America’s unique, enduring gun problem, explained
“In 2008, the Supreme Court effectively wrote NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s “good guy with a gun” theory into the Constitution. The Court’s 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was the first Supreme Court decision in American history to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm. But it also went much further than that.
Heller held that one of the primary purposes of the Second Amendment is to protect the right of individuals — good guys with a gun, in LaPierre’s framework — to use firearms to stop bad guys with guns. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in Heller, an “inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right.”
As a matter of textual interpretation, this holding makes no sense. The Second Amendment provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
We don’t need to guess why the Second Amendment protects a right to firearms because it is right there in the Constitution. The Second Amendment’s purpose is to preserve “a well-regulated Militia,” not to allow individuals to use their weapons for personal self-defense.
For many years, the Supreme Court took the first 13 words of the Second Amendment seriously. As the Court said in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias. And thus the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view.” Heller abandoned that approach.
Heller also reached another important policy conclusion. Handguns, according to Scalia, are “overwhelmingly chosen” by gun owners who wish to carry a firearm for self-defense. For this reason, he wrote, handguns enjoy a kind of super-legal status. Lawmakers are not allowed to ban what Scalia described as “the most preferred firearm in the nation to ‘keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family.”
This declaration regarding handguns matters because this easily concealed weapon is responsible for far more deaths than any other weapon in the United States — and it isn’t close. In 2019, for example, a total of 13,927 people were murdered in the US, according to the FBI. Of these murder victims, at least 6,368 — just over 45 percent — were killed by handguns.”
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“It is likely, moreover, that the Supreme Court is going to make it even harder for federal and state lawmakers to combat gun violence very soon.”
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“The future of firearm regulation looks grim for anyone who believes that the government should help protect us from gun violence.”
How America fails children
“The firearm homicide rate for US children..is astronomical compared to other wealthy nations…Guns..kill more kids than car[s], in part because, through design changes and..regulations, cars [got] safer while guns [became] more accessible and lethal.”
Russian advances are making the battle for the Donbas a ‘different story’ to the start of the war
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-advantage-eastern-ukraine-now-145506219.html
What Old-Time Saloons Tell Us About the Pandemic’s Damage
New Investigation Finds FDA’s Food Side Is ‘Broken’
“The Politico investigation, which focuses chiefly on food safety, nutrition, and structural issues within FDA, includes interviews with dozens of current and former senior FDA officials, industry representatives, members of Congress, and trade groups—all of them familiar with the inner workings of the FDA. Those who spoke with Politico for the investigation characterized the agency’s regulation of the food supply invariably as “ridiculous,” “impossible,” “broken,” “byzantine” and “a joke.” The piece notes even many agency supporters are now “questioning whether the agency is making the best use of its roughly $1 billion food budget,” pointing out that even though around two-thirds of that budget goes to pay for food safety inspections, “the number of food safety inspections performed each year has been going down despite increased resources.” Such complaints about the FDA—that the agency consistently does less with more—have been at the heart of my own criticisms of the agency over the years.”
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“One of the more interesting responses to the Politico piece came from former senior FDA official Michael Taylor, who in a subsequent op-ed noted the “damning but fair picture” the investigation paints. He called for the FDA to be broken up, with its food safety oversight authority handed to a single food safety agency. That’s a plan that many—me included (though with plenty of caveats)—think could yield real results.
We’ve arrived at a point where most everyone seems to agree the FDA is falling short of fulfilling its mission and duties. But people still disagree about how to fix that fundamental problem. I think the ultimate problem isn’t, as the investigation suggests, that the FDA isn’t meeting consumer expectations or doing enough. Rather, I think the fault lies with the politicians, bureaucrats, and advocates who’ve convinced Americans that supporting bigger FDA budgets and stricter food regulations, including FSMA, will make our food supply safer and improve nutritional outcomes. The FDA has demonstrated it can’t do big things. Reducing the agency’s budget and narrowing its mission could help it to succeed at the small stuff.”
The Politics of DNA
“”Luck,” E.B. White once said, “is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.” They worked hard, no doubt, to get where they are. But they also benefited enormously from good fortune, not just in life but in life’s building blocks. A fortunate combination of thousands of slight genetic differences boosted their intelligence, motivation, openness to experience, task perseverance, executive function, and interpersonal skills.
