones and the victims, adding that she doesn’t “know if there was any interaction outside of the class.”

A motive is not clear, Ryan said Monday.

Jones is facing three counts of second-degree murder and three counts of using a handgun in the commission of a felony, according to UVA Police Chief Timothy Longo. Charges could change, he said.

Albemarle County Commonwealth Attorney James Hingeley confirmed to ABC News that Jones also faces two counts of malicious wounding of the two other students.

As UVA students mourn, classes are resuming on Wednesday. But undergraduates aren’t required to finish any graded assignments or take exams before Thanksgiving break, Ryan said.

As of Tuesday, the football team had not decided if it’ll play this Saturday’s scheduled game against Coastal Carolina.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(UVALDE, Texas) — For months since the May 24 school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, attention and blame have been focused on the chief of the tiny school district’s police force. That man, Pete Arredondo, was first suspended and then fired as investigators pointed to him as the incident commander who failed the students and their teachers by failing to act to stop the carnage.

But records that are still being kept confidential and interviews with officials familiar with the most sensitive aspects of the investigations shed new light on the events of that day and raise questions about another ranking law enforcement official who has, thus far, avoided nearly all scrutiny.

That official is Uvalde County Sheriff Ruben Nolasco.

“We’re looking at him,” one law enforcement official said of Nolasco.

Officials briefed on the investigation said Nolasco and his role on the day of the massacre have been a focus as detectives work to unravel both the events that led up to the shooting and the bungled and delayed response of law enforcement to what was an “active shooter” situation.

Determining just who was in charge that day is a focal point as investigators try to make sense of a series of poor law enforcement decisions and delays in the police response that could well have cost lives.

Nolasco, who insists he was not the incident commander when an 18-year-old former student of Robb Elementary School killed 19 children and two of their teachers, has been on the radar of investigators from the start. He initially refused to cooperate with a special investigative committee empaneled by the Texas House of Representatives, agreeing to appear only when he was threatened with civil penalties after being summoned, the committee announced at the time.

Families of the victims, meanwhile, want to know more about his role on the day catastrophe struck Uvalde.

“We feel he should have done more to save children,” said Berlinda Arreola, step-grandmother of Amerie Jo Garza who was killed in the rampage. “We feel like he’s hiding something. There is a reason he hasn’t spoken to anyone.”

In his first interview with a news organization since the shooting, Nolasco defended himself and said he was not and could not have been in command as the massacre played out.

“All I can say is I was not the incident commander that day,” Nolasco told ABC News. “Honestly, I mean, there’s just a lot of finger-pointing that’s going on right now … I think they want to point fingers to me and point fingers at me.”

He said he had given interviews to state and federal investigators leading the official probes into the massacre.

A spokesman for Texas DPS declined to comment for this story.

Soon after radio calls for assistance went out on May 24, scores of police from an array of different agencies poured into the neighborhood around the Robb campus on Old Carrizo Road while the massacre was unfolding inside two adjoining classrooms.

According to investigators, Arredondo had assumed control inside the school building. But official reports say it was a different story outside. There, Nolasco “had operational control,” according to one of the highest-ranking state troopers to report to the site that day.

In a June 2 interview with the Texas Rangers leading the investigation, Capt. Joel Betancourt of the Texas Department of Public Safety said he “initially understood that Sheriff Nolasco was the scene commander.” That statement was included in two synopses of investigator interviews with Betancourt reviewed by ABC News.

That report says Betancourt told Ranger Lt. Randy Garcia that, when Betancourt arrived at Robb, he “met with Uvalde County Sheriff Nolasco and started setting up a command post.” Betancourt went on to explain that he and Nolasco discussed the situation inside the school and the law enforcement resources that were on their way. Betancourt said the sheriff told him the original “active shooter” emergency had settled into one in which an individual was behind closed doors and holding police at bay — what is called a “barricaded subject” in police parlance.

It would go down as the same bad call made inside the school’s hallway by Arredondo.

Betancourt described to the investigator a scene of confusion and poor communication.

“Captain Betancourt said he was getting his information from Uvalde County Sheriff Nolasco because he had operational control,” Garcia wrote in his report. “Captain Betancourt said he did not know if anyone was in charge inside the building. Captain Betancourt relayed a story where at one point he started towards the door to the school and the Sheriff stated there were too many people inside there already, insinuating for Captain Betancourt not to go inside the building. Captain Betancourt took that statement to mean the Sheriff was in operational control.”

Betancourt told the investigator that it was only after the shooter had been killed by a special assault team from U.S. Border Patrol that he “realized that Chief Arredondo was the incident commander.”

Nolasco said he believes it was clear that Arredondo was in charge that day.

“You have a chief of police that works for the school,” Nolasco said. “And he coauthored (the school district active shooter) policy that put him in charge. The incident is at school and I’ll let you do the math.”

