“Even once you identify some details that many of the attackers have in common, such a large swath of the population shares these traits that the “profile” is fairly useless for prevention. Red flag laws circumvent that problem by focusing less on a type of person and more on a type of emotional and situational crisis — where the people involved aren’t necessarily “bad guys” but troubled individuals in need of help. Gill thinks of it as a public health approach, analogous to the way we treat physical health problems that are hard to profile.
“We know that raised cholesterol leads to heart problems. We don’t have the ability to predict who in the general population who already has raised cholesterol will go on to have a heart attack. So we put in place prevention policies to try to decrease cholesterol in the whole ‘at risk’ community,” he said.
For the researchers who study mass violence, what’s appealing about red flag laws is that these rules have the potential to shift the emphasis from a cut-and-dried checklist of dangerous traits to a more nuanced system that accounts for a person’s big-picture emotional state.”
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“these researchers supported red flag laws because they could create a clear plan of action for friends and family concerned about a loved one’s combination of emotional crisis and violent threats. It creates a place to take concerns, a system to evaluate those concerns and a means of mitigating them. That’s particularly true, researchers said, if national red flag laws are set up so that the system isn’t punitive. Ideally, the process would focus on helping a person get through to the other side of an emotional crisis rather than putting them in jail. It’s also important, the researchers said, to make sure the laws are focused on professional evaluations of overall behavior, not checklists.”
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“there’s some evidence this could work. An analysis of records from California, where one of the first red flag laws was enacted in 2016, found at least 21 cases where the laws had been used specifically because people around a person were worried about their potential to commit a mass shooting. As of 2019, none of those people had followed through on that potential. It’s impossible to know, however, how those risks would have played out if the red flag hadn’t been there.
But if those parts work together the way they should, then red flag laws really could be a useful tool for combating the segment of mass shootings that function like very public, violent suicides. “There’s an important piece when we interviewed school shooters and active threat cases,” Randazzo said. “They feel very strongly about two things: They have to carry out the violence, they have no options left, but they also don’t want to do it and hope someone will stop them.””
“Ireland’s laws against abortion were some of the most restrictive in the world.2 From 1983 to 2018, “the right to life of the unborn” was equal to the “right to life of the mother,” and the state was empowered to “defend and vindicate that right.” This was enshrined in the Irish Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, which two-thirds of voters approved in a 1983 referendum. Furthermore, under Irish law, performing or obtaining an abortion was punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
Of course, this didn’t stop abortions in Ireland. Abortions happened anyway, both abroad and underground. But the fact that they still happened — and that they were still in demand — didn’t make the effort to legalize them any easier. It took another 35 years for abortion to become legal in Ireland — and a steady stream of activism and high-profile stories of suffering for abortion rights to expand.”
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“It took almost a decade for the broader Irish public to become aware of the dire consequences faced by those who are denied abortions. In 1991, a 14-year-old girl was raped by the father of one of her friends. The attorney general filed an injunction prohibiting her and her parents from traveling to England to seek an abortion because the law compelled the state to protect the life of the fetus. During that time, the girl was expressing suicidal thoughts, and a clinical psychologist testified in a court hearing that the girl was at risk of killing herself; ultimately, the Irish Supreme Court decided to set aside the initial court ruling, thus allowing the girl to get an abortion because there was a real threat of suicide.”
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“If Ireland is any example, a lot more women in America will have to die or experience mental-health issues before attitudes toward abortion care dramatically shift.”
“The carnage was impossible to deny. As the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol laid out its evidence that former President Donald Trump was the catalyst of the assault on American democracy, a 12-minute video showed the full consequences of Trump’s willful lie that the election was stolen. It was perhaps the committee’s most compelling argument.
The video — which included images recorded by participants in the attack, security footage, news footage, audio recordings from police radio communication and police body-camera recordings — tracked the evolution of the violence on that day, from an agitated crowd gathering at the outskirts of the Capitol, through the bloody, forceful invasion of the building. Much of the footage was raw and played at length; the violence was visceral. In one clip, a first-person view from a fallen U.S. Capitol Police officer’s body camera, you can see the mob bearing down, beating the officer mercilessly.
You can watch as many clips of Jan. 6 participants calmly strolling through the rotunda as you like, but the footage shared during the hearing make it inarguable that this was no “normal tourist visit,” as GOP Rep. Andrew Clyde claimed four months after the attack.”
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“Videos — some previously released, others being aired for the first time — were carefully sprinkled throughout the hearing, punctuating information shared by Cheney and committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson. Even in his opening remarks, Thompson included video to underscore the fact that the 2020 election was not stolen from Trump, signaling how big a role media would play in the hearings to come. Warning that the clip contained “strong language,” Thompson paused his remarks to play a clip from former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr’s testimony to the committee, where Barr said he remembers at least three discussions with the president where “I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit.”
