“One of the most common types of new laws this year are those that allow handgun owners to carry a concealed gun without a permit. Florida, Nebraska and South Carolina have passed such laws, joining 23 other states that have passed permitless concealed carry since 2010. North Carolina advanced a similar law that was shelved earlier this month, but the state legislature did repeal a law that required a permit to buy a handgun, overriding the Democratic governor’s veto.
Other states have considered expanding the areas in which concealed weapons can be carried. In Mississippi, the state Board of Education implemented a policy last year to comply with a decade-old law that allowed guns in K-12 schools. In West Virginia, guns are now allowed on public college and university campuses, a similar law to one Tennessee considered. The Iowa state House passed a bill allowing legal gun owners to keep a weapon in their car on public grounds and decriminalized the carry of concealed weapons for certain people, like those deemed a danger to themselves or others. The Missouri House advanced a law allowing guns in places of worship and on public transportation.
Many of these gun-rights expansions are also geared toward schools. After the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers, the Republican Party promoted arming teachers as a way to increase school safety, and states have since begun passing laws allowing it. Last year, Ohio passed a law allowing teachers to be armed after 24 hours of training (down from 700 hours); this year, Mississippi passed a bill that would create a program to arm teachers, and Oklahoma has considered one similar to Ohio’s, though its legislative session is almost over. Texas’s legislature is considering a law that would offer a stipend to armed teachers, and Indiana has passed a bill allowing state-funded handgun training for teachers.”
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“We don’t know much about the effects most of these specific laws will have, because longstanding roadblocks on gun-related research mean we don’t know a lot about what kinds of gun laws prevent shootings, especially mass shootings. More than 20 years of research has found that increased availability of guns is associated with higher rates of homicide, and a 2014 study in the Journal of Urban Health found that a repeal of Missouri’s permit requirement for handgun purchases contributed to a 25 percent increase in firearm homicide rates in the five years that followed.”
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“many states are working to prevent the kind of data collection that would tell us more about the relationship between guns and gun violence. The federal government doesn’t track gun purchases. To fill in the gaps in that data, the gun-safety advocacy community has tried to work with credit-card companies to track gun purchases, according to Holihan. But Arkansas, Florida, Montana and Utah are among the states that have passed new legislation preventing “discrimination” against gun manufacturers in an effort to stop that practice before it starts, and credit-card companies have backed away from it. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has also banned state agencies from working with banks that track gun purchases.”
“In an executive order signed on April 6, Biden fleshed out the details of how the new regulatory regime will operate. There are three major changes.
First, the executive order changes the threshold for what counts as an “economically significant” regulation from $100 million to $200 million—and orders the new, higher threshold to continue rising with inflation. Because regulations deemed to have economically significant costs are subject to additional layers of scrutiny before being approved, this change would expand the number of regulations that could be approved without that additional oversight.”
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“Secondly, Biden’s new rules instruct federal agencies to “promote equitable and meaningful participation by a range of interested or affected parties, including underserved communities.” This push for greater equity is so complicated that it requires a separate 10-page memo explaining how to implement it. That includes new guidance for how the White House’s Office for Information and Regulatory Affairs should “facilitate the initiation of meeting requests” from groups that have “not historically requested such meetings, including those from underserved communities.”
It’s certainly easy to roll one’s eyes at the federal government’s equity mess, but getting more feedback from groups that could potentially be affected by federal regulations is not necessarily a problem—even though it will surely include calls for greater regulation in many cases. At the very least, adding more steps to the approval process might slow the gears of the regulatory state.
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“Finally, Biden’s executive order also changes how regulations will be weighed by the federal agencies approving them, including the foreshadowed changes to how costs and benefits are calculated. Probably the most significant change is a new time horizon for the consideration of regulatory costs, including a new formula for calculating costs and benefits that will extend over multiple generations—seemingly an attempt to make climate regulations appear less costly.”
“Transit agencies face a conundrum. Because they view transit ridership largely in equity terms, they design the systems largely as social-welfare programs designed to provide poorer residents with a means to get around. Yet when they dump billions of dollars in boutique rail lines, they inevitably cannibalize funds from the bus routes that serve the bulk of their riders—and few drivers end up taking those rail lines, anyway.”
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“Instead of thinking like business-people who need to meet the needs of customers, California transit officials act like government bureaucrats who are married to high-cost government and union solutions, and mainly want to impose their preferences on us—rather than lure us into transit by offering high-quality transportation alternatives. Until they change their thinking, Californians will continue to vote with their gas pedals.”
“Among the more controversial measures is a section authorizing another $12 million for the “Unauthorized Alien Transport Program,” which will fund stunts like last September’s migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Notably, it’ll authorize transport “within the United States”—nothing saying that relocation must begin in Florida, or even involve migrants present in the state.
The bill’s more mundane measures will affect far more people, however. Under S.B. 1718, private businesses with 25 or more employees will be required to use the federal E-Verify system to ensure that workers may legally work in the country. Once a business learns that an employee is unauthorized to work, it must fire him or her. Multiple violations in a 24-month period may result in the suspension of state-issued business licenses. Businesses may also lose their licenses based on the number of unauthorized people they employ: Employing between one and 10 will lead to a suspension of up to 30 days, escalating to full “revocation of all applicable licenses” for employing more than 50 unauthorized people.”