Fred Clasen-Kelly and Renuka Rayasam
BOGALUSA, La. — Less than a mile from a century-old mill that sustained generations on this small city north of New Orleans, 19-year-old Tajdryn Forbes was shot to demise close to his mom’s home.
She discovered Forbes face down on the street in August 2023, two weeks earlier than he had deliberate to maneuver away from the empty storefronts, boarded-up homes, and poverty that make this probably the most troubled locations within the nation.
Naketra Guy thought of how her son overcame shedding his father at age 4 and was the glue of the household. She referred to as him “humble” and “respectful,” a pacesetter in the neighborhood and on the soccer area, the place he shined.
Yet he couldn’t outrun the grim statistics of his hometown. Bogalusa posts among the worst well being outcomes and poverty in Louisiana, a state that routinely ranks among the many worst nationally in each. And Bogalusa has endured one other indicator of poor public well being: excessive ranges of gun violence.
Since the start of the covid-19 pandemic, gun violence has shattered any sense of peace or progress right here. Louisiana suffers the nation’s second-highest firearm death rate — and Bogalusa, a predominantly Black neighborhood with 10,000 residents, has seen dozens of shootings and a violent crime price approaching twice the nationwide common.
A close-by workforce refused to play soccer at Bogalusa High School in fall 2022, citing safety concerns.
Bogalusa’s mayor, Tyrin Truong, was elected in 2022 at age 23 on his guarantees to repair entrenched challenges: few youth applications and good jobs, and perpetual crime and blight.
“I ran for mayor because I got sick of seeing our city painted as mini-New Orleans,” he mentioned, “due to the high levels of youth gun violence.”
In January, the Louisiana State Police arrested Truong, accusing him of soliciting a prostitute and collaborating in a drug trafficking ring that allegedly used illicit proceeds to purchase firearms. He has said he is innocent. “I still haven’t been formally arraigned,” he instructed KFF Health News in late July, “and I haven’t been charged with anything.”
Every 12 months tens of hundreds of Americans — one every few minutes — are killed by gun violence on the dimensions of a public well being epidemic.
Many hundreds extra are left to recuperate from extreme accidents, crushing medical debt, and the mental health toll of shedding family members.
Most headlines give attention to America’s city facilities, however the numbers additionally replicate the expansion of gun violence in locations like Bogalusa, a pinprick of a city 75 miles north of New Orleans. In 2020, the gun violence demise price for rural communities was 40% higher than in giant metropolitan areas, in line with Johns Hopkins University.
Firearms are the No. 1 killer of youngsters within the U.S., and no group suffers greater than young Black people. More Black boys and males ages 15 to 24 in 2023 were killed in gun homicides than from the following 15 main causes of deaths mixed. Though general U.S. homicides dropped sharply after the pandemic ended, adolescent gun deaths climbed even increased within the years after, in line with research by Jonathan Jay, an affiliate professor within the School of Public Health at Boston University.
“It has all the markers of an epidemic. It is a major driver of death and disability,” Jay mentioned. “Gun violence does not get the attention it deserves. It is underrecognized because it disproportionately impacts Black and brown people.”
Rather than bolstering efforts to avoid wasting lives, federal, state, and native authorities officers have undermined them. KFF Health News undertook an examination of gun violence for the reason that pandemic, a interval when firearm demise charges surged. Reporters reviewed authorities studies and tutorial analysis and interviewed dozens of well being coverage specialists, activists, and victims or their family. They reviewed company earnings studies from gun producers and data on the industry’s donations to politicians.
In polling revealed in 2023 by KFF, more than half of Americans mentioned they or a member of the family had been impacted by gun violence corresponding to by seeing a capturing or being threatened, injured, or killed with a gun.
American politicians and regulators have put in place legal guidelines and practices which have helped enrich firearm and ammunition producers — which tout $91 billion in economic impact — whilst gun violence has terrorized neighborhoods already broken by white flight, systemic disinvestment, and different types of racial discrimination.
President Donald Trump championed gun rights on the marketing campaign path and has received millions from the National Rifle Association, to whose members he promised, “No one will lay a finger on your firearms.” His administration has rolled again efforts underneath President Joe Biden to deal with the rise in gun violence.
Emboldened in his second time period, Trump is pushing to allow more guns in colleges, weaken federal oversight of the gun business, override state and native gun legal guidelines, allow gross sales without background checks, and lower funding for violence intervention.
