tonight the nation is enduring the pain of another mass shooting after a gunman opened fire Saturday at an outlet mall in Allen Texas a suburb just outside of Dallas killing eight people including children and wounding at least seven others before being killed by police authorities are still zeroing in on a specific motive of the 33-year-old shooter but investigators believe he may have been influenced by domestic violent extremist ideals as of today there have been 202 mass shootings within the year that's according to the gun violence archive Reviving calls by some for stricter gun control in Newark meanwhile police say they responded to an early morning shooting on the 400 block of Orange Street on Sunday that left one man dead and three others injured the investigation is ongoing and no arrests have been made for a deeper look though at how gun reforms impact gun violence I'm joined by Mike Anestis executive director of the New Jersey gun violence research center Mike thanks for offering some of your time on this we had yet another tragedy over the weekend both here in the state of course nationally it's really spurred more people to look at what's happening with our gun reforms and yet concealed carry as a whole is caught in this limbo in the courts how is that affecting uh you know some of the incidents that we're seeing and what do we know happens when gun laws are loosened yeah so I mean we know that where concealed carry is more prevalent you see more firearm injury and death so as New Jersey is going through the court battle to determine what the state can and cannot do in terms of regulating issuing of concealed carry licenses we're certainly a bit vulnerable the question that New Jersey is trying to race the court is can we designate specific sensitive places individuals cannot carry firearms places like schools or public parks and that's sort of the debate that's going on currently within the legal system well we know we've seen that advocates for having stricter laws say you know the result of of having more guns out there more guns accessible in those public places at least statistically shows that more incidents with guns with shootings happen is that the case it is so you can certainly zoom out and say the more gun loss less firearm injury and death but I think it's most important to say specific gun laws backed by data when they're present reduce specific forms of gun violence and death right so reducing high capacity magazine access is going to help with mass shootings like we saw in Texas over the weekend but having the licensing law in place can help produce suicide by fire I'm in homicide more broadly and so it just sort of depends on the type of legislation when you have a situation in Texas where authorities at least right now believe that there may be some ideals based in extremism perhaps white supremacy involved there was a patch that the shooter allegedly had on him that had some Neo-Nazi ties how do we look at that in light of the fact that guns are so prevalent and that accessibility in other parts of the country is quite easy we've seen a number of incidents lately where white supremacists beliefs have been seemingly a motivational factor between what happened and that's certainly sounds like it might be the case in in Texas um and I think that the question then becomes it's not only that where there's more Firearms there's more injury and death it's that when those Firearms are ending up in the hands of folks who have extremist beliefs who are living in fear who are motivated to cause violence to others then you see these horrific tragedies happening as often as you see in places like Texas yeah and then yet here in Newark we had a shooting where we don't know the motive but we do know that there are a lot of illegal guns on our streets and that that's remained a problem for decades yeah because there is no strict Federal legislation regarding Firearms states are left to work on their own so unfortunately neighboring or nearby states with less restrictive legislation are places where strong purchasing happens and people bring those illegal Firearms into the state and some are around 80 percent of all the Firearms were covered in State uh crime scenes in New Jersey come from outside of New Jersey and so New Jersey is sort of beholden to the sort of whims of their peers across the country yeah which is something that we've heard time and time again Michael Anestis with the gun violence research center thanks so much thank you [Music]