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      ‘Fearful and trigger happy’: flooded with guns and paranoia, the US reels from shootings

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      Waldes Thomas and Diamond Darville were driving for the grocery delivery service Instacart near Miami in mid-April when they drove the order up to the wrong address.Thomas, 19, and Darville, 18, reportedly told authorities they were backing away from the home when the owner emerged with his son, grabbed on to the driver’s window and fired a gun three times at their car. Antonio Caccavale, who didn’t hit anyone, later reportedly claimed to police who investigated the encounter that he shot because he feared for his and his son’s lives as Thomas and Darville’s car ran over his foot and struck a boulder.Eventually, police concluded everyone – including Caccavale – acted “justifiably based on the circumstances they perceived”, leading to no arrests.It remains to be seen whether the police’s interpretation of the case is the final word on the matter. A local prosecutor told ABC News in a statement that he would evaluate whether Caccavale should be charged, adding that “the safety of the entire Instacart community is incredibly important” to his office.Nonetheless, that case, along with a spate of recent shootings across the country which victimized Americans who approached property owners by mistake or for an otherwise innocent reason, did not only vividly illustrate how the US is flooded with guns. It all also showed how people who are made paranoid by the nation’s bitter political climate believe they can use guns with impunity thanks to firearms laws and self-defense statutes that in many states are remarkably permissive, according to experts who spoke with the Guardian this week.“A lot of people who shouldn’t have guns, who don’t need them, who don’t know how to use them safely … are fearful and trigger happy,” said the president of Global Action on Gun Violence, Jonathan Lowy. “And it’s inevitable that that will lead to tragedies like we’re seeing.”In a speech on the legislative floor, the Democratic Connecticut US senator Chris Murphy added: “Gun murders are now just the way in which we work out our frustrations. This is a dystopia … that we’ve chosen for ourselves.”A Harvard University study from 2016 found “there is no good evidence” that using a firearm in purported self-defense reduces the likelihood of injury.The study’s author, David Hemenway, found some evidence that having a gun for such a purpose may reduce the likelihood of property loss. “But the evidence is equally compelling that having another weapon, such as [pepper spray] or a baseball bat, will also reduce the likelihood of property loss,” Hemenway has said.Nonetheless, US gun manufacturers have been able to sell their products briskly – some experts estimate there are more than 400m firearms circulating across the country, whose population is about 332 million. Experts say gun manufacturers have done that by collectively convincing buyers that having a firearm is both a constitutional right as well as an effective tool to help them ward off potential danger, playing up the worst-case scenarios that few people are statistically likely to experience but which receive disproportionate attention from media outlets and political partisans.“The narrative that has been pushed by the gun industry and many politicians [is] that a person needs to be armed at all times everywhere or else they are going to get murdered by the boogeyman,” said Allison Anderman, the Giffords Law Center’s senior counsel and director of local policy.Most US states now allow residents to carry around a concealed gun without a permit that would typically require some level of training to get, even as a pro-gun, self-defense expert like the author Paxton Quigley says such instruction is essential to be a responsible firearm owner.“There are very good courses out there that will explain … when you can shoot a gun and if you should shoot it under certain circumstances,” said Quigley, adding that she began carrying a gun on her after her friend was raped. “But a lot of people will just go to a gun store, say ‘that’s a cute gun’, pick it up, see they can handle it and off they go.”Meanwhile, at least 28 American states, along with the territory of Puerto Rico, permit people to resort to meet an aggressor with deadly force without being required to try to retreat as long as they are lawfully in that place, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.Information from the conference adds that at least 10 states mention the right for a person to “stand his or her ground” – including Florida, where the Instacart delivery pair were shot at.To many experts, the inevitable outcome of those realties is a quick-trigger culture exposed internationally by a hellacious, two-week stretch that more or less began with the 13 April shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl. Yarl was shot and injured in Kansas City, Missouri, by a man whose doorbell he rang after going to the wrong address to pick up his siblings.Kaylin Gillis, 20, was shot dead two days later in upstate New York when the car she was riding in pulled into the driveway of a wrong address. Three days after that, high school cheerleaders Payton Washington and Heather Roth were shot in Elgin, Texas, after practice when Roth inadvertently almost got into a car that strongly resembled her vehicle but was actually the shooter’s.The same day as the cheerleaders’ shooting in Texas, six-year-old Kinsley White and her parents were allegedly shot by a neighbor in Gastonia, North Carolina, after a basketball that the child was playing with rolled into the attacker’s yard. And in Illinois, on Tuesday, police accused a man of shooting his neighbor, 59-year-old William Martys, to death 13 days earlier while Martys used a leaf blower in his own yard.The shootings of Yarl, Gillis, Washington, Roth, White, her parents and Martys have all led to arrests, but it remains to be seen whether their accused attackers are convicted. For instance, in 2013 and 2021 in Nevada and Wisconsin, respectively, juries acquitted George Zimmerman of murdering Trayvon Martin and Kyle Rittenhouse of murdering Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber after claiming that they shot in self-defense.Rodney Peairs was acquitted in Louisiana in 1993 of committing manslaughter when he shot Yoshihiro Hattori to death after claiming that he feared for his, his wife’s and their child’s lives when the 16-year-old Japanese exchange student mistakenly knocked on his door during the previous Halloween while looking for a party.State legislatures and the US federal government could at least limit the chances of cases like these unfolding if they enacted measures that “separated people who are not responsible gun owners from their guns”, Mike Lawlor, a criminal justice professor at Connecticut’s University of New Haven, said.While a member of Connecticut’s legislature in 1999, Lawlor authored the first of the nation’s “red-flag” laws, which enable courts to be petitioned to allow police to confiscate weapons from a person who is judged to be dangerous to themselves or others. The state five years earlier had banned assault-style weapons.And after an intruder at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook elementary school shot 20 children and six adults dead in 2012, Lawlor said the state enacted even more restrictive gun laws, including prohibiting high-capacity ammunition magazines, requiring permits to purchase firearms and bullets, and outlawing the public carrying of loaded rifles.The fact that people can go to many other states to circumvent those restrictions stop a place like Connecticut from getting the full benefit of that legislative work, said Anderman, adding that it’d be more effective if Congress passed more substantial federal gun control.Nonetheless, Lawlor said he firmly believes that legislation is why Connecticut and states that have sought to build similar systems – including New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts – consistently have firearm death rates ranking among the lowest in the US, though they are higher than many other places around the globe where guns aren’t so culturally or legally entrenched.“As long as there are more guns in circulation in this country than there are responsible gun owners, public policy … has got to narrow that gap,” Lawlor said.On Friday, a day after Lawlor made that remark to the Guardian, Colorado’s governor signed four gun control bills as the state continued its attempt to reckon with its long history of mass gun violence, including the killings of people at an LGBTQ+ nightclub last fall. 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      South Dakota governor says her two-year-old grandchild has several guns

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      South Dakota’s governor told an audience of people that her two-year-old grandchild has several guns.While speaking on Friday at a National Rifle Association (NRA) lobbying leadership forum in Indiana, the Republican governor Kristi Noem told audience members her toddler grandchild has multiple guns, reported Mediaite.During her remarks, Noem spoke about her grandchildren: Addie, who is almost two, and Branch, who is a few months old. Noem then said that Addie already had a shotgun and a rifle.“Now Addie, who you know – soon will need them, I wanna reassure you, she already has a shotgun and she already has a rifle and she’s got a little pony named Sparkles too. So the girl is set up,” said Noem.Noem’s remarks on her grandchild have gone viral on social media, with many commenters decrying the governor promoting gun ownership among children.