“Like being born to a rich or poor family, being born with a certain set of genetic variants is the outcome of a lottery of birth,” the behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden argues in The Genetic Lottery. “And, like social class, the outcome of the genetic lottery is a systemic force that matters for who gets more, and who gets less, of nearly everything we care about in society.””
States Are Flush With Cash
“As state legislators kicked off their 2022 sessions this spring and started planning new budgets, many found that their tax coffers were overflowing. What lawmakers do with that extra money could have long-range consequences.
The excess revenue resulted from a convergence of two windfalls. State tax collections rose sharply in 2021 as the pandemic waned, businesses fully reopened, and consumers started spending again. And the federal government showered states with more than $360 billion as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed in March 2021. The passage of President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill means even more federal taxpayer money for state treasuries in the near future.
All told, state revenues (including federal funds) increased by more than 12 percent in 2021, according to data from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Thirty-two states reported higher than expected revenue in 2021, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers.
As a result, many states now have significant year-over-year budget surpluses for the current year. California leads the way with a $31 billion surplus—an amount larger than many states’ entire annual budgets. Florida ($11.2 billion surplus), Maryland ($4.6 billion), Minnesota ($7.7 billion), and Virginia ($2.6 billion) also have large cash reserves. But state lawmakers should be careful about letting the extra dough burn a hole in their pockets.
“It’s understandable that there is all this pent-up demand for different kinds of new programs or tax cuts,” says Josh Goodman, a senior officer with Pew’s state fiscal health initiative. The impulse to use surpluses for pet projects, Goodman says, ignores data that suggest many states are running long-term structural deficits—largely due to pension obligations and health care costs in programs like Medicaid. “The question is not just what’s the budget situation this year,” Goodman says, “but what is the budget -situation going to be five or 10 years down the road.””
Taking Formula From Immigrant Babies Won’t Fix the Shortage
“Migrants in detention centers aren’t free to leave facilities whenever they want to shop for baby formula. Legally, essential products must be provided to migrant children that the government has detained. “Facilities will provide access to…drinking water and food as appropriate,” reads the 1997 Flores settlement that addressed the treatment of migrant children. A 2015 Customs and Border Patrol document on detention standards noted that “food must be appropriate for at-risk detainees’ age and capabilities (such as formula and baby food).” These legal standards predate the Biden administration.
Nor would diverting baby formula away from immigrant detention centers ease supply chain woes in a meaningful way. Ursula—the facility Cammack singled out on Twitter—holds around 1,100 detainees. The number of American parents who rely on formula to feed their infants is on the order of millions. Though several Republican lawmakers and right-leaning news outlets are agitating about the “pallets of baby formula for all of the illegals who are crossing into the United States,” none have been able to say exactly how much formula is going to detention facilities or how often shipments are arriving.
The baby formula shortage is indeed a huge problem. About 40 percent of top baby formula brands are out of stock right now, and producers are warning that shortages could last for several months. But the shortage wasn’t caused by the government’s legal duty to feed the kids it has confined. “Much of the current shortage is rooted in a February recall of formula after a suspected bacterial outbreak at an Abbott Nutrition plant in Michigan,” explains Reason’s Eric Boehm. And while we could re-fill those shelves with formula from abroad, tariffs and quotas “make it burdensome and costly to import the supplies that are now desperately needed.”
You can’t solve the national shortage by making it harder for undocumented parents to feed their babies. Instead of looking for immigrant scapegoats, lawmakers should tackle the trade and regulatory policies that helped create the current shortage.”
He Faces 10 Years to Life for Selling Pot, a Legal Business in Most States
“Jonathan Wall, a 26-year-old cannabis entrepreneur, has been confined at a federal supermax facility in Maryland for nearly 20 months, awaiting a May 2 trial that could send him to prison for life. Wall is accused of transporting more than 1,000 kilograms of marijuana from California, where cannabis is legal for recreational use, to Maryland, which allows only medical use.
Wall’s case illustrates the draconian penalties that can still be imposed on people for selling pot at a time when most states have legalized marijuana businesses. As far as the federal government is concerned, all of those businesses are criminal enterprises. But depending on how federal prosecutors choose to exercise their discretion, selling pot can make you millions of dollars as a state-licensed supplier, or it can send you to prison for decades.”