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Trump Apparently Shot at Rally, Minor Wound

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2024 //
60

It’s all over the news. Trump was speaking at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Shots rang out, and one of them seemed to graze his right ear. He went to the ground and was quickly surrounded by Secret Service agents, who hustled him away to safety in an armored limousine.

At this point, no one has been identified or apprehended as a suspect.

Two points:

1. America needs gun control, which Trump opposes.

2. Political violence is horrifying. Gun violence is horrifying. No candidate has done more to encourage violence for political ends than Trump, whether it is his alliance with the Proud Boys or a dozen other extremist, militant white Christian nationalists that have rallied to his cause.

All that said, I am deeply saddened that Trump was targeted by a shooter. I wish him a speedy recovery, good health, and a new understanding of the importance of comprehensive gun control

Categories Guns, Trump

Justice Thomas Stands Up For the 2nd Amendment Rights of Violent Spousal Abusers

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2024 //
38

Lucien V. Truscott IV explains Justice Clarence Thomas’ devotion to gun owners.

He writes:

Well, I guess somebody has to stand up for the rights of spousal killers, wife beaters, child abusers, and the Second Amendment, and I’ll just bet you can guess who it is.  Today, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas stepped up and took one for the team, voting alone against the 8-1 decision in United States v. Rahimi that bars people from possessing firearms while they are under domestic violence restraining orders.  Not stripping them of the right to own guns, mind you, but only suspending that right under the Second Amendment until such an asshole can get the restraining order straightened out so he can get his guns back. 


Thomas must be spending so much time in the history stacks in the Fairfax County library, where he lives in Virginia, that they’re probably considering buying a cot for him to take naps on during his long hours of study of our laws in the 1700’s and 1800’s, not to mention old English law and a few ancient Greek statutes he quoted in his Bruen gun rights decision.  Perusing the laws that were in existence at the time of our nation’s founding, Thomas wrote in his dissent in today’s case that “Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue.”  The “statute at issue” suspends the right of those under domestic violence restraining orders from possessing guns.


Chief Justice John Roberts appears to be the one who convinced four of the other six gun nuts on the court, all of whom voted to allow bump stock equipped machine guns earlier in the week, to join him in at least temporarily coming to their senses.  Roberts was able to somehow resurrect enough common sense on the court that he got enough votes to rule, as the author of the decision, that “an individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.”  I mean, whoop-de-fucking-doo, but I guess we are in the position of taking them when we can get them, right?

The plaintiff in the case, one Zacky Rahimi, is a convicted drug dealer who had beaten his girlfriend to the ground in a parking lot and was dragging her back to his car when a bystander intervened.  Rahimi fired a shot at the bystander, and the girlfriend took that opportunity to escape.  Rahimi called her later and threatened violence – specifically, he said he would “shoot” her – if she told anyone about the incident. The girlfriend asked a Texas court to issue a restraining order and amazingly they agreed, finding that Rahimi had committed “family violence” and suspended his right to possess guns while the restraining order was in effect. 

Rahimi managed to hang onto enough firearms that he was involved in five shootings in the following months, according to the Supreme Court brief filed by the Biden Department of Justice.  Rahimi was charged with illegal possession of a firearm, was convicted in federal court and sentenced to six years in prison.  But Rahimi continued to argue that his rights under the Second Amendment had been violated.  The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Rahimi at his first hearing, but after Justice Thomas wrote the decision in Bruen, ruling that laws restricting firearms had to be rooted in the “history and tradition” of this country, the Fifth Circuit reheard the case and, incredibly, ruled for Rahimi.  Citing the Bruen case a Trump appointee on the court wrote that while the federal law banning people under restraining orders from possessing firearms was “meant to protect vulnerable people in our society…our ancestors would never have accepted” laws against domestic violence.

The decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was unanimous, so Rahimi’s right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment was restored.

The case was appealed by the DOJ to the Supreme Court, where many legal experts feared it would hit the “history and tradition” brick wall of Thomas’ Bruen decision.  Chief Justice Roberts, however, appeared to back the court away from that decision a bit today.  “Some courts have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases. These precedents were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber,” Roberts wrote. “The Second Amendment permits more than just those regulations identical to ones that could be found in 1791.”  Roberts cautioned that if courts hearing gun cases were to consider only laws in existence at the founding of the country, they would find laws dealing with “muskets and sabers.”  Instead, Roberts urged courts that will interpret his decision in the future to consider whether a gun regulation at issue is “relatively similar” to regulations that were in effect closer to the nation’s founding.  “For example,” Roberts wrote, “if laws at the founding regulated firearm use to address particular problems, that will be a strong indicator that contemporary laws imposing similar restrictions for similar reasons fall within a permissible category of regulations.”

In the amazingly dull and nearly impenetrable language of the Supreme Court, that comes as close as we will ever get to a relaxation of the Thomas decision in Bruen, which courts like the Fifth Circuit have interpreted as turning back the clock to the way guns were regulated in 1791, which is to say not at all.

That may be why Thomas was the lone dissenter in the decision today, because it took some of the edges off his celebration of guns-for-everybody in the Bruen decision.  Or maybe Thomas, in his history-stacks-diving on domestic violence laws discovered, as he has before, a favorite old English construction of what husbands and domestic partners are permitted to do to the women in their lives:  the “Rule of Thumb.” 

It’s not like this subject hasn’t been dealt with before.  In January of 1982, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report that was entitled “Under the Rule of Thumb:  Battered Women and the Administration of Justice.”  The Commission found that when it came to domestic violence, “American law is built on the British Common Law that condoned wife beating and even prescribed the weapon to be used.  This ‘rule of thumb’ stipulated that a man could only beat his wife with ‘a rod not thicker than his thumb.’” 

The Commission noted that William Blackstone, who “greatly influenced the making of law in the American colonies,” commented thusly on the rule of thumb:  “For as the husband is to answer for her misbehavior, the law thought it reasonable to entrust him with this power of chastisement, in the same moderation that a man is allow to correct his apprentices or children.”

American courts, bless their bleeding hearts, can be said to have taken up the rod passed to them by the Brits.  Have a look at this from an 1864 court in a case of a man who choked his wife:  “The law permits him to use towards his wife such a degree of force, as is necessary to control an unruly temper, and make her behave herself; and unless some permanent injury be inflicted, or there be an excess of violence, or such a degree of cruelty as shows that it is inflicted to gratify his own bad passions, the law will not invade the domestic forum, or go behind the curtain. It prefers to leave the parties to themselves.”  The Civil Rights Commission quoted a Mississippi Supreme Court case from 1824: “Let the husband be permitted to exercise the right of moderate chastisement, in cases of great emergency, and use salutary restraints in every case of misbehaviour, without being subjected to vexatious prosecutions, resulting in the mutual discredit and shame of all parties concerned.”

After an Alabama court had rescinded the right of a man to beat his wife in 1871, a North Carolina court came along and provided some relief to all those poor men who had to deal with those damn recalcitrant women: “If no permanent injury has been inflicted, nor malice, cruelty nor dangerous violence shown by the husband, it is better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze, and leave the parties to forget and forgive.”

Thomas, in his dissent that would allow abusive husbands and male partners under court restraining orders to own guns, would appear to smile upon Ye Ole Rule of Thumb as well.  It’s history and tradition, you understand — Thomas’ favorite harkening back to the good old days when a man was allowed to own not only a gun, but a stick big enough to beat his wife with.

Categories Extremism, Gender, Guns, Injustice, Safety

Robert Hubbell: The Supreme Court’s Wacky Spin on Gun Control

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2024 //
15

Robert Hubbell understands that the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority would like to remove all limits on gun ownership. But even this group of extremists couldn’t find a way to justify allowing a man with a history of domestic abuse and violent threats to exercise Second Amendnent rights. So they got tangled up in knots trying to find common ground to say that some people should not own guns.

Note that Justice Clarence Thomas dissented and was willing to allow a man who had threatened his girlfriend’s life and fired a gun at others to have a gun. Justice Thomas complained that Mr. Rahimi had lost his right to own a gun without due process.

In the odd world of Republican ideology, it is perfectly reasonable to defend both “the right to life” and the right for everyone to own and carry a gun in the open. Except this particular person, Mr. Rahimi.

Hubbell wrote:

On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that a domestic abuser with a demonstrated history of gun violence could have his right to possess a firearm suspended pending a hearing on a restraining order. See US v. Rahimi. The result was the only rational outcome in a case with horrific facts. As described by Mark Joseph Stern in Slate,

Zackey Rahimi, who beat his girlfriend, then fired shots at either her or a witness as she fled his abuse. His girlfriend subsequently obtained a restraining order from a state court that found that he posed “a credible threat” to her “physical safety.” Rahimi, however, continued harassing her, threatened a different woman with a firearm, and was identified as the suspect in at least five additional shootings. When the police searched his apartment, they found a pistol, a rifle, ammunition, and a copy of the restraining order.

Although we should celebrate the outcome, the fact that that case made it to the Supreme Court is emblematic of the extremism that the Court’s prior Second Amendment decisions have unleashed. Worse, in attempting to walk back from the precipice of the absurd absolutist position adopted by the Court in an earlier case (Bruen), the justices needed seven different opinions to explain how their ruling in Bruen applied to the facts in Rahimi.

In short, the opinion in Rahimi is a hot mess that leaves lower courts with no meaningful guidance on how to apply the nonsensical rule of Bruen to the real world of a society under siege by gun violence. There is an old saying in law that “Hard cases make bad law.” That saying is true of today’s ruling in Rahimi, as explained below.

It is important to reflect on how we arrived at this moment—one in which rational people heaved a sigh of relief that the Court did not adopt an insane result. The fact that we are grateful for the crumbs that fall from the table of the reactionary majority is a sign of the urgent need to reform the Court.

Background on Supreme Court Second Amendment cases

The Second Amendment was ratified in 1791. Between 1791 and 2008, the Supreme Court interpreted the language of the Second Amendment as protecting a collective right to bear arms, as was made plain by the language of the amendment:

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.

