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Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's Plan to 'Unleash' Police Risks More Abuses of Everyone's Rights
It wasn't a surprise when President Donald Trump penned his recent executive order that calls "for cities to unleash high-impact local police forces." In 2017, the president told a police audience about handling crime suspects: "When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon. You just see them thrown in—rough. I said, 'Please don't be too nice.'" The official line was that he was just joking, but even some police officials were uncomfortable with making light of police brutality. In the ensuing years, Trump's rhetoric has only gotten worse. His recent use of the word unleashing wasn't by accident. Unleash means "to let happen or begin something powerful that, once begun, cannot be controlled." The purpose of the Constitution is to put the leash on the government and its agents. In the Declaration of Independence, colonists complained that the British king "sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance." Police officers are the front line between the government and the people—and few others have such power to deprive us of our liberties and lives. Many conservatives applauded the order, arguing that he's merely empowering police to do their jobs. But police and prosecutors have plenty of tools. Similarly, this administration has mocked the constitutional process of due process, whereby the accused get their day in court. That protects the innocent more than the guilty by simply requiring the government to prove its case. As someone who has covered police-abuse cases, I can guarantee that officers make mistakes, can be overly aggressive, and on occasion are corrupt. After the 1980s-era War on Drugs, police often have used tactics more appropriate to an occupying military force rather than to civilian police officers. If you think police should be unrestrained, get back to me after a SWAT team gets the wrong address and invades your house instead. This is not about letting police do their jobs. Let's say a President Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom—or whichever potential Democratic politician keeps you awake at night—issued an executive order calling for the feds to "unleash high-impact" Internal Revenue Service, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, or Environmental Protection Agency officers. Would you say, "That's great, they're just cracking down on tax cheats, illegal guns, and environmental scofflaws"? Of course not. You'd instead fear they are going to tread on the rights of honest taxpayers, legitimate gun owners, and law-abiding business owners. You'd believe the purpose of the executive order would be political. In 2023, for instance, a Republican-controlled House subcommittee called on the IRS to end "unannounced field visits" because they believed the agency was targeting conservative groups, abusing its power, and harassing ordinary citizens. I expect this argument to fall on deaf ears, given the inconsistent positions taken by members of each political tribe. As an aside, I saw a pickup truck with a "don't tread on me" flag bumper sticker and one of those blue-striped flags symbolizing support for police. Who, exactly, does the driver think will tread on his rights? We're all supportive of police who honestly and legally use their authority to battle crime, but only the most naïve person would believe that unleashing them from legal constraints will only hobble gang-bangers and felons. In many ways, police have already been unleashed from reasonable limits. Consider the issue of civil asset forfeiture, whereby police officers, FBI agents, and other law enforcement officials take the homes, cars, and cash of people who have never been accused of a crime. That also started with the War on Drugs. Federal officials argued that the best way to stifle criminal gangs was to take their assets. That's a fair point, provided it's bound by normal, legal standards—i.e., forcing the government to prove an underlying crime before engaging in a taking. Unfortunately, police take what they want based on their own claims—and then force the owners to prove their innocence to reclaim their life's savings. This is what unleashing looks like in the real world. As one of the founders of that program has argued, it "has turned into an evil itself, with the corruption it engendered among government and law enforcement coming to clearly outweigh any benefits." And that abuse only involves our property. Imagine the abuses that will result when police are free to use whatever violence they deem necessary—and when those who abuse their powers are given even more protections from accountability. Sure, most police officers are honorable, which makes it all the more appalling to incentivize bad ones. "Bad cops are the product of bad policy," wrote Radley Balko, author of Rise of the Warrior Cop. "And policy is ultimately made by politicians. A bad system loaded with bad incentives will unfailingly produce bad cops." These Trump actions provide all the wrong incentives—and law-abiding citizens have much more to fear from them than criminals. This column was first published in The Orange County Register. The post Trump's Plan to 'Unleash' Police Risks More Abuses of Everyone's Rights appeared first on
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Supreme Court's Illusory Consensus on Ghost Guns
The Supreme Court handed gun manufacturers a defeat on Wednesday by upholding a Biden-era regulation that targeted 'ghost guns,' a term used to describe untraceable firearms made from ready-made kits. In a 7-2 decision in Bondi v. Vanderstok, the justices held that the kits could be regulated under existing federal laws. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court, held that the Gun Control Act of 1968 'embraces, and thus permits ATF to regulate, some weapon parts kits and unfinished frames or receivers,' referring to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito cast the dissenting votes, though Thomas was the only one who rejected the court's overall reasoning. Gun-related cases can appear before the Supreme Court in a few different forms. The most impactful cases are the ones decided on constitutional grounds, like the 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller that found an individual right to bear arms in the Second Amendment, or the 2022 decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen that laid out a strict test for gun-related restrictions. Other cases require the court to interpret federal laws instead of the Constitution itself. At issue in this particular case was the Gun Control Act of 1968, or GCA, which sets out the basic framework for how the federal government registers and tracks firearm sales to lawful owners. The law defines a 'firearm' as 'any weapon [...] which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive' and 'the frame or receiver of any such weapon.' Congress began considering measures that would become the GCA after Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy with a mail-order rifle. Most of the GCA's focus is on creating a system for registering and tracking firearm sales through licensed dealers to law-abiding customers who pass background checks. The result is that almost every modern gun sold today in the United States is etched with a licensed serial number that can be used to track its ownership—an important tool for law enforcement when conducting investigations. In recent years, however, some gun manufacturers have offered a way around this regulatory system. In addition to selling fully fabricated firearms, they offer what are known as 'weapon parts kits.' Customers could purchase these kits without passing a background check and manufacturers could sell them without a license. The assembled guns would also lack serial numbers or registered owners, thereby evading the entire federal regulatory regime for gun purchases. These kits—and the 'ghost guns' created with them—drew considerable concern from law enforcement officials, as well as from state and federal leaders. In 2022, ATF drafted a rule that would allow it to regulate weapons parts kits as if they were completed firearms, citing the GCA's language that covers the 'frame or receiver' of such weapons. A coalition of kit manufacturers and gunsmiths sued the bureau before the rule could go into effect, arguing that it went beyond what the GCA allowed it to regulate. This was an uphill battle for the plaintiffs from the start. When challenging a regulation like this one on its face, they must show that the regulation would be invalid in all circumstances. The government need only prove that it is correct in some cases to prevail. Despite that handicap, the plaintiffs prevailed at first in a federal district court in Texas and then before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. (Given the pronounced rightward tilt of these courts, these results are hardly surprising.) The Supreme Court saw things differently. As I noted earlier, the GCA's definition of a firearm includes not just the obvious finished products, but also something that 'will' or 'is designed to' or 'may be readily converted' into a gun. It also includes the 'frame or receiver' of a gun, which generally refers to the firing mechanism. Gorsuch read this language to include kits that could be easily constructed into a functional firearm, including the Polymer80 'Buy Build Shoot' kit on which the case was largely focused. 'It comes with 'all of the necessary components to build' a Glock-variant semiautomatic pistol,' he wrote, quoting from the Justice Department's brief. 'And it is so easy to assemble that, in an ATF test, an individual who had never before encountered the kit was able to produce a gun from it in 21 minutes using only 'common' tools and instructions found in publicly available YouTube videos.' Gorsuch rejected the idea that such a kit did not count as a 'weapon' for the GCA's purposes. He noted that the term weapon is an 'artifact noun,' a linguistic term for a word that describes a human creation. Everyday speakers often use artifact nouns to describe unfinished versions of an object, Gorsuch explained, citing friend-of-the-court briefs filed by linguistics scholars. 'An author might invite your opinion on her latest novel, even if she sends you an unfinished manuscript,' he wrote. 'A friend might speak of the table he just bought at IKEA, even though hours of assembly remain ahead of him. In both cases, the artifact noun fits because the intended function of the unfinished object is obvious to speaker and listener alike.' Gorsuch showed a judge's sobriety by not writing, 'C'mon, folks, this is an obvious one.' He noted that people would describe a rifle that is partially disassembled for travel and storage as a rifle. And he indicated that the name of Polymer80's kit gave the game away. 'Yes, perhaps a half hour of work is required before anyone can fire a shot,' he wrote. 'But even as sold, the kit comes with all necessary components, and its intended function as [an] instrument of combat is obvious. Really, the kit's name says it all: 'Buy Build Shoot.'' Thomas was not the only dissenting justice in the case, but he was the only one who substantively disagreed with Gorsuch on the merits. (Alito wrote that he would have sent the case back to the lower courts on procedural grounds.) His argument largely drew upon fears raised by conservative judges in the lower courts about the ATF's decision to regulate unfinished frames and receivers under the statutory term of 'frame or receiver.' 'If an object already is what it may be converted into, then semiautomatic AR-15s would seem to be partially complete, automatic machineguns,' Thomas warned. 'This reasoning exposes the manufacturers, sellers, and owners of AR-15s to criminal liability under the [National Firearms Act]. But, Congress does not 'hide elephants in mouseholes.' An interpretive approach that would allow ATF to regulate the most popular semiautomatic rifle in America under a statute addressing automatic machineguns should give us pause.' This is not a very realistic prospect, to say the least. It verges on the conspiratorial for Thomas to suggest that ATF is sneaking some sort of back-door effort to criminalize roughly 16 million AR-15 owners through this rule change. (Note that the Trump administration did not reverse the outgoing Biden administration's stance in this case after taking office.) In response to this claim from Thomas and the plaintiffs, Gorsuch took pains to note that the Justice Department denied it had any such plans and hinted that the court would almost certainly not interpret the GCA or the National Firearms Act, which regulates fully automatic firearms, in such a way. This will likely not be the end of legal battles over weapons parts kits and ghost guns. Again, the government only had to prove that the ATF rule was a valid interpretation of the statute in some cases, not all of them. And while there is broad consensus among the justices—excluding Thomas, of course—that ATF can regulate the kits, there appears to be some daylight between them on how far the bureau can go. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for example, wrote a short concurring opinion to emphasize the state-of-mind requirement in the relevant federal firearms laws. Those laws require that a defendant have acted 'willfully' to be criminally charged with violating them—not inadvertently, accidentally, or so on. 'As the government seemed to recognize, if the government were to charge a background-check violation against an individual who was unaware that he was violating the law, that defendant might have a due process argument based on lack of fair notice,' Kavanaugh noted. Alito, for his part, focused his dissenting opinion about procedural questions about the standard of review that the court should apply. But he also wrote that dissent in such a way as to suggest that the court's opinion was a very narrow one. 'The Court points to a gun kit that is all-but-assembled, and a frame that is as close to completion as possible,' Alito wrote. 'As applied to those extreme situations, the Court holds—and I agree—the rule does not deviate from the statute.' That drew pushback from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who rejected the idea that the court had only signed off on 'all-but-assembled' kits and frames 'as close to completion as possible,' as Alito had slyly implied. 'The court's opinion speaks for itself on that point and others,' she wrote. 'I encourage readers to go to the source, rather than rely on dissents, to understand what the court holds. It is the court's ruling, not the one set forth by the dissents, that binds the lower courts.' Alito, via a footnote, fired back. 'Although Justice Sotomayor obviously wishes that the court had gone further, all that the court has actually held is that the ATF rule is not facially invalid because at least some applications of the rule are consistent with the statute,' he wrote, citing the two examples noted by Gorsuch. 'The court has not held that any other kits or presently non-functional receivers are covered.' So potent is the issue of gun rights that even in a case where the justices largely agreed with one another, they couldn't help but find ways to part ways.
The Hill
20-03-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
DOJ creating path for people with criminal convictions to again own guns
The Justice Department (DOJ) plans to create a process for those with criminal convictions to restore their gun rights, sparking alarm it will return firearms to those convicted of violent crimes. The interim rule, posted in the Federal Register Thursday, follows a February executive order from President Trump directing a review of the country's gun restrictions to 'assess any ongoing infringements.' The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) has the power to restore gun rights, but the agency has been blocked from doing so under congressional appropriations riders since 1992. Under the DOJ proposal, the attorney general would designate that power within the department. DOJ said the rule 'reflects an appropriate avenue to restore firearm rights to certain individuals who no longer warrant such disability based on a combination of the nature of their past criminal activity and their subsequent and current law-abiding behavior.' The notice also said that 'no constitutional right is limitless' and that they would be 'screening out others for whom full restoration of firearm rights would not be appropriate.' However, groups advocating against gun violence argue the policy would ease the process for those convicted of violent crimes to gain access to a weapon. 'The Trump Administration is throwing out decades of bipartisan precedent and laying the groundwork to put guns back in the hands of domestic abusers and violent criminals,' John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement. 'At a time when violent crime is down, this dangerous development could put law enforcement and our communities at greater risk by opening the floodgates to violent criminals rearming themselves,' he added. The Justice Department recently moved to restore gun rights to Mel Gibson, who lost his gun rights in connection with a 2011 conviction on misdemeanor domestic violence charges. One Justice Department attorney was fired after she refused to recommend restoration of his gun rights, with former pardon attorney Liz Oyer saying she felt she could not do so given the risks associated with returning guns to those convicted of violent crimes. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence said the rule would create 'a unilateral system to give gun rights back to those who are dangerous and high risk.' 'This is a blatant and dangerous power grab by the Trump Administration and a gift to his donors in the gun industry – one that will open new markets for them by putting guns back into the hands of people who should never have them. In no uncertain terms, Trump is paving the way for mass restoration of gun rights without guardrails,' Kris Brown, the president of the group said in a statement. Gun rights groups celebrated the interim rule, with Gun Owners of America saying it would end the 'legal limbo' for those seeking to restore their right to own a weapon. 'For decades, law-abiding Americans who have had their gun rights unfairly restricted have been left in legal limbo — creating an unconstitutional de facto lifetime gun ban,' Erich Pratt, the group's senior vice president, said in a statement. 'This bureaucratic failure has denied thousands of individuals their lawful opportunity to restore their rights,' he added.
Boston Globe
28-02-2025
- Science
- Boston Globe
Today in History: February 28, the Waco Siege begins
In 1953, Francis H.C. Crick announced that he and fellow scientist James D. Watson had discovered the double-helix structure of DNA. Advertisement In 1956, a commuter train barreling down the tracks at 50 miles per hour slammed into a stopped train from Portsmouth, N.H., near the Swampscott Station, killing 13 people and injuring more than 100 amid a nor'easter. In 1975, 43 people were killed in London's Underground when a train failed to stop at Moorgate station, smashing into the end of a tunnel. In 1983, the final episode of the television series 'M.A.S.H.' aired; nearly 106 million viewers saw the finale, which remains the most-watched episode of any US television series to date. In 1986, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated while walking on a Stockholm street with his wife; his assailant was never captured and remains unidentified. In 1993, a gun battle erupted at a religious compound near Waco, Texas, when Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents tried to arrest Branch Davidian leader David Koresh on weapons charges; four agents and six Davidians were killed as a 51-day standoff began. In 2013, Benedict XVI became the first pope in 600 years to resign, ending an eight-year pontificate. (Benedict was succeeded the following month by Pope Francis.) Advertisement In 2014, delivering a blunt warning to Moscow, President Obama expressed deep concern over reported military activity inside Ukraine by Russia and warned 'there will be costs' for any intervention.