“Absolutely sickening. How the hell is this real life in America?” wrote the Tennessee Democrat Chris D Jackson on Twitter.Another user commented: “Call CPS”.Noem’s comments follow yet another recent mass shooting involving children. Last month, three children and three adults were killed by a shooter – a former student – at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee.Noem also signed an executive order during her remarks that seeks to “further protect the second amendment rights of South Dakotans”, and was joined on stage by the NRA’s CEO, Wayne LaPierre.“South Dakota is setting the standard for the most second amendment friendly state in the nation,” said Noem when discussing the executive order.The executive order would prohibit state agencies from contracting with any business that discriminate against a “firearm-related entity”, KELO reported.Former vice-president Mike Pence also spoke at the conference, but was booed loudly by audience members as he made his way to speak in his home state – possibly because some of the Republican base turned on him after he certified the 2020 election results. More

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      Popularity is optional as Republicans find ways to impose minority rule

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      “We called for you all to ban assault weapons, and you respond with an assault on democracy.” These were the words of Justin Jones, a Black Democrat, to Tennessee Republicans after he and a colleague, Justin Pearson, were expelled for leading a gun protest on the state house of representatives floor.A week later, Jones and Pearson were reinstated amid applause, whoops and cheers at the state capitol in Nashville. But few believe that the assault on democracy is at an end. What happened in Tennessee is seen as indicative of a Donald Trump-led Republican party ready to push its extremist agenda by any means necessary.Opinion poll after opinion poll shows that Republicans are increasingly out of touch with mainstream sentiment on hot button issues such as abortion rights and gun safety. Accordingly, the party has suffered disappointment in elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022. Yet instead of rethinking its positions, critics say, it is turning to rightwing judges and state legislators to enforce minority rule.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “The ballot box didn’t work – the voice of the people said, we’re not going to tolerate these kind of threats by Republicans. But Republicans are using other tools and shredding the fabric of American democracy. It’s a kind of minority authoritarianism.”Despite extraordinary pressures, democracy has proved resilient in recent years. It survived an insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Joe Biden was sworn in as the duly elected president and declared in his inaugural address: “Democracy has prevailed.” And election deniers were routed in last year’s midterms.But while Democrats control the White House and Senate, Republicans have proved expert at finding workarounds, using cogs in the machine that have typically received less attention from activists, journalists and voters. One of them is the judiciary.The supreme court, which includes three justices appointed during Trump’s single term, last year overturned the Roe v Wade ruling that had enshrined the right to abortion for nearly half a century, despite opinion polls showing a majority wanted to protect it.Lower courts have also flexed their muscles. Matthew Kacsmaryk, a judge nominated by Trump in Amarillo, Texas, has ruled against the Joe Biden administration on issues including immigration and LGBTQ+ protections. Earlier this month he blocked the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, the most common abortion method in America.A legal battle ensued with the justice department pledging to take its appeal all the way to the supreme court. The political backlash was also swift.Mini Timmaraju, the president of Naral Pro-Choice America, said: “One extremist judge appointed by a twice impeached, now-indicted former president, Donald Trump, was attempting to effectively ban medication abortion nationwide. The decision is a prime example of minority rule at its worst. These extremists will not stop until they control our reproductive health decisions.”Polling by Ipsos shows that two-thirds of Americans believe medication abortion should remain legal, including 84% of Democrats, 67% of independents and 49% of Republicans. Timmaraju added: “It’s obvious that anti-choice extremists and lawmakers are out of step with Americans. It’s really worth remembering how far out of step they are.”If judges fall short of the Republican wishlist, state governors have shown willingness to intervene. In Texas, Greg Abbott has said he will pardon an Uber driver convicted of murder in the July 2020 shooting of a man at a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Austin, the state capital.The case hinged on whether the shooting was in