But in 2008, the Supreme Court overthrew two centuries of jurisprudence to rule in District of Columbia v. Heller, that the right to bear arms belongs to individuals seeking self-defense in their homes. In 2010, the Court ruled that the provisions of the Second Amendment apply to states and municipalities. Finally, in 2022, in NY State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Court ruled that the “ability to carry a pistol in public was a constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment.”

See how fast that happened? For two centuries, the right to bear arms was a collective right grounded in state militias. In the 14 years from 2008 to 2022, the right quickly morphed from a right to self-defense in homes to the right pack a pistol in public. And last week, the Supreme Court ruled that right extended to private ownership of machine guns.

The problem with Justice Thomas’ majority opinion in Bruen (2022)

Justice Thomas wrote the opinion in Bruce upholding the right to carry a pistol in public. He adopted an “originalist” approach, holding that laws regulating guns were presumptively unconstitutional and that regulations could pass muster only if they were “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Because most modern firearms were not in existence when the Second Amendment was ratified, virtually all restrictions on gun possession would be ruled unconstitutional under the originalist test in Bruen.

In short, Bruen was an absolutist nightmare that would lead to absurd results. District and appellate courts were quickly mired in rulings leading to nonsensical results—such as the Fifth Circuit’s ruling that Rahimi could not be deprived of his guns despite his demonstrated history of actual and threatened use of firearms against domestic partners.

The ruling in Rahimi (2024)

In Rahimi, issued on Friday, the majority ruled (8 to 1) that temporarily suspending a respondent’s gun ownership in a domestic violence proceeding was constitutional, notwithstanding the holding in Bruen. Justice Thomas dissented, writing (correctly) that applying the holding in Bruen to the facts of the case in Rahimi should have resulted in a ruling declaring the temporary suspension unconstitutional.

But the majority in Rahimi understood that the facts in that case were horrific and that it would be ludicrous to apply their earlier ruling in Bruen as written. In a just universe, the majority should have declared Justice Thomas’ opinion in Bruen a mistake and adopted a new rule. Sadly, the majority did not overrule Bruen. Instead, it came up with an exception to Bruen, which was crafted by Chief Justice Roberts.  

The exception created by Roberts is as nonsensical as Justice Thomas’s original rule. Or, as Ian Millhiser writes in Vox, Justice Roberts’ opinion is “incoherent gobbledygook.” See Vox, The Supreme Court refuses to accept blame for its worst guns decision, in US v. Rahimi.

Justice Roberts narrowed Bruen by writing that some gun regulations would be constitutional if they were based on “analogous regulations that existed when the Constitution was framed.” Okay, so far. What “analogous regulations” existed in 1791 that were similar to depriving a domestic abuser of his firearms? Answer: There were no such regulations. (A point made by Justice Thomas.)

Instead, Justice Roberts pointed to “surety laws” that required some people to post a bond if it could be shown they might engage in dangerous activity. But posting money is nothing like being deprived of a firearm (a point made by Justice Thomas). Nonetheless, Justice Roberts ruled that posting a surety bond was “relevantly similar” to depriving someone of gun ownership. Uh, okay. If you say so, Justice Roberts.

Don’t get me wrong. I am happy with the outcome. But Justice Roberts’ test of finding “relevantly similar analogous regulations” is pure mush—especially if posting a money bond is “analogous” to being deprived of gun ownership. The test provides no guidance and casts lower courts adrift on a sea of challenges to local gun regulations.

But it gets worse. Justice Roberts left the door open for future challenges from plaintiffs like Rahami. Why? Because Rahami claimed that the statute in question was invalid on its face as applied to everyone. This distinction is explained by Ian Millhiser in his Vox article, cited above:

Facial challenges allege that a particular law is unconstitutional in all of its applications, meaning that a court must effectively strike it from the books. They stand in contrast to weaker “as-applied” challenges, which allege that a law is unconstitutional only when enforced against a particular party. As Roberts explains, facial challenges are notoriously difficult to win — the party challenging the law must “establish that no set of circumstances exists under which the Act would be valid.”

So, it is possible that if Rahami had simply said, “The law is invalid as applied to me,” he might have won under Justice Roberts’ approach.

In the end, the Supreme Court has anointed itself as the final arbiter of every challenge to a gun regulation because no lower court can be certain that it has divined whether a regulation is “relevantly similar” to an “analogous regulation” that existed in 1791. Lower courts are effectively consigned to playing a game of Twenty Questions with the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court’s inability to set forth a coherent, predictable, interpretable rule for lower courts is due to its rushing headlong to overturn long-established, settled precedent—as it did in Heller, Bruen, and Dobbs.

Again, in the words of Ian Millhiser,

Rahimi, in other words, is a monument to this Court’s arrogance, and its inability to admit its own mistakes. Bruen is an unworkable disaster that has caused mass confusion within the lower courts. It should be overruled in its entirety.

To similar effect, with a slightly more positive view of the opinion in Rahimi, see Mark Joseph Stern in Slate, The Supreme Court Walks Back Clarence Thomas’ Guns Extremism. Stern writes,

By replacing Thomas’ hard-line views with a more malleable standard, SCOTUS has ended one battle over guns. But by remaining in this area, where it has no right to be in the first place, the court has invited a thousand more.

Finally, for a review of the various concurring opinions, see Chris Geidner’s Substack, Law Dork, What the justices are writing about when they write about Rahimi. Geidner includes the following excerpt of Justice Sotomayor’s concurring opinion, which will be the final word on the subject for today’s edition:

The Court today clarifies Bruen’s historical inquiry and rejects the dissent’s exacting historical test. I welcome that development.

That being said, I remain troubled by Bruen’s myopic focus on history and tradition, which fails to give full consideration to the real and present stakes of the problems facing our society today.

In my view, the Second Amendment allows legislators “to take account of the serious problems posed by gun violence” not merely by asking what their predecessors at the time of the founding or Reconstruction thought, but by listening to their constituents and crafting new and appropriately tailored solutions.

Categories Guns, Safety

Robert Hubbell: Clarence Thomas Is Now the Nation’s Leading Gun Expert

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2024 //
7

Robert Hubbell writes today about the shocking decision by the reactionary majority on the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a Trump-era ban on bump stocks. This restriction on a device that turns semi-automatic rifles into machine guns followed a massacre in Las Vegas when 60 people were killed and 500 were injured by a lone gunman firing from a hotel room high above a music festival. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion.

He and five others have “blood on their hands,” says Hubbbell. How many more massacres before the madness ends?

Hubbell writes:

The reactionary majority on the Supreme Court has dropped all pretense of following the law, so we should drop all pretense about the consequences of their actions: They will have blood on their hands. On Friday, that majority legalized machine guns by striking down a Trump-era federal regulation prohibiting “bump-stock” accessories for semi-automatic rifles. It is now legal for hundreds of millions of Americans to own machine guns—weapons of war favored by organized crime that Congress outlawed in 1934.

It is merely a matter of time until a “law-abiding citizen” exercising his “Second Amendment rights” uses a Supreme-Court-sanctioned machine gun to inflict mass deaths on schoolchildren and adults. When that happens, there will be a direct line from their opinion in Garland v. Cargill to the dead and mangled bodies killed by a weapon that can fire 800 rounds a minute with a single pull of the trigger.

The carnage will be horrific, but the reactionary majority will remain safe and snug in their private jets, wood-paneled chambers, and $5,000-a-plate dinners hosted by conservative advocacy organizations disguised as bar associations and historical societies. Their genteel world will be protected by heavily armed, armor-clad US Marshals who insulate the justices from the dangerous world they just made more dangerous.

The majority’s opinion in Garland v. Cargill is pernicious on multiple levels. The callousness of the majority’s conclusion is shocking. Their abandonment of settled rules of judicial construction is hypocritical. Their continued assault on the expertise of federal agencies charged with regulating complex, fact-dependent questions is part of their master plan to deconstruct the administrative state. Their willingness to base their decision on a lie about how bump stocks work continues the majority’s distressing pattern of making up facts to support otherwise unsupportable opinions.

For those interested in reading the opinion in full, it is here: Garland v. Cargill (06/14/2024)

Background.

The case arose from the mass killings in Las Vegas in 2017 by a shooter using semi-automatic weapons equipped with a bump-stock accessory. A bump stock replaces the original rifle stock and allows semi-automatic weapons to fire continuously up to 800 rounds per minute. Using semiautomatic weapons equipped with bump stocks, the Las Vegas shooter killed 58 people and wounded over 500 in a matter of minutes.

The 1934 Firearms Act prohibits civilian ownership of machine guns, defined as a weapon that can shoot “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” 26 U. S. C. §5845(b)

While a semi-automatic weapon requires the shooter to pull the trigger after each shot, a weapon modified with a bump stock does not. “As long as the shooter keeps his trigger finger on the finger rest and maintains constant forward pressure on the rifle’s barrel or front grip, the weapon will fire continuously.” See 83 Fed. Reg. 66516.

The distinction between the need to pull the trigger after each shot versus holding a finger continuously on the trigger was the pivotal fact in the decision. And that is the fact about which Justice Thomas lied in his majority opinion.

After the Las Vegas mass killing, the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) amended federal regulations to include bump-stock weapons in the definition of “machine guns” under the 1934 Firearms Act.

The opinion of the majority.

Justice Thomas, writing for the reactionary majority, ignored the plain language of the 1934 Firearms Act, overrode the findings and judgment of the ATF, and lied about the mechanics and operation of a bump stock, claiming that a shooter had to pull the trigger for each shot fired. As discussed below, that is a bald-faced lie. It is not humanly possible to pull a trigger 800 times per minute—which would be 13 times per second!

But even if we assume that Thomas’s opinion did not promote a deliberate lie, he presumed for himself the subject-matter expertise regarding firearms that belong to ATF.

Whatever Thomas’s motivations, his fiction about a shooter pulling a trigger 800 times per minute is the basis on which the majority ruled that semi-automatic weapons modified to be machine guns can now be legally owned by hundreds of millions of Americans.

The callousness of the majority’s decision is shocking.

The majority placed the profits of the merchants of death and the MAGA sponsors above the safety of the American people. They did so by effectively ignoring the tragedy in Las Vegas, citing it once and in passing. The majority opinion turns the tragedy into the animating force for “tremendous political pressure” to ban bump stocks—as if the widely held beliefs of a people desiring to protect itself is mere “politics.” It was not mere “politics.” It was the will of the people broadly shared by hundreds of millions of Americans—including then-President Trump.

The sterile and mechanical approach of the majority to a national tragedy is shocking. They are prisoners of their privilege and corruption. Terms limits for Supreme Court justices have never looked better.

The majority abandoned the settled rules of statutory construction

As Justice Sotomayor notes in her dissent, the majority ignored the statutory rule of interpretation known as “presumption against ineffectiveness.” As earlier explained by the late Justice Scalia, “The presumption against ineffectiveness ensures that a text’s manifest purpose is furthered, not hindered.”  In other words, courts should not credit interpretations that seek to evade the intent of a statute. (For more on this point, see Ian Millhiser in Vox, The Supreme Court just effectively legalized machine guns.)

As Sotomayor writes,

Congress sought to restrict the civilian use of machine guns because they eliminated the need for a person rapidly to pull the trigger himself to fire continuously. A bump stock serves that function. [¶]

The majority tosses aside the presumption against ineffectiveness, claiming that its interpretation only “draws a line more narrowly than one of [Congress’s] conceivable statutory purposes might suggest” because the statute still regulates “all traditional machineguns” . . . . [¶]

Every Member of the majority has previously emphasized that the best way to respect congressional intent is to adhere to the ordinary understanding of the terms Congress uses.

Justice Sotomayor then name-checks every majority member, citing their statements in previous opinions about the need to respect the “ordinary understanding” of the terms used by Congress. But the majority does violence to the ordinary understanding of the plain words in the statute by resorting to hyper-technical, metaphysical distinctions that separate the respective roles of the bump stock and the shooter in the process of firing.

Hogwash! As Sotomayor writes, “Machine guns do not shoot themselves.” The shooter pulls the trigger once and can unleash hundreds of rounds without ever pulling the trigger again. That functionality is what Congress prohibited. End of discussion.

The majority opinion is part of the Court’s assault on the expertise of federal agencies

To arrive at its result, Thomas and his cohort fashioned themselves as firearms experts with superior knowledge to the real experts at ATF. It is no secret that the reactionary majority is engaged in a long-term plan to neuter federal agencies to the extent possible and substitute the federal judiciary as a regulator of last resort. See Steven Vladeck, The Atlantic, The Bump-Stocks Case Is About Something Far Bigger Than Gun Regulations.

Vladeck writes,

[T] he real question in Cargill is not whether a rifle with a bump stock counts as a machine gun; the real question is whether we’re ready for a world in which that question will be resolved not by an expert executive-branch agency that answers directly to the president, but by federal judges who answer to no one.

We now live in a world in which the corrupt and corruptible Clarence Thomas is our nation’s preeminent firearms expert. And it will likely get worse next week if the reactionary majority overrules the “Chevron deference” doctrine in two pending cases.

Justice Thomas based his opinion on a lie

The reactionary majority has shown a shocking willingness to make up facts to support their preferred outcome. See Ian Millhiser in Vox, (6/30/2023), Neil Gorsuch has a problem with telling the truth, in 303 Creative v. Elenis. (“Gorsuch hands a victory to the Christian right by making false claims about an important First Amendment case.”)

Justice Thomas followed Justice Gorsuch’s unethical judicial doctrine known as “Facts? We don’t need no stinking facts! We can make up our own.” As noted above, Thomas engages in the fiction that a shooter can pull a trigger 800 times per minute. That is physically, humanly impossible—yet it is the opinion’s foundation. For a detailed explanation of Thomas’s lie, see Lucian K. Truscott IV’s excellent essay in his Substack blog, Justice Thomas’ Supreme Court opinion on bump stocks is a stinking, rotting carcass of a lie.

Where does the Cargill opinion leave us?

As you know, I am optimistic about democracy’s future in America—both short-term and long term. But opinions like Cargill—and Dobbs, Bruen, 303 Creative v. Elenis, Alexander v. NAACP, Trump v. Anderson—are the tip of the spear. 

The Supreme Court is about to unleash a wave of reactionary, retrograde, lawless, partisan opinions designed to implement the fundamentalist, supremacist, nationalist agenda of the far-right Christian core of the MAGA movement. Sadly, it will get way worse before it gets better as far as the Supreme Court is concerned.

But in the ashes of every liberty abrogated or right trammeled upon by the Court are the seeds of resurrection. The Court is inflicting widespread injury on hundreds of millions of Americans. It is denying the dignity and personhood of women. It is disenfranchising the descendants of enslaved people. It is threatening the climate that young people today will live with into the next century. It is making society a more violent, dangerous place where everyone can carry a machine gun.

