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    Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy’

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    Charlie Kirk, the far-right commentator and ally of Donald Trump, was killed on Wednesday doing what he was known for throughout his career – making incendiary and often racist and sexist comments to large audiences.If it was current and controversial in US politics, chances are that Kirk was talking about it. On his podcasts, and on the podcasts of friends and adversaries, and especially on college campuses, where he would go to debate students, Kirk spent much of his adult life defending and articulating a worldview aligned with Trump and the Maga movement. Accountable to no one but his audience, he did not shy away in his rhetoric from bigotry, intolerance, exclusion and stereotyping.Here’s Kirk, in his own words. Many of his comments were documented by Media Matters for America, a progressive non-profit that tracks conservative media.On race
    If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024

    If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 8 December 2022

    Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023

    If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because affirmative action?
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024
    On debate
    We record all of it so that we put [it] on the internet so people can see these ideas collide. When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.
    – Kirk discussing his work in an undated clip that circulated on X after his killing.

    Prove me wrong.
    – Kirk’s challenge to students to publicly debate him during the tour of colleges he was on when he was assassinated.
    On gender, feminism and reproductive rights
    Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.
    – Discussing news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement on The Charlie Kirk Show, 26 August 2025

    The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.
    – Responding to a question about whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter aborting a pregnancy conceived because of rape on the debate show Surrounded, published on 8 September 2024

    We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 April 2024
    On gun violence
    I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.
    – Event organized by TPUSA Faith, the religious arm of Kirk’s conservative group Turning Point USA, on 5 April 2023
    On immigration
    America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 22 August 2025

    The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 20 March 2024

    The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 March 2024
    On Islam
    America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank: large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 30 April 2025

    We’ve been warning about the rise of Islam on the show, to great amount of backlash. We don’t care, that’s what we do here. And we said that Islam is not compatible with western civilization.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 24 June 2025
    On religion
    There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 6 July 2022 More

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      They hoped their children’s deaths would bring change. Then a Colorado bill to protect kids online failed