Trump ordered the attorney general to evaluate all Biden administration actions that “purport to promote safety but may have impinged on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.”
The Biden administration mentioned “a historic spike in homicides” in the course of the pandemic took its biggest toll on racially segregated and high-poverty neighborhoods.
Black youths in 4 main cities have been 100 times as likely as white ones to expertise a firearm assault, analysis confirmed. Gun suicides reached an all-time excessive, and for the primary time the firearm suicide price amongst older Black teenagers surpassed that of older white teenagers.
In Bogalusa, the pandemic gun violence unfold worry. Among the victims killed have been a 15-year-old attending a party and a 24-year-old nationally recognized musician. Thirteen individuals have been injured at a memorial for a person who himself had been shot. Residents mentioned neighbors stopped sitting of their yards due to stray bullets.
Researchers say communities like Bogalusa endure a collective trauma that shatters their sense of security. Two years after Forbes’ death, his mom says that when she leaves house her surviving youngsters fear that she, too, may get shot.
Repercussions from the surge will final years, researchers mentioned: Exposure to shootings will increase danger for post-traumatic stress dysfunction, nervousness, suicide, melancholy, substance abuse, and poor college efficiency for survivors and those that dwell close to them.
“We saw gun violence exposure go up for every group of children except white children, in the cities we studied,” Jay mentioned. “Limits on government funding into gun violence research may stop us from ever knowing exactly why.”
Politics of Pain
The 12 months earlier than Forbes died in Bogalusa, Biden signed into regulation the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, thought of the most sweeping firearm legislation in a long time.
In a matter of months, Trump has systematically dismantled key provisions.
Efforts to control weapons have lengthy confirmed ineffective in opposition to the facility of political and enterprise pursuits that fill the streets with weapons. In 2020, the variety of weapons manufactured yearly within the U.S. hit 11.3 million, greater than double a decade earlier, in line with the federal government. In 2022, the United States had almost 78,000 licensed gun dealers, greater than its mixed variety of McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and Subway areas, in line with Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group.
The Biden administration announced in 2021 it will try to cut back gun violence by adopting a “zero tolerance” coverage towards firearm sellers who dedicated violations corresponding to failing to run a required background verify or promoting to somebody prohibited from shopping for a gun.
The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, which licenses gun sellers, has the authority to implement legal guidelines meant to stop unlawful gun gross sales. In issuing an government order, the Trump administration declared that, underneath Biden, the company focused “mom-and-pop shop small businesses who made innocent paperwork errors.”
From October 2010 to February 2022, the company performed greater than 111,000 inspections, recommending revocation of a seller’s license solely 589 occasions, about 0.5% of instances, an inspector basic’s report mentioned. Even when it cited severe violations, the ATF not often shut sellers down.
ATF leaders told the inspector general’s office that suggestions for license revocations elevated after Biden’s zero-tolerance coverage was carried out. In April, the Trump administration repealed it.
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy last year declared firearm violence a public well being disaster. Within weeks of Trump’s inauguration, his administration removed the advisory. Of the 15 main U.S. causes of demise, firearm accidents acquired much less analysis funding from the National Institutes of Health for every one that died than all however poisoning and falls, in line with an analysis in 2024 by Brady, an anti-gun violence group. Trump is trying to cut that funding, too.
Trump’s Department of Justice abruptly cut 373 grants in April for initiatives price about $820 million, with a big share from gun violence intervention.
“We are going to lose a generation of community violence prevention folks,” mentioned Volkan Topalli, a gun violence researcher at Georgia State University. “People are going to die, I’m sorry to say, but that is the bleak truth of this.”
Asked about its insurance policies, the White House didn’t handle questions on public well being concerns round gun violence.
“Illegal violence of any sort is a crime issue, and President Trump has been clear since Day One that he is committed to Making America Safe Again by empowering law enforcement to uphold law and order,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai mentioned.
Trump administration officers “want safer streets and less violence,” Topalli mentioned. “They are hurting their cause.”
Garen Wintemute, an emergency medication professor who directs the violence prevention program on the University of California-Davis, was among the many first within the nation to contemplate weapons and violence as a public well being situation. He mentioned race performs a major position in perceptions about gun violence.
“People look at the demographic risk for firearm homicide and depending on the demographics of the people in the audience, I can see the transformation in their faces,” Wintemute mentioned. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘Not my people, not my problem.’”
Eroding Gun Restrictions
Trump’s incursions in opposition to public well being efforts to include gun violence are backed by lobbying energy.