At some point, the victims of the Court’s decisions will understand that the only way to break the unholy grip of the reactionary majority on the throat of the Constitution is to elect Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress and a president willing to enlarge the Court. It is as simple and difficult as that.

Legislation and regulations are informed by the political will of the people. The ATF outlawed bump stocks because the people demanded that its government do so. The reactionary majority believes the will of the people is mere “political pressure” to be circumvented by bad-faith wordplay paid for by the gun lobby.

Sadly, predictably, there will be another mass casualty event. And another. And another—until our nation experiences an event so shocking that even the Clarence Thomas’s of the world will be moved to recognize that the Framers did not intend the Constitution to hold its citizens hostages to weapons of war roaming the streets in the hands of criminals, madmen, and insurrectionists. I pray that we can avoid that dark day, but history teaches us that “thoughts and prayers” are useless against machine guns and armor-piercing bullets.

We will reform the Court—in our lifetimes. That is how bad it will get—and how quickly things will change when the worst happens. I wish it were otherwise. We have a path forward. We need only the political will to elect Democrats with the courage to restrain a lawless Court.

For more on this insane decision, read this:

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-kneecaps-congress-and-the-administrative-state-to-advance-its-own-policy-preference-enabling-more-mass-murders

Categories Guns

The Supreme Court’s Insane Decision to Gut Ban on Bump Stocks for Guns

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2024 //
49

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today to overturn a ban on bump stocks, a device that turns a semiautomatic rifle into a gun capable of firing 400-800 rounds a minute. The ban was imposed in 2018 by the Trump administration after the massacre of 60 people at a music festival in Las Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. The shooter fired from a high floor in a hotel overlooking the festival; he used a bump stock.

The 6-3 decision was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, who ruled that a bump stock does not convert a semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun. A 1986 law prohibits civilians from owning machine guns.

The question was whether the bump stock could fire multiple rounds with a single pull of the trigger or required multiple pulls.

The National Rifle Association must be celebrating. Responsible gun owners are not.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Deregulation, Evil, Extremism, Guns, Safety

Uvalde Families Sue Corporations That Encouraged School Shooter

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2024 //
9

Two years after the horrendous massacre of 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, the families are suing the corporations that fed the warped mind of the young man who perpetrated the murder. They hired the lawyer who successfully represented the Sandy Hook families and won a $73 million settlement for them.

The Washington Post reported:

SAN ANTONIO — The lawyer who won a record-setting settlement for Sandy Hook families announced two lawsuits Friday on behalf of Uvalde school shooting victims against the manufacturer of the AR-15-style weapon used in the attack, as well as the publisher of “Call of Duty” and the social media giant Meta.

The lawsuits against Daniel Defense, known for its high-end rifles; Activision, the manufacturer of first-person shooter game “Call of Duty”;” and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, may be the first of their kind to connect aggressive firearms marketing tactics on social media and gaming platforms to the actions of a mass shooter.

The complaints contend the three companies are responsible for “grooming” a generation of “socially vulnerable” young men radicalized to live out violent video game fantasies in the real world with easily accessible weapons of war.

USA Today reported:

The wrongful death suits were filed in Texas and California against Meta, Instagram’s parent company; Activision, the video game publisher; and Daniel Defense, a weapons company that manufactured the assault rifle used by the mass shooter in Uvalde. The filings came on the second anniversary of the shooting.

A press release sent on Friday by the law offices of Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder PC and Guerra LLP said the lawsuits show that, over the past 15 years, the three companies have partnered in a “scheme that preys upon insecure, adolescent boys…”

The first lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, accuses Meta’s Instagram of giving gun manufacturers “an unsupervised channel to speak directly to minors, in their homes, at school, even in the middle of the night,” with only token oversight.

The complaint also alleges that Activision’s popular warfare game Call of Duty “creates a vividly realistic and addicting theater of violence in which teenage boys learn to kill with frightening skill and ease,” using real-life weapons as models for the game’s firearms.

[Salvador] Ramos played Call of Duty – which features, among other weapons, an assault-style rifle manufactured by Daniel Defense, according to the lawsuit – and visited Instagram obsessively, where Daniel Defense often advertised.

Categories Evil, For-Profit, Guns, Justice, Texas

Idaho: A Conservative Republican Wins an Uphill Battle Against Extremists Who Run the State

By dianeravitch
May 24, 2024 //
5

Politico published a fascinating article about Idaho’s extremist Republican politics. The story focused on one former Republican state legislator, Jim Woodward, who is anti-abortion and pro-gun in a state where Democrats are a tiny minority, only 12.6% of registered voters.

Idaho has one of the strictest abortion laws in the nation.

Woodward was elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2020. But he lost in 2022 to Scott Herndon, an extremist who wants to criminalize abortion and codify it as murder; who wants vouchers for religious schools; and who wants guns everywhere.