self-defence. A jury found that Perry, who is white, shot and killed Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old white man, who was carrying an AK-47, according to the Austin American-Statesman newspaper. Abbott tweeted that he will pardon Daniel Perry, 37, an army sergeant, as soon as a request from the parole board “hits my desk”.Earlier this year Abbott also led a state takeover of Houston’s public school district, the eighth biggest in the country with nearly 200,000 students, infuriating Democrats who condemned the move as politically motivated.In Florida another Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has centralised power as he assails gun safety and voting rights, the teaching of gender and race in schools and major corporations such as Disney. On Thursday he signed a bill to ban most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.In this he is backed by a supermajority in the Florida state legislature. State governments, which receive less and less scrutiny as local newspapers go extinct, are another key weapon in the Republican arsenal. In deep red states they have imposed near or total bans on abortion, loosened gun restrictions, curbed LGBTQ+ and voting rights and endorsed Trump’s false claims of election fraud.RaceMinority rule is, more than anything, about race. Whereas white Christians made up 54% of the population when Barack Obama was first running for president in 2008, they now make up only 44%.Activists point to Republican-dominated state governments pushing legislation that would allow them to control Black-led cities and push hardline policies on crime. Examples include expanding the jurisdiction of state police in Jackson, Mississippi, and removing local control of the St Louis police department in Missouri. Republicans in the US Congress itself overturned police reform in Washington DC.Makia Green, a lead strategist for the Movement for Black Lives, said: “A lot of it is not only taking away the people we sent to speak for us – to make sure that our voices are heard and that we are part of the process – but also to overwhelm Black voters, to instil apathy in Black voters so that it feels like, ‘I went out, I voted, I did what I had to do, and they took the power away from me, so why should I show up next year?’”Green, co-founder of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, a Black community organisation in the Washington area, added: “Our democracy has holes in it, especially with the record number of attacks on voting rights and civic education. Republican and rightwing extremists have been making it harder and harder for our people to vote and so people are questioning, do I still live in a democracy?”Then there was Tennessee where, on 6 April, Republicans sparked national outrage by kicking out Jones and Pearson, two young Black Democrats, as punishment for breaking rules of decorum a week earlier by leading a protest inside the house chamber. The demonstration was prompted by a March school shooting in Nashville in which three children, three adults and the attacker were killed.Just as on abortion, Republicans are demonstrably at odds with public opinion on gun safety. A poll last year by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows 71% of Americans say gun laws should be stricter, including about half of Republicans, the vast majority of Democrats and a majority of those in gun-owning households.Meagan Hatcher-Mays, director of democracy policy at the progressive movement Indivisible, said: “It’s never the situation that the GOP moderates their position on something. It’s always a reflexive pivot to attacking and undermining democracy and that’s exactly what they did in this situation.”But Hatcher-Mays added: “If there’s any silver lining to the way that the GOP behaves it’s that they can’t hide forever from the bad and unpopular things that they do.”Republicans have long been struggling against demographic headwinds and political trends. They have lost the national popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. They suffered another reminder of abortion’s potency when a Democratic-backed Milwaukee judge won a recent Wisconsin supreme court race with the fate of the state’s abortion ban on the line.Republicans remain competitive in the US Senate – the body that approves nominated judges – because small, predominantly white states get two seats each, carrying as much weight as vast, racially diverse ones. In 2018 David Leonhardt of the New York Times calculated that the Senate gives the average Black American only 75% as much representation as the average white American, and the average Hispanic American only 55% as much.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, noted that the government was founded with checks and balances to ensure that minority viewpoints could be heard. “But it was not the intent of the framers and founders to have those minority views imposed on the majority and certainly not to have those in the minority attack the rule of law to try to unravel majority rule, which is what’s happening right now. It doesn’t get more anti-democratic than expelling members from a legislative body for expressing themselves in a constitutionally protected way.“Republicans are inflicting injury and harm on democracy. It’s a continuation of what they started to do with the big lie [that the 2020 election was stolen] … which paved the way for an insurrectionist attempt. We’re seeing other extreme iterations of that play out in individual states. When you have a minority of people exercising power over the majority, that’s authoritarianism.”Additional reporting by Lauren Gambino More