Nolasco, a Republican, was elected sheriff in 2020 after nearly three decades in law enforcement. He first joined the Uvalde sheriff’s department in 2005 and has done everything from 911 dispatch to emergency medical response to undercover narcotics operations.

The sheriff said any attempt to make him look responsible for incident command shows “they’re just looking for a scapegoat.”

Arredondo and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment for this story. In his only news interview after the shooting, Arredondo said he did not view himself as the incident commander.

“I didn’t issue any orders,” he told the Texas Tribune.

In a statement issued just before being fired from the school district in August, Arredondo’s attorney also made it a point to remind the public that the school attack first began as a shooting at the Diaz Street home of gunman Salvador Ramos where Ramos shot his grandmother in the face. Nolasco personally responded to that scene.

“That would have been the first incident to establish incident command,” Arredondo’s lawyer, George Hyde, wrote, referring to the Diaz Street location.

In his comments to ABC News, Nolasco took issue with that, saying, at the time, “I didn’t know the connection to that other scene over there” on Diaz Street.

The connection between the Robb school shooting and the earlier gunshots on Diaz Street was a prime focus of the special legislative committee that Nolasco was reluctant to cooperate with. The committee reported that there were differing accounts of when Nolasco arrived on Diaz Street and when he later learned of the Robb shooting.

“In a desire to put this issue to rest, and to foreclose the suggestion that earlier reporting of the attacker’s assault on his grandmother could have led to an earlier law enforcement intervention, the committee has requested records from Sheriff Nolasco’s mobile phones to confirm that he was not contacted directly for assistance on Diaz Street,” the committee wrote in a footnote to its July 17 report. “The committee has not yet received these records. The issue is important if a more timely report of the Diaz Street shooting could have prompted an earlier call from dispatch for law enforcement response to the area or an earlier … alert at the school.”

The committee still has not received those records, said former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman, who served as one of three members of the legislative panel.

“Sheriff Nolasco had a key role, and transparency around his actions that day would serve the people of Uvalde well,” Guzman told ABC News.

In an interview with Ranger investigator Garcia on June 3, Nolasco insisted “he was in his office when he heard radio traffic of a traffic crash near Robb Elementary School,” according to a synopsis reviewed by ABC News. “Soon thereafter, the radio traffic advised of a shooting related to the crash, and Sheriff Nolasco responded to the area. While traveling on Garden Street, he was contacted by the Ramos family as he passed.”

Nolasco also told the investigator, according to the synopsis, that he and DPS Capt. Betancourt “planned the establishment of a command post” but did not proceed once they learned the gunman had been killed by officers inside the school.

As for his reluctance to cooperate with the legislative probe, Nolasco said the reason was simple: “There is an investigation going on. And I participated while cooperating with the Rangers and the FBI. I told them my part of what happened on that day, my understanding, and I was instructed not to talk to anybody else because of the ongoing investigation … It put me in a bad spot. I’m here to cooperate and try to help as much as I can.”

“But, you know, when you have an investigation that’s going on, you wait till it’s investigated before you talk to anybody that’s going to review, I guess, anything,” he said.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(LOS ANGELES) — A homeless man has been shot and killed by a security guard after he reportedly walked into a Target store and allegedly stabbed two people, including a 7-year-old boy, with a large butcher knife he grabbed off of a shelf, police said.

The incident occurred at approximately 6:20 p.m. on Tuesday at a Target near Figueroa and 7th Streets in Los Angeles, California, when police say the man entered the store and grabbed a butcher knife with a 9-inch blade off of a shelf before confronting the 7-year-old boy, Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore told the media following the incident.

“(He) confronted him and told the young boy he was going to stab him and kill him,” Moore said. “He repeated that more than once. The young child attempted to flee and leave, ignore him, move away. The suspect without any further provocation suddenly attacked and stabbed this child in the back.”

Following the initial stabbing, the suspect subsequently encountered a a group of women and stabbed a 25-year-old woman “brutally” in the chest, according to Moore.

The boy suffered a deep wound to his back and shoulder area and fell to the floor after being stabbed, officials said. The 25-year-old woman was tended to by good Samaritans who reportedly came to her rescue by pulling her into the store’s pharmacy area and closing the gate behind them, according to ABC’s Los Angeles station KABC-TV.

The suspect then moved to the front of the store but was confronted by an armed Target security guard who reportedly tried to defuse the situation with his baton before switching to his gun when the suspected allegedly continued to approach him with the 9-inch blade, according to KABC.

The security guard shot the man at least once in the torso before Los Angeles Police Department officers who happened to be in the nearby shopping complex next to Target responded to the scene and took the stabbing suspect into custody, according to KABC.

The incident reportedly caused mass panic in the store as customers fled the scene of the crime and one woman was trampled in the stampede and bruised in her face, authorities said.

“Out of nowhere, we heard people screaming,” Kevin Zaragoza, who was shopping at Target with his brother at the time of the stabbings, told KABC following the incident. “We rushed to the front. Right there by the exit we see a girl on the floor, blood all over her. After that, we see the whole LAPD swarming in there with shotguns, all types of stuff. It was crazy.”

The 7-year-old boy who was stabbed underwent surgery after the attack and is currently listed in stable condition, though he may have suffered potential neurological damage in the stabbing, officials said. The 25-year-old woman was also taken to the hospital and underwent surgery for the deep stab wound to her chest. Authorities have not yet given an update on her condition but did confirm that the suspect had no relation to either of the victims involved in the stabbing.

The suspect who was shot by the security guard during the altercation was also taken to the hospital but died from the gunshot wound he sustained following the stabbings, police said.

The investigation into the incident is ongoing.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — The Artemis I rocket launched early Wednesday morning, the latest attempt to send an unmanned capsule near the moon after a series of postponements due to weather and mechanical issues.

NASA pushed back a takeoff scheduled for Monday after Hurricane Nicole made landfall about 85 miles south of Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The launch marks the first step in an ambitious plan to establish a long-term presence on the moon for scientific discovery and economic development. Eventually, the Artemis expedition could lead to the first crewed space trip to Mars, according to NASA.

Nov 16, 1:50 AM EST
Artemis moon rocket launches from Cape Canaveral

The unmanned mission is headed back to the moon after liftoff was achieved at 1:47am ET.

We are going.

For the first time, the @NASA_SLS rocket and @NASA_Orion fly together. #Artemis I begins a new chapter in human lunar exploration. pic.twitter.com/vmC64Qgft9

— NASA (@NASA) November 16, 2022

Nov 16, 1:43 AM EST
Artemis cleared for 1:47 a.m. launch

NASA conducted a “Go-No Go Poll” resulting in a “GO” for launch in 10 minutes, at 1:47 a.m. ET.

Nov 16, 12:03 AM EST
Technicians need to replace ethernet cable

NASA said the “red crew” team has fixed the hydrogen leak problem.

However, a radar on the range is not operational until technicians replace an ethernet cable, which NASA says will take about an hour.

The launch window opens at 1:04 a.m. and runs until 3:04 a.m.

Nov 15, 10:38 PM EST
NASA begins live broadcast ahead of launch

NASA has begun its live broadcast ahead of the anticipated Artemis launch.

Nov 15, 9:46 PM EST
Leak reported ahead of launch

NASA has reported a “small leak” ahead of the Artemis launch.

“Engineers have paused flowing liquid hydrogen into the core stage because of a small leak on a hydrogen valve inside of the mobile launcher,” NASA said. “A team of personnel called a red crew is being assembled to go to the pad to make sure all of the connections and valves remain tight. The valve is located within the base of the mobile launcher.”

-ABC News’ Gio Benitez

Nov 15, 9:28 PM EST
How to watch the Artemis launch

The Artemis launch will take place early Wednesday morning, unless NASA postpones the takeoff due to weather or other concerns.

If Artemis is declared ready, a two-hour window will open at 1:04 a.m. ET. If needed, the back-up windows are Saturday, Nov. 19, and Friday, Nov. 25.

NASA will broadcast the launch on NASA TV.

Nov 15, 9:24 PM EST
Weather 90% favorable for launch

The weather is currently at 90% favorable for the Artemis launch early Wednesday morning, according to NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems.

Nov 15, 9:02 PM EST
Artemis mission aims to send astronauts to the moon

The Artemis launch on Wednesday kicks off a yearslong expedition that aims to put astronauts on the moon and enable a future trip to Mars.

The Artemis expedition includes four missions, each of which will cost roughly $4.1 billion. In all, the project will cost up to $93 billion by 2025, according to an audit from the NASA Office of the Inspector General.

If Artemis I is successful, Artemis II will take four astronauts near the moon in 2024. After that, Artemis III will take a crewed spacecraft for a moon landing. Finally, Artemis IV will fly to a space station near the moon.

Over the course of the Artemis missions, NASA plans to eventually send the first female astronaut and the first astronaut of color to the moon.

Nov 15, 9:01 PM EST
Artemis mission has suffered months of delays

The Artemis mission has suffered a series of setbacks since an original launch date in late August that was expected to feature Vice President Kamala Harris in attendance among about 100,000 spectators.

NASA called off that initial takeoff, set for Aug. 29, after a defective sensor prevented one of the rocket’s engines from cooling down to a temperature required before ignition.

Days later, a second launch attempt on Sept. 3 was scrubbed after the space agency identified a liquid hydrogen leak.

A third planned launch attempt, on Sept. 27, faced postponement due to Hurricane Ian. The rocket was moved off the launchpad to protect it, as Ian wrought destruction along its path northward from Florida to the Carolinas.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.