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      Bereaved parents saw their hopes for change dashed after a bill meant to protect children from sexual predators and drug dealers online died in the Colorado state legislature last month.Several of those parents had helped shape the bill, including Lori Schott, whose 18-year-old daughter Annalee died by suicide in 2020 after consuming content on TikTok and Instagram about depression, anxiety and suicide.“When the legislators failed to vote and pushed it off onto some fake calendar date where they’re not even in session, to not even have accountability for where they stand – as a parent, it’s a slap in the face,” said Schott, who identifies as a pro-second amendment Republican. “It’s a slap in the face of my daughter, and to other kids that we’ve lost.”Had the legislation passed, it would have required social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to investigate and take down accounts engaged in gun or drug sales or in the sexual exploitation or trafficking of minors. It also mandated the creation of direct hotlines to tech company personnel for law enforcement and a 72-hour response window for police requests, a higher burden than under current law.Additionally, platforms would have had to report on how many minors used their services, how often they did so, for how long and how much those young users engaged with content that violated company policies. Several big tech firms registered official positions on the bill. According to Colorado lobbying disclosures, Meta’s longtime in-state lobby firm, Headwater Strategies, is registered as a proponent for changing the bill. Google and TikTok also hired lobbyists to oppose it.View image in fullscreen“We’re just extremely disappointed,” said Kim Osterman, whose 18-year-old son Max died in 2021 after purchasing drugs spiked with fentanyl from a dealer he met on Snapchat. “[Legislators] chose big tech over protecting children and families.”Colorado legislators agree to hold social media companies responsible for protecting childrenProtections for users of social media (SB 25-086) passed both chambers before being vetoed on 24 April by governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, who cited the bill’s potential to “erode privacy, freedom and innovation” as reasons for his veto. Colorado’s senate voted to override the veto on 25 April, yet those efforts fell apart on 28 April when the state house opted to delay the vote until after the legislative session ended, effectively blocking an override and keeping the bill alive.The bill originally passed the senate by a 29-6 vote and the house by a 46-18 margin. On 25 April, the senate voted 29-6 to override Polis’s veto. Lawmakers anticipated that the house would take up the override later that day. At the time, according to those interviewed, there appeared to be enough bipartisan support to successfully overturn his veto.“It was an easy vote for folks because of what we were voting on: protecting kids from social media companies,” said the senator Lindsey Daugherty, a Democrat and a co-sponsor of the bill. She said she urged house leadership to hold the vote Friday, but they declined: “The speaker knew the governor didn’t want us to do it on Friday, because they knew we would win.”The parents who advocated for the bill attribute its failure to an unexpected, 11th-hour lobbying campaign by a far-right gun owners’ association in Colorado. Two state legislators as well as seven people involved in the legislative process echoed the parents’ claims.An abnormal, last-minute campaign disrupts bipartisan consensusRocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO) cast the bill as an instrument of government censorship in texts and emails over the legislation’s provisions against “ghost guns”, untraceable weapons assembled from kits purchased online, which would have been prohibited.RMGO launched massive social media and email campaigns urging its 200,000 members to contact their legislators to demand they vote against the bill. A source with knowledge of the workings of the Colorado state house described the gun group’s social media and text campaigns, encouraging Republicans voters to contact their legislators to demand opposition to the bill, as incessant.“[Legislators] were getting countless calls and emails and being yelled at by activists. It was a full-fledged attack. There was a whole campaign saying: ‘This is a government censorship bill,’” they said.The group’s actions were instrumental in a campaign to deter house Republicans from voting against the veto, resulting in the quashing of the bill, and unexpected from an organization that had been facing funding shortfalls, according to 10 people interviewed who were involved in the design of the bill and legislative process. Sources in the Colorado state house spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal from RMGO.The house had delayed the vote until 28 April, which allowed RMGO time to launch a campaign against the bill over the weekend. When lawmakers reconvened Monday, the house voted 51-13 to postpone the override until after the legislative session ended – effectively killing the effort.View image in fullscreenThe gun activists’ mass text message campaign to registered Republican voters asserted the social media bill would constitute an attempt to “compel social media companies to conduct mass surveillance of content posted on their platforms” to search for violations of Colorado’s gun laws, describing the bill as an attack on first and second amendment rights, according to texts seen by the Guardian.A familiar, aggressive foeFounded in 1996, RMGO claims to have a membership of more than 200,000 activists. It is recognized as a far-right group that takes a “no-compromise” stance on gun rights. Dudley Brown, its founder and leader, also serves as the president of the National Association for Gun Rights, which positions itself further to the right than the National Rifle Association (NRA). RMGO has mounted criticism against the NRA for being too moderate and politically compromising. Critics have described RMGO as “bullies” and “extremists” because of its combative tactics, which include targeting and smearing Democrats and moderate Republicans. The group did not respond to requests for comment on its legislative efforts.RMGO is a well-known presence at the Colorado capitol, typically opposing gun-control legislation. Daugherty described its typical campaign tactics as “scary”. She got rid of her X account after being singled out by the group over her work on a bill to ban assault weapons earlier this year.“When we were running any of the gun bills at the capitol, they put my and some other legislators’ faces on their websites,” she said. A screenshot of a tweet from RMGO showed Daugherty with a red “traitor” stamp on her forehead.The group’s campaign resulted in the spread of misinformation about the bill’s impact on gun ownership rights, sources involved in the legislative process said.“The reason I was in support of the bill, and in support of the override, was it has to do with child trafficking and protecting the kids,” said the senator Rod Pelton, a Republican, who voted in favor of the veto override in the senate. “I just didn’t really buy into the whole second amendment argument.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe bill had enjoyed the backing of all 23 of Colorado’s district attorneys as well as bipartisan state house support.RMGO’s late-stage opposition to the social media bill marked a break from its usual playbook. The group generally weighs in on legislation earlier in the process, according to eight sources, including two of the bill’s co-sponsors, Daugherty and the representative Andy Boesenecker.“They really ramped up their efforts,” Boesenecker said. “It was curious to me that their opposition came in very late and appeared to be very well funded at the end.”In recent years, RMGO group had been less active due to well-documented money problems that limited its ability to campaign on legislative issues. In a 2024 interview, the group’s leaders stated plainly that it struggled with funding. Daugherty believes RMGO would not have been able to embark on such an apparently costly outreach campaign without a major infusion of cash. A major text campaign like the one launched for SB-86 was beyond their financial capacity, she said. Others in Colorado politics agreed.“Rocky Mountain Gun Owners have not been important or effective in probably at least four years in the legislature. They’ve had no money, and then all of a sudden they had tons of money, funding their rise back into power,” said Dawn Reinfeld, executive director of Blue Rising Together, a Colorado-based non-profit focused on youth rights.The campaign made legislators feel threatened, with primary elections in their districts over the weekend, Daugherty said, particularly after accounts on X, formerly Twitter, bombarded the bill’s supporters.View image in fullscreen“Folks were worried about being primaried, mostly the Republicans, and that’s kind of what it came down to,” Daugherty said.Aaron Ping’s 16-year-old son Avery died of an overdose in December after buying what he thought was ecstasy over Snapchat and receiving instead a substance laced with fentanyl. Ping saw the campaign against the bill as an intentional misconstrual of its intent.“It was looking like the bill was going to pass, until all this misinformation about it taking away people’s gun rights because it addresses people buying illegal shadow guns off the internet,” he said.Ping gave testimony in support of the bill in February before the first senate vote, alongside other bereaved parents, teens in recovery and a district attorney.“The bill gave me hope that Avery’s legacy would be to help. So when it didn’t pass, it was pretty soul-crushing,” said Ping.States take up online child-safety bills as federal lawmakers falterSeveral states, including California, Maryland, Vermont, Minnesota, Hawaii, Illinois, New Mexico, South Carolina and Nevada, have introduced legislation aimed at improving online safety for children in the past two years. These efforts have faced strong resistance from the tech industry, including heavy lobbying and lawsuits.Maryland became the first state to successfully pass a Kids Code bill, signing it into law in May 2024. But the victory may be short-lived: NetChoice, a tech industry coalition representing companies including Meta, Google and Amazon, quickly launched a legal challenge against the measure, which is ongoing.Meanwhile, in the US federal government, the kids online safety act (Kosa), which had wound its way through the legislature for years, died in February when it failed to pass in the House after years of markups and votes. A revamped version of the bill was reintroduced to Congress on 14 May.In California, a similar bill known as the age-appropriate design code act, modeled after UK legislation, was blocked in late 2023. A federal judge granted NetChoice a preliminary injunction, citing potential violations of the first amendment, which stopped the law from going into effect. 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      Florida students lobby to keep 2018 gun control law in wake of recent shooting

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      Florida students who were traumatized by the 2018 Parkland school shooting – and last week’s deadly shooting at Florida State University – are urging lawmakers in the Republican-controlled statehouse not to roll back gun restrictions they passed in the wake of the killing at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school.Gun rights activists have been fighting to unravel the 2018 law since it was passed, including a provision that raised the state’s minimum age to buy a gun to 21. Governor Ron DeSantis and some Republican lawmakers have argued that if an 18-year-old Floridian can serve in the military, they should be able to purchase a firearm.In the wake of the FSU shooting, student activists – including some who were in the vicinity of both mass shootings – were walking the halls of the capitol building in Tallahassee, lobbying lawmakers to support gun control policies in the final two weeks of the legislative session, which is scheduled to end on 2 May.“No one should ever have to experience a school shooting – let alone two – just to have to beg lawmakers to care enough to stop the next one,” said Stephanie Horowitz, who was a freshman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in 2018 and is now a graduate student at FSU.Two people were killed and six others injured in the shooting last Thursday that terrorized FSU’s campus, about a mile from the state capitol. Logan Rubenstein, a 21-year-old junior at FSU, says it could have been much worse, if a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers had not taken action after Parkland.Rubenstein believes gun restrictions passed by the Florida legislature in 2018 helped prevent the FSU shooter from carrying out more carnage – like what happened at Rubenstein’s high school in Parkland seven years ago.Rubenstein was in eighth grade at nearby Coral Springs middle school when a 19-year-old gunman armed with an AR-15-style rifle killed 17 people and injured 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.Investigators say the suspect in the FSU shooting, a 20-year-old student at the university named Phoenix Ikner, armed himself with a handgun that was the former service weapon of his stepmother, a local sheriff’s deputy. Under the state’s current laws, he could not legally buy a rifle from a federally licensed dealer.“The law that we passed after Parkland worked,” Rubenstein said. “Because if he was able to buy an AR-15, body armor and a bump stock and unlimited ammo, how much more deadly would it have been?”About three weeks before the FSU shooting, the Florida house passed a bill that would lower the state’s minimum age to buy a gun to 18. The proposal had stalled in the state senate even before the FSU shooting, and it appears even less likely to advance now.Still, speaking at a rally with student activists on the steps of Florida’s historic old capitol on Wednesday, the Democratic state senator Tina Polsky said she was not letting up. Polsky, whose district includes Parkland, is among the Democrats who have sponsored gun control bills this session that never got a hearing in the capitol, where Republicans hold a supermajority in both chambers.“I am begging them to do something like we did after the horrific Parkland shooting,” Polsky said. “I don’t know if it’s going to happen. But we will continue to fight.” More

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      US government cuts imperil life-saving gun violence research. As doctors, we fear for the future | Jessica Beard and Elinore Kaufman

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      We don’t have a reliable count for how many people have been shot in the United States this year. We don’t know how many were shot last year either. Or the year before that. These most basic numbers should inform our gun violence prevention efforts. But they don’t exist.This is the void of information that is created and persists when critical research is suppressed.For those struggling to keep up with our erratic news cycle, what we saw unfold in February at the National Institutes of Health – with communication blackouts, funding freezes and cuts that will obstruct life-saving research efforts – may feel inconsequential. But make no mistake: the peril hanging over our country’s research efforts remains, and we in the gun violence research community are bracing ourselves for a dangerous situation we know all too well.Our field has already experienced the devastating consequences of defunding and censorship. The story of how we got here begins in the 1990s.Buoyed by the success of a public health approach in curbing traffic fatalities, researchers were hopeful that the same approach – track the problem, identify and test solutions, share findings and implement what works – could be used to prevent gun violence. The researchers got to work, and that work advanced rapidly. But some of the findings that emerged – in particular, that owning a gun increased one’s risk of being murdered in one’s home – angered the powerful gun lobby.The late congressman Jay Dickey, who served as the National Rifle Association’s point person in Congress, took up the cause, introducing a provision into an omnibus bill that called for no federal funds to be used “to advocate or promote gun control”. The Dickey Amendment, passed in 1996, did not ban gun violence research outright, but research dollars within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were reallocated, and the search for solutions was reduced to a trickle.Sixteen years later, days after the Aurora theatre mass shooting, Dickey co-authored an op-ed reversing his stance. In it, he urged more scientific research, not less, and stated the truly “senseless” part of gun violence “is to decry these deaths as senseless when the tools exist to understand causes and to prevent these deadly effects”.Six months later – and one month after Sandy Hook – then president Barack Obama directed the CDC to “conduct or sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it”.But even with the public outcry that followed these mass killings, even with Dickey’s reversal, even with the president’s directive, the pause in research continued.In 2018, on the heels of yet another high-profile mass shooting – this one at a high school in Parkland, Florida – then president Donald Trump signed a bill clarifying that the Dickey Amendment did not actually prohibit gun violence research.But it wasn’t until 2021 that these policy changes would lead to the first dedicated federal funding for gun violence research in 25 years. By this time, we lacked the most fundamental tools to support gun violence research: expertise, mentorship, basic data, surveillance and the infrastructure to implement that critical public health approach to address and prevent gun violence.The year the funding returned, 2021, was also the deadliest on record for gun violence in the US: 48,830 lives lost to guns over the span of just 12 months. As trauma surgeons in Philadelphia, we witnessed this heartbreaking moment in our country’s history firsthand. We were bombarded by the dying and the desperate and the so many who were harmed by this disease of gun violence – a disease our government had, for 25 years, not deemed consequential enough to cure.Because the CDC tracks gun deaths but not the total number of people with non-fatal firearm injuries each year, we don’t know exactly how many people were shot during that 25-year funding pause. But we do know that hundreds of thousands of lives were forever altered or lost. And the research community could not ask why, could not ask how, could not find the answers we so desperately needed then and so desperately need now.The suffering of our patients motivates us to do research to prevent gun violence – and the suffering we witnessed during the pandemic-related surge of gun violence very nearly brought us to our knees. We want research to stop our patients from being shot. We want research to stop them from dying.The moment we find ourselves in today is especially painful because with renewed research efforts over the last few years, we had finally begun to untangle the root causes of gun violence and identify and test solutions. We had also been making progress with gun violence prevention policy nationally.Three years ago, with bipartisan support, Congress passed the first major federal legislation addressing gun violence prevention in decades. Two years ago, we saw the creation of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which implemented an all-of-government approach to tackling gun violence. And last year brought the landmark US surgeon general’s advisory, which deemed gun violence a public health crisis that demands attention.What’s more, we’ve seen the rate of gun violence decreasing. Here in Philadelphia, the total number of shooting victims over the last year is down about a third from the same point just before the pandemic.We had so much reason for hope, until January, when the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention was shuttered. Then in February, there were broad attacks on scientific research. And this month, the surgeon general’s gun violence advisory disappeared from the government’s website.We loathe to think of what the next news cycle may bring.We were among the first to document the rise in violence in 2020, anticipating the catastrophic years that would follow. Now, as we watch a cascade of executive orders threaten public health and public safety, as we see fears of economic disempowerment sowed across this country, we trauma surgeons are bracing ourselves for another surge in gun violence.We should be filled with hope, not fear.But here we are, fearing for our patients, for our communities and for the countless many who will die from this preventable and treatable disease of gun violence because the research that could have saved them was defunded and censored yet again.No matter your political allegiances, no matter your life experiences, no matter your job, your income, your religion, your age or your race, we must stand firmly, together, in support of research that will help us understand this disease that causes suffering for so many – and one day, find its cure.

      Dr Jessica Beard is the director of research for the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting, a Stoneleigh Foundation Fellow, and director of trauma research at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University; Dr Elinore Kaufman is the research director for the division of trauma at the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the Pennsylvania Trauma System Foundation Research Committee. Both are trauma surgeons in Philadelphia. More

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      White House removes advisory defining gun violence as a public health issue

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      The Trump administration has removed former surgeon general Vivek Murthy’s advisory on gun violence as a public health issue from the US Department of Health and Human Services’ website. This move was made to comply with Donald Trump’s executive order to protect second amendment rights, a White House official told the Guardian.The “firearm violence in America” page, where the advisory had been posted, was filled with data and information about the ripple effects of shootings, the prevalence of firearm suicides and the number of American children and adolescents who have been shot and killed. Now, when someone reaches the site they will be met with a “page not found” message.When it was originally released last summer, Murthy’s advisory was met with praise from violence prevention and research groups, and was lambasted by second amendment law centers and advocacy groups that argued the Biden administration was using public health as a cloak to push forward more gun control.“This is an extension of the Biden Administration’s war on law-abiding gun owners. America has a crime problem caused by criminals,” the National Rifle Association (NRA) said in a statement posted to X on 25 July 2024.But Daniel Semenza, a firearm violence researcher with Rutgers University, argues that talking about gun violence through a public health lens is meant to “bring the heat down” about a deeply politicized issue and broaden what prevention can look like.In 2023, nearly 47,000 people died by firearms, most of them suicides.“When people read gun violence is a public health problem, they read guns are a public health problem,” Semenza said. “This idea actually removes the politics from the issue and is an engine to get us on the same page. [The removal] feels like an unnecessary and mean-spirited way to politicize something that people have actively been trying to bring people together on.”The removal of Murthy’s advisory and the rest of the information on the page is one of the thousands of pieces of health information and research removed from federal websites. They include information about vaccines, health risks among youth and gender-based violence, the New York Times reported.Some of these pages have been restored following a court order, and it is unclear whether the removal of the “firearm violence in America” will see the same fate.In response to the Guardian’s question about the removal of webpages, the White House said: “Illegal violence of any sort is a crime issue, and as he again made clear during his recent speech at the Department of Justice, President Trump is committed to Making America Safe Again by empowering law enforcement to uphold law and order.”While researchers and violence prevention advocates have described gun violence – including both suicides and homicides – as a public health issue for more than a decade, it’s only recently that this language has entered mainstream discourse. Experts across the field of violence prevention argue that this updated lens is meant to reflect the widespread impacts of shootings on entire communities and offer solutions to violence beyond law enforcement and firearm restrictions and policy.This new framing has also led to more dollars from federal government offices, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health, for research that could illuminate preventive methods. These efforts were supercharged with the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, passed in June 2022, which allocated millions of dollars for research into the unseen consequences of shootings. It also allowed researchers to evaluate groups that are working on the ground in the nation’s most underserved communities where shootings happen most.If this work doesn’t continue or is severely pared down, years of progress and gun violence status as a public health is at risk of being lost, Semenza said.“The vernacular of gun violence as a public health issue that has shaped in the last five to 10 years of research and advocacy is under direct threat,” he said. “I’m really disheartened and sad to hear about it. But it’s not because I’m surprised. This is a clear example of this administration pulling the wool over people’s eyes and being disingenuous about the things that harm people who are most vulnerable.” More

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      Joe Biden issues ‘full and unconditional’ pardon to son Hunter

