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Amid a numbing succession of mass shootings, gun control groups outspent the National Rifle Association in the midterm election cycle, federal filings and additional reporting indicate, upending the usual order in the partisan battle over gun use. Two groups that are focused on gun control, Giffords and Everytown for Gun Safety, spent at least $37 million at the state and federal level in the midterms, compared with at least $20 million by the N.R.A. (Hakim and Shorey, 11/16)

For months, members of the panel investigating Florida’s high school massacre have called the sheriff’s deputy assigned to guard the campus “a coward” for hiding and not rushing inside in an attempt to stop the shooter. Given an opportunity to confront his critics Thursday, now-retired Broward Sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson sent his attorney instead before the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission. (Spencer and Fischer, 11/16)

The Virginia House of Delegates has a blueprint for how it hopes to improve school safety during the upcoming General Assembly session. A special committee appointed by Speaker Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, after February’s deadly school shooting in Florida agreed to a set of 24 recommendations Wednesday that it will take up in January when the full legislature convenes. ... Included in the group’s recommendations was an endorsement of increasing funding for more school resource officers, more time spent by counselors with students, and creating a mental health and suicide prevention tip line, among others. (Mattingly, 11/14)

After the recent mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, Calif., in which 11 people were killed at a country music bar, President Donald Trump struck a familiar refrain: “It’s a mental health problem,” he said of the gunman, Ian David Long. “He was a very sick puppy.” Similarly, after a school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 students and staff members in February, Trump tweeted that there were “so many signs that the shooter was mentally disturbed.” (Waters, 11/16)

Kaiser Health News: Podcast: KHN’s ‘What The Health?’ Doctors, Guns And Lame Ducks

Election Day was Nov. 6, but results remain undetermined in some races at the state and federal levels. Nonetheless, it is already clear that the election could have major implications for health policy in 2019. The current Congress is back in Washington for a lame-duck session, and while the budget for the Department of Health and Human Services is set for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, other health bills, including ones addressing AIDS and bioterrorism, are on the to-do list. (11/15)