[ZeroHedge] Gun violence remains one of the most pressing public health issues in the United States.
But as Visual Capitalist;s Bruno Venditti shws in the following chart, according to data from USAFacts as of December 2023, gun-related deaths vary significantly across states, reflecting long-standing regional and demographic differences.
Preliminary numbers show that between January and August 2024, an estimated 30,100 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., 5% fewer than during the same period in 2023.
The rate of gun-related deaths in the U.S. has shifted over time. In the early 1990s, the rate fluctuated between 14.5 and 15.0 deaths per 100,000 people. From 2000 to 2014, however, that figure declined and remained below 10.5 deaths per 100,000.
By 2023, the rate rose again to 13.7 per 100,000—still 8% lower than its peak in 1993.
Washington, DC recorded the highest rate in the country in 2023, with 28.5 deaths per 100,000 residents, more than 60% above the next highest state.
At the other end of the spectrum, several states reported significantly lower rates. Those include Hawaii, Utah, and Nebraska.
Although they receive less public attention than gun-related homicides, suicides have consistently made up the majority of gun deaths in the United States. In 2023, suicides accounted for 58% of all gun-related fatalities, totaling 27,300 deaths, according to CDC data. By comparison, 38% were classified as murders (17,927 deaths).
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[JustTheNews] The FBI and intelligence watchdogs are interviewing whistleblowers after explosive revelations emerge.
An elite unit of scientists working for the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded three months after the pandemic began that COVID-19 likely was genetically manufactured and escaped a Chinese lab rather than evolving in nature as Dr. Anthony Fauci claimed, a bombshell revelation now at the heart of ongoing investigations into a possible U.S. intelligence cover-up.
“SARS-CoV-2 Spike Appears to be a Chimera,” a slide from the DIA National Center for Medical Intelligence's June 25, 2020 presentation declared, using the scientific terms for the COVID-19 virus and the “chimera’ term for a genetically engineered pathogen that is a combination of pieces from two separate viruses.
The study – using complex genome analysis – also traced the process used for creating the new virus to an earlier manuscript that the Wuhan Institute of Virology published a decade prior. "Break points align with those identified by WIV Scientists in 2008,” the presentation said.
"The molecular biology capabilities of WIV and the genome assessment are consistent with the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 was a lab-engineered virus that was part of a bank of chimeric viruses … at WIV that escaped from containment," the study concluded.
You can read the full presentation here.
REPORT SUPPRESSED FOR YEARS
The long-hidden study was only recently released under the Freedom of Information Act by U.S. intelligence agencies, a bombshell now at the center of ongoing investigations.
At least four whistleblowers have been interviewed in recent months by the Intelligence Community Inspector General’s office, the DIA’s internal watchdog and the FBI about the early findings from DIA’s National Center for Medical Intelligence and whether there was an effort to keep those genetic sleuths from communicating their evidence to other intelligence agencies, government officials told Just the News.
One area of focus is whether intelligence agencies sought to suppress the DIA research from a highly public release by President Joe Biden’s Director of National Intelligence Office in 2021 that assessed that COVID was “equally likely” to have come from nature or a lab accident, the officials said. That analysis – dubbed the 90-day sprint – made no overt reference to the detailed analysis DIA had offered a year earlier.
Efforts by the DIA scientists to insert their data into the 90-day document were snubbed and their edits were deleted, officials told Just the News.
Sen. Roger “Doc” Marshall, R-Kan., recently provided the intelligence community's inspector general with detailed accounts from the whistleblowers alleging the DIA research was intentionally suppressed from ODNI’s review.
“The ODNI assessment remains flawed. Witnesses claim that during the ODNI-led investigation, conflicted individuals may have censored the laboratory-origin-related intelligence and, if true, this signals an alarming breach of integrity in the investigative process,” the senator wrote in a November letter to the IG reviewed by Just the News.
You can read that letter here.
FBI PROBING COVID COVER-UPS, FAUCI'S PHONES
The intelligence community watchdog responded with a letter in January confirming receipt of the whistleblower complaints. Since then, some of the whistleblowers and other witnesses have been interviewed by the IC and DIA watchdog offices, officials said.
Separately, Just the News reported the FBI has a sprawling criminal investigation into COVID cover-ups, including one based in Cleveland that is focused on the virus' origins. Some witnesses familiar with the DIA assessment have already been in contact with agents in the case.
FBI Director Kash Patel dropped another bombshell over the weekend, confirming his agents had obtained the long-sought cellphones belonging to Fauci during the pandemic.
The emergence of the DIA research is a jarring twist in a long-running drama inside Washington as to why U.S. intelligence agencies – except for the FBI and Energy Department – were so slow to embrace evidence showing a possible lab accident/leak from dangerous gain-of-function research inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology had unleashed the deadly pandemic. The CIA only recently changed its assessment that COVID-19 had likely emanated from a lab leak.
A central piece of evidence to come into clearer public view is the presentation authored by John Hardham, a PhD microbiologist assisting the DIA’s National Center for Medical Intelligence and a Captain in the Navy Reserve. Hardham previously served in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Chemical and Biological Defense Programs.
Hardham’s presentation concluded the spike protein in SARS-CoV-2 — more commonly known as COVID-19 — “appears to be a chimera” that showed possible signs of laboratory manipulation.