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      Joe Biden has issued “a full and unconditional” pardon to his son Hunter Biden covering convictions on federal gun and tax charges, the US president said in a statement released by the White House on Sunday.The decision marks a reversal for the president, who had repeatedly said he would not use his executive authority to pardon his son or commute his sentence.Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced for his conviction on federal gun charges on 12 December. He was scheduled to be sentenced in the tax case four days later.In the statement, Joe Biden said that he had long maintained that he would “not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted”.But, he argued, “it is clear that Hunter was treated differently”, adding that the charges in the case “came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election”.Hunter Biden was found guilty in Delaware in June on three felony counts relating to his purchase of a handgun in 2018. He had written on his gun-purchase form, falsely, that he was not a user of illicit drugs.He pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges in Los Angeles in September, opting for an “open” plea, where a defendant pleads guilty to the charges and leaves his sentencing fate in the hands of the judge.The tax charges carried up to 17 years behind bars and the gun charges were punishable by up to 25 years, though federal sentencing guidelines were expected to call for far less time and it was possible the president’s son would have avoided prison time entirely.The pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted”.Joe Biden said on Sunday evening that his son had been prosecuted when “without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form”.He noted in the statement that “those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions”.Biden accused his political opponents of singling out his 54-year-old son.“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong,” he said.“There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”Biden departed for Angola later on Sunday evening for what may be his last foreign trip as president before leaving office.Speculation had been mounting that the president would issue a pardon since Hunter was seen with his father in Nantucket over the Thanksgiving break.Donald Trump had said in October that he would not be surprised if Hunter Biden were to receive a pardon.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I wouldn’t take it off the books,” Trump said. “See, unlike Joe Biden, despite what they’ve done to me, where they’ve gone after me so viciously … And Hunter’s a bad boy.”On Sunday, Trump reacted with outrage, writing on his social network: “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!” Just one day earlier, though, Trump had reminded Americans that he himself had previously used the pardon power to wipe away convictions of those close to him. In his final weeks in office, Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in law, Jared Kushner, as well as multiple allies convicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. On Saturday, Trump announced plans to nominate the elder Kushner to be the US ambassador to France.Republicans have long zeroed in on Hunter Biden’s difficulties – questions around lucrative foreign consultancies, broken relationships and a crack cocaine addiction – in an effort to politically damage his father.A laptop Hunter Biden left in a Delaware repair shop that made its way into Republican hands formed a scandal in the closing days of the 2020 election. Republicans claimed that the so-called “laptop from hell”, which featured images of Hunter posing with guns, sex workers and crack cocaine, was suppressed by media favorable to Democrats.Hunter Biden later published a book, Beautiful Things: a Memoir, that detailed his struggles as a drug addict. The Biden family denied more serious accusations that Hunter’s profitable financial arrangements with businesspeople in Ukraine and China amounted to graft using the family name.James Comer, one of the Republicans leading congressional investigations into Biden’s family, denounced the pardon. “The charges Hunter faced were just the tip of the iceberg in the blatant corruption that President Biden and the Biden Crime Family have lied about to the American people,” Comer wrote on X. “It’s unfortunate that, rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability.”“I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction – mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport,” Hunter Biden said in a statement on Sunday, adding he had remained sober for more than five years.“In the throes of addiction, I squandered many opportunities and advantages … I will never take the clemency I have been given today for granted and will devote the life I have rebuilt to helping those who are still sick and suffering.”Hunter Biden’s legal team filed Sunday night in both Los Angeles and Delaware asking the judges handling his gun and tax cases to immediately dismiss them, citing the pardon.In the statement announcing the pardon, Joe Biden said that for his “entire career” he had followed a simple principle: to tell the truth to the American people.“Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice – and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a president would come to this decision.”Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report. More

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      In Saginaw, where children are dying of gun violence, local races loom large

