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WEF did not announce CBDCs must be implanted to engage in society
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-15-0634/facts-and-fact-checking-wef-did-not-announce-cbdcs-must-be-implanted-engage
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Facts and Fact Checking
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centers
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https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-wef-cbdc/fact-check-wef-did-not-announce-cbdcs-must-be-implanted-to-engage-in-society-idUSL1N39W0Y2
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By Reuters Fact Check
4 MIN READ
The World Economic Forum (WEF) did not announce that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) must be “implanted under your skin” for an individual to participate in society, as claimed in social media posts.
The claim stems from an article published on July 10 by the People’s Voice website with the headline: “WEF Says CBDCs Must Be ‘Implanted Under Your Skin’ if You Want To Participate in Society" (ghostarchive.org/archive/QjVJW).
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Posts Exaggerate Significance of Swiss Study on Heart Risk and COVID-19 Vaccination
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-14-0558/facts-and-fact-checking-posts-exaggerate-significance-swiss-study-heart-risk
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Facts and Fact Checking
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centers
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https://www.factcheck.org/2023/08/scicheck-posts-exaggerate-significance-of-swiss-study-on-heart-risk-and-covid-19-vaccination/
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SciCheck Digest
A Swiss study found that after a COVID-19 booster, less than 3% of people briefly had a slightly elevated blood level of a protein that can be a marker of heart injury. No one in the study had any serious heart damage, and other experts say the findings are unlikely to be clinically significant. Viral posts, however, are spinning the results to falsely claim that the study shows the vaccine’s risks are “off the scale.”
Full Story
Multiple studies have shown that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective in protecting against severe disease and death. While myocarditis and pericarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle and its surrounding tissue, have been identified as rare serious side effects of the vaccines, the benefits of mRNA COVID-19 vaccination still outweigh the risks across all age groups.
Myocarditis is a potentially serious condition that can be triggered by a viral infection, including an infection with the coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2. As we’ve written, studies have shown that even though both the vaccine and COVID-19 can cause myocarditis, the overall risks associated with COVID-19 are higher. Vaccine-associated myocarditis is rare, occurring most frequently in young males after a second dose, and is usually mild and resolves quickly.
A review of studies on the topic published in May in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation Research found that in people 12 years and older, the frequency of myocarditis after two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines is estimated at 3.5 cases per 100,000 people, and 1.9 per 100,000 people for those 16 years and older.
But viral social media posts, including one by Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, misrepresent a recent study published by Swiss researchers to say it proves mRNA vaccines are too risky.
“Two USC basketball players experience cardiac arrest in the past year and both almost certainly were forced or misled into taking a vaccine never proven to meaningfully benefit young, healthy people, but definitely proven to cause cardiac injury,” Ladapo posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, on July 27. “Florida data and a new Swiss study show it,” he added, linking to the study, and referring to a flawed Florida analysis that we’ve written about before.
There is no evidence to suggest that the cardiac arrests suffered by University of Southern California basketball players Vince Iwuchukwu in July 2022 and Bronny James, LeBron James’ son, in July 2023 were due to the vaccines.
Update, Aug. 29: Bronny James has been diagnosed with an “anatomically and functionally significant Congenital Heart Defect,” which caused his sudden cardiac arrest, a spokeswoman said in an Aug. 25 statement on behalf of the James family. “We are very confident in Bronny’s full recovery and return to basketball in the very near future,” the statement said.
John Campbell, a nurse educator in the U.K. who often spreads misinformation on his YouTube channel, said the risk shown by the Swiss study was “off the scale.” “The only way you would take this kind of risk in health care is if the alternative was certain death,” he said in a video that has over a million views.
An Instagram user posted a snapshot of a headline from the conservative news site the Gateway Pundit that reads: “KILL SHOT: Recent Peer-Reviewed Report Finds 1 in 35 People Who Took Moderna COVID Shot Had Signs of Heart Damage.”
But these claims are distorting a study published by researchers at the University Hospital of Basel in the European Journal of Heart Failure in July. It found mild and transient levels of a protein that can be a marker of heart injury, but no cases of myocarditis or other serious cardiac events, among 777 hospital workers who received a booster of the Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.
“No patient had electrocardiographic changes, and none developed major adverse cardiac events within 30 days,” the abstract reads, referring to changes in an electrocardiogram. “No definitive case of myocarditis was found,” the study continues, although there were two probable cases.
The study measured the volunteers’ levels of cardiac troponin three days after they received a Moderna booster. Cardiac troponin is a protein that exists inside heart muscle cells. Normally, only tiny amounts of it circulate in the bloodstream. But when cardiac muscle cells are injured, more troponin is released into the blood.
The University of Basel researchers wanted to find out if myocardial injury was more common after vaccination than reported — if they proactively looked for indicators of possible injury, instead of relying on passive surveillance that mostly detects myocarditis cases that require hospitalization. To do so they measured high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T, using a test that can detect very low levels of troponin that go undetected in regular tests.
The results did show a small, temporary, above-average presence of troponin in 22 of the 777 hospital employees, or about 1 in 35 people. These people did not report more symptoms than those who did not have elevated troponin levels. The median age of the participants in which troponin was detected was 46 years, and 20 of the 22 cases occurred in women. Troponin levels decreased in all but one patient in a follow-up visit.
“These increases in cardiac troponin are not clinically significant and would not be associated with any quantifiable effect on the heart using imaging,” Dr. Nicholas Mills, professor of cardiology at the University of Edinburgh, who studies troponin, told us in an email.
“The principle conclusion — that if you look really hard for minor amounts of injury after vaccination you can find it — is likely true,” Dr. James de Lemos, a cardiologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, told Lead Stories. But, he said, the results were “overplayed” and the levels of troponin found were “trivial.”
“These small troponin elevations are not likely events of clinical significance,” he said.
Mills explained that troponin elevation is not always an indication of consequential damage — it also occurs in healthy people after exercise, “where it is not thought to have any pathophysiological consequences,” he said, pointing us to a 2008 study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. He also said the fact that the study showed higher troponin elevation among women, contrary to the existing evidence on vaccine-associated myocarditis, “is counter-intuitive and suggests troponin elevations were less likely to be a consequence of subclinical myocarditis.”
Mills, who has collaborated with the University of Basel researchers but had no participation in this study, said the results “merit further study.” But the study had an important limitation, he said, since it didn’t measure troponin levels prior to vaccination, and the researchers’ attempts to address this limitation weren’t adequate.
“It is therefore not possible to determine whether troponin elevation was a consequence of vaccination or occurred at this frequency in this population prior to vaccination,” he said.
What the Swiss Study Actually Says
According to the authors, their findings confirm their hypothesis. “mRNA-1273 booster vaccination-associated elevation of markers of myocardial injury occurred in about one out of 35 persons (2.8%), a greater incidence than estimated in meta-analyses of hospitalized cases with myocarditis (estimated incidence 0.0035%) after the second vaccination,” the study reads.
IllustrActions / stock.adobe.com
Yet, that doesn’t mean the vaccines are harmful or should be avoided.
“[A]ll cases were mild with only a transient and short period of myocardial injury,” the study reads. “COVID-19 associates with a substantially higher risk for myocarditis [than] mRNA vaccination, and myocarditis related to COVID-19 infection has shown a higher mortality than myocarditis related to mRNA vaccination,” the study adds.
Dr. Christian Mueller, director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute Basel and the senior author of the study, told us in an email that even though his study found “myocardial cells were severely injured,” the results have to be considered taking into account “all the benefits of vaccination.” To do so, “we would need to know the prevalence and extent of myocardial injury after COVID-19 infection with the strain circulating at that time and the (possible) reduction in the likelihood that people get infected and/or get ill from infection,” he said.
Furthermore, the authors explain that even though the long-term consequences of the low and temporary troponin elevations they found are unknown, “good long-term outcomes can be expected.”
As we said, Mills and de Lemos said the troponin levels weren’t likely to be clinically significant.
In an interview published in November 2022 on the University of Basel’s website, Mueller explained that the marker they used is “extremely sensitive” and emphasized that the damage to the cardiac muscle is mild. People should not be skeptical about mRNA vaccination based on these results, he added. “mRNA vaccination technology is a fantastic development … The vaccines saved millions of lives,” he said. But he said the findings could help improve vaccination in the future.
A spokesperson for Moderna told us the company has a “robust pharmacovigilance function” and makes sure all adverse events are reported to regulators.
“mRNA-1273 has been administered to hundreds of millions of people worldwide and has been shown to reduce severe illness, hospitalizations, and deaths caused by COVID-19. Regulatory agencies around the world have stated that the benefits of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines significantly outweigh the risk across all age groups,” Luke Mircea-Willats, senior director of media relations and communications, told us in an email.
Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.
Sources
Safety of COVID-19 Vaccines. CDC. Updated 7 Mar 2023.
Altman, Natasha L., et al. “Vaccination-Associated Myocarditis and Myocardial Injury.” Circulation Research. 11 May 2023.
Goddard, Kristin, et al. “Risk of myocarditis and pericarditis following BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccination.” Vaccine. Jul 12 2022.
Klein, Nicola. Myocarditis Analyses in the Vaccine Safety Datalink: Rapid Cycle Analyses and “Head-to-Head” Product Comparisons. PowerPoint presentation for Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. 04 Feb 2022.
Jaramillo, Catalina. “Benefits of COVID-19 Vaccination Outweigh the Rare Risk of Myocarditis, Even in Young Males.” FactCheck.org. Updated 5 Apr 2022.
Purtill, Corinne. “Q&A: Why would a young, healthy athlete go into cardiac arrest?” Los Angeles Times. Updated 26 Jul 2023.
Trela, Nate. “No evidence Bronny James, other athletes, were injured by COVID-19 vaccine | Fact check.” USA Today. 28 Jul 2023.
Thompson Payton, L’Oreal. “Bronny James’s cardiac arrest reignites rumors linking rare instances of myocarditis to the COVID-19 vaccine.” Fortune. 25 July 2023.
Buegin, Natacha, et al. “Sex-specific differences in myocardial injuryincidence after COVID-19 mRNA-1273booster vaccination.” European Journal of Heart Failure. 20 Jul 2023.
Troponin Test. Cleveland Clinic. 17 Mar 2022.
Mehta, Parang. “What Is a Cardiac Troponin Test?” WebMD. 28 Apr 2022.
Mills, Nicolas. Professor of cardiology at The University of Edinburgh. Email sent to FactCheck.org. 4 Aug 2023.
Payne, Ed. “Fact Check: Video, Swiss Study Do NOT Prove 1 In 35 Given COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Develop Heart Injury.” Lead Stories. 31 Jul 2023.
Middleton, Natalie, et al. “Cardiac troponin T release is stimulated by endurance exercise in healthy humans.” Journal of the American College of Cardiology. 25 Nov 2008.
Mueller, Christian. Director of Cardiovascular Research Institute Basel. Email to FactCheck.org. 29 Jul 2023.
Jacobs, Angelika. “Temporary mild damage to heart muscle cells after Covid-19 booster vaccination.” University of Basel. 9 Nov 2022.
Mircea-Willats, Luke. Senior director ofmedia relations and communications at Moderna. Email sent to FactCheck.org. 5 Aug 2023.
Categories FactCheck Posts SciCheck
Issue Coronavirus COVID-19 Vaccination Myocarditis
People John Campbell Joseph Ladapo
Misconceptions Distortions Of Science Vaccination Safety
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Two-Thirds of College Students Think Shouting Down A Public Speaker Can Be Acceptable
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-09-07-1244/free-speech-two-thirds-college-students-think-shouting-down-public-speaker-can
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Free Speech
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rights
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https://reason.com/2023/09/06/two-thirds-of-college-students-think-shouting-down-a-public-speaker-can-be-acceptable/?itm_source=parsely-api
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CAMPUS FREE SPEECH
Two-Thirds of College Students Think Shouting Down A Public Speaker Can Be Acceptable
Even at schools with solid speech policies, many students show little tolerance for opposing political beliefs.
EMMA CAMP | 9.6.2023 4:44 PM
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The Washington Post Says Democracy Demands Less Freedom of Speech
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-27-0209/media-bias-washington-post-says-democracy-demands-less-freedom-speech
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Free Speech
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https://reason.com/2023/08/25/the-washington-post-says-democracy-demands-less-freedom-of-speech/
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DONALD TRUMP
The Washington Post Says Democracy Demands Less Freedom of Speech
The paper worries that "social media companies are receding from their role as watchdogs against political misinformation."
JACOB SULLUM | 8.25.2023 4:20 PM
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| 403
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Montana asks judge not to block state’s TikTok ban, says law doesn’t violate First Amendment
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-21-1515/technology-montana-asks-judge-not-block-state-s-tiktok-ban-says-law-doesn-t
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Free Speech
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/aug/21/montana-asks-judge-not-block-states-tiktok-ban-say/
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House Judiciary Subpoenas FBI's Wray, AG Garland
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-17-1408/politics-house-judiciary-subpoenas-fbis-wray-ag-garland
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https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/house-judiciary-subpoena-fbi/2023/08/17/id/1131119/
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FBI Told Twitter Hunter Biden Laptop Was Real on Day It Was Censored
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-21-0558/free-speech-fbi-told-twitter-hunter-biden-laptop-was-real-day-it-was-censored
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Free Speech
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-told-twitter-hunter-biden-laptop-was-real-on-day-it-was-censored/
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NEWS
MEDIA
FBI Official Told Twitter Hunter Biden Laptop Was Real on Day New York Post Story Was Censored
Hunter Biden disembarks from Air Force One at Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, N.Y., February 4, 2023. (Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)
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By JEFF ZYMERI
July 20, 2023 3:12 PM
House Judiciary Committee Republicans said Thursday that an FBI official told Twitter that Hunter Biden’s laptop was real and not Russian disinformation on the day the social-media company censored a New York Post story relying on emails from that laptop.
According to a letter from chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) to FBI director Christopher Wray, Laura Dehmlow, the section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), said in a transcribed interview earlier this month that when Twitter asked whether the laptop was real, an FBI official said: “Yes, it was.” An FBI lawyer on the call then jumped in and said: “No further comment.” Dehmlow could not recall if this information had been relayed to her or whether she actually overheard it.
Internal deliberations were held after that call in which the decision was made that FITF would say “no comment” going forward, according to Dehmlow. The section chief declined to say which FBI official made the decision that FITF would say “no comment” except to state that it “was not [her] decision.” Later on the same day, there was a call between the FBI and social-media company Facebook in which the agency declined comment when asked a similar question about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Jordan’s letter explains.
According to a separate part of the transcribed interview, Dehmlow said that she “would assume” then-FITF section chief Brad Benavides was aware of the laptop’s authenticity. She added that she was “pretty certain” the chief of the Russia unit was also aware.
The Post’s story alleging an influence-peddling scheme involving the president and his family ran early in the morning on October 14, 2020, weeks before the general election. The president has denied the allegations.
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The calls the FBI had with Twitter and Facebook occurred later that day.
In the hours following the publication of the story, Twitter blocked the story from being shared and Facebook, which is now called Meta, suppressed the story. According to Jordan, the FBI had constant information-sharing up to that point with social-media companies. It then made the institutional decision to refuse to answer direct questions about the laptop’s authenticity. “Put simply, after the FBI conditioned social media companies to believe that the laptop was the product of a hack-and-dump operation, the Bureau stopped its information sharing, allowing social media companies to conclude that the New York Post story was Russian disinformation,” reads the letter to Wray.
According to New York magazine, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that the FBI came to the company and said it should be on high alert as it expected there would be Russian disinformation during the 2020 election similar to the previous presidential cycle. Zuckerberg told Rogan he could not recall whether the FBI mentioned Hunter Biden or his personal data in the warning issued to the company, but said the Post story “fit the pattern” of what they had described.
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According to Jordan, had the Hunter Biden story been a product of a Russian disinformation campaign, FITF would have been fully authorized to warn the companies of such a campaign. Dehmlow explained: “If there is a foreign malign influence operation and we’ve got specific details about how those actors are propagating information operations, influence operations on platforms, that’s something we could share the specific details of.”
Jordan added during a Thursday hearing that even the account of Judiciary Committee Republicans was prevented from sharing the Post’s story.
During the hearing, Judiciary Committee Democrats cited another part of Dehmlow’s testimony to rebut the parts of the deposition made public by their Republican colleagues.
According to ranking member Stacey Plaskett (D., Virgin Islands), Dehmlow was asked: “If someone…were to leave this interview and were to suggest or imply or state that when you said the laptop was real — that it meant that the FBI had affirmatively determined in October 2020 that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden, that the contents belonged to Hunter Biden, and that the contents had not been manipulated in some way, they would be misrepresenting what you said, correct?”
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Dehmlow responded: “They would be misrepresenting what I said because I don’t have much knowledge of that.”
Plaskett said she was introducing this into the record because the “committee likes to misrepresent or leave off complete sentences of what individuals said.” She added that an answer of no comment is typically “what they say when there’s an ongoing investigation.”
The FBI took possession of the laptop from a Delaware computer-repair shop in December 2019, according to the date on a copy of the grand-jury subpoena, as explained by New York magazine. John Paul Mac Isaac kept a copy of the laptop’s hard drive for himself as insurance and the contents would later make their way to the New York Post.
Representative Dan Goldman (D., N.Y.) tried to draw a distinction between the laptop and the hard drive during his questioning Thursday. However, the Washington Post has verified the authenticity of thousands of emails from the hard drive provided to the paper by a Republican strategist. While the paper noted its forensic analysts thought the data was sloppily handled and could not verify all of it, they also could not find clear evidence of tampering in their examinations. The Washington Post has gone on to report on Hunter Biden’s Chinese business dealings relying on some of these emails.
The Thursday Judiciary hearing comes after a federal judge banned officials from coordinating with social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content. The injunction from Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana applied to officials from the DOJ and FBI as well as other agencies, but was lifted by the Fifth Circuit as it reviews the case.
Doughty mentioned the FBI’s behavior during the 2020 election in his preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden.
“The FBI’s failure to alert social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, and not mere Russian disinformation, is particularly troubling. The FBI had the laptop in their possession since December 2019 and had warned social-media companies to look out for a ‘hack and dump’ operation by the Russians prior to the 2020 election,” Doughty wrote.
“Even after Facebook specifically asked whether the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation, Dehmlow of the FBI refused to comment, resulting in the social-media companies’ suppression of the story. As a result, millions of U.S. citizens did not hear the story prior to the November 3, 2020 election,” Doughty continued.
Jordan argued in his letter that the refusal of FBI officials to verify the authenticity of the laptop allowed “widespread censorship.” The Judiciary Committee chairman demanded Wray send further information and documents relating to these meetings and the FITF’s work by August 3, 2023.
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JEFF ZYMERI is a news writer for National Review Online. @jeffzymeri
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Speech We Loathe Is Speech We Must Defend
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-12-0837/free-speech-speech-we-loathe-speech-we-must-defend
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Speech We Loathe Is Speech We Must Defend
July 11, 2023
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In the late 1950s, the Rhode Island legislature created a commission “to encourage morality in youth.” One of its practices was to send notices to out-of-state distributors and retailers of publications it deemed obscene, asking for “cooperation” in suppressing them. The notices warned that the commission had circulated lists of objectionable materials to local police departments, and that it would recommend prosecution against those found to be purveying obscenity.
Four publishers sued. The case went to the Supreme Court. With one dissent, the justices in Bantam Books Inc. v. Sullivan (1963) held that the “informal censorship” violated the 14th Amendment. They also noted that it didn’t matter that the Rhode Island commission had no real power beyond “informal sanctions.”
“People do not lightly disregard public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around,” noted Justice William Brennan, a fierce liberal, in his opinion. “It would be naïve to credit the state’s assertion that these blacklists are in the nature of mere legal advice, when they plainly serve as instruments of regulation independent of the laws against obscenity.”
Brennan’s warning is worth keeping in mind when considering last week’s ruling in Missouri v. Biden, in which a federal district judge in Louisiana, Terry Doughty, ordered the Biden administration to desist from communicating with social media platforms for purposes of “removal, deletion, suppression or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
Judge Doughty’s order has flaws, including, it seems, some dubious assertions of fact that need to be closely investigated. And the broadness of the preliminary injunction is also a practical issue.
Still, the order is a triumph for civil liberties. It also ought to be considered a victory for liberals, insofar as liberals have historically been suspicious of Big Tech and the big national-security state — cooperating, as alleged in this case — to suppress the speech of people whose views they deem dangerous.
But in one of the stranger inversions of recent politics, it’s mostly conservatives who are cheering — and liberals who are decrying — the ruling. “A government official appearing on a television show and stating that certain speech is disinformation does not come even remotely close to the government coercing social media companies into removing that speech,” scoff the law professors Laurence Tribe and Leah Litman in an essay on the Just Security website.
Fair enough. And it’s certainly true that senior government officials, no less than private individuals, also have free speech rights, which include urging companies to do what they think is the right thing. The legal line between a government official encouraging or discouraging private conduct versus engaging in behavior that amounts to coercion is a blurry one.
But it’s also a line that, in this case, the administration seems to have repeatedly crossed. Two examples:
In a July 20, 2021, interview on MSNBC, the anchor Mika Brzezinski asked Kate Bedingfield, who was then the White House communications director, whether the White House would amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so that social media companies would be “open to lawsuits” for hosting Covid misinformation. Bedingfield replied, “We’re reviewing that, and certainly they should be held accountable.” Social media companies soon began to remove the pages and accounts of the so-called Disinformation Dozen, referring to notorious vaccine skeptics.
On Oct. 29, 2021, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy tweeted that “we must demand Facebook and the rest of the social media ecosystem take responsibility for stopping health misinformation on their platforms.” That day, according to Doughty’s ruling, Facebook requested that the government provide a “federal health contract” to determine “what content would be censored on Facebook’s platforms.”
Neither of these cases is an example of the administration merely encouraging Big Tech to remove ostensibly harmful content. On the contrary, it is multiple federal agencies yelling “jump” and threatening dire legal consequences and Big Tech replying, in effect, “How high?”
The constitutional principle should be obvious. “Government should not be able to do an end-run around its constitutional obligation to protect freedom of speech by delegating censorship to private-sector actors,” Nadine Strossen, a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me on Tuesday. “If private-sector action becomes so closely interwoven with the government that it becomes functionally indistinguishable from state action, it sensibly becomes subject to First Amendment constraints.”
That’s true irrespective of whose speech is being curtailed.
Critics of last week’s ruling may claim that, at the height of the pandemic, with thousands of Americans dying of Covid every day, the government had an urgent interest in curtailing what it saw as misinformation. Similar claims were made about communists at the height of the Cold War and antiwar activists during World War I. Yet the actions of government and powerful media companies against them shock us to this day.
It shouldn’t be hard to agree that the highest purpose of the First Amendment is to protect speech we like the least — speech we are sure is pernicious, bigoted, obscene or potentially harmful to health. Liberals especially should take care that the arguments they now make for privatized censorship will not eventually be turned on them.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
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Bret Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on July 12, 2023, Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Speech We Loathe Is Speech We Must Defend. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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The Disinformation Industry’s Jig Is Up
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-10-0749/facts-and-fact-checking-disinformation-industry-s-jig
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Free Speech
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LAW & THE COURTS
The Disinformation Industry’s Jig Is Up
Left: Mark Zuckerberg speaks on "the challenges of protecting free speech while combating hate speech online, fighting misinformation, and political data privacy and security," in Washington, D.C., October 17, 2019. Right: President Joe Biden speaks at the White House in Washington, D.C., February 16, 2023. (Carlos Jasso, Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
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By NOAH ROTHMAN
July 6, 2023 2:25 PM
A federal judge’s order preventing the government from pressuring social-media firms to suppress content spells trouble for the fact police.
O
n Independence Day, federal Judge Terry Doughty issued a national injunction preventing federal entities from corresponding with social-media firms for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
Doughty’s ruling does make some important exceptions: Government officials and social-media firms are still allowed to share information and exchange recommendations regarding criminal activity and issues that relate to national security. But beyond that, Doughty erred on the side of free expression and a maximalist interpretation of what constitutes governmental coercion.
Joe Biden’s Justice Department has vowed to appeal, ...
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NOAH ROTHMAN is a senior writer at National Review. He is the author of THE RISE OF THE NEW PURITANS: Fighting Back against Progressives’ War on Fun and Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America. @noahcrothman
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‘I Guess Barbie Is Made in China’: Ted Cruz Blasts Hollywood for Catering to CCP in New Blockbuster
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-05-1143/china-i-guess-barbie-made-china-ted-cruz-blasts-hollywood-catering-ccp-new
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Free Speech
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/i-guess-barbie-is-made-in-china-ted-cruz-blasts-hollywood-for-catering-to-ccp-in-new-blockbuster/
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Ted Cruz blasted Warner Bros. Pictures after Vietnam announced it was banning the distribution of the film Barbie because it shows a map featuring contested territory claimed by China.
“I guess Barbie is made in China…” Cruz tweeted following the news.
The controversy surrounds a scene in the picture featuring a fantastical “World Map” with a crude outline of the “nine-dash line,” a contested swath of the South China Sea unilaterally claimed by the People’s Republic of China that includes the Spratly and Paracel Islands.
“We do not grant [a] license for the American movie Barbie to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line,” the state-sponsored media outlet, Tuoi Tre, reported on Monday.
The development led Representative Mark Green (R., Tenn.), whose bill – Stopping Communist Regimes from Engaging in Edits Now (SCREEN) Act – aims to protect Hollywood studios from Chinese pressure, to denounce the Chinese Communist Party.
“The CCP’s censorship reaches across the entirety of our film industry. That’s why my SCREEN Act is so essential — to ensure taxpayers never subsidize this censorship,” the lawmaker told National Review.
Vietnam’s decision to boycott the film has sparked lawmakers in other East Asian countries to openly contemplate a similar course of action.
“The movie is fiction, and so is the nine-dash line. At the minimum, our cinemas should include an explicit disclaimer that the nine-dash line is a figment of China’s imagination,” Philipino Senator Risa Hontiveros said during a talk on Tuesday.
A similar note was struck by fellow Philippines Senator Francis Tolentino. “If the invalidated nine-dash line was indeed depicted in the movie Barbie, then it is incumbent upon the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board of the Philippines to ban the same as it denigrates Philippine sovereignty,” the legislator told CNN’s local news affiliate.
Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei also lay claim to various stretches of the South China Sea.
Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, downplayed the controversy while underscoring the country’s territorial posture during a press conference on Tuesday.
“China’s position on the South China Sea issue is clear and consistent,” the official said, adding that Vietnam “should not link the South China Sea issue with normal cultural exchange.”
This isn’t the first time the 9-Dash Line has been inserted into an American film. In 2019, a DreamWorks Animation production, Abominable, similarly presented a regional map of Asia with the controversial borderline prominently featured.
Dreamworks' latest animation movie "Abominable" shows 9 dash line in China map. You know, I've always felt @Dreamworks animations were abominable. pic.twitter.com/vQH11FFP2n
— China Uncensored (@ChinaUncensored) October 14, 2019
American legislators have grown increasingly alarmed by the pressure Chinese censors exert on filmmakers since revelations last March that the makers of Top Gun: Maverick had removed images of Taiwanese and Japanese flag patches from Maverick’s bomber jacket to please the Chinese Communist Party.
Last week, the Department of Defense announced it would no longer work with film studios that censor movies to placate the CCP.
The Pentagon “will not provide production assistance when there is demonstrable evidence that the production has complied or is likely to comply with a demand from the Government of the People’s Republic of China . . . to censor the content of the project in a material manner to advance the national interest of the People’s Republic of China,” an agency document first obtained by Politico reads.
New guidelines instituted by the DoD ensure that any forthcoming projects greenlit by the department will have an officer work directly with the production’s leadership. If the Chinese government insists on any alterations to the film, the official must be notified “in writing of such a censorship demand, including the terms of such demand, and whether the project has complied or is likely to comply with a demand for such censorship.”
The policy update drew the approval of Representative Green.
“I applaud the Pentagon’s decision not to provide production assistance to film studios that allow the CCP to censor their content. American tastes and opinions should guide film studios’ creative decisions, not an adversarial nation’s political interests,” the Tennessee lawmaker told National Review on Monday.
Send a tip to the news team at NR.
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Belarus minister responsible for illegally diverting Ryanair flight to arrest opposition journalist dies mysteriously aged 46
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-05-1123/world-belarus-minister-responsible-illegally-diverting-ryanair-flight-arrest
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Free Speech
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12266303/Belarus-minister-responsible-illegal-Ryanair-flight-diversion-dies-mysteriously.html
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US ambassador to Russia allowed to visit detained WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich for first time in months
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-05-0656/russia-us-ambassador-russia-allowed-visit-detained-wsj-reporter-evan
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Free Speech
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/us-ambassador-russia-allowed-visit-detained-wsj-reporter-evan-gershkovich-first-time-months
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RUSSIA
US ambassador to Russia allowed to visit detained WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich for first time in months
Kremlin addresses potential prisoner swap for Gershkovich
By Danielle Wallace Fox News
Published July 5, 2023 8:57am EDT
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The Kremlin on Tuesday addressed the potential of a prisoner swap with the United States for detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, a day after the U.S. ambassador to Moscow was permitted to visit the journalist held at the notorious Lefortovo Prison for the first time since April.
On a call with reporters Tuesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov was asked whether Monday's consular visits to Gershkovich, who has been held behind bars in Moscow since March on what the U.S. government deems bogus charges of espionage, and Vladimir Dunaev, a Russian citizen in U.S. custody on cybercrime charges, could potentially herald a prisoner swap.
"We have said that there have been certain contacts on the subject, but we don't want them to be discussed in public," Peskov said of discussions between Russian and U.S. officials. "They must be carried out and continue in complete silence."
He did not offer any further details, but added that "the lawful right to consular contacts must be ensured on both sides."
RUSSIA ATTEMPTS TO LINK US TO ALLEGED MOSCOW DRONE ATTACK, SAYS WEST PROVIDED 'INTELLIGENCE'
The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has worked in Russia for six years, was detained in Yekaterinburg on March 29 and charged with spying in the interests of the American government. (Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
On Monday, Lynne M. Tracy, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, met with Gershkovich in the Lefortovo detention center in Moscow.
"Evan is in good health and remains resilient despite the circumstances. We hope that the Russian authorities will provide regular consular access," the U.S. embassy in Russia tweeted.
That was the first time U.S. embassy officials were granted consular access to Gershkovich since April 17, a State Department spokesperson said, according to Reuters.
The 31-year-old Gershkovich, who has been based in Russia for nearly six years, was arrested March 29 while on a reporting trip to the central city of Yekaterinburg.
A Moscow court last week upheld a ruling to keep him in custody until Aug. 30. Gershkovich and his employer deny the allegations.
The U.S. government declared Gershkovich, as well as Paul Whelan, a U.S. Marine veteran serving a 16-year sentence after being convicted in 2020 of spying, to be wrongfully detained.
President Biden gestures as an image of U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich appears onscreen during the White House Correspondents' Association dinner at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C., April 29, 2023. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
BROTHER OF RUSSIA DETAINEE PAUL WHELAN CALLS ON BIDEN ADMINISTRATION TO GET HIM, IMPRISONED WSJ REPORTER HOME
Whelan’s brother, David, spoke to NewsNation on Tuesday on America's Independence Day.
He said Paul Whelan has been losing weight and has been leading "a very depressing life," over the past five years since he was detained in Russia in 2018. "On a day like today, when you know that America has its freedom, and Americans have it," David Whelan said, "at least Paul has that to look forward to that at some point, he will be coming back to our free country and people in Russia really can’t understand what it is to have the rights and freedoms not always perfect, but the opportunity, the possibility of the freedom, and I think Paul is sustained by that."
In what was the most recent prisoner swap achieved between the U.S. and Russia, WNBA star Brittney Griner was released in December in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
Gershkovich is the first American reporter to face espionage charges in Russia since September 1986, when Nicholas Daniloff, a Moscow correspondent for U.S. News and World Report, was arrested by the KGB. Daniloff was released 20 days later in a swap for an employee of the Soviet Union’s U.N. mission who was arrested by the FBI, also on spying charges.
Evan Gershkovich appears at the Moscow court to appeal against the decision to keep him in a former KGB prison in Russia on June 22, 2023. (Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
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Dunaev was extradited from South Korea on U.S. cybercrime charges and is in detention in Ohio. Russian diplomats were granted consular access to him on Monday for the first time since his arrest in 2021, Nadezhda Shumova, the head of the Russian Embassy's consular section, said in remarks carried by the Tass news agency.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Danielle Wallace is a reporter for Fox News Digital covering politics, crime, police and more. Story tips can be sent to [email protected] and on Twitter: @danimwallace.
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Federal Judge Blocks Florida's Anti-Drag Law
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-27-0829/culture-federal-judge-blocks-floridas-anti-drag-law
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Free Speech
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https://reason.com/2023/06/26/federal-judge-blocks-floridas-anti-drag-law/
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FIRST AMENDMENT
Federal Judge Blocks Florida's Anti-Drag Law
The ruling is the latest in a series of legal defeats for anti-drag laws.
EMMA CAMP | 6.26.2023 2:55 PM
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(Illustration: Lex Villena; Sophie Davis)
On Friday, a federal judge in Florida blocked a law preventing minors from attending drag shows, ruling that the statute violated the First Amendment rights of an Orlando-based restaurant. While attempts at banning or restricting access to drag performances have swept local governments and state legislatures, most have failed to pass legal muster.
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Firing a Professor for 'Left-Wing' Views Is Unconstitutional
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-09-1559/free-speech-firing-professor-left-wing-views-unconstitutional
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https://reason.com/2023/06/09/firing-a-professor-for-left-wing-views-is-unconstitutional/
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FREE SPEECH
Firing a Professor for 'Left-Wing' Views Is Unconstitutional
But Chris Rufo bragged about breaking the law anyway.
EMMA CAMP | 6.9.2023 3:45 PM
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(Illustration: Lex Villena; Dirk Shadd/ZUMA Press/Newscom)
On Tuesday, conservative activist and New College of Florida trustee Christopher Rufo announced that the college had declined to renew a visiting professor's contract because of his purportedly "left-wing" views.
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YouTube Abandons Election Misinformation Policy That Censored Political Speech
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-04-1252/free-speech-youtube-abandons-election-misinformation-policy-censored-political
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https://reason.com/2023/06/02/youtube-misinformation-policy-election-change-trump/
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SOCIAL MEDIA
YouTube Abandons Election Misinformation Policy That Censored Political Speech
"We find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech."
ROBBY SOAVE | 6.2.2023 5:00 PM
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Top 10 Companies That Ignore First Amendment Rights
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-05-26-1357/free-speech-top-10-companies-ignore-first-amendment-rights
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Free Speech
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https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/05/23/top-10-companies-disrespect-religious-freedom-free-speech/
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A new database shows that some of Americans’ favorite companies—such as Airbnb, Amazon, and Disney—disregard religious freedom and free speech.
Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal organization devoted to protecting religious freedom and other First Amendment rights, joined with Inspire Insight, an investment tool that provides data on the religious values of companies, to produce the second annual Business Index ranking companies by Viewpoint Diversity Score.
The viewpoint diversity index is a “comprehensive benchmark designed to measure corporate respect for free speech and religious freedom,” Alliance Defending Freedom says in a press release.
Of 75 major companies ranked in the index, the Top 10 for disrespecting freedom of speech and religion are Airbnb, Alphabet, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, PayPal, Pinterest, Twitter, Disney, and Adobe.
Through a Viewpoint Diversity Score survey and public documents such as corporate “terms of service,” Alliance Defending Freedom ranked the 75 companies on their level of support for religious freedom and free speech in three categories: market, workplace, and public sphere.
“Across all three categories, our methodology evaluated whether companies treat customers, vendors, employees, and nonprofits equally regardless of their political or religious views,” ADF writes of the 2023 scores released May 16. “We also look at whether companies are using their business resources or their brands to support public figures or causes hostile to fundamental freedoms.”
The findings show that “only 7% of scored companies allow employees to form faith-based Employee Resource Groups even though 90% of Fortune 500 companies allow [such groups] for other affinities like race and sexual orientation,” the legal organization says.
Furthermore, ADF says, 78% of ranked companies prohibit employees from donating to certain charities “because of their religious status, practices, or related advocacy.”
And 57% of ranked companies refuse to give grants to faith-based organizations due to their beliefs.
Many not only discriminated based on religious beliefs, but supported groups that failed to promote free speech and created an environment on their platforms that limits free speech.
Over half of the ranked companies spent about 45% of political donations on legislation or court cases considered “harmful to speech or religion,” according to ADF.
Fully 63% used their “brands and dollars to support harmful legislation aimed at rolling back free speech and religious freedom protections.”
Here’s a breakdown of ADF’s tightly grouped top offenders, and why they received their rankings:
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email [email protected] and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
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Elon Musk touts Twitter purchase as 'priceless' for free speech during DeSantis 2024 launch
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-05-26-1351/free-speech-elon-musk-touts-twitter-purchase-priceless-free-speech-during
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/technology/elon-musk-twitter-purchase-priceless-desantis-interview
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RON DESANTIS
Elon Musk touts Twitter purchase as 'priceless' for free speech during DeSantis 2024 launch
by Christopher Hutton, Technology Reporter
May 24, 2023 07:22 PM
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Elon Musk held up his expensive purchase of Twitter as "priceless" for free speech during a Wednesday interview with 2024 presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).
Musk interviewed DeSantis on Twitter Spaces in a glitchy town hall-style event launching the Florida governor's run for the White House. The billionaire attempted to use the conversation to tout Twitter, which had been purchased for $44 billion in October, as a win for free speech. It was a choice that DeSantis praised.