A chimera is defined as a “new hybrid microorganism created by joining nucleic acid fragments from two or more different microorganisms in which each of at least two of the fragments contain essential genes necessary for replication,” by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
DETAILS POINTED TO WUHAN LAB ALMOST FROM BEGINNING
Hardham and fellow researchers noted the techniques required to construct a key segment of the COVID-19 virus matched closely with prior research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — the facility long suspected as a possible source of a lab leak.
The presentation, which was first delivered to military intelligence in June 2020, showed that WIV possessed the capabilities required to insert the Receptor Binding Domain of the important “spike protein” that enables the virus to gain entry into human cells, citing its vast database of bat coronaviruses and a record of Gain of Function research on the SARS virus.
The scientist also concluded that the WIV had developed a specific “Reverse Genetics System” that could have been employed by the lab to construct clones of infectious coronaviruses by inserting gene segments for the spike protein without leaving a signature in a process that has been referred to as “No See-Em."
Specifically, the “break points” in the COVID-19 genetic code for the spike protein align with those that were identified in a 2008 study associated with WIV. That study, cited by the scientists, as Ren, et. al was produced by researchers affiliated with the Wuhan laboratory used by WIV.
On March 8, 2021 Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote a letter to Avril Haines, Biden's Director of National Intelligence, and other officials requesting all information the agencies possessed regarding nine specific areas around the COVID-19 origin. The request should have resulted in the intelligence agency providing the DIA NCMI origin assessment. However, no such information was sent to Grassley.
Further evidence showed that DIA scientists were skeptical of early conclusions that COVID-19 had a zoonotic origin—that is spread naturally from animal hosts to infect humans. The House Select Subcommittee on the COVID-19 Pandemic found that two military intelligence agency scientists from the DIA’s National Center for Medical Intelligence authored a working paper that was highly critical of the main zoonotic origin thesis published earlier that year by a NIH-funded scientist named Kristian Andersen in Nature magazine — and used as the primary piece of evidence for the media and other government agencies to discount lab leak theories.
Andersen has been a focus of congressional inquiries because he quickly claimed COVID-19 was man-made and then flipped to the natural evolution theory.
While not disproving Andersen et al.’s conclusions, the DIA scientists found that the evidence presented in that Nature article “does not prove that the virus arose naturally,” and in fact rested on several assumptions, like assuming the motivations of Chinese researchers and trusting in Chinese research transparency about prior work.
You can read that DIA presentation here.
Supporters of Dr. Fauci, who ran the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease during the pandemic and for decades before it, argued the most likely origin of the virus was a wet-market where dangerous animals were sold for food near Wuhan around November 2019.
But government officials told Just the News the intelligence community had vast amounts of classified evidence for years that disputed the natural origins theory and pointed toward a lab leak of a man-made pathogen prior to December 2019, including:
The first COVID-19-like death reported in China occurred in September 2019, well before the alleged wet market episode. That detail was recently made public in the state of Missouri’s successful $24 billion lawsuit against China for hiding details of the pandemic;
U.S. agencies had signal intelligence indicating activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in October 2019 suggesting a biological hazard cleanup occurred, just a few weeks after the first death was reported. That type of cleanup is consistent with a lab leak;
Some scientists associated with WIV came down with COVID-19 in fall 2019 and were treated in the Wuhan area.
Several U.S. military athletes were sickened with COVID at the World Military Games held in Wuhan in October and November 2019;
Some WIV scientists were identified as working at the Wuhan military games as hygienists, raising suspicions among intelligence agencies; and
China tried to report to the United States government in December the genetic data sequence for the COVID-19 virus, but it was deleted by NIH scientists.
Sen. Marshall also relayed another important revelation to the intelligence community inspector general: American spies had obtained classified evidence in 2021 that China planned two years earlier to develop a man-made coronavirus nearly identical to COVID-19, also known in the scientific community as SARS2.
“U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) had classified access in July 2021 to a proposed research plan that, if completed, could have produced a synthetic coronavirus in 2019 with the same unique construction as SARS-CoV-2 (SARS2),” Marshall’s letter stated.
#2
An elite unit of scientists working for the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded three months after the pandemic began that COVID-19 likely was genetically manufactured
Many here on this site were saying the same thing on Day-3.
[Babylon Bee] LOS ANGELES, CA — The Republican Party expressed gratitude to a local group of illegal immigrants who helped film some commercials for the next presidential campaign.
The rowdy group was filmed torching cop cars, looting stores, and waving Mexican flags, providing some "killer" footage for the 2028 race.
"Man, this is great stuff," said one Republican consultant as he reviewed a scene of several illegal immigrants defecating on an American flag while throwing bricks at people's faces. "We couldn't have asked for better footage here. Just 10 seconds will give us a 10-point boost in the polls. Thanks, illegals!"
Sources say Republicans have approximately 3,000 hours of footage depicting illegal immigrants behaving violently and cursing the country that allowed them in. "This is just the beginning," said one strategist. "I just saw an illegal immigrant shout 'Death to America' before kicking an old lady down some stairs. This is absolute gold."
Local authorities are urging rioters to reduce the violent behavior, or at least make sure there are no cameras rolling first. "Make sure the cameras don't catch your acts of terrorism," said L.A. Mayor Karen Bass.
At publishing time, California Governor Gavin Newsom had finally quelled the violence after learning his boss, CCP President Xi, was coming into town for a visit.
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Posted by: Frank G ||
06/10/2025 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Migrants/Illegal Immigrants
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Babylon Bee] LOS ANGELES, CA — The Republican Party expressed gratitude to a local group of illegal immigrants who helped film some commercials for the next presidential campaign.