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      Tiffany Owens stood before the city council in Saginaw, Michigan, struggling to contain her anguish.“I hate this city because this city took away something that was so precious and dear to me. I’ve been living here all my life and I had to bury two of my kids. They out in Forest Lawn cemetery,” she said, her voice shaking with grief.“We just need y’all to do something. I don’t want another mother to have to stand here where I’m standing. It’s not fair that we all are here but I do not want another parent to have to go through this trauma, go through this pain.”Owens’ eldest son, Tamaris, was 12 years old when he was killed by a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting. Her 26-year-old daughter, Tamarea, met a similar fate nine years later in 2021. Owens fears for the wellbeing of her remaining son.The family tragedy does not stop there. Owens’ niece, Tonquinisha McKinley, was killed outside her home during a family celebration before Tamarea’s high school prom in 2013.Behind Owens, other mothers held photographs of children murdered in one of the most dangerous cities in the US. Saginaw has at times had the highest crime rate of any city in Michigan during recent years, surpassing Detroit, with which it shares many of the same problems of industrial decline, deepening poverty and diminishing population over decades.More than 180 people have been murdered in the city of Saginaw over the past decade, most of them with guns, alongside hundreds of non-fatal shootings. About 20 people have been murdered so far this year.The bereaved mothers were pleading for action from Saginaw’s city council at its last meeting before local elections alongside the presidential ballot on Tuesday. For some, the local race is the more important of the two as they look to reverse their city’s decline while the Saginaw council stands accused of dithering and focusing on the wrong priorities. Others see Saginaw’s fate, and the safety of its families, as also inextricably tied to who gets into the White House.Tamara Tucker also spoke at the council meeting. She was still in high school when her 17-year-old brother was shot dead. Not long afterwards, she joined the support group Parents of Murdered Children to help her mother through a terrible time.Tucker remained a member when a few years later she, too, came to experience the grief of being a parent losing a child after her daughter was murdered.“I thought, my God, how can this be? Not again,” she told the Guardian.View image in fullscreenTucker’s daughter, MoeNeisha Simmons-Ross, was trying to prevent her boyfriend from leaving her Saginaw apartment with a gun. He shot her with it. She was pregnant with their child. The boyfriend was convicted of murder.That wasn’t the end. A few months later, Tucker’s younger sister was killed in Florida, and then her nephew in Saginaw.Tucker blames “selfishness” for the violence and the city’s failure to curb it.“It’s going to take the whole community to turn this around. I keep saying it, and I will say it until I’m blue in the face, it’s going to take the community caring. Apparently, there’s not enough children being murdered for them to actually say we got to do something about this,” she said.Barbara Clark went to college to get a degree in criminal justice in an effort to understand the causes of the violence in Saginaw and what to do about it after her son, Tommie Ford, was murdered at 17 years old by another teenager jealous of Ford talking to his former girlfriend.“I wanted to learn as much about the criminal justice system because I need to be able to talk to them in their language so I can know what you’re talking about when they tell me what you can and can’t do,” she said.Clark said that politicians, the police and people in other parts of Saginaw county were too often willing to blame parenting and gang culture for the killings so as to sidestep the part played by poverty, which runs at about 34% of the city’s population, and lack of resources.She ties the rise in murders, shootings and other crimes to Saginaw’s economic decline as more than a dozen car factories closed since the 1990s and the population fell sharply to about 45,000 today. Abandoned houses and bulldozed lots dot many streets on the lower-income east side of the city. Schools have been closed and consolidated. With a dwindling tax base, the city government cut back on services including recreational facilities.“Everything that was there to help those young people, to go to recreation centres, to do anything, has been shut down, decimated. All the schools here are gone. The schools are now placed on the other side of town so you gotta be commuted to it,” she said.“A lot of people want to say the parents ain’t doing their job. That may be true in some cases but not in all. There are some parents, for instance us, we are doing the best that we can do. But when you have limited funds, there’s only so much you can do. You’re looking at a poverty level of people in the inner city that things are happening to the family. What needs to happen is for the city of Saginaw to bring things back in for these young people to do, give them a chance.”There was plenty of sympathy for the mothers from city council members. One expressed condolences for the family of the latest victim, 14-year-old Keyvon Bentley, who was killed at the end of October.Council member Michael Flores, who is not running for re-election, read the names of some of those killed.View image in fullscreen“The thing that hurts me the most as a public official is that we lose Saginaw’s future constantly throughout every year that I’ve been here,” he said. “And a lot of the murder victims that I just listed off were 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 … It’s the saddest thing that I’ve experienced on council.”But there was little commitment to specific change even from those members up for re-election.Criticism of the council has focused on how it is spending $52m in grants under Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act (Arpa). The council used half of the funds to fill a budget shortfall.The council’s plan for the rest of the money includes $10m to support “community centres, childcare and youth development”. But how that will be spent is still unresolved, to the frustration of campaigners.Flores told the Guardian the city “lacks either the imagination or the ability” to provide opportunities for young people, including initiatives to help those who are otherwise drawn into “a life of crime to be able to produce money for their families”.He said the council was too focused on allocating money to develop upscale housing, in the hope of drawing higher-income residents to the city, at the expense of affordable homes that would improve the lives of lower-income families. He pointed to a recent case where the council spent $3m to upgrade a building only to sell it to a developer for $1,000 to convert it to relatively upscale condos while rejecting a higher offer that would have brought more affordable housing.“The council always has the opportunity to be on the side of the people or be on the side of outside developers that want to come in and get tax abatement or tax credits for developing. We never tend to give it to the people that really need the help,” he said.Carly Hammond is a union organiser running for a seat on the council who is campaigning for more Arpa money to be spent on facilities for young people.“There is a lot that the city council can do to combat youth violence and create youth opportunities. Back in the 1960s, there used to be much more robust after-school youth education programmes, community centres, funded by the city,” she said.View image in fullscreen“A lot of these organisms and concepts were strategically dismantled. Rebuilding them takes a whole lot. Youth development means investing in neighbourhoods.”Hammond accuses the council of hiding behind its own bureaucracy to explain why it is not doing more on affordable housing and support for community organisations. She also accuses the council of leaving some federal money on the table from the community development block grant because it failed to put together the proper documentation.“The lack of investment overall in the community is felt most by the children. They just feel like there’s no future. If you hear parents and young people talk about this, they’re asking for direct action. They’re not asking for sympathy,” she said.The council also heard from Matthew Carpus, president of the Saginaw police union. He said officers on the force long ago lost confidence in the city’s police chief and council to address crime.“Most victims in this city don’t speak out. Either they move out of the city or they suffer in silence. Very few come to these meetings because, like officers, they feel you’re not going to do anything,” he said.“Not only isn’t it being solved, it’s not getting better, it’s trending in the wrong direction. We need to try something different.”Flores wants to see more of the Arpa money spent on policing.“I have done many ride-alongs with police officers. For the amount of area that they have to cover, they’re drastically understaffed,” he said. “There were calls, some of them domestic violence calls and the like, that just weren’t able to be picked up because there were more pressing issues in the moment.”The city has brought in the state police to patrol parts of Saginaw but Clark said that had resulted in little more than racially profiled stop-and-searches of cars.“It’s not helping. Instead of them doing what they were brought in to do, which is community service, they’re targeting. If these young men are blessed to have a nice car with nice rims and dress nice, you’re definitely targeted. If your car is dressed, made up a certain type of way, they’re definitely going to pull you over,” she said.Clark is looking to the new council to change the trajectory. But she said the presidential election would be decisive because while Biden has directed financial support to lower-income communities, she expects Trump to do just the opposite.“Who’s in the White House does affect us because it, I won’t say it trickles down, it starts down and works it way up. They come for our programmes before they do anybody else’s programme. They will cancel our programme before they cancel anybody else’s programmes,” she said. More

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      in US Politics

      The California community caught between a powerful megachurch and far-right extremists

