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.
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.
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.
Jonathan V. Last writes for The Bulwark, a website for Never Trumper Republicans that has some of the best writing on the current state of politics. In this post, Last explains that Trump presided over a period of crime “American carnage,” Trump called it), but crime has dropped during Biden’s term in office.
Last writes:
Remember the bad old days when people lost their minds about the crime wave Joe Biden had unleashed on America with his woke whatever-whatever policies?
How many stories have the Washington Examiner and the WSJ op-ed page written about these facts?
I’ll let you guess. But wait—there’s even more good news.
The “Biden crime wave” was always proffered in bad faith because the “crime wave” appeared in 2020, while Donald Trump was president: 2020 saw the largest rise in the murder rate in American history.
Now just because Biden inherited a problem doesn’t mean he gets a pass on its existence. When you’re president, you’re supposed to solve everyone’s problems, not just the ones that crop up during your administration.
And here’s the data: All crime is down under Biden, with one exception.
Violent crimes like murder and rape? Down. Property crimes like burglary and theft? Down. Crime in cities? Down. Crime in rural areas? Down.
The lone exception is that car theft in metropolitan areas has gone up. That’s it.
Like the man said: Take the W.
In Donald Trump’s final year in office the murder rate rose by 30 percent, which was the largest jump in U.S. history. Over Joe Biden’s last 16 months, we’ve had the biggest drop in the murder rate in U.S. history.
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.
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.
Colorado has been the site of some high-profile mass murders. One thinks of the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, which involved 15 deaths plus the two shooters. The massacre at a movie theatre in 2012 in Aurora, which involved 12 deaths. The massacre at a supermarket in Boulder, where 10 people died. Five people died at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs in 2023. Curtailing access to guns may be one way to limit future killers.
Colorado would ban the sale, transfer and importation of so-called assault weaponsunder a bill introduced Tuesday in the state House.
The measure, HB24-1292, is similar to legislation that a House committee killed last spring in its first hearing, but this year’s version may have better chances. The new bill would define assault weapons as including semi-automatic rifles and pistols with fixed large-capacity magazines or the ability to accept detachable magazines, along with several other types of high-powered firearms.
It would not ban the possession of the weapons but would prohibit the “manufacturing, importing, purchasing, selling, offering to sell or transferring” of them, with exemptions for police and the military. It also would prohibit the possession of rapid-fire trigger activators, Seth Klamann reports.
After the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, some 16 Republican-dominated states have imposed near-total bans on abortion. In response, access to abortion pills has grown.
In this article in VOX, veteran journalist Rachel M. Cohen describes the numerous organizations that provide telehealth sessions with doctors who provide prescriptions, as well as supplying abortion pills. In addition, several Democrat-dominated states have passed shield laws to protect doctors in their state who advise women in red states.
A network of like-minded groups have filled the gap created by the Dobbs decision, making these pills easily available and inexpensive.
Taking a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol within the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy was already the most common method for abortion in the United States before the Dobbs decision, partly due to its safety record, itslower cost, diminished access to in-person care, and greater opportunities for privacy. The popularity of medication abortion has only grown since then:A poll released in March found majorities of Americans support keeping medication abortion legal and allowing women to use it at home to end an early-stage pregnancy. Another survey found 59 percent of voters disapprove of overturning the FDA’s approval of abortion medication, including 72 percent of Democrats, 65 percent of independents, and 40 percent of Republicans.
Immediately after Dobbs, the only way to obtain the pills by mail was through international sources, which took weeks to arrive. Now, however, the pills are available by mail in the U.S. and will arrive in days.
The e-commerce marketplace for abortion medication has expanded, and the cost for pills has fallen dramatically
Outside of telemedicine options, there are over two dozen e-commerce websites that sell and ship medication abortion to the US. This international supply chain has grown significantly since Dobbs and most of these sites do not require prescriptions and do not require people to upload their IDs or have medical consultations. Plan C has vetted 26 of these sites, including testing their pills to ensure they’re “real products of acceptable quality.”
The cost of the pills has dropped significantly, some for as little as $42-47.
Volunteer groups have sprung up, with some offering the pills for free.
