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      Mapping the anti-trans laws sweeping America: ‘A war on 100 fronts’

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      On the first day of Pride month, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, signed a law banning transgender girls from participating on girls’ sports teams in middle school through college.It was just one of 13 anti-trans bills conservative lawmakers in the US passed this year, and one of more than 110 bills that were proposed – by far the largest number in US history.This extraordinary legislative attack on trans rights has primarily targeted children and young adults and has dramatically escalated over the last several months, establishing anti-trans policy as a signature priority for state Republicans. The results could be catastrophic for vulnerable children, advocates and affected families say, given that the bills target healthcare, recreation and school life, with policies that intensify discrimination and exclusion of trans kids.The proposals have spanned 37 states, affecting nearly every region of the country, according to Freedom for All Americans, a not-for-profit that has tracked the bills and compiled data for the Guardian.While most legislative sessions have now ended and a majority of the bills failed, there are at least six anti-trans bills that remain active, in addition to the 13 laws that passed.“What we saw was unprecedented, and it was an avalanche,” said Jules Gill-Peterson, a professor of gender, sexuality and women’s studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and an expert on trans kids. “There’s this relentlessness and exhaustion. How do you fight a war on 100 fronts simultaneously?”The most common target: trans athletesThe most common anti-trans proposals were focused on sports, many of them specifically seeking to ban trans girls from competing on girls’ teams. Sports bills limiting the access of trans girls to teams have been passed this year in Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi and West Virginia. Bills that more broadly ban trans kids from playing on the teams that match their gender were signed into law in Alabama, Montana and Tennessee. (Arkansas also passed a second sports-related law that creates an enforcement mechanism for its ban.)In South Dakota, the sports bills failed, but the governor instead signed two executive orders banning trans girls from girls sports teams in K-12, and in college. There are several states where the legislative sessions are ongoing and these types of bans are still under consideration, including Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In total more than 60 sports ban laws were proposed this year across 36 states.“It’s a piece of your life that you work so hard for, and for it just to be taken away is hard,” a 12-year-old swimmer and trans girl in Utah told the Guardian earlier this year. The proposed ban in her state ultimately failed.Other bills target gender-affirming healthcareThe bulk of the other anti-trans bills sought to outlaw gender-affirming healthcare, with at least 36 proposals related to medical treatments across 21 states. In April, Arkansas passed the first ban on affirming healthcare for youth, with a policy that threatens to discipline or revoke the licenses of doctors who provide it. Experts and clinicians had strongly objected, arguing that the state was prohibiting care that is considered standard and best practice, and advocates said it was one of the most extreme anti-trans bills to ever be enacted.Tennessee later adopted a more narrow anti-trans medical bill, which prohibited hormone treatments for “prepubertal minors”. Advocates noted that youth do not receive hormones pre-puberty and that this law would not disrupt existing care, but was nonetheless sending a hateful message.‘No goals here except discrimination’Five states also considered anti-trans bathroom bills, with Tennessee ultimately passing two separate laws. One prohibits trans kids from using bathrooms and locker rooms at school that match their gender. Another requires that if businesses allow trans people to use the correct bathrooms, they have to post a sign that says, “This facility maintains a policy of allowing the use of restrooms by either biological sex, regardless of the designation on the restroom.”Montana passed a law banning trans people from correcting the gender marker on their birth certificates if they haven’t undergone affirming surgery.“State legislatures prioritized mean-spirited, dangerous and unnecessary bills targeting transgender kids at a moment when states are still recovering from the pandemic,” said Hannah Willard, the vice-president of government affairs with Freedom for All Americans. “It was unconscionable.”Civil rights groups have begun filing lawsuits challenging the bills, some of which are scheduled to go into effect in July. These court battles could overturn or temporarily block the laws, but families have already reported fleeing their states to protect their kids. Some advocates have called on people in power to defy the laws, and the district attorney in Nashville has said he would not enforce one of the bathroom bills.Trans youth, who have repeatedly traveled to their state capitols to testify against the bills, said the political debates about their lives have worsened their mental health and anxiety.“It’s hard to describe the magnitude of damage that has been done,” said Gill-Peterson. “Even in the states where the bills didn’t pass, trans young people are living in an environment where prominent politicians have stated that it’s open season on their lives, that they don’t deserve basic human rights, that their lives are expandable or wrong, and that the people who love and care for them are somehow enemies of the Republican party.”She said she feared that the next legislative cycle would bring even more extreme bills, adding, “There were no goals here except discrimination, and cheap political points. And now, we are living in a more policed, more dangerous country for trans young people.” More

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      Supreme court justice Stephen Breyer: Democrats must ‘get Republicans talking’

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      The supreme court justice Stephen Breyer has told young Americans Democrats facing Republican intransigence, obstruction and outright attacks on democracy should “get ‘em talking”, in search of compromise and progress.Breyer was speaking to middle- and high-school students on Friday, in an event organised by the National Constitution Center.The same day, Republicans in the Senate deployed the filibuster, by which the minority can thwart the will of the majority, to block the establishment of a 9/11-style commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump on 6 January.Thomas Kean, who led the 9/11 panel, told the Guardian the Republican move was “democracy’s loss”.From the White House, Joe Biden faces Republican reluctance to engage on his plans for investment in infrastructure and the pandemic-battered economy. Amid concerted attacks on voting rights in Republican states, federal bills to protect such rights seem unlikely to pass the Senate.“You need that Republican’s support?” Breyer told the listening students. “Talk to them … You say, ‘What do you think? My friend, what do you think?’ Get ’em talking. Once they start talking eventually they’ll say something you agree with.”Democrats do not agree with Trump’s lie that his election defeat by Biden was the result of electoral fraud, which fuelled the deadly attack on the Capitol. Nor do they agree with Republican attempts to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 supreme court ruling which safeguards a woman’s right to abortion.The court has a 6-3 conservative majority, after Republicans ripped up precedent to block Barack Obama’s final appointment then installed three justices under Trump, in the last case reversing their own position on appointments in the last year of a presidency.Breyer was speaking less than two weeks after the court agreed to hear a major challenge to abortion rights.The case, which the justices will hear in their next term, beginning in October, involves an attempt by Mississippi to revive a law that bans the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy.In 2019 the conservative Clarence Thomas, who has backed abortion restrictions, urged the court to feel less bound to upholding precedent. Asked about the value of adhering to past rulings, Breyer said the court should overturn precedent only in the “rare case where it’s really necessary” and said law is about stability.“The law might not be perfect but if you’re changing it all the time people won’t know what to do, and the more you change it the more people will ask to have it changed, and the more the court hears that, the more they’ll change it.”Many on the left seek change on the court, in the form of Breyer’s retirement. After the death of the progressive champion Ruth Bader Ginsburg at 87 last September, Breyer, at 82, is the oldest judge on the panel. Ginsburg was replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, a strict Catholic widely seen as likely to favour overturning precedent on abortion.Brett Kavanaugh, another conservative justice, was installed by Republicans after Anthony Kennedy retired, a move supported by the Trump White House. Kennedy was conservative but a swing vote on key rulings regarding individual rights. Kavanaugh, once an aide to President George W Bush, is more reliably rightwing.Breyer told the students, aged between 11 and 18, that as part of his daily routine he watches reruns of M*A*S*H, a hit sitcom that ran from 1972 to 1983. He also rides a stationary bike and meditates.Questioned about deepening polarisation some fear may tear the US apart, Breyer said he was “basically optimistic”. For all of its flaws, he said, American democracy is “better than the alternatives”.He also urged his listeners to put “unfortunate things” in historical context.“It’s happened before,” he said. “This is not the first time that people have become discouraged with the democratic process. This is not the first time that we’ve had real racism in this country. It used to be slavery before that.” More

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      Should Biden reform the supreme court? Politics Weekly Extra – podcast

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      Last week, the US supreme court agreed to hear a case that could significantly roll back abortion rights. This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Christopher Kang, former deputy counsel to President Obama, about calls to restructure the highest federal court in the country

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      Christopher Kang spent several years working in the White House when Barack Obama was in office. Now he is the co-founder and chief counsel of Demand Justice, an organisation pushing for Congress to pass a bill that would allow the addition of four seats to the US supreme court, diluting the majority conservatives currently have on the bench. Jonathan questions the consequences of such an act, whether there is another way to restore balance, and the politics behind such a radical move. More

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      Will rule of law succeed where Congress failed and hold Trump accountable?

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      Standing in court, the former president pleaded not guilty to charges of financial crimes that he insists are part of a politically motivated witch hunt. Jacob Zuma, once the populist leader of South Africa, cut a humbled figure on Wednesday – and offered a potential glimpse of America’s future.A similar fate for Donald Trump became significantly more likely with reports that New York prosecutors have convened a grand jury to decide whether to indict him on criminal charges.The jurists will examine evidence gathered during the Manhattan district attorney’s two-year investigation into the former US president’s business dealings and alleged hush money payments to women on his behalf.There is a long way to go, but it is a sign that the long arm of the law may reach parts where Congress, in particular the Republican party, consistently failed by holding Trump accountable for his actions.Prosecutors have a decent chance of maintaining the perception of independence because the decision whether to bring charges rests with a jury of citizens studying evidence in secret rather than with Democrat Joe Biden’s department of justice.Biden and his attorney general, Merrick Garland, will be sure to stay as far away from the case as possible to avoid any hint of political interference. If the jury goes against him, Trump would be the first former US president charged with a crime.This would surely produce the trial of the century, a fittingly Trumpian spectacle dominating every screen. Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general, told the MSNBC network: “I think it’s a potential sign that it looks like Donald Trump is moving on from the presidency to his next turn on TV, which is as a defendant.”A criminal conviction and jail sentence would be seen by America’s admirers as evidence of the rule of law – and by its detractors as the vindictive pursuit of a former leader reminiscent of a failing state.Trump is bound to play on such fears when he soon resumes campaign rallies. He said in a statement on Tuesday: “This is a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt in American history.”He added pointedly: “Interesting that today a poll came out indicating I’m far in the lead for the Republican Presidential Primary and the General Election in 2024.”The fact that the message is tired and predictable makes it no less potent among his core supporters. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, and the Democrats’ impeachment of Trump over his quid pro quo with the Ukraine, became regular foils for Trump on the campaign trail.When the rallies resume, expect to hear these golden oldies combined with some new material: how the 6 January insurrection was actually a fun day out with supporters kissing police, only to be hijacked by Antifa; and how the Manhattan district attorney’s case is a Democratic conspiracy designed to thwart any Trump reelection plans.Prosecutors cannot allow such nonsense to blow them off course; Trump will always find some grievance to weaponise. With the help of rightwing media and an acquiescent Republican party, it might secure him millions of votes but not enough to win the national popular vote and, current polls suggest, not the electoral college.A Trump 2024 election campaign depends on numerous variables: his age (he turns 75 next month), the lure of the golf course, how Republicans fare in the 2022 midterm elections, whether Republicans produce a viable alternative and how Biden’s economy performs. But the grand jury could scuttle it before it begins.In America, anything is possible. Four or five years from now, Trump might be back in the White House – or he might be in prison. Only the brave or foolhardy would bet which. More

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      Trump’s revenge: tilting of supreme court to the right poised to bear fruit

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      Donald Trump’s presidency was capricious and chaotic, but there was one issue on which he focused with laser-like discipline: tilting the judiciary to the right.Now America is about to reap that harvest. In the next year the supreme court is set to consider healthcare, voting, LGBTQ rights, guns and, most explosively, abortion. The cases provide a vivid demonstration of how, after being rejected at the ballot box, conservative partisans could push their agenda through the courts instead.“Next year’s supreme court term is shaping up to be the revenge of Donald Trump,” said Edward Fallone, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School.It was always said that, long after the tweets and leaks were forgotten, Trump’s judicial legacy would endure. He appointed 234 judges, including 54 appellate judges, outpacing Barack Obama’s first term total of 172 and George W Bush’s 204.The blitz included three supreme court justices, most recently Amy Coney Barrett, a devout Catholic, who replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg following the liberal linchpin’s death, handing conservatives a 6-3 majority.Just after Barrett’s arrival and Joe Biden’s victory, the court heard arguments in a new challenge to Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act. A decision is expected soon. If the court’s conservatives overturn Obamacare, they would succeed where Republicans in Congress failed.That outcome is seen as unlikely, but the right is expected to fare better in two cases brought by Democrats contending that voting restrictions in Arizona are racially discriminatory. A ruling, expected soon, could make it harder to challenge dozens of other Republican-led voting measures in the wake of last year’s election.Another looming case involves a Roman Catholic adoption agency in Philadelphia that argues it is entitled to discriminate against potential foster parents on the basis of sexual orientation. Arguments at a hearing last November again implied that the conservative majority will rule in favour of the agency.The supreme court’s 2020-21 term offers further flashpoints. The nine justices will review a challenge to New York’s restrictions on people carrying concealed handguns in public. It will be the court’s first major gun rights case in more than a decade, even as Biden pushes for Congress to tackle America’s firearm violence epidemic.And, it emerged this week, America’s highest court will also consider a bid to revive a Republican-backed state law that would ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The eventual ruling could undercut the seminal 1973 Roe v Wade decision that enshrined a woman’s right to abortion nationwide.Fallone believes the move is a sign that the court’s conservatives are no longer worried about Chief Justice John Roberts casting a decisive vote against them. “The only reason to take this case would be to overturn Roe,” he said. “They’re pretty confident they can succeed without it.”Despite holding the White House and both chambers of Congress, Democrats have few options in the short term. Fallone, who unsuccessfully ran for the Wisconsin supreme court as a Democrat, added: “I don’t really think realistically that there is much that the Democrats can do about the court. The conservative majority is going to be emboldened next term.“They’ve been waiting for that moment for a long time and it’s finally going to arise. The second amendment case involving the New York law against carrying firearms openly in public is also setting up next term to be a big win for conservatives potentially as well.”A commission established by Biden to study potential changes to the supreme court held its first meeting on Wednesday. It has six months to issue a report on reforms including possibly expanding the number of justices to 13, an idea championed by some liberal activists and Democratic members of Congress.Christopher Kang, co-founder and chief counsel of the pressure group Demand Justice, said: “From the gun violence prevention case to the abortion case, the Republican super majority on the supreme court is showing that it is full steam ahead with its ultra-conservative agenda regardless of what the country thinks.“Ultimately we have to grapple with the need for structural reform of the supreme court. We’re just starting to build the education and activism around this and gaining momentum in Congress. As the supreme court continues to take these grossly political steps, unfortunately they’re going to make the argument for us about why the supreme court needs to be reformed.”A bill to expand the court was introduced in Congress last month but Democratic moderates have expressed scepticism. Kang insisted: “Sooner or later, this is going to be a question that comes to the Democrats about how we’re going to preserve our democracy. The need to add supreme court seats, regrettably, is going to become very clear within the next couple of years.”Republicans have opposed the idea of expanding the number of justices, sometimes described as “court packing” and last seriously attempted by the Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. They deny that they are using the courts as a workaround to subvert democracy and impose a form of minority rule.Curt Levey, president of the rightwing advocacy group the Committee for Justice, said: “I don’t see Biden’s narrow victory as an endorsement of abortion on demand, which is pretty much the current regime or, for that matter, as an endorsement of draconian restrictions on handguns. So I guess I don’t really see it as being out of step.“I think the opposite was true for many decades where the supreme court represented elite opinion that was out of touch with the majority. Perhaps for the first time, the supreme court is more in line with the American people generally. I certainly understand why the left is upset that they’ve lost an institution that helped them to implement their agenda.”In fact Biden won the national popular vote by 7m ballots. About six in 10 Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the Pew Research Center, although the partisan split over the issue has deepened in recent years.Meagan Hatcher-Mays, director of democracy policy at the grassroots movement Indivisible, said: “Most people in the United States think that abortion should be legal and easy to access so it’s not really a political winner for Republicans, especially among suburban women, to go at women’s bodily autonomy like this legislatively.“If the courts do it, then they get what they want and they don’t face any blowback for it because it wasn’t them that did it. They didn’t pass a law that says abortion is bad; they got the supreme court to do it. And so that’s what this 40-year project has been about: stacking the courts with people that are conservative loyalists and who will do the unpopular dirty work of Republicans that they can’t get done legislatively.”It is a very long game. A recent article in the Atlantic magazine noted that Trump’s judges will not reach the peak of their influence until the early 2040s, when they are likely to lead nearly every appeals court at the same time.Hatcher-Mays warned: “The lower courts also have been hijacked, frankly, by people who are loyal not just to conservative values but Republican political outcomes. That was Trump’s big legacy. Not every case goes to the supreme court; a lot of them are decided at the lower level; a lot of those people that he picked are Trumpian-type judges. So that’s really, really scary.” More