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      This is the third in a series of three stories on the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election in Shasta county, a region of 180,000 people in northern California that has emerged as a center of the election denial movement and hotbed for far-right politics. Read the first and second story.For years, an extremist far-right movement has worked to transform one of California’s most conservative regions. Since gaining a majority on Shasta county’s governing body, they have managed to spark an exodus of government workers, attempted to do away with the voting system and fought the state over policies pertaining to Covid-19 and the second amendment.Earlier this year, voters in the community of 180,000 – perhaps tired of Shasta’s national notoriety as a hotbed for extremist politics and election denialism – declared they had had enough. In a stunning rebuke, they voted out a far-right leader by an enormous margin, handing his seat to a political newcomer.Matt Plummer, a Yale-educated former college football player who owns a corporate training business, pledged to provide an alternative to the “hostility and division” tearing Shasta apart. Supporters view Plummer, with his focus on issues such as crime, roads and homelessness, as someone who can help the community chart a path out of the upheaval.But others are concerned about Plummer’s connection to another powerful and ultra-conservative force that has reshaped the region: Bethel church. The megachurch has more than 11,000 members, including Plummer, and a school of “supernatural ministry” that serves 2,000 students a year.View image in fullscreenBethel leaders once said that God wanted Donald Trump to have a second term and have claimed that Joe Biden won the 2020 election by “fraud”. Church members have become major players in local government – three of the five members on the city council in Redding, the county seat, attend Bethel. The city’s vice-mayor is a church elder.The church is involved in nearly every part of Shasta county, and is a cornerstone of the local economy, said Doni Chamberlain, a longtime local journalist and chronicler of the area.Shasta’s extreme political landscape has forced residents to choose between a toxic rightwing movement and a church that also has deeply conservative and extreme beliefs, she said.“This is the bind we’re in,” she said. “Shasta county is in this weird extremist sandwich where we have the rightwing pushing for guns and splitting the state. And there is the other extreme side of the sandwich that is Bethel church. Then the middle where people are trying to figure out how to survive in this place.”Before Shasta county garnered national attention for its fierce opposition to Covid-19 restrictions and efforts to institute a hand-count voting system favored by those who believe lies about election fraud, it was Bethel church that raised the region’s profile.There are churches – of which Shasta county has plenty – and then there is Bethel, a behemoth institution without parallel in the area. First established in a private home in 1952, it now has more than 11,000 members – more than 10% of the population in the city of Redding – where the church is based.Bethel’s transformation came under the direction of Bill Johnson, the son of a long-serving pastor who began leading the church with Beni, his wife, in 1996. The church has grown significantly, opening a school, a youth outreach program and Bethel Music, a record label that produces popular worship music and reported $18m in revenue in 2023. Justin Bieber is a fan and has filmed himself covering a song from a Bethel artist. Today several of Johnson’s children work as senior leaders in the church.But it’s Bethel’s school of supernatural ministry, which has been called a “Christian Hogwarts”, that is often credited with its growth. The program was founded by Kris and Kathy Vallotton, the senior leaders of the church, and teaches students that they can perform miracles and heal through prayer. “Students will learn how to read, understand, and ‘do’ the Bible, how to practice His presence, to witness, heal the sick, prophesy, preach, pray, cast out demons and much more,” the school website states.People travel to Redding from around the world, more than 100 countries, to attend the vocational program. Students have been known to approach people in the city, particularly those in casts or with walkers, to offer prayers for healing. The focus on “supernatural power” is fundamental to the church, which in 2019 asked members to pray for the resurrection of a two-year-old girl.Bethel has long believed in the power of healing people through prayer. Chamberlain joined the church as a child after her mother died and her siblings were adopted by a local couple who were members. When they learned that Chamberlain and her twin sister had a neurological disorder that caused involuntary movements, church elders came to treat their “demons” and the children were made to throw away their medications, Chamberlain recalled.“When you have a bunch of adults circling around you and putting their hands on your heads and shaking you, it was pretty intimidating,” she said, adding that they coached her on how to speak in tongues.“It’s like being waterboarded, you just give up and give in so they leave you alone. Then you’re in the club.”Since its founding in 1998, Bethel’s supernatural school has brought thousands of people to Redding. They are a visible presence around the city, in its grocery stores and the hip cafes and bakeries operated by Bethel members. And as the church’s footprint has grown, so too has criticism of its role.Supporters say the church has been a positive force in Redding and that it’s natural for a large institution to attract scrutiny but that members want to be a part of the community in which they live. They often point to local volunteer work or when the church donated money to fund police positions in Redding and began leasing the local auditorium when it appeared the city would have to close it down.Bethel did not respond to multiple requests for comment.View image in fullscreenBut other Shasta county residents argue the church has changed the fabric of the community and worsened an existing housing shortage by drawing thousands of students to the area while driving up costs.“If you look from the outside in, there seems to be positives. They’ve done good things, but I don’t feel like on balance what they’ve done is for the good of the community in general,” said Robert Sid, a Shasta county resident who supported Plummer. “Their Hogwarts supernatural ministry has really played into flooding the market and artificially pricing things that the regular Redding person can’t afford.”Critics have expressed discomfort with church members who hold key positions in local government voting on proposals from Bethel to expand. Some residents have joined a Facebook group to identify businesses connected to the church.“[The owners] tithe to the church. If you patronize a Bethel-affiliated business then now some of those profits are being tithed to the church. You’re kind of indirectly supporting the church by doing that,” said Rachel Strickland, who started the group. “People don’t want to do that.”And for some in this deeply conservative region, where Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one, the church’s political ties have been cause for concern as well. Religious experts have described it as closely related to the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement built around the idea of modern-day prophets and apostles that aims to have Christians transform society and rule over key political and cultural institutions, referred to as the “Seven Mountain Mandate”.Johnson co-authored a book, Invading Babylon: the 7 Mountain Mandate, which advises Christians to exert influence in seven core areas: church, family, education, government, media, arts and commerce.Matthew D Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish studies who has studied Bethel, argued that the church appears to be trying to implement the Seven Mountain Mandate in its community.“I think they very much intend to enact this bigger vision of Christian supremacy and Christian dominance in the Redding area. It doesn’t mean they are always overt about that,” said Taylor, the author of a book on the New Apostolic Reformation for which he interviewed Johnson.Bethel leaders endorsed Donald Trump, and in 2021 one apologized for incorrectly prophesying that he would win a second term. The church has come out against efforts to restrict conversion therapy. In 2019, several figures associated with the church attended an Oval Office event with Trump to pray over the president. Bethel has sought to distance itself from January 6, however, Taylor said.“They are trying to tone down public rhetoric and make themselves [seem] less extreme than they are but as far as I can tell they haven’t moderated their extremism. They are just trying to package it in a better way,” he argued.The church has long emphasized that the beliefs of individual church members are not necessarily reflective of the church’s positions. Chamberlain, who left the church as a young adult, argues it is important to distinguish between the church leadership and its members.“You have to separate the leaders of the church, the people who are millionaires and drive expensive cars, cars that cost as much as somebody might pay for a house. They have vacation homes and eat at The French Laundry,” Chamberlain said.They live a life of the rich and famous, she added, while some Bethel members, and students, leave their homes abroad and live in extreme poverty to be close to the church.Members point out that they are not a monolith.Matt Plummer’s journey to Redding began the same way thousands of others have – with Bethel. He moved to the city in 2016 with his wife and daughters to attend the church, and remains a member, he said in an interview with the Guardian.Plummer, who grew up in rural New Jersey where his first job was on a horse farm, was drawn to the region’s access to nature from hiking to swimming holes, he said, and the family has developed deep ties to the area.He decided to run for the board of supervisors after working in several political campaigns and seeing the intense polarization and problems that have plagued Shasta county.“We have tied basically for the highest suicide rate in the state. You have one of the highest rates of childhood trauma and one of the highest rates of kids being born with drug withdrawal effects,” he said. “This is a pretty cool community that has a lot to offer but at the same time if you look at all these dimensions of what makes a community thrive, we’re trailing.”View image in fullscreenHe had a tough race ahead of him seeking to unseat Patrick Jones, who previously served on the Redding city council and had been a supervisor for three years as well as a leader of the anti-establishment movement that has come to define local politics.Jones, a gun store manager, led some of the county’s most controversial efforts, including attempting to upend the voting system and moving to allow people to carry firearms in public buildings in violation of state law. He also spread conspiracy theories, telling a conservative national news outlet: “Elections have been manipulated at the county level for decades.”He once responded to a reporter’s query by telling them to “drop dead”.While polarizing, Jones was well-known and had been in politics for years, Plummer said, and had the backing of a Connecticut magnate who has poured millions of dollars into local elections.Plummer made up for that by making personal contact, and personally knocked on about 9,000 doors, he said (there are about 23,000 registered voters in his district).“People care if you show up and meet them,” he said.He sought to stay out of ideological debates and focus on what residents were worried about, primarily public safety, roads and homelessness. The number of unhoused residents has grown significantly in recent years from 793 in 2022 to 1,013 people in 2023.“My opponent had been on the board almost four years and he had been on city council for eight years, which had some jurisdiction over the same things. And they had all gotten worse,” he said.His affiliation with Bethel was a concern, he acknowledged, one he tried to address and alleviate. “I’m not speaking on stage and not this type of celebrity at Bethel. I just go there on a Sunday morning.”View image in fullscreen“One of the things I said is: ‘I’m not running to represent Bethel and so my job is not to defend Bethel’ and so when people would attack Bethel for things, I’d say OK, that’s fine. That’s actually not my priority here,” he said.Strickland, who has described Bethel as a cult, said the choice put the community in a tough position, but that even in her Facebook group people seemed to be leaning toward Plummer. “For me Patrick Jones is much more dangerous.”Plummer received the endorsement of Chamberlain’s publication, A News Cafe, drawing backlash from some readers who started referring to the outlet as Bethel Cafe.“It was a tough call. I have a problem with Bethel on a lot of levels, but just kind of putting on your thinking cap sometimes the Bethel candidates were the best choice for the positions,” she said.“Do we vote for Patrick Jones who is pushing guns and open carry? Or do we vote for Matt Plummer who is a Bethel member? He’s also articulate, educated and smart.”And in the current political climate in the county, Chamberlain mused, few people would want to subject themselves to running for office. “The Bethel people are kind of impervious to it. It’s scriptural.” More