Community support groups, also known as “companion networks,” have grown since the overturn of Roe v. Wade and now actively provide free abortion pills to people living in states with bans on reproductive health care. These groups, some of which can be found on sites like Plan C and Red State Access, mail medication abortion and offer doula support.
But what happens if the Supreme Court limits access to mail-order abortion pills?
While abortion advocates doubt the justices will go so far as to pull mifepristone off the market, as a federal judge in Texas attempted to do earlier in 2023, they are bracing for the possibility that the court might reimpose medically unnecessary restrictionson access, like bans on prescribing mifepristone via telemedicine.
Even if that happens, though, most of the aforementioned options for accessing medication abortion would remain intact. It’s not clear if the FDA would even abide by such a Supreme Court ruling, but if it did, providers using shield laws could still legally ship misoprostol to patients in banned states.
“A Supreme Court ruling wouldn’t affect the community-based networks, ProgressiveRx, or the e-commerce websites that sell pills at all, and so there would still be ways of getting mifepristone and misoprostol in the mail,” Wells said. “The Supreme Court could affect services like Aid Access and Abuzz, but they could also switch to misoprostol-only abortions and that’s what they’re planning to do.”
The rapid growth in the number of ways to access abortion pills and the planning to protect access in the future demonstrate that Dobbs will prove to be like prohibiting the sale or consumption of liquor. When the population has grown accustomed to consuming alcohol or getting an abortion legally, it will be impossible to ban it.
The high school student killed an 11-year-old sixth grader and wounded several others, then killed himself.
Mr. Marburger gave his life to save the lives of students.
In this country, “gun rights” have more protection than the lives of students, teachers, and principals. Don’t believe those politicians who say they protect “life” but oppose gun control. This is a contradiction or outright hypocrisy. Anyone who values life must demand gun control.
Governor Kim Reynolds ordered state flags to be flown at half-mast. Surely, she also offered thoughts and prayers. Maybe. Don’t count on her to inquire why a high school student had a deadly weapon or to act to make sure that buyers of guns undergo background checks, take training in gun safety, are required to own gun safes, and are subject to red flag laws. But none of that will happen. Expect that she will propose arming teachers and other adults in the school. Metal detectors. Probably, she’ll spend some money on mental health.
One big reason to feel hopeful about the future is that our youth seem to have figured out how to organize for change. After the massacre of students at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, survivors organized a huge protest demanding gun control. They haven’t won so far but they are not likely to give up.
The grownups are not doing enough to address climate change, and Republicans keep insisting that climate change is a hoax.
In June 2023, the hottest June ever recorded in a summer that would break global heat records, 16 young people walked into a courthouse in Helena, Montana, and insisted that they had the right to a stable climate.
The moment was, in the United States, unprecedented.
For years, youth around the world had been suing governments – state, regional, federal – and demanding more action by policymakers to address what scientists worldwide agree is an environmental crisis directly caused by human behavior. By 2022 there had been 34 global climate cases brought on behalf of plaintiffs ages 25 and younger – part of a global climate litigation explosion, according to Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
In the courtroom that day, the young people were asking not for any financial reward, but for the government of Montana to uphold its Constitution, one of a handful in the U.S. that explicitly protects both current and future citizens’ right to a healthful environment. There was Rikki Held, the oldest of the Montana youth plaintiffs at 22, whose name was on the lawsuit and whose family’s ranch was increasingly threatened by fires and floods. There were Lander and Badge Busse, teenage brothers whose schoolmates taunted them about this case, but who’d decided they needed to be part of this lawsuit to protect the wilderness where they loved to fish and hunt. And there was Grace Gibson-Snyder, a Missoula 19-year-old. Her ancestors had come to this big-sky state in a covered wagon. But Ms. Gibson-Snyder worried about whether this land would be habitable for her own children – if she felt it were morally appropriate to have any. She wore her favorite boots to trial, for good luck.
And in some places, young people had begun to make headway. A German court in 2021, for instance, agreed with youth that the government needed to do more to reduce emissions. Colombia’s Supreme Court agreed with young plaintiffs in 2018 that officials needed to better protect the Amazon rainforest, in part because of climate concerns.
But in the U.S., the country that has sent more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere than any other nation, young people had failed to get courts to rule in their favor.
That was about to change.
In the courtroom that day, the young people were asking not for any financial reward, but for the government of Montana to uphold its Constitution, one of a handful in the U.S. that explicitly protects both current and future citizens’ right to a healthful environment. There was Rikki Held, the oldest of the Montana youth plaintiffs at 22, whose name was on the lawsuit and whose family’s ranch was increasingly threatened by fires and floods. There were Lander and Badge Busse, teenage brothers whose schoolmates taunted them about this case, but who’d decided they needed to be part of this lawsuit to protect the wilderness where they loved to fish and hunt. And there was Grace Gibson-Snyder, a Missoula 19-year-old. Her ancestors had come to this big-sky state in a covered wagon. But Ms. Gibson-Snyder worried about whether this land would be habitable for her own children – if she felt it were morally appropriate to have any. She wore her favorite boots to trial, for good luck.
They and their fellow plaintiffs were represented by an Oregon-based law firm called Our Children’s Trust, which has helped young people across the country bring constitutional climate cases.
Opposing them was the state of Montana, represented by an attorney general whose spokesperson had called the lawsuit “outrageous” and “political theater” – a case of well-intentioned children exploited by an outside interest group.
For the better part of the next two weeks, the two sides presented their cases.
Then youth and legal experts waited anxiously for the judge’s decision. Held v. Montana, many said, was a crucial moment in what they saw as a legal transformation building around the world. Members of the Climate Generation – as we’re calling the cohort born since 1989, when the world became both climatically unstable and increasingly focused on children’s rights – were working to define what it meant to have rights as a young person. And in particular, they were working to define what it meant to have rights while looking at a future that scientists agree will be shaped by what older people have done to the atmosphere. A ruling in Montana could dramatically impact this global effort.
“The Montana case is incredibly important,” says Shaina Sadai, the Hitz fellow for litigation-relevant science at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Young people involved with climate action, she adds, “are very internationally connected. They are very much in touch with each other. … A win anywhere for any of them is a win for all of them. It’s that global youth solidarity.”
Which is why Dallin Rima, a 19-year-old plaintiff in a different climate lawsuit, turned up the radio when he heard that Montana District Judge Kathy Seeley had released her verdict.
Mr. Rima is part of a group of Utah youth who have sued their state, arguing that its promotion of fossil fuels violates their constitutional rights to life, health, and safety. He’d been following what was going on in Montana, the same way young climate plaintiffs from Oregon to the South Pacific to Portugal had been keeping track. While he knew firsthand about the challenges of the legal system, about the delays and disappointments, he had allowed himself to hope.
He was driving to his grandmother’s house outside Salt Lake City, listening to NPR, when the news came on. It was a good thing nobody else was in the car, Mr. Rima says. Because as he listened to the newscast, he began to “express himself,” as he puts it. Loudly.
The judge had ruled in the young plaintiffs’ favor. Specifically, this meant that Montana policymakers had violated the young people’s constitutional rights by ignoring the climate impacts of their energy decisions. But Mr. Rima understood that there were far broader implications.
By siding with the young Montanans, Judge Seeley explicitly connected the right to a clean environment with the right to a stable climate. She gave a judicial stamp of approval to climate science. And she proved that, in the face of what many young people see as politicians’ ineptitude in addressing climate change, the judiciary is a branch of government that might still be able to protect their futures.
“I’ve learned not to get my hopes up. But I was just shocked, ecstatic to hear that they had won,” Mr. Rima says. “It was a really powerful moment. … It feels like our work isn’t in vain.”
The Washington Post identifies a serious problem with home schooling: No one is monitoring the well-being of children. In public schools, teachers and staff are designated reporters of children’s physical health; if they see signs of abuse, they are legally bound to report it to authorities. In home schooling, child abuse may be hidden. Read this horrifying story and bear in mind that some states are paying parents to keep their children home instead of sending them to school.
His family had searched, taping hand-drawn “missing” posters to telephone poles and driving the streets calling out the 11-year-olds name. So had many of his neighbors, their flashlights sweeping over the sidewalks as the winter darkness settled on the Sierra Nevada foothills.
The police were searching, too, and nowthey had returned to the place where Roman had gone missing earlier that day: his family’s rented home in Placerville, Calif. Roman’s stepmother, Lindsay Piper, hesitated when officers showed up at her door the night of Jan. 11, 2020, asking to comb the house again. But she had told them that Roman liked to hide in odd places — even the clothes dryer — and agreed to let them in.
Brock Garvin, Roman’s 15-year-old stepbrother, was sitting in the dimly lit basement when police came downstairs shortly after 10:30 p.m. He ignored them, he said later, watching “Supernatural” on television as three officers began inspecting the black-and-yellow Home Depot storage bins stacked along the back wall.
Brock had no idea what had happened to Roman. But he did know something the police did not: Much of what his mother had said to them that day was a lie.
When she reported Roman’s disappearance, Piper told the police she was home schooling the eight kids in her household. This was technically true. It was also a ruse.
Most schoolshave teachers, principals, guidance counselors — professionals trained to recognize the unexplained bruises or erratic behaviors that may point to an abusive parent. Home education was an easy way to avoid the scrutiny of such people. That was the case for Piper, whose children were learning less from her about math and history than they were about violence, cruelty and neglect.
Left to their own devices while she lay in bed watching TV crime procedurals, and her husband, Jordan, worked long hours as a utility lineman, their days and nights passed in a penumbral blur of video games, microwave dinners and fistfights. Almost nothing resembling education took place,her sons said. But there was a shared project in which she diligently led her children: the torture of their stepbrother, Roman.
Roman had been a loving, extroverted 7-year-old who obsessed over dinosaurs when Piper came into his life, a mama’s boy perpetually in search of a mother as Jordan, his father, cycled from one broken relationship to the next.
On the day he was reported missing, he was a sixth-graderwho weighed only 42 pounds. He had been locked in closets, whipped with extension cords and bound with zip ties, according to police reports and interviews with family members who witnessed his treatment. Unwilling to give him even short breaks from his isolation, Piper kept him in diapers.
The Washington Post reconstructed Piper’s torment of her stepson from hundreds of pages of previously undisclosed law enforcement records, as well as interviews with two of her four biological children, other relatives, friends of the family, neighbors and police officers.
Piper, 41, who is in prison, did not respond to two letters requesting comment for this story. Her former public defender did not return calls or emails. Jordan Piper, 38, also in prison, declined a request to comment through his attorney.
Little research exists on the links between home schooling and child abuse. The few studies conducted in recent years have not shown that home-schooled children are at significantly greater risk of mistreatment than those who attend public, private or charter schools.
But the research also suggests that when abuse does occur in home-school families, it can escalate into especially severe forms — and that some parents exploit lax home education laws to avoid contact with social service agencies.
In 2014, a group of pediatricians published a study of more than two dozen tortured children treated at medical centers in Virginia, Texas, Wisconsin, Utah and Washington. Among the 17 victims old enough to attend school, eight were home-schooled.
After a home-schooling mother killed her autistic teenager, government analysts in Connecticut gathered data from six school districts over three years. Their report, released in 2018 by the state’s Office of the Child Advocate, found that 138 of the 380 students withdrawn from public schools for home education during that period lived in households with at least one prior complaint of suspected abuse or neglect.
Child-welfare advocates have long pushed fora minimal level of oversight for home-schooled students — calls that have grown more urgent as home schooling has exploded, becoming the country’s fastest growing form of education.But home-school parents, arguing that serious episodes of abuse are rare, have fiercely resisted. And nowhere have their efforts been more successful than in the state where Roman and his siblings spent most of their lives: Michigan.
Michigan is one of 11 states in which parents are not even required to tell anyone they are home schooling, let alone demonstrate they are teaching their children anything. Its lack of regulation, the result of a 1993 state Supreme Court decision still celebrated by home-school advocates, has repeatedly concealed the actions of abusive parents like Piper.
“She told people we were home-schooled, but we weren’t,” Carson Garvin, one of Roman’s stepbrothers, now 16, later wrote in a victim impact statement. “Now I can see it wasn’t for us that she made this decision. It was to protect herself from the school counselors and staff. I believe that if we had went to school that someone would have had a feeling that something was off and that she would have been reported at some point.”
Despite what Piper told the police, Roman had never really liked hiding. The truth was that he had been hidden. And home schooling is what allowed her to hide him.
As Brock Garvin sat in the basement watching TV on the night of Roman’s disappearance, listening to the police officers banter as they opened the Tough Storage Tote bins, he was in a fog. He had been up all night playing “Dark Souls” on his Xbox, and was upset that he hadn’t been allowed to sleep for most of the day, as he usually did.
He was also jarred by the entrance of unknown grown-ups into the house. The family had moved to California from Michigan just a few months earlier. Long isolated, they were now strangers to everyone around them.
But Brock wasn’t worried about Roman. If his stepbrother had run away, whatever he found could hardly be worse than what he had escaped.
Then the lid on one last bin snapped open, and the officers’ laughter stopped.
Even in his benumbed state Brock felt something strange pass through the room, as if the air pressure had suddenly dropped. It was quiet for a moment, then the police began pulling on latex gloves.
‘I’ll behave’
Romanloved beingalive. It was a strange thing to say about an infant, but that was Jennifer Morasco’s first impression of the sunny 5-month-old boy who would become her stepson when she married Jordan Piper in 2010.
“He’d be teething, but he wouldn’t cry,” recalled Morasco, now 41. “He was just so happy to be in existence, and loved being around people and doing stuff with everyone.”
Roman’s mother, Rochelle Lopez, was a soldier who deployed to Iraq when he was 14 months old. After returning, she struggled with heart problems, anxiety and addiction to pain medication, according to police records. Lopez, who died in 2021 at age 34, fought with Jordan in court for years over custody of Roman.
But none of that seemed to weigh on the boy that Morasco largely raised until he was about 4 years old. Morasco still remembers the lyrics to “Life is a Highway,” a song from Roman’s favorite movie, “Cars,” that he sang over and over. Another favorite was “Rainbow Connection,” the banjo-accompanied Muppet ode to life’s unfulfilled promises.
“He thought he was Kermit the Frog, essentially,” Morasco said.
Even after Morasco left Jordan Piper, she kept in touch with Roman, calling every year on his birthday. But in 2016, Jordan wasn’t picking up his phone, so she tried sending a Facebook message to Roman’s new stepmom, asking her to tell him “he is loved all the way to the moon and back.”
Lindsay Piper reacted harshly, warning Morasco not to contact her again and boasting that Roman “has excelled in ways I can’t begin to explain.”
Piper herself had barely graduated high school, according to her sister, Chanel Campbell. Her interest was never in academics; it was in babies. It wasn’t an unusual fixation for a young girl, but there was something off-kilter about the intensity that Lindsay brought to her aspirations of motherhood, her sister said.
“She carried a baby doll around with her until she was, like, 12,” said Campbell, who was raised with her sister in and around Flint. “She just had this fascination with baby dolls and dressing them up and changing them and putting them in diapers.” This treatment extended to the family’s miniature schnauzer, which Lindsay forced into footed pajamas.
By the time she married Jordan Piper, Lindsay had four children of her own. Their father, Marcus Garvin, was an infantryman in the Army and Army National Guard. He returned from his service in Iraq to years of marital turmoil with Lindsay, who eventually gained full custody of their children. After marrying Jordan, she became the parent of a fifth: her stepson, Roman.
In Piper’s frequent Facebook posts, they were a happily blended family, all beaming smiles and matching flannel shirts. But Campbell knew this image was no more real than the dolls her sister had once carried around. At family gatherings, Piper’s children tended to run wild, and she responded in disturbing ways: pinching them, or biting them on their forearms. When Campbell protested, she said, her sister would storm off.
Reached by phone, Piper’s mother, the guardian of Carson’s twin brother, initially said she would consider speaking to The Post but did not respond to subsequent calls or text messages. Piper’s eldest daughter, now 21, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Shortly after her marriage to Jordan, Piper started to complain about her boys’ experience at their elementary school.
“She said, ‘I’m just going to home-school them. I’m tired of the teachers singling them out. I’m tired of everyone picking on them,’” Campbell recalled. “I thought to myself, ‘You’re definitely right. We’ve got a problem here. But home schooling isn’t going to be the answer to it.’”
