(NEW YORK) — Nearly 600,000 customers are without power in New England Wednesday after a powerful, record-breaking nor’easter lashed the Northeast.

Heavy rain flooded roads from Massachusetts to New York, while water rescues were reported in New Jersey.

Dangerous winds also toppled trees and blocked roads.

Wind gusts climbed to 94 mph on Martha’s Vineyard.

Brant Rock in Marshfield right now. @kellyannwx tells me gusts of up to 44mph so far. The peak winds of this Fall Nor’easter is expected overnight @WCVB #wcvb pic.twitter.com/RBtEMZ6aG3

— Nathalie Pozo (@NathalieWCVB) October 27, 2021

The storm became a “bomb cyclone” when its pressure dropped 24 mb in less than 24 hours. In Nantucket, Massachusetts, the nor’easter set a record for the lowest pressure ever recorded in October.

The heavy rain will be ending in most of the Northeast on Wednesday but the winds will continue to roar up to 60 mph from Long Island to Massachusetts to Maine. On Wednesday morning, winds gusted near 80 mph in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

More power outages are possible Wednesday in New England. By 7 p.m., wind gusts could still reach near 50 mph in Massachusetts.

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — This report is a part of “Rethinking Gun Violence,” an ABC News series examining the level of gun violence in the U.S. — and what can be done about it.

Alex Schachter, a 14-year-old marching band member gunned down in the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, would have graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School this year.

“All of Alex’s friends were able to walk across that stage,” his father, Max Schachter, told ABC News. “Since Alex wasn’t there, I did it and collected his posthumous diploma. It’s sad watching all of these kids go off and go to college and do everything that I hoped that Alex would do.”

Alexander, my sweetest little boy. I still can not believe this has happened. How? Why? I miss you every day.

One week from worst Valentine’s Day ever. pic.twitter.com/Se1o9tCPhk

— Max Schachter (@maxschachter) February 7, 2021

The accused Parkland gunman was armed with an AR-15-style rifle when he stormed into Stoneman Douglas in February 2018, killing Alex and 16 others.

The United States has over 20 million AR-15-style rifles legally in circulation, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a national trade association for the firearm industry. That accounts for a small percentage of the roughly 400 million guns in the country — but the popularity of AR-15-style rifles has been growing “exponentially” ever since the federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004, said Mark Oliva, the NSSF’s public affairs director.

Because AR-15-style rifles are so versatile, with the ability to add scopes and change both the length and size of the barrel, they became a desirable weapon for many Americans, especially people who like to hunt, ABC News contributor and former FBI agent Brad Garrett said.

But along with that rise in popularity, the use of these weapons in mass shootings is also climbing, according to Louis Klarevas, a research professor at Teachers College, Columbia University who specializes in gun violence and safety. From Sandy Hook to San Bernardino to Orlando to Las Vegas, “most of the deadly high-profile mass shootings in the past decade were perpetrated with assault weapons, particularly AR-15-style assault rifles,” Klarevas said.

The history

Sometimes referred to as “assault weapons” or “military-style rifles,” this class of firearm can encompass many different kinds of guns — not just the more well-known rifles, such as the AK and AR-15 series weapons. The term “assault weapon” generally encompasses a wide range of models, including the UZI rifle and pistol, the Beretta AR-70, the SKS rifle and more, according to the California Attorney General’s Assault Weapons Identification Guide.

AR-15 style rifles are rifles “modeled on the AR-15 platform and that fire the same caliber cartridges,” Klarevas said, such as the Smith & Wesson M&P15 and the Ruger AR-556.

Along with their use in hunting, for some Americans, AR-15-type weapons also connote patriotism, which can be traced back to the M16 military rifle that became prominent during the Vietnam War, according to Garrett.

“It didn’t hurt that Sylvester Stallone uses an assault-type weapon in ‘Rambo,'” the 1982 film about a Vietnam veteran, Garrett said.

But in 1989, an AK-47 was used to kill five children at a Stockton, California, elementary school, leading California to become the first state to enact an assault weapons ban, Klarevas said. That was followed by two other high-profile mass shootings with semiautomatic pistols — one in San Francisco and one on a Long Island Rail Road commuter train — in 1993.

Those shootings were the impetus for the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, signed into effect by President Bill Clinton in 1994, stopping the manufacture, sale, transfer and possession of these types of firearms.

The federal law led to a decrease in gun massacre incidents where six or more victims are killed, Klarevas wrote in a report he issued last year as an expert witness in a federal court case challenging California’s ban on assault weapons. When compared to data from 1984 to 1994, the U.S. saw a 43% drop in gun massacre deaths and a 26% decline in gun massacre deaths involving assault weapons in 1994 to 2004, according to his report.

The federal ban was not renewed by Congress and expired in 2004. Gun massacre incidents involving these weapons then skyrocketed from 2004 to 2014, jumping 167% compared to the 10 years the federal law was in effect, Klarevas’ report said, and active shooter incidents with different guns overall have been steadily climbing over the last two decades, according to FBI data, which does not break down murders by exact model of gun used.

While there’s no federal assault weapons ban now, Washington, D.C., and seven states — California, New Jersey, Hawaii, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York — have banned the possession of certain kinds of these firearms, and the rules vary state to state. According to Klarevas’ report, “In the past 30 years, accounting for population, states with assault weapons bans in place experienced 54% fewer gun massacres involving the use of assault weapons and 67% fewer deaths resulting from such attacks perpetrated with assault weapons.”

The pros and cons

In many rural and suburban areas, fully and semi-automatic rifles hold a practical value, such as for defending property, and a familial value, to pass down weapons to future generations, Garrett said.

AR-15-type rifles are also beloved as sporting rifles because they are accurate, versatile, light and easy to disassemble, Garrett said. They’re also simple to shoot — Garrett said anyone could be trained in a few hours.

Oliva and his wife, both Marine Corps veterans, shoot AR-15s recreationally.

“The way it’s designed, it is easily adaptable. It can fit my frame,” Oliva said, and with adjustments, “It can also fit my wife, and she can shoot that rifle just as easily.”

Oliva stressed that AR-15-style rifles are semi-automatic — and the automatic rifle he used in Iraq and Afghanistan “is not the same rifle that I have in my gun safe today.”

The rifle he carried in war was automatic and could fire three rounds without any other action, Oliva said, while the gun in his safe is semi-automatic and requires pulling the trigger every time you want to fire.

But according to Garrett, automatic and semi-automatic rifles can easily fall into the hands of those who want to commit murder.

Sometimes after a high-profile mass shooting, states will tighten up gun laws, such as by requiring background checks, reducing the sale of certain weapons or banning the sale of high-capacity magazines. But those looking to buy these items can often find another way, Garrett said.

In most states you must be 21 years old to buy a handgun from a federally licensed firearms dealer, but only need to be 18 to buy a rifle, he pointed out. That’s because, historically, rifles have been used by people in rural areas to hunt or defend property, Garrett said. But with the prevalence of private and black market sales, “none of these laws apply in reality,” he said.

Some guns are modified by bump stocks, which are used to make the weapons fire like machine guns. The perpetrator of the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, used a bump stock, leading them to be banned federally in 2019.

Since 9/11, the 10 deadliest acts of intentional violence in the U.S. have all been gun massacres, according to Klarevas. Of those 10 acts, the seven most recent — including Parkland — involved what he defined as an assault weapon. The other three shootings, carried out with handguns, were the oldest, one taking place in 2007 and two others happening in 2009.

In the 1980s, less than 20% of gun massacres involved assault weapons, while in the 2010s, that number went up to 35%, Klarevas said. In the last three years, those weapons made up 67% of gun massacres, according to his report.

The push and pull over bans

When Alex was killed in Parkland, “it left a huge hole in my family that could never be replaced,” his aunt, Gail Schwartz, told ABC News. Alex would have turned 18 in July.

Schwartz, along with other family members and survivors of the Parkland and Orlando mass shootings, launched Ban Assault Weapons NOW (BAWN), a grassroots initiative aiming to ban assault weapons in Florida through legislative and electoral efforts.

BAWN first looked to bring a constitutional amendment banning assault weapons before Florida voters, and collected signatures and donations across the state, she said.

“But when we took the amendment to the Florida Supreme Court — because we need to get their approval before appearing on the ballot — the … justices rejected the amendment,” Schwartz said.

Florida’s Supreme Court rejected the proposed constitutional amendment in June 2020 on grounds that the wording was misleading, The Miami Herald reported. The ballot measure summary, which was limited to 75 words, said assault weapons lawfully possessed before the new rule would be exempt; the ballot measure’s full text said the weapons could not be transferred, the Herald reported. The majority of the justices, however, said “the summary exempts the weapon itself. So, under that theory, the weapon, if it’s registered, could be transferred to someone else,” and since the justices’ “interpretation of the summary conflicts with the full text of the amendment,” they deemed that “the measure itself is misleading,” the Herald reported.

