“While these incidents supposedly underline the need for gun control, they simultaneously cast doubt on that argument, since California already has the strictest gun laws in the country.”
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“California does have a relatively low rate of gun-related deaths: the seventh-lowest in the country, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its ranking is less impressive, however, when you focus on firearm homicides, which is what Everytown for Gun Safety ostensibly is talking about in this context. Based on data from 2010 through 2017, California’s gun homicide rate was middling: lower than the rates in 24 states but higher than the rates in 25 states, including many with looser gun laws.
If you want to make the case that California’s firearm restrictions have resulted in fewer homicides than otherwise would have occurred, you need to look at what happened after those laws were passed and compare it to what happened in otherwise similar places that did not enact such laws. The observation that “California continues to have one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the country” (if you include suicides) as legislators pass one gun law after another hardly shows those laws are working as advertised.”
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“The converted handgun that police recovered after the shooting was stolen, which is not the sort of transfer that would be affected even by perfect compliance with a law requiring “background checks on all gun sales.” According to a 2019 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, just 10 percent of guns used in crimes were obtained from a “retail source” such as a gun store, a pawn shop, a flea market, or a gun show. Nine out of 10 were obtained from informal sources, including friends or relatives, the “underground market,” and theft.
It makes sense that criminals would prefer such sources, especially if they have felony records that disqualify them from legally possessing firearms.”
“Three Republicans voted to confirm Jackson: Romney, and Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine. Of those three, only Romney voted last year against confirming Jackson to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, often considered the second-highest court in the land.
After meeting with Jackson last month and reviewing her confirmation hearings, Romney changed his mind, saying he had “concluded that she is a well-qualified jurist and a person of honor.” It was an implicit rejection of the narrative that his fellow Republicans had pushed about the first Black woman to be put forward for the Supreme Court, who many of them portrayed during her confirmation hearings as a liberal extremist who was soft on crime.
“While I do not expect to agree with every decision she may make on the court, I believe that she more than meets the standard of excellence and integrity,” Romney said in a statement this week.
He is, at the moment, seemingly in the middle of everything. He just brokered a bipartisan deal to salvage a $10 billion coronavirus response package that had stalled amid partisan haggling, this time fully paid for by previously allocated federal funds. He is part of bipartisan efforts to rewrite the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which President Donald Trump sought to manipulate to keep himself in office after losing the 2020 election.
And Romney has appealed to Democrats to work with him on legislation to support children and families, now that the expanded child tax credit has expired and President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better safety net legislation is moribund. All of that is coming after he helped deliver what might be the crowning achievement of Biden’s first year in office: the $1 trillion infrastructure bill.
As Democrats have struggled to pull together 50 senators to advance social safety net legislation, they may find that Romney is a more persuadable bet for that pivotal 50th vote than Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the Democrat who has stymied their efforts so far.
“Whenever there is a bipartisan effort to tackle an issue, its success is nearly guaranteed,” Romney said in a recent interview. “Bipartisan efforts pass. What does not pass in a 50-50 Senate is legislation crafted entirely by one party.””
“The fact that the BAA is allowing residents from other countries whose governments have committed similar sins of aggressive war and mass civilian killings to participate in the marathon shows that it’s not indeed acting on some universal revulsion at government atrocities. Instead, its decision appears to be knee-jerk discrimination against the most visible war occurring right now. It’s hard to treat that as a particularly noble stance.
Of course, trying to exclude every athlete from a country with a nasty government would be a near-impossible task for the BAA. Even if it were feasible to have a consistent policy on when to exclude particular nationalities, that would hardly be desirable for the association. The marathon would become increasingly less inclusive and lose its international recognition. It may even lose its domestic participants. Perhaps, U.S. runners should have been prevented from competing in the 2003 Boston Marathon because of their government’s invasion of Iraq?
The world isn’t made a better place by treating individual athletes as appendages of their governments and sporting events as perpetuations of war and politics.
Particularly during these times of conflict and war, we want international events where people can compete or collaborate peacefully. Excluding Russians from the Boston Marathon just moves us further in the wrong direction.”
“Police in Rochester, New York, seized $8,040 from Cristal Starling during a raid on her apartment in October 2020. Starling was never charged with a crime, but she may never see her money again due to missing a court deadline during the complicated process of challenging the seizure.
Starling’s apartment was one of two locations Rochester police hit while investigating her former boyfriend, who was suspected of dealing drugs. The police didn’t find any drugs in the apartment, but they did find and take Starling’s cash. Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can seize property suspected of being connected to criminal activity. (Starling’s ex-boyfriend was arrested for drugs found at a separate raid in the same investigation, but he was later acquitted.)
Starling, who runs a food cart and says she was saving up for a food truck, began trying to fight the seizure without a lawyer. She managed to get her seized car back, and she thought that, with no criminal charges pending in the case anymore, she would no doubt soon get her cash back, too.
Instead, she got a nasty surprise. The Rochester Police Department had sent her money to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and although she had filed a notice with the Justice Department that she was challenging the forfeiture, she had missed a deadline to do so in federal court, meaning the government could move to forfeit her money by default.
After a judge rejected Starling’s request for an extended deadline, the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm, announced this week that it will file an appeal on her behalf, arguing that people like Starling should have greater opportunity to challenge government seizures.”
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“What Starling has learned the hard way is that asset forfeiture laws not only allow police to seize one’s property without an accompanying criminal charge, but that the process to challenge a seizure is tilted in favor of the government. It’s extremely hard for everyday people to navigate the labyrinthine process to get their money back without paying for an attorney, which in Starling’s case would have probably cost enough to make a victory in court negligible.”
“Eight seconds after a Minneapolis SWAT team entered the apartment where Amir Locke was sleeping on a living room couch, Officer Mark Hanneman shot him dead. A joint report that Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman released yesterday uses footage from six body cameras to break those seconds down into tiny pieces, describing what each officer was doing and what he could see at any given moment. The bottom line: Ellison and Freeman say criminal charges will not be filed against Hanneman or any of the other officers who participated in the deadly February 2 raid, because they reacted appropriately to what they reasonably perceived as a lethal threat—the handgun that Locke picked up after the cops stormed into the apartment.
At the same time, Ellison and Freeman describe Locke as “a victim” and concede that his reaction to the pre-dawn, no-knock raid “was not per se unreasonable.” In fact, they say, “We recognize that Mr. Locke may have been sleeping and that he, like others in the apartment, may have perceived the officers’ entry to be someone breaking into the apartment. We do not dispute this and believe that it is possible that is exactly what happened here.”
The implication is that Locke and Hanneman both acted in self-defense: Locke was justified in grabbing his gun, and Hanneman was justified in responding by shooting him. That perplexing situation, which is similar to what happened during the March 2020 drug raid that killed Breonna Taylor in Louisville, underlines the dangers of police tactics that aim to reduce the risk of violence but often have the opposite effect.
The SWAT team was assisting the St. Paul Police Department in a homicide investigation, but Locke was neither a suspect nor a person of interest. The cops were looking for his cousin, Mekhi Speed, who lived on a different floor of the same apartment building. Locke, a 22-year-old aspiring hip-hop artist, was staying with Mekhi’s brother, Marlon Speed, who shared the apartment with his girlfriend. St. Paul police originally obtained “knock and announce” warrants for Mekhi Speed’s apartment, his brother’s place, and a third unit where “the suspect and his associates often convened.”
Minneapolis SWAT officers refused to participate unless the warrants were changed so that they were authorized to enter early in the morning without first announcing themselves. From their perspective, that was a prudent precaution, since their main target was a murder suspect who was known to be armed. Ellison and Freeman note that police knew “the primary suspect and two other suspects had recently made social media posts in which they were seen with multiple firearms; that the suspects were associated with multiple armed robberies and carjackings; and that the .223 caliber rifle used in the homicide had not yet been recovered.””
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” the problem illustrated by Amir Locke’s senseless death goes beyond no-knock warrants. Even when police knock and announce themselves before they enter, they can easily be mistaken for criminals when they burst into a home at an hour when the residents are likely to be sleeping.”
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“The problem in both cases was not the officers’ split-second decisions so much as the situation that made them necessary. The strategy of discouraging resistance by deliberately discombobulating people while serving warrants has for years led to similar outcomes in cities across the country. Such tragedies are completely predictable in a country where people have a constitutional right to keep guns in the home for self-defense and commonly do.
This well-established hazard has to be considered every time police enter a home, regardless of whether the warrant notionally requires that they give the residents a chance to answer the door. When police decide to surprise people by serving warrants in the middle of the night with an overwhelming show of force, there is little practical difference between banging on the door and quietly unlocking the door before charging in. Either approach creates a substantial risk that people will not understand what is going on. And if they dare to defend themselves, even “an objectively reasonable officer” is apt to perceive a danger that justifies the use of deadly force.”