Between late 2016 and the summer of 2017, Piper withdrew the children from school, Brock and Carson said. With the exception of a few brief interludes when they were sent back for days or weeks, they would not regularly attend school again for the next five years.
At first, they sporadically logged on to an online learning program, Brock and Carson recalled. Then any pretense of education was dropped.
Piper spent the day watching “Criminal Minds” and “Law & Order,” her sons said, and in the evenings, when Jordan returned from work, the couple would sit around drinking Jack Daniels.
By this time, the family had moved to Gaines, a tiny town amid soybean fields about 20 miles southwest of Flint. At midday, the sound of children at recess echoed past their house from the elementary school three blocks away. But for Piper’s kids, the high-pitched laughter and shouting might as well have come from another planet.
“My world got very, very small,” recalled Brock, who was then 12. “I wouldn’t see the sun or moon. I would just be in my room 24/7.” He at least had his Xbox; Carson had his twin brother. Roman had nothing and nobody, because the things thatmade him human were methodically stripped away.
It happened slowly, his stepbrothers said. Early on, when the boys scuffled, Piper blamed Roman, the one to whom she had not given birth, punishing him with lengthy timeouts. Then she began locking the door to his room. Then she began covering his window with a blanket.
“He would sit in the dark on his bed all day. And she would have us, like, scratch on the walls and make creepy noises so he’d think there’s demons trying to kill him,” said Brock, who expressed deep regret about participating. “He’d sit there and scream, like, ‘Stop it, please’ or ‘I’ll behave’ … that was his life.”
Soon there was no disciplinary pretext for the harm inflicted on Roman, Carson and Brock said. It was simply what the family did. Piper ordered her sons to join in when she whipped him with phone charger cords. Roman began trying to escape, so she tied him down. She took away his clothes. Most of her kids were overweight, but Roman was put on something worse than a starvation diet.
“She would feed him oatmeal with huge amounts of salt in it,” Carson said. “He puked it up, so he wouldn’t have to keep eating it. And she would make him eat his puke.”
Campbell suspected there was something badly wrong inside her sister’s house. She said that after seeing bruises on Roman’s face at a Christmas get-together in 2016, she called child protective services.
She made two follow-up calls, she said, but could never determine whether any action was taken. Police later said they found no records of CPS investigations into Piper’s treatment of Roman. A spokesman for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services — which oversees such investigations — declined to comment, citing the confidentiality of child-welfare cases.
Roman kept appearing in Piper’s Facebook photos, increasingly wraithlike beside his grinning siblings.
“He was just lifeless, just sad. You could just see it in his face, aside from the puffy eyes and the bruising on his forehead,” Campbell said. “The love had been sucked out of him.”
It seemed unimaginable that a child could fall so completely through the safety net because a parent like Piper decided to home-school. But in Michigan, it had happened before.
‘A shield for child abuse’
About two years before Roman was withdrawn from school, an eviction crew entered Mitchelle Blair’s Detroit apartment on March 24, 2015. The 35-year-old mother of four wasn’t home, so they began removing her furniture. But their work came to an abrupt halt when they opened a deep freezer in the living room: inside were the bodies of two children.
Stoni Blair and Stephen Berry — estimated to have been ages 13 and 9 when their mother killed them — had been pulled out of Detroit public schools with their siblings two years earlier. During Blair’s conviction and sentencing to life in prison for first-degree murder, it emerged that she had burned her children with scalding water and beaten them with wooden planks.
She also claimed to be home-schooling them.
Stephanie Chang, then a freshman Democratic state representative whose district included the site of the murders, was horrified by the case. She was also alarmed by what she perceived as a yawning gap in the state’s child protection system.
It wasn’t just Stoni and Stephen. Seven years earlier, there had been Calista Springer, a home-schooled 16-year-old who died in a house fire in Centreville, Mich., unable to free herself from a choke chain her parents used to tie her to her bed. Marsha and Anthony Springer were convicted of torture and child abuse and sentenced to lengthy prison sentences.
Chang understood such cases didn’t represent most children’s home-schooling experiences. But she also believed abusive parents were taking advantage of Michigan’s absence of any notification or monitoring requirements for home educators, with devastating consequences.