BIDEN'S OTHER CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS: STUDENT LOANS CANCELLATION IN LIMBO
"I think what was done with Twitter was significant for the future of our country," DeSantis said. Musk agreed, noting that "Twitter was indeed expensive, but free speech is priceless."
Twitter Spaces' servers dropped out at 6 p.m. after an awkward 20-minute period of Musk addressing the audience and attempting to fix the technical problems. Musk confirmed that he had fired over 80% of the company's staff, leaving Twitter with a skeleton crew to keep something like Spaces operating.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
"This is feeling a bit like an ad for Twitter, not a presidential announcement," tweeted Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump administration official who has grown critical of the former president.
This is feeling a bit like an ad for Twitter.. not a presidential announcement.
— Alyssa Farah Griffin (@Alyssafarah) May 24, 2023
DeSantis's interview was an attempt to bypass traditional media and reach people directly. The Florida governor was joined by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and conservative activist Christopher Rufo, along with other guests.
Ron DeSantis Elon Musk News Twitter 2024 Elections
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In Trump cases, experts say defendant’s rhetoric will be hard to police
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-22-0723/justice-trump-cases-experts-say-defendant-s-rhetoric-will-be-hard-police
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/08/21/trump-rhetoric-indictments-threats/
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Former president Donald Trump in Iowa on Aug. 12. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
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At her first hearing overseeing the 2020 election obstruction case against former president Donald Trump, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan tried to draw a line in the sand: “I intend to keep politics out of this.”
Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
Legal experts say that will be a tricky — perhaps impossible — task, especially in a criminal prosecution in which politicians or their aides are the alleged perpetrators, witnesses and victims, and the defendant is running for president.
On Monday, a state court judge in Atlanta issued strict limits on Trump’s public statements as conditions of his release on election-related charges there. But policing and enforcing those kinds of rules will be a challenge for judges in many jurisdictions, including Chutkan, who is presiding over the case brought by special counsel Jack Smith in Washington.
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“It’s right and good that Judge Chutkan is making it clear that she’s not going to focus on politics. That’s a very no-nonsense federal judge thing to say,” said Kenneth White, a former federal prosecutor in California who specializes in free-speech issues. “But even if she’d like this to be completely divorced from politics, it can’t be. It’s steeped in politics.”
Chutkan spoke on Aug. 11 as she considered how restrictive an order to issue in limiting Trump and others from talking about the evidence in the D.C. case, which is focused on efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory by pressuring state and federal officials to alter the results.
The question illustrates the inherent tension between the buttoned-up procedures and practices of court proceedings and the often white-hot rhetoric of Trump, a former reality TV star who for the third time is leading the GOP field for president.
The Post’s Aaron Blake analyzes the charges against former president Donald Trump centered on his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 Georgia election results. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post, Photo: Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
As a 2024 candidate, Trump “has the best imaginable First Amendment case for talking about the charges against him, the evidence against him, the witnesses against him,” White said, particularly when one of those witnesses is former vice president Mike Pence, who is also seeking the GOP nomination.
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The fraught Trump-Pence dynamic underscores just how difficult it can be to separate candidate Trump from defendant Trump.
After Trump was indicted, Pence said the former president “asked me to put him over the Constitution, but I chose the Constitution.”
Trump fired back on social media, denying one of the allegations against him in the indictment — that he once called Pence “too honest” for not going along with Trump’s efforts to undo the 2020 election results.
“He’s delusional, and now he wants to show he’s a tough guy,” Trump said.
Trump has been indicted four times since March, accused in federal and state court of obstructing the election, and separately charged with mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House and falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments in 2016. He has denied all wrongdoing.
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As his legal troubles have mounted, his insults and attacks have continued. He has called Smith a “deranged lunatic” who “looks like a crackhead.” He said Chutkan “obviously wants me behind bars. VERY BIASED & UNFAIR!” He accused Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D), who brought the state-level election indictment, of having an affair with a gangster.
Trump’s public comments have caused consternation among law enforcement officials worried about ensuring fair trials and the security of witnesses, prosecutors and court workers.
Breaking down the 91 charges Trump faces in his four indictments
Long before the indictments in D.C. and Georgia, Trump said the election-related investigations themselves sought to punish him for exercising his First Amendment speech rights in the aftermath of the 2020 voting. A pretrial legal battle over what the former president can or cannot say about those events might buttress that line of attack, experts said.
Advisers say the Trump campaign sees a benefit in him testing boundaries by publicly attacking judges and prosecutors — either he gets away with it, or he gets to play the victim for being censored by the courts. Some of Trump’s political advisers said they are betting that judges will not risk the blowback of imposing sanctions on a major-party candidate.
Judges typically keep close tabs on what criminal defendants say ahead of trial, to ensure that they do not intimidate witnesses or influence potential jurors who have yet to hear the evidence. In cases in which a defendant’s pretrial statements are viewed as crossing the line, a judge can threaten to issue a gag order. If the defendant violates that gag order, the judge could hold the person in contempt and threaten them with jail, or they can decide the defendant violated the conditions of their release and send them to jail.
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In most cases, just the threat of possible jail time scares a defendant into keeping quiet. But while lawyers generally agree that Trump should get no special treatment, he is a different kind of defendant.
He has pleaded not guilty to the 78 charges laid out in the first three indictments and been released on his own recognizance; he is expected to plead not guilty in Georgia as well.
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Under the terms of Trump’s bond in Fulton County, he was ordered to “perform no act to intimidate any person known to him or her to be a codefendant or witness in this case” and “make no direct or indirect threat of any nature against any witness” or victim. The agreement announced Monday said the restrictions “include, but are not limited to, posts on social media or reposts of posts made by another individual on social media.”
Legal experts say placing a tight leash on Trump’s pretrial statements could play into his hands by sparking a legal fight over free speech that he has already signaled he wants.
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In Washington, Chutkan “no doubt wants to treat Donald Trump like any other defendant, but she must treat him like every other defendant who is also running for president, an unprecedented situation,” said Barbara McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor and former U.S. attorney.
“Any judge would be very reluctant to jail a candidate for president, not only to protect the candidate’s First Amendment rights, but to permit voters access to the defendant’s statements as they decide how to cast their ballots,” McQuade said. “It will take an awful lot for Judge Chutkan to jail Trump, and you can bet he will push the line as far as he can. It is a win-win situation for him. If he is not gagged and jailed, he can disparage prosecutors and witnesses with impunity. If he is jailed, he can portray himself as a victim of persecution.”
At the Aug. 11 hearing, Chutkan seemed aware of the potential danger of going down that path, saying at one point that “nobody’s talked about contempt.” Her point, she insisted, was that whatever Trump’s habits may be as a political candidate, they must “yield” to the court’s standards of conduct for criminal defendants.
“I reiterate that the existence of a political campaign is not going to have any bearing on my decision other than, you know, any other lawyer coming before me saying that my client needs to be able to do his job,” the judge said. “I will always, obviously, factor it in, but I intend to keep politics out of this.”
Trump’s advisers say the former president has been briefed on the protective order Chutkan is considering — a standard legal filing that restricts public disclosure of sensitive evidence during discovery, when prosecutors share such evidence privately with defense lawyers in preparation for trial.
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In speeches and social media posts, however, Trump has mischaracterized the order — falsely portraying it as a full-blown gag order on his political message, rather than a warning against intimidating witnesses or prejudicing potential jurors.
“So now I have these lunatic reporters back there saying, ‘Sir, we would like to talk to you about your case.’ ‘I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to talk about it,’” Trump parodied during a campaign stop in New Hampshire this month. “Somehow that’s not good for votes. Do you agree? When we say, ‘I can’t talk,’ I’d love to. I will talk about it. I will. They’re not taking away my First Amendment.”
Trump also mocked the possibility that he may have to leave the campaign trail for court appearances.
“I’m sorry, I won’t be able to go to Iowa today, I won’t be able to go to New Hampshire today, because I’m sitting in a courtroom on bullshit,” he said. The crowd responded by chanting his last word.
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Trump investigations
Donald Trump has been indicted in four cases. The Washington Post is keeping track of where each Trump investigation stands. Here is a breakdown of all 91 charges Trump faces.
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In court, Trump’s attorneys have similarly argued that the proceedings should not interfere with his schedule or speech as a presidential candidate.
“President Trump has [to have] the ability to respond fairly to political opponents,” defense attorney John Lauro said at the Aug. 11 hearing.
While arguing for a more far-reaching protective order than Trump’s lawyers want, prosecutors cited a 2018 case in which Chutkan issued a gag order for those involved in defending and prosecuting Maria Butina, a Russian woman accused of being an unregistered operative for a foreign lawmaker.
Prosecutors had wrongly accused Butina of offering to trade sex for a job, angering the judge. But the judge was also displeased by a decision by Butina’s lawyer to publicly rebut the accusation, and issued a gag order.
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If Chutkan’s approach to the Butina case were applied to Trump, he might already have a gag order. Chutkan, however, was cool to the suggestion that the cases were comparable. “I think the differences with the Butina case, which now seems so small and quiet, is that there was no argument from the defense there that the defendant in that case needed to speak,” she said. “And we have a different situation.”
Prosecutors in Trump classified documents case are facing threats
The concerns about Trump’s statements go beyond pretrial protocol and legal principles of fairness.
For more than a year, senior Justice Department officials have been concerned about Trump’s rhetoric and social media posts. Law enforcement officials and extremism experts say that while Trump’s taunts and broadsides against judges, prosecutors and witnesses are often not explicit threats, the statements could encourage some supporters to target those individuals with threatening or violent behavior.
Fresh evidence of such alleged behavior surfaced this month, when authorities arrested a Texas woman for allegedly threatening to kill Chutkan. Abigail Jo Shry, 43, also allegedly threatened to kill Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.), as well as all Washington Democrats and members of the LGBTQ community.
Federal officials have been particularly concerned about security threats from Trump supporters since an armed man in Ohio attacked an FBI office last year, apparently angry that agents had searched Trump’s Florida home Aug. 8, 2022, as part of the classified-documents investigation. That man was shot and killed in a standoff with law enforcement.
In recent days, FBI officials in Atlanta said they are working with local police officials there to investigate threats made against Fulton County officials after Trump’s indictment by a grand jury there.
“Individuals found responsible for making threats in violation of state and/or federal laws will be prosecuted,” the FBI said in a statement.
More on the Trump Jan. 6 indictment
The latest: Former president Donald Trump pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges that he plotted to overturn the 2020 election in the runup to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The charges: Trump faces four charges in connection with what prosecutors allege was a plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Here’s a breakdown of the charges against Trump and what they mean and things that stand out from the Trump indictment. Read the full text of the 45-page indictment, which references Pence or vice presidency more than 100 times.
The case: The special counsel’s office has been investigating whether Trump or those close to him violated the law by interfering with the lawful transfer of power after the 2020 presidential election or with Congress’s confirmation of the results on Jan. 6, 2021. It is one of several ongoing investigations involving Trump. Here’s what happens next in the Jan. 6 case.
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SPECIAL COUNSEL'S JAN. 6 INVESTIGATION
HAND CURATED
Justice Department asks court for ‘limited’ restrictions on Trump’s words
September 15, 2023
Special counsel fights Trump bid to oust Judge Chutkan from Jan. 6 case
September 15, 2023
All the times Trump’s trials conflict with the 2024 election campaign
August 28, 2023
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Why Trump’s Free-Speech Defense Is a ‘Red Herring’
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-04-0748/free-speech-why-trump-s-free-speech-defense-red-herring
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JUST ASKING QUESTIONS AUG. 4, 2023
Why Trump’s Free-Speech Defense Is a ‘Red Herring’
By Benjamin Hart, staff editor at Intelligencer who joined New York in 2017
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Few people are more familiar with the events surrounding the Capitol riot than Timothy Heaphy. The lead investigator for the January 6 House Select Committee, Heaphy helped lay the groundwork for Jack Smith’s indictment of former president Donald Trump this week. As a white-collar defense lawyer, he also has a handle on how Trump’s attorneys will probably approach the difficult task of keeping their client out of prison. I spoke with Heaphy, who has served as a U.S. attorney as well, about the strength of the charges against Trump, whether he’s surprised it took this long to prosecute the ex-president over January 6, and how Washington’s jury pool might affect a forthcoming trial.
As many have pointed out, this week’s indictment relies quite heavily on the January 6 Committee’s findings, though there are some important new details, such as Donald Trump telling Mike Pence, “You’re too honest.” Were you hoping Jack Smith would uncover more that the committee hadn’t already figured out, or are you satisfied with what the indictment includes?
Look, the facts are what they are. Lawyers are only as successful as what they’re given to work with. The core story has been there, and that’s because people like Bill Barr and Pat Cipollone and Rich Donoghue and Cassidy Hutchinson stood up. The story is exactly what Liz Cheney outlined in her opening statement at the first hearing: This was a multipart, intentional plan of increasing desperation to prevent the joint session from going forward. It starts with the lawsuits, and it ends with launching an angry mob at the Capitol. That’s the story she told and that our hearings and our report outlined.
So no, I’m not surprised or disappointed, because the facts have been out there for a while. Smith will get more important new stuff. The conversation you mentioned is important. Cipollone asserted executive privilege with us, but he has now said he called the president on the night of January 6 and said, You need to concede, you need to pull back these objections. And the president disagreed. So we’re getting more direct conversations, and that’s important but it’s not new per se. We knew the president was not going to stand down, and we knew he didn’t want to issue a statement. So it’s just confirming that.
Smith names six unindicted co-conspirators who may still talk more. He’s got a lot of leverage over them, obviously.
Absolutely. Look, the co-conspirators are not off the hook because they’re not in the indictment. They’re not in the indictment because Smith wants to go fast. It’s clear to me as a former prosecutor, he’s trying to get this tried as soon as possible. And when you charge one person, you have a better chance than if you charge seven people. He’s got a streamlined case — there are only four counts and a very linear story that positions this, to the best extent possible, to be tried sometime in 2024.
It’s a similar approach to the documents case, where it’s simple to follow for both the public and a potential jury.
Yep, exactly.
The January 6 Committee spent a lot of time establishing facts about the riot itself, but Smith more or less skipped from Trump calling for people to gather in Washington to him, Rudy Giuliani, and others pressuring people over fake electors and what have you. I’ve seen the argument that bringing charges over the riot itself might have been much more difficult to prove than the others and that they could have been a distraction. Do you agree?
The First Amendment defense I think is likely coming would have been more potentially relevant if there was an incitement-of-insurrection count. Going back to what I said before, I think the special counsel has not used that statute — which arguably applies in part — in order to streamline the case. The other issue here is that the most serious charge stemming from the riot itself is seditious conspiracy, which requires proof of intent to use force. They had that with the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, but it’s harder to establish with the president. It’s easier to establish that he intended to disrupt. I think the verbs are obstruct, interfere with, or impede an official proceeding. That’s a much easier threshold of evidence than that he intended it to be violent.
We looked at that and did not list seditious conspiracy as one the federal statutes for which we made a criminal referral. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. We looked very hard for connections between the White House and folks on the ground. That largely would’ve come from Steve Bannon and Roger Stone and Mike Flynn. None of them talked to us, so we could not establish that the president or others were coordinating with those extremist groups or anybody on the ground. I’m not sure that they were or were not; we just weren’t able to establish that as a matter of evidence. That’s reflected in our referrals, and I think it’s reflected in the charges here.
Some people have been focusing on Trump’s state of mind as portrayed in the indictment, which alleges he knowingly lied about losing the election, or whether he was self-deluded enough to actually believe what he was saying. That’s where his comment to Pence about honesty comes into play. But Trump isn’t being charged with lying, even though his alleged crimes are built on lies. So is this conversation about what he was thinking a bit of a distraction? How much does it matter?
It matters, but there’s a difference between state of mind and free speech. His defense is that this is punishing political speech. It’s just wrong. This is punishing conduct, not speech. If he had stood up and said the election was stolen without taking subsequent action to actually prevent the transfer of power, that would be fine. But he didn’t. The speech informs the conduct. It’s the fake electors, the pressure, the potential change at the Department of Justice, all those steps that he took. That’s conduct, not speech. So it’s just a red herring to say this is strictly punishing political speech. He went well beyond speech and took a lot of action, and that’s why it’s criminal.
The intent is really important because in order to show that there was a 1512 violation, they have to show that he intended to disrupt the joint session. So that then falls back on, Was he aware that what he was saying was false? Was he aware that there was no election fraud, that the vice-president did not have that authority? That informs his intent and makes his actions more nefarious. He’s not using the joint session as a sort of legitimate forum. He’s actually trying to subvert it because he knows there’s no factual basis for those objections.
Yeah, a colleague noted that Trump’s Election Night proclamation that he actually won was not included in the indictment. The events laid out begin on November 14, quite a bit after the election, I assume because they’re trying to prove that those statements are the ones that inspired action, not just saying I won.
Precisely. Again, you can stand up in front of America and say, I won, it was stolen from me. He could say that all the time, but he went beyond saying it to actually taking steps to implement this strategy to prevent the outcome from being certified. And that’s why it’s criminal.
New York contributing writer Ankush Khardori has been critical of Merrick Garland and Joe Biden for waiting so long to take action. As he lays it out, they purposely avoided it for more than a year until the January 6 Committee uncovered all this evidence and forced the Department of Justice’s hand. What do you make of that argument?
I don’t know and can’t comment on what was informing the Department of Justice’s leadership decisions. I can say that as we pursued what I call the white-collar part of the case, we were getting there first. So when we were interviewing people like Marc Short, Rich Donoghue, Jeff Rosen, Cassidy Hutchinson, it was clear that we were the first footprints in the snow. The DOJ had not been focused on those people and those issues. Conversely, they were way ahead of us when it came to the blue-collar part of the case: the rioters themselves, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers. We had trouble actually getting information because a lot of those people were criminally charged and they weren’t going to talk to us when they had Fifth Amendment privilege.
When our hearings started presenting those facts, they were compelling. And I think that likely showed the world, including the Department of Justice that this might very well be criminal, and they had to look into it. I can’t speculate as to why they did or didn’t take certain steps.
But did it surprise you that you were the first people to look into this stuff?
Yes. It did surprise us because it was so clear that these witnesses had really relevant information that informed the riot. It’s not just who was hitting cops at the Capitol; it’s why they were there in the first place.
Right, the rioters are the low-hanging fruit.
Yeah, exactly. If we had just done a report about that and sketched out who moved where at the Capitol, we would’ve been way underinclusive in terms of our mandate. Our mandate was the facts surrounding the attack on the Capitol. That’s in the enabling statute. So we took that seriously. You have to look at motivation. You have to look at the elements that put the riot in place. And that reaches way, way back into things well beyond what happened on either side of the fence at the Capitol.
Let’s look ahead to the actual trial. The judge in this case, Tanya Chutkan, has handed down notably severe sentences related to January 6. And this will be tried in Washington, D.C., which, of course, is heavily Democratic. How do you think the judge and venue affect things?
I don’t think it makes any difference. I think we spend way too much time gaming out jury pools. The same thing happened in Florida. In my experience — and I’ve tried cases in D.C., I was an assistant U.S. Attorney there for years — jurors pay attention to the evidence and they follow the court’s instructions. I don’t think it matters where this case is tried; it could be tried in Alaska or Philadelphia. Same thing with the documents. Case jurors generally do the right thing, and those who may not are typically screened out by the lawyers and the judge. I generally think the process works, and the 12 people that sit in that jury box — regardless of whether they live in D.C. or wherever they live — I just don’t think it matters. And I don’t think Smith cares either. He’s building cases he believes are so strong that they could literally grab 12 people off the street, put them in the jury box, and he’d have the goods to get a conviction.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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There is no First Amendment right to overturn an election
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There is no First Amendment right to overturn an election
Trump’s lawyers plan to argue he had a First Amendment right to subvert the 2020 election. He didn’t.
By Ian Millhiser Aug 2, 2023, 4:30pm EDT
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This is not protected speech. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.
Shortly after special counsel Jack Smith unveiled four new criminal charges against former president Donald Trump — all arising out of Trump’s failed efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election — one of Trump’s lawyers revealed one of the legal arguments he plans to use to defend the former president.
“This is an attack on free speech and political advocacy,” Trump attorney John Lauro told CNN Tuesday evening. In a separate appearance on Fox News, Lauro claimed that Trump is being prosecuted for “what he believed in and the policies and the political speech that he carried out as president.”
Lauro, in other words, appears to be laying the groundwork for an audacious First Amendment defense. His argument appears to be that, even if Smith proves all the facts laid out in the recent indictment — which alleges that Trump pressured officials throughout the federal and state governments to change vote counts, appoint fake members of the Electoral College, and otherwise tamper with the 2020 election’s results — Trump’s actions were all political speech protected by the First Amendment.
But Lauro is wrong.
There are at least two reasons Trump’s alleged actions are not protected speech. One is that Smith repeatedly accuses Trump of pressuring other government officials to commit criminal acts of election fraud, and it is well established that soliciting another individual to commit a crime is not protected by the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court held in United States v. Williams (2008), “offers to engage in illegal transactions are categorically excluded from First Amendment protection.”
Trump, for example, may not pressure a state elections official to “find” fraudulent votes that will change the electoral result in that state, for the same reason that he could not legally tell a hit man, “I will give you $50,000 if you kill my wife.” In both cases, Trump is engaged in speech. But the fact that this speech solicits another person to commit a specific crime generally removes it from the First Amendment’s protections.
Additionally, Smith repeatedly alleges that Trump “knew” that he was spreading lies when he claimed that he had prevailed in 2020, or that the outcome of the 2020 election was in doubt. This matters because the Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment is especially weak when applied to false statements made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
In fairness, the Supreme Court did say in United States v. Alvarez (2012) that some lies are protected speech. But Alvarez also indicates that “where false claims are made to effect a fraud or secure moneys or other valuable considerations, say offers of employment, it is well established that the Government may restrict speech without affronting the First Amendment.”
The latest indictment against Trump alleges that he knew his false statements, made in the hope of overturning the election, were lies. And the indictment offers several examples of conversations between Trump and his senior advisers that bolster the claim that Trump knew he was lying.
Smith alleges, for example, that, 17 days before Biden’s inauguration, Trump was briefed on “an overseas national security issue,” and his advisers suggested that Trump take no action because he was about to leave office. In response to this suggestion, Trump allegedly responded, “Yeah, you’re right, it’s too late for us. We’re going to give that to the next guy,” a statement which indicates that Trump knew full well that “the next guy” had won the 2020 election.
Of course, any legal analysis of an indictment against Donald Trump must come with a caveat. The federal judiciary, and particularly the Supreme Court, is controlled by Republican appointees who cannot always be trusted to apply the law fairly in the most politically charged cases. There is no guarantee, especially if Trump is the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nominee, that his fellow partisans on the Supreme Court won’t try to bail him out by reading the First Amendment more expansively than it has been read in the past.
But, if the courts apply longstanding law to Trump’s case, he has no First Amendment defense.
Soliciting a crime is not protected by the First Amendment
There are fairly obvious reasons why soliciting another person to commit a crime is not protected speech. If it were, a criminal defendant who asks a hit man to commit murder, who offers to buy cocaine from a drug dealer, or who offers to exchange pornographic pictures of a child in return for similar pictures, could not be charged with a crime for these actions.
Williams involved just such an offer to exchange child pornography, and it declared in sweeping terms that “offers to engage in illegal transactions are categorically excluded from First Amendment protection.” In drawing this line, the Court also distinguished between speech that tries to induce a third party to commit a specific crime and vaguer forms of political advocacy. As the Court said in Williams, there is “an important distinction between a proposal to engage in illegal activity and the abstract advocacy of illegality.”
Thus, for example, the First Amendment does protect an individual’s right to say, “I believe that child pornography should be legal.” And it even protects that individual’s right to make a vague statement encouraging criminal activity, such as, “I encourage you to obtain child pornography.” But if an individual explicitly solicits a third party to turn over “a particular piece of purported child pornography,” that is not protected speech.
The indictment includes many allegations that Trump did not simply engage in “abstract advocacy” in favor of overthrowing the 2020 election, but that he specifically solicited specific individuals to commit specific crimes — the very kind of activity that is not protected under Williams.
The indictment claims, for example, that Trump “asked the Arizona House Speaker to use the legislature to circumvent the process by which legitimate electors would be ascertained for Biden based on the popular vote, and replace those electors with a new slate for the Defendant.” It describes a call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump urged Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” (Trump lost Georgia by 11,779 votes). And it claims that Trump “directly pressured the Vice President to use his ceremonial role at the certification proceeding on January 6 to fraudulently overturn the results of the election.”
These allegations, along with similar allegations in the indictment that Trump pressured other officials to commit crimes, are the very kind of solicitation contemplated by Williams. Again, they go beyond the kind of “abstract advocacy” for overturning the 2020 election that is protected by the First Amendment, and cross the line into soliciting specific individuals to commit specific criminal acts.
All of this said, Smith cannot convict Trump unless he can prove the allegations in the indictment beyond a reasonable doubt. That is, while the indictment describes several alleged incidents when Trump and his co-conspirators solicited another person to commit a crime, Smith must prove to a jury that these incidents actually happened as he describes them.
But, assuming that Smith meets his burden of proof at trial, Williams should prevent Trump from hiding behind the First Amendment.
The First Amendment does not protect the kind of lies Trump is accused of telling
Additionally, the First Amendment provides much weaker protections for people who knowingly make false statements than it does for other speakers.
The seminal case establishing that lies enjoy far less First Amendment protection than the truth is New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), about when an individual may be sued for defamation if they make a false statement about a public official regarding a matter of public concern. Sullivan is best known because it provides very robust free speech protection to many false statements. As the Court emphasized, “erroneous statement is inevitable in free debate, and ... it must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to have the ‘breathing space’ that they ‘need to survive.”
That said, Sullivan did hold that defamation suits could proceed, even when the plaintiff is an important political figure and even when the suit concerns political speech if the defendant made a false statement “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” So, when an individual tells a lie, knowing full well that they are lying, they enjoy far less First Amendment protection than they would in other contexts.
In fairness, the Court did place some limits on the government’s ability to criminalize lying in Alvarez, which struck down the Stolen Valor Act — a law making it a crime to lie about receiving a military decoration “made at any time, in any place, to any person.”
The Alvarez decision is a little difficult to parse because it did not produce a majority opinion. Three justices joined a dissent by Justice Samuel Alito, which would have upheld the Stolen Valor Act. Four others joined a plurality opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, which read the First Amendment fairly broadly; and two others joined a separate opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer, which struck down the Act, but on narrower grounds than the Kennedy opinion.
In any event, of these three opinions, Kennedy took the most expansive approach to free speech — and even his opinion makes clear that Trump’s alleged lies are not protected speech. Though Kennedy emphasized that the government may not make it a crime to tell a lie in “personal, whispered conversations within a home,” he endorsed prohibitions on laws prohibiting “defamation, fraud, or some other legally cognizable harm associated with a false statement.”
Thus, while Kennedy faulted the Stolen Valor Act for sweeping too broadly — criminalizing private statements that were unlikely to cause harm to anyone — he made clear that the government may still make it a crime to commit fraud. And, of course, that’s exactly what Trump is accused of doing. Among other things, the latest indictment against Trump accuses him of engaging in an illegal conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Thus, assuming that the Supreme Court does not decide to reinterpret the First Amendment to protect criminal activity that it has never protected in the past, Trump should not have a First Amendment defense against the latest charges against him. Soliciting others to commit a crime is not protected speech, and neither is willful fraud.
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TEXAS LEGISLATURE 2023
Booksellers sue over Texas law requiring them to rate books for appropriateness
Two Texas bookstores and three national bookseller associations file suit over House Bill 900, which requires private booksellers to rate books on appropriateness, and bans “sexually explicit” material from libraries.
BY REBECCA SCHNEID
JULY 25, 2023
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Books at Vandegrift High School's library on March 2, 2022. A new Texas law requires book vendors to apply ratings to all titles before hitting bookshelves.
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A coalition of Texas bookstores and national bookseller associations filed suit on Tuesday over House Bill 900, which aims to ban sexually explicit material from school libraries.
HB 900 passed in the Legislature and was signed by Gov. Greg Abbott earlier this year. It is set to go into effect on Sept. 1 and requires book vendors to assign ratings to books based on the presence of depictions or references to sex. In school libraries, books with a “sexually explicit” rating will be removed from bookshelves. And students who want to check out school library books deemed “sexually relevant” would have to get parental permission first.
Plaintiffs in the suit include two Texas bookstores, Austin’s BookPeople and West Houston’s Blue Willow Bookshop, as well as the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
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They are suing defendants Martha Wong, chair of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission; Keven Ellis, chair of the Texas State Board of Education; and Mike Morath, commissioner of the Texas Education Agency.
According to the official complaint, which was filed in an Austin federal court, the plaintiffs argue that HB 900 violates the First and 14th amendments by regulating speech with “vague and overbroad” terms and targeting protected speech.
They go on to argue that HB 900 forces the plaintiffs to comply with the government’s views, even if they do not agree, and that the law operates as prior restraint — which is government action that prohibits speech or other expression before the speech happens.
“The book ban establishes an unconstitutional regime of compelled speech, retaliation, and licensing that violates clear First Amendment precedent and this country’s history of fostering a robust marketplace of ideas,” the complaint says.
The CEOs of both bookstores say it is not possible for them to comply with the rating system required of book vendors in HB 900. The sheer volume of titles they would need to rate is too much, Charley Rejsek, CEO of BookPeople, said in a statement.
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In a joint statement by the three bookseller associations, they said they are not questioning that content for students should be age-appropriate, but rather that they believe HB 900 does not accomplish such a goal.
“It robs parents, schools and teachers from across the state of Texas of the right to make decisions for their respective communities and classrooms, instead handing that role to a state entity and private businesses,” the statement says.
The complaint emphasizes how the plaintiffs believe HB 900 will “shatter” small bookstores in Texas, placing “additional economic pressure” on them.
Supporters of HB 900, like Cindi Castilla, president of conservative think tank Texas Eagle Forum, characterized the proposal as a child protection bill. In a Senate education committee hearing in May, Castilla said explicit materials in books are educationally unsuitable for students and that taxpayers should not fund such books.
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“Our schools must not sexualize our students or provide them pornographic reading material or introduce them to inappropriate materials that distract from the educational goals we’ve set as a state,” she said.
Lawmakers like state Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney agreed, arguing that HB 900 is a “tool” to be used by communities to address “harmful sexually explicit material.”
Opponents of HB 900 have been worried that by targeting so-called “sexually explicit material” lawmakers will be specifically targeting books that explore LGBTQ+ themes, including books such as “Calvin” and “Being Jazz.” Bill author Rep. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, also condemned the book “Gender Queer,” a graphic novel that traces the author’s experiences with gender growing up.
Many librarians and booksellers, including representatives from the Texas Library Association and individual libraries across the state, testified to the House and Senate in May that the bill will slow down book sales and acquisition of books by school libraries.
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“Such oversight has not been needed in the past and is not needed now,” said Mark Smith, the former director of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. “The bill will interfere with student learning and achievement by blocking access to materials that have been restricted.”
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Joy Alonzo accused by student of disparaging Dan Patrick in lecture on opioid crisis at Texas A&M University
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Tue 25 Jul 2023 16.38 CEST
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The Texas A&M University professor Joy Alonzo criticized the Texas lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, during a visiting lecture in March 2023 on the opioid crisis at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas.
Just hours later, Alonzo learned a student accused her of disparaging Patrick during the lecture. The complaint reached her supervisors and the chancellor of Texas A&M, John Sharp, who was in communication directly with the lieutenant governor’s office.
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The student is reportedly the daughter of the Texas land commissioner, Dawn Buckingham, who served in the Texas senate with Patrick for six years, received an endorsement from him in her run for land commissioner, and had attended Sharp’s wedding in May.
Less than two hours after the lecture had ended, Patrick’s chief of staff forwarded Alonzo’s professional biography to Sharp, reported the Texas Tribune. The chancellor responded to the lieutenant governor directly via text message that Alonzo would immediately be placed on administrative leave pending an investigation to fire her.
The University of Texas Medical Board quickly issued a censure statement, distancing itself from any comments Alonzo made during the lecture.
Texas A&M and the University of Texas Medical Board did not specify what Alonzo said during the lecture that prompted the investigation. Students interviewed by the Texas Tribune only recalled a vague reference to Patrick during the lecture on opioid overdose policies. Texas A&M ultimately allowed Alonzo to retain her job after the investigation did not reveal any wrongdoing.
The swift investigation sparked criticism from Alonzo’s colleagues and free speech advocates over the interference of politicians into classroom discussions and how state universities are managed.
Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a non-profit legal group focused on protecting free speech on college campuses, criticized the investigation as “inappropriate” in an interview with the Tribune and noted its chilling effect, regardless of the outcome of the investigation.
Marcia Ory, a professor at Texas A&M Health and co-chair of the university’s Opioid Task Force with Alonzo, noted the long-term consequences of the interference in an email to Jon Mogford, vice-president of Texas A&M Health.
The reporting of the suspension and investigation of Alonzo comes as the Texas A&M president, Katherine Banks, resigned last week over the backlash to politically motivated outsiders halting the hiring by the university of Kathleen McElroy, a Black journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, to revive the journalism school at Texas A&M.
On Alonzo, a spokesperson for the university system told the Tribune: “It is not unusual to respond to any state official who has concerns about anything occurring at the Texas A&M System,” claiming the system followed standard procedure investigating the claim against Alonzo.
The Guardian has contacted Texas A&M, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and Joy Alonzo for further comment.
This article was amended on 25 July 2023 to correct an error in the headline. Dan Patrick is the lieutenant governor of Texas, not the lieutenant general.
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Five key takeaways from the Supreme Court’s anti-LGBTQ decision
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-06-0620/supreme-court-five-key-takeaways-supreme-court-s-anti-lgbtq-decision
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https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/07/five-key-takeaways-from-the-supreme-courts-anti-lgbtq-decision/
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A crucifix in front of the U.S. Supreme Court
Photo: Shutterstock
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision to allow a homophobic website designer to discriminate against gay couples because it violated her faith was hardly a surprise. The conservative majority on the Court has made it loud and clear that its role is to fulfill the fantasies of the right. It may draw the line at some of the wilder dreams, like the idea that legislatures can overturn popular votes, but on core beliefs it has been extraordinarily consistent. The decision last year to overturn five decades of precedent allowing abortion removed any doubt.
Still, the decision in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis is shocking for its unalloyed willingness to discount LGBTQ+ protections and even mock the Court’s minority’s vigorous defense of them. In his majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch has picked up some of Justice Samuel Alito’s sneer as he chastises fellow Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the author of the dissent, for engaging in “an unfortunate tendency by some to defend First Amendment values only when they find the speaker’s message sympathetic.”
While the full impact of the decision will take a while to unfold, some things are already clear. Here are five takeaways from the decision.
This was always going to be the outcome. The right wing of the Court has been looking for an excuse to elevate the rights of conservative Christians at the expense of LGBTQ+ people for a while. This case was the perfect vehicle. So what that Lorie Smith, the owner of the firm in question, never made a wedding website in her life. So what if no one actually asked her to make one. So what if the case included a fake request from someone who turned out to be a straight man. None of that mattered.
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A normal Court would not be ruling in the case of someone who is asking hypothetical questions. Smith hasn’t suffered any harm, a basic threshold for seeking redress. Instead, this Court plowed ahead because it has been heading in this direction for years. From its ruling in the Hobby Lobby case, granting a corporation the right to withhold contraception access in employee health care plans because the owners are Christian, to its rulings allowing a public school football coach to pray on the field and allowing anti-gay Christian schools to get public funds, the Court has been elevating the rights of conservative Christians. The most recent ruling is just the logical, if reprehensible, next step in that progression.
You can’t blame it all on Donald Trump. Yes, Donald Trump appointed three of the justices on the Court, tilting it far to the right. He was quick to take credit for the ruling overturning affirmative action, and no doubt he will make the Court a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. But the fact of the matter is we would have had this Court no matter who won the 2016 primary. It’s the product of the Republican party, not Donald Trump.
Any Republican president would have appointed the same or similar justices who would have ruled precisely the same way. That’s because the conservative pipeline for the Supreme Court is filled with people who have been thoroughly screened for their adherence to a particular ideology.
The Federalist Society is now the hothouse in which the right raises its judicial prospects. It offers the training, creates the legal arguments, provides connections, and, most of all, wields the influence to move conservatives into positions of power on the bench. Essentially, any Republican president would have to vet his or her Supreme Court nominee through the Federalist Society. A Jeb Bush Court wouldn’t have ruled any differently.
The ruling itself conflates speech and action. Gorsuch’s majority ruling wraps itself in knots trying to make the case about free speech, when in fact Smith was selling her services as a designer. Sotomayor makes quick work of this bogus claim, calling it “profoundly wrong.”
“[T]he act of discrimination has never constituted protected expression under the First Amendment,” Sotomayor wrote. “Our Constitution contains no right to refuse service to a disfavored group.”
Gorsuch makes the absurd argument that Smith isn’t really discriminating against gay people but against gay weddings, which violate her religious beliefs. He argues that this means that the ruling can’t be broadly applied to most other business transactions because they aren’t really expressions of free speech. For example, renting to a gay couple is a public accommodation issue, not a speech issue.
That’s a comforting thought if you buy it. But the Court has shown itself more than willing to start picking away at rights bit by bit.
There will be a lot more lawsuits. The majority opinion leaves a lot of questions unanswered. The way they are going to get answered is in the courts.
Sotomayor was quick to point out that the ruling opened the door to a flood of lawsuits, saying a “large retail store could reserve its family portrait services for ‘traditional’ families.” Gorsuch pooh-poohed that idea, saying that this case was much more straightforward.
It’s not.
Moreover, sensing blood in the water, Alliance Defending Freedom and similar hate groups will want to capitalize on their victory. They aren’t about to stop at this ruling. They will keep pushing the boundaries, using this ruling as the precedent. They will be seeking every possible exception to nondiscrimination laws that they can find in order to weaken them.
It will get worse before it gets better. With the Court demonstrating its willingness to abandon precedent and principle. we are going to be suffering its decisions for a long time. Efforts to change the Court are unlikely to go far, as Republicans won’t relinquish the power it gives them. Eventually, the tide will turn, but until it does, we are in for a tsunami of rulings chipping away at our hard-earned rights.
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Supreme Court limits LGBTQ protections with ruling in favor of Christian web designer
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-30-0821/supreme-court-supreme-court-limits-lgbtq-protections-ruling-favor-christian-web
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https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/politics/supreme-court-303-creative-lgbtq-rights-colorado/index.html
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The Supreme Court Friday ruled in favor of a Christian web designer in Colorado who refuses to create websites to celebrate same-sex weddings out of religious objections.
The 6-3 decision was penned by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas. Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned a dissent joined by her liberal colleagues Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The court’s decision represents a devastating blow to LGBTQ protections, which have in recent years been bolstered by landmark decisions at the nation’s highest court, including one authored three years ago by Gorsuch in which the majority expanded protections for LGBTQ workers, and the 2015 case legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide.
Lorie Smith, who runs a company called 303 Creative, sought to expand her business into the area of weddings and wrote a webpage explaining why she won’t create websites for same-sex couple. But under a Colorado public accommodations law, she said she cannot post the statement because the state considers it illegal.
The ruling – rooted in free speech grounds – will pierce state public accommodation laws for those businesses who sell so-called “expressive” goods. It is the latest victory for religious conservatives at the high court and will alarm critics who fear the current court is setting its sights on overturning the 2015 marriage case.
Gorsuch wrote that “the First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands.” He said Colorado sought to “deny that promise.”
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“All manner of speech – from ‘pictures, films, paintings, drawings, and engravings,’ to ‘oral utterance and the printed word’ – qualify for the First Amendment’s protections; no less can hold true when it comes to speech like Ms. Smith’s conveyed over the Internet,” Gorsuch said.
In dissent, Sotomayor said the decision will undermine the government’s compelling interest in ensuring that all Americans have equal access to the public marketplace.
“Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class,” she wrote.
“Specifically, the Court holds that the First Amendment exempts a website design company from a state law that prohibits the company from denying wedding websites to same-sex couples if the company chooses to sell those websites to the public,” she wrote.
Sotomayor called this a “sad day in American constitutional law and the lives of LGBT people.”
“By issuing this new license to discriminate in a case brought by a company that seeks to deny same-sex couples the full and equal enjoyment of its services, the immediate, symbolic effect of the decision is to mark gays and lesbians for second-class status,” she wrote in dissent.
She said the “decision itself inflicts a kind of stigmatic harm, on top of any harm caused by denials of service.”
“The opinion of the Court is, quite literally, a notice that reads: ‘Some services may be denied to same-sex couples.’”
She suggested that decision would be more far-reaching. “The decision’s logic cannot be limited to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.”
“The decision threatens to balkanize the market and to allow the exclusion of other groups from many services,” she said, adding that “a website designer could equally refuse to create a wedding website for an interracial couple, for example.”
But in a footnote, Gorsuch pushed back. “Our decision today does not concern – much less endorse – anything like the ‘straight couples only’ notices the dissent conjures out of thin air.”
Smith’s lawyer, Kristen Waggoner, said in a statement Friday, “The U.S. Supreme Court rightly reaffirmed that the government can’t force Americans to say things they don’t believe. The court reiterated that it’s unconstitutional for the state to eliminate from the public square ideas it dislikes, including the belief that marriage is the union of husband and wife.”
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Kagan’s dissent and Gorsuch’s switch
The court’s decision came on the final day of Pride Month, an annual celebration of the LGBTQ community and its movement for equality that takes place throughout June.
In her dissent, Sotomayor laid out key moments in that decades-long movement as she explained how states came to pass the kinds of laws at issue in the case and why they’re necessary for members of the community. “Who could forget the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard?” she wrote, adding later: “Or the Pulse nightclub massacre, the second-deadliest mass shooting in U. S. history?”
“One significant change has been the addition of sexual orientation and gender identity to public accommodations laws,” Sotomayor wrote. “LGBT people do not seek any special treatment. All they seek is to exist in public. To inhabit public spaces on the same terms and conditions as everyone else.”
Conservatives are on a roll in their quest to remake America through the courts
Gorsuch’s opinion delivering a massive loss to the LGBTQ community likely came as a surprise to members of the LGBTQ community after he delivered them a key win in 2020.
In that case, Bostock v. Clayton County, the conservative justice wrote for the majority that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination “because of sex,” also covers claims based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The decision extended protections to millions of workers nationwide and was a defeat for the Trump administration, which argued that the sex discrimination bar in Title VII did not extend to claims of gender identity and sexual orientation.
A ‘power to discriminate’
LGBTQ advocates quickly condemned the ruling, echoing Sotomayor’s argument that it gives some businesses a federal right to discriminate against members of the community.
“This decision by the Supreme Court is a dangerous step backward, giving some businesses the power to discriminate against people simply because of who we are,” Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said in a statement.
“People deserve to have commercial spaces that are safe and welcoming. This decision continues to affirm how radical and out-of-touch this Court is, especially when 80 percent of Americans support robust and LGBTQ+ inclusive nondiscrimination laws,” she said.
The American Civil Liberties Union similarly criticized the ruling, saying in a tweet that it means “certain businesses have a right to discriminate when selling customized, expressive services. This is the first time the Court has permitted a business open to the public to turn away customers in defiance of a nondiscrimination law.”
And Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres, an openly gay member of the House, said on Twitter that the court’s majority “invokes religious liberty to license discrimination against LGBTQ people.”
“The LGBTQ community might be the first victim of the Supreme Court’s decision but it won’t be the last. ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’” Torres wrote in a tweet.
Oral arguments highlight potential impact
Waggoner, Smith’s lawyer, came under intense attack during oral arguments in the case from liberals on the bench who launched a slew of hypotheticals meant to explore the potential sweeping consequences of the case if Smith were to prevail. They suggested that other businesses could discriminate based on race or physical disability.
Five years ago, the court considered a similar case involving a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, citing religious objections.
That 7-2 ruling favoring the baker, however, was tied to specific circumstances in that case and did not apply broadly to similar disputes nationwide. Under the law, a business may not refuse to serve individuals because of their sexual orientation.
Smith – who has yet to expand her business into wedding websites – said that she is willing to work with all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, but she refuses to create websites that celebrate same-sex marriage.
“Nobody should be put in that position and the court’s decision yesterday protects speech not just for me but the LGBT website designer and every other artist out there,” Smith said on CNN’s “Smerconish” on Saturday. “Nobody should be punished by the government for speaking consistent with their beliefs.”
“I create speech for a living. When speech is involved, speech should be protected,” she added.
“The state of Colorado is forcing me to create custom, unique artwork communicating and celebrating a different view of marriage, a view of marriage that goes against my deeply held beliefs,” Smith told CNN in an interview.
When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in February 2022, the justices sidestepped whether the law violated Smith’s free exercise of religion. Instead, the court said it would look at the dispute through the lens of free speech and decide whether applying the public accommodations law “to compel an artist to speak or stay silent” violates the Free Speech Clause of the Constitution’s First Amendment.
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In court, Waggoner said that the law works to compel speech in violation of the First Amendment.
She said her client believes “opposite sex marriage honors scripture and that same-sex marriage contradicts it.” She said the state could interpret its law to allow speakers who serve all people to decline specific projects based on their message. Such a move, she contended, would stop status discrimination without coercing or suppressing speech. “Art is different,” Waggoner said.
Twenty states had weighed in in favor of Smith in friend-of-the-court briefs. They said that they have public accommodation laws on the books, but their laws exempt those businesspeople who make their living creating custom art.
Smith has written a webpage explaining that her decision is based on her belief that marriage should be between one man and one woman. But she has not yet published the statement out of fear of violating the “publication clause” of the law that bars a company from publishing any communication that indicates that a public accommodation service will be refused based on sexual orientation, Waggoner claims in court papers.
Smith lost her case in lower courts. The 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals held that while a diversity of faiths and religious exercises “enriches our society,” the state has a compelling interest in “protecting its citizens from the harms of discrimination.”
Colorado Solicitor General Eric Olson argued that the law does not regulate or compel speech. Instead, he said, it regulates commercial conduct to ensure all customers have the ability to participate in everyday commercial exchanges regardless of their religion, race, disability or other characteristics. He said the Colorado law targets “commercial conduct of discriminatory sales” and that its effect on expression is “at most incidental.”
“Granting such a license to discriminate would empower all businesses that offer what they believe to be expressive services, from architects, to photographers, to consultants, to refuse service to customers because of their disability, sexual orientation, religion or race,” he said.
He added that the law does not aim to suppress any message that Smith may want to express. Instead, 303 Creative is free to decide what design services to offer and whether to communicate its vision of marriage through biblical quotes on its wedding websites. But critically, the law requires the company to sell whatever product or service it offers to all.
This story has been updated with additional information.
CNN’s Morgan Rimmer and Andrew Millman contributed to this report.
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Supreme Court clarifies when online harassment can be prosecuted
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-27-1535/supreme-court-supreme-court-clarifies-when-online-harassment-can-be-prosecuted
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https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/27/politics/supreme-court-ruling-counterman-v-colorado/index.html
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The Supreme Court building is seen on May 16, 2023, in Washington.
Alex Brandon/AP
CNN
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The Supreme Court on Tuesday wiped away a lower court decision upholding the stalking conviction of a Colorado man who sent hundreds of messages to a woman over Facebook.
The justices said the court had used the wrong standard in convicting the man and sent the case back down with a new test to apply to the case. The justices said it would suffice for prosecutors to show that the speaker was aware that his speech could be viewed as a threat and that the speech was reckless, even if not intentionally threatening.
The court’s move could worry those working to combat stalking in the age of social media where the internet has expanded the number of violent threats, enabling activities that include online harassment and intimidation. They fear the court’s standard could raise the bar for the government when trying to prove that a series of messages amounted to a true threat, unprotected by the First Amendment.
While advocates for abused women have pushed the court to protect less such threatening speech, free speech advocates have expressed concern that the court could act too broadly and chill speech that is misunderstood to be a threat.
The case involves a Colorado man, Billy Raymond Counterman, who was convicted of stalking a songwriter, Coles Whalen, after sending her hundreds of direct messages on Facebook.
Supreme Court rejects controversial Trump-backed election law theory
Whalen found the messages “creepy” especially because they indicated he was surveilling her. She never responded, but instead, repeatedly tried to block him on Facebook. But he continued to create new accounts in order to send her messages.
The messages –over a two year period– included:
• “was that you in the white Jeep?”
• “seems like I’m being talked about more than I’m being talked to. This isn’t healthy.”
• “You’re not being good for human relations. Die. Don’t need you.”
At one point he asked her for a “hot date at Wal-Mart” and another time expressed anger and frustration at her lack of response.
Whalen was so upset she took preventative measures such as hiring extra security and even canceling some of her performances. Ultimately, she filed suit, and Counterman was found guilty of stalking and sentenced to four and a half years in prison. But his lawyers argued that the conviction violated his free speech rights.
The Supreme Court has defined “true threats” – those that are unprotected by the First Amendment – as statements by which the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence. The speaker need not carry out the act.
But lower courts have been divided over whether the government must demonstrate that the speaker knew the threatening nature of the speech. Some courts have said it’s enough that a “reasonable person” recognized the threat.
John Elwood, a lawyer for Counterman, argued that his client’s speech was protected by the Constitution’s Free Speech Clause and said the justices should insist on a standard that “considers the speaker’s intent” in order to “avoid criminalizing inevitable misunderstandings.” He said that Counterman suffers from mental illness and did not understand his messages to be threatening.
“The bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment is that the government may not prohibit expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,” Elwood said.
Colorado defended its stalking law, stressing that it protects victims from “intrusive, threatening, and escalating course of conduct characteristic of stalking.”
Colorado Attorney General Philip J. Weiser argued that Whalen had dedicated her life to making music and after years of unwanted messages, her dream “ended” and her mental health deteriorated.
This story has been updated with additional details.
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Supreme Court says a conviction for online threats violated 1st Amendment
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-27-1122/supreme-court-supreme-court-says-conviction-online-threats-violated-1st
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/27/supreme-court-true-threat-stalking/
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The Supreme Court building in Washington on Tuesday. (Minh Connors/The Washington Post)
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The Supreme Court on Tuesday reversed the conviction of a man who made extensive online threats to a stranger, saying free speech protections require prosecutors to prove the stalker was aware of the threatening nature of his communications.
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In a 7-2 ruling with Justice Elena Kagan writing for the majority, the court emphasized that true threats of violence are not protected by the First Amendment. But to guard against a chilling effect on non-threatening speech, the majority said, states must prove that a criminal defendant has acted recklessly, meaning that he “disregarded a substantial risk that his communications would be viewed as threatening violence.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined in part by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, agreed with the outcome but expressed concern about the risk of cracking down on speech that is unintentionally threatening. She worried that the ruling could lead, for instance, to a high school student going to prison for sending another student violent music lyrics.
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Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett dissented from the majority, with Barrett writing that the standard set by the court on Thursday gives “preferential treatment” to a broad range of threatening speech and makes it more difficult for law enforcement to address actual threats.
“A delusional speaker may lack awareness of the threatening nature of her speech; a devious speaker may strategically disclaim such awareness; and a lucky speaker may leave behind no evidence of mental state for the government to use against her,” Barrett wrote. “The Court’s decision thus sweeps much further than it lets on.”
His online messages terrorized her. But were they actual threats?
The case concerned a Colorado law used to convict Billy Raymond Counterman of stalking and causing “emotional distress” to Coles Whalen, a singer-songwriter he had never met. Counterman, who had previously been convicted of making threats to others, served four years in prison in the Whalen case.
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The court’s interest involved the question of when statements, especially those made online, can be considered “true threats” not protected by the First Amendment.
Counterman contended that the state must show that the speaker intends the messages to be threatening. Colorado, backed by the Justice Department and a majority of states, says it should be enough that a “reasonable” recipient feel that physical harm could be imminent, on the basis of the context of the circumstances.
The case returns to the lower courts, where prosecutors could decide to retry the matter under the new standards set by the Supreme Court’s decision.
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(Chloe Cushman for The Washington Post)
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Whalen testified at Counterman’s trial, and told The Washington Post in an interview, that she was terrified by Counterman’s relentless pursuit. She said she never knew whether her stalker would be in the crowd at her performances. The worry affected her mental health, caused her to cancel concerts and hampered her career and even caused her for a time to give up performing, she said.
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For years, when she blocked Counterman from her Facebook page, which she used to publicize her appearances and her work, he formed new profiles and continued sending the messages.
Whalen eventually sought help from a lawyer, who researched Counterman’s background and told her of his previous convictions. “I was already scared, but then I was terrified,” Whalen said in the interview. “I thought, ‘Why did I wait so long?’”
Among the messages presented at Counterman’s trial:
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“I’m currently unsupervised. I know, it freaks me out too, but the possibilities are endless.”
“F--- off permanently.”
“You’re not being good for human relations. Die. Don’t need you.”
The Supreme Court last confronted the true-threats question in 2015, when justices reversed the conviction of a Pennsylvania man who had made violent and graphic statements against co-workers and his estranged wife. Anthony Elonis said his postings were therapeutic rants. The court found that federal law required more evidence about Elonis’s intent but left the First Amendment question unsettled, opening the door for this lawsuit.
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In Counterman’s case, the justices were revisiting the limits of free speech. The majority cited the court’s past rulings in explaining why it shares Counterman’s concerns about deterring or silencing protected types of speech and expression.
“Our decisions have often insisted on protecting even some historically unprotected speech through the adoption of a subjective mental-state element,” Kagan wrote. “We follow the same path today, holding that the State must prove in true-threats cases that the defendant had some understanding of his statements’ threatening character.”
In addition, the majority held that to lose constitutional protections for what they say, speakers must “recklessly” disregard the threatening nature of their speech. That means, Kagan wrote, that the speaker knows that others could consider the statements as threatening violence and makes them anyway.
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Sotomayor said she was concerned about overzealous prosecution and for that reason would set a higher bar than recklessness for proving that certain speech is a “true threat.”
“True threats encompass a narrow band of intentional threats,” she wrote. “Especially in a climate of intense polarization, it is dangerous to allow criminal prosecutions for heated words based solely on an amorphous recklessness standard.”
Sotomayor noted that different corners of the internet have “considerably different norms around appropriate speech” and that online posts may lack the usual context clues, such as tone and expression.
A jury’s determination about “when angry hyperbole crosses the line will depend on amorphous norms around language, which will vary greatly from one discursive community to another,” Sotomayor wrote. “Unfortunately yet predictably, racial and cultural stereotypes can also influence whether speech is perceived as dangerous.”
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In dissent, Barrett rejected the recklessness standard set by the majority as “not grounded in law.” She listed some potential negative consequences of the court’s ruling, including scenarios in which a person threatens to bomb an airport or to shoot up a courthouse.
“The speaker might well end up barred from the location in question — for good reason,” wrote Barrett, joined by Thomas. “Yet after today, such orders cannot be obtained without proof — not necessarily easy to secure — that the person who issued the threat anticipated that it would elicit fear.”
Kagan acknowledged the competing interests in protecting speech and prosecuting true threats. The court’s approach, she wrote, finds a middle ground by offering “‘enough “breathing space” for protected speech,’ without sacrificing too many of the benefits of enforcing laws against true threats.”
The case is Counterman v. Colorado.
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SUPREME COURT ETHICS
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Supreme Court Rejects Free Speech Challenge to Immigration Law
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-25-0736/immigration-supreme-court-rejects-free-speech-challenge-immigration-law
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Free Speech
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/us/scotus-free-speech-immigration.html
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Supreme Court Rejects Free Speech Challenge to Immigration Law
In a 7-to-2 decision, the court gave a narrow reading to a statute that made it a crime to encourage unauthorized immigrants to come to or stay in the United States.
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A group of migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, near the U.S. border, in May.
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Mark Abramson for The New York Times
By Adam Liptak
Reporting from Washington
June 23, 2023
The Supreme Court avoided a difficult First Amendment question on Friday, ruling that an unusual 1986 federal law that makes it a crime to “encourage” or “induce” unauthorized immigrants to come to or stay in the United States should be read narrowly to require complicity in a criminal conduct.
A broader interpretation of the law would give rise to constitutional concerns, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority in the 7-to-2 decision. She added that the law’s key words were terms of art used in a “specialized, criminal-law sense” and mean something different than they do in ordinary usage. For purposes of the law, she wrote, the terms require proof of solicitation or facilitation of a crime.
When the case was argued in March, several justices asked questions about the law’s sweep, given the usual meaning of “encourage.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked about a grandmother living in the United States without authorization. “The grandmother tells her son she’s worried about the burden she’s putting on the family,” the justice said. “And the son says: ‘Abuelita, you are never a burden to us. If you want to continue living here with us, your grandchildren love having you.’”
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh asked about charitable organizations. “There’s still going to be a chill or a threat of prosecution for them for providing food and shelter and aid and recommending people for scholarships,” he said.
U.S. Supreme Court Decisions and Developments
Key Decisions in 2023: The Supreme Court term concluded with a series of 6-to-3 decisions divided along partisan lines. See how the justices voted in this year’s major rulings.
Social Media: The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to pause a ruling from a federal appeals court barring many kinds of contacts between administration officials and social media platforms.
Alabama Congressional Map: Alabama filed an emergency application in the Supreme Court, asking the justices to keep in place for now a congressional map that a lower court found failed to comply with orders to establish a second majority-Black district or something “close to it.”
Two Justices Clash: For the second summer in a row, Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan sketched out dueling conceptions of the Supreme Court’s place in the constitutional structure.
In dissent on Friday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sotomayor, rejected the majority’s approach and said the court should have struck down the law on First Amendment grounds. She gave other examples of the law’s sweep if its words bore their ordinary meaning.
“It would also apply to the doctor who informs a noncitizen patient that a necessary medical treatment is more readily available in the United States, influencing the patient to stay beyond the expiration of his visa to await treatment,” Justice Jackson wrote. “The college counselor who advises an undocumented student that she can obtain a private scholarship to attend college in the United States, inspiring the student to reside here, would also fall within the scope of the statute.”
The case involved Helaman Hansen, who was convicted of violating the law, along with mail and wire fraud, for taking large fees to help undocumented immigrants obtain citizenship through adult adoption.
“It was too good to be true,” Justice Barrett wrote. “There is no path to citizenship through ‘adult adoption.’”
She described some of Mr. Hansen’s victims. “After hearing about the program from their pastor, one husband and wife met with Hansen and wrote him a check for $9,000 — initially saved for a payment on a house in Mexico — so that they could participate,” Justice Barrett wrote. “Another noncitizen paid Hansen out of savings he had accumulated over 21 years as a house painter. Still others borrowed from relatives and friends. All told, Hansen lured over 450 noncitizens into his program, and he raked in nearly $2 million as a result.”
Last year, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld Mr. Hansen’s fraud convictions, which resulted in 20-year prison sentences, but it reversed his convictions under the 1986 law for encouraging immigrants to overstay their visas, which would have come with 10-year sentences to be served at the same time as the sentences for fraud.
Esha Bhandari, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Mr. Hansen, reacted cautiously to Friday’s ruling.
“The Supreme Court has drastically limited the encouragement provision to apply only to intentional solicitation or facilitation of immigration law violations,” she said. “As written by Congress, the law has left people wondering what they can safely say on the subject of immigration. Now we expect the government to respect free speech rights and only enforce the law narrowly going forward.”
In dissent, Justice Jackson wrote that she feared that constitutionally protected speech would continue to be stifled under the majority’s approach.
“Ordinary people confronted with the encouragement provision, for instance, will see only its broad, speech-chilling language,” she wrote. “Even if they do consult this court’s decision, and do recognize that it substantially narrows the statute’s scope, the court’s decision leaves many things about future potential prosecutions up in the air.”
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002. More about Adam Liptak
A version of this article appears in print on June 24, 2023, Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: Justices Take Narrow View Of an Immigration Law. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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New video undercuts claim Twitter censored pro-Trump views before Jan. 6
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U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
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On Jan. 5, 2021, the lawyers and specialists on Twitter’s safety policy team, which set rules about violent content, were bracing for a day of brutality in Washington. In the weeks since President Donald Trump had tweeted a call for his supporters to gather in the nation’s capital for a protest he promised would be “wild,” the site had erupted with pledges of political vengeance and plans for a military-style assault.
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“I am very concerned about what happens tomorrow, especially given what we have been seeing,” one member of the team, Anika Collier Navaroli, said in a video call, the details of which are reported here for the first time. “For months we have been allowing folks to maintain and say on the platform that they’re locked and loaded, that they’re ready to shoot people, that they’re ready to commit violence.”
Some participants in the call pushed the company to adopt a tougher position, arguing that moderators should be able to remove what they called “coded incitements to violence” — messages, such as “locked and loaded,” that could be read as threats. But a senior manager dismissed the idea, saying executives wanted them to take action against only the most flagrant rules violations, adding, “We didn’t want to go too far.”
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“What if there’s violence on the ground?” responded another team member in Twitter’s Dublin office. “Would we take action … or do we have to wait for violence — someone getting shot?”
The next day, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, leaving five people dead and more than 100 police officers injured.
Two and a half years after those events, the role of social media companies in fomenting the violence remains a volatile topic. Twitter’s current owner, Elon Musk, commissioned a series of reports intended to reveal how the company had previously sought to squelch conservative speech, and a Republican-led committee in the House of Representatives is working to build the case that the tech giants have been digitally weaponized against conservative ideas.
But the video and other newly obtained internal Twitter records show that, far from working to censor pro-Trump sentiment in the days before the Capitol riot, the company’s leaders were intent on leaving it up — despite internal warnings that trouble was brewing.
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Congressional Republicans, Trump supporters and Musk allies have condemned the company for suspending Trump’s account in the riot’s aftermath, saying its employees were too quick to punish the former president because of their liberal prejudice.
But the records reveal a company that fought until the end to give some of Trump’s most belligerent supporters the benefit of the doubt, even as its internal teams faced an overwhelming volume of tweets threatening retribution in line with Trump’s lies that the election had been stolen.
They also show that Twitter’s leaders were reluctant to take action against Trump’s account two days after the insurrection, even as lawyers inside the company argued that his continued praise of the Capitol rioters amounted to “glorification of violence,” an offense punishable then by suspension under Twitter’s rules.
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Trump’s 88 million-follower account was ultimately suspended on the night of Jan. 8, hours after he’d tweeted that “great American Patriots … will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” The suspension, the records show, was enacted only after employees had assembled for executives a list of examples in which Twitter users responded to Trump’s tweets with calls for further violence across the United States.
The records also undercut claims that Twitter had worked on behalf of the Biden administration in freezing Trump’s account, as Trump claimed in a lawsuit against Twitter that was dismissed last year by a federal judge.
What the Jan. 6 probe found out about social media, but didn’t report
None of the records obtained by The Washington Post — including the 32-minute video, a five-page retrospective memo outlining the suspension discussions, and a 114-page agenda document detailing the safety policy team’s meetings and conversations — show any contacts with federal officials pushing the company to take any action involving Trump’s account.
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The records were part of a large set of Slack messages, policy documents and other files given to the House Jan. 6 committee in preparation for its landmark hearings, though the committee never made them public. The Post obtained the records from a person connected to the investigation, and their authenticity was confirmed by another person with knowledge of their contents.
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Jan. 6 report takeaways
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The Jan. 6 committee released its final report last year, marking the culmination of an 18-month investigation into the violent insurrection. Read The Post’s analysis about the committee’s new findings and conclusions.
Criminal referrals
The committee made four criminal referrals against Donald Trump: inciting or assisting an insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to make a false statement. Here’s what the criminal referrals mean.
What we learned
The first 160 pages of the report released Monday contained some new details, including more evidence that Trump resist urging peace on Jan. 6 (and before), information on hundreds of weapons seized, and more. Here’s what we’ve learned from the Jan. 6 committee report so far.
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The Post is not naming employees cited in the records because of the sensitivity of the matter. The Post was able to view the full video, the existence of which, along with a partial description of its contents, was first reported by Rolling Stone.
Navaroli, who declined to comment, ultimately testified before Congress that Twitter’s reluctance to take action earlier had been fueled by anxiety over both the political and financial consequences of pushing out one of the platform’s biggest attractions.
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Another former employee, who testified before the committee under the pseudonym J. Johnson, said that “Twitter was terrified of the backlash they would get if they followed their own rules and applied them to Donald Trump.”
A former Twitter executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of harassment, said the leaders believed the company’s policies as they stood already applied to “coded” threats.
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Investigators for the Jan. 6 committee wrote in a memo that Twitter had played a key role in helping provoke the Capitol riots by hosting and amplifying Trump’s incendiary statements about his 2020 election loss and that Twitter leadership had “hesitated to act until after the attack on the Capitol” and “changed course only after it was too late.”
The memo was circulated among committee members but was not made public because of hesitations about taking on issues that could divert the focus from Trump, three people familiar with the matter told The Post earlier this year.
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On the night of Jan. 6, after law enforcement officials had fought to regain control of the Capitol grounds, Twitter briefly suspended Trump’s account but said it would allow him to return after 12 hours if he deleted three tweets that broke Twitter’s “civic integrity” rules against manipulating or interfering in elections. One tweet included a video in which he called for peace from the “very special” rioters who he said had been “hurt” because the “fraudulent election … was stolen from us.”
The former Twitter executive said the company sent Trump’s representatives an email on Jan. 6 saying that his account would face an immediate ban if he broke another rule and that the executives hoped, with a 12-hour timeout, Trump would “get the message.”
Trump deleted the tweets and, on Jan. 7, posted a conciliatory video in which he said that “this moment calls for healing and reconciliation.” The next day, however, he tweeted a more fiery message about how the “American Patriots” who voted for him would “not be disrespected” and announced that he would not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration.
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The tweets set off new alarms inside Twitter, according to a postmortem document written by Navaroli that detailed the company’s deliberations for the purpose of internal review.
In a Slack channel where the safety policy team discussed “escalations” requiring high-level consideration, members initially agreed that the tweets had not broken Twitter’s rules because they offered no clear “call to violence” or “target of abuse,” the document states.
The members drafted a short advisory memo saying as much, which was then passed to other departments, including to Twitter’s general counsel, Vijaya Gadde, and its chief executive, Jack Dorsey, who was working then from a French Polynesian island.
One of those departments, a team of internal lawyers that advised the safety policy team, wrote back with a different argument: that the “American Patriots” of Trump’s tweet could refer to the rioters who had just ransacked the Capitol, an interpretation that would violate Twitter’s “glorification of violence” policy, according to Navaroli’s document.
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“They see it that ‘He is the leader of a violent extremist group who is glorifying the group and its recent actions,’” one employee wrote on Slack, describing the lawyers’ assessment. The message was first reported in the “Twitter Files,” a cache of internal documents Musk made available to a select group of writers.
“They now view him as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed,” the employee added.
The lawyers, according to the postmortem document, argued that the tweets should not be assessed in isolation but as part of “a continuation and culmination of rhetoric that led to deadly violence days before.”
Twitter moderators at the time had recorded many instances of pro-Trump accounts continuing to call for violence, including “additional occupations” of federal and state government buildings, the document said. Others were citing Trump’s commitment not to attend the inauguration as an indication that the event would be ripe for attack.
At the lawyers’ recommendation, members of the safety policy team drafted a second assessment ruling that Trump’s tweets had broken the rules against glorification of violence and recommending that his account be permanently suspended.
Twitter’s online competitors had already taken similar action. On Jan. 6, Facebook and Instagram suspended Trump’s accounts for 24 hours, and the next morning Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg announced that the suspensions would be extended indefinitely, saying the risks of Trump using the sites after having incited and condoned a “violent insurrection” were “simply too great.”
And inside Twitter, everyone seemed to be on edge. Thousands of employees, most of whom were not involved in content-moderation decisions, had spoken out on Slack threads and video calls, urging the company to take stronger action against Trump and saying they were worried about their personal safety.
Still, some Twitter executives voiced hesitation about taking down Trump’s account, arguing that “reasonable minds could differ” as to the intentions of Trump’s tweets, according to Navaroli’s document. Twitter had for years declined to hold Trump to the same rules as everyone else on the basis that world leaders’ views were especially important for voters to hear.
At a 2 p.m. video call on Jan. 8, which was described in the document but not viewed by The Post, top officials in Twitter’s trust and safety team questioned the “glorification of violence” argument and debated whether the company should instead wait to act until Trump more blatantly broke the platform’s rules.
Navaroli argued that this course of inaction had “led us to the current crisis situation” and could lead “to the same end result — continued violence and death in a nation in the midst of a sociopolitical crisis,” the document shows.
In another call, around 3:30 p.m., after safety policy team members had compiled examples of tweets in which users detailed plans for future violence, Twitter’s top lawyers and policy officials voiced support for a “permanent suspension” of Trump’s account. One note in the safety policy agenda document read that there was a “team consensus that this is a [violation]” due to Trump’s “pattern of behavior.”
Their assessment was sent to Dorsey and Gadde for final approval and, at 6:21 p.m., Twitter’s policy team was notified over Slack that Trump had been suspended. A company tweet and blog post announced the decision to the world shortly after.
Dorsey later tweeted that he regretted having to approve a move that would “limit the potential for clarification, redemption and learning” but that he ultimately believed “we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety.”
The suspension, as it turned out, was not permanent. Trump’s Twitter account was reinstated late last year at the direction of Musk, who has called the suspension tyrannical.
In February, executives at Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta also ended Trump’s two-year account suspension, saying they’d surveyed the “current environment” and determined that “the risk has sufficiently receded.” And this month, YouTube said it would no longer remove videos that falsely claimed the 2020 election had been stolen, arguing that the removals could curtail “political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence.”
Trump has yet to use his restored Twitter account, choosing instead to post messages, known as “truths,” to a website he owns called Truth Social. But it is there, if he ever wants to, and still has 86 million followers.
The Jan. 6 insurrection
The report: The Jan. 6 committee released its final report, marking the culmination of an 18-month investigation into the violent insurrection. Read The Post’s analysis about the committee’s new findings and conclusions.
The final hearing: The House committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol held its final public meeting where members referred four criminal charges against former president Donald Trump and others to the Justice Department. Here’s what the criminal referrals mean.
The riot: On Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election results. Five people died on that day or in the immediate aftermath, and 140 police officers were assaulted.
Inside the siege: During the rampage, rioters came perilously close to penetrating the inner sanctums of the building while lawmakers were still there, including . The Washington Post examined text messages, photos and videos to create a Here’s what we know about .
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A bipartisan bill aims to protect journalists from being forced to reveal their sources
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Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asks a question during the Senate Finance Committee hearing on President Joe Biden's budget request for the fiscal year 2024 for the IRS, Wednesday, April 19, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
Mariam Zuhaib/AP
Editor’s Note: A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.
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Journalists could soon enjoy greater protections under federal law.
A bipartisan group of US senators and congressmen united this week to reintroduce the Protect Reporters from Exploitive State Spying Act, or as it is more commonly known, the PRESS Act.
The legislation, which passed the House last year but did not get a vote in the Senate, would safeguard journalists in two important ways. First, it would prevent the government from compelling reporters from being forced to disclose their sources. Second, it would ensure that important data held by a third party, such as a phone or internet company, cannot be seized without notice and providing the ability to challenge the move in court.
“The PRESS Act is the strongest federal shield bill for journalists we’ve ever seen,” Seth Stern, director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in a statement. “Its definition of journalist is broad, its exceptions are narrow and targeted, and it restricts subpoenas directed not only to journalists but to their phone and email providers.”
The PRESS Act enjoys broad support in the journalism community, with strong endorsements from a number of trade organizations that represent most major news organizations, including the News/Media Alliance, Radio Television Digital News Association, and National Association of Broadcasters. Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union have also backed the legislation.
The move to tighten protections for journalists comes after the Department of Justice, under disgraced former President Donald Trump, secretly seized records from reporters at news organizations, including CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
In the aftermath of the revelations of the secret seizures, Attorney General Merrick Garland adopted formal regulations prohibiting such actions, leaving a carveout for only very exceptional circumstances. But those rules, adopted by the DOJ, could be reversed under another administration. The PRESS Act would solve for that by enshrining protections into federal law.
“In a world where information is power, the role of reporters as truth-seekers and watchdogs cannot be understated,” Republican Sen. Mike Lee, one of the lawmakers who reintroduced the bill, said in a statement. “Recent events, however, have cast a chilling shadow over their pursuits. Law-enforcement agencies have resorted to clandestine tactics, subpoenaing emails and phone records in an effort to unmask confidential sources.”
“Not only is this legislation imperative to shield journalists from unnecessary government surveillance, but it is also necessary to protect the public’s right to access information, hold their elected officials accountable, and actively participate in representative government,” Lee added. “We must seize this opportunity and ensure that the Fourth Estate remains an indomitable force in its quest for truth.”
Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, another one of the lawmakers who helped reintroduce the bill, noted that “unnecessary surveillance of journalists makes it harder to bring waste, fraud and abuse to light, by scaring off sources and reporters who are essential to a well-functioning democracy.”
“Spying on reporters to learn the identity of their sources,” Wyden added, “is a finger in the eye of the First Amendment.”
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Mississippi harms free speech by requiring state permits before protests, lawsuit says
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FILE - Jackson residents and supporters march with members of the Poor People’s Campaign of Mississippi to the Governor’s Mansion in Jackson, Miss., to protest water system problems, poverty and other issues, Oct. 10, 2022. A lawsuit filed Friday, June 2, 2023, challenges a new Mississippi law that will require people to receive state law enforcement permission before protests near state government buildings in Jackson. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, file)
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A new Mississippi law will restrict free speech by requiring people to obtain permission from state law enforcement officials for any protest near the statehouse, Governor’s Mansion or other state government buildings in the capital city of Jackson, according to a lawsuit that seeks to block the mandate from taking effect July 1.
“Those who peacefully protest without state government authorization and who are charged with crimes for doing so may be prosecuted and sentenced to prison. This chills protected speech,” said the lawsuit filed on behalf of the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign and several other organizations.
The federal lawsuit was filed Thursday against the two people authorized to issue permits for protests or other events in parts of the majority-Black city: Mississippi Department of Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell and the chief of the state-run Capitol Police department, Bo Luckey.
“These two officials, both white men, will now have veto authority over protests that have included, and will continue to include, criticisms of their own expanded authority and actions as well as that of other state officials,” said the lawsuit filed by attorneys for the Mississippi Center for Justice and the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi School of Law.
The Associated Press sought comment Monday from the Department of Public Safety, and a spokesperson did not immediately respond for the agency or for Capitol Police, which is a division of it.
The new lawsuit is the third one to challenge new Mississippi laws that expand the state’s role in courts and policing in Jackson.
Critics say the majority-white and Republican-controlled Legislature passed the laws to take away local autonomy in Jackson and surrounding Hinds County, which are both majority-Black and governed by Democrats. Supporters of the laws say they are trying to control violent crime.
Several protests have been held near state government buildings in downtown Jackson during the past year, including some in January, February and March against the legislation dealing with courts and policing. The Poor People’s Campaign held events on a street outside the Governor’s Mansion last fall to protest what organizers said was the state’s inadequate investment in Jackson’s struggling water system.
People planning protests or other events in downtown Jackson are already required to obtain a city-issued permit — the same local procedure used in many other parts of the state. The lawsuit said people will need permission from both the city and the state for protests or events in parts of Jackson, but state permission is not required for protests or events near state government buildings elsewhere in Mississippi.
One of the plaintiffs, JXN Undivided Coalition, said in a statement Monday that its members “have for years engaged in the deeply American tradition of peacefully gathering on public property to convey to elected officials what matters most to us,” including voting rights and self-determination for Jackson residents.
“We have spoken, and the state has responded with a sweeping prohibition of speech next to properties in Jackson occupied by state officials absent prior authorization,” the coalition said.
This story has been corrected to show that the lawsuit was filed Thursday, not Friday.
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New college free speech rankings released. Harvard comes in last.
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Disney drops all but free speech claim in political retaliation suit against DeSantis
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Tucker Carlson is 'Dead Man Walking', Putin Ally Warns
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The Internet Speech Case That the Supreme Court Can’t Dodge
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JEFF KOSSEFFIDEASAUG 7, 2023 9:00 AM
The Internet Speech Case That the Supreme Court Can’t Dodge
Forget Gonzalez v. Google. There's another dispute that will come before the justices in the next year and this time they will have to directly deal with issues involving platforms and speech.
PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: WIRED STAFF; GETTY IMAGES
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WHEN THE US Supreme Court agreed to hear Gonzalez v. Google, its first case involving Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the tech-policy world was laser-focused on its implications. The week before oral arguments, in February last year, the Brookings Institution held a panel touting the case’s “power to reshape the internet.” The New York Times wrote that the case “could have potentially seismic ramifications for the social media platforms that have become conduits of communication, commerce and culture for billions of people.” Google’s general counsel wrote that the “decision could radically alter the way that Americans use the internet.”
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Those predictions fell short a few months later when the court released its opinion and completely punted on any interpretation of Section 230, the 1996 law that protects platforms from liability for user content. In a 2019 book, I called this statute “the twenty-six words that created the internet,” because it gave internet companies the flexibility to build their business models around user-generated content. As tech companies gained more power, critics on the left and right increasingly attacked the law, which they see as a get-out-of-jail-free card. But the Supreme Court was reluctant to resolve the heated debate. “We really don’t know about these things,” Justice Elena Kagan said during oral arguments. “You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet.”
Despite their reluctance to decide lofty cyber issues, there is a good chance that another internet law dispute will come before the justices in the next year. And this time, it will be difficult for them to avoid directly deciding the issue and having a huge impact on how the internet looks for decades to come.
The disputes involve two similar Texas and Florida laws which both restrict platforms from moderating certain speech and require transparency about user content policies. The Texas law, for example, states that large social media platforms “may not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s ability to receive the expression of another person” based on viewpoints or the users’ location. NetChoice, a group representing tech companies, has challenged both laws.
Last year, the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit struck down Florida’s moderation restrictions. Judge Kevin Newsom wrote that platforms’ content moderation choices “constitute protected exercises of editorial judgment,” so the law likely violates the First Amendment. But later that year, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the Texas law. “Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say,” Judge Andrew Oldham wrote.
The Florida and Texas laws are not identical, but it is impossible to reconcile the courts’ opinions. In the Eleventh Circuit, tech companies have a First Amendment right to moderate user content as they see fit. In the Fifth Circuit, they do not. Lawyers refer to this problem—having different legal rules depending on what part of the country you’re in—as a “circuit split.” And a circuit split is particularly problematic for issues involving the internet, which reaches across state borders.
The Supreme Court receives more than 7,000 requests to review lower court decisions each year, and typically grants less than 1 percent of them. But the chances of the Supreme Court reviewing the NetChoice cases are greater than those of an average dispute. A circuit split—particularly a high-profile one such as this—makes the Supreme Court more likely to take interest. Assuming that the court agrees to hear the cases, we could expect an opinion next June.
A Supreme Court opinion in the NetChoice cases, far more than Gonzalez v. Google, has the potential to upend the laissez-faire approach that courts have applied since the internet’s infancy. The NetChoice cases are about more than just liability in lawsuits; they will require the Supreme Court to decide whether online platforms have a First Amendment right to moderate user content.
No court had ever before allowed the government to force websites to publish speech. “If allowed to stand, the Fifth Circuit’s opinion will upend settled First Amendment jurisprudence and threaten to transform speech on the internet as we know it today,” NetChoice wrote.
Platforms should be free of any direct or indirect government restrictions on their ability to distribute constitutionally protected user-generated content, even if that content is distasteful or objectionable. But the platforms also should have the flexibility to set their own policies, free of government coercion, and create the environments they believe are best suited to their users. The free market—and not the government—should reward or punish these business decisions.
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The outcome of the cases could reach far beyond content moderation disputes. NetChoice repeatedly relies on a 1997 Supreme Court decision, Reno v. ACLU, to argue that the Florida and Texas laws are unconstitutional. In Reno, the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that restricted the online transmission of indecent images. The federal government had argued that just as the government can restrict television stations from broadcasting indecent content, it also could limit such material on the nascent internet. But the Supreme Court disagreed. The internet, the Court wrote, is “a unique and wholly new medium of worldwide human communication.”
This conclusion led the justices to rule that the internet is not like broadcasting, and deserves the full scope of First Amendment protections. “As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it,” the Court wrote. “The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.”
But that was more than a quarter-century ago, when online platforms were not as central to everyday life and business. Big Tech back then was Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL. The Supreme Court could use the NetChoice cases to rethink—and possibly limit—the hands-off approach to the internet that it articulated in Reno. Texas, for instance, argues that platforms should receive the less rigorous First Amendment protections that are afforded to cable companies.
Weakening Reno could open the door to more state attempts to force platforms to carry user content that the platforms believe violates their policies. But it would do more than that. If the Supreme Court were to conclude that First Amendment protections are weaker on the internet, it might allow other states to pass laws that make it more difficult for certain users to post, or that prohibit user content that would otherwise be constitutionally protected.
This is not hypothetical. In the past year, some states have passed laws that require all social media users to verify their ages, threatening the ability of people to post anonymously. Blue states have proposed bills to crack down on misinformation, hate speech, and algorithms. While these proposals could face substantial First Amendment obstacles under current precedent, they might be more likely to survive in a world without Reno.
Had the Supreme Court’s ruling in Gonzalez caused substantial harms, Congress could have stepped in and fixed the problems by amending Section 230. But because the First Amendment—and not a statute—is at the heart of the NetChoice cases, the Supreme Court’s ruling will be the final word. So it’s vital that the justices, regardless of whether they actually are the nine greatest experts on the internet, get this one right.
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Korans burnt in front of Egyptian, Turkish embassies in Denmark
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Korans burnt in front of Egyptian, Turkish embassies in Denmark
Reuters
July 25, 20238:57 PM GMT+2Updated 2 months ago
People demonstrate against the desecration of the Koran in Denmark, in Sanaa, Yemen July 24, 2023. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah Acquire Licensing Rights
COPENHAGEN, July 25 (Reuters) - A small group of anti-Islam activists set fire to Korans in front of the Egyptian and Turkish embassies in Copenhagen on Tuesday after similar protests in Denmark and Sweden over recent weeks that have Muslims.
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China suspends 2 online media outlets as censors tighten grip
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Health Insight covered the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan in early 2020 and has been critical of the healthcare system. It is one of two online media outlets blocked in China this week. Photo: Reuters
ChinaPolitics
China suspends 2 online media outlets as censors tighten grip
Health Insight exposed Covid-related scandals, while Media Camp recently covered the case of a reporter beaten by police
Both have had their social media accounts blocked this week, with no explanation given
Censorship
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Yuanyue Dang
in Beijing
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Published: 7:31pm, 5 Jul, 2023
Why you can trust SCMP
China’s censors have blocked two online media outlets this week – one that exposed Covid-related scandals during the pandemic, the other focused on trends in the news industry.
The social media accounts of Health Insight and Media Camp were suspended as of Monday evening, with no explanation given.
It comes after the internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, began a campaign in March to “strictly regulate the chaos of self-publishing media”.
Chinese censor has shut down over 4,000 websites and 55 apps in 3 months
Health Insight was set up in 2018 and posted content on WeChat, Weibo and Zhihu. All three accounts have been suspended.
“This account has been blocked, content cannot be viewed,” a notice on the outlet’s WeChat page read.
Health Insight is one of the few media outlets in China focused on healthcare reporting. It covered the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, Hubei province in early 2020 and reported on the death of Dr Li Wenliang, who had tried to raise the alarm about the new coronavirus.
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Its reporters also looked into issues that were mostly ignored by mainstream media during the three years of China’s harsh zero-Covid rules. It pointed out the lack of medical evidence to support the use of Linhua Qingwen, a traditional Chinese medicine that Beijing claimed could treat Covid-19. At the height of a months-long lockdown in Shanghai last year, the outlet looked at its impact on mental health – an issue authorities were reluctant to address.
After the pandemic controls were abruptly scrapped in December, Health Insight reported on the huge sums spent by local governments on Covid prevention and excessive amounts of medical equipment.
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It has also covered the competition between public hospitals in China, price gouging on prescription drugs, the lack of accessible infrastructure for disabled people, and the profit-driven management of big hospitals.
A former staff writer said Health Insight’s reports had been censored and removed by internet regulators previously – mainly those that criticised the zero-Covid policy and the healthcare system.
Health Insight’s reporters have covered issues ranging from price gouging on prescription drugs to the lack of accessible infrastructure for disabled people. Photo: Weibo
The other outlet blocked this week, Media Camp, is a WeChat public account founded by investigative journalists that has published multiple articles on the difficulties faced by Chinese reporters. A recent article looked at the case of a reporter who was beaten by police last month while covering an accident in which two teachers were killed in the southern province of Guizhou.
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Online media outlets are severely restricted in China and need an official background to obtain accreditation, especially for current affairs and financial reporting. Outlets including Health Insight can survive in a “grey area” unless they delve into sensitive issues.
Zhan Jiang, a retired professor who used to teach journalism at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said the move to block the two outlets was “arbitrary” and showed a “lack of lawfulness”.
Why a joke about the PLA has got China’s stand-up comics worried
Last month, well-known financial writer Wu Xiaobo’s Weibo account was also suspended. Weibo said Wu had “posted content that attacked the current policy and management system by speculating on the unemployment rate and spreading harmful information such as smearing the development of the securities market”.
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Judge Orders Biden Officials to Limit Contact With Social-Media Companies
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By
Updated July 4, 2023 6:35 pm ET
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(2 min)
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Biden officials must limit contact with social media firms
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Biden officials must limit contact with social media firms
Published
5 July
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IMAGE SOURCE,
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By Annabelle Liang
BBC News
A US federal judge has limited the Biden administration's communications with social media companies which are aimed at moderating their content.
In a 155-page ruling on Tuesday, judge Terry Doughty barred White House officials and some government agencies from contacting firms over "content containing protected free speech".
It is a victory for Republicans who have accused officials of censorship.
Democrats said the platforms have failed to address misinformation.
The case was one of the most closely-watched First Amendment battles in the US courts, sparking a debate over the government's role in moderating content which it deemed to be false or harmful.
The White House said the US Department of Justice was reviewing the ruling and deciding on its next steps.
"Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people," the White House said in a statement.
It added that platforms should "make independent choices about the information they present".
Instagram owner set to launch Twitter rival this week
War crimes evidence erased by social media firms
The ruling comes after a lawsuit by the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana alleged that US officials had pressured social media platforms to address posts on topics including Covid-19 policies and election security.
Judge Doughty, who was an appointee of former US President Donald Trump, said the plaintiffs had "presented substantial evidence in support of their claims".
"Evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario," Mr Doughty said in his ruling.
He added: "During the Covid-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth.'"
The ruling limited communications by government agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services and the FBI.
It also restricted US officials including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
However, it made exceptions for contacting firms to warn them about risks to national security and criminal activity.
Judge Doughty also referred to several e-mail exchanges between White House executives and social media companies.
This included an April 2021 email by Rob Flaherty, who was formerly the White House's director of digital strategy, to employees at technology giant Google.
In the email, Mr Flaherty said Google's video-sharing platform YouTube was "funneling" people into vaccine hesitancy.
"This is a concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the WH," he wrote.
Google did not immediately respond to a BBC request for comment.
Social media platform Twitter, which is owned by multi-billionaire Elon Musk, did not directly to a respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, Facebook and Instagram owner Meta declined to comment on the ruling.
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Companies
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War crimes evidence erased by social media firms
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1 June
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Man denies making request cited in landmark Supreme Court LGBTQ case
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Elon Musk Seeks Support Against Rules on Free Speech Online
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ANTONIO PIEMONTESEBUSINESSJUN 28, 2023 2:16 PM
Elon Musk Seeks Support Against Rules on Free Speech Online
During a tour in Europe to make a Neuralink announcement, Musk's real goal became apparent: Stop the European Commission’s proposed measures regarding online content moderation.
PHOTOGRAPH: CHESNOT/GETTY IMAGES
SAVE
WHEN ELON MUSK arrived at VivaTech, a leading technology conference in France, his presence had an immediate effect, as event founder Maurice Levy of Publicis Groupe was quick to point out. Suddenly everyone wanted to be there. Musk’s visit represented a substantial investment for the organization, with rumors of a fee of around a million euros, private plane excluded. The tech star’s dazzle may have dimmed somewhat, but innovators still welcome him with open arms.
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New Hope for Neurological Patients
An admitted introvert who can also be eloquent and at times even poetic, Musk answered every question he was asked. But the only real news he had to share concerned Neuralink, the biotech company he cofounded to develop implantable neural interfaces. “Hopefully later this year, we’ll do our first human device implantation on someone who has quadriplegia and potentially restore full body function,” Musk said. “You can imagine if Steven Hawking were alive today, what a profound change that would be.
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Neuroprosthetics could offer hope for people affected by incurable neurological conditions. The San Francisco-based company shares a building with OpenAI, a venture Musk also cofounded that has made headlines for its generative artificial intelligence algorithm, ChatGPT. France has also been pursuing Musk to open a second Tesla factory in the country, but he did not reveal anything regarding those plans.
“Potentially Catastrophic”
On the topic of artificial intelligence, Musk reaffirmed his position that a moratorium on AI development is necessary (at the end of March he called for such a pause, along with other tech leaders). “I think there’s a real danger for digital super intelligence having negative consequences. If we are not careful, it could have a potentially catastrophic outcome. So we need to minimize the probability that something will go wrong. I’m in favor of AI regulation because I think advanced AI is a risk to the public. And anything that’s a risk to the public, there needs to be some kind of referee, and that referee is the regulator,” Musk said.
Freedom of Speech
During the VivaTech panel, Musk also discussed Twitter, another hot topic for the entrepreneur who has founded or led PayPal, Tesla, and Space X, among other companies. “If I am so smart, why did I pay so much for Twitter then?” he asked the crowd, referring to the $44 billion he spent on the platform. He also described some of the radical changes at the site in recent months: “We’ve gotten rid of 90 percent of the bots and the scams. It was a problem that had been going on for 10 years, and no action,” he said. When pressed by Christel Heydemann, CEO of the French telecommunications company Orange Group, Musk defended his platform’s permissive moderation policies. After the January 6 assault on Capitol Hill in 2021, Twitter had blocked accounts such as that of then-president Donald Trump. When Musk purchased the platform in 2022, he ushered in what he describes as a return to free speech principles.
FEATURED VIDEO
“We call it freedom of speech, not freedom of reach,” he told the audience. “Yes, you can say offensive things, but then your content is going to get rated down. So if you’re a jerk, your reach will drop.” He continued, “I think people should be able to say things because the alternative is censorship. I think if you go down the censorship route, it’s only a matter of time before censorship is turned upon you.” Twitter, he adds, “was having a corrosive effect on civil society, but I think today most people would say their experience has improved.”
Before his trip to France, Musk stopped in Italy, a visit that appears to have helped consolidate the sympathies of right-wing supporters in his battle against the Digital Services Act. Musk, along with other tech leaders, opposes the package of EU rules on platform liability that includes requirements to block fake news and restrict online violence. And it is precisely the right-wing political forces in Europe that could help curb measures proposed by the European Commission.
There was time at the end of Musk’s appearance for a few questions from the audience. A woman took advantage of the opportunity to hand Musk her business card. He awkwardly accepted, and she received a round of applause. A true startup moment.
This story originally appeared at Wired Italia.
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Free Speech Advocates Blast Elizabeth Gilbert For Pulling Book Set In Russia
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Freedom of speech and LGBT rights: Americans’ views of issues in Supreme Court case
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JUNE 14, 2023
Freedom of speech and LGBT rights: Americans’ views of issues in Supreme Court case
BY J. BAXTER OLIPHANT AND CARROLL DOHERTY
Supporters of Colorado web designer Lorie Smith and counterprotesters demonstrate at the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 5, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
A majority of Americans think business owners should be able to refuse to provide services in situations where providing them may “suggest support for beliefs about lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) issues” to which they have personal or religious objections, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
How we did this
In earlier surveys, the public has expressed positive views of the impact of legalization of same-sex marriage and broad support for policies aimed at preventing discrimination against transgender Americans.
But in a question reflecting the arguments in a pending Supreme Court case, 60% of Americans think business owners should not have to provide services if it might signal support for beliefs on LGBT issues that they oppose, according to the survey conducted in early April. Around four-in-ten (38%) say business owners should be required to provide services in these situations.
The Supreme Court case centers on a challenge to Colorado’s public accommodations law by website designer Lorie Smith, who says the law violates her right to freedom of speech by requiring her to design wedding websites for same-sex couples.
The oral arguments in the case highlighted the competing rights at issue. Smith’s attorney said her client’s complaint is based on the message being conveyed by her work, not the customers who may be affected. However, Colorado’s solicitor general said that by ruling in favor of Smith, the court would undermine the state’s accommodations law and open the door to discrimination because of a person’s race or religion, in addition to their sexual or gender identity.
The survey question does not ask whether business owners should have the right to discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people. Rather, it asks whether business owners who object to providing services that could suggest beliefs on LGBT issues – such as a “designer of wedding websites who has objections to same-sex marriage” – should be required to provide these services or be able to refuse to do so.
Views by party, religion
As with opinions on same-sex marriage and transgender issues, there is a wide partisan gap in views of whether business owners should be able to refuse to provide services if it conflicts with their views on LGBT issues. Republican and Republican-leaning independents overwhelmingly side with business owners who object to providing services in these situations (82% vs. 17%). By a smaller margin (59% to 40%), Democrats and Democratic leaners say business owners should have to provide services in these cases.
Opinions also differ by religious affiliation. For example, while 83% of White evangelical Protestants say business owners should be able to deny services in situations where it could conflict with their beliefs, just half of religiously unaffiliated adults say the same.
Note: Here are the questions used for the report, along with responses, and its methodology.
Topics Gender & LGBTQFree Speech & PressLGBTQ AcceptanceReligion & LGBTQ AcceptanceReligious Freedom & RestrictionsPartisanship & Issues
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Carroll Doherty is director of political research at Pew Research Center.
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Disney rips DeSantis bid to disqualify judge in free speech lawsuit
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UN can help journalists beyond World Press Freedom Day
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New York, May 1, 2023–Evan Gershkovich and Jimmy Lai are about to spend World Press Freedom Day behind bars.
Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal Moscow correspondent, and Lai, a pro-democracy Hong Kong media magnate, are among record numbers of journalists in prison as the United Nations marks the 30th anniversary of its special day for media freedom on Wednesday, May 3, in New York.
Their imprisonment, by countries that make up two of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, highlights the shrinking of media freedom globally and the need for the U.N. to do more to address it.
Gershkovich was one of the few foreign correspondents left in Russia since Vladimir Putin launched his all-out invasion of Ukraine last year and clamped down on all independent reporting. Lai had tried to keep alive the promise of a free press in Hong Kong but in 2020 was silenced by Beijing’s security state.
When World Press Freedom Day was inaugurated in 1993, independent news outlets were springing up in Russia and the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual prison census did not find any journalists jailed in the country for their work. CPJ’s most recent census, by contrast, recorded 19 in prison on December 1, 2022. Independent news media are now either shuttered or forced abroad.
In 1993, Hong Kong was four years away from being handed back to China by Britain and enjoying a robust media landscape. The mainland was still a minefield for independent Chinese reporters, but many learned to pick a path through Communist Party censorship. Chinese jails housed 29 journalists that year, compared with 43 last December.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West believed it had won the Cold War and would usher in a new democratic world order. Many Eastern European nations embraced new freedoms and independent journalism emerged from the dissident underground into the daylight.
The impetus to establish a day to honor press freedom, however, came out of Africa with the Windhoek Declaration of 1991. Then, a sense of political optimism gripped much of the continent as apartheid unraveled in South Africa, Namibia shook off colonial rule and Ethiopia toppled a murderous dictator.
In the decade that followed, independent journalism blossomed globally. The arrival of the internet and the publishing freedoms it brought briefly tipped the balance of power between state control of information and the press in favor of free expression.
But that began to shift back in the 2000s, coinciding with the post-9/11 U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the ability of governments to turn the new liberating technologies into tools of censorship and surveillance.
Journalism needs democracy and rule of law to thrive. It is now losing both.
The Swedish-based V-Dem Institute, which monitors political freedoms globally, says the gains of the past 35 years have been wiped out. It estimates that 72% of the world’s population – 5.7 billion people – now live in autocracies. “The decline is most dramatic in the Asia-Pacific region, which is back to levels last recorded in 1978,” it says in its 2023 Democracy Report. The U.S. watchdog Freedom House agrees. Global freedom declined for the 17th consecutive year, it notes in its 2023 report.
So, has the U.N. made any progress all these years?
At the constant prodding of civil society organizations and free-press-friendly member states, UNESCO – the Paris-based U.N. agency responsible for free expression – has helped promote journalist safety and an end to impunity in the killing of journalists. In 2012, it launched a Plan of Action to defend free media. It has also designated November 2 as International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists.
But UNESCO is a relatively small unit with the U.N. structure. It is constrained by U.N. member states’ power politics, which prevent it from calling out individual countries for repressing the media, and it lacks the global footprint and resources to intervene quickly where journalists are detained, attacked or murdered.
The limits of the U.N. mechanisms to keep journalists safe were clearly on display after the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. It was down to the individual initiative of Special Rapporteur Agnès Callamard to assemble a team and go to Turkey to investigate the killing and draft a report for the Geneva-based Human Rights Council. Special rapporteurs are independent human rights experts appointed, but not paid, by the U.N. to investigate violations. They can only visit countries to probe abuses if the country under scrutiny agrees.
However, there is still a lot the U.N. can do with its existing authority and structure to address press freedom. First, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres and supportive member states need to invest the resources needed to strengthen UNESCO’S plan on journalist safety. Then they need to say and do more against states that flagrantly ignore or violate human rights, as they did by voting to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council last year.
David Kaye, a former special rapporteur for freedom of expression, suggests creating a task force of investigators under the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council to probe attacks on the media. He also sees a bigger role for the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and its new head, Volker Türk, in defending the press. “I think that the ability to get human rights researchers or investigators on the ground in the immediate aftermath of an attack or a series of attacks on journalists, can be really meaningful,” Kaye told me.
Türk’s office is already working with press freedom groups to draw up its own list of imprisoned journalists and called for the release of those who have been arbitrarily detained for “doing their essential work”– encouraging signs that can reinforce swift action by existing U.N. institutions when journalists are killed or detained.
“The key is that you want press freedom to be a part of the fabric of the UN process rather than a one-off,” Kaye added. “It’s great to have a day, but you need to have it day after day, you have to have the institutional ability to actually address impunity.”
Evan Gershkovich, Jimmy Lai, and some 363 other jailed journalists are counting on just that.
Robert Mahoney
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| 445
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Dominion v. Fox: Could case be weaponized against freedom of press?
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Dominion v. Fox: Could case be weaponized against freedom of press?
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Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
View caption
QUICK READ DEEP READ ( 7 MIN. )
By Harry Bruinius Staff writer
@HarryBruinius
April 17, 2023
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NEW YORK
This week is set to bring a major test of modern freedom of the press in an era of disinformation.
The case of Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News has its roots in conspiracy theories aired about voting machines after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Fox News argues that it was simply airing newsworthy allegations when it repeated those falsehoods. The defamation case brought by Dominion represents a “profound threat to the First Amendment,” Fox’s lawyers argued in a filing. If it loses, the network argues, it would be a journalistic disaster, opening networks and newspapers to all kinds of lawsuits.
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Monitor journalism changes lives because we open that too-small box that most people think they live in. We believe news can and should expand a sense of identity and possibility beyond narrow conventional expectations.
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Biden sticking to his gun ban plans as the answer to America’s violent crime epidemic
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Law Profs Tout Qualified Immunity for Unconstitutional Gun Restrictions
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GUN CONTROL
J.D. TUCCILLE | 8.2.2023 7:00 AM
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Kamala Harris Falsely Claims Gun Violence Leading Cause of Death for Children
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Fact Check: Kamala Harris Falsely Claims Gun Violence Leading Cause of Death for Children
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for GLAAD
AWR HAWKINS17 Jul 2023
CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris claimed on Sunday that gun violence is the leading cause of death for children.
VERDICT: False. Numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show firearm-related deaths for children aged 0-17 was 2,281 in 2020, while the number of motor vehicle deaths for the same ages was 2,503.
Harris tweeted:
Congress must have the courage to step up and pass commonsense gun safety laws. pic.twitter.com/J0Naa8WHW8
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) July 16, 2023
Moreover, according to CDC numbers, children are are 27 times more likely to die an accidental car death than an accidental gun death and unintentional suffocation deaths are 10 times higher among children than accidental gun deaths.
Harris coupled her false claim about the number one killer of children with a push for universal background checks and an “assault weapons” ban.
WATCH — AWR Hawkins: Universal Background Checks = Gun Registry
ahawkins
California has had universal background checks and an “assault weapons” ban since the late 20th century, yet the CDC’s Homicide Mortality map shows California led the nation in 2021 with 2,495 homicides, according to the CDC.
WATCH: Here’s the Difference Between an AR-15 and an Assault Weapon”
ahawkins
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at [email protected].
2nd AmendmentPolitics"Assault Weapons" Ban Gun ControlCaliforniaCDCCenters for Disease Control and PreventionDemocrat Gun ControlKamala Harrisuniversal background checks
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Hollywood May Tell You Differently, but Reality Includes These 12 Examples of Defensive Gun Use
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California governor calls for U.S. constitutional amendment on gun control
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-08-1220/gun-control-and-gun-rights-california-governor-calls-us-constitutional
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Gun Control and Gun Rights
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jun/8/gavin-newsom-california-governor-calls-us-constitu/
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Chuck Schumer Summons Democrat Caucus for More Gun Control
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https://www.breitbart.com/2nd-amendment/2023/05/09/chuck-schumer-summons-democrat-caucus-for-more-gun-control/
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Chuck Schumer Summons Democrat Caucus for More Gun Control
Alex Wong/Getty Images
AWR HAWKINS9 May 2023702
1:52
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D) is calling the Democrat Caucus to meet and discuss ways to act on President Joe Biden’s request for more gun control.
UPI reported Schumer put out the call for the caucus on Monday, following Biden’s Sunday push for more gun laws.
On Sunday Schumer tweeted:
The news of this latest mass shooting in Texas is horrifying
We pray for the victims, the survivors, their families, and the community, and thank the first responders
We must keep working to end gun violence in America
We must keep working for stronger gun safety legislation
— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) May 7, 2023
The Hill indicated the success of Schumer’s gun control efforts hinge on whether Sen. John Cornyn (R) will cross the aisle and work with Democrats for more gun control again.
Breitbart News pointed out it was Sen. Cornyn who worked with Democrats to fashion the gun control bill Biden signed on June 25, 2022.
The Cornyn gun control package expanded background checks for some gun buyers, used taxpayer money to incentivize states to enact red flag laws, and broadened the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) prohibited purchasers list by using domestic violence statutes to cover dating relationships.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. AWR Hawkins holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at [email protected].
2nd AmendmentPoliticsChuck SchumerDemocrat Gun ControlJohn Cornyn
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Standing Your Ground Is A Constitutional Right
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An analysis of state statutes and case law reveals that, when discussing the defense of oneself the home, some variety of “castle doctrine” can almost always be claimed. This concept requires no duty to retreat, as it reaffirms that one’s home is his castle, and a person need not retreat to the furthest wall before defending self and family.
Moreover, the 2008 case clearly affirmed the centrality of the “inherent” right of self-defense to the Second Amendment. Two years later, in , the Supreme Court further elaborated that “[s]elf-defense is a basic right, recognized by many legal systems from ancient times to the present day, and … individual self-defense is ‘the central component’ of the Second Amendment right.” bolstered this holding and expanded its scope by cementing the right of citizens to carry arms for self-defense in public, as “confrontation can surely take place outside the home.”
It’s a disgrace that a merely for defending themselves in public because of “duty to retreat” statutes. Shame on Martha Raddatz for failing to call out the complete and utter lies from the Giffords anti-gun activist. Allowing her to present a completely false historical analysis of the inherent right to self-defense on a national stage was gross malpractice.
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‘Not A Firearms Expert’: Biden’s ATF Chief Admits He Can’t Define What An ‘Assault Weapon’ Is
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/04/18/atf-director-define-assault-weapon/
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Another Federal Judge Rejects the DOJ's Argument That Cannabis Consumers Have No Second Amendment Rights
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https://reason.com/2023/04/11/another-federal-judge-rejects-the-dojs-argument-that-cannabis-consumers-have-no-second-amendment-rights/
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GUN RIGHTS
Another Federal Judge Rejects the DOJ's Argument That Cannabis Consumers Have No Second Amendment Rights
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone was unimpressed by the Biden administration's argument that marijuana users are too "dangerous" to own guns.
JACOB SULLUM | 4.11.2023 3:10 PM
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| 456
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Spurs' Gregg Popovich makes plea for tighter gun control, likens Second Amendment to 'myth'
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-04-10-0900/gun-control-and-gun-rights-spurs-gregg-popovich-makes-plea-tighter-gun-control
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https://www.foxnews.com/sports/spurs-gregg-popovich-makes-plea-tighter-gun-control-likens-second-amendment-myth
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SAN ANTONIO SPURS
Spurs' Gregg Popovich makes plea for tighter gun control, likens Second Amendment to 'myth'
Popovich was getting ready to coach Spurs in potentially final game of his career
By Ryan Gaydos Fox News
Published April 9, 2023 5:48pm EDT
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San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich used the final pregame press conference of the NBA season to call for stricter gun measures in the U.S. and slammed lawmakers in his speech.
Popovich spoke to the media before the team’s game against the Dallas Mavericks. The outspoken coach spoke for more than nine minutes, calling for tighter gun laws in the U.S. as well as addressing the Tennessee state lawmakers who voted for the expulsion of two state representatives.
He asked reporters whether any of them were carrying a gun.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM
San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich counsels guard Blake Wesley (14) during the first quarter of an NBA basketball game against the Sacramento Kings in Sacramento, Calif., Sunday, April 2, 2023. (AP Photo/Randall Benton)
"I just wondered because we have a governor and lieutenant governor and an attorney general that made it easier to have more guns," Popovich said, referring to Texas officials, according to ESPN. "That was a response to our kids getting murdered. I just thought that was a little bit strange decision. It's just me, though."
"Well, since you guys asked, what would it take to budge those people? What would it take?"
He then started on his essay about Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, the two Democrats who were expelled from the Tennessee legislature for their roles in a protest calling for gun control after the March 27 shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville, which killed six people, including three children.
"I mean, we've got two young Black guys in Tennessee who just got railroaded by a bunch of people that I would bet down deep in their soul want to go back to Jim Crow," Popovich said. "And what they just did is a good start. It's beyond comprehension. And what were they guilty of? They actually protested?"
NBA OPENS INVESTIGATION INTO MAVERICKS AFTER DALLAS SITS KEY PLAYERS AGAINST BULLS
San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich signals to his players during the first half of an NBA basketball game against the Portland Trail Blazers in Austin, Texas, Thursday, April 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
"Those [Tennessee Republican] legislators called those kids that were protesting insurrectionists. That's hard to believe in America. But America ain't what we thought America was. It's changed. So, if those kids are insurrectionists, what were the people on Jan. 6th? What do we call them? What's the next step or word or level of violence after insurrectionists? I don't know what it is. What will it take?"
Popovich took issue with the responses to the Covenant School mass shooting in Tennessee from Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Gov. Bill Lee. Popovich cited Blackburn’s office by saying the senator was in contact with authorities responding to the shooting and Lee offering prayers and saying he was monitoring the situation.
He then likened the Second Amendment to a "myth."
"But they’re going to cloak all this stuff [in] the myth of the Second Amendment, the freedom," he added. "You know, it's just a myth. It’s a joke. It’s just a game they play. I mean, that's freedom. Is it freedom for kids to go to school and try to socialize and try to learn and be scared to death that they might die that day?"
"But Ted Cruz will fix it because he is going to double the number of cops in the schools. That’s what he wants to do. Well, that’ll create a great environment. Is that freedom? Or is it freedom to have a congressman who can make a postcard with all his family holding rifles, including an AR-15 or whatever. Is that cool? Is that like street cred for a Republican? That’s freedom? That’s more important than protecting kids? I don’t get it."
San Antonio Spurs beach coach Gregg Popovich sits on the bench during the first quarter of an NBA basketball game against the Dallas Mavericks in Dallas, Sunday, April 9, 2023. (AP Photo/LM Otero)
The longtime NBA coach didn't mention how many police officers or armed security guards have protected him and the team during the course of the 82-game season.
Popovich added that it may take the gruesomeness of a school shooting to actually make things change.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
"You know, these people, they think we're stupid – Republican and Democratic alike. But they might be right because they get away with that crap. They tell us things about prayers and, you know, their offices are monitoring this stuff, like I said. Get away from me. Stop all the bulls---. Stop talking down to us. We're not stupid, but they will do it to keep their jobs," he added.
Ryan Gaydos is a senior editor for Fox News Digital.
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Why the Media Isn't Going to Touch This School Shooting Plot in Colorado
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-04-07-0629/media-bias-why-media-isnt-going-touch-school-shooting-plot-colorado
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/04/06/transgender-teen-busted-for-plotting-a-school-shooting-n2621682
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TIPSHEET
Why the Media Isn't Going to Touch This School Shooting Plot in Colorado
Matt Vespa
April 06, 2023 11:30 PM
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AP Photo/Matt Rourke
It’s buried in the Colorado Springs-based newspaper, The Gazette, but it’s not hard to figure out why the media isn’t anywhere near this school shooting plot that was foiled by authorities. When you read about the background of the would-be killer, the local press has committed acts of violence according to the rules outlined by the progressive Left. William Whitworth, 19, was charged with planning to commit mass murder at Timberview Middle School in Colorado Springs. In the affidavit, Whitworth’s sister doesn’t refer to the accused by male pronouns but as “Lily.” Whitworth is transgender, so you can see why no one outside of some local outlets wants to go near this one (via Fox 21 News):
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On Thursday, April 6, William Whitworth, who identifies as “Lilly Whitworth,” was formally charged with the following offenses:
Criminal Attempt to Commit Murder in the First Degree (two counts)
Criminal Mischief
Menacing
Interference with Staff, Faculty, or Students of Educational Institutions
The defendant’s preliminary hearing is slated for May 5 at 2:30 p.m. Her bond is set at $75,000.
A statement from an ASD20 spokesperson explained Whitworth attended three ASD20 schools over two years, but only for nine months:
August 2014 – February 2015: Prairie Hills Elementary
January 2016 – February 2016: Home School Academy
August 2016 – October 2016: Timberview Middle School
[…]
The 911 caller reported her sister, identified as Lilly Whitworth, threatened to shoot up a school at least twice and has severe anger issues, per arrest papers.
Upon arrival, the deputy entered the home and noticed “trash piled up all around the house to where it made it hard to walk inside.” The deputy also reported “numerous containers filled with half-eaten food with mold growing inside and numerous alcoholic beverage containers laying around the house.”
The deputy was directed to the room where Whitworth was reportedly sleeping and saw two holes in the wall that appeared to be punch marks as well as the door to the bedroom off its hinges lying beside the opening. Inside the room was trash piled up as high as Whitworth’s bed, a hole in the wall beside the bed, and sheets stained brown, according to the affidavit.
While being questioned, Whitworth told the deputy she had been planning a school shooting for “a month or two,” and was “about a third of the way from doing it.”
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The school was one of the main targets, but churches were also on the hit list. Newsweek fact-checked a tweet on social media about transgenders being frequent suspects in past shootings. They proved it to be a correct claim, whether intentional or not. This arrest comes after Audrey Hale, a biological female who identified as male, shot and killed six people at Covenant, a private Christian school, on March 27. Hale was killed by police, but the transgender mass shooter is becoming more frequent and could become more of a trend if the radical Left keeps pushing the ‘days of vengeance’ mentality.
Tags: WOKE
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Gun control advocates protest in Tennessee as Republicans debate expelling Democratic lawmakers
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Gun Control and Gun Rights
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/gun-control-protest-tennessee-republicans-debate-expelling-democratic-lawmakers
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TENNESSEE
Gun control advocates protest in Tennessee as Republicans debate expelling Democratic lawmakers
by Rachel Schilke, Breaking News Reporter
April 06, 2023 03:03 PM
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Demonstrators arrived back at the Tennessee state Capitol on Thursday to protest the expulsion of three state Democratic lawmakers who disrupted House floor proceedings to join last week's protest for gun control reform after the Nashville mass school shooting.
Democratic state Reps. Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and Justin Pearson face expulsion introduced by fellow GOP lawmakers who allege they brought "disorder and dishonor" upon the state House of Representatives on March 30.
TENNESSEE LAWMAKERS FILE RESOLUTIONS TO OUST THREE DEMOCRATS FROM STATEHOUSE OVER PROTESTS
Tennessee State Troopers block the stairwell leading to the legislative chambers Thursday, April 6, 2023, in Nashville, Tenn. Tennessee Republicans are seeking to oust three House Democrats for using a bullhorn to shout support for pro-gun control protesters in the House chamber. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
George Walker IV/AP
Protesters gathered inside and outside the Capitol to urge for stronger gun control laws, as well as vote against expelling the three Democratic lawmakers.
Gun reform and "Tennessee Three" supporters raise signs in the gallery of the House chamber Thursday, April 6, 2023, in Nashville, Tenn. Tennessee Republicans are seeking to oust three House Democrats for using a bullhorn to shout support for pro-gun control protesters in the House chamber. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
George Walker IV/AP
"No more silence, end gun violence," attendees chanted. As lawmakers made their way into the House chamber, several of the protesters chanted, "Free, free, free, free the Tennessee Three."
Students yell, asking for gun reform legislation and support the Tennessee Three outside the House chamber Thursday, April 6, 2023, in Nashville, Tenn. Tennessee Republicans are seeking to oust three House Democrats for using a bullhorn to shout support for pro-gun control protesters in the House chamber. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
George Walker IV/AP
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Videos taken regarding the March 30 shown on the House floor on Thursday showed Pearson and Jones taking a megaphone calling for gun control laws and justice while Johnson stood next to them.
Republican state House Speaker Cameron Sexton said the lawmakers would have their chance for due process in front of an overwhelmingly Republican majority. Sexton said Wednesday to Fox News that the expulsion of the members has no relation to the protests inside or outside the state Capitol on March 30.
Tennessee Gun Control News Democratic State Legislatures
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| 459
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Left-Wing Violence Chic
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-03-31-0708/violence-america-left-wing-violence-chic
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Gun Control and Gun Rights
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https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2023/03/31/left-wing-violence-chic-n2621383
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OPINION
Left-Wing Violence Chic
Victor Davis Hanson
Mar 31, 2023
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
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A transgender Tennessee mass shooter this week executed three adults and three nine-year-old children at a Nashville private Christian school.
Supposedly she left behind her a manifesto justifying her mass murdering. As of this writing, law enforcement officials have declined to make the document public.
Yet in about a nano-second after the news was disclosed, the left-wing activist machine kicked in, led by politicians, entertainers, and the media.
Three predictable themes surfaced.
The first was led by none other than President Joe Biden. He lectured that guns were the cause of the mass deaths, not the free will of a psychopathic killer.
Few noted that the shooter illegally purchased firearms by hiding her documented record of emotional disorders.
Second, America was told that it would serve no purpose to publish the shooter's manifesto. Apparently, this exception to the usual practice was due to fears her manifesto would hurt the transgender cause.
Third, some in the activist media claimed that, while such murdering was regrettable, it was also understandable - given supposed Christian, conservative America's intolerance of transgender people. In our sick society, the targeted victims became the political victimizers.
Did the transgender shooter anticipate that violence for her "correct" cause would be either contextualized or blamed on the weapon rather than she who used it?
Likewise, at about the same time, a transgender activist entered the Texas Legislature and physically fought with the sergeant-of-arms.
Just days after the Nashville shooting, a trans advocacy group decided neither to cancel, nor to change the name of, their long-planned "Trans Day of Vengeance" protest in front of the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C.
It was recently disclosed that federal authorities did little or nothing last year when pro-abortion mobs traveled to the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices, yelling and disrupting their neighborhoods.
That mobbing was in clear violation of federal laws prohibiting protesters from swarming the homes of justices to influence their opinions. Yet, mysteriously, Attorney General Merrick Garland demurred from prosecuting the lawbreakers or beefing up security.
Amid this environment of general chaos, a would-be assassin of Justice Brett Kavanaugh turned up near the justice's home, but was convinced by his own sister to surrender.
In March 2020, then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., had all but called for violence against the justices, when he threatened two by name before an angry pro-abortion crowd protesting at the doors to the court:
"I want to tell you Gorsuch; I want to tell you Kavanaugh - you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions."
What did Schumer mean by "whirlwind," "pay the price" and "what hit you"?
On a recent episode of ABC's "The View," octogenarian actress Jane Fonda reentered controversy by boasting that women were not going to retreat on abortion rights. And if their marching and protesting were not enough, Fonda smirked, "Well, I've thought of murder."
Recently Wayne State Professor Steven Shaviro posted his views on free speech on campus: "Although I do not advocate violating federal and state criminal codes, I think it is far more admirable to kill a racist, homophobic, or transphobic speaker than it is to shout them down."
Shaviro apparently was referring to the mob at Stanford Law School that shouted down U.S. Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan, who had been invited to speak by the campus Federalist Society. Students prevented him from delivering his lecture, apparently for his past refusal to change the pronouns of a convicted pedophile.
Among the many obscene taunts that were leveled at the judge by Stanford's future lawyers, one law-school protester shouted that he hoped Duncan's daughters would be raped.
U.S. Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky., House Majority Leader Steven Scalise, R-La., and former Republican New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin have all been the target of vicious politically driven physical attacks.
Most Americans decried the illegal entry into the Capitol on January 6, 2021, by protesting Trump supporters. Over 1,000 have been charged, or are in prison, with hundreds more facing indictment.
Yet none in the Capitol were armed. And the only ones to die violently that day were among the protesters themselves.
No so in the summer 2020. Then the vast majority of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa-led violent protesters who rioted, burned, and looted for 120 days - injuring 1,500 police officers and causing over 35 deaths - were either not arrested or released.
For that matter, what do Johnny Depp, Snoop Dogg, Kathy Griffin, George Lopez, Moby, Rosie O'Donnell, Mickey Rourke, and Larry Wilmore all have in common? At one time or another they alluded to various ways of imagining former President Donald Trump's violent death.
What do Joe Biden, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Robert De Niro have in common? They all bragged of their desire to physically assault or beat up Trump.
For the radical Left, ideology exempts its political violence. The result for everyone else is an open-season and the end of deterrence - and frightening days ahead.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of "The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won," from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing [email protected].
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Dem Congresswoman Says This Is the Real Purpose of the Second Amendment
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-03-30-0845/gun-control-and-gun-rights-dem-congresswoman-says-real-purpose-second-amendment
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Gun Control and Gun Rights
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rights
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/juliorosas/2023/03/30/dem-congresswoman-says-the-second-amendment-was-meant-for-this-instead-of-ar-15s-n2621273
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TIPSHEET
Dem Congresswoman Says This Is the Real Purpose of the Second Amendment
Julio Rosas
March 30, 2023 10:50 AM
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Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN) claimed the vast majority of Americans, including the majority of gun owners, want "common sense" gun control laws to prevent things like the recent shooting in Nashville, Tennessee because the Second Amendment allows for activities like trap shooting.
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"There are extremes that we're talking about. This is about common sense reforms. Like the majority of Americans, including many responsible gun-owners like myself, we can have the Second Amendment that allowed me last weekend to go trap shooting and we can take away assault weapons of war from our streets in America," she said.
The Second Amendment is not about keeping firearms for sport, as it laid out in the text, it's about the right of the people to keep and bear arms "being necessary to the security of a free State." While there is nothing wrong with trap shooting, the Second Amendment is much more than that.
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Calls for an "assault weapons" ban have renewed after a shooter, who identified as transgender, targeted a private Christian school, killing three young children and three adults before responding police were able to take them out. Nashville Police Chief John Drake revealed the shooter thought of shooting up another location but decided against it because after looking at the security it had, it was too hard of a target.
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America’s unique, enduring gun problem, explained
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-28-0641/gun-control-and-gun-rights-america-s-unique-enduring-gun-problem-explained
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Gun Control and Gun Rights
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https://www.vox.com/23142734/jacksonville-racially-motivated-shooting
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A grad student accused of shooting and killing a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on August 28 has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder and possessing a gun on an education property.
The faculty member was the grad student’s adviser, Zijie Yan, an associate professor in the department of Applied Physical Sciences. It’s not yet clear what the shooter’s motivation may have been. Police are still searching for the weapon used in the attack and have not determined whether it was obtained legally.
It’s one of dozens of school shootings this year alone, and comes just after another high-profile shooting in Jacksonville, Florida, where the shooter appeared to first try to target Edward Waters University, a historically Black university, before opening fire at Black victims in a Dollar General store instead.
This kind of violence is unique to the US and should not be normalized.
No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,375 per year. According to the latest available analysis of data from 2015 to 2019, the US gun homicide rate was 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate was nearly 12 times higher. Mass shootings, defined as attacks in which at least four people are injured or killed excluding the shooter, have been on the rise since 2015, peaking at 686 incidents in 2021. There have been 476 mass shootings in the US in 2023 as of late August, and at the current pace, the US is set to eclipse the 2021 record this year.
Despite that sheer carnage, however, the political debate over how to ensure that guns don’t fall into the hands of people who may hurt themselves and others — such as the UNC shooter — has long proved intractable. Last year, Congress reached a deal on limited gun reforms for the first time in nearly 30 years in the wake of a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas — the deadliest school shooting since 2012.
But those narrow reforms clearly haven’t stopped America’s gun violence epidemic. The US’s expansive view of civilian gun ownership has been so ingrained in politics, in culture, and in the law since the nation’s founding that there’s no telling how many more people will die before federal lawmakers take further action. In that absence, many red states have loosened their gun laws over the last few years, rather than making it harder to obtain a gun.
“America is unique in that guns have always been present, there is wide civilian ownership, and the government hasn’t claimed more of a monopoly on them,” said David Yamane, a professor at Wake Forest University who studies American gun culture.
It’s hard to estimate the number of privately owned guns in America since there is no countrywide database where people register whether they own guns, there is a thriving black market for them in the absence of strong federal gun trafficking laws, and people can manufacture their own guns with DIY kits or 3D printers. The gun lobby has also vehemently opposed federal legislation to track gun sales and establish a national handgun registry.
One estimate from the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based research project, found that there were approximately 390 million guns in circulation in the US in 2018, or about 120.5 firearms per 100 residents. That number has likely climbed in the years since, given that one in five households purchased a gun during the pandemic, though the 2018 estimate remains the most recent available. There has also been a significant increase in the number of guns manufactured and imported in the years since. But even without accounting for that increase, US gun ownership is still well above any other country: Yemen, which has the world’s second-highest level of gun ownership, has only 52.8 guns per 100 residents; in Iceland, it’s 31.7.
American guns are concentrated in a tiny minority of households: just 3 percent own about half the nation’s guns, according to a 2016 Harvard and Northeastern University study. They’re called “super owners” who have an average of 17 guns each. Gallup, using a different methodology, found that 45 percent of Americans lived in a household with guns in 2022.
Researchers have found a clear link between gun ownership in the US and gun violence, and some argue that it’s causal. One 2013 Boston University-led study, for instance, found that for each percentage point increase in gun ownership at the household level, the state firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9 percent. And states with weaker gun laws have higher rates of gun-related homicides and suicides, according to a study by the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.
The link between gun deaths and gun ownership is much stronger than the link that gun rights advocates often seek to draw between violence and mental health issues. If it were possible to cure all schizophrenia, bipolar, and depressive disorders, violent crime in the US would fall by only 4 percent, according to a study from Duke University professor Jeffrey Swanson, who examines policies to reduce gun violence.
There’s still a pervasive idea, pushed by gun manufacturers and gun rights organizations like the National Rifle Association, that further arming America is the answer to preventing gun violence — the “good guy with a gun” theory. But there have been relatively few instances in which police or armed bystanders have been able to successfully stop an active attack.
According to a database maintained by Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University, there were 520 active attacks — defined as when one or more people are “actively killing or attempting to kill multiple unrelated people in a public space,” including but not limited to shootings — between 2000 and 2022. In many of those cases, police were unable to stop the attacker, either because the attack had already ended by the time they arrived or because the attacker surrendered or committed suicide. Only in 160 cases were police able to successfully intervene by shooting or otherwise subduing the attacker.
Another 2021 study from Hamline University and Metropolitan State University found that the rate of deaths in 133 mass school shootings between 1980 and 2019 was 2.83 times greater in cases where there was an armed guard present. The researchers argue the results suggest the presence of an armed guard increased shooters’ aggression and that because many school shooters have been found to be suicidal, “an armed officer may be an incentive rather than a deterrent.”
“The idea that the solution to mass shootings is that we need more guns in the hands of more people in more places so that we’ll be able to protect ourselves — there’s no evidence that that’s true,” Swanson said.
The prevalence of the self-defense narrative is part of what sets apart the gun rights movement in the US from similar movements in places like Canada and Australia, according to Robert Spitzer, a professor at SUNY Cortland who studies the politics of gun control.
Self-defense has become by far the most prominent reason for gun ownership in the US today, eclipsing hunting, recreation, or owning guns because they’re antiques, heirlooms, or work-related. That’s also reflected in ballooning handgun sales, since the primary purpose of those guns isn’t recreational, but self-defense.
American gun culture “brings together the hunting-sporting tradition with the militia-frontier tradition, but in modern times the hunting element has been eclipsed by a heavily politicized notion that gun carrying is an expression of freedom, individuality, hostility to government, and personal self-protection,” Spitzer said.
That culture of gun ownership in the US has made it all the more difficult to explore serious policy solutions to gun violence after mass shootings. In high-income countries lacking that culture, mass shootings have historically galvanized public support behind gun control measures that would seem extreme by US standards.
Canada banned military-style assault weapons two weeks after a 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia. In 2019, less than a month after the Christchurch massacre, New Zealand lawmakers passed a gun buyback scheme, as well as restrictions on AR-15s and other semiautomatic weapons, and they later established a firearms registry. The 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Australia spurred the government to buy back 650,000 firearms within a year, and murders and suicides plummeted as a result.
By contrast, nearly a decade went by after the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, before Congress passed a new gun control law. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the law passed in June 2022, was relatively limited: It incentivized states to pass red flag laws, enhanced background checks for gun buyers under 21, and closed the “boyfriend loophole,” which allowed some people with domestic violence convictions to purchase guns. But it did not ban any types of weapons, and certain studies suggest that even truly universal background checks may have limited effects on gun violence.
At the same time, many states have sought to expand gun ownership in recent years. At least 27 states have now passed laws allowing residents to carry a handgun without a permit and allow school staff and teachers to carry guns on campus.
“Other countries look at this problem and say, ‘People walking around in the community with handguns is just way too dangerous, so we’re going to broadly limit legal access to that and make exceptions on the margins for people who might have a good reason to have a gun,’” Swanson said. “Here we do just the opposite: We say that, because of the way that the Supreme Court interpreted the Second Amendment, everybody has the right to a gun for personal protection, and then we tried to make exceptions for really dangerous people, but we can’t figure out who they are.”
While the majority of Americans support more gun control restrictions, including universal background checks, a vocal Republican minority unequivocally opposes such laws — and is willing to put pressure on GOP lawmakers to do the same. Alongside the NRA, and a well-funded gun lobby, this contingent of voters sees gun control as a deciding issue, and one that could warrant a primary challenge for a lawmaker who votes for it.
The gun lobby has the advantage of enthusiasm. “Despite being outnumbered, Americans who oppose gun control are more likely to contact public officials about it and to base their votes on it,” Barnard College’s Matthew Lacombe explained in 2020. “As a result, many politicians believe that supporting gun regulation is more likely to lose them votes than to gain them votes.”
In 2008, the Supreme Court effectively wrote NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s “good guy with a gun” theory into the Constitution. The Court’s 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was the first Supreme Court decision in American history to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm. But it also went much further than that.
Heller held that one of the primary purposes of the Second Amendment is to protect the right of individuals — good guys with a gun, in LaPierre’s framework — to use firearms to stop bad guys with guns. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in Heller, an “inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right.”
As a matter of textual interpretation, this holding makes no sense. The Second Amendment provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
We don’t need to guess why the Second Amendment protects a right to firearms because it is right there in the Constitution. The Second Amendment’s purpose is to preserve “a well-regulated Militia,” not to allow individuals to use their weapons for personal self-defense.
For many years, the Supreme Court took the first 13 words of the Second Amendment seriously. As the Court said in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias. And thus the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view.” Heller abandoned that approach.
Heller also reached another important policy conclusion. Handguns, according to Scalia, are “overwhelmingly chosen” by gun owners who wish to carry a firearm for self-defense. For this reason, he wrote, handguns enjoy a kind of super-legal status. Lawmakers are not allowed to ban what Scalia described as “the most preferred firearm in the nation to ‘keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family.”
This declaration regarding handguns matters because this easily concealed weapon is responsible for far more deaths than any other weapon in the United States — and it isn’t close. In 2021, for example, a total of 14,616 people were murdered in the US, according to the FBI. Of these murder victims, at least 5,992 — just over 40 percent — were killed by handguns.
Last year, the Supreme Court made it even harder for federal and state lawmakers to combat gun violence. In its decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, it massively expands the scope of the Second Amendment, abandons more than a decade of case law governing which gun laws are permitted by the Constitution, and replaces this case law with a new legal framework that, as Justice Stephen Breyer writes in dissent, “imposes a task on the lower courts that judges cannot easily accomplish.”
Bruen has since allowed handguns — which are responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun murders in the United States — to proliferate on many American streets. That’s because Bruen strikes the types of laws that limit who can legally carry handguns in public, holding that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” Amid a flurry of activity in the courts over the last year, more than a dozen state and federal gun control laws have been invalidated in whole or in part as a result.
Under this new legal regime, the future of firearm regulation looks grim for anyone who believes that the government should help protect us from gun violence.
Update, August 29, 5:30 pm ET: This story was originally published on May 26, 2022, and has been updated multiple times, most recently with details from the August 28 shooting at UNC Chapel Hill.
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‘Even more insidious than the NRA’: US gun lobby group gains in power
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-01-0655/gun-control-and-gun-rights-even-more-insidious-nra-us-gun-lobby-group-gains
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Gun Control and Gun Rights
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lefts
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/01/gun-lobby-nra-national-shooting-sports-foundation
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An attendee at the NSSF’s Shot show in Las Vegas. The NSSF has expanded its legal and lobbying spending to fight gun-control efforts nationwide. Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
US gun control
This article is more than 1 month old
‘Even more insidious than the NRA’: US gun lobby group gains in power
This article is more than 1 month old
The National Shooting Sports Foundation has been aggressively pushing gun manufacturers’ interests, and is starting to eclipse its bigger rival
Peter Stone in Washington
Tue 1 Aug 2023 12.00 CEST
Last modified on Tue 1 Aug 2023 17.49 CEST
A business trade group representing 10,000 gunmakers, dealers and other firearm firms is emerging as a rising force in the US and starting to eclipse – in some respects – the might of the powerful but scandal-plagued National Rifle Association.
Meet the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s conservative and aggressive lobbying group. Its range of activities is broad but always geared to zealously and single-mindedly preserving and extending the power of the gun industry.
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It has been lobbying Congress to pass bills that would block financial institutions from using environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria in making investment and loan decisions to protect gun companies’ bottom lines.
Meanwhile, gun manufacturers are relying on this same group to mount legal challenges to several state laws that limit the gun industry’s highly prized and unique protection from contentious liability laws enacted by Congress in 2005.
During Donald Trump’s presidency, the NSSF used its lobbying muscle to help prod his administration to move regulation of gun exports from the state department to the commerce department, a shift that seems to have yielded financial dividends for gun exporters due to the department’s pro-business approach.
In the past few years, as the 5-million-member NRA has been battered by financial woes, internal rifts and legal threats from the New York attorney general and private interests, the NSSF has expanded its legal and lobbying spending to fight gun-control efforts nationwide, while boosting gun rights and industry sales.
“The NSSF functions as the gun industry’s voice, with a singular focus on expanding the market for all types of firearms, including assault weapons and short-barreled rifles, and is eclipsing the NRA’s lobbying power on Capitol Hill,” said Kristen Rand, a lawyer with the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy and research group.
The rising clout of the NSSF is underscored in part by the group’s increased spending on lobbying, which has outpaced the NRA’s lobbying spending in recent years. For instance, in 2020 and 2021, the NSSF reported spending $4.6m and $5m respectively on federal lobbying. By contrast, the NRA spent $2.2m and $4.9m.
Further, the NSSF’s legal muscle has expanded in the last year since the NSSF tapped the former solicitor general Paul Clement as an outside lawyer to fight laws in seven states that limit the protections from lawsuits that were granted by Congress.
Clement has also mounted legal challenges for the NSSF against new gun-control measures in New York, New Jersey and other states that have been enacted in the wake of a supreme court decision last year against a New York law limiting concealed-carry permits to those people who can show a “proper purpose” for having such weapons outside their homes.
The NSSF’s board of governors reflects the group’s financial interests and clout: the board includes top executives from major arms companies such as Daniel Defense and Smith & Wesson, which made the AR-15 military-style assault rifles used in the Uvalde and Highland Park mass shootings.
Little wonder the NSSF, founded in 1961 and once best known for hosting an annual and lavish “Shot” (Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade show) in Las Vegas, has become a more active and visible player waging legal and lobbying battles to boost arms company interests, say experts and gun control advocates.
“The NSSF burrows in on every nook and cranny of gun regulation as it works to ensure that the gun industry’s financial interests are consistently and zealously represented – on even the most arcane issues. For NSSF, gun violence prevention legislation is literally bad for business,” said Rand.
The NSSF’s growing influence is reflected in part by the group’s revenues, which soared to over $51m in fiscal year 2022, versus $36m in fiscal year 2016.
The revenue hikes at NSSF have come as the group’s membership has grown in the past few years to 10,000 from 8,000, said NSSF’s general counsel and top lobbyist, Larry Keane. Keane said the NSSF has four full-time lobbyists and is recruiting a fifth for its Washington office, which opened in 2012.
Overall, the American gun industry has mushroomed in recent years.
Gun sales surged during the pandemic, as almost 60m guns were bought by Americans between 2020 and 2022, according to the Trace, a non-partisan news outfit that reports on gun violence. In 2008, about 8m guns were sold, but in 2016 gun sales had almost doubled to 16m.
Gun experts say the NSSF has become a more prominent player in battles to benefit the gun industry’s bottom line.
“The NSSF has stepped up its political activities in at least three ways: much more political lobbying and related activities in DC and elsewhere; filing lawsuits against gun laws around the country in the courts, especially after the supreme court’s 2022 Bruen decision; and promoting gun manufacturing and sales data, which is increasingly being cited in court cases by gun-rights litigants,” said Robert Spitzer, the author of several books on gun issues and an emeritus professor at Suny Cortland in New York.
Donald Trump at the NRA’s annual meeting in Indianapolis in April. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
Spitzer added: “Unfortunately, their data is problematic, because they don’t fully reveal their methodology, and they have a vested interest in inflating their numbers to support the argument that the more guns and gun accessories in circulation, the more futile gun laws are.”
NRA veterans also say the NSSF has become a more robust tool for gun interests. “Given the dumpster fires at the NRA, industry has increased its engagement at NSSF,” a former NRA board member told the Guardian.
The NSSF’s key battles now range widely, from the halls of Congress to many states nationwide where legislative and legal fights have intensified.
Keane said the NSSF had been working with a multi-industry coalition which includes fossil-fuel firms, dubbed the Fair Access to Banking Coalition, to push for Republican-sponsored bills in the House and the Senate that would curb financial companies from using ESG guidelines in making investment and loan decisions.
Keane said that the NSSF’s push for these bills stems from gun-industry complaints about “discrimination” by financial institutions that have adopted ESG guidelines, which have led to decisions by banks and other financial firms being made for “political and not business” reasons.
But Nick Suplina, a senior vice-president for law and policy with Everytown for Gun Safety said the “NSSF is riding the coattails of the fossil fuel industry in passing these bills, and made common cause, because doing what is best for society might hurt their bottom line”.
He added: “As more businesses and banks recognized that customers expected them to do their part in addressing widespread social harms, big coal and the gun industry have embraced a culture-war veneer to mask their profit motive: declare war on woke corporations.
“As a result, the NSSF has pressed legislation that abandons free-market principles and restricts companies’ freedom to set reasonable risk standards for doing business with the gun industry, while fossil-fuel companies try to prohibit consideration of environmental impact.”
With Democrats in control of the Senate, the bill’s passage is not likely, but given that Republicans control the House, it could pass there.
On another battlefront, Keane said that NSSF members are troubled about several state laws that “gut” the controversial and unique liability protections Congress granted the gun industry in 2005, and “open up the industry to new litigation”.
To date, seven states including California, New York and New Jersey have passed laws that permit some litigation against gun companies, thereby undercutting the sweeping liability protections that Congress gave the industry.
The NSSF has tapped Clement, the former solicitor general, to fight these state laws in court, because, Keane said, they “open up industry” to lawsuits which Congress blocked in 2005.
As the NSSF has become a more robust force in pushing gun-industry priorities, gun-control advocates see similarities and differences with the NRA.
“Make no mistake: the NSSF is even more insidious than the NRA with its ever-expanding lobbying operation and abnormally cozy relationship with its regulator,” said Adzi Vokhiwa, the director of federal affairs at Giffords, the gun control advocacy group. “The NSSF hides behind its public identity as a simple trade association, while aggressively working to undermine any and all attempts to slow this nation’s devastating gun violence crisis.”
Vokhiwa, for instance, noted that the NSSF ran a television ad blitz, its first ever, to scuttle the Biden administration’s first nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, David Chipman, by stressing his role as a Giffords adviser after 25 years of serving as an ATF agent.
“From leading dangerous smear campaigns against ATF director nominees who publicly promise to better regulate the gun industry, and bullying members of Congress to vote against even the most reasonable pieces of legislation regulating guns, the NSSF continues to value gun-industry profits more than the American people’s right to live in safe communities,” Vokhiwa said.
Other gun-control advocates say the NSSF, like the NRA, has often exploited fears of gun owners and pushed conspiracy theories about “big government” efforts to undermine the second amendment, in order to rally opposition to gun-control measures.
“The firearms industry was peddling anti-government conspiracies long before Trump came along talking about the ‘deep state’,” said Suplina. “That includes claiming that even modest proposals for gun-violence prevention, like requiring background checks on every gun sale, are part of a sinister government plot to disarm all Americans.
“The industry seems to hope that paranoia will drive more people to purchase their products and has in fact recognized that, after mass shootings, fear of new laws drive gun sales.”
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The US sets a grim milestone with a new record for the deadliest six months of mass killings
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-14-1025/gun-control-and-gun-rights-us-sets-grim-milestone-new-record-deadliest-six
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Gun Control and Gun Rights
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lefts
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https://apnews.com/article/mass-killings-record-gun-violence-0174103c37756fe4d247fd15cd3bc009
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FILE - A child weeps while on the bus leaving The Covenant School following a mass shooting at the school in Nashville, Tenn., Monday, March 27, 2023. A 28-year-old killed three children and three adults in a shooting at a small Christian elementary school before being killed by police. The shooter was a former student there. Police have said the shooter “was assigned female at birth” but used masculine pronouns on social media. (Nicole Hester/The Tennessean via AP, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Slain at the hands of strangers or gunned down by loved ones. Massacred in small towns, in big cities, inside their own homes or outside in broad daylight. This year’s unrelenting bloodshed across the U.S. has led to the grimmest of milestones: The deadliest six months of mass killings recorded since at least 2006.
From Jan. 1 to June 30, the nation endured 28 mass killings, all but one of which involved guns. The death toll rose just about every week, a constant cycle of violence and grief.
Six months. 181 days. 28 mass killings. 140 victims. One country.
“What a ghastly milestone,” said Brent Leatherwood, whose three children were in class at a private Christian school in Nashville on March 27 when a former student killed three children and three adults. “You never think your family would be a part of a statistic like that.”
Leatherwood, a prominent Republican in a state that hasn’t strengthened gun laws, believes something must be done to get guns out of the hands of people who might become violent. The shock of seeing the bloodshed strike so close to home has prompted him to speak out.
“You may as well say Martians have landed, right? It’s hard to wrap your mind around it,” he said.
A mass killing is defined as an occurrence when four or more people are slain, not including the assailant, within a 24-hour period. A database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University tracks this large-scale violence dating back to 2006.
The 2023 milestone beat the previous record of 27 mass killings, which was only set in the second half of 2022. James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University, never imagined records like this when he began overseeing the database about five years ago.
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“We used to say there were two to three dozen a year,” Fox said. “The fact that there’s 28 in half a year is a staggering statistic.”
But the chaos of the first six months of 2023 doesn’t automatically doom the last six months. The remainder of the year could be calmer, despite more violence over the July Fourthholiday weekend.
“Hopefully it was just a blip,” said Dr. Amy Barnhorst, a psychiatrist who is the associate director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis.
“There could be fewer killings later in 2023, or this could be part of a trend. But we won’t know for sometime,” she added.
Experts like Barnhorst and Fox attribute the rising bloodshed to a growing population with an increased number of guns in the U.S. Yet for all the headlines, mass killings are statistically rare and represent a fraction of the country’s overall gun violence.
“We need to keep it in perspective,” Fox said.
But the mass violence most often spurs attempts to reform gun laws, even if the efforts are not always successful.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, had urged the General Assembly in the wake of the Nashville school shooting to pass legislation keeping firearms away from people who could harm themselves or others, so-called “red flag laws,” though Lee says the term is politically toxic.
Getting such a measure passed in Tennessee is an uphill climb. The Republican-led Legislature adjourned earlier this year without taking on gun control, prompting Lee to schedule a special session for August.
Leatherwood, a former executive director of the Tennessee Republican Party and now the head of the influential Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, wrote a letter to lawmakers asking them to pass the governor’s proposal.
Leatherwood said he doesn’t want any other family to go through what his children experienced at the time of the shooting when they were in kindergarten, second grade and fourth grade. One of his kids, preparing for a recent sleepaway camp, asked whether they would be safe there.
“Our child was asking, ‘Do you think that there will be a gunman that comes to this camp? Do I need to be worried about that?’” Leatherwood said.
The Nashville shooter, whose writings Leatherwood and other parents are asking a court to keep private, used three guns in the attack, including an AR-15-style rifle. It was one of at least four mass killings in the first half of 2023 involving such a weapon, according to the database.
Nearly all of the mass killings in the first half of this year, 27 of 28, involved guns. The other was a fire that killed four people in a home in Monroe, Louisiana. A 37-year-old man was arrested on arson and murder charges in connection with the March 31 deaths.
Despite the unprecedented carnage, the National Rifle Association maintains fierce opposition to regulating firearms, including AR-15-style rifles and similar weapons.
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ constant efforts to gut the Second Amendment will not usher in safety for Americans; instead, it will only embolden criminals,” NRA spokesman Billy McLaughlin said in a statement. “That is why the NRA continues our fight for self-defense laws. Rest assured, we will never bow, we will never retreat, and we will never apologize for championing the self-defense rights of law-abiding Americans.”
Tito Anchondo’s brother, Andre Anchondo, was among 23 people killed in a 2019 mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The gunman was sentenced last week to 90 consecutive life sentences but could face more punishment, including the death penalty. The prosecution of the racist attack on Hispanic shoppers in the border city was one of the U.S. government’s largest hate crime cases.
Andre Anchondo and his wife, Jordan, died shielding their 2-month-old son from bullets. Paul, who escaped with just broken bones, is now 4 years old.
Tito Anchondo said he feels like the country has forgotten about the El Paso victims in the years since and that not nearly enough has been done to stem the bloodshed. He worries about Paul’s future.
“I hope that things can drastically change because this country is going down a very, very slippery slope; a downward spiral,” he said. “It’s just a little unnerving to know that he’s eventually going to go to school with kids that also may bring a gun to school.”
Dazio reported from Los Angeles.
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GOP’s booming support for guns is turning off millennial, Gen Z Republicans
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-08-0526/gun-control-and-gun-rights-gop-s-booming-support-guns-turning-millennial-gen-z
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Gun Control and Gun Rights
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https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/08/millennial-gen-z-republicans-gun-restrictions-mass-shootings-00100878
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POLITICS
About a quarter of young Republicans in one poll said they strongly or somewhat supported an assault weapons ban.
A significant share of younger conservatives, reared in an age of mass violence, embrace firearm restrictions, polling shows. | Michael Conroy/AP Photo
By JUAN PEREZ JR.
06/08/2023 05:00 AM EDT
Young Republicans aren’t clinging to guns like the rest of the GOP.
As former President Donald Trump and new campaign entrants, including former Vice President Mike Pence, tout their Second Amendment bonafides and opposition to “gun confiscation” to 2024 primary voters, some Gen Z and millennial Republicans are moving in the opposite direction: A significant share of younger conservatives, reared in an age of mass violence, embrace firearm restrictions.
One poll conducted by Harvard’s political institute this spring found that a clear majority of young conservatives supported mandatory psychological exams for gun purchasers. A separate, recurring survey from YouGov concluded in March that Gen Z and millennial Republicans are more likely to believe in tougher gun laws than older Republicans and that young conservatives’ support for the idea has grown in the past year.
The generational disconnect suggests broader GOP opposition to gun restrictions will be a steady irritant inside a party already struggling to appeal to young voters. It could also challenge White House hopefuls and members of Congress to eventually refine their message on guns with Republican primary and general election voters, even if the concerns of young people won’t transform GOP politics overnight.
“There are some concerns from Gen Z voters specifically, mainly because they’ve had to deal with it more growing up — it’s become more rampant in society,” Joacim Hernandez, the elected chairman of the Texas Young Republican Federation, said of gun violence.
“But at the same time, I really don’t know when and where that conversation within the party will happen,” Hernandez said in an interview. “You still have a lot of elected officials and Republicans within the party who don’t believe we should have government interference when it comes to owning guns.”
A partisan divide and age gap on gun restrictions remains deeply embedded in American politics. Concern about mass shootings tends to spike in the aftermath of attention-grabbing attacks before fading. But access to firearms has been a bedrock principle for the GOP for decades, and polls show older Republican primary voters remain some of the strongest firearm supporters in the country. Plus, recent polling from ruby-red Texas underscores the complexity of the GOP’s internal split.
A University of Texas/Texas Politics Project Poll last month found 64 percent of all Texas Republicans supported raising the age limit on gun purchases and the concept of “red flag” laws that require people determined to be a risk to themselves or others to surrender their firearms. Republicans under the age of 45 tended to support those measures at higher rates than older party supporters, Texas Politics Project Director James Henson said after examining the poll’s underlying response data at POLITICO’s request.
Yet Texas legislators have considered an array of gun restrictions with little progress. Low voter turnout in the state helps create competitive GOP primaries that invite challengers eager to exploit any backlash to liberal-backed gun safety policy. Other political concerns are competing for attention and Texas conservatives overall tend to blame a wide range of factors for mass shootings — but not guns.
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“You can find evidence that younger Republicans appear less strongly in favor of gun rights instead of public safety considerations,” Henson said in an interview. “But the difference is not so big, and the share of young Republicans is small enough as a share of overall Republicans that I would not expect there to be a shift in the center of gravity on guns driven by younger Republican voters.”
Despite the headwinds in Texas, young conservative attitudes seem to be evolving nationwide in a way that some Democrats and gun safety advocates see as an opening for new policies.
Not only are a significant share of Republicans voicing support for liberal-aligned gun laws, but politicians are increasingly confronted with a cohort of young people whose lives have been marked by campus gun attacks and schoolhouse shooter drills.
“I think Republicans certainly have a generational issue on guns and other issues,” said John Della Volpe, a specialist in millennial and Gen Z voter research who advised President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.
A national poll of 18- to 29-year-olds conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics in mid-March found that 59 percent of young Republicans supported requiring psychological exams for all gun purchases — a version of “red flag” measures largely supported by Democrats.
“The right to feel safe in school, safe in public and safe in your own home is a fundamental issue that needs to be addressed if anyone is going to have a conversation with younger people moving forward,” said Della Volpe, who is also the director of polling at Harvard’s political institute.
“If there’s no alignment on the issue that these values are real, that they’re coming from someplace central to the lives and identity of a generation, then the GOP is likely to be a regional party by the time this generation hits middle age,” he said.
The Republican National Committee did not respond to a request for comment.
The YouGov Social Change Monitor, a biweekly survey of 1,500 U.S. adults conducted between June 2020 and March 2023, found Gen Z and millennial Republicans’ nationwide support for more restrictive gun laws increased to 47 percent in February compared to 41 percent in August 2022. Thirty-two percent of young Republicans said the Constitution only protects access to guns for militias — more than double the share of older Republicans who expressed that belief.
Thirty-six percent of young GOP backers in the Harvard poll meanwhile said gun laws should be more strict than they are now. A combined 27 percent of young Republicans even said they strongly or somewhat supported an assault weapons ban.
“There is a clear generational divide, particularly within the Republican party,” said Zeenat Yahya, policy director of the March for Our Lives gun safety advocacy organization.
“We’re seeing this uptick in young Republicans caring a lot more about this issue — that’s completely fair when young people are the ones bearing the brunt of this issue as it’s the leading cause of death for children and teens,” Yahya said. “It really makes it clear, in my opinion, that the Second Amendment isn’t necessarily the third-rail political issue politicians think it is.”
