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Enhanced background checks have blocked thousands of gun sales to people under the age of 21 and those convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence crimes in the past year, the White House said on Sunday, a year after President Joe Biden set up a new office to accelerate work on preventing gun violence. Homicides have dropped 17% in the period, building on the largest-ever drop in homicides in 2023, the White House said. It said data from the Gun Violence Archive showed that mass shootings were also down 20% to date in 2024 compared to a year earlier and would reach their lowest level this year since 2019. (Shalal, 9/22)

Gun policy has been a topic of debate in America for decades, and its prominence has increased as gun-related deaths and mass shootings have risen nearly every year since 2014, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks gun violence in the United States. Many Americans despair of ever taming the epidemic, but a new report says certain laws can make a difference. (Hernández, 9/20)

Childhood trauma can raise the risk of developing major diseases later in life that vary based on a person's unique experiences and even their sex, new research concludes. Although it's widely understood that trauma early in life has biological and real-world health impacts, the findings shed light on how different life experiences can shape the way the body functions and make a person susceptible to chronic diseases. (Owens and Snyder, 9/23)

Immigration status, structural racism and other social factors may contribute to disparities in cardiovascular health among Asian Americans, according to a statement prepared by a group of clinicians and researchers and published in the American Heart Association journal, Circulation. Asian Americans are less likely than White adults to have or die of heart disease, according to the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health. But researchers in the Circulation article note that cardiovascular health can vary widely between subgroups of Asian Americans, and warn that combining different subgroups of people into a single “Asian” category could mask important differences. (Blakemore, 9/22)

They won’t get you buzzed, but some experts say low-alcohol and alcohol-free beers and mocktails shouldn’t be sold to minors, and they’re calling for laws that curb underage sales to kids and teens. (Goodman, 9/20)

John A. Clements, a pulmonary specialist whose research into one of the puzzles of human respiration — the inhale-exhale cycle of the lungs’ air sacs — revolutionized neonatal care with a treatment that saved thousands of premature infants from fatal oxygen deprivation, died Sept. 3 at his home in Tiburon, Calif. He was 101. The death was announced by the University of California at San Francisco, where Dr. Clements had based his research for more than six decades. (Murphy, 9/21)