“There are so many amazing home-school parents who I have so much respect for. But when people use home schooling as a shield for child abuse, that’s not acceptable,” said Chang, now a state senator. “That lack of a notification requirement creates an environment where parents can basically just do whatever they want.”
It is a concern that extends beyond Michigan, and that pediatricians share with politicians….
A month after Mitchelle Blair’s children were discovered dead in Detroit, Chang introduced a bill requiring that parents notify their local school district of a decision to home-school and that home-schooled children meet at least twice a year with a mandated child abuse reporter, such as a teacher, doctor or psychologist.
“It’s such a common-sense thing, in my view,” Chang said.
The state board of education in Michigan endorsed the legislation. But the possibility of any oversight infuriated home-schoolers, and they organized to defeat Chang’s modest proposal.
The story goes on to explain that Roman died of salt poisoning. He was 11, but weighed the same as a six-year-old.
When the older boys were returned to their biological father in Michigan, who had not seen them for years, he insisted on sending them to public school.
His parents were arrested and jailed in California for second degree murder. The mother has been sentenced to a term of 15 years to life. Roman’s father awaits sentencing.
In the face of such horrifying stories, it is incomprehensible that state officials do not pass laws to regulate home schooling: first, to check in the health of the children, and second, to determine whether they are learning anything. A parent with several children, like the one in this story, could collect almost $60,000 a year from the state in Florida or in other states where vouchers go to unregulated home schooling parents.
Has the U.S. Supreme Court stripped away all limits on the right to buy and carry arms? We are soon to find out, as the Court just heard a case challenging restrictions on domestic violence abusers. A federal appeals court decided that even violent people should have the right to bear arms, because that is what the Founders wanted. Some states allow open carry of weapons; some require no background checks for purchasers. We may soon be living in the “O.K. Corral,” where shootouts are a common occurrence.
Since 2008, there has been no greater obstacle to confronting America’s epidemic of gun violence than the Supreme Court. That was the year five justices on the Court decided the Heller case, which held, for the first time in the country’s history, that the Second Amendment of the Constitution protected an individual’s right to bear arms and was not, in spite of its plain language, cabined to protecting the collective right of a militia to bear arms. The Court’s majority claimed its view was consistent with the original meaning of the clause, but legal historians have demolished that claim. The Court’s decision was instead the product of an orchestrated campaign by the National Rifle Association over decades to shift opinion on the Constitution’s meaning. Heller was the culmination of those efforts and the decision drastically curtailed the ability of voters to limit gun possession because it entrenched a constitutional right to possess firearms. The actual holding of Heller covered only the ability to possess a gun inside one’s home for self-defense, but it was just the first step in the Court’s takeover of gun policy.
Despite widespread criticism by legal scholars and historians of the Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, the Court (pardon the pun) stuck to its guns. Last Term in Bruen, the Court expanded the scope of the Second Amendment by striking down a New York law that required people to show “proper cause” to get a permit to carry guns for self-defense in public. That decision not only expanded the right to bear arms to include carrying a weapon in public, but it also changed the manner in which the Court would analyze Second Amendment claims to make it even harder for sensible gun regulations to survive the Court’s review.
The Court, in an opinion authored by Justice Thomas, rejected the argument that a regulation that covers guns outside the home can be upheld if it promotes an important interest. Instead, “The government must affirmatively prove that its firearms regulation is part of the historical tradition that delimits the outer bounds of the right to keep and bear arms.”
In other words, no matter how much the government might want to address the scourge of gun violence and mass shootings, its hands are tied by what the Court believes white men in the 18th century would have wanted. Moreover, this is an inquiry that the Court typically gets wrong because it is not a body composed of trained historians, but of lawyers doing back-of-the-envelope history (derisively and accurately referred to as “law office history”) that typically just so happens to yield the very result a majority of justices would like to see.
That is how we have arrived at the surreal moment at the Court on Tuesday in which the justices heard arguments about whether the government can remove guns from domestic violence abusers. That is the issue in United States v. Rahimi, a case out of the Fifth Circuit, a conservative federal intermediate appellate court that covers Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. The Fifth Circuit believed it correctly followed the framework from Bruen and struck down a federal law that prevents people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms. To obtain such a restraining order, a court must find, after notice and a hearing, that a person presents a credible threat to their intimate partner or child, and that the order is necessary to protect the partner or child from “domestic gun abuse.”