Later, clips of testimony from Trump’s daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, another senior White House adviser, demonstrated that those closest to the former president were aware that his claims of fraud were baseless. Video testimony of defendants charged for their alleged involvement in the attack saying that they were in Washington, D.C., that day because Trump had summoned them underscored the president’s role in inspiring the attack. Footage of Caroline Edwards, a U.S. Capitol Police officer on the front lines that day, being knocked unconscious after the mob plowed past a barricade toward her punctuated her live testimony on how violent Jan. 6 was.”
“The New York Times reckons that four gun control measures Congress is considering “might have changed the course of at least 35 mass shootings” since 1999—one-third of attacks in which a gunman killed at least four people. While that conclusion is excessively optimistic, the newspaper is at least asking the right question: Are new restrictions on firearms likely to work as advertised?
President Joe Biden, by contrast, simply assumes the wisdom of the policies he favors and the bad faith of anyone who opposes them. “The issue we face is one of conscience and common sense,” he insisted last week, implying that skeptics lack one or both.
Among other things, Biden wants Congress to require background checks for private gun transfers, which means such transactions must be completed through a federally licensed dealer. The Times found that four of the mass killers in the 105 cases it examined bought guns in private transactions.
One of those perpetrators had already failed a background check. One of the other three, the Violence Policy Center reports, “legally bought” a pistol from a gun shop. According to a 2013 review in The Atlantic, it is not clear whether either of the two other killers had disqualifying criminal or psychiatric records.
In at least one case out of 105, then, an expanded federal background-check requirement might have been an obstacle. But that’s assuming private sellers generally would comply with that mandate, and data from states that notionally require “universal background checks” suggest such rules are widely flouted.
The Times found that at least 20 mass murderers used magazines that held more than 10 rounds. The 1994 federal “assault weapon” law, which expired in 2004, prohibited the production and sale of such magazines, and Biden wants Congress to renew that limit.
Even if we assume that the need to switch magazines after firing 10 rounds can make an important difference in mass shootings, the effectiveness of a ban is doubtful. A 2004 report commissioned by the Justice Department found that the 1994 ban had no measurable impact on the use of “large capacity magazines” in crimes, probably “due to the immense stock of exempted pre-ban magazines”—a stock that is even bigger now than it was then.
In 10 of the 105 mass shootings analyzed by the Times, the perpetrators used stolen guns. The paper suggests “safe storage” legislation backed by Biden might have made a difference in those cases.
One such bill would establish a $500 fine for gun owners who fail to secure their weapons in circumstances where a minor “is likely to gain access” to them or in households where a resident is legally barred from possessing firearms. If a minor or prohibited person uses an unsecured gun to injure or kill someone, the owner would face up to five years in prison.
The bill also would provide grants aimed at encouraging states to establish and enforce similar requirements. The idea that such laws could prevent would-be mass shooters from obtaining firearms assumes wide compliance and a lack of alternative sources, both of which are debatable assumptions.
The Times says “four of the gunmen might have been stymied” by a law prohibiting federally licensed gun dealers from selling semiautomatic centerfire rifles that accept detachable magazines to anyone younger than 21. That bill, which Biden also supports, avoids the arbitrary distinctions drawn by “assault weapon” bans, which target guns based on functionally unimportant characteristics.
Since the bill does not apply to private transfers, however, adult buyers younger than 21 could still legally obtain semiautomatic rifles. Furthermore, a federal appeals court ruled last month that prohibiting young adults from buying such firearms because a tiny fraction of them might commit violent crimes was inconsistent with the Second Amendment.
Before deciding whether to support policies like these, legislators should rationally weigh their costs and benefits, including their constitutional implications. Biden prefers a different approach, replacing logic and evidence with self-righteous certitude.”
“A series of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have made it practically impossible to sue a federal officer over an alleged constitutional rights violation. In a 6-3 ruling released today, the Court doubled down on this regrettable trend.
The case is Egbert v. Boule. At issue were the actions of a border patrol agent who sought to question one of the guests at a Washington state bed-and-breakfast about the guest’s immigration status. When owner Robert Boule told the agent, Erik Egbert, to leave his property, Egbert allegedly assaulted Boule. Then, when Boule complained about the alleged assault to the agent’s superiors, Egbert allegedly retaliated by asking the IRS to investigate Boule, who was audited. Boule sued Egbert for violating his Fourth Amendment rights (the assault) and his First Amendment rights (the retaliation against Boule’s complaint).
In Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (1971), the Supreme Court allowed federal officers to be sued in federal court for alleged Fourth Amendment violations. Unfortunately, the Court has since narrowed Bivens to point of practically overruling it. Today’s decision in Egbert v. Boule has shriveled Bivens even further.