Firearm business advocacy teams made thousands and thousands of {dollars} in political donations in recent times, principally to conservative causes and Republican candidates. That contains $1.4 million to Trump, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks marketing campaign finance information.
The assassination of civil rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. helped result in the passage of the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, which imposed stricter licensing guidelines and outlawed the sale of firearms and ammunition to felons.
While it stays the regulation of the land, over time, federal and state authorities actions have considerably weakened its protections.
Most states now allow people to carry hid weapons with no allow or background verify, though research suggests the apply can improve the chance of firearm homicides.
In Louisiana, Democratic former Gov. John Bel Edwards, in workplace from 2016 to 2024, vetoed a bill that may have allowed individuals to hold hid firearms with no allow.
Elected in 2023, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed a law to permit any individual over age 18 to conceal-carry with no allow.
The Trump administration has created a task force to implement his government order to finish most gun rules and which might permit extra individuals with legal convictions, together with for home abuse, to personal weapons.
Figures differ, however some researchers estimate as many as 500 million weapons flow into within the U.S. Sales reached record highs in the course of the pandemic and publicly traded firearm and ammunition corporations noticed profits jump.
Donald Trump Jr. this summer season joined the board of GrabAGun, an internet gun retailer that went public in July underneath the inventory ticker PEW. In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, the corporate, which markets weapons to individuals ages 18 to 44, cited “gun violence prevention and legislative advocacy organizations that oppose sales of firearms and ammunition” as threats to its gross sales development.
Dave Workman, a gun rights advocate with the Second Amendment Foundation, mentioned firearms are to not blame for the surge in pandemic shootings.
“Bad guys are going to do what bad guys are going to do regardless of the law,” Workman mentioned. “Taking away gun rights is not going to reduce crime.”
David Yamane, a Wake Forest University sociology professor and nationwide authority on weapons, mentioned the U.S. firearm debate is advanced and the business is usually “painted with too broad a brush.”
Most weapons won’t ever be used to kill anybody, he mentioned. Americans have a tendency to purchase extra weapons throughout occasions of unrest, Yamane added: “It’s part of the American tradition. Guns are seen as a legitimate tool for defending yourself.”
‘A Low Level of Hope’
Once referred to as “the Magic City,” Bogalusa has grow to be a grim image of deindustrialization.
Bogalusa emerged as Black individuals fashioned their very own communities within the time of Jim Crow racial segregation on the flip of the Twentieth century.
Racism concentrated Black individuals in neighborhoods that became epicenters of poor health, mirrored in excessive charges of most cancers, bronchial asthma, persistent stress, preterm births, pregnancy-related issues — and, over latest a long time, firearm violence.
Thousands flocked to Bogalusa after the Great Southern Lumber Company constructed one of many world’s greatest sawmills, establishing Bogalusa as an organization city. Racial tensions soon followed.
Members of the native Deacons for Defense and Justice gained nationwide consideration within the Nineteen Sixties for shielding civil rights organizers from the Ku Klux Klan, a hate group that burned homes and church buildings, terrorizing and killing Black individuals.
As the mill modified palms over the a long time, Bogalusa’s fortunes slid. In the mid-Twentieth century, the inhabitants surpassed 20,000, however it’s now about half that.
International Paper, a Fortune 500 company based mostly in Tennessee, runs the mill as a containerboard manufacturing facility, using about 650 individuals. In 2021, the state introduced incentives for the corporate that included a $500,000 tax break, saying the transfer would assist carry “prosperity.”
Businesses stay boarded up alongside the primary drag. Houses nonetheless bear injury from Hurricane Katrina, and plenty of streets are eerily quiet.
Nearly 1 in 3 individuals in Bogalusa dwell in poverty — 2½ occasions the nationwide common.
Bogalusa’s violent gun crime price reached 646.1 per 100,000 individuals in 2022, increased than Louisiana’s and 1.7 occasions the nationwide one, in line with the nonprofit Equal Justice USA, citing FBI Uniform Crime Reporting information.
In many rural cities throughout the South, “there is a level of desperation that is more apparent” than in different elements of the U.S., mentioned Luke Shaefer, a University of Michigan professor of social justice and public coverage.
“They don’t have the same infrastructure to have robust social services. People are like, ‘What are my life chances?’” Shaefer mentioned. “People feel like there is nothing that can be done. There is a low level of hope.”
Missed Opportunities
Mayor Truong lamented the violence in Bogalusa after Forbes was killed, writing on Facebook, “When are we as a community going to come together and decide enough is enough?”
