“The New York Police Department (NYPD) has a history of protecting bystanders by shooting them. This March, when Brooklyn man Nathan Scott tried to shoot a mugger who had his wallet, the NYPD killed Scott and wounded an auto mechanic across the street. In 2013, after a man in a road rage incident made finger guns and reached for his pocket, the NYPD tased the man and shot two women nearby. In 2012, after a disgruntled ex-employee murdered his coworker outside the Empire State Building, the NYPD shot the murderer along with nine bystanders.”
…
“After chef Derrell Mickles allegedly snuck into a subway station without paying his fare on Sunday, the NYPD tried to arrest him. They claim that Mickles muttered “I’m going to kill you if you don’t stop following me” and drew a knife. (Mickles’ mother says the knife was from his job.)
After failing to subdue Mickles with a taser, the officers shot him, two bystanders, and one of their own in the crowded station.”
…
“Mickles was within seven feet of the officers when they shot him, the NYPD says. Police are traditionally taught the “21-foot rule,” which says that a suspect holding a knife within 21 feet is close enough to pose an immediate threat. But the 21-foot rule is not a license to start shooting anyone within that distance”
“The “historical tradition” test announced in Bruen has no real substance, cannot be applied consistently by lower court judges, and has led to absurd and immoral results. Just last June, for example, the Supreme Court had to intervene after an appeals court, in a perfectly honest application of the Bruen decision, ruled that people subject to domestic violence restraining orders have a constitutional right to own a gun.
But, while the Court’s decision in that case, United States v. Rahimi, reversed one of the federal judiciary’s most astonishing post-Bruen decisions, it left Bruen’s confounding historical test in place. Under Rahimi, “a court must ascertain whether the new law is ‘relevantly similar’ to laws that our tradition is understood to permit” — whatever the hell that means.
In a separate concurring opinion in Rahimi, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson quoted a dozen lower court opinions complaining that judges can’t figure out how Bruen is supposed to work. As one of those opinions stated, “courts, operating in good faith, are struggling at every stage of the Bruen inquiry. Those struggles encompass numerous, often dispositive, difficult questions.”
This chaos is likely to continue until Bruen is overruled. The history and tradition test announced in the case provides lower court judges with no meaningful guidance on which gun laws are constitutional. And Bruen allows judges who are determined to reach pro-gun conclusions no matter what the consequences to strike down virtually any gun law — which may explain Broomes’s decision in the Morgan case.”
“one high school student who was “known as a class clown” made “an offhand joke about committing an act of violence” last school year, according to ProPublica’s report. “Rumors spread among the students about his comment, warping it in the process. He was called to the principal’s office, where a waiting police officer asked whether he had a gun in his backpack. He showed them that he didn’t and insisted that he had just been making a joke….School officials initiated a threat assessment and gathered statements from the students who heard the joke, which were then used as evidence against him. He was expelled for a year.””
“officials said that U.S. Secret Service agents opened fire after spotting the suspect near the golf course’s perimeter. It remains unclear if the individual fired any shots before fleeing in an SUV. The suspect was taken into custody in a neighboring county.
The incident happened around 1:30 p.m. ET, authorities said. Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw stated that the suspect, armed with an AK-style rifle, was positioned roughly 300 to 500 yards away from Trump, concealed in shrubbery that lines the course just a few holes ahead of where Trump was.”
…
“The suspect fled in a vehicle but was quickly apprehended on I-95 in Martin County, north of Palm Beach.
Martin County Sheriff William Snyder said the suspect was unarmed at the time of the arrest. Bradshaw said that a witness saw a man fleeing the golf course bushes. The witness took a photo of the suspect’s black Nissan, and a license plate reader spotted the vehicle.”
“The shooter entered the store the afternoon ofMarch 22, 2021, and opened fire, killing 10 people – including the first Boulder police officer to arrive on the scene.
While families agonized for hours waiting to learn the fate of their missing loved ones, several survivors described the surreal attack.”
“We do know that he was 20 years old, and male.
Those two facts — and his role in Saturday’s shocking crimes — put him in a small but frightening group: He’s now among a handful of young American men who, driven by psychological distress, hatred, or something else, commit highly public acts of violence with powerful guns.
He joins a list of young men that includes the two high school seniors who killed 13 people at Columbine High School in 1999; the 24-year-old who killed 12 people at a movie theater in Colorado in 2012; the 19-year-old who killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018; the 18-year-old who killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket the same year; and, unfortunately, many more.
“Across the board, young men are responsible for the vast majority of gun violence in this country,” said Jillian Peterson, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University and executive director of the Violence Prevention Project Research Center. That’s especially true for public mass shooters, 98 percent of whom are male and a growing number of whom are in their late teens or early 20s.
The reasons young men turn to public violence are many and complicated, but experts say that common factors include access to guns that has grown even easier in recent years and a sense of social isolation deepened by the pandemic. That isolation can lead young men to seek out community in dangerous places, including a growing number of online communities that glorify violence.”
“As a matter of statutory law, the case against Biden is straightforward. He has publicly admitted that he was regularly smoking crack cocaine around the time he bought the gun, and prosecutors say investigators found cocaine residue on the leather pouch in which he had kept it. As a matter of constitutional law, the viability of the case is less clear”
…
“Judging from survey data on drug use and gun ownership, something like 20 million Americans are committing that felony right now. The Justice Department prosecutes only a minuscule percentage of those potential defendants. That is partly because such cases are not a high priority, which tells you something about the logic of treating this offense as a felony that is currently punishable by up to 15 years in prison (thanks to legislation that Biden’s father signed in 2022). But the main reason that gun-owning drug users are rarely prosecuted is that the government generally does not know who they are.
The Biden exception to that rule is the result of two factors. If he had not publicly disclosed his drug use or if Hallie Biden had not publicly revealed his gun possession, there would have been no basis to charge him. But even at that point, federal prosecutors did not have to pursue the case, let alone treat a single gun purchase as three felonies. Here is where Weiss’ eagerness to show that Biden would not get a pass simply because he is the president’s son may have played a role.”