“The Court of Appeals permitted not one, but two constitutional damages actions to proceed against a U.S. Border Patrol agent,” complained the majority opinion of Justice Clarence Thomas. “Because our cases have made clear that, in all but the most unusual circumstances, prescribing a cause of action is a job for Congress, not the courts, we reverse.” Thomas’ opinion was joined in full by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Writing in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out that Thomas’ decision was plainly at odds with Bivens. “Boule’s Fourth Amendment claim does not arise in a new context,” she wrote, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. “Bivens itself involved a U.S. citizen bringing a Fourth Amendment claim against individual, rank-and-file federal law enforcement officers who allegedly violated his constitutional rights within the United States by entering his property without a warrant and using excessive force. Those are precisely the facts of Boule’s complaint.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed with Sotomayor about that. “The plaintiff is an American citizen who argues that a federal law enforcement officer violated the Fourth Amendment in searching the curtilage of his home. Candidly, I struggle to see how this set of facts differs meaningfully from those in Bivens itself.” Still, Gorsuch concurred with Thomas, arguing that the officer should win this case because Bivens should be overruled outright.
The upshot [the] ruling is that federal officers, who already enjoy extraordinary protections against being sued over alleged rights violations, are now more untouchable than ever.”
“The federal government sent billions in unemployment aid to ineligible beneficiaries and outright fraudsters during the pandemic, according to a new watchdog report. At least $78 billion in jobless benefits, and potentially much more, were misspent during fiscal year 2021, according to a Tuesday report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
“Not only is the system falling short in meeting the needs of workers and the broader economy, but the potential for huge financial losses could undermine public confidence in the stewardship of government funds,” said GAO head Gene Dorado in a press release yesterday, who called the report’s findings “extremely troubling.”
The Congressional watchdog agency has rated the unemployment insurance system as “high risk” for waste, fraud, and abuse and called on lawmakers and the administration to undertake immediate reforms.
The federal government’s unemployment insurance system—jointly administered by the Department of Labor and a patchwork of state agencies—has long struggled with making improper payments. This problem only got worse during the pandemic, when Congress dumped billions more into an expanded number of unemployment assistance programs.
The GAO found that the improper payment rate jumped from 9 percent in the pre-pandemic fiscal year 2020 to 18.9 percent the next year. That means nearly one in five unemployment insurance dollars went to an ineligible or overpaid beneficiary.
There are multiple reasons for this sharp rise in improper payments.
The GAO reports that some states’ legacy 40- and 50-year-old information technology systems used to administer benefits weren’t up to the task of identifying potential fraud or overpayments. These same systems also struggled to handle totally new benefit programs covering self-employed workers like rideshare drivers, who typically aren’t covered by unemployment insurance.
Federal rules on who was eligible to receive benefits were also “untimely and unclear,” according to the GAO report. Some state officials told the agency they’d already set up programs and started sending money out the door by the time Labor Department guidance came down.
The massive increase in available unemployment funds also increased the rate of improper payments. Federal funding for unemployment benefits jumped from $86.9 billion in fiscal year 2020 to $410 billion in fiscal year 2021.
States often struggled to hire enough people to administer these new benefits. The staff they did hire were often undertrained.
The huge increase in unemployment benefits also became a target for fraudsters. The GAO reports that 146 people have pleaded guilty to federal charges of defrauding unemployment systems. In California, for instance, the state paid an estimated $400 million on fraudulent claims made in the name of state prison inmates.”
“The year was 1952, and Sen. Clyde R. Hoey (D–N.C.) was investigating how many gay people worked for the federal government and whether these workers were a security threat. In what would eventually be called the Lavender Scare, the government launched a purge of gay and lesbian employees, aided by a 1953 executive order by President Dwight Eisenhower. The witch hunts soon spilled over into the private sector, as workers lost jobs that required security clearances.”
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“The year was 2004, and one state—Massachusetts—had started legally recognizing same-sex marriages. President George W. Bush, facing re-election, called for Congress to pass a constitutional amendment “defining and protecting marriage as a union of a man and a woman as husband and wife.” The Republican Party added the idea to its platform. While the national amendment was never adopted, 11 states passed their own constitutional bans against recognition that fall.”
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“DeSantis and allied lawmakers have barred Florida educators from any instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity with young students at all, and they have restricted how teachers can approach those subjects in the higher grades. Parents are authorized to seek financial damages from school districts if they believe teachers or staff are discussing LGBT topics inappropriately—and what’s inappropriate is defined so vaguely that all sorts of unobjectionable conversations could prompt a suit. Some Florida schools have even started removing children’s books like I Am Jazz from their libraries because they featured trans characters. It’s not clear that the law actually requires such removals, but the possibility of lawsuits encourages districts to interpret the restrictions broadly.