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      One in five Americans has had family member killed by gun violence – study

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      One in five Americans has lost a family member to gun violence, an alarming survey published on Tuesday claims.The research came out one day after five people were killed by a gunman at a Louisville bank, at least the 15th mass shooting of the month, and 146th this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.The resource website defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are killed or wounded.The new study reflects the increasing commonality of gun-related incidents across the US. The survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 19% of Americans said they had a family member killed by a gun, including by suicide, and one in six said they had witnessed a shooting.Among respondents who are Black, the already shocking figure in both categories jumped to one in three.The fear of gun violence is also prevalent, the study found. In particular, an epidemic of school shootings, from Columbine high school in 1999 to last month’s murder of six – including three nine-year-old students – at the Covenant school in Nashville, appears to have left parents more concerned than others.Asked if they were worried “daily or almost daily” about a family member falling victim to gun violence, 24% of parents with children under 18 said they were, compared with 15% for the adult population at large.“Unfortunately when we allow guns everywhere, for anyone with no questions asked, nowhere is safe from this gun violence epidemic,” said the founder of the gun safety advocacy group Moms Demand Action, Shannon Watts, in response to the Nashville school shooting.“We cannot and will not accept this reality. Our lawmakers must take action to keep us safe.”The survey was conducted in the week before the 27 March shooting in Nashville and delved deeper into Americans’ experiences with guns as well as gun crime.More than one in five, 21%, said they had personally been threatened with a gun, and 17% said they had witnessed somebody being shot. Those who said they had been injured by a gunshot, or had fired a weapon in self-defense, totaled 4% in each category.The results also revealed, unsurprisingly, that gun violence affects racial minorities at a far higher rate.Black adults (34%) are about twice as likely as white (17%) or Hispanic (18%) adults to say that they have a family member who was killed by a gun. They are also more than twice as likely – 31% to 14% – as white adults to say they witnessed someone being shot, with Hispanic adults in between at 22%.Overall, the survey found a majority of US adults, 54%, have either personally been affected or had a family member affected by a gun-related incident, such as witnessing a shooting, being threatened by gun, or being injured or killed by a gun.Amid the recent rise in mass shootings in the US, almost all of which were committed using AR-15 style rifles, Joe Biden has repeated his call for Congress to pass an assault weapons ban, which was not included in a bipartisan gun reform package that the president signed into law last year.But Democrats, despite controlling the Senate, have been unable to make headway and in the last Congress lacked the two-thirds majority needed to approve the assault weapons ban approved by the House of Representatives.The Connecticut US senator Chris Murphy, who was elected after a gunman murdered 26 people – including 20 children – at his state’s Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012, has been among the most vocal Democrats criticizing the opposition party’s unwillingness to pass more substantial gun control.“It is beyond me why Republicans who claim to care about the health of our kids don’t seem to give a crap about our children who are being exposed to these epidemic, cataclysmic rates of gun violence,” Murphy said in an interview with Salon.“I don’t really think people understand how big a problem this is and how quickly it has come to overwhelm us.” More

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      ‘People will die’: why is Ron DeSantis loosening gun laws that most Floridians support?