This year Woodward is running as a moderate Republican, still anti-abortion but supporting exceptions like the health of the mother.

Idaho’s ban, which automatically took effect when Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, begins at conception and doesn’t make an exception for the future health of the mother. In 2020, Woodward, a Republican, voted yes on a law that requires physicians to prove that a mother’s life is at risk before performing an abortion or face fines, lawsuits, jail time and revoked medical licenses. In March of 2022, Woodward voted yes on another law that allows family members, including those of rapists (although not rapists themselves), to sue providers for performing abortions.

But Woodward is now running to moderate the law, having realized belatedly that physicians are fleeing the states and the hospital in his own district has closed its labor and delivery service, leaving 50,000 women without access to OB-GYN health services. Democrats can’t vote in the Republican primary. So Woodward must reach out to moderate Republicans.

His opponent Scott Herndon opposes any exceptions to the ban on abortion. Herndon believes that there should be no abortion allowed even for a child who has been raped. Instead, the child should view her pregnancy as “an opportunity.”

Woodward beat Herndon in a close election by 52-48%. But in the same election, other moderate Republicans lost their seats to extremists, who picked up two Senate seats and five House seats.

The Politico article uses the contest between Woodward and Herndon to illustrate the close link between extremist views on abortion and on vouchers. They want to ban all abortions and destroy public schools.

The Recall Replace Rebuild West Bonner County School District (RRR) group was started by a group of Priest River moms — both Republicans and Democrats — when their school board was infiltrated by far-right culture warriors in the 2022 election. In June 2023, those members, who held a majority as three of the five trustees on the board, elected a superintendent, Brendan Durst, with zero state-required education certifications and ties to the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a far-right political activist organization that aims “to defeat Marxism and socialism”; it has called public schools “the most virulent form of socialism.” Militia members began showing up at school board meetings, the school levy that funds basic operations failed to pass as residents became divided into camps “for” or “against” public education, curriculum slipped out of state compliance, and Durst began working to have intelligent design taught in biology classes and offer an Old Testament course (neither came to pass). The resulting chaos, social and political division, and lack of resources sent nearly 50 teachers, counselors and a principal fleeing the district. Many families left as well. Durst told one reporter that “his takeover was a ‘pilot’ others could learn from.”

Less than three months after Durst was hired, RRR gathered enough signatures to hold a recall election — framed not along party lines, but as those who cared about a functioning school district for their children against those embracing extremism. An astonishing 60.9 percent of voters turned out, and two of the three far-right board members were voted off. Durst resigned the following month when the State Board of Education blocked his certification.

“Eight hundred people voted in the 2022 election where those three board members were elected, and they won by a handful of votes, literally single digits,” Woodward says as we pull up to the community center. “But when 2,100 people showed up to vote in the recall election, then two of those same people were told to pack their bags. When you get a bigger slice of the population showing up, you get a decision that really reflects the values of the community.”

The RRR meeting tonight is attended by at least 50 people, in a town of only 1,700 on a rainy Monday night; there’s a lot of work to be done still to pass a levy to fund the school district. It’s clear that there’s no love in the room for Herndon. People say he escorted Durst into the first school board meeting where Durst was considered as superintendent, which was packed with militia members (Herndon says he was at the meeting, but did not escort Durst). After finishing the meeting agenda, Dana Douglas, one of the group leaders and a self-described conservative Christian, introduces Woodward with a reminder to the group that in the 2022 election, “only a third of Priest River turned out to vote. And of those votes, 75 percent went to Herndon and 25 percent went to Woodward. We want to flip that this time, and we need your help.”

Even if Woodward does win this race, it’s doubtful how much he can accomplish in a legislature with a far-right caucus bullying legislators into voting in lockstep. But he’s optimistic that a stronger moderate showing in the election will empower more moderate lawmaking.

“It takes leadership and a few strong individuals to do the right thing,” he says. “If the voters are supportive of a more moderate position, then legislators can step forward and do that. The party’s controlled by the minority position, so that silent majority needs to step up and let people know that they want to be represented.”

The article is a stark reminder of the deep divide that splits the nation and the rise of extremist politics in the Republican Party.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Gender, Guns, Idaho, Vouchers

Arkansas Supreme Court Furious at Judge Who Called Its Gun Ruling “LOCO”

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2024 //
6

By now, there are countries that warn their citizens to be careful about visiting the United States because of the widespread availability of guns.

Recently the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that lawyers could bring guns into courthouses, though not into the courtroom.

The high court of Arkansas remanded its ruling to a judge who opposed it and told him to reach a different decision. The lower court judge called the decision LOCO, and the state Supreme Court removed him from the case.

Debra Hale-Shelton reported in the Arkansas Times:

Remember Circuit Judge Morgan “Chip” Welch‘s order that questioned the sanity of a recent Arkansas Supreme Court ruling allowing attorneys to carry guns in courthouses? It turns out the thin-skinned Supreme Court justices don’t like judges questioning the sanity of their rulings, even when there’s good reason to do so.

But on Monday, the Supreme Court ordered Welch removed from the case. The order came days after Welch nicknamed the high court’s order “Lawyer/officer-of-the-court Carry Opinion” and repeatedly referred to it by the acronym LOCO. In Spanish, “loco” translates to crazy or insane.

The state Supreme Court’s vote to allow lawyers to tote guns in courthouses overturned Welch’s earlier decision. It then fell to Welch, as the original judge in the case, to put the higher court’s order into action.

Welch put some temporary guns-in-courthouses rules in place pending an August hearing to address safety concerns. His rules temporarily allowed guns in the Pulaski County Courthouse but only in the “common areas” on the building’s first floor and nowhere else.

In his temporary order, Welch raised numerous questions that seem pretty important. For example, how can we make sure inmates in the courthouse for their hearings don’t get their hands on these guns? We should note that the high court’s decision excluded courtrooms from the places where guns could be brought.

The Supreme Court accused Judge Welch of violating the ethics code for judges and showing bias; it called for an expedited hearing on May 23 to consider what to do about an insolent judge.

Categories Arkansas, Extremism, Guns, Safety

Jim Hightower: George Orwell Would Understand the Texas GOP: Mean and Crazy

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2024 //
6

Jim Hightower is an old-fashioned Texas liberal. He tries to understand what’s happened to his state in his blog. The GOP is just plain mean and crazy.

He writes:

If you think the GOP’s Congress of Clowns represents the fringiest, freakiest, pack of politicos that MAGA-world can hurl at us – you haven’t been to Texas.

It’s widely known, of course, that Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, and most other top Republican officials here are obsequious Trump acolytes. Thus, Texas is infamously racing against Florida to be declared the stupidest, meanest, most-repressive state government in America, constantly making demonic attacks on women’s freedom, immigrants, voting rights, public schools, poor people, and so on. But I’m confident Texas will win this race to the bottom for one big reason: GOP crazy runs extraordinarily deep here.

We have a county-level layer of ultra-MAGA cultists constantly pressing the state’s far-right officials to march all the way to the farthest edge of extremism – then leap into absurdity. Therefore, the party officially supports abolishment of labor unions, elimination of the minimum wage, privatization of social security, legalization of machine guns, and… well, you get the drift. Now, though, local mad-dog Trumpistas are pushing their party straight into the abyss of autocracy by declaring war on H-E-B.

What’s that? H-E-B is a Texas chain of supermarkets beloved in communities throughout the state. “Beloved,” because the stores fully embrace the rich diversity of all people in our state, has affordable prices, values employees, and supports community needs.

Nonetheless, county Republican zealots screech that H-E-B violates their party ideology by accepting food stamps, opposing privatization of schools, and (horrors!) sponsoring some LBGTQ pride events. So, they’re demanding official condemnation of the grocery chain for – GET THIS – “advocating for policies contrary to the Republican Party of Texas platform.”

Yes, violating the party platform is to be criminalized. It’s the reincarnation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Be MAGA… or else.

Categories BATS, Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Guns, Ignorance, Insane, Privatization, Racism, Republicans, Stupid, Texas

Should Parents Be Held Accountable for Their Child’s Crimes?

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2024 //
10

Two different juries in Michigan convicted the parents of a school shooter. James and Jennifer Crumbley were both found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and were sentenced to 10-15 years in prison. Their son Ethan murdered four other students and wounded several others and a teacher at Oxford High School in Oxford, Michigan.

CNN reported:

James purchased the firearm for his son on Black Friday, four days before the shooting. The next day, Jennifer took her son to the firing range for target practice. “Mom & son day testing out his new Xmas present,” she wrote afterward on social media. The parents failed to properly secure the firearm, as James Crumbley hid it in their bedroom but did not use any locking device, the prosecution argued.

In addition, the trials focused on a pivotal meeting between school employees, Ethan and his parents on the morning of the shooting. Ethan had been called into the school office after he made disturbing writings on a math worksheet, including the phrases “blood everywhere” and “my life is useless” and drawings of a gun and bullet.

The school employees recommended the parents immediately take him out of class and get him mental health treatment, but they declined to do so, saying they had work. The Crumbleys also did not mention to the school the recent gun purchase. Afterward, Ethan was sent back to class. About two hours later, he took the gun out of his backpack and opened fire at the school.

This was apparently the first time that parents have been held accountable for their child’s crimes.

Do you approve? I do.

Do you think other parents might be more responsible in the future? I wish so but I doubt it. I recall that the mother of the Sandy Hook murderer bought him an AR-15, took him to target practice to teach him how to use it. He was mentally ill. She was the first one he killed on the day of the massacre. He shot her in the face while she was still in bed. He then went to Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed 26 people, including 20 children, ages 6 and 7, and six staff members.

Nonetheless, parent accountability for the crimes of their minor children is a step forward. In a sane country, access to deadly weapons would be restricted. In most of this country, there are no limits on buying and carrying guns, thanks to the Republican Party and the Supreme Court, the NRA and the Federalist Society.

Human life is cheap in a fun-loving society.

Categories Accountability, Guns, Michigan, Parents, Safety, Students
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