When BAWN lobbied the Florida legislature in 2020, 52 co-sponsors signed on, accounting for 90% of the state’s Democratic legislators, she said. But no Republicans — who hold the majority in Florida’s legislature — would co-sponsor the bills, Schwartz said.

Those numbers mostly match up with how members of political parties feel about a potential ban. When split by party, 27% of Republicans support an assault weapons ban and 70% oppose, while 88% of Democrats support the idea and 11% oppose it, according to an April poll from Quinnipiac University, a nationally recognized public opinion polling center.

Overall, 52% of Americans support and 43% oppose a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons, according to the poll.

Oliva is among those against a ban.

“It’s truly heartbreaking to hear the stories” of mass shootings, Oliva said, but he added that AR-15s tend to take the blame “for the evil that the individual has committed instead of holding those individuals responsible.”

“I don’t want to take away the ability for those who choose to defend themselves with a firearm of their choosing from that choice,” Oliva said. “I think when we start to look at bans on entire classes of firearms, what you’re doing is taking a tool away from those who would choose to defend themselves.”

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(SHREVEPORT, La.) — When a series of fights at a Louisiana high school resulted in nearly two dozen students getting arrested, suspended or expelled in a span of 72 hours, a group of dads stepped up to help.

The five dads, all parents of students at Southwood High School in Shreveport, met on a Sunday night to brainstorm how they could help lessen the violence at their children’s school.

“After about three hours, we came up with the idea to have us be a presence on the campus,” said Michael LaFitte Jr., who hosted the meeting at his office, told “Good Morning America.” “We thought we could be a collective unit to be able to show them that there are strong men who are on the campus.”

The dads named their group “Dad’s on Duty USA.”

For the past six weeks, they have traded shifts so members of the group are always present on the Southwood High campus.

Wearing “Dad’s on Duty” T-shirts, the dads welcome students to school, share jokes with them and offer a helping hand and listening ear, according to LaFitte, whose daughter is a junior at the high school.

“Although we’re titled ‘dad’s on duty,’ we also serve as uncle’s on duty, we serve as men of the community on duty,” he said. “Because there are some folks who don’t have a father or don’t have such a great relationship with their father, and it’s our goal to let them see what the right relationship with a male figure is supposed to look like.”

The five dads who originally started the effort, as first reported by CBS News, have more than quadrupled in number, according to LaFitte, who works with an independent security company to vet the fathers who participate.

Working in shifts, there are six to 10 dads on campus at Southwood High every day, throughout the school day. They not only have a presence on the school campus, but also at extracurricular activities like football games and a recent homecoming dance.

“Some days we have long, long days, but we will be at school no matter what,” said Zachary Johnson, who has four children at Southwood High and, like the other dads involved, also works a full-time job. “When your heart is into whatever you’re doing, you make it work.”

David Telsee III said his son, a 15-year-old sophomore, was at first not sure about the idea of seeing his dad on campus every day, but now has “warmed up to it.”

“At first, mine was like, ‘What are you doing dad?'” said Teslee, who spends around three to four hours each day on campus, split between the morning and the afternoon. “He’s starting to warm up to it now, but at first he couldn’t believe it.”

The dads’ efforts have paid off, according to Kim H. Pendleton, Ph.D., the principal of Southwood High, a public school with around 1,500 students.

Pendleton said the school faced serious gang violence at the beginning of the school year, but that has tapered off since the start of the “Dad’s on Duty” effort.

“After the fights, there was a heavy police presence at the school and the kids told me they did not like that,” said Pendleton. “The dads are from the community.”

“They care and they’re committed to being present,” she said. “The kids see them as they’re walking in in the morning. They greet the kids. They tell corny jokes. When I do my rounds to classrooms, they walk with me. They’re making sure that kids are leaving school safely. People are able to talk to them.”

With the success of their effort, the dads said they are working to expand “Dad’s on Duty” to other schools in their school district and then hope to make the effort national.

“We just want people to know that it’s possible,” said Johnson. “We went with it hoping it would make an impact on the school, and now that we see that it’s working, we want to take it to other schools.”

“We’d like this to be the same as the PTA, something that is in every school in every county,” added LaFitte.

Pendleton said the dads have helped her fulfill her mission to make sure every student on campus feels seen and heard.

“My biggest charge to kids is to find one adult that you can interact with and you can trust and you can share information with and we can help you,” said Pendleton. “I want them to find one person on campus who knows who they are, and the dads help with that.”

To her, it’s a great demonstration that it takes a team “to make sure that a school works and works well.”

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