ProPublica:
Why 18-Year-Olds in Texas Can Buy AR-15s but Not Handguns
The massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, highlights disparities in how federal laws regulate rifles and handguns. The shooter bought two rifles days after his 18th birthday.
Following Tuesday’s massacre at Robb Elementary School, which killed 19 children and two adults, a growing number of lawmakers in Texas and beyond are calling for the minimum age to purchase assault rifles to be raised to 21 from 18. Doing so would require undoing nearly two centuries of more permissive regulations on so-called long guns.
“It’s something that could happen at either the state or federal level, but I do not see movement on either front,” said Sandra Guerra Thompson, a criminal law professor at the University of Houston Law Center.
Elizabeth Dias /The New York Times:
The Arrow in America’s Heart
Relentless mass shootings, a million dead from Covid – How much do we value a single life?
A man is shot with a poisoned arrow, Ms. Han recounted as she drove a group of high school seniors to visit a Thai temple in Massachusetts.
The arrow piercing his flesh, the man demands answers. What kind of arrow is it? Who shot the arrow? What kind of poison is it? What feathers are on the arrow, a peacock’s or a hawk’s?
But all these questions miss the point, the Buddha tells his disciple. What is important is pulling out that poison arrow, and tending to the wound.
Is it a magazine or a clip? According to some, you’re not qualified to have an opinion if you can not answer correctly, or identify the bullet caliber within three decimals, or do not know what “AR” stands for (it’s not “assault rifle”).
But Buddha knew better and cut through the crap.
Houston Chronicle:
I was at the table when Gov. Greg Abbott seemed serious about gun reform
In the days after the 2018 mass shooting at Santa Fe High School, which followed on the heels of the murders at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the resulting March for Our Lives movement, Abbott convened the first of his closed door “roundtable” discussions. on gun violence. My advocacy organization at the time, Texas Gun Sense, was invited to attend. In a room filled with our state’s top elected officials, law enforcement, educators and mental health professionals, the governor sought input on a variety of small but meaningful reform proposals. These included establishing a red flag law, increasing the penalty for failing to secure a firearm, and mandatory reporting of stolen firearms – modest but groundbreaking for a Texas Republican. His knowledge of these policy areas was impressive and his interest appeared genuine. So what happened? Why didn’t any of these ideas get signed into law?
Thomas Lecaque / The Bulwark:
Doug Mastriano, Christian Nationalism, and the Cult of the AR-15
The Republican nominee for Pennsylvania governor has ties to a gun-worshiping sect. But the real scandal is just how common many of their beliefs have become on the right.
Mastriano’s résumé hits all the main points of today’s bog-standard MAGA candidate template. He is an insurrectionist who ginned up enthusiasm for the attempted coup as a featured speaker for Jericho March’s rally in December 2020 before participating — by his own admission — in the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021. (He bused Trump supporters to Washington and although he claimