Why Mass Shootings Happen Even in States With Strict Gun Laws

Gun culture

By Jennifer Mascia for The Trace

This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

On October 15, a 16-year-old boy opened fire at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, killing three children and a teacher and critically wounding two others. The incident is the deadliest school shooting since the one in 2024 at Apalachee High School in Georgia, which also resulted in four deaths. 

Shortly after the Oregon shooting, gun control groups lamented weak federal gun laws and urged people to vote for reform-minded leaders. Gun rights advocates, meanwhile, argued that the state’s strong gun laws — including universal background checks, a red flag law, and a ghost gun ban — didn’t prevent the shooting. 

Do gun rights advocates have a point? While research has shown that states with the loosest gun laws and highest rates of gun ownership have the highest rates of gun death, high-profile incidents like the tragedy in Bend still happen all over the country. 

Eight of the deadliest school shootings in the past 15 years have occurred in blue states, including California, Oregon, and Washington, according to Gun Violence Archive. Those states routinely earn top scores on the annual gun law scorecard from the advocacy group Giffords, which ranks each state by the strength of its gun laws.

“Public mass shootings represent less than 1 percent of gun violence in this country,” said Michael Anestis, director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University. “Research has shown time and time again that specific forms of firearm legislation are effective at reducing specific forms of injury and death,” he added, pointing to interventions that have reduced community violence.

Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, director of the Center for Firearm Injury Prevention at the University of Washington, agrees that there’s no single solution for reducing all types of gun violence. “Certain gun laws can reduce gun deaths, but no law can fully eliminate the risk of school shootings,” he said. “We should judge laws by their overall impact, not individual incidents.”

So what’s going on? 

Is LORIB still challenging South County Democrats in the General Election?

Both of Charlestown’s state Senate seats have LORIB-endorsed candidates

By Will Collette

LORIB has pushed for anonymous money for its candidates

Brewed Awakenings owner Dave Levesque of Narragansett took a big gamble this year, setting up 40 – yes, that’s forty – political action committees (PAC), one for each Rhode Island municipality plus a statewide PAC. They all bear the name “League of Rhode Island Businesses (LORIB)” and all of them were tasked with defeating liberal Democrats, especially women legislators in South County.

Levesque ran “Democrat in Name Only (DINO)” candidates in nine districts statewide. Levesque plunked around $20,000 into each campaign, using his galaxy of PACs to “bundle” the funding and evade the Rhode Island campaign finance legal limits on such donations - $2000. 

Sex crime defense lawyer Leah Boisclair, Levesque’s DINO challenger to Charlestown’s state Representative Tina Spears, received funding from at least 20 of Levesque’s 40 PACs.

Levesque also encouraged MAGA conservatives to donate to his PACs at amounts below the $200 per PAC limit that triggered disclosure of their identities.

Despite all the money Levesque put into these nine DINOs, they all lost, often by huge margins. In Charlestown, Boisclair lost to Tina Spears by a margin of 82% to 18%.

After this beating, is Levesque still in the game? After all, he still has candidates in many General Assembly in the November 3 General Election. Both of Charlestown’s state Senate seats have LORIB-backed candidates, and popular Democratic South County women face LORIB challengers.

Both of Charlestown’s two state Senate seats feature a LORIB-endorsed candidate.

Senate District 38

Our incumbent state Senator Victoria Gu

Let’s start with Senate District 38 that stretches from Westerly through the bottom half of Charlestown and into South Kingstown. Incumbent Senator Victoria Gu (D) is seeking a third term based on her outstanding record. She faces MAGAnut Westin Place (R-LORIB) for the third time. Victoria cleaned the floor with Place in the last two elections.

There’s no reason to think Place’s chances are going to be any better. 

The most recent campaign finance reports filed by Sen. Gu and Place for the period ending Oct. 5 paint this picture of the race in its final month.

Westin Place goes into the final month with $6300 in the bank. Victoria has $48,229. She raised $54,704 in the last quarter compared to Place’s $7,929. Place’s fundraising total includes his first and only payment from Dave Levesque’s LORIB Narragansett PAC of $2,000. Contrast that with the $20,000 LORIB threw into Leah Boisclair’s pathetic effort to unseat Rep. Tina Spears.

Without LORIB’s promised support, Place has had to rely on major donations from the state and local Republican Party and the gun lobby.

Senator Gu has a solid, positive record, a strong volunteer campaign team, and a huge cash advantage. She’s compiled one of the most comprehensive lists of legislative achievements I’ve seen in a long time. And she diligently reports on these and other matters of public interest in her frequent email constituent reports.

Place has none of that. Indeed, other than being a MAGA guy who doesn’t like Democrats, I really don’t know what he actually stands for other than the usual MAGA talking points he used throughout his recent “debate” with Victoria. CLICK HERE to read the transcript. When you read his answers to what he calls “those extremely confusing questions,” you can see he is clearly out of his depth.

He also has no record of public service or civic engagement except for running against Victoria every two years. In 2024, he wrote a letter to the Westerly Sun saying his main issue was lack of transparency in government.

Well, Westin, how about some transparency in your campaign finances? His filings with the Board of Elections show page after page of $50-$100 donations without any identification of the donor, all listed as “Aggregate-Individual.” I am guessing these checks ran through Dave Levesque’s money laundry but who – beside Place – knows. Victoria’s finance reports, by contrast, identify every donor, even those who kicked in as little as $10.

At the end of the debate, Place falls back on trying to red-bait all Democrats with the Democratic-Socialist brush and claims that this election is all about the MAGA fight for “freedom” which he claims is typified by “Providence.” His solution: “I’m going to go up there as a voice to say Providence can suck eggs.” Oh sure, that’s going to help him deliver for the people of Charlestown, Westerly and South Kingstown.

Senate District 34

Elaine Morgan

Speaking of sucking eggs, this is district that includes the northern half of Charlestown, Richmond, Hopkinton, Exeter and a piece of West Greenwich. Since 2014, Sen. Elaine Morgan (R and MAGA before there was MAGA) has been the state senator and she’s running for a sixth term. In 2020, she signed a pledge of support for term limits, which apparently does not apply to her.

Instead of delivering for this district, Morgan has done something in almost every year she’s been in office to embarrass the voters of District 34, starting with her call in her first year to put refugees from the war in Syria in concentration camps.

Several of her stunts have made national news, such as her more recent stunt where she “raided” an innovative temporary housing for the homeless project in Providence, falsely claiming she was an accredited agent of Elon Musk’s DOGE.

She has been busted for campaign finance fraud for using her campaign finances as her personal funds. She blamed her use of the money for groceries, restaurants and beauty salon visits on her late husband.

Sam Wilcox. Photo by Steve Ahlquist

She has a lively and able opponent in Democrat Sam (Samantha) Wilcox, President of the Richmond Town Council. 

In 2022, Sam led a slate of Democrats who ousted the MAGA Town Council majority that had been taking Richmond deep into the culture wars. Under her leadership, sanity and civility was restored to town government.

Is she the one who can bring sanity and civility back to Senate District 38? Let’s look at the numbers.

I noted after the September 9 primary that even though neither Sam nor Morgan had a primary opponent, it’s worth looking at how many members of their base voted for them anyway. While the vote counts only show people registered to one of the two major parties (and the largest bloc of voters are unaffiliated), we saw Sam receive 2,732 Senate District 34 Democratic votes compared to only 1,114 Republicans who voted for Morgan.

Since Charlestown has usually voted by large margins against Morgan in the past, Sam’s prospects going into November 3 look good.

The campaign finance reports also show an edge for Sam Wilcox.

Morgan’s finance reports are predictably messy. In the third quarter, she had to file numerous amended filings apparently to correct mistakes. One such example caught my eye: in one filing, she listed a $250 donation from Arrowhead Dental co-owner Dr. Bruce Gouin but then in amended filings, she showed $250 refunded to Dr. Gouin, replaced by a $250 donation from his spouse and Arrowhead co-owner Dr. Christine Benoit.

Note: Dr. Gouin's name is misspelled.

Other donations from anonymous individuals listed under “aggregate” were subject of several revisions. There was an entry labelled “Aggregate PAC” that showed $350 coming in and an apparent refund of $250. I suspect Morgan be getting another visit from the auditors from the RI Board of Elections.

In the most recent filing for the period ending October 5, Morgan shows a fundraising total of $7,124 with only one $500 LORIB check issued by the LORIB Hopkinton branch, but not the $20,000 windfall Leah Boisclair received. Morgan has a cash balance of $12,791.

Sam Wilcox raised $7,797 for the same period and shows a cash balance of $13,007.

On the merits, the two Democrats who want to represent Charlestown in the RI Senate as far and away so much better than their MAGA Republican rivals. Their campaign finance reports are much more thorough and transparent than their rivals and show that their support is largely more local.

District 38 voters have another sensible way to judge who they want in the state Senate: ask yourselves what Elaine Morgan has done since 2014 that's made your life better.

Remember: Early and mail-in voting starts this week. I hope this information helps you make better choices.

Murder-Suicide Appears to Be Rising Among Older Americans

Most often by men against women

By Jennifer Mascia for The Trace and Chip Brownlee for The Trace

This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

This story was published in collaboration with The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics, policy, and power.

A day after New Year’s, 2025, a 91-year-old man fatally shot his 89-year-old wife in their house in Camarillo, California. He called the police to confess before killing himself. “They were inseparable for the 64 years they were together,” according to the couple’s joint obituary.

Last November in upstate New York, a 69-year-old retiree struggling with his mental health killed his 68-year-old longtime girlfriend and then himself in their home. A neighbor discovered their bodies. “I just don’t know what happened to him,” another neighbor said about the retiree. “He was just a good guy.”

Gun deaths overall have been declining in recent years, but murder-suicides in which at least one of the victims was age 65 or older are higher than ever, according to a Trace analysis of data from the Gun Violence Archive. At least 134 older adults were killed in murder-suicides last year, a slight rise over 2024 and the highest number since GVA began compiling data more than a decade ago. Another 85 older adults perpetrated a killing before dying by their own hand.

GVA tracks shootings through media and police reports, so it may not capture every incident. Still, it is one of the most comprehensive sources of data on gun violence in the United States. The Trace took a closer look at the murder-suicides and whether there are points of intervention for people at risk.

What the Data Shows

There were 679 gun-related murder-suicides in the United States last year. In 144 of them, or 21 percent, at least one victim or perpetrator was 65 or older.

The circumstances behind the murder-suicides of older adults varied. Illness was a motivating factor in at least 15 percent of them. In several cases, the perpetrator was the victim’s full-time caregiver. 

A couple of shootings followed disputes over inheritance. Two other shooters reported financial struggles before pulling the trigger. A few couples left notes saying the decision to die was mutual, but most shootings appeared to be unilateral actions on the part of the shooter. In many cases, the motive will never be known — not even to the families.

In more than half of the cases we examined, the perpetrator fatally shot their spouse or a current or former romantic partner. In just over a quarter, the perpetrator killed their parent or child, or another immediate family member. Family annihilations — in which someone kills multiple members of their immediate family — accounted for 16 percent of the incidents. Over the past two years, family annihilation has become a twice-daily phenomenon in the United States.

Women made up 80 percent of the victims in last year’s murder-suicides among older adults. The oldest victim was 102. Her 75-year-old son-in-law fatally shot her and her 73-year-old daughter in La Porte, Indiana, in May 2025. A neighbor said the victims had health problems and that the son-in-law had been taking care of them.

All but two of the shooters were men. The oldest perpetrator, a 92-year-old man in Mesa, Arizona, killed his 93-year-old wife and then himself at their senior group home in October. 

Several of the incidents involved couples whose bodies were discovered during welfare checks instigated by neighbors or family members, sometimes days or weeks after the killings. In those cases, a motive was difficult to discern — and in a few cases, police couldn’t even tell who the shooter was.

Only a few cases involved a documented history of domestic abuse. In August last year, a 70-year-old man fatally shot his 69-year-old wife and 40-year-old daughter at their mansion in Rolling Hills, California, before killing himself. The couple was in the middle of a divorce. Both victims had a restraining order against the shooter.

Trump regime lets sales of sawed-off shotguns and silencers become legal

Just in time for fall hunting season

By Chip Brownlee for The Trace

Silencers and short-barreled firearms like sawed-off shotguns have been heavily regulated under the National Firearms Act for nearly a century. That just changed.

Under the NFA, enacted in 1934, owners of silencers, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, and some other atypical weapons were required to register their guns with the federal government and undergo more extensive vetting. On August 5, a federal judge in Texas, James Wesley Hendrix, found the registration requirements unconstitutional and issued an injunction blocking the provision. He gave the Trump administration a week to appeal.

The Justice Department missed that deadline. So on August 13, the special regulations on silencers (also known as suppressors) and short-barreled guns were effectively scrapped for the first time in more than 90 years. 

Gun rights proponents cheered the decision. In Texas, far-right congressional candidate Brandon Herrera — known online as TheAKGuy — was among the first to buy a legal, unregistered silencer just after midnight at an event organized by Gun Owners of America. Hours later, in South Carolina, the National Association for Gun Rights posted a video claiming silencers were “flying off the shelves” at the Greenville store of Palmetto State Armory, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

Take care of yourself and your loved ones

Starting Saturday, don't get mistaken for Bambi's mom

Stand out during Hunting Season with Orange Safety Clothing

During hunting season it’s safety first, fashion second. The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) reminds the public that it’s time to wear your fluorescent orange clothing and embrace high visibility fall fits. Bright and bold, orange clothing helps keep you safe while outdoors. 

Starting this weekend with archery deer season, anyone in state management areas and undeveloped state parks during hunting season must wear at least 200 square inches (a hat or vest) of orange from Saturday, Sept. 12 through Sunday, Feb. 28. Archery hunters are exempt from this requirement during archery deer season. For more details, visit www.dem.ri.gov/orange.

For a complete breakdown of hunting season dates and regulations, please review the 2026-27 Hunting and Trapping Regulation Guide available online at www.eregulations.com/rhodeisland/hunting and at local sales agents.

 For more information on DEM programs and initiatives, visit www.dem.ri.gov. Follow DEM on Facebook, Twitter (@RhodeIslandDEM), or Instagram (@rhodeisland.dem) for timely updates. Follow DFW on Facebook and Instagram (@ri.fishandwildlife) to stay up to date on news, events and volunteer opportunities. You can also subscribe to DFW’s monthly newsletter here.

And Make sure you abide by these rules, too.

For the humor-impaired, this is satire.

South County Democrats: Beware of DINOs on the Sept. 9 Primary ballot

The League of RI Businesses is a wolf in sheep’s clothing

An oped from Bill Ibelle

There’s a new, big-money player on the Rhode Island political stage that’s targeting many of our finest environmental legislators because they also support gun control.

The League of RI Businesses is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, posing as a moderate, bipartisan, pro-business organization, when in fact, it was created last year specifically to knock off legislators who voted for a ban on assault weapons.

So if you feel safer knowing the guy down the street has an assault rifle hanging in his living room gun rack, then by all means, vote for a League-endorsed candidate. (listed below).

The League’s founder, David Levesque, knows that most Rhode Islanders don’t believe a deer hunter needs to pump out 60 rounds a minute to bag a doe. 

So Levesque and his cohorts rarely mention assault weapons when explaining why the League has targeted so many fine legislators. Instead, in an interview with Ocean State Media, he said that the League is merely targeting legislators who “fail to support the Constitution.” Only when pressed repeatedly by an interviewer does he concede that he’s referring exclusively to the Second Amendment—the right to bear arms.

Apparently, the League believes that James Madison had assault weapons in mind when he introduced the amendment to Congress in 1789. Never mind that an assault rifle, at that time, was a musket, a ramrod, a powder pouch, and a lead ball that took nearly a minute to load and, because it had no rifling, had the accuracy of a pea shooter.

He’s also against renewable energy because it’s unprofitable, doesn’t work, and has driven up electric rates by 27 percent — all untrue. What is true is that he revealed his true colors when he claimed that if we eliminated all state wind and solar programs, “we could literally put almost $30 million a month back in the hands of Rhode Island businesses.” Translation: The heck with our children’s future, we want bigger profits now.

Levesque insists that his group wants “middle-of-the-road, common-sense people” in office. This seems just a wee bit hard to believe, given that Levesque is a vocal Trump supporter who, when asked by the Providence Journal about our president’s second term, said, “I think it’s going awesome.”

So if ICE raids make you feel safer; if you think the war with Iran is the best use of $37 billion in taxpayer money; if you believe the skyrocketing price of oil is the path to affordability; and if you thrill at the grade-school insults our leader routinely hurls at our foreign allies—then by all means, take the League’s advice on who to vote for.

If you’re still not convinced that this organization is poison, consider the League’s subversion of the state’s campaign finance laws. To get around the state’s $2,000 limit on individual donations, they formed 40 separate Political Action Committees (PACs). In an interview with Channel 12, Levesque boasted that “What we did is extraordinary. It’s never been done before. We opened more PACs than anybody’s ever done [in Rhode Island]. This will allow us to give $80,000 to an individual candidate. There’s no other organization in the state of Rhode Island that can put that kind of money into a candidate’s hands.”

Just to be clear, the state donation limit is $2,000 and the League says its armada of 40 PACs makes it legal to give $80,000.

If you would like to reduce the influence of money in state politics, you might want to vote against the candidates the League is financing.

Here is a list of incumbents the League has targeted and the candidates it is backing to unseat them:

The League also endorsed nine incumbents: John Brien, Elaine Morgan, Leonidas Raptiakis, Patrick Maloney, Gregory Constantino, Marie Hopkins, Paul Santucci, Stephano Famiglietti, and six candidates running for open seats:

 

MAGA guy wants to buy Charlestown election for pedo-defending lawyer

As early and mail-in voting starts for the September 9, beware of phony Democrats

By Will Collette

As I've reported previously, there is a push by a MAGA group called "the League of Rhode Island Businesses (LORIB)" to oust Democrats around the state, but especially in South County. Some of their candidates are masquerading as Democrats so they can run in the Sept. 9 Primary. Others are running in the General Election.

LORIB is run by a rightwing MAGA guy named Dave Levesque who owns a chain of coffee shops. He lives in Narragansett. He formed LORIB to push his agenda of protecting the rich from taxes and opposing sensible measures to control gun violence. He set up a state Political Action Committee, as well as 39 local PACs, one for every Rhode Island city and town, including Charlestown.

None of these local PACs are actually local. He runs them all and set out this year to challenge just about every South County Democratic woman legislator, including Charlestown’s own state Representative Tina Spears.

In Charlestown, Levesque and the LORIB machine are promoting criminal defense lawyer Leah Boisclair to oust Tina Spears in the September 9 Democratic Primary. They actively tried to get Republicans and MAGA supporters to switch their party registration to Democrat to swing the numbers in Boisclair’s favor.

The deadline to make that party switch was August 10. Nancy Levin reported in the Rhode Island Current on August 17 that only 198 Republicans statewide had switched to Democrat. 

Boisclair’s signs and her mailings (so far) have been pretty low-key and vague. My main take-away from them so far is that she owns a dog. She stripped her Facebook page of dozens of rightwing posts – although not before we captured those posts in screenshots.

One fact she absolutely does not mention is that her law practice is built on representing people accused of heinous crimes, including child rape, human trafficking and domestic violence. She not only represents them but actively tries to recruit such clients with come-ons like this from her own website:

Nice touch with the stilettos and red lace underwear

And what specific sex crimes does Boisclair want to defend against? Conveniently, she expressly tells us on her website:

She has no record of community service, involvement in the Democratic Party or political interests in anything other than MAGA, guns and defending pedos.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall for Boisclair family Thanksgiving dinners. I'd love to hear Boisclair explain to her grandmother what she does for living. 

The money war

But who cares if you have enough cash to create a thick enough smokescreen.

LORIB kicked in $10,500 from six of its PACs that showed up in Boisclair’s campaign finance form for the last quarter of 2025. According to that report, she received $2000 each from the PACs claiming to be in Charlestown, Block Island, North and South Kingstown and Westerly, plus $500 from Newport.

Her most recent campaign finance report filed with the Board of Elections shows TWENTY LORIB PAC donations. All give their addresses as 1140 Reservoir Avenue in Cranston, with Levesque as their leader. Here's the list:

1. LORIB statewide: $2,000
2. LORIB Bristol: $250
3. LORIB Charlestown: $500
4. LORIB Cranston: $1,300
5. LORIB Cumberland: $600
6. LORIB Hopkinton: $250
7. LORIB Jamestown: $250
8. LORIB Lincoln: $250
9. LORIB Narragansett: $500
10. LORIB Newport: $250
11. LORIB North Kingstown: $200
12. LORIB North Providence: $300
13. LORIB North Smithfield: $1,000
14. LORIB Pawtucket: $300
15. LORIB Portsmouth: $250
16. LORIB Providence: $300
17. LORIB West Greenwich: $500
18. LORIB West Warwick: $250
19. LORIB Westerly: $500
20. LORIB Woonsocket: $250

It’s amazing how much interest our local House District 36 race is drawing from all over the state, drawing in a total of $20,000 just from LORIB affiliates.

But understand, it’s all Levesque.

Levesque appears to have some pretty good legal advisors on how to work around campaign finance laws. He avoids the $2000 limit on contributions through his 40 PACs. If he wants to drop big bucks in a campaign, he just cuts separate checks, each no more than $2000.

Four of his PACs gave more than $2000 to Boisclair but again, no problem because there were two checks, one in calendar year 2025 and the other this year. I checked with the Board of Elections, and the $2000 contribution cap is an annual cap.

Boisclair’s campaign finance reports show lots of money from unidentified donors, lumped together as "aggregated donations." 

Again, LORIB’s strategy has been to encourage dark contributions by asking donors to write checks UNDER $200, so the money doesn’t have to be identified by source.

Boisclair may be a nice person who is kind to dogs. But that doesn’t make her a good state Representative. Boisclair made a voluntary career choice in setting up law practice to represent clients accused of terrible crimes. 

She has a right to represent them but her choice to do that means I don’t want her to represent me.

She certainly is no match for our current Representative Tina Spears who has an impeccable record of achievement, integrity and public service. For me, Tina is the only choice.

Other LORIB news of note

As I expected, LORIB has added incumbent wingnut Senator Elaine Morgan as an endorsed candidate. Morgan has been an embarrassment to her district, which includes the northern half of Charlestown, since she was elected.

Morgan has been busted for campaign finance fraud and likes to cavort in places she doesn’t belong, pretending she’s a law enforcement official. The most recent escapade happened last year, when she “raided” a housing for the homeless project in Providence. She claimed she was an official with Elon Musk’s DOGE and was looking for waste, fraud and abuse.

Morgan faces a serious challenge this year from Samantha “Sam” Wilcox, chair of the Richmond Town Council. Go Sam!

Sen. Alana DiMario (Narragansett/So. Kingstown) also faces a DINO/LORIB challenger in the Democratic Primary as does Democrat Bob Craven, Jr. in the race to fill his father's vacant seat. The same dynamics are at play in these races as we're seeing in Charlestown.

LORIB also has challengers to South County Democrats in the General Election, including Charlestown's Democratic state Senator Victoria Gu, but we'll hold off on going into those races until after we've passed the Primary.

While LORIB doesn't seem likely to officially push any candidates seeking office beyond the General Assembly, there are several "LORIB-Adjacent" candidates to flag.

They include DINO Attorney General candidate Joe Solomon whose yard signs seem to appear right next to Lean Boisclair's all over Charlestown. He also tried the ploy of enticing Republicans to cross over to vote in the September 9 primary to vote for him. 

Republican Gubernatorial contender Aaron Guckian, behind in the polls in the Republican primary, announced his candidacy at a LORIB event. 

Finally, the Florida MAGA nut Vic Mellor who is running in the Republican Primary for the party nomination to run for US House District 2 against Seth Magaziner, also seems pretty tight with Levesque and LORIB. Of note, even though Mellor is a serious rightwing nut, he is also a registered agent of the government of Cuba. 

One of my colleagues speculated that maybe Mellor wants to front for hotel and resort businesses after Donald Trump invades Cuba.

AG DINO candidate aligns with League of RI Businesses shabby electoral practices

Joseph Solomon Jr. is asking Republicans to disaffiliate and vote for him in the Democratic Primary for Attorney General

Steve Ahlquist

Here's how Charlestown DINO and sex crimes
defense lawyer Leah Boisclair hopes
to win the Sept 9 Democratic Primary: Get Republicans
to change party registration so they can sneak her in.
Incidentally, if you drive down Route 2, most
Boisclair signs now have Joe Solomon signs
right next to them.  - Will Collette

State Representative Joseph Solomon Jr. is one of the four people running in the Democratic Primary to be the next Rhode Island Attorney General. [The other candidates in the race are Kimberly Ahern, Keith Hoffmann, and Jason Knight.] 

Solomon is a conservative Democrat who voted against the codification of Roe v. Wade into Rhode Island State Law and against the assault weapons ban that went into effect on July 1. 

At the Southside Justice and Policy Debate, Representative Solomon took some hits from other candidates:

Jason Knight: I voted to put Roe v Wade into state law so that Rhode Island women were protected when the Dobbs decision came down and stripped that right away from everyone else in the rest of the country if the state hadn’t covered abortion services. Joe Solomon voted against that bill. That’s a lukewarm response from one of the candidates up here on an issue that is so critical to all of us in Rhode Island, certainly all the people that I care about.

Joseph Solomon Jr.: Let’s get this straight: I am committed to protecting a woman’s right to choose. You hear me say it now, and you’re going to hear me say it forever. I voted for the SHIELD Act, which would protect women and their doctors from out-of-state enforcement. I voted for the Equity in Abortion Coverage Act, which would provide Medicaid coverage for those who couldn’t afford it. And I’m committed to fighting the Trump Administration to protect a woman’s right to choose. My vote from years ago [2019] was before the Dobbs decision.

Once the Dobbs decision came down, it changed the entire landscape. And now I am committed. Hear me now, hear me later: I’m committed to protecting a woman’s right to choose.

Later:

Keith Hoffmann: I support a high-capacity magazine ban and an assault weapons ban because I have two children and I worry about their safety every single day, and so do you. Everybody in this community deserves to be safe from illegal firearms that should not be on our streets. Those laws need to be aggressively enforced by the next attorney general and me, and that is a difference between Mr. Solomon and me as well.

Joseph Solomon Jr.: As a bail commissioner, I need to go after the illegal guns all the time. Over and over, I see the same repeat offenders with stolen guns and with guns with serial numbers shaved off. We need to go after those violent offenders, the ones causing the crimes. We need to be careful not to go after the person who might be a lawful gun owner, because sometimes the laws that are passed, even though they have fancy names and whatnot, if you look at the details, they encompass people just like you and me, who may potentially be committing a crime because of how it was written. It is so important that we look at the details. [italics added]

It should be noted that Representative Jason Knight championed the Assault Weapons Ban bill in the House.

I thought Representative Solomon’s statements about the assault weapons ban were interesting, so I watched his appearance on the July 27, 2026 episode of the Cumberland Unfiltered podcast, hosted by Caleb Minson, Brad Dean, Jason Dean, and Andrew Bacon. Jason Dean and Andrew Bacon are members of the Cumberland School Committee. 

The guests on the show are extremely conservative. They’ve featured Mike Stenhouse, founder and CEO of the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a right-wing public policy think tank; Moms for Liberty; and anti-trans Christian Nationalist Robert Chiaradio.

Here’s the video with Joseph Solomon Jr. and a transcript edited for clarity: Joe Solomon - Rhode Island Attorney General Candidate

Why we have the Second Amendment

 

League of Rhode Island Businesses: Republican business owners seeking power by subverting campaign finance rules and misleading voters

Behind the mask

Tom Sgouros

Things are seldom dull in the world of politics. This year, Rhode Island has seen the creation of the “League of Rhode Island Businesses,” an organization running several candidates for the General Assembly, many in Democratic primaries. League founder Dave Levesque, who owns the Brewed Awakenings coffee shops in Cranston, Johnston, and Warwick, is a Republican pro-gun activist who feels his point of view is underrepresented at the State House.

You can see a “Lively” interview with him where he calls women’s rights and the repeal of Roe v. Wade “little bitty issues” and tries valiantly to avoid saying that Joe Biden was elected President in 2020. (Kudos to Bill Bartholomew for pursuing him on the points.)

(Full interview here.)

Levesque was to be a featured speaker at a “Rhode Island First” rally planned for this past May, featuring Roger Stone. Yes, that Roger Stone, the treasonous fop with a Nixon tattoo on his back, was sentenced to prison for covering up for Donald Trump’s campaign collusion with Russian operatives in 2016. Trump commuted his sentence, leaving him free to become centrally involved in the 2021 “Stop the Steal” event that led to the January 6 assault on Congress.

Levesque’s League has embraced an innovative strategy to fund its candidates. They created 40 different PACs — one statewide and one for each city and town in Rhode Island — and when you donate through the League web page, it automatically distributes your donation among them so that you can totally evade the disclosure rules for campaign donations. 

To me, the remarkable part is that they boast, right there on the website, that they are doing this to evade disclosure requirements. ➜

 According to the state Board of Elections, what they are doing is indeed legal. It is a loophole in Rhode Island campaign finance law that allows a single organization to control multiple PACs. The League is not the only organization doing this, and a few unions control multiple PACs, as do Amica Insurance and Bally’s. 

Presumably, this is why a bill to close this loophole failed in the General Assembly this year. 

⟵ But for the sake of comparison, here is a chart of information from the Board of Elections showing all the organizations who control multiple PACs. (Thank you, Nancy Lavin, of the Rhode Island Current.) Sometimes a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind, and I marvel that any union would lobby to preserve this kind of disadvantage.

As Levesque has explained, the organizing base of the League is the pro-gun activists who show up to the state house every year to lobby against any proposed regulation of guns. Their website features lots of calls to action like this one. ⬇

As the League, they embrace more issues than just guns. They also inveigh against taxes, road tolls, and business regulation. In other words, standard Republican stuff. However, try as I might, I cannot find the word “Republican” anywhere on their website, or on any of the websites of candidates they endorse.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with advocating for positions I do not agree with. Obviously, I think people who hold positions I disagree with are misguided (that’s what it means), but go ahead and take those positions and defend them. 

What’s remarkable about the League is the extent to which its candidates seek to obscure those positions, mainly by running in Democratic primaries on an essentially Republican platform.

Take Kevin Hoyle, for instance, a candidate in the Democratic primary for House District 32 in North Kingstown. Here’s how he introduces himself on Facebook, an image he included in an email exchange with me.

Challenged to endorse the state’s Democratic Party platform, Hoyle emailed me a detailed list of where he agrees and where he does not. 

I suspect he thought this would end a conversation about what kind of Democrat he actually is by allowing him to say he agrees with most of it. 

But his endorsement is filled with cautions and careful wording, such as saying “Recent IPCC reports may change some of this” in response to the platform’s Environment and Climate section, or noting that investment in transportation and infrastructure is important but not through taxes. 

He supports the party platform on voting rights, but felt it was important to emphasize that he only wants voting rights for citizens. Imagining that there is anyone out there advocating for voting rights for non-citizens is a standard part of the MAGA fever dream, of course. Hoyle even included a strange hedge on the civil rights plank, questioning its use of the word “equitable”.

As an exercise in power, running very conservative, if not covertly Republican, candidates in September’s Democratic primary is not a terrible strategy. As we have seen all too well, many voters are not inclined to do much research on the candidates they vote for, and it is relatively straightforward to mislead them. 

Blake Filippi, who was the Republican leader in the House from 2018 to 2022, first won his seat in a Democratic primary in 2014. After defeating Donna Walsh, one of the leaders of Progressive Charlestown, he was unopposed in November and promptly disaffiliated upon his election. Eventually, he became the House Minority leader, successfully — and repeatedly — winning re-election while never using the word “Republican” on his campaign website. You can say this is essentially dishonest, but you can also say, hey, it worked.

EDITOR'S NOTE: While Rep. Donna Walsh was a Progressive Charlestown favorite and I personally work with Donna on issues and her campaigns, she never had any official connection to Progressive Charlestown.  - Will Collette

So this is the League of Rhode Island Businesses: Republican business owners who are seeking power by subverting campaign finance rules and misleading voters. Hoyle is not the only such candidate, and with the lure of plenty of untraceable money to spend, the League has recruited several others, including Mark Mesrobian in Narragansett and North Kingstown; Vanessa Lopez in Pawtucket; Brian Coogan in East Providence; and Leah Boisclair in Charlestown and Westerly. These are all going to be well-funded campaigns, and here’s hoping that money is not enough in the state’s Democratic primaries.

A guest post by Tom Sgouros, Public policy nerd and data scientist. Currently at work on projects in public finance, immunology, astronomy, and information theory. Also a bus rider.

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