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      Governor Ron DeSantis went to the Florida capitol earlier this month to sign a bill behind closed doors with a handful of his allies. The bill, one of many hard-right proposals that Florida Republicans hope to pass during this legislative session, has stoked fear and outrage among gun safety advocates: permitless carry.With Republicans’ sweeping control of the state legislature and governorship, the bill – which would allow Floridians to carry guns without a permit or training – easily passed both chambers before being signed into law by DeSantis. The Florida house approved the bill late last month in a vote of 76 to 32, and the senate then passed the proposal in a vote of 27 to 13.The Republicans’ latest push reflects a broader rightward lurch in Florida’s politics since DeSantis took office in 2019, even though Trump carried the battleground state by just three points in 2020. Polls show that a majority of Floridians oppose the policy, and previous surveys have indicated that Florida voters overwhelmingly support other gun safety measures like universal background checks and mandatory waiting periods.Gun safety groups have provided evidence suggesting the permitless carry law will contribute to an increase in violence. They accuse the governor of prioritizing presidential ambitions over his constituents’ safety in a state that has witnessed two of America’s deadliest mass shootings.“It all has to do with talking points and setting him up to run for higher office,” said Congressman Maxwell Frost, a Democrat of Florida. “And as a result, people will die.”No ‘permission slip’ requiredRepublican legislators across the country have embraced permitless carry, or “constitutional carry” to its supporters, in recent years. The policy has won praise from rightwing activists who view any firearm-related regulation as a violation of their second amendment right to bear arms. Florida law previously stipulated that those who wish to carry a concealed gun must complete safety training and undergo a more detailed background check, but Republicans moved to do away with those requirements.“I believe that this comes down to one pretty clear thing that shall not be infringed,” the Republican state senator Jay Collins said at a committee hearing last month. “We don’t need to have the government get in the way of law-abiding citizens’ rights.”Twenty-five states have already enacted laws allowing residents to carry concealed firearms without a permit, and Florida will become the 26th in July, when the policy goes into effect.“A constitutional right should not require a permission slip from the government,” DeSantis said in his State of the State address last month. “It is time we joined 25 other states to enact constitutional carry in the state of Florida.”The proposal had been endorsed by the Florida Sheriffs Association, which represents the 67 elected sheriffs across the state.“Violent career criminals are not applying for a state permit to carry a gun,” Al Nienhuis, the association’s president and sheriff of Hernando county, said at a January press conference. “Removing the permitting process will assist our law-abiding citizens with the protections they need to defend themselves and their families from those criminals who intend to do them harm.”Florida crime statistics appear to challenge that argument. The 2021 Annual Uniform Crime Report showed Florida’s crime rate had reached a 50-year low, a fact that DeSantis himself touted in his state of the state address.Research suggests that removing the permitting requirement to carry concealed guns may instead contribute to a rise in violent crime. One study released in 2019 found that states saw an increase of 13% to 15% in violent crime rates in the years after they loosened regulations on carrying concealed firearms.Those concerns have fueled a divide among Florida’s law enforcement officers. Although the Florida Sheriffs Association supported the bill, a number of officers said they fear the policy will only further endanger them and their colleagues.“It’s not going to make our communities safer,” Sheriff John Mina of Orange county said on The Problem With Jon Stewart. “It’s going to make them more dangerous.”At the March committee hearing on the permitless carry bill, dozens of Florida residents echoed those fears. Isabella Burgos, a volunteer with the gun safety group Students Demand Action and a first-year student at Florida State University, gave emotional testimony about how she regularly fears for her life as she walks around campus. Burgos spoke just weeks after a gunman attacked Michigan State University, killing three students.“I’m at war with the terrors of the chance I may die young,” Burgos said through tears. “This epidemic will turn to utter war with this bill in place. So I urge you all to oppose this deadly bill that would be destructive to our minds and destructive to society – vote no. My life, my children’s lives and your children’s lives depend on it.”A ‘uniquely heinous proposal’In February, Florida marked five years since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, which claimed the lives of 14 students and three educators. The attack came less than two years after a gunman killed 49 people at Pulse, an LGBTQ+ nightclub, in Orlando.For gun safety advocates, Republicans’ introduction of a permitless carry bill on the heels of the Parkland anniversary feels cruel. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a former Democratic congresswoman from Florida and now senior adviser to the gun safety group Giffords, described Republicans’ actions as “shameful”.“We are one of the largest states in the country, where we have seen two of the worst mass shootings,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “And we have to continue to do the work to make sure that we protect the lives of Floridians.”As Mucarsel-Powell noted, Florida legislators came together in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting to craft a bipartisan gun safety bill. The legislation, which raised the age requirement for buying a long gun from 18 to 21 and established a “red flag” law allowing law enforcement to seize firearms from those deemed to be dangerous, was signed by the then governor, Rick Scott, a Republican.“Everybody can say that partisanship has increased and the partisan divide is getting bigger, and I think that’s really evident in Florida,” said Cate Allen, a survivor of the Parkland shooting and leader of Students Demand Action. “Our representatives, our congressmen are pursuing political ambitions and personal gain over what their constituents actually want.”Surveys indicate that Florida residents broadly oppose permitless carry. One recent poll conducted by the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab showed 77% of Florida voters, including 62% of Republicans, do not support the proposal.“I’m not going to say that the bills that [DeSantis] pushed in the past were good, but I think this one in particular is uniquely heinous,” said Alyssa Ackbar, a Tallahassee-based organizer for the gun safety group March for Our Lives. “The notion of getting rid of the permitting for concealed carry is honestly devastating.”To DeSantis’s critics such as Frost, the governor’s robust support for permitless carry is a particularly alarming example of how his political aspirations have endangered Floridians.“This is just one in a laundry list of legislation that will result in deaths, that will result in harm, that will result in trauma,” Frost said. “But it’s all part of a greater plan here because he’s more interested in running for president than he is in running the state of Florida.”‘Bullying people into submission’Although the permitless carry bill has now passed, gun safety advocates say they are still committed to holding Republican legislators accountable for supporting the widely unpopular bill.“I think it’s important to let lawmakers know that we’re watching them,” said Shannon Watts, founder of the gun safety group Moms Demand Action. “If they do the right thing, we’ll have their back, and if they do the wrong thing, we’ll have their job.”Advocates put a significant share of the blame for the bill on the shoulders of DeSantis, accusing Republican legislators of allowing their allegiance to the governor to take priority over the wishes of their constituents.“We’re seeing a rise of extremism and radicalism from DeSantis and the legislators that are completely loyal to him,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “They will not do anything that he doesn’t support.”Ackbar said she had heard from legislators that some of their colleagues only expressed support for the permitless carry bill because they want to stay in DeSantis’s good graces.“DeSantis has a way of bullying people into submission, into doing what he wants, and I truly believe that this bill is part of that as well,” Ackbar said.Gun safety advocates fear DeSantis will only escalate his demands to relax Florida’s gun regulations as he prepares to launch a presidential campaign, given that he has previously received criticism from hardline gun rights activists. The governor faced accusations of hypocrisy from gun safety advocates and gun rights activists alike in February, after the Washington Post reported on emails showing that DeSantis’s campaign team quietly sought to ban concealed weapons from his own election night party in Tampa last November.Watts mocked DeSantis’s stance as “guns everywhere for thee but not for me”, adding: “The governor knows that it is dangerous for people to have easy access to guns and then show up at his events. And yet, he wants those same people in our schools and in public places. It is the height of hypocrisy.”Gun rights activists have similarly criticized DeSantis for holding events where firearms are prohibited. A gun rights protester was arrested in October for trespassing at an Alachua county Republican party event where DeSantis was speaking, although those charges were later dropped. The protester held a sign reading: “I will not be disarmed by DeSantis.”Even the permitless carry proposal has sparked frustration among gun rights activists, who say the legislation does not go far enough. Those activists instead want a law similar to the one used in Texas, which allows residents to openly carry a gun in public without a permit instead of limiting the policy to concealed weapons. DeSantis’s failure to enact an open permitless carry law reflects “political impotence”, as one gun rights supporter put it at the committee hearing last month.Given those complaints from rightwing activists, gun safety advocates worry that DeSantis will eventually push for an open permitless carry policy in his quest to woo Republican primary voters. The human toll of such a political strategy, they say, could be devastating.“All of his political moves and all of the bullying that he does to have people vote his way, it costs lives,” Ackbar said. “They’re not just talking points. They’re not just political notions. They are real, and there are young people in communities in this state that are constantly harmed by the ways that he pushes these bills.” More