Meanwhile, politicians in several states have introduced aggressive laws that attempt to stop minors from getting any sort of trans-affirmative medical treatment for gender dysphoria, even when parents and doctors support it. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton has declared that giving minors any such treatment counts as “child abuse” and Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered officials to start investigating families. One of the first targets investigated was a parent who worked for the state’s own Department of Family and Protective Services. (Following a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, a Texas court has put Abbott’s order on temporary hold.)
Contrary to their supporters’ rhetoric, these laws aren’t about preserving parents’ right to shape their children’s educations or protecting vulnerable young people from threats. After all, if you think families should make decisions about children’s education and care, that means accepting that families will make different decisions. Rules like these don’t establish a neutral position. They let one group of Americans tell another group of Americans that they don’t get a say in what their kids are taught or what treatments they can pursue.”
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“The existence of detransitioners does not discredit trans-affirming treatments. The dramatically increased acceptance of gay and trans people in the U.S. has undoubtedly made young people more comfortable with questioning their gender identities. And the science of identifying gender dysphoria is complex and still being heavily researched, so it is inevitable that a certain number of people who believe they are trans might eventually decide otherwise and have regrets. (A survey from 2015 of more than 27,000 transgender Americans found that 8 percent had at least temporarily detransitioned at some point. Just 0.4 percent of all those surveyed had done so because they had concluded that they were not transgender after all, as opposed to stopping because of pressure from others, because they found the process to be too hard, or because of harassment.)
None of that justifies political intervention, even when we’re talking about minors. If you doubt that, consider the other optional surgeries that young people pursue. According to 2020 data from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, doctors performed more than 87,000 cosmetic surgical procedures on teenagers.
It’s considered controversial in some quarters to let teens get surgery to change their appearance. Certainly some adults would love for legislators to pass laws stopping minors from getting many of these procedures. But neither federal nor state governments have done so. As a culture, we accept that decisions about these surgeries are properly made by the teens, consenting parents, and medical professionals. You may think these are reckless decisions that the teens may someday regret, and probably some of them do. Some of them might go wrong, might not be as beautiful or as affirming as the teens hoped. But that isn’t our decision to make, and embracing liberty means accepting that people will make decisions that we might not choose for ourselves. (And if the doctor commits actual malpractice, there are civil courts to resolve that.)
That doesn’t change when the surgeries involve teen genitals rather than teen noses. Critics of these treatments believe youths are permanently disfiguring their bodies, but supporters retort that denying trans kids the treatments they want (not all of which are surgical) can lead to worsening mental health, even suicide. Either way, the stakes are higher—and that makes it more important that families be able to make these decisions without political interference.”
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“The state is an expression of political will, not ethical medicine. The attorney general of Texas has no idea what treatments are best for kids who believe they may be transgender, but he has the power to investigate and jail parents for making decisions the government deems to be “abusive.” And we have a lengthy history of child welfare agencies harassing families for behavior that offends officials but does not cause actual harm to children.”
“”Though Covid-19 measures may have varied from country to country, governments’ approaches to tackling the pandemic have had a common failing,” said Rajat Khosla, Amnesty International’s senior director of research, advocacy, and policy, in a statement. “An overemphasis on using punitive sanctions against people for non-compliance with regulations, rather than supporting them to better comply, had a grossly disproportionate effect on those who already faced systematic discrimination.”
“Contrary to the often-voiced claim by governments that ‘we were all in this together’, the truth is that their responses to Covid-19 have been experienced unequally,” states Amnesty’s report. “Nowhere is this more evident than in the impact of Covid-19 measures on people who are discriminatorily targeted by criminal sanctions or punitive laws, policies or regulations,” including people who are homeless, engage in sex work, or use drugs, as well as people “targeted because of their sexual orientation or gender identity and expression.”
Amnesty’s report comes from a survey of private groups “working on issues including sex workers’ rights, LGBTI rights, drug policy reform, homelessness, racial justice, Indigenous people’s rights, discrimination based on work and descent, and sexual and reproductive rights.” It includes information from 28 countries, including the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.”
“The widespread use of COVID relief funds to line the wallets of public employees should also raise even more questions about whether a federal bailout of state and local governments was necessary. Expected revenue shortfalls in state and local tax coffers never materialized—and many states emerged from the pandemic with surpluses instead.
States have until the end of 2024 to spend the federal aid distributed as part of the American Rescue Plan, so the totals reported so far (the Treasury’s tracker has been updated to include spending through December 31 of last year) could increase.
In an analysis of the spending published last month, the Treasury notes that state and local governments spent $5 billion of their federal COVID aid on “worker support,” a category that includes those bonuses along with things like unemployment payments and job training. That’s the same amount of money that states and local governments reported using for actual COVID relief—a category that includes “vaccinations, testing, contact tracing, PPE, prevention in congregate facilities, medical expenses, and other public health measures.””