And there are signs the White House senses an opportunity.
Vice President Kamala Harris held a campaign-style rally in a suburban Virginia high school gymnasium Friday, showcasing how gun restrictions and young voters will play in Biden’s reelection pitches.
“It is a false choice to suggest that we have to choose between either supporting the Second Amendment or passing reasonable gun safety laws,” Harris said. “We can do both.”
But Texas, the site of what Biden described as the “killing field” of Robb Elementary as he commemorated the Uvalde massacre’s one-year anniversary, illustrates the slim chance young conservatives alone will shift the GOP’s gun politics.
“I think people prefer the safety of being armed,” said Hernandez, the young Texas Republican. “And if at some point, a weaker generation prefers for the government to just take care of them, then that will be the case.”
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Hawaii allows more concealed carry after US Supreme Court ruling, but bans guns in most places
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Gun Control and Gun Rights
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https://apnews.com/article/hawaii-gun-control-law-concealed-carry-permit-72e5ebe107fdea85319a4552dcb23b97
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Hawaii Gov. Josh Green signs gun control legislation in Honolulu on Friday, June 2, 2023 as Leia Kandell, left, age 10, and Cole Kandell, age 7, look on. Green signed legislation that allows more people to carry concealed firearms but at the same time prohibit people from taking guns to a wide range of places, including beaches, hospitals, stadiums, bars that serve alcohol and movie theaters. (AP Photo/Audrey McAvoy)
HONOLULU (AP) — Hawaii Gov. Josh Green on Friday signed legislation that will allow more people to carry concealed firearms but at the same time prohibit people from taking guns to a wide range of places, including beaches, hospitals, stadiums, bars that serve alcohol and movie theaters. Private businesses allowing guns will have to post a sign to that effect.
The legal overhaul comes in response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling from last year that expanded gun rights by saying Americans have a right to carry firearms in public for self-defense.
New York and New Jersey adopted similar laws last year that quickly met legalchallenges which are making their way through federal courts.
Green, who is a physician by training and has been an emergency room doctor in Hawaii for decades, said gun violence is a public health crisis and action needs to be taken to address it.
“On many occasions in my training back on the mainland, I was one of the physicians that took care of individuals who were victims of gun violence. Not only that, I lost a loved one to a suicide with a gun,” Green said before signing the measure. “And so anything that we can do, we should.”
Rep. David Tarnas, chair of the House judiciary committee, said lawmakers carefully crafted the measure to be consistent with the high court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment right to bear arms and also establish what he called a “fair system” for regulating concealed carry permits.
“We aim to create a balanced approach that respects the rights of gun owners and the need to maintain a safe and protected space in Hawaii,” Tarnas said.
Hawaii has long had some of the strictest gun laws in the nation.
Before the Supreme Court ruling, Hawaii law gave county police chiefs the discretion to determine whether to issue gun owners a permit to carry. Police chiefs rarely did. They issued just six such permits in 21 years, making it virtually impossible for civilians to carry guns in Hawaii. Otherwise state law only allowed people to keep firearms in their homes and to transport them – unloaded and locked up – to shooting ranges, hunting areas and other limited places like repair shops.
In 2022, Hawaii had the second-lowest gun death rate among the 50 states, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only Massachusetts had a lower figure.
Andrew Namiki Roberts, the director of the Hawaii Firearms Coalition, said Hawaii lawmakers wanted the law to be a “workaround” of the high court’s decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen. He said the new law effectively makes it so people can’t carry firearms in public for self-defense and is a “gross infringement” on the Second Amendment.
“It limits carrying a firearm to public sidewalks and private businesses — if you can get permission. All other places in the state, it’s going to be illegal to carry a firearm,” he said.
Kainoa Kaku, president of the Hawaii Rifle Association, said it showed the state’s leaders viewed “law-abiding, gun-owning citizenry of Hawaii as criminals.”
“They are so stupid they cannot tell the difference between someone who doesn’t follow the law and commits crimes with firearms and someone that just wants to protect themselves and their family with a gun,” he said.
Both gun rights groups plan to challenge the new law in court.
Attorney General Anne Lopez said her office was prepared to fight these lawsuits.
Kaku also objected to the anticipated expenses of the new law, estimating it will cost gun owners $1,000 to take all the classes and proficiency tests required to obtain a concealed carry permit that will only be valid for four years.
The governor also signed another bill requiring the state Department of Education to develop a training program to help public and charter schools respond to school shootings.
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Profits Skyrocket for AI Gun Detection Used in Schools — Despite Dubious Results
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-05-21-0620/gun-control-and-gun-rights-profits-skyrocket-ai-gun-detection-used-schools
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Gun Control and Gun Rights
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https://theintercept.com/2023/05/19/ai-gun-detector-evolv-stock/
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PROFITS SKYROCKET FOR AI GUN DETECTION USED IN SCHOOLS — DESPITE DUBIOUS RESULTS
Amid aggressive marketing to schools, Evolv announced it had doubled its first-quarter earnings compared to last year.
Georgia Gee
May 19 2023, 10:00 a.m.
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The Evolv Express weapons detection system flags a weapon worn by an Evolv Technology employee, on May 25, 2022, in New York. Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP
“IF YOU ARE serious about our systems, then let’s jump on a quick call this week,” Anthony Geraci, a sales representative of Evolv Technology, wrote in an email to New Mexico’s Clovis Municipal Schools last November. “This is not a pressure tactic.”
There was, however, pressure: If Clovis didn’t purchase the systems by the end of the year on a four-year agreement, Geraci explained, the prices would escalate. “We just want you to know this option exists and don’t want you upset when you hear that others have taken advantage of this option,” Geraci wrote.
The tactic eventually worked. It would be another high-priced sale for Evolv, a leading company in the world of weapons detection systems that use artificial intelligence.
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Local media reported in March that Clovis bought the technology for $345,000, funded by the Federal CARES Act, a Covid-19 relief measure. Evolv, though, didn’t announce the sale until May 9 — timed so that the company could promote the purchase in its first-quarter earnings release.
Earlier in May, before the announcement, Evolv officials had asked Clovis if they could tout the sale in their earnings report, according to internal emails. And on May 10, Evolv named the purchase — alongside half a dozen other school districts — in a webcast.
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Evolv, a publicly traded company, had much to brag about. Despite public reports on Evolv’s overpromises on efficiency and effectiveness for its technology, the company’s aggressive marketing to schools paid off: Evolv announced it had doubled its earnings compared to last year’s first quarter and saw its stock price rise 167 percent over the past year.
“The salespeople will use whatever leverage they have, and there is a real, genuine fear about weapons and shootings in America today,” said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a professor of law at American University and an expert on surveillance. “It plays right into the salesperson’s game plan to market fear as hard as they can.”
“It plays right into the salesperson’s game plan to market fear as hard as they can.”
Evolv has come under intense criticism for the faults in its technology, including incidents in which guns and knives bypassed the system in schools — with, in two cases, students being stabbed. Nonetheless, the company announced $18.6 million in total revenue for the first quarter of 2023, an increase of 113 percent compared to the first quarter last year, beating its prior estimates.
CEO Peter George also said Evolv would add at least one more school building daily in the next three months to its roster of clients.
“Weapons detection is not perfect, but it adds a layer of protection that can help deter, detect and mitigate risk,” said Dana Loof, Evolv’s chief marketing officer, in a statement to The Intercept. “We are a partner with our customers and work with them every step of the way towards helping to create a safer environment.”
With its star status and value rising, the company recently hired former Tesla product leader Parag Vaish as chief digital product officer.
“Just like digital advances can bring civilians to space, drive cars autonomously, and help address challenges in climate change,” George said, “developments and artificial intelligence can be applied to the gun violence epidemic gripping the country.”
Public records, obtained by research publication IPVM and shared with The Intercept, reveal the extent the company goes to persuade schools to buy, and advertise, its technology.
In internal emails to the Clovis school district, Evolv sent the school a plan recommending the use of conveyor belts alongside the AI system — offered as a means of efficiency, but in effect rendering Evolv’s technology an auxiliary for more traditional security procedures.
Evolv also sent the district marketing materials, including template letters to send to parents to notify them of the technology.
“One of the things we have seen in the past year is that customers who opt to not make an announcement are oftentimes subject to misinformation by local media and critics,” Beatriz Almeida, Evolv’s marketing director, wrote to Clovis, “and we like to get ahead of these potential situations by helping you craft the story and tell your side before any misconceptions can occur.” (The Clovis school district did not respond to a request for comment.)
Experts say that Evolv’s pressure on schools to correct the narrative could be harmful. “Labeling facts about Evolv’s detection capabilities as ‘misinformation’ distorts the public’s understanding of what Evolv can and cannot do,” said Don Maye, head of operations at IPVM.
Loof, from Evolv, said, “We strive to be transparent with our customers and security professionals about our technology’s capabilities and that our focus is on weapons that could cause mass casualty.”
PRIOR REPORTS HAVE illustrated how easily the Evolv alerts sound with metal objects, including misidentifying a lunch box for a bomb, but Clovis went ahead with the Evolv collaboration. And officials with the schools agreed to collaborate on the Evolv press release announcing the sale, according to internal emails.
“Evolv gives us the security we need,” Loran Hill, senior director of operations at Clovis, said in Evolv’s press release, “and since it can tell the difference between threats and most of the everyday items people bring into school, our students’ routines won’t change when they come to school, keeping anxiety levels low and the focus on education.”
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AI Tries (and Fails) to Detect Weapons in Schools
The public documents obtained by The Intercept indicate that everything wasn’t perhaps as smooth as advertised. The Intercept has previously reported that research shows metallic objects repeatedly trigger alerts, despite Evolv’s claim that it’s not a metal detection system.
The sensitivity to metal came up for the Clovis school district. In an email earlier this month from Hill herself, she discussed the system’s use during the recent prom. “We all learnt a lot about clutch purses,” Hill wrote.
“Honestly didn’t think about those,” Mark Monfredi from the integrator Stone Security, responded. ”But being the same construction as the metal eye glass cases” — apparently another item that set off false alarms — “it makes sense.” (Stone Security did not respond to a request for comment.)
Despite Evolv’s initial pitch of efficiency to the school district — the company said a single-lane system could scan up to 2,000 children an hour — other Evolv internal documents sent to the school outline ways to speed up the scanning process. The two options include “The Pass Around Method” for sending students around the machines and “Conveyer Belt Addition,” the latter resembling airport security checkpoints. Both options require students to remove laptops or other “nuisance alarm items” from their bags that may set off the system.
“We are upfront with our customers and prospects that if they want the potential for a sterile environment, they will need TSA-style screening,” said Loof, referring to the Transportation Security Administration.
In another document, titled “Empowering Student Well-Being,” the company attempts to spin potential faults in its technology — namely false alarms — as potentially beneficial experiences for the students.
“Some of the students who get stopped often for secondary checks, see the interaction as part of their daily routine,” says one school official promoted in Evolv’s materials for its clients. “It gives them a chance to have a positive conversation with an adult to start the day. This even happens for students who don’t set off an alert.”
Despite the need to propose workarounds to make the system function properly, George, the CEO, couldn’t help touting about Evolv’s technology on the earnings webcast: “We’re really, really, really good at detecting guns.”
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15-year-old arrested after bringing AR-15, ammunition to a Phoenix high school, police say
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-05-21-0608/gun-control-and-gun-rights-15-year-old-arrested-after-bringing-ar-15-ammunition
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https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/student-arrested-bringing-ar-15-ammunition-phoenix-high-school-police-rcna85418
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Student, 15, arrested after bringing AR-15 and ammunition to a Phoenix high school, police say
The student is facing “serious felony charges” after allegedly bringing the semi-automatic rifle to Bostrom High School, where he was arrested Friday, the Phoenix Police Department said.
Teen arrested after bringing AR-15 to Phoenix high school, police say
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Police arrested a 15-year-old student after he allegedly brought an AR-15 and ammunition to a Phoenix high school on Friday, authorities said.
The student is facing "serious felony charges" after allegedly bringing the semi-automatic rifle — the weapon behind a dozen of the 21 deadliest mass shootings in the U.S. since 2006 — to Bostrom High School, where he was arrested in the main office around 1 p.m. on Friday, according to a news release from the Phoenix Police Department.
Authorities also allegedly found more ammunition in the student's backpack and lunch box, according to the police department.
School officials alerted police after "others on campus" told them "that the student may have a gun," Donna Rossi, director of communications for the Phoenix police, told NBC News.
Administrators received the alert about the possible weapon on campus during the lunch time at the school, a spokesperson for the Phoenix Union High School District said in a statement.
The spokesperson added that “school personnel reported a possible weapon on campus based on an initial, anonymous tip” but did not elaborate further.
The school went into a lockdown "as soon as school officials were notified of the possible gun on campus," Rossi added. A spokesperson for the school district said the lockdown lasted a little over one hour.
School officials looking into the allegation of the possible weapon "discovered the report was accurate and local authorities intervened and confiscated the weapon," the statement from the school district said.
The student was booked into juvenile detention on charges including "minor in possession of a firearm, carrying a weapon on school grounds, interfering with an educational institution and other weapon related charges," Rossi added.
The student remains in custody, and the police department's crime gun intelligence unit is investigating alongside school and district officials, according to the news release from Phoenix police, who have not publicly identified the student.
"We commend those who originally reported the possibility of a weapon on school grounds to adults on campus who immediately called police," a statement from the police department said.
It was not immediately clear how the student obtained the gun and ammunition or what his intent was in bringing them to school. The police department did not respond to those questions, and the school district spokesperson did not know the answers to them.
The spokesperson added that the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act prevents them from being able to release the student's disciplinary records.
The statement from the school district said officials "are grateful to those who reported this incident to trusted adults."
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"As always, the safety and well-being of our staff, students, and visitors remains our top priority, and we will work with law enforcement as they continue to investigate," the statement added.
In a letter sent to families Sunday, school officials said there would be additional safety measures in place Monday "out of an abundance of caution," and that no backpacks would be allowed on campus this week. Officials will also host a meeting with parents in the school cafeteria on Monday night, the letter states.
"We recognize the severity of this situation and the fear and anxiety it causes our students and staff," the letter said, adding that there would be "social-emotional support available at school" for students and staff.
Rossi and police Sgt. Robert Scherer directed further questions about the student's bail status, when he is next due in court and the potential sentence he could face if convicted to the Maricopa County Attorney's Office and the Juvenile Department of the Maricopa County Superior Court.
An official with the Maricopa County Attorney's Office said the office "does not comment on juvenile cases." The police spokesperson said the investigation is ongoing.
The school district describes Bostrom High School as an “alternative center” that provides a “small school environment that focuses on student-centered learning while simultaneously supporting the whole student.”
Arizona does not ban semi-automatic rifles, but prohibits minors from buying or possessing a gun without written consent from a parent or guardian, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a nonprofit gun control advocacy group. The state also bans firearms on school grounds, except by those authorized to carry them or for use in approved school programs, according to the Giffords Law Center.
The Phoenix incident comes just days after an 18-year-old shooter in New Mexico used three weapons — including an AR-15 — to fatally shoot three elderly women: Shirley Voita, 79, Melody Ivie, 73 and her mother Gwendolyn Schofield, 97. The shooter was killed by police on Monday following his deadly rampage.
As mass shootings have increased, calls have intensified to place restrictions around sales of semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15, which was originally created for military use and is now copied by a variety of manufacturers under different names.
With their ability to fire bullets at a fast speed, AR-15s are known to inflict extensive damage to the human body and are more likely to be deadly than other firearms are.
Washington state banned semi-automatic rifles last month, becoming the ninth state with such a ban, plus Washington, D.C., according to the Associated Press. President Joe Biden has called for a national semi-automatic weapons ban in light of the increase in mass killings.
Julianne McShane
Jon Schuppe and Jiachuan Wu contributed.
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The Supreme Court hands down a temporary, but significant, victory for gun control
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-05-18-0653/gun-control-and-gun-rights-supreme-court-hands-down-temporary-significant
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Gun Control and Gun Rights
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https://www.vox.com/2023/5/17/23727034/supreme-court-assault-rifles-weapons-shadow-docket-national-association-gun-rights-naperville
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The Supreme Court hands down a temporary, but significant, victory for gun control
The Court appears to be backing away from its “shadow docket.”
By Ian Millhiser May 17, 2023, 1:50pm EDT
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Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett talk before President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address in 2023. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court handed down a very brief order on Wednesday morning that offers gun regulation advocates a slightly surprising — but likely short-lived — victory.
The order denies relief to litigants challenging Illinois’s ban on semiautomatic assault weapons, and a similar ban enacted by the city of Naperville, Illinois, who had argued both violated the Second Amendment. Had these litigants prevailed in the nation’s highest court, such a decision could have invalidated assault rifle bans throughout the United States.
That said, Wednesday’s order is only a very brief victory for proponents of gun regulation. The case, known as National Association for Gun Rights v. City of Naperville, arose on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a hodgepodge of emergency motions and other expedited matters that the Court sometimes decides without full briefing or oral argument. The most likely explanation for the Court’s latest order is that a majority of the justices believed that this case did not warrant this expedited treatment, not that a majority of the Court will ultimately vote to uphold assault rifle bans. (Notably, Brett Kavanaugh, the median justice on the current, very conservative Supreme Court, is a longtime proponent of legalizing assault weapons.)
The case will be heard by a federal appeals court in late June, and that court’s decision may be reviewed by the Supreme Court under its ordinary, less rushed process for hearing cases.
Nevertheless, the Court’s brief order in the Naperville case is significant less because of what it says about the justices’ approach to gun policy than because it suggests that at least some key members of the Supreme Court have grown disillusioned with the Court’s once-very-frequent use of the shadow docket.
The Court started issuing many shadow docket orders that benefited conservatives during the Trump administration
Historically, the Supreme Court has been reluctant to weigh in on any case before it was fully litigated in the lower courts, and before the justices spent months considering the parties’ briefs and hearing oral arguments. The Court, after all, has the final word on how to interpret US law, so if the justices moved too quickly, they risked handing down an erroneous decision that could not easily be corrected.
Indeed, the Court’s reluctance to bypass its ordinary, very slow procedures was so well-known among Supreme Court practitioners that these lawyers were historically reluctant to even ask the justices for shadow docket relief. As University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck found in a 2019 paper, “during the sixteen years of the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, the Solicitor General filed a total of eight [shadow docket] applications” asking the justices to block a lower court’s decision, “averaging one every other [Supreme Court] Term.”
The Trump administration, however, abandoned this restraint, and they were rewarded for it. Vladeck found that “in less than three years, [Trump’s] Solicitor General has filed at least twenty-one applications for stays in the Supreme Court (including ten during the October 2018 Term alone).” And the Court encouraged this tactic — Vladeck found that the Trump administration achieved a full or partial victory in about two-thirds of cases where it sought to temporarily block a lower court opinion.
After Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation just days before the 2020 election, the Court grew even more aggressive on its shadow docket. Less than a month after Barrett joined the Court, for example, the justices handed down a revolutionary shadow docket decision in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo (2020), which significantly expanded the power of religious conservatives to seek exemptions from state laws.
This decision, and others that followed it, showed that the justices were now willing to hand down major, precedent-setting decisions without going through the ordinary deliberative process that the Court has historically engaged in before doing so.
Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett warned that the Court was deciding too many cases too quickly in a 2021 opinion
In October 2021, however, Barrett wrote a brief opinion, joined by Kavanaugh, which suggested that she thought her Court was deciding too many cases without adequate deliberation.
Barrett’s concurring opinion in Does v. Mills (2021) raised two concerns about the shadow docket. One was that it could be used by litigants to “force the Court to give a merits preview in cases that it would be unlikely to take” — that is, by seeking shadow docket relief, litigants could goad the justices into weighing in on legal matters that they would otherwise simply ignore and leave to the lower courts. She also raised the familiar concern that shadow docket cases force the Court to decide important questions on a “short fuse without benefit of full briefing and oral argument.”
It’s easy to be cynical about the timing of Barrett’s opinion in Does, which was handed down in the same year that Democrat Joe Biden became president. Indeed, one of the most frustrating things about this Court’s approach to its shadow docket is that, while the justices were eager to grant expedited relief to the Trump administration when it asked the Court to block lower court decisions undermining its policies, the Court’s GOP-appointed majority suddenly became very reluctant to grant such relief when the Biden administration took over.
That said, there is now a decent amount of evidence that Barrett was acting in good faith when she wrote her Does opinion, and that she and Kavanaugh believe that the Court should be less aggressive about granting shadow docket petitions of all kinds than they were in the Trump years.
The Does case, for example, was one of a handful of decisions where the Court denied shadow docket relief to health care workers who objected, on religious grounds, to state rules requiring them to be vaccinated against Covid-19. Last month, the Court denied a shadow docket request seeking to reinstate West Virginia’s law prohibiting transgender athletes from playing on school sports teams that match their gender identity. And now they’ve denied another shadow docket request attacking a gun law that is most likely opposed by a majority of the justices.
The Court, in other words, has recently shown some restraint on its shadow docket cases, even when such restraint runs counter to the Republican Party’s policy preferences. It has even shown some willingness to grant shadow docket relief to left-leaning litigants when conservative judges engage in particularly egregious overreach, such as in a recent decision where the Supreme Court blocked a notorious Trump-appointed judge’s attempt to ban the abortion drug mifepristone.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether the Court’s newfound reluctance to decide politically charged cases as quickly as possible will remain if a Republican moves into the White House. For the moment, however, it appears that Barrett and Kavanaugh were being sincere when they called for a more cautious approach to shadow docket decisions in Does.
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NEXT UP IN SUPREME COURT
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| 469
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Supreme Court denies request to block Illinois ban on semi-automatic rifles
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Supreme Court denies request to block Illinois ban on semi-automatic rifles
BY MELISSA QUINN
UPDATED ON: MAY 17, 2023 / 11:50 AM / CBS NEWS
Washington — The Supreme Court on Wednesday left in place for now state and local laws in Illinois that ban assault-style weapons, turning down a request to block the restrictions as the nation again finds itself grappling with a slew of recent mass shootings.
The brief, unsigned order from the high court rejects an application for emergency relief sought by a gun rights group and gun store owner who argued that the Illinois law and a Naperville ordinance violated their Second Amendment rights. There were no noted dissents.
The decision comes on the heels of a six-day span of fatal shootings beginning May 1: eight people were killed when a gunman opened fire at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas; one was killed in a shooting at a medical building in Atlanta; and six people were fatally shot in Henryetta, Oklahoma. Those deadly incidents came after four were shot and killed at a birthday party at a dance studio in Dadeville, Alabama on April 15; five died in a shooting at a bank in Louisville on April 10; and six people, including three children, were fatally shot at a private Christian school in Nashville on March 27.
On Monday, three people were killed and six others were injured in a shooting in Farmington, New Mexico.
President Biden has implored Congress to pass legislation banning assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, but any legislative response seems unlikely, given Democrats' slim majority in the Senate and the GOP control of the House.
The state law at the center of the court fight, called the Protect Illinois Communities Act, was Illinois' answer to a mass shooting at an Independence Day on July 4, 2022, in Highland Park that left seven people dead. Passed by the state legislature in January, the measure restricts the sale and purchase of so-called assault weapons, including AR-15s and AK-47s, and "large capacity ammunition feeding devices," defined as a magazine or similar device that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition for a long gun or 15 rounds for handguns.
Naperville, a suburb of Chicago, passed a separate ordinance in August 2022 that outlaws the sale of assault-style weapons within city limits.
In January, a pro-Second Amendment advocacy group, gun store and its owner sued the city of Naperville and the state, arguing that the state and local bans did not comport with the Second Amendment.
A federal district court declined requests to block the measures, finding that the Naperville ordinance and state law are "consistent with the Second Amendment's text, history, and tradition." The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit denied the gun rights supporters' request to halt enforcement of the law pending appeal.
In an emergency request to the Supreme Court for an injunction pending appeal, a lawyer for the National Association for Gun Rights and gun shop owner Robert Bevis argued that the Illinois and Naperville bans are unconstitutional, and said "millions of law-abiding citizens" own AR-15s and similar rifles for lawful purposes. The semi-automatic rifles, they said, are commonly used today.
"Despite the district court's histrionics, the possession of these weapons poses no more of a public safety threat than the possession of hands and feet," the gun rights backers wrote in a filing to the high court.
The challengers to the gun restrictions said that under the Supreme Court's major Second Amendment decisions — the 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller and 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen — they are allowed to keep and bear the semi-automatic firearms and large-capacity magazines targeted by the Illinois laws.
"The Second Amendment protects arms that are commonly possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, especially self-defense in the home. The arms banned by Respondents are possessed by millions of law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, including self-defense in the home," they wrote. "Under this Court's precedents, 'that is all that is needed for citizens to have a right under the Second Amendment to keep such weapons.' There cannot be the slightest question, therefore, that the challenged laws are unconstitutional."
In the Heller decision, a divided court held that the Second Amendment protects the right to possess a firearm in the home for self-defense. Then, last June, the Supreme Court's conservative majority expanded gun rights further and imposed a new standard for determining whether firearms rules are constitutional. Under that test, the government must demonstrate that gun restrictions are consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation.
The gun rights advocates said it is impossible for local and state officials to identify a historical analogue to a ban on assault-style weapons.
"No founding-era precedent remotely burdens Second Amendment rights as much as an absolute ban on a category of arms commonly held by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes," they argued.
But top Illinois officials urged the Supreme Court to allow the bans to take effect. In a filing with the high court, they said that the question of whether large-capacity magazines are considered "arms," as opposed to accessories, under the Second Amendment is not settled, and said the gun rights supporters failed to demonstrate that semi-automatic rifles are commonly used for self-defense.
"By prohibiting the manufacture and sale of weapons and magazines increasingly used in the deadliest mass shootings, the Act comfortably fits within this pattern of regulation in response to new forms of violent crime perpetrated with technologically advanced weapons," they wrote. "The public safety justifications underlying the Act are nearly identical to those that prompted 18th, 19th, and 20th century legislatures to regulate categories of weapons associated with an increase in homicides attributable to specific weapons and other criminal misuse."
Since the Supreme Court's decision expanding the Second Amendment nearly one year ago, the high court has declined to wade into disputes over firearms laws passed in the wake of its ruling. In January, it allowed New York rules that imposed restrictions on carrying firearms in public and regulating commercial gun sales to remain in place.
The challenge to Illinois' ban from the National Association for Gun Rights is one of several winding their way through the federal courts. In a case brought by two gun owners, two gun shops and a trade association for the firearms industry in January, a federal district court blocked the state from enforcing the prohibition on semi-automatic rifles, finding that it likely cannot be "harmonized" with the Second Amendment.
"Whether well-intentioned, brilliant or arrogant, no state may enact a law that denies its citizens rights that the Constitution guarantees them," U.S. District Judge Stephen McGlynn wrote in an April 28 order. "Even legislation that may enjoy the support of a majority of its citizens must fail if it violates the constitutional rights of fellow citizens."
The state appealed the decision to the 7th Circuit, and a judge on the appeals court lifted the lower court's injunction on May 4, pending further action from the court. The order from the 7th Circuit allows the law to go back into effect for now.
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First published on May 17, 2023 / 11:17 AM
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Rare GOP votes in Texas for gun bill after mass shootings
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https://apnews.com/article/assault-guns-age-bill-shootings-texas-30503eb6237b8c2126a4763082aa559f
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Texas state Rep. Sam Harless, R-Spring, listens to debate in the House chamber in Austin, Texas, Tuesday, May 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — As a Republican in the Texas Capitol, Sam Harless turned heads: He voted in favor of a stricter gun law.
In doing so, the Houston state representative helped advance a bill in the Texas House that would raise the purchase age for AR-style rifles like the kind used by an 18-year-old gunman in Uvalde last year. The vote came just days after eight people at an outdoor mall in Dallas were killed by a 33-year-old gunman, who President Biden said used an AR-15-style weapon.
The bill has little chance of becoming law, but that did not stop powerful gun rights groups Tuesday from springing into action to stamp out the rare glimpse of momentum for supporters of tougher restrictions as mass killings continue to spread anguish in Texas.
It underlined how almost any attempt to tighten gun laws in Texas is off the table in the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature, which in recent years has made gun access easier following other mass shootings and shows no appetite for reversing course. That includes Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who — since Saturday shooting in Allen — has called mental health the root of the problem.
That made Harless’ vote Monday all the more notable.
“Every kid has a right to go to school and feel safe, and every parent has a right for the kid to feel safe at school,” Harless said in an interview.
Another Republican, state Rep. Justin Holland, also joined Democrats on the House Select Committee on Community Safety in voting 8-5 to advance the measure that would raise the purchase age of certain semiautomatic weapons from 18 to 21. The bill has been the priority all year of several Uvalde families whose children were among the 19 students and two teachers killed by a gunman nearly a year ago at Robb Elementary School.
The vote Monday came unexpectedly. For weeks the bill had stalled in the committee, but as protesters filled the Capitol and shouted “Do Something!” two days after the shooting in Allen, the committee gathered to vote the bill out.
In a statement defending his vote, Holland said, “I do not believe in gun control,” and he noted that he previously voted in support of Texas removing training and background checks to carry a handgun. He also said he has earned three consecutive “A” ratings from the National Rifle Association — but acknowledged he has “no idea” if they will rate him so highly going forward.
He said testimony given to the committee convinced him that a law raising the purchase age might serve as a “significant roadblock” to a young person acquiring certain semiautomatic weapons and causing harm.
Gun rights groups, which are rarely forced to aggressively play defense in the Texas Capitol, responded to the bill advancing by urging its members to call lawmakers. Texas Gun Rights, one of the most outspoken groups, said Tuesday that Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three people during a Wisconsin protest in 2020 and was later acquitted of murder, had joined them in opposition to the bill.
Harless, who represents a solidly GOP-leaning district in the Houston suburbs, said he has received no pushback from other House Republicans.
“I just voted my heart and my constituents are likely not the gun groups,” Harless said.
For a decade, Nicole Golden has been a mainstay in the Texas Capitol in pushing for stricter gun laws, only to see Republicans instead gradually keep removing the ones that are in place. She called Monday’s vote “unprecedented” given the attention that had surrounded the bill.
Golden, the executive director of the group Texas Gun Sense, said the Legislature has let wither far less contentious bills over guns this year, including one to promote education about gun storage safety. She could not recall a previous time that Republicans took a vote like the one Monday.
“We’ve gone to their offices to thank them,” she said. “And I think that thanks are due.”
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A new Supreme Court case seeks to legalize assault weapons in all 50 states
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-05-10-0641/gun-control-and-gun-rights-new-supreme-court-case-seeks-legalize-assault
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https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/5/9/23716863/supreme-court-assault-rifles-weapons-national-association-gun-rights-naperville-brett-kavanaugh
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EXPLAINERS
CRIMINAL JUSTICE
A new Supreme Court case seeks to legalize assault weapons in all 50 states
A case on the Court’s “shadow docket” could strike down state and local bans on AR-15s and similar weapons.
By Ian Millhiser May 9, 2023, 4:30pm EDT
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AR-15 build kits seen for sale at the Durkin Tactical display during the National Rifle Association’s Annual Meetings & Exhibits at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis on April 15, 2023. Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court could hand down a decision any day now in National Association for Gun Rights v. City of Naperville, a case that could legalize assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in all 50 states.
The case challenges a Naperville, Illinois, ordinance and a similar Illinois state law, both of which ban assault weapons, which the state law defines to include certain semiautomatic rifles such as AR-15s and AK-47s. Additionally, the state law prohibits the sale of a “large capacity ammunition feeding device,” which the statute defines as long gun magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition, or handgun magazines that hold more than 15 bullets.
The plaintiffs, which include a gun shop owner and a gun rights group, claim the two statutes violate the Second Amendment.
Should the Supreme Court accept that argument and overturn these laws, it would have sweeping implications for the entire country. That decision would need to be followed throughout the entire nation — which would most likely mean that neither any state nor the US Congress could ban assault rifles or high-capacity magazines.
And there is good reason to fear that this Court could, at the very least, decide to make semiautomatic assault rifles legal throughout the United States. In 2011, a federal appeals court upheld the District of Columbia’s ban on assault weapons — over the dissent of an up-and-coming right-wing judge named Brett Kavanaugh.
Although the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) permitted lawmakers to ban “dangerous and unusual weapons,” Kavanaugh read that decision narrowly in his 2011 opinion. He reasoned that semiautomatic rifles are neither more dangerous than lawful weapons such as handguns, nor are they especially unusual — among other things, he argued that at the time of his opinion, “about two million semi-automatic AR-15 rifles have been manufactured.”
Flash forward a dozen years, and Kavanaugh is now the median justice on a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees. So if he still believes semiautomatic rifles aren’t particularly “dangerous and unusual,” he is well-positioned to turn the opinion he wrote in 2011 into law.
That said, there is some uncertainty about whether the Court will issue a sweeping pronouncement right away on the legality of assault rifles. The Naperville case arises on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other expedited matters that the Court sometimes decides without full briefing or oral argument.
Shortly after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment gave Republican appointees a supermajority on the Supreme Court, the Court started handing down transformative — occasionally revolutionary — decisions on its shadow docket. In a fall 2021 concurring opinion, however, Barrett expressed concern that her Court was deciding too many cases on its shadow docket, warning that litigants were using the shadow docket to get the Supreme Court to opine on cases it ordinarily would not hear, and “on a short fuse without benefit of full briefing and oral argument.”
Notably, Barrett’s opinion in that 2021 case, Does v. Mills, was joined by Kavanaugh.
So there is a real chance that the Court will delay deciding the questions raised by Naperville until it or a similar case has been fully litigated in the lower courts and the case reaches the justices through the ordinary, more time-consuming process that the Court uses to hear most major cases.
But even if the Court does decide to push off the Naperville case until another day, when that day comes there will likely be five votes on this Supreme Court to legalize assault weapons throughout the country.
The Court’s Second Amendment decisions are incoherent and atextual
The Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence turn a sharp rightward turn in Heller, which was the first case in American history to hold that the Constitution protects an individual right to bear arms. And Heller and the Court’s later Second Amendment decisions are largely divorced from the actual text of the Second Amendment.
That amendment, of course, provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Thus, unlike most constitutional amendments, the Second Amendment does not simply announce that a particular right exists (the right to “keep and bear Arms”) it also states the purpose of this right (to provide for “a well regulated Militia”).
As the Court explained in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias, and the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view.”
In Heller, however, the Court abandoned this textualist approach to the Second Amendment, holding that the actual purpose of the amendment is to protect an individual right to “self-defense.” As the Court said in its most recent Second Amendment decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), “individual self-defense is ‘the central component’ of the Second Amendment right.”
Yet Heller also held that “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” And, at the insistence of now-retired Justice Anthony Kennedy, a relatively moderate conservative, the Heller opinion enumerated several specific limitations on the right to bear arms, including a rule permitting lawmakers to ban “dangerous and unusual weapons.”
Bruen was a 6-3 decision that expanded the Second Amendment beyond the bounds laid out in Heller — it struck down a 109-year-old New York law that limited who could obtain a license to carry a concealed firearm. Significantly, however, Kavanaugh wrote a separate concurring opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, which emphasized that several of Heller’s limits on the right to bear arms, including the restriction on “dangerous and unusual weapons,” remain good law.
That suggests, at the very least, that the Court’s current majority will honor this limit on the Second Amendment right. Kavanaugh, plus Roberts and the three liberal justices, form a working majority that supports bans on dangerous and unusual weapons.
But Kavanaugh has also signaled that he reads the words “dangerous and unusual weapons” very narrowly.
The Court is likely to strike down assault rifle bans — eventually
In his 2011 dissenting opinion on assault rifles, Kavanaugh explained why he thinks that semiautomatic rifles like the ones captured by DC’s assault weapons ban do not qualify as dangerous or unusual.
Recall that Heller essentially nullified the first 13 words of the Second Amendment, and ruled that the actual purpose of this amendment is to protect an individual right to self-defense. After inventing this new, atextual right to personal self-defense, Heller concluded that handguns enjoy special constitutional protection because they are “the most preferred firearm in the nation to ‘keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family.”
Kavanaugh argued in his 2011 opinion that, if handguns do not qualify as “dangerous” weapons, then neither can semiautomatic rifles of any kind — because “semiautomatic handguns are used in connection with violent crimes far more than semi-automatic rifles are.”
He has a point. According to the FBI, more than 10,000 people were murdered by a firearm in 2019 alone — and nearly 6,400 of these murders were committed by a handgun. Meanwhile, only 364 gun murders were committed by a rifle of any kind.
It’s worth noting that 3,281 of all gun murders were attributed to a “firearm, type not stated,” so it’s likely that the absolute number of murders committed with a handgun or a rifle is higher than the FBI’s raw numbers suggest. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, if you only count gun murders where the type of firearm is known, about 90 percent of such murders were committed with a handgun. Only about 5 percent were committed with a rifle.
Similarly, Kavanaugh argued that assault rifles are not “unusual” because they are widely owned by civilians (Congress banned assault weapons in 1994, but that law expired after 10 years and was not renewed). As noted, Kavanaugh argued that over 2 million AR-15s had been made when he wrote his 2011 opinion. He also argued that “the AR-15 alone accounted for 5.5 percent of firearms and 14.4 percent of rifles produced in the United States for the domestic market.”
There’s plenty to quibble with in Kavanaugh’s opinion. For starters, handguns are the most commonly used murder weapon because they are easily concealed and easily stored in a nightstand or in a similar location in the home. But that doesn’t mean that assault rifles are any less dangerous when they are used to commit premeditated murder, sometimes in a mass shooting.