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      ‘Power to the people’: expelled Democrat returns to Tennessee state legislature – video

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      Nashville’s governing council on Monday afternoon voted unanimously to return expelled Black lawmaker Justin Jones to the Tennessee state legislature. The body’s Republican majority expelled Jones and fellow house member Justin Pearson late last week because they led protests in the chamber demanding stricter gun control after a mass shooting at an elementary school in the city days before. Jones took his oath of office on the Capitol steps before speaking on the house floor More

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      Nashville council votes to reinstate expelled Democrat Justin Jones

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      The city of Nashville’s governing council on Monday afternoon voted unanimously to return expelled Black lawmaker Justin Jones to the Tennessee state legislature.The body’s Republican majority state lawmakers had expelled Jones and fellow house member Justin Pearson late last week because they led protests in the chamber demanding gun control after yet another mass shooting in an American school, this one at an elementary school in the city days before.Moments later, Jones marched to the Capitol several blocks away. He took the oath of office on the steps and entered the building while supporters sang This Little Light of Mine.A loud round of applause erupted as Jones walked into the chamber with Democratic representative Gloria Johnson, who was also targeted for expulsion, but spared by one vote.“To the people of Tennessee, I stand with you,” Jones said in his first statement on the house floor. “We will continue to be your voice here. And no expulsion, no attempt to silence us will stop us, but it will only galvanize and strengthen our movement. And we will continue to show up in the people’s house.“Power to the people,” he shouted, to cheers.The other lawmaker, Justin Pearson, could be reappointed Wednesday at a meeting of the Shelby county commission.There was uproar last week and the act was condemned by many as an extraordinary act of political retaliation. Thousands of protesters flocked to the Tennessee state capitol to support the three Democratic members and their expulsion was slammed as racist. Joe Biden had called the move “shocking, undemocratic and without precedent” in a statement.And US vice-president Kamala Harris rushed to Nashville on Friday evening and praised the lawmakers, whom she said “chose to show courage in the face of extreme tragedy”.Jones’ appointment is on an interim basis. Special elections for the seats will take place in the coming months. Jones and Pearson have said they plan to run in the special election.Before the special council session was to begin, a couple of hundred people gathered in front of the Nashville courthouse, and more were pouring in. Some held signs reading, “No Justin, No Peace.” Inside the courthouse, a line of people waited outside the council chambers for the doors to open.Rosalyn Daniel arrived early and waited in line to get a seat in the council chambers. She said she is not in Jones’ district but is a Nashville resident and concerned citizen.“I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, during the civil rights movement, so I understand why this is so important,” she said.Republican house speaker Cameron Sexton’s spokesperson, Doug Kufner, indicated that whoever is appointed to the vacancies by the Nashville and Shelby county governments “will be seated as representatives as the constitution requires”.House majority leader William Lamberth and Republican Caucus chairman Jeremy Faison said they will welcome back the expelled lawmakers if they are reinstated.“Tennessee’s constitution provides a pathway back for expulsion,” they said in a statement. “Should any expelled member be reappointed, we will welcome them. Like everyone else, they are expected to follow the rules of the house as well as state law.”“The world is watching Tennessee,” attorneys for Jones and Pearson wrote to Sexton in a letter Monday. “Any partisan retributive action, such as the discriminatory treatment of elected officials, or threats or actions to withhold funding for government programs, would constitute further unconstitutional action that would require redress.”Johnson, the third Democrat targeted for expulsion, also attracted national attention.She had suggested race was likely a factor in why Jones and Pearson were ousted but not her. Johnson told reporters it “might have to do with the color of our skin”.GOP leaders have said the expulsions – a mechanism used only a handful times since the civil war – had nothing to do with race and instead were necessary to avoid setting a precedent that lawmakers’ disruptions of house proceedings through protest would be tolerated. More