The federal authorities had supplied one path ahead.
The Biden administration supplied billions of {dollars} to native governments by the American Rescue Plan Act in the course of the pandemic. Biden urged them to deploy cash to neighborhood violence intervention applications, proven to reduce homicides by as a lot as 60%.
A handful of cities seized the chance, however most didn’t. Bogalusa has acquired $4.25 million in ARPA funds since 2021. None seems to have gone towards violence prevention.
The Louisiana legislative auditor, Michael Waguespack, discovered that Bogalusa used almost $500,000 for worker bonuses, which his report mentioned could have violated state regulation. In some instances, the report says, funds weren’t tied to work carried out.
Bogalusa officers didn’t reply to a public data request from KFF Health News in search of detailed details about its ARPA cash.
Former Mayor Wendy O’Quin-Perrette, who served from 2015 by early 2023, instructed Waguespack in a June 2024 letter that town used ARPA cash to enhance streets and pay the bonuses. “We would not have done it without being sure it was allowed,” she mentioned.
O’Quin-Perrette didn’t reply to requests for remark.
In a 2023 letter to Waguespack, O’Quin-Perrette’s successor, Truong, wrote that Bogalusa officers didn’t understand how the federal cash was spent. When he took workplace, Truong alleged, officers found “tens of thousands of dollars of checks and cash” stashed “in various drawers and on desks” in metropolis places of work.
Truong defended his stewardship of ARPA funds, saying that about $1 million remained when he assumed workplace however that the cash was wanted for extra pressing sewer infrastructure repairs. “I wish we could have invested more, invested any money in gun violence prevention efforts,” he mentioned.
In an interview, Truong mentioned town has been “intentional” about bringing down gun violence, together with by a summer season jobs program. He pointed to statistics that present homicides decreased from 9 in 2022 to 2 in 2024. “If you keep them busy, they won’t have time to do anything else,” he mentioned.
Asked about his January arrest, Truong mentioned he has political enemies.
“I’m the only Democrat in a very red part of the state, and, you know, I’ve made a lot of changes at City Hall, and that ticks people off,” Truong instructed KFF Health News. He mentioned that he ended long-standing metropolis contracts with native businesspeople. “When you’re shaking up power structures, you become a target.”
Josie Alexander, a Louisiana-based senior strategist for Equal Justice USA, mentioned metropolis officers missed a chance once they didn’t use ARPA funds for gun violence prevention. “The sad thing is people here can now see that money was coming in,” she mentioned. “But it just wasn’t used the way it needed to be.”
‘Too Much Trouble Here’
Truong mentioned town remains to be reeling from the pandemic spike in violent crime. He mentioned he was at Bogalusa High School’s homecoming soccer recreation in 2022 when one teen shot one other. Shots rang out, Truong mentioned, and he grabbed his 3-month-old son and “laid in the bleachers.”
“It’s not a foreign topic to hardly anybody in town, whether you’ve heard the gunshots in the distance, whether you have attended a funeral of somebody who passed due to gun violence,” he mentioned. Many nonetheless grapple with trauma.
In December 2022, Khlilia Daniels mentioned, she hosted a party for her teenage niece, praying nobody would carry a gun.
The hosts checked friends for weapons, she mentioned.
Yet gunfire erupted, Daniels mentioned. Three teenagers have been shot, together with 15-year-old Ronié Taylor, who died, in line with police.
“When someone you know is killed, you never forget,” mentioned Daniels, 32, who held Taylor till emergency responders arrived.
Tajdryn Forbes was planning his future when he was killed, seemingly due to a dispute that began on social media over lyrics in a rap tune, Guy mentioned.
In a Facebook post in January, Bogalusa police mentioned that they had arrested somebody in reference to Forbes’ killing. Authorities had previously announced the arrest of a teen in reference to the murder.
Forbes had been a highschool soccer standout, like his late father, Charles Forbes Jr., who performed semipro. When Forbes scored a landing, he would look to the sky to honor his dad.
The college praised Forbes for his senior baseball season in a social media post: “This young man makes a difference on our campus and on the field with his strong character.”
When hopes for a university soccer scholarship didn’t pan out, Forbes labored as a deckhand for a marine transportation firm. He saved cash, wanting ahead to transferring to Slidell, a suburb of New Orleans.
“He would always say, ‘There’s too much trouble here’” in Bogalusa, Guy recalled.