But, in any event, Kavanaugh is the median justice on the current Supreme Court. So his views carry a great deal of sway. If he believes that assault rifle bans are unconstitutional, it is likely that he has the votes to declare them unconstitutional — though it remains an open question whether he will do so on the shadow docket.
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A meteorologist's Facebook comments about guns and kids alarm his audience
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A meteorologist's Facebook comments about guns and kids alarm his audience
May 3, 202311:29 AM ET
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Jaclyn Diaz
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A social media meteorologist posted comments about being armed when a 6-year-old girl rang his doorbell. His comments were alarming to some of his followers.
Bryan Steffy/Getty Images for MoveOn.org Civic Action
When Stefani Seeley moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area seven years ago, she was not used to the area's notoriously unpredictable weather.
So she turned to iWeatherNet, a Facebook page and website that posts regular updates about Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta-area weather for a loyal following. The website lists a number of contributors as part of its team, but founder Chris Robbins appears to run the entire Facebook account, with more than 115,000 followers, and posts frequently.
Lately, Seeley's once reliable weather resource has turned into something completely unsettling.
This week, Robbins wrote in a Facebook post that has since been deleted, "A child just rang my doorbell. Folks you do NOT ring doorbells in 2023. My 6 was loaded," he said, referencing a gun. "Keep your kids away."
Robbins didn't respond to NPR's repeated requests for comment.
Seeley took a screenshot of the post and shared it on Twitter in a tweet that has since been reshared thousands of times.
Just posted by a meteorologist, a gun nut, who covers our area. This is scary. pic.twitter.com/FpzqUfb7ZU
— TisStef (@TisStef) May 1, 2023
Later on, Robbins wrote in a separate update, "Folks, it is a bad idea to allow your kids to go around ringing doorbells in 2023. Read the news. Stop it."
His follow-up post went on to say that the girl had been looking for her lost kitten and that Robbins warned her that he "might pull her hair" if she rang his doorbell again. He ended with, "Others out there will cause harm. Please teach your kids to stay away from doorbells."
The comments disturbed Seeley and some of Robbins' other followers — especially as the remarks came just weeks after tragic shootings involving gun-wielding homeowners.
The social media posts show fear and paranoia in America, expert says
Last month, Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old in Kansas City, Mo., was shot and seriously injured after ringing the doorbell of a wrong house. Days later, 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis, who was on her way to a friend's house in rural New York, was shot and killed after the car she was in pulled into the driveway of the wrong house.
LAW
2 shootings at mistaken addresses renew the focus on controversial self-defense laws
Many of Robbins' followers who commented on these posts perceived his comments as disturbing threats. Some even urged him to get professional counseling.
The feelings portrayed in Robbins' social media messages are an example of the fear and paranoia that exist nationwide and push many Americans to reach for their guns, said Mark Bryant, the executive director of Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit group that tracks cases of gun violence.
In the last decade, "propagated by escalating rhetoric of the [National Rifle Association] and their acolytes we are seeing an underlying fear and paranoia that isn't abated by social norms and counter thought," he wrote to NPR in an email. "Folks live in their echo chambers and that fear is reenforced that there is a bad guy around every corner."
The NRA didn't immediately respond to a request for a response.
Bryant added, "We should be enjoying the fruits of exploding technological advancements and instead, a third of the country is cowering behind their firearms, sure that danger is just around the corner."
Robbins doubled down on his feelings in subsequent posts.
On Tuesday, he wrote in a since-deleted post, "Little girl got a pass. Do not ring doorbell. Please," along with a link to an Inside Edition story on the shooting of Yarl. He shared that same link in another post that said, "my 6 is right over there. ... I know the Fulton County police chief."
Robbins said in another update that he was joking, and he alleged that he was receiving death threats and had the police called on him.
Seeley said Robbins has made questionable comments on this Facebook page before. "He likes to rile people up, but then paint himself as the victim," she told NPR via Facebook Messenger.
But these comments were different and unsettling in light of the incidents involving Yarl and Gillis, she said.
"My kids have been on lockdown at school multiple times this year. They are living in fear, and parents are just getting used to the idea that it will happen and it will happen to people you know, including their own kids," Seeley told NPR.
Seeley said she had lost a child in a "senseless car accident. I'm used to feeling like another one of them could be taken at the hands of another AGAIN. Kids and parents deserve to feel safe. I just don't want to see other parents go through burying a child."
Fernando Alfonso III contributed to this story.
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One big idea that could prevent thousands of gun deaths
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-04-26-0828/gun-control-and-gun-rights-one-big-idea-could-prevent-thousands-gun-deaths
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https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23691442/gun-violence-secure-storage-laws-suicides-unintentional-shootings
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FILED UNDER:
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One big idea that could prevent thousands of gun deaths
The scorched-earth fight over gun control obscures a key idea that could actually save lives: prioritizing gun storage.
By Rachel DuRose@durosettastone Apr 26, 2023, 9:00am EDT
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A child holds a sign during a protest to end gun violence in schools at the Colorado state Capitol on March 24, 2023, in Denver, Colorado. Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images
Rachel DuRose is a Future Perfect fellow, covering climate change, housing, mental health, and more. Rachel previously wrote about the workplace, hiring, and executive leadership for Business Insider.
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Growing up in Florida, my twin sister and I never knew there were guns kept in our home.
My father’s unloaded firearms — a .22 pistol and a 20-gauge shotgun — were stored in a locked cabinet in the garage behind an array of boxes, bikes, and golf clubs. He worked across the country in California, and he kept the key with him at all times.
By most standards, my father’s weapons were safely stored, but he was in the minority of gun owners: 54 percent of the approximately 77 million gun owners in the US do not practice safe gun storage, according to a 2018 Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health survey. And one-third of these households with dangerously stored guns are also home to children.
This is a fact that should alarm us. In 2020, firearms surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children, with 4,357 children killed by gunfire that year. While the majority of child deaths from guns are due to homicide, an average of 35 percent between 2018 and 2021 were suicides, while 5 percent were caused by unintentional, accidental shootings.
“I often reflect on the day that our children walked out the door and one of my children returned home and for the other, I was picking out a casket,” said Julvonnia McDowell, a volunteer with the gun safety movement Moms Demand Action, whose 14-year-old son, JaJuan McDowell, was unintentionally shot and killed in 2016 by another teen who was playing with an unsecured gun. “Every time I say this, my heart breaks because our children deserve to live. They shouldn’t have to die like this.”
JaJuan (left) and his mother, Julvonnia McDowell. JaJuan was unintentionally shot and killed in 2016 by another teen playing with an unsecured gun. Courtesy of Julvonnia McDowell
Despite the horrific toll of firearm violence, America remains deeply divided on guns, and hopes for any kind of comprehensive gun control reform is dim. But the US could reduce gun violence — both youth suicides and unintentional shootings — by adopting stricter secure storage laws and educating gun owners about proper storage methods.
That’s why the national gun control advocacy organization Everytown for Gun Safety on Wednesday released a new report on preventing unintentional shootings by children, which was first shared with Vox. The group found that nine of the 10 states with the lowest number of unintentional shootings by adolescents have some form of secure storage protection. In contrast, the 10 states with the highest rates of unintentional shootings by children have very limited or no secure storage laws.
And while tougher laws and norms to better store guns would do nothing about the sheer number of firearms in America, storage safety offers a rare opportunity to find political consensus on guns. “Often people feel like nothing can happen in the gun debate, and while it’s true that the state of gun laws in the US remains weak, relative to our peers around the world, that doesn’t mean that change is impossible,” said Matthew Lacombe, the author of Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners Into a Political Force. “But as bleak as things seem, and as dire and scary as this problem is, we’re in a better position to keep putting in the work to make change happen.”
What does a safely stored gun look like?
While American gun owners and non-gun owners disagree about many gun restrictions, they actually find common ground when it comes to gun storage, a 2019 APM Research Lab survey on Americans’ views on gun policies found. Over half of gun owners and non-gun owners support speaking to their children about gun safety, keeping guns in a locked place, and taking gun safety courses.
That means most American adults support at least one pillar of what Johanna Thomas — a licensed certified social worker, gun owner, and volunteer with Moms Demand Action — calls the “gold standard of firearm storage”: keeping stored firearms unloaded and locked away, with ammunition kept separately and locked as well.
An unloaded weapon prevents someone from using the device if they do not know how to load it, while keeping ammunition separate prevents unauthorized users who do know how to load a gun from doing so. For a firearm to be locked, it needs to be stored in a locked cabinet or safe, or, at minimum, with a trigger lock that needs to be removed.
Gun locks prevent a gun from being fired. Ryan McFadden/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images
These three rules — unloaded, locked, and separate — have been shown by researchers to provide protection for children who live in the home where guns are stored. And while some gun owners may argue that locking a weapon could put them in peril if they need to use it quickly, evidence from Everytown’s report shows that an unsecured weapon does not make an individual safer or more capable of defending themselves.
“When I tell people I keep [my gun] in a safe, and I keep the ammunition stored separately, there are always questions about that,” says Thomas. “But I can tell them, I have access to my firearm in three seconds if I need it. Those three seconds also help me to decide, do I actually need my firearm?” That’s time enough, Thomas says, to give her the opportunity to determine whether a possible intruder is actually her child or spouse entering her home.
The state of American gun violence and the policies meant to prevent it
In the first four months of this year alone, guns killed more than 13,200 people — 470 of whom were teens (ages 12 to 17) and 81 of whom were children. Of these thousands of deaths, 234 are from the 173 mass shootings that have occurred in the US this year so far. These mass shootings, including the recent March Nashville school shooting — the 377th school shooting since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting — often make national headlines.
However, suicides are a significant and overlooked portion of American gun deaths and account for well over half of all annual gun deaths. An encouraging finding from a RAND Corporation report is that child access prevention laws — laws that require guns to be made inaccessible to children — reduce the rate of suicides among young people in states where they are implemented, simply by making it more difficult for a child or adolescent in mental distress to get access to a weapon that could instantly end their lives.
“Part of what I think makes gun storage laws or safe gun storage practices important is that the studies show that they can help reduce the risk of adolescent suicide, and that isn’t necessarily what we think of when we think of a gun violence problem in this country,” said Lacombe. “I think gun storage is an example of a policy that could make a real difference in terms of combating one of these underdiscussed but unfortunately really common types of gun misuse.”
Currently, 25 states and Washington, DC, require gun owners to take responsibility for the secure storage of their guns to some capacity. These laws range in intensity and level of protection, with the most comprehensive enacted in Massachusetts and Oregon, where gun owners are required to secure their guns when they are not in possession of the weapon. In Massachusetts, the penalty for not properly securing a gun ranges from a $2,500 fine to 15 years in prison depending on the type of gun.
Along with reducing suicides, these two states with the strongest policies have a 78 percent lower rate of unintentional shootings when compared to states without secure storage laws.
“Secure storage laws are some of the most evidence-proven gun safety laws that there are,” said Sarah Burd-Sharps, senior director of research for Everytown. “I think the hopeful news of this report is that nearly all of these shootings are preventable.”
Ending the stigma around asking about gun storage
When you send your children to someone else’s home, you often ask questions to keep them safe: Do you have pets? Do you have a pool, and if so, how is it secured? My child has an allergy, do you have peanuts in your house? “All of those things are routine,” says Burd-Sharps. “Asking about firearms and how they’re stored should be another routine safety precaution.”
“It’s a difficult conversation, but it’s one that we have to have,” said Thomas, a mom to a 13-year-old and 10-year-old who has this conversation every time she sends her children to a new home or in a new vehicle. In the few cases where Thomas felt a firearm was not stored properly, she found alternative solutions, such as driving her child herself or proposing an outdoor play date.
One way to make this conversation easier is to communicate via text and share information about your own home first, Thomas added. “Anytime my children are going to visit somebody else’s home or I have children coming to my home, I offer up that information,” she said. “A lot of times my conversation starts with, ‘We have three dogs in our home, we have a pool, it has an alarm, we have all of our liquor stored in a locked cabinet, medications are put in a safe, we have two firearms, they’re stored in our closet. Guns are in one safe, and ammunition is in another. Kids don’t have access.’”
Volunteering this information means parents often offer it in return without having to be asked, she said. Parents can also find more information on how to lead this conversation through Everytown’s gun storage campaign, Be SMART, Burd-Sharps added.
On top of checking in with other adults, parents should also be educating their children about the dangers of firearms and the need to find and notify an adult if they see an unsecured firearm. “I think that with children, you have to have that conversation about the dangers of guns,” said McDowell. But, she adds, “I always lead this back to it’s always the adults’ responsibility to prevent unauthorized access to guns and not a curious child’s responsibility to avoid guns.”
“We should talk to our kids about gun safety, but it’s a precaution, it is not a guarantee,” Thomas agreed. “The onus is on adults to keep children safe, always, at every point.”
Parents aren’t the only ones who should be leading these conversations. Everyone should be taking up the task. In fact, most gun owners believe law enforcement, hunting and outdoor organizations, active-duty military, and veterans would be good messengers for information on safe storage practices.
Health care professionals also play a critical role in promoting safe firearm storage, said Thomas Delaney, an associate professor of pediatrics who does suicide prevention work at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont.
“Particularly when there are children or youth in the home or people with identified risk for suicide, health care professionals have an opportunity to ask, ‘How are firearms in the home stored?’ and then provide guidance about how improving storage practices can increase the safety of everyone in the home,” said Delaney. “Health care providers in general have a lot of credibility and often trustful relationships with patients built up over many years, and their guidance can be a powerful tool for increasing safe storage and, downstream, helping prevent suicide deaths, homicide deaths, and theft or improper accessing of firearms.”
McDowell, who knows the devastation of these unintentional shootings firsthand, agrees that it is everyone’s job to educate and be concerned about this issue.
“I honor JaJuan by using my voice to talk to Americans all over the country, from all walks of life, about secure storage of firearms,” said McDowell. “For me, taking action isn’t a choice, it’s my new path, my new mission. But gun violence is an issue that we all need to worry about.”
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FILE - Students at a nearby school pay respects at a memorial for the people who were killed, at an entry to Covenant School, Tuesday, March 28, 2023, in Nashville, Tenn. Six people were killed at the private school and church yesterday by a shooter. The U.S. is setting a record pace for mass killings in 2023, replaying the horror in a deadly loop roughly once a week so far this year. The bloodshed overall represents just a fraction of the deadly violence that occurs in the U.S. annually. (AP Photo/John Amis, File)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Four people found shot to death in an RV in a small Mojave Desert community in California. Four partygoers slain and 32 injured in small-town Alabama during a Sweet 16 birthday that ended with a girl kneeling beside her fatally wounded brother. Six people, included three 9-year-old children, gunned down at an elementary school in Nashville.
Now the discovery of seven people found shot to death in rural Oklahoma is keeping the U.S. on a torrid pace for mass killings in 2023 and could push the number of people slain past 100 for the year.
The Mojave slayings over the weekend represented the 19th mass killing of the year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in a partnership with Northeastern University. That is the most during the first four months of the year since data was first recorded in 2006. The Oklahoma deaths have not been added to the database as of Tuesday afternoon.
As of the Mojave shooting, 97 people had been killed in the 19 mass killings this year, exceeding the record set in 2009 when 93 people were killed in 17 incidents by the end of April.
The number killed is a fraction of the total number of people who died by homicide for the year. The database counts killings involving four or more fatalities, not including the perpetrator, the same standard as the FBI, and tracks a number of variables for each.
“Nobody should be shocked,” said Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was one of 17 people killed at a Parkland, Florida, high school in 2018. “I visit my daughter in a cemetery. Outrage doesn’t begin to describe how I feel.”
The Parkland victims are among the 2,851 people who have died in mass killings in the U.S. since 2006, according to the database.
Mass killings are happening with staggering frequency this year: an average of about one a week, according to an analysis of The AP/USA Today data.
The 2023 numbers stand out even more when they are compared with the tally for full-year totals since data was collected. The U.S. recorded 30 or fewer mass killings in more than half of the years in the database, so to be at 19 a third of the way through is remarkable.
The violence has erupted from coast to coast and has sparked by a range of motives. Murder-suicides and domestic violence; gang retaliation; school shootings; and workplace vendettas. All have taken the lives of four or more people at once since Jan. 1.
Yet barriers to change remain. The likelihood of Congress reinstating a ban on semi-automatic rifles appears far off, and the U.S. Supreme Court last year set new standards for reviewing the nation’s gun laws, calling into question firearms restrictions across the country.
The pace of mass shootings so far this year doesn’t necessarily foretell a new annual record. In 2009, the bloodshed slowed and the year finished with a final count of 32 mass killings and 172 fatalities. Those figures just barely exceed the averages of 31.1 mass killings and 162 victims a year, according to an analysis of data dating back to 2006.
Gruesome records have been set within the last decade. The data shows a high of 45 mass killings in 2019 and 230 people slain in such tragedies in 2017. That year, 60 people died when a gunman opened fire over an outdoor country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. The massacre still accounts for the most fatalities from a mass shooting in modern America.
“Here’s the reality: If somebody is determined to commit mass violence, they’re going to,” said Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Rockefeller Institute of Government’s Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium. “And it’s our role as society to try and put up obstacles and barriers to make that more difficult.”
But there is little indication at either the state or federal level — with a handful of exceptions — that many major policy changes are on the horizon.
Some states have tried to impose more gun control within their own borders. Last month, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a new law mandating criminal background checks to purchase rifles and shotguns, whereas the state previously required them only for people buying pistols. And last week, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed a ban on certain kinds of semi-automatic rifles into law. But it faces a federal court challenge.
Other states are experiencing a new round of pressure. In conservative Tennessee, protesters descended on the state Capitol to demand more gun regulation after the March shooting at the Nashville school.
At the federal level, President Joe Biden last year signed a milestone gun violence bill, toughening background checks for the youngest gun buyers, keeping firearms from more domestic violence offenders and helping states use red flag laws that enable police to ask courts to take guns from people who show signs they could turn violent.
Despite the blaring headlines, mass killings are statistically rare, perpetrated by just a handful of people each year in a country of nearly 335 million. And there’s no way to predict whether this year’s events will continue at this rate.
Sometimes mass killings happen back-to-back — like in January, when deadly events in California occurred just two days apart — while other months pass without bloodshed.
“We shouldn’t necessarily expect that this — one mass killing every less than seven days — will continue,” said Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, who oversees the database. “Hopefully it won’t.”
Still, experts and advocates decry the proliferation of guns in the U.S. in recent years, including record sales during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We have to know that this isn’t the way to live,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety. “We don’t have to live this way. And we cannot live in a country with an agenda of guns everywhere, every place and every time.”
Jaime Guttenberg would be 19 years old now. Her father now spends his days as a gun control activist.
“America shouldn’t be surprised by where we are today,” Guttenberg said. “It’s all in the numbers. The numbers don’t lie. But we need to do something immediately to fix it.”
Fenn reported from New York.
This story has been corrected to say that shootings are happening an average of about once a week, not nearly one a week.
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Two Teenagers Were Charged With Murder In Connection To The Shooting At A Sweet 16 Party That Killed 4
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GUN VIOLENCE
Three People Were Charged With Murder In Connection To The Shooting At A Sweet 16 Party That Killed 4
Wilson LaMar Hill Jr., 20, Ty Reik McCullough, 17, and Travis McCullough, 16, were both charged as adults with four counts of reckless murder.
Pocharapon Neammanee
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on April 19, 2023 at 8:46 pm
View 6 comments
Megan Varner / Getty Images
Someone covers the door of the Mahogany Masterpiece dance studio in Dadeville, Alabama, on April 16.
An Auburn man and two Tuskegee teenagers were arrested on Tuesday in connection to a shooting that killed four people at a Sweet 16 party in Dadeville, Alabama, on April 15.
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Ty Reik McCullough, 17, and Travis McCullough, 16, were taken into custody on Tuesday night and both charged as adults with four counts of reckless murder, Sgt. Jeremy J. Burkett of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency announced at a news conference Wednesday morning. It was not immediately clear if either teen had legal representation.
Later on Tuesday, police announced the arrest of Wilson LaMar Hill Jr., 20, of Auburn, who was formally charged with four counts of reckless murder in the shooting which ocurred Saturday night.
Alabama Law Enforcement Agency
@ALEAprotects
At approximately 2:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 19, Special Agents with ALEA's SBI, made a 3rd arrest in connection to the Tallapoosa County death investigation in Dadeville. Wilson LaMar Hill Jr., 20, of Auburn, was arrested and formally charged with four counts of Reckless Murder
09:18 PM - 19 Apr 2023
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The shooting took place around 10:30 p.m. on Saturday at the Mahogany Masterpiece dance studio in Dadeville, where a birthday party was being held for Alexis Dowdell. Those killed included: Dowdell’s brother Philstavious Dowdell, 18; Shaunkivia Nicole Smith, 17; Marsiah Emmanuel Collins, 19; and Corbin Dahmontrey Holston, 23. Thirty-two others were injured.
Philstavious Dowdell and Smith were both high school seniors a week away from graduating.
At the press conference, Burkett said four of those injured in the shooting remain in the hospital in critical condition. Officials released few other details at the news conference and did not comment on a possible motive.
“We can’t get into a motive right now, because that would be part of an ongoing investigation,” Burkett said. “We can’t share that.”
Burkett did say that more charges are expected.
Speaking at the news conference, Tallapoosa District Attorney Mike Segrest promised to deliver justice to the victims and planned to convene a grand jury to bring an indictment.
“We’re going to make sure all those victims have justice, not just the deceased,” Segrest said.
Gun violence in the US is a public health crisis, according to the American Public Health Association. It is a leading cause of premature death in the country, responsible for more than 38,000 deaths annually. As of April 19, at least 5,414 people have died from gun violence this year, and another 7,194 have died by suicide, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive.
According to gun safety advocacy group Everytown For Gun Safety, Alabama has the fifth highest rate of gun violence in the country. An average of 1,149 people in the state die by gun violence yearly.
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Pocharapon Neammanee is a breaking fellow for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.
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Supreme Court to Hear Case on Gun Ownership for People Under Domestic Violence Restraining Order
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The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to review a case in its next term that asks whether people under domestic violence restraining orders are allowed to own guns.
The case centers around Zackey Rahimi, an Arlington, Texas, man whose girlfriend got a restraining order against him in early 2020 after Rahimi threatened to shoot her. Under the restraining order Rahimi agreed he would not possess firearms.
But Rahimi was then involved in five shootings spanning late 2020 and early 2021. He ultimately pleaded guilty to violations of the Federal Firearms Act, namely a provision added to the law in 1994 that prohibits people named in a restraining order from possessing guns.
The Guardian, or Authority of Law, created by sculptor James Earle Fraser, rests on the side of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.Al Drago/Getty Images
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit this spring overturned Rahimi's conviction, noting the amendment to the original law violated his Second Amendment rights.
The Department of Justice appealed the decision, pushing to the forefront the question of whether taking someone's right to own firearms while under a domestic violence restraining order is a violation of their Second Amendment rights.
The case is United States v. Rahim.
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Age limits, waiting periods, expanded red flag among changes to Colorado law
Gov. Jared Polis signed four gun control bills and hands the pen to Sandy and Lonnie Phillips, parents of Aurora theater shooting victim Jessica Ghawi, at the Governor’s office in Colorado Capitol building in Denver on Friday, April 28, 2023. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
By NICK COLTRAIN | [email protected] | The Denver Post
PUBLISHED: April 28, 2023 at 11:53 a.m. | UPDATED: April 28, 2023 at 5:12 p.m.
Gov. Jared Polis signed into law Friday morning a bevy of new gun regulations that advocates hope will tamp down gun violence in the state and had opponents pledging to sue over as soon as his pen hit the paper.
The new laws restrict gun purchases to people age 21 and older; create a three-day waiting period before a purchaser can take possession of the firearm; expand who can file so-called red flag laws to include medical care providers, mental health-care providers, educators, and district attorneys; and remove liability protections for gun manufacturers in lawsuits.
All four bills passed with only Democratic support in the legislature, where the party holds a supermajority in the House and a near supermajority in the Senate. A fifth bill to ban so-called ghost guns — firearms that lack serial numbers, such as those sold in build-it-yourself-kits — is working its way through the legislature. Democratic leaders backed all five.
Surrounded by advocates and survivors of gun violence, Polis said the bills will save lives. Supporters of the reforms have often pointed out these bills aren’t just about the mass shootings that have rocked the entire state, but also suicides, domestic violence and other shootings that don’t lead to days of news coverage.
“No action can ever bring back the loved one that you lost,” Polis said. “But turning your own personal tragedy into action in a way that will make others safer, will really prevent others from having to go through what you went through.”
The bills faced stiff opposition as they wound their way through the General Assembly. Republicans led a multi-day filibuster in March before the Democratic supermajority invoked a rule to limit debate. Republicans largely argued against the bills on the basis of Second Amendment rights and Coloradans’ ability to defend themselves and their property.
“Today, Colorado is less free and our citizens less safe and able to protect themselves,” House Minority Leader Mike Lynch, a Wellington Republican, said in a statement. “For law-abiding Coloradans, it’s a historically dark day — a day that many of our citizens, no matter their political party, thought impossible in their state. We know the vast majority of Colorado gun owners go above and beyond to follow the law. But as usual, Democrats want to punish the majority for the criminal or tragic actions of the few. This policy has never been successful and has been rejected in the past.”
Droves of students also filled the Capitol following shootings earlier this year following shootings at East High School that left classmates dead and administrators wounded. Several lawmakers at the bill signing invoked the student protests specifically.
“Mothers and fathers, doctors, kids, teachers, the people of the state of Colorado are saying enough,” state Sen. Jessie Danielson, a Wheat Ridge Democrat, said. “Enough is enough. Enough of your thoughts and your prayers, it is time for action. It is time for you in the legislature to do something. And we did.”
She and other lawmakers pledged that they’d come back with more gun legislation in future legislative sessions.
Meanwhile, gun rights groups pledged immediate legal action over the bills. Rocky Mountain Gun Owners already filed lawsuits targeting the constitutionality of the three-day waiting period and age limits for gun purchases. The group’s executive director, Taylor Rhodes, cited the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling commonly known as the Bruen decision as strengthening Second Amendment rights.
“Gun owners’ rights are being ravaged in the Colorado legislature,” Rhodes said in a statement that also called Democrats “puppets” of gun violence reduction advocates. “And they will not be happy until all law-abiding gun owners are disarmed and only the criminals have guns.”
Tom Mauser, father of Columbine High School shooting victim Daniel Mauser, left, Sandy and Lonnie Phillips, parents of Aurora theater shooting victim Jessica Ghawi, and gun control supporters gather after Gov. Jared Polis signed four gun control bills at Colorado State Capitol Building in Denver, Colorado on Friday, April 28, 2023. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
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Echoing arguments made by Republican lawmakers, he invoked domestic violence victims and young women being unable to defend themselves.
As the lawmakers debated the proposals earlier this year, a lobbyist for the group also argued against recent analyses that found firearms are a leading cause of death for children in the United States. The statistic wasn’t true “if you remove black males in that age group,” the lobbyist, Kevin Lorusso, said. The comment drew audible reactions during that February hearing and led Rhodes to tell Denver 7 that the lobbyist “misspoke.”
State Rep. Jennifer Bacon, a Denver Democrat and Black woman, invoked the incident during the bill signing ceremony. She called forward several other Black women at the signing to be seen for their work, including the incoming executive director of Mom’s Demand Action and the group’s legal adviser and state Sen. Rhonda Fields, an Aurora Democrat who lost her son to gun violence.
“These are faces of people who have quite literally, through this process, been delegitimized,” Bacon said. “People have tried to erase the tragedies that are happening in communities of color … I come to this bill to remind people that our lives matter and that we are a part of this narrative through the tragedies through which you haven’t experienced. And quite honestly, watching people skip over that has been devastating.”
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Nick Coltrain covers state politics for the Denver Post. He joined the news organization in 2022 after covering the Iowa caucus and COVID-19 for the Des Moines Register and all things for the Fort Collins Coloradoan.
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The Deadly Rise of 'Stand Your Ground' Laws
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-04-25-1415/gun-control-and-gun-rights-deadly-rise-stand-your-ground-laws
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Posts Mislead on Rules for Guns at NRA Convention, Utah GOP Event
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-04-24-0837/facts-and-fact-checking-posts-mislead-rules-guns-nra-convention-utah-gop-event
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Gun Control and Gun Rights
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https://www.factcheck.org/2023/04/posts-mislead-on-rules-for-guns-at-nra-convention-utah-gop-event/
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Quick Take
The three-day National Rifle Association convention in Indianapolis allowed attendees to carry firearms, except for a two-hour period when former President Donald Trump and other leaders spoke in a hall secured by the Secret Service. Yet, social media posts from a Democratic advocacy group misleadingly claimed that “guns were BANNED at the NRA convention.”
Full Story
There have been more than 160 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2023 as of April 21, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines “mass shooting” as any incident that involves at least four victims who were either shot or killed. Such shootings have led to calls for gun control from Democratic leaders, including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Many Republican leaders oppose restrictions on firearms and some attended the three-day National Rifle Association convention in mid-April in Indianapolis, Indiana, to speak against gun control.
While GOP leaders advocate for the right to bear arms, guns are not allowed at some political events involving former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is reportedly considering running for the 2024 Republican nomination for president.
But Occupy Democrats, an advocacy group that has previously posted false or misleading claims on social media, posted memes on Facebook misleadingly claiming that guns were not allowed at the NRA convention and an upcoming GOP event in Utah.
A post from Occupy Democrats shared on April 14 said, “Republicans want to turn schools into maximum security prisons, but meanwhile guns are BANNED from today’s NRA conference, because spoiler alert, guns are … DANGEROUS.”
A post from the same group on April 17 claimed: “Guns were just BANNED at the Utah Republican convention where DeSantis is speaking this month. Guns were BANNED at the NRA convention.”
But guns were mostly allowed at the NRA convention held from April 14 to 16 — except at the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum on April 14, where Trump and other leaders spoke. The Secret Service did not permit guns during the forum.
Guidelines for the NRA convention state that “[d]uring the 152nd NRA Annual Meetings & Exhibits, personal firearms may be carried in the Indiana Convention Center. When carrying your firearm, always adhere to all federal, state, and local laws.”
Indiana gun laws generally allow individuals 18 years or older to carry a handgun without a license.
“Special Note for those attending the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum (Friday April 14th 2:00pm): Please check the events page at NRAAM.org for a list of restricted items mandated by the United States Secret Service. This only applies to those attending the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum,” the NRA guidelines added.
Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence and other elected officials — including Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson — spoke at the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum on April 14 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. The Secret Service controlled security for the room during that time and did not allow guns at that location.
“U.S. Secret Service will control security within Hall A of the Indiana Convention Center and require attendees of the forum to be screened through magnetometers before entry. You will be subject to a search of your person and belongings,” the NRA noted on its website.
Guests inspect merchandise while attending the NRA convention on April 14 in Indianapolis. Photo by Alex Wroblewski/AFP.
“Per the U.S. SECRET SERVICE, firearms, firearm accessories, knives, and other items WILL NOT BE PERMITTED in Hall A. For a full list of prohibited items, please click here. Read the list of prohibited items carefully before traveling to the event. You will not be allowed in Hall A with any of the items on this list,” the NRA added.
Guns were allowed in the other areas of the convention. In addition, an exhibit hall featured a variety of weapons at the convention, which was expected to attract more than 70,000 people.
Guns were also not allowed during Trump’s speech at the 2022 NRA Convention in Houston — which was held just days after the May 24 shooting of 19 children and two adults at a school in Uvalde, Texas. Guns were permitted at other events during the convention.
Utah GOP Convention Will Allow Guns
The Utah Republican Party’s 2023 Organizing Convention on April 22 is scheduled to feature DeSantis as the keynote speaker — as noted in the post by Occupy Democrats.
While it is true that some rallies and events with scheduled appearances by DeSantis have not allowed guns, the Occupy Democrats post wrongly said that guns are banned at the Utah convention.
The Utah Republican Party said in an April 4 Facebook post that the convention will follow state law, which permits guns at such events.
Utah gun laws allow anyone 21 and older who can lawfully possess a firearm to carry a loaded firearm in public — whether it is concealed or not. Individuals 18 and up are allowed to open carry a “statutorily ‘unloaded’ (two mechanisms to fire)” firearm if they don’t have a concealed weapons license.
“We wish to clarify some rumors floating around. We will have some increased security for [the] convention, no doubt. As far as firearms are concerned, all state laws will be followed. Utah is an amazing second amendment state and we will keep it that way!! So anyone claiming firearms will not be allowed at the UTGOP convention is either lying to you or they are misinformed,” the Utah GOP said.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.
Sources
Allen, Greg. “Eyeing a run for president, Ron DeSantis wants to ‘Make America Florida‘.” NPR. 6 Mar 2023.
Allen, Jonathan. “Trump says mass shootings are not ‘a gun problem’ as 2024 GOP hopefuls pledge loyalty to the NRA.” NBC News. 14 Apr 2023.
Cathey, Libby. “After Nashville shooting, Republican lawmakers again call gun action ‘premature‘.” ABC News. 28 Mar 2023.
Davis, Charles R. “Firearms banned at events with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has argued ‘gun-free’ zones are less safe.” Business Insider. 8 Aug 2022.
Gaudiano, Nicole. “NRA says it plans to ‘showcase over 14 acres of the latest guns and gear’ at its convention days after the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting.” Business Insider. 27 May 2022.
Gregorian, Dareh. “Gun owners, protesters and Donald Trump converge on Houston for NRA event.” NBC News. 27 May 2022.
Hernandez, Joe. “Guns are banned during Trump’s upcoming speech at the NRA conference.” NPR. 25 May 2022.
National Rifle Association. “Frequently Asked Questions.” Accessed 18 Apr 2023.
National Rifle Association. “JOIN US FOR THE 152ND NRA ANNUAL MEETINGS & EXHIBITS IN INDIANAPOLIS, IN!.” Accessed 18 Apr 2023.
Joshi, Saumya. “US President Joe Biden Urges Congress To Pass Stricter Gun Control Laws.” Republic World. 17 Apr 2023.
Magdaleno, Johnny. “Not everyone can carry a firearm starting July 1 in Indiana. Here’s what remains illegal.” IndyStar. Updated 18 Jul 2022.
National Rifle Association. “NRA-ILA Leadership Forum.” Accessed 18 Apr 2023.
National Constitution Center. “Right to Bear Arms.” Accessed 18 Apr 2022.
FactCheck.org. “Tag: Occupy Democrats.” Accessed 18 Apr 2023.
ABC News. “Trump, Pence speak at NRA convention.” 14 Apr 2023.
U.S. Concealed Carry Association. “Indiana Concealed Carry Reciprocity Map & Gun Laws.” Updated 22 Mar 2022.
Utah Carry Laws. “Utah Firearm Laws.” Accessed 18 Apr 2023.
Ward, Myah. “‘We need you all’: Harris takes White House message on guns to Nashville.” Politico. 7 Apr 2023.
Wolfe, Elizabeth and Raja Razek. “Tennessee House GOP expels 2 Democrats in retaliation over gun control protest, on ‘sad day for democracy’.” CNN. 7 Apr 2023.
Categories Debunking Viral Claims FactCheck Posts
Tags 2024 Elections
Location Utah
Issue Gun Control Guns
People Donald Trump Ron DeSantis
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Governor calls for Tennessee law to keep guns from ‘dangerous people’ after Nashville school shooting
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https://tn.chalkbeat.org/2023/4/11/23679261/tennessee-nashville-school-shooting-covenant-governor-bill-lee-red-flag-law
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Gov. Bill Lee calls Tuesday for a gun restriction law aimed at people experiencing a mental health crisis. Lee spoke with reporters after visiting with officers at a police precinct that responded when a shooter killed three children and three adults at a Nashville school on March 27, 2023.
Marta W. Aldrich / Chalkbeat
Gov. Bill Lee called Tuesday for a new Tennessee law to help keep guns out of the hands of people deemed at risk of hurting themselves or others, his first full embrace of a gun reform measure in one of the nation’s most gun-friendly states.
Lee said that he’s asked legislative leaders to create and pass new “order of protection” legislation that strengthens existing law designed to protect domestic violence victims. He wants the GOP-controlled General Assembly to deliver a broader bill to his desk in the next month, before adjourning for the year.
Later Tuesday, the governor signed an executive order to strengthen background checks for buying firearms in the state.
The announcements came two weeks after a shooter killed six people at a Nashville school and one day after another mass shooting at a bank in neighboring Kentucky.
“We can’t stop evil, but we can do something,” Lee said. “And when there is a clear need for action, I think that we have an obligation … to remind people that we should set aside politics and pride and accomplish something that the people of Tennessee want us to accomplish.”
Lee’s call to action comes after thousands of Tennesseans rallied for stricter gun laws during daily protests at the State Capitol since the March 27 tragedy left three children and three staff members dead at The Covenant School, a private Christian campus serving about 200 children.
The shooter, who authorities later said was seeing a doctor for an “emotional disorder,” was shot and killed by police on site.
Authorities in Louisville are still investigating what led an employee of Old National Bank to pull out a rifle and open fire in his workplace on Monday, killing five people and injuring nine others.
“What happened in Kentucky yesterday might be averted by a piece of legislation that we’re talking about delivering today,” said Lee, who said he spoke with that state’s governor, Democrat Andy Beshear.