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      in US Politics

      US supreme court signals willingness to uphold regulation on ‘ghost gun’ kits

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      The US supreme court signalled a willingness to uphold the regulation of “ghost guns” – firearms without serial numbers that are built from kits that people can order online and assemble at home.The manufacturers and gun rights groups challenging the rule argued the Biden administration overstepped by trying to regulate kits.Justice Samuel Alito compared gun parts to meal ingredients, saying a lineup including eggs and peppers isn’t necessarily a Western omelet. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, though, questioned whether gun kits are more like ready-to-eat meal kits that contain everything needed to make a dinner like turkey chili.Chief Justice John Roberts seemed skeptical of the challengers’ position that the kits are mostly popular with hobbyists who enjoy making their own weapons, like auto enthusiasts might rebuild a car on the weekend.Many ghost gun kits require only the drilling of a few holes and removal of plastic tabs.
      “My understanding is that it’s not terribly difficult to do this,” Roberts said. “He really wouldn’t think he has built that gun, would he?”A ruling is expected in the coming months.As ghost guns were increasingly used in crimes – including 1,200 homicides and attempted homicides between 2016 and 2022, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms – the Biden administration issued new rules regulating them in 2022. The new ATF rule classified ghost gun kits as firearms under the Gun Control Act of 1968, the US’s main firearms law – making them subject to the same regulations as all other guns.Since the rule went into effect, police departments in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia have all recovered fewer ghost guns at crime scenes.However, firearms manufacturers and gun-rights groups quickly sued to block the ATF rule. A federal district court judge in Texas ruled against the ATF in 2023 – but the Biden administration appealed the decision to the fifth circuit court of appeals. While that decision was pending, the supreme court intervened to keep the regulation in effect, by a narrow 5-4 vote. The fifth circuit ultimately ruled against the Biden administration, which then appealed the case to the supreme court.Garland v VanDerStok will require the supreme court to consider issues of firearm policy, but also the extent of federal regulatory powers. The court has been resistant to regulate guns in recent years, issuing decisions like a 2022 ruling striking down New York state’s ban on concealed carry firearms and a decision earlier this year overturning a ban on bump stocks.At the same time, the court has been wary of federal regulatory power, overturning a 40-year-old legal precedent known as Chevron deference, which allowed agencies like the ATF to broadly interpret the laws they are charged with implementing, earlier this year.The supreme court sided with the Biden administration last year, allowing the regulation to go. Roberts and Barrett joined with the court’s three liberal members to form the majority.Ghost guns, which can be assembled at home in under an hour to produce a fully functional weapon, used to be rare, except among hobbyists. In 2016, police recovered about 1,800 such firearms. But by 2021, that number had soared to nearly 20,000, according to the justice department. The weapons’ popularity was in part tied to the fact they were not regulated like already assembled firearms: they had no serial number, no sales records and did not require a background check.

      The Associated Press contributed reporting More