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      Ordered online, assembled at home: the deadly toll of California’s ‘ghost guns’

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      When Brian Muhammad, a program manager at a gun violence prevention group in California, asked a 16-year-old boy in 2018 how young people were getting guns, he assumed the answer would be Nevada, the neighboring state with looser gun laws.“Who would waste time going to Nevada when you can just get them in the mail and put it together?” the Stockton teen nonchalantly replied.Three years later, homemade weapons known as “ghost guns” have risen to the top of the Biden administration’s policy agenda. When the president announced executive actions targeting gun violence after the mass shootings in Georgia, California and Colorado, they included steps to regulate the sale of the devices – the first time the federal government took up such efforts.Warnings about do-it-yourself guns have steadily grown in recent years, spurred by ominous news stories describing the weapons’ use in a slew of mass shootings, domestic terrorism cases and gun trafficking busts. In California alone, homemade guns were used in a 2013 mass shooting in Santa Monica, a 2014 bank robbery in Stockton and a shooting spree in rural Tehama county that killed six in 2017. In 2019, a 16 year old killed two students and injured three others before killing himself with a ghost gun at a school in Santa Clarita. The next year, as protests over police violence filled city streets, Steven Carrillo used a homemade machine gun to shoot two security guards at a federal building in Oakland and a sheriff’s deputy in an ambush in Santa Cruz.But as the role of ghost guns in high profile criminal cases has grown, community violence reduction workers warn of the less visible toll ghost guns are taking : ghost guns, they say, have become a hot commodity in many vulnerable communities, a trend that has only intensified during the pandemic.The ease with which these guns can be ordered and constructed, their low cost and the difficulties in tracing them have made them readily available in many California cities, the organizers say. Their rapid spread, combined with Covid-19 limitations to the in-person contact so many violence interrupters rely on, have created a dangerous combination that is contributing to the surge in gun deaths that began last year.“We have people buying guns on the street at a faster pace. We can’t keep up with the number of guns especially when they may be more accessible than social services for some,” said Muhammad, of the Advance Peace program, a gun violence prevention organization, in Stockton.‘If a person wants a gun, they can get it’Antoine Towers, the chair of Oakland’s Violence Prevention Coalition, said he first heard about ghost guns at the beginning of the pandemic.First from friends who bought a ghost gun and assembled it, next up were some family members, then his co-workers. Gun ownership in Black communities in California rose significantly during the pandemic, mass protests and election chaos of 2020, and Towers’ network was opting for ghost guns rather than buying full-priced guns from stores that were inundated with sales.Soon, Towers said, ghost guns started showing up at his work. “We already had a problem with firearms, but it became really ridiculous,” Towers said. “[Ghost guns] are so easy to get right now that the only solution I see is figuring out a way to make sure people who have them aren’t using them. It’s heartbreaking.”Once a niche hobby among gun enthusiasts, do-it-yourself gun kits have been around since the 1990s, but they’ve increasingly become a feature on the nightly news since the early 2010s.The kits are substantially less expensive than a traditional gun bought from a federally licensed store. For example: a pistol from Bass Pro Shop, a US-based outdoor sporting goods conglomerate, can range in price from $470 to more than $900 while a homemade pistol kit from Polymer80, a popular online gun retailer, costs less than $180 and can be assembled with common tools like screwdrivers and a few drill bits.The guns aren’t subject to traditional firearm sale mandates, including background checks and serial numbers, because of a legal loophole. Since they are shipped in several pieces, they fall out of the bounds of what the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) classifies as a legal firearm.“The argument is that they can’t fire in the condition they’re sold in. Because they require some assembly, they’re not firearms,” said Eric Tirschwell, the managing director of litigation for Everytown for Gun Safety, a national gun violence prevention advocacy group.Previously, police say, they mostly found ghost guns during large gun busts and underground trafficking operations. But in the past two years, they are more frequently turning up in the backs of cars or the hands of individuals. Increasingly popular among gun owners, the guns have also become an interesting business proposition for traffickers.Tina Padilla, a peacekeeper with Breaking Through Barriers to Success (BTBS), a Los Angeles-based violence prevention nonprofit, said she first heard about ghost guns on the news a few years ago, especially after mass shootings. Then she heard some young people trickle into the nonprofit’s office discussing their purchases and what kits they were eyeing in passing conversation.“I learned the logistics of getting a ghost gun from working in the community and found out that they can be purchased from different sites, with different credit cards to different addresses and the government can’t trace who’s buying these guns and where they’re going,” Padilla said.“Now, instead of people having to purchase weapons for $600 to $700, they can buy them on the computer, put them together and use them on the street,” said Padilla.Police in Stockton first became familiar with ghost guns in 2014, when a homemade AK-47 was recovered after a deadly bank robbery that turned into a hostage situation and hour-long car chase. In 2019, the department recovered 42 ghost guns. And in 2020, it seized 175, nearly four times as many.The ATF has been recovering more ghost guns in the US each year. In 2019, they seized more than 7,100 and in 2020 that number grew to 8,712, according to department data. Police departments in other California cities have reported similar rises. San Francisco police started tracking ghost guns in 2016, and found six that year. In 2019, they recovered 77 and, in 2020, the number leaped to 164. Los Angeles county police found 813 ghost guns in 2020. In Oakland, 16% of all guns seized by police in 2020 were ghost guns. So far in 2021, 22% are ghost guns.Violence intervention workers say the rise in ghost guns has played some role in the rise in gun deaths recorded in cities all across America.“There’s a whole industry of people who are making guns and in this digital age the difficulty factor isn’t there, so if a person wants a gun they can get it,” said Muhammad, the Advanced Peace director in Stockton.Like hundreds of other cities, homicides in Stockton have ticked up in past months. In 2020, 55 people were murdered in the city, the highest number in three years. Muhammad believes that ghost guns have played a role, especially among Stockton’s teens.“We’ve seen a younger group of people engaging in gunplay, he said. “There’s no school right now, and a 14, 15 year old isn’t gonna just sit at home if their parents are out working.” The loss of in-person schooling and extracurriculars, have left “ample time to get in disagreement”, he said.“Whatever people can do to make money, they will. And they know there’s a high demand, with people scared at the beginning of the pandemic and buying guns,” said Rudy Corpuz Jr, the executive director of United Playaz, a San Francisco-based violence prevention and youth development organization.“It’s scary because a lot of the ghost guns are in hands that are not responsible. And when you have kids all over in parks and places where violence happens, there’s potential that one of these can be used, and then one of these kids doesn’t get a chance to grow up.”Padilla, the Los Angeles-based violence interrupter, said the casualness with which she’s heard some young people talk about getting a kit sent to their home worried her. She said language barriers and lack of information among parents can make it difficult for them to regulate the packages that are being sent to their homes.“We need to do more education campaigns because some of these parents may get a package they may not think too much about. We need to let them know that they need to keep an eye out because these guns can cause a lot of harm,” she said.Ghost gun regulationsFollowing three mass shootings this spring, including a downtown San Diego shooting where a ghost gun was used, Biden directed the Department of Justice to develop new regulations around ghost guns. On 7 May, the ATF, which is part of the DOJ, proposed new rules that would close the loophole that allows ghost guns to be sold with little oversight. Under the new measures, the primary parts of a gun kit would be considered firearms, and therefore would need a serial number. Buyers would have to pass a background check.The measures would mark the first effort to regulate ghost guns on the federal level.In California, a 2018 state law required at-home kit builders to apply for a unique serial number, but the requirement only applied to ghost gun builders, and not to sellers, leaving it legal to sell kits without a serial number.San Francisco is set to weigh a proposal that would go further, and ban the sale of ghost guns as well. If the ordinance passed, it would make the city the first in California to do so.Meanwhile, several local district attorneys have sued ghost gun manufacturers and a number of states and cities have had lawsuits against the ATF for their original refusal to regulate ghost gun kits like traditional firearms. The Los Angeles city attorney joined Everytown for Gun Safety in a lawsuit against Polymer80, a popular gun kit seller that is facing a number of other lawsuits in California and Washington DC over their advertisement practices. The suit alleges that the dealer acted negligently and failed “to avoid exposing others to reasonably foreseeable risks of injury”, according to the complaint filed in December.Everytown is also suing 1911builders.com, the gun kit maker and dealer who sold the kit that was used in the Saugus school shooting, on behalf of one of the victims.In November 2019, Mia Tretta was injured in a mass shooting at Saugus high school in Santa Clarita. A 16-year-old student at the school had brought a homemade .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol which he used to shoot five students – two fatally – before turning the ghost gun on himself. The entire incident lasted less than 30 seconds.Since the tragedy, in which she lost her close friend Dominic Blackwell, Tretta’s been a vocal gun violence prevention advocate with Students Demand Action, a youth-led organization that lobbies for strengthened gun laws.“In my situation, we still don’t know who bought the gun. We know who used it, but we can’t trace it back,” Tretta said. “I want people to use my story to show what happens when anyone can get a gun.”‘It won’t stop the guns’Community workers such as Corpuz and Muhammad welcome Biden’s efforts, and agree that the spread of ghost guns needs to be stifled.But they also worry that federal action will beget local police crackdowns, a backlash that would lead to more harm among those who are already most at-risk of being shot. Rather than increased patrols and traffic stops, the interventionists say, communities need traditional violence intervention practices that provide social support and healing services.“The devil’s in the details,” said Corpuz of United Playaz. “You can think a new policy is about the ghost guns but then it leads to harassment. We all want ghost guns off of the street but we have to look to see what the fine print is before we support the rules because they can be harsh on Black and brown communities.”Muhammad of Advanced Peace likened the potential danger of increased policing and harsher sentences for having a ghost gun to the crack-cocaine laws of the late 20th century.“Once the laws happen they affect the bottom rung,” Muhammad said. “Police forces all over the country get access to federal dollars for any campaign, but that won’t stop the shooting; it won’t stop the guns from getting into the hands of young people.” More

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      Democrats renew effort to get Donald Trump’s financial records

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      A powerful Democrat-led House committee is pushing a federal judge to order Donald Trump to comply with a subpoena for his financial records, arguing he no longer has a viable claim to withhold materials now that he is out of office, according to a source familiar with the matter.The move from the House oversight committee, led by the chair Carolyn Maloney, marks the latest salvo from Democrats in their years-long pursuit to secure Trump’s tax records and related documents, in a case testing the scope and limits of Congress’s oversight authority.If successful, the committee would be a step closer to obtaining Trump’s tax records and potentially making them public, the source said.“While the committee’s need for the subpoenaed information has not changed, one key fact has: plaintiff Donald J Trump is no longer the president,” Douglas Letter, the general counsel for congressional Democrats, wrote in a motion filed last week in the US district court for the District of Columbia.“Because he is no longer the incumbent, the constitutional separation-of-powers principles that were the foundation of the supreme court’s recent decision are significantly diminished,” Letter wrote.Prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office in New York obtained the former president’s tax records in March, just hours after the supreme court denied his last-ditch attempt to keep them concealed. But, as they are part of a law enforcement investigation, they have not so far been released.The thousands of documents turned over by Trump’s accounting firm Mazars USA include tax returns from January 2011 to August 2019, as well as financial statements, engagement letters and communications related to financial disclosures, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office said.But in a separate decision, the supreme court ruled last summer that Congress could not see many of the same records, saying instead the case should be returned to lower courts on account of “significant separation of powers concerns” surrounding the issue.The committee, though, now believes that with Trump out of office, the separation of powers concerns that arose when he was subpoenaed by Congress as a sitting president no longer apply, the source said.If the committee is ultimately successful, it could pave the way for Trump’s tax returns to one day become public, since Congress is not restricted by grand jury secrecy rules that bar the Manhattan district attorney’s office from releasing the documents except as evidence at a trial.A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.House Democrats and Trump have been locked in a bitterly contested dispute since April 2019, when the committee first issued a subpoena to Mazars USA demanding 10 years’ worth of Trump’s financial records under the leadership of the late Representative Elijah Cummings.Maloney reissued the subpoena to Mazars USA earlier this year, after the initial subpoena expired with the new Congress.“For more than 22 months, the committee has been denied key information needed to inform legislative action to address the once-in-a-generation ethics crisis created by former President Trump’s unprecedented conflicts of interests,” Maloney said at the time, in a memo obtained by the Guardian.“The committee’s need for this information – in order to verify key facts and tailor legislative reforms to be as effective as possible – remains just as compelling now as it was when the committee first issued its subpoena.” More

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      US supreme court to hear case over right to carry concealed guns outside

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      The US supreme court stepped back into the gun control debate on Monday, saying it would take up a case focused on whether people can carry concealed guns outside the home in New York.The case could lead to the most consequential ruling on the scope of the second amendment in more than a decade.The case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Corlett, is backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA). It seeks an unfettered right to carry concealed handguns in public. A state firearms licensing officer granted the two plaintiffs “concealed carry” permits but restricted them to hunting and target practice, prompting the legal challenge.It will come before a conservative-leaning court. The court’s 6-3 rightwing majority, entrenched by three appointments under Donald Trump, is seen as sympathetic to an expansive view of second amendment rights.The debate over gun control in the US has intensified amid a spate of mass shootings, including one at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis on 15 April in which a gunman killed eight people and then himself and two in less than a week in March, one in Georgia and the other in Colorado, that left 18 dead.In 2008, the supreme court recognized an individual’s right to keep guns at home for self-defense. In 2010 the court applied that right to the states. The plaintiffs in the New York case want that right to be extended beyond the home.Lower courts threw out out their case, rejecting the argument that the New York restrictions violated the second amendment right to keep and bear arms.A ruling invalidating the New York law could imperil laws in other states with criteria for concealed-carry licenses. Seven other states and the District of Columbia give authorities more discretion to deny concealed firearm permits.A ruling against New York could also force lower courts to cast a skeptical eye on new or existing gun control laws.Gun control advocates are concerned the conservative supreme court justices could create a standard for gun control that will threaten measures already implemented, such as expanded criminal background checks for gun buyers and “red flag” laws targeting the firearms of people deemed dangerous by the courts.Republicans and gun rights advocates have pressed the justices to take up a new case and further extend gun rights. Last year, the court sidestepped a ruling in an NRA-supported challenge to a New York City restriction on transporting firearms outside the home, because the city had rolled back the regulation. More