The two mass shootings hit close to home for both leaders. Lee’s wife, Maria, who is a former teacher, was a friend and former co-worker of two of the adult victims at Covenant. And Beshear said he lost one of his closest friends.
Extreme risk protection orders allow law enforcement to intervene and temporarily take away a person’s weapons if a judge deems that person is at risk of hurting himself or others. Florida passed a so-called red flag law allowing such protection orders after a shooter killed 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.
Lee did not use the phrase “red flag law” in describing his desire for new ”order of protection” legislation.
Instead, he called his proposal the next step beyond his comprehensive school safety package, which overwhelmingly passed the House last week and is expected to clear the Senate in the next week.
After the Covenant shooting, Lee’s administration revised the package and his proposed budget to include more than $200 million more next year to place an armed security guard at every Tennessee public school, boost physical security at public and private schools, and provide additional mental health resources for Tennesseans. Currently, about two-thirds of the state’s public schools have a law enforcement officer on site.
Lee held his press conference at a Nashville police precinct after meeting earlier with officers who responded to the active-shooter alert at Covenant.
“Protective orders are led by law enforcement,” Lee said. “They have a high standard burden of proof. There is due process.”
The governor acknowledged that passing an order-of-protection law in the legislature could be difficult — a key Senate committee voted last week to defer action on any gun-related legislation until next year — but said he is hopeful for bipartisan support “to get this done.”
“I’m one that believes that really difficult circumstances can bring about really positive outcomes,” Lee said, adding: “I certainly believe it’s that time.”
Democrats already have proposed several pieces of legislation aimed at gun reforms, including one on expanded protective orders. Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, the Senate’s top Republican leader, said after the Covenant shooting that he’s open to that approach, as long as it includes protections against false or fraudulent reporting.
House Speaker Cameron Sexton raised similar concerns on Tuesday.
“As we look at mental health orders of protection, they must have a level of due process, protections from fraudulent claims, and a quick judicial hearing for individuals who pose imminent threats,” Sexton said in a statement.
But Senate Minority Leader Raumesh Akbari expressed no reservation. The Memphis Democrat praised Lee for prioritizing legislation to restrict gun access and curb gun violence.
“We are ready to work with the governor,” she said, “and we urge our Republican colleagues in the legislature to move quickly to put gun reform legislation on his desk.”
Gun violence is the leading cause of death for children in America.
After a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Congress passed a law to provide federal funding for states that enact red flag laws. And in February, President Joe Biden announced that the Justice Department would give $231 million to states to implement crisis intervention programs like red flag laws.
Red flag laws are relatively new, and their impacts are still being studied.
In Colorado, where a law went into effect three years ago, nearly 400 cases have been filed so far seeking protective orders against gun owners, according to a review by Colorado Public Radio. Of those, more than a dozen respondents had allegedly talked about carrying out mass shootings in places like grocery stores, theaters, and neighborhoods, with varying levels of planning. More than a dozen others talked about a “suicide by cop” or otherwise ambushing police officers, and one had threatened to assassinate political leaders.
In most cases, the person was reported to own multiple guns, in one case as many as 31 firearms.
Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at [email protected].
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Nashville-area board may return Democratic lawmaker who was expelled from Republican-controlled statehouse
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-04-10-0601/politics-nashville-area-board-may-return-democratic-lawmaker-who-was-expelled
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Gun Control and Gun Rights
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https://www.reuters.com/world/us/nashville-area-board-may-send-expelled-tennessee-lawmaker-back-statehouse-2023-04-10/
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United States
Tennessee lawmaker returns to House after expulsion over gun protest
By Sandra Stojanovic and Omar Younis
April 11, 20238:36 AM GMT+2Updated 5 months ago
NASHVILLE, Tennessee, April 10 (Reuters) - Tennessee state Representative Justin Jones returned to the state House on Monday, pumping his fist and declaring "power to the people" as a Nashville-area council restored him to office following his expulsion over a gun protest.
Republican lawmakers ousted Jones and another young, Black legislator last week over their gun control protest on the House floor, capturing national attention with Democrats seeking to advance gun violence prevention and racial equality while Republicans wielded their supermajority power.
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With more shootings and guns on campus, schools walk a fine line in response
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-04-05-1253/education-more-shootings-and-guns-campus-schools-walk-fine-line-response
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Gun Control and Gun Rights
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https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/4/5/23670535/shootings-guns-schools-violence-metal-detectors-police
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A makeshift memorial for victims of the school shooting in Nashville last month. With gun violence on the rise, schools are trying to enhance security and soothe anxious students and families.
Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images
When Superintendent Kenny Rodrequez first heard about last week’s fatal attack on a Nashville elementary school, he immediately ached for the three children and three adults who were gunned down.
But as a school district leader, he soon began an all-too-familiar routine. He studies news reports about each new school shooting, looking for ways to strengthen his own district’s security, aware that any school could be next.
“It’s not like it’s in some faraway land,” said Rodrequez, who heads a small district outside of Kansas City, Missouri. “It’s happening everywhere.”
The data confirms that school gun violence is pervasive — and spreading. The number of guns seized in schools and fired on school property has skyrocketed since before the pandemic, according to gun violence databases.
In response, schools have taken steps to mitigate safety risks and soothe anxious students, teachers, and parents. A Pennsylvania district is preparing to install metal detectors in its elementary schools, while students in a Maine district have learned how to barricade classroom doors and confront would-be attackers. Other districts that had cut ties with school police are bringing them back, while still others are teaching families how to safely store their firearms.
Many schools are trying to walk a fine line, seeking to enhance security without turning their campuses into forbidding fortresses or funnels into the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, a national debate over gun control is raging around schools, with Tennessee students walking out of schools Monday to demand tighter gun restrictions — even as some lawmakers propose loosening the state’s gun laws.
The debate can be exasperating for school officials, who cannot control students’ access to guns yet are expected to protect them from gun violence.
“Many times when there’s a shooting or a gun found in a school, people are like, ‘You’ve got to keep guns out of the schools,’” Rodrequez said. But he believes the conversation about guns must be broader: “We have to keep them out of our communities.”
Gun violence in children’s homes and neighborhoods is far more common than school shootings, which account for less than 1% of all gun deaths among American children.
Yet school gun violence has become more prevalent. Guns have been brandished or fired on school grounds more than 230 times this academic year, according to the K-12 Shooting Database, which tracks all gun-related incidents on school property, including those without injuries. The number of such incidents is down slightly from the same period last school year but up nearly 170% compared with that period pre-pandemic.
More students are also bringing guns to school. The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks news and police reports, has compiled roughly 850 instances of guns found in schools since last August. By contrast, just over 600 guns were found during that period last year, and fewer than 500 were found during that period pre-pandemic.
In Erie, Pennsylvania, Superintendent Brian Polito attributes some students’ growing entanglement with guns to the loss of stability and structure during remote learning. In addition, a citywide anti-violence campaign went on hiatus during the pandemic lockdowns.
“When the pandemic hit, everything kind of fell apart,” he said.
Exactly one year ago, a freshman at Erie High School allegedly shot another student inside the school — the first shooting in the district since the 1990s, Polito said. After the incident, the district installed metal detectors in all middle and high schools. Polito estimates the district has spent about $2 million in federal pandemic recovery funds over the past two years on security upgrades, including new alarm systems, door locks, and security cameras.
The high school shooting is part of a growing wave of youth violence in the community, and even very young students are getting pulled in. Polito said that when a local university recently identified students at high risk of violence based on crime and discipline data, the list included some elementary school students. That data, along with news in January that a 6-year-old Virginia boy had shot his teacher during class, convinced Polito to expand metal detectors to elementary schools.
“Unfortunately, it’s our reality now,” Polito said about gun violence, adding that the district has also ramped up mental health support for students. “It’s something we all have to deal with.”
Even in communities where gun violence is rare, schools face pressure to prepare. In Gorham, Maine, a small town just west of Portland, schools Superintendent Heather Perry said she hears from worried parents whenever a school shooting makes the national news.
“People are much more hypervigilant,” she said, adding that online videos can make a distant shooting feel “like it’s next door.”
After high-profile shootings, Perry sends messages to families reassuring them that the district has detailed safety plans. The district has also invested in security technology, including surveillance cameras that the police can access and electronic door locks. And the local police department guides schools in active shooter drills, which includes having middle and high school students practice distracting a gunman by throwing objects or shouting, Perry said.
But even as schools plan for the possibility of violence, Perry said she doesn’t want students to feel constantly scared or surveilled.
“We don’t want our schools to become prisons,” she said.
Some school districts have added guards, and a few have reinstated school police officers after removing them or reducing their numbers following the protests in 2020 over police brutality against Black people. Last month, after a Denver high school student shot and injured two staff members, the school board swiftly voted to lift its ban on armed school officers.
Critics of school police cite research showing that their presence leads to more student suspensions and arrests. They also worry about the potential for bias when school security is beefed up, with Black students, students with disabilities, and others facing closer scrutiny and even criminalization.
But proponents say school police, often called school resource officers, help reduce violence by defusing conflicts and developing relationships with students.
Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said he is not surprised to see schools bringing in more officers as gun violence surges.
“Schools are most definitely under pressure to try to figure out how to keep their students safe,” he said.
Still, he cautioned against hastily adding security agents, arguing that effective school police officers are highly trained in law enforcement and working with young people.
“In the rush to shore up” school safety, he said, “we can easily create a whole new problem if we don’t do this the right way.”
Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at [email protected].
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As Nashville reels from school shooting, Tenn. lawmakers consider loosening gun restrictions
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-03-29-1132/gun-control-and-gun-rights-nashville-reels-school-shooting-tenn-lawmakers
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Gun Control and Gun Rights
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https://tn.chalkbeat.org/2023/3/28/23661164/nashville-school-shooting-tennessee-covenant-gun-policy-protest-legislature
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Nashville teacher Charlene Culbertson arrived at work early Tuesday morning. But she hesitated to walk into the building, a public elementary school not far from the church school where a shooter had killed three children and three adults a day earlier.
“I sat in my car until I felt like I had a good enough mask on to be who my kids expect to see,” said Culbertson, who teaches 20 preschoolers at Shwab Elementary School.
“My little students seem fine today, but I am not,” she said. “This has been a hard day.”
Teachers and students returned to class at Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools after police released chilling video footage overnight showing how a 28-year-old intruder, armed with two rifles and a pistol, shot through a glass door to The Covenant School in Nashville’s affluent Green Hills community.
The shooter, who had legally purchased multiple firearms from five Nashville-area gun stores, entered the school and began firing at students and staff before being killed by a police SWAT team.
Monday’s attack brings the U.S. count to 15 mass school shootings — resulting in the deaths of four or more people — since 1999’s Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, according to The Associated Press.
“Hearing all of this is heartbreaking. We’re scared,” said 16-year-old Jennie Li, who decided to come to a rally at the Capitol with her younger sister, Mary, instead of going to class at the magnet school they attend in downtown Nashville. They wanted their student voices heard.
Tennessee has one of the nation’s highest rates of gun deaths, including murders, suicides and accidental shootings. It also has some of the most permissive gun laws.
In 2021, it enacted a law that lets most Tennesseans 21 and older carry handguns without first clearing a background check, obtaining a permit, or getting trained on firearms safety. “Guns are essentially ubiquitous” in the state, a part of the culture, said Nashville Mayor John Cooper.
And state lawmakers in the Republican-controlled legislature are considering numerous pieces of gun legislation to make firearms even more prevalent.
One bill, sponsored by Sen. John Stevens of Huntingdon and Rep. Rusty Grills of Newbern, would drop that age from 21 to 18. The House version would let people carry rifles and shotguns in public without a permit.
Another bill, sponsored by Sen. Paul Bailey of Sparta and Rep. Ryan Williams of Cookeville, would allow faculty or school staff members to carry a concealed handgun on school grounds with a permit.
Both measures were scheduled for votes Tuesday in various committees but, after Monday’s deadly shooting, legislative leaders delayed taking up any contentious gun-related legislation until next week.
“Yesterday was a tragic event in this country and this state and in Nashville, and we need to be respectful of those victims and the families of those victims,” said Sen. Todd Gardenhire, a Chattanooga Republican who chairs his chamber’s judiciary committee.
Gov. Bill Lee agreed. He signed the controversial law to loosen restrictions for gun ownership and has questioned the effectiveness of red flag laws that would restrict gun access for people who are most likely to misuse them.
“There will come a time to discuss and debate policy,” but not immediately, Lee said in a video message released late Tuesday. He called on Tennesseans first to pray for the families of the victims and the shooter, the school, police, and others “who are hurting and angry and confused.”
Among the hurting is Becca Dryden, a Nashville parent who spoke at a rally outside of legislative offices in downtown Nashville. About a hundred people showed up to the Tuesday event, sponsored by Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, which has a chapter in Tennessee.
“This is a really scary time to be a parent,” Dryden said through tears, “and I just want my kids to live a full life. I want them to live. I want to pick them up from school every day — alive.”
Becca Dryden, a Nashville mother of two children, speaks Tuesday at a rally against gun violence, held outside of the Nashville offices of state legislators who are considering gun legislation. The rally was sponsored by Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.
Marta W. Aldrich / Chalkbeat
Amanda Rosenberger, a college professor in Cookeville, said she survived a 1992 school shooting while attending Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Massachusetts — and still carries the trauma with her every day.
“I’m tired of seeing people crying on the television. I’m tired of it,” Rosenberger said. “I don’t want to be one of those people any more. We need to stand up for our kids.”
Linda McFadyen-Ketchum, a retired teacher who leads the advocacy group’s Tennessee chapter, criticized GOP leaders for delaying business on gun legislation. The time to act, she said, is now, while the slayings of 9-year-olds Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney and school staff members Katherine Koonce, Mike Hill, and Cynthia Peak were fresh on everyone’s minds.
“I don’t have any more tears, y’all,” McFadyen-Ketchum told the crowd. “We’ve been crying since Sandy Hook. We’re cried out. We don’t need a day to mourn. We need a day of action.”
On the other side of Nashville, eighth-grade teacher Kelly Ann Graff had lots of tears. She cried on the way to work on Tuesday. To get through the school day, she put her emotions on the back burner and tried to support her students by answering their questions honestly in an age-appropriate way.
But she’s also worried about the well-being of her co-workers at Thurgood Marshall Middle School, as well as educators across the nation who are overworked, underpaid, undersupported, and grappling with the growing threat of gun violence.
The teachers are not OK, she said.
“I’m very afraid of us moving on too quickly from this event,” Graff said. “I’m afraid that prioritizing normalcy will enable this new normal of mass school shootings. This shooting hit close to home, and that’s a fact that we need to sit with.”
Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at [email protected].
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Nashville school shooting: Police seize guns at home of attacker
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Nashville school shooting: Police seize guns at home of attacker
Published
28 March
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Police released CCTV images showing the shooter gaining entry to the school
By Angélica Casas in Nashville & George Wright in London
BBC News
Three children and three adults have been killed in a shooting by an ex-student at a school in the US city of Nashville, Tennessee.
The attack took place at The Covenant School, a private Christian school for students aged three to 11. The three pupils who died were all aged nine.
Police said the suspect, armed with three guns, gained entry by shooting through a door at the school.
New video footage shows officers racing through the school to find the shooter.
The child victims have been named as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney.
The adult victims were named as Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61.
The suspect, identified as 28-year-old Audrey Hale, was shot dead by police.
Follow the latest updates here
There has been some confusion about Hale's gender identity - with police initially describing the attacker as a woman, and later saying that Hale identified as transgender.
A police spokesperson told the Washington Post that Hale "is a biological woman who, on a social media profile, used male pronouns".
Hale, who had no criminal record, was a former student at the school and officers said they believe "resentment" may have been a motive.
The shooter was armed with three guns, including a semi-automatic rifle. A search of the suspect's home led to officers seizing more firearms.
Police also found a manifesto, a detailed map of the school, and a plan for other attacks, including on a Nashville mall.
First call
The incident unfolded on Monday morning and police received the first call about the shooting at 10:13 local time (15:13 GMT).
Police said the suspect drove to the school and got in by firing through one of the school doors, which were all locked.
Surveillance footage released by Nashville police shows Hale using a gun to gain entry by shattering glass panes on the front doors, then wandering the school's deserted corridors - at one point walking past a room labelled "Children's Ministry".
The shooter is seen wearing what looks like a protective vest and carrying an assault-style rifle in one hand, with a second, similar weapon also visible hanging from the left hip.
IMAGE SOURCE,
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Image caption,
Vigils took place at the Woodmont Christian Church
As police cars arrived, Hale fired on them, striking one in the windscreen, said police.
Body camera footage released by police on Tuesday shows officers rushing inside and confronting the suspect. Hale was shot and killed by police at 10:27 local time.
Beloved school head among Nashville shooting victims
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Police spoke with the attacker's father during a search of a nearby home that was listed as the shooter's address.
It is where officers found a manifesto and "a map of how all of this was going to play out," said Nashville Police Chief John Drake.
Police also found additional weapons, including a sawed-off shotgun and a second shotgun.
Hale had reportedly messaged a former middle school basketball teammate 15 minutes before the attack, writing: "I've left more than enough evidence behind. But something bad is about to happen."
Hale's mother, Norma Hale, told ABC News: "It is very, very difficult right now", before asking for privacy.
Media caption,
Survivor of Illinois shooting makes angry plea in Nashville
The Presbyterian-affiliated Covenant School is located in the upmarket Green Hills neighbourhood, south of central Nashville.
In a statement, the school said they are "grieving tremendous loss and are in shock".
The mother of one pupil said her son had been left traumatised. "I think he's doing better now that he knows that the shooter is dead," Shaundelle Brooks told BBC News.
Hours after the shooting, a memorial service for the victims was held at the nearby Woodmont Christian Church.
Senior minister Clay Stauffer tearfully said that Evelyn Dieckhaus's sister, who is 11, had plans to be baptised in a few weeks, according to local outlet the Tennessean.
Evelyn's sister cried as she said, "I don't want to be an only child."
President Joe Biden called the shooting a "family's worst nightmare".
"We have to do more to stop gun violence," he said, once again urging Congress to pass tougher gun control laws. "It is ripping our communities apart, and ripping at the very soul of this nation."
The attack was America's 129th mass shooting of 2023, according to Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit that tracks gun violence data.
According to data compiled by Education Week, there have been 12 school shootings that have resulted in deaths or injuries in the US this year up until the end of last week.
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Is ‘Run, Hide, Fight’ the best advice for shootings?
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Rite Aid prepares to file for bankruptcy: report
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RETAIL Published August 25, 2023 2:21pm EDT
Rite Aid prepares to file for bankruptcy: report
Rite Aid is facing numerous lawsuits regarding its alleged role in the opioid crisis
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Pharmacy giant Rite Aid, which is facing an onslaught of lawsuits over its alleged role in the opioid epidemic, is planning to file for bankruptcy protection, according to a report.
The company's multibillion-dollar debt load and pending legal allegations that it oversupplied prescription painkillers, will be covered under the Chapter 11 filing, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
A Rite Aid spokesperson told FOX Business that the company does "not comment on rumors and speculation."
The law firm reportedly handling the restructuring, Kirkland & Ellis LLP, did not immediately respond to FOX Business' request for comment.
DOJ SUES RITE AID FOR ALLEGED INVOLVEMENT IN OPIOID CRISIS
A person walks into a Rite Aid store in Los Angeles on Dec. 22, 2021. ( Mario Tama/Getty Images / Getty Images)
Rite Aid, one of the nation's largest pharmacy chains with more than 2,2000 locations, is facing numerous lawsuits for allegedly contributing to the opioid crisis that has taken a toll on communities nationwide.
DRUG DISTRIBUTOR CONTRIBUTED TO OPIOID CRISIS BY IGNORING SIGNS OF ABUSE, FEDS SAY
The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Rite Aid earlier this year, claiming the company knowingly filled "unlawful prescriptions for controlled substances" in violation of the False Claims Act and Controlled Substances Act.
Ticker Security Last Change Change %
RAD RITE AID CORP. 0.70 -0.00 -0.45%
Rite Aid has denied allegations that it filled unlawful prescriptions, the Journal reported. A bankruptcy filing would also halt these suits for the time being and provide the company another pathway to resolve them, according to the newspaper.
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Cases of leprosy, 'historically uncommon' in US, surge in central Florida, CDC says
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INFECTIOUS DISEASE
Cases of leprosy, 'historically uncommon' in US, surge in central Florida, CDC says
Author warns that research suggests leprosy ‘has become an endemic disease process in Florida’
By Julia Musto Fox News
Published August 1, 2023 1:39pm EDT | Updated August 2, 2023 8:30am EDT
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Cases of leprosy are surging in central Florida, according to a recent research letter shared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The authors said that the Sunshine State has "witnessed an increased incidence of leprosy cases lacking traditional risk factors," with trends contributing to "rising evidence that leprosy has become endemic in the southeastern United States."
"Travel to Florida should be considered when conducting leprosy contact tracing in any state," they wrote.
The letter said that the number of reported leprosy cases in southeastern states has more than doubled in the last decade.
GEORGIA RESIDENT DIES FROM RARE BRAIN-EATING AMOEBA FOUND IN FRESHWATER LAKES
Lepromatous leprosy in a 54-year-old man in central Florida in 2022. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
Citing the National Hansen's Disease Program, it said 159 new cases were reported in the U.S. in 2020, with Florida among the top reporting states.
Central Florida accounted for 81% of cases reported in the state and nearly a fifth of nationally reported cases.
"Whereas leprosy in the United States previously affected persons who had immigrated from leprosy-endemic areas, ≈34% of new case-patients during 2015-2020 appeared to have locally acquired the disease. Several cases in central Florida demonstrate no clear evidence of zoonotic exposure or traditionally known risk factors," the letter noted. Zoonotic diseases are caused by germs that spread between animals and people.
In one central Florida man, a 54-year-old without risk factors for known transmission routes, the authors reported lepromatous leprosy. Lepromatous leprosy is one of three main types of leprosy, and people who are infected with it have widespread sores and lesions. The disease is more contagious, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
The man, who has lived in the area his whole life and is a landscaper, had sought treatment at a dermatology clinic for a painful and progressive erythematous rash. He denied recent foreign or domestic travel, exposure to armadillos, prolonged contact with immigrants from leprosy-endemic countries or connections with someone known to have leprosy.
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Feet of a leprosy patient in the Curupaiti Hospital in Rio de Janeiro Sept. 13, 2018. (Fabio Teixeira/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Whereas, a high percentage of unrelated case in the South were found to carry the same unique strain of M. leprae as nine-banded armadillos in the region, suggesting a strong likelihood of zoonotic transmission.
Many cases reported in eastern United States, including Georgia and central Florida, lacked zoonotic exposure or recent residence outside the U.S., and the letter said that there is some support for the theory that international migration of persons with leprosy is a potential source of autochthonous, or native, transmission.
The authors said a link to migration may account for the increase in incidence of leprosy in historically nonendemic areas and that further reports show that rates of new diagnoses in people born outside the U.S. has been declining since 2002.
"This information suggests that leprosy has become an endemic disease process in Florida, warranting further research into other methods of autochthonous transmission," they said.
A leprosy patient holds out his hand at the leprosy hospital in downtown Srinagar on Jan. 30, 2017. (TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP via Getty Images)
"Travel to this area, even in the absence of other risk factors, should prompt consideration of leprosy in the appropriate clinical context," the letter added.
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The absence of traditional risk factors in many Florida cases and the high proportion of residents who spend a great deal of time outdoors supports the investigation into environmental reservoirs as a potential source of transmission, they posit.
READ THE CDC LEPROSY LETTER - APP USERS, CLICK HERE:
Prolonged per person-to-person contact through respiratory droplets is the most widely recognized route of transmission. Leprosy, that is also known as Hansen disease, is a chronic infectious disease that primarily affects the skin and peripheral nervous system. It has been "historically uncommon" in the U.S., according to the CDC.
The World Health Organization says leprosy occurs in more than 120 countries and that more than 200,000 new cases are reported every year. As of 2019, Brazil, India and Indonesia all reported more than 10,000 new cases, while 13 other countries each reported 1,000-10,000 new cases.
Julia Musto is a reporter for Fox News and Fox Business Digital.
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First Alzheimer's disease risk assessment blood test for consumers hits market
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HEALTH CARE Updated on July 31, 2023 12:50pm EDT
First Alzheimer's disease risk assessment blood test for consumers hits market
Blood tests like AD-Detect can make Alzheimer's disease risk assessment more accessible
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Quest Diagnostics on Monday released the first blood test for consumer purchase that can help assess the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.
The AD-Detect Test for Alzheimer's Disease costs $399 and is available for purchase online and can assess a person's risk based on a brain protein that contributes to the condition, according to Quest.
Quest said its screening test uses plasma from a single blood draw to evaluate levels of amyloid beta proteins – which can form plaques in the brain and are linked to the progression of Alzheimer's disease – to help detect early signs associated with the risk of developing the disease.
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The innovation comes as the landscape for Alzheimer's disease care rapidly changes with new and emerging therapies.
"We are seeing much attention on emerging therapies for Alzheimer's disease, but with new treatment options will come the need to make screening and diagnosis more widely available," said Dr. Michael Racke, medical director of neurology for Quest Diagnostics.
Dr. Seth Gale points out evidence of Alzheimer’s disease on an MRI at the Center for Alzheimer Research and Treatment (CART) at Brigham And Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 30, 2023. (Reuters//Brian Snyder / Reuters Photos)
Blood tests like the one Quest launched Monday have the potential to make Alzheimer's disease risk assessment accessible and convenient, Racke added.
FDA TO DECIDE ON FULL APPROVAL OF ALZHEIMER'S TREATMENT LEQEMBI IN EARLY JULY
The test utilizes the same expertise and technology as its clinical AD-Detect Amyloid Beta 42/40 Ratio test that was launched for physicians in early 2022.
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Good candidates for the test include people who believe they are experiencing cognitive decline, if their loved one recognizes potential signs of mild cognitive impairment as well as those with a family history of Alzheimer's disease even if they are not exhibiting symptoms, are 65 years of age or older, or have had brain trauma or head injury, according to Quest.
Those who purchase a test online and have it ordered by the independent physician network will be prompted to schedule an appointment at one of Quest Diagnostics' patient service centers for a blood draw.
Test results will be posted on a secure patient portal, according to Quest.
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Illegal immigrant kids with tuberculosis infections released into 44 states
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National Warrior Call Day proposed in bipartisan bill to fight veteran suicide
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HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
National Warrior Call Day proposed in bipartisan bill to fight veteran suicide
'This stuff has got to stop,' bill co-sponsor says
By Elizabeth Elkind Fox News
Published June 21, 2023 7:00am EDT
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National D-Day Memorial Foundation President and CEO April Cheek-Messier says "talking to" World War II veterans "while we still can" will help us learn about this pivotal part of U.S. history.
FIRST ON FOX: A bipartisan bill would create a new, nationally recognized day aimed at helping fight the tragedy of veteran suicide.
A new bill being introduced Wednesday by Reps. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis., and Derek Kilmer, D-Wash., would recognize the Sunday after Veterans Day as National Warrior Call Day. Americans would be encouraged to mark the day by calling a current or former member of the Armed Forces to "have an honest conversation, and connect them with support," according to bill text previewed by Fox News Digital.
"I've had about 21 of my friends commit suicide, and I've had around 50 of my friends, a little over 50 of my friends, killed in combat. That's 71 people that I know personally, that I worked with, who were very good friends of mine that have died since 9/11. And I'm only 53 years old. So, this stuff has got to stop," Van Orden told Fox News Digital.
The first-term GOP congressman is a retired Navy SEAL with five combat deployments. His bill notes that the rate of veteran suicides has "steadily increased" since 2006 and that suicides among active-duty service members have increased from 2019 to 2020.
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Reps. Derrick van Orden, left, and Derek Kilmer are co-sponsoring a veteran suicide prevention bill. (Associated Press & House of Representatives)
"If people can call each other and just check in and say hi and see how you're doing ... one of the first suicidal inclinations is isolation. So, when we can break that isolation, hopefully it'll allow our fellow veterans to sort of police our own and take further steps if there is an issue or they think that there's an issue," Van Orden said.
A recent study by America's Warrior Partnership and in collaboration with the Pentagon and University of Alabama shows that the annual rate of veteran suicides is in reality 2.4 times higher than the Veterans Affairs Department has been reporting.
COMBAT VETERAN AND WIFE HELP OTHERS FIGHT PTSD – AND FIND HEALING AND HOPE
Kilmer said he hopes to see the legislation move swiftly through Congress.
The rate of veteran suicides has been increasing in the post-9/11 era, according to the legislation's text. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
"The good news is this got broad bipartisan support, not to mention the fact that all seven living former secretaries of the VA, a bunch of veterans service organizations, 27 Medal of Honor recipients have backed this because they understand the need," Kilmer told Fox News Digital. "I don't think this is a Democratic issue or a Republican issue. I think this is an American issue. And I just fundamentally believe we should embrace the notion if you serve our country, we should have your back."
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Kilmer, who is a co-chair of the bipartisan House Military Mental Health Task Force, recalled a conversation that made him realize the impact that insufficient mental health support has on the country’s troops.
"We know that veterans face alarming suicide rates, nearly double those of civilians. That rate is even higher for young post-9/11 vets and service members," he said.
Both Van Orden and Kilmer expressed hope the bill will move through Congress quickly. (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque/File)
"For me, part of this stems from early on in my tenure, meeting with a military leader, and I asked him, ‘What keeps you up at night?’ thinking he was going to say, sequestration or budget cuts or terrorists or something," Kilmer said. "He said, ‘You know what keeps me up at night is mental health.’ He said, ‘I've lost more soldiers to suicide than I have to enemy combatants.’"
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Van Orden commended the bipartisanship he's seen on the Veterans Affairs Committee so far, where he chairs the subcommittee on economic opportunity, and added of his legislation, "I cannot possibly imagine anyone who would not vote for this bill."
"Check your team jersey at the door, that's a huge deal, start working together," he said.
Elizabeth Elkind is a reporter for Fox News Digital focused on Congress as well as the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and politics. Previous digital bylines seen at Daily Mail and CBS News.
Follow on Twitter at @liz_elkind and send tips to [email protected]
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Biden gets two-day root canal after report president eats ‘like a child’
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Biden gets two-day root canal after report president eats ‘like a child’
By Steven Nelson
Published June 12, 2023
Updated June 12, 2023, 10:20 p.m. ET
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WASHINGTON — President Biden canceled all three of his planned public events Monday to complete a two-day root canal — after a report last month described tension within Biden’s inner circle over the ice cream-loving chief executive eating “like a child.”
Presidential physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor revealed that Biden, 80, had the first part of a root canal Sunday after “experiencing some dental pain in his lower right premolar” and that a second procedure would happen Monday.
“Our Presidential Dental Team from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center was able to perform an examination, to include x-rays, in the White House Dental Operatory. They determined that endodontic treatment (root canal) was most appropriate,” O’Connor wrote.
“Initial root canal procedure was performed at the time, with a plan for specialized endodontal follow up in the near future. The President tolerated the procedure well. There were no complications,” O’Connor added.
“He is experiencing further discomfort this morning, which was anticipated. The endodontal specialty team from Walter Reed will complete the President’s root canal today, at the White House.”
President Biden is having a root canal to repair a lower premolar.
AP
If a root canal requires more than one visit, the first treatment generally is “when the infected pulp is removed” and the “second (and maybe third) appointment is when the root canal gets cleaned and filled with a crown or other filling to prevent infections,” according to the American Association of Endodontists.
Biden’s aides have expressed concern about the president’s sugary food choices, Axios reported last month.
Biden’s physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor (right) said the procedure required two days of work.
White House Photo Office
The president likes to drink orange Gatorade and his favorite foods “include peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, BLT’s, pizza, cookies, spaghetti with butter and red sauce, and ice cream that he occasionally makes into a full sundae, according to current and former Biden aides,” the outlet reported.
Former President Donald Trump, 76, who is seeking a rematch against Biden next year, also stoked concern about his diet.
When a New York Times report described an overweight president chowing down on fries, his aides insisted he often skipped lunch, which also can cause health issues.
Biden had been booked for a full work day on Monday, including hosting an 11:30 a.m. event on the White House lawn with college athletes.
The root canal wasn’t publicly disclosed until shortly before the gathering, which Vice President Kamala Harris headlined in Biden’s place.
Biden’s tooth repair also forced him to scrap a mid-afternoon meeting with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, which now will take place on Tuesday, and a scheduled 6 p.m. reception for diplomats.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at her regular briefing Monday afternoon that Biden’s dental work was complete and he is “doing just fine.”
Biden had to cancel a Monday morning appearance with athletes on the White House lawn.
AP
“He was not put under general anesthesia. The 25th Amendment certainly was not invoked and he received local anesthesia for the procedure,” she said.
“I can certainly share all of that — as far as the health of the president’s teeth, I cannot speak to that,” she added.
Jean-Pierre said that among White House staff, “we all found out this morning internally” about the agenda-disrupting procedure.
The press secretary at first tried to laugh off questions and then grew testy when a journalist continued pressing her on details.
Dr. O’Connor has not been allowed to brief reporters on Biden’s health.
VCOM
“I should never get a root canal here because then I could see the judgment that comes — is coming my way,” she at first joked.
Later in the briefing, she more sternly sought to shut down questions about the timeline, saying: “Sir, it is a root canal.
Millions of Americans go through this. There’s nothing mysterious about it. It’s a regular thing that many people go through.
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What do you think? Post a comment.
In a break from historical practice, the White House press office has not allowed O’Connor to field press questions on Biden’s health — as polling indicates a majority of voters are uncomfortable with Biden’s fitness for a second four-year term, which he would be 86 years old upon completing.
O’Connor’s confirmation that Biden’s bottom row of teeth are his own follows speculation that Biden wore dentures.
At a 2019 Democratic primary debate, Biden appeared to be trying to hold in the top row of his teeth while answering a question from ABC’s David Muir.
FILED UNDER 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION DONALD TRUMP JOE BIDEN KAMALA HARRIS WHITE HOUSE 6/12/23
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South Carolina chips away at nanny-state healthcare
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-02-0649/federal-state-and-tribal-powers-south-carolina-chips-away-nanny-state
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Healthcare
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rights
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/south-carolina-healthcare-certificate-of-need-henry-mcmaster-hospitals
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MAGAZINE - WASHINGTON BRIEFING
South Carolina chips away at nanny-state healthcare
by Andrea Ruth, Contributor
June 02, 2023 01:01 AM
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South Carolina healthcare providers no longer have to seek permission from the state government to offer new services, expand facilities, or invest in technology.
On May 17, Gov. Henry McMaster (R-SC) signed a repeal of the state’s certificate of need rules. A staple of healthcare regimes in many states, certificate of need laws require a hospital to get government permission before adding beds or a new wing, expanding their offices to include OBGYN services, or procuring ultrasound transducers, among others.
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Certificate of need regulations were put in place by the federal government in the 1970s. The goal is to promote cost containment and prevent unnecessary duplication of healthcare facilities and services. But problems with these rules have been apparent almost from the start, with a growing list of bureaucratic rules quickly burdening hospitals, doctors, and other healthcare providers. By 1986, with evidence piling up showing certificate of need laws were ineffective, the federal government repealed the mandate.
In response, a handful of states did away with their certificate of need laws. But the bulk of states kept them in place. Today, 34 states and the District of Columbia still have certificate of need laws on the books, in full or in part. That’s necessary, say certificate of need supporters, because they help constrain healthcare costs and provide fairer access to facilities.
South Carolina’s repeal, though, highlights criticism of this approach, and it could be an inspiration to other states considering lifting certificate of need laws, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic in states where more significant percentages of the population live in rural areas.
According to the American Hospital Association, 136 rural hospitals closed between 2010 and 2021. Six of those hospitals were in South Carolina. To reverse this trend, and help rural hospitals achieve financial stability, the AHA called for “flexible models of care," along with a “decreased regulatory burden,” among other solutions.
Moreover, states with certificate of need laws still on the books have a range of healthcare problems, according to a 2021 study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, including rising healthcare costs and fewer hospitals overall.
According to Mercatus, rural states with certificate of need laws have 13% fewer rural hospitals than those with such laws and 30% fewer hospitals overall for every 100,000 residents. A separate study found states with certificate of need laws have 99 fewer hospital beds per 100,000 people than those states without.
A Mercatus analysis found that South Carolina, by repealing its certificate of need laws, will increase the total number of hospitals from 82 to 116 and, perhaps more importantly, grow the number of rural hospitals in the state from 21 to 30. That would be a significant rise since eight Palmetto State counties out of 46 do not have a hospital.
State Sen. Wes Climer, the lead sponsor of the certificate of need repeal law, said in a statement it would have a prompt impact.
“Over the last, I think, five or six years, certificate of need has been used to block over $400 million in healthcare investment in South Carolina,” Climer said. “So, there’s a lot of pent-up demand for healthcare investment in our state.”
In a statement released after signing the bill, McMaster said, “South Carolinians will have greater access to affordable health care services with the repeal of the Certificate of Need laws. Everyone benefits when the proven power of the free market is unleashed in our state.”
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The repeal of the certificate of need law in South Carolina represents a significant shift in the state’s healthcare policy. It’s one likely to appear more attractive to governors and legislators in other states as they evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of certificate of need laws.
The only other option is to continue living with laws that stifle innovation, expansion, and investment, which leads to fewer choices and lower quality of care for patients, critics say. Several states are considering proposals such as the South Carolina repeal law. If they follow through, proponents say the future of healthcare regulation in the United States is likely to prioritize market dynamics, consumer choice, and improved access to care.
Healthcare Hospitals Christopher Wray South Carolina Policy Law Regulation
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