In a sane world, the question of whether someone should lose access to weapons would turn on the adequacy of the procedures for making that determination and the evidence that the person poses a threat. In the Supreme Court’s world, in contrast, whether someone is stripped of access to guns depends solely on whether the government of the 18th century disarmed similarly situated people. According to the Fifth Circuit, the government’s evidence from the 18th century about taking guns from “dangerous” people was not sufficiently similar, so the federal law could not pass muster.
Will five justices of the Supreme Court agree with the Fifth Circuit that the historical record is too thin to support the domestic violence law? The Court’s three liberal justices will almost certainly side with the government. Justices Kagan and Sotomayor have already expressed their disagreement with the Court’s flawed framework for deciding these issues by joining Justice Breyer’s dissent in Bruen. Justice Jackson was not on the Court in Bruen, but she expressed skepticism about the Bruen framework in her questioning at oral argument in Rahimi. She got to the heart of the insanity of the matter when she asked Rahimi’s lawyer if the Court’s task, in his view, was to look for “the regulation of white Protestant men related to domestic violence,” or if it was possible to take the level of generality up a notch.
The question is whether at least two of the six conservative justices will agree, and all signs from the oral argument are that the government has amassed enough evidence to get five votes to uphold this particular law. Justice Barrett wrote an opinion when she was on the Seventh Circuit that recognized firearms can be removed from dangerous people, and her questions at argument suggested she sees Rahimi as falling into that category. Indeed, she talked about domestic violence as being in the heartland of danger. Justice Gorsuch also gave indications that the facts of this case would survive Second Amendment scrutiny because he kept carving out issues for future cases. It is likely other justices will join this decision as well, given the clear finding of danger under the facts of the case. Even Rahimi’s counsel had a hard time arguing his client was not a danger when asked at oral argument.
It is less clear that there are enough votes to shift the framework for deciding these cases so that the government in 2023 and beyond is not hamstrung by what the government did in the 18th century. Part of the debate at oral argument was over how specific a historical analog has to be to allow a gun regulation today. If the Court does not make clear that governments today can identify threats and dangers – even if the Framing generation did not identify those same threats and dangers – as suitable for disarmament, the government in Rahimi will have won a battle, but not the war, on gun violence. Whether gun regulations survive will depend on what five lawyers on the Supreme Court think.
The Court’s track record in Second Amendment cases does not inspire confidence. The Court got the history of the Second Amendment’s scope wrong in Heller. It is not an individual right but a collective one in the service of militias. The Court then made matters far worse in Bruen by broadening the scope of that right and preventing the government from regulating firearms unless the Framers passed a similar regulation. Everything comes down to an interpretation of 18th century America’s approach to guns, despite the fact that almost nothing about firearms is the same as it was at the time of the framing.
The Court’s inconsistent approach to originalism is the reason people can more easily lose their liberty than their right to keep a firearm. Although we are supposed to have a presumption of innocence in America and that is a concept firmly rooted in the original meaning of due process, if you are merely charged with a crime – not convicted – you can be locked in jail, according to the Supreme Court, as long as a judge thinks you are dangerous. No originalist should permit this, as the Framing generation did not condone incarceration on the basis that someone was merely accused of a crime and then deemed dangerous by a judge before conviction. Yet we have hundreds of thousands of people incarcerated on just this basis because the Court has not taken the same strict originalist approach to pretrial detention. We can only ponder why we ended up with a regime that would allow liberty to be taken away so cavalierly, but that treats gun rights as inviolate without a sufficiently precise historical analog.
The Framers were not so foolish as to place greater protections on guns than freedom. But the Supreme Court does not seem to understand the relevant history. Whatever the Court decides in Rahimi, we are a long way from a sensible constitutional framework for thinking about these issues as long as the inquiry will depend on the Court’s faulty historical analysis. Tragically, this is an area where the Court’s law office history is literally killing us.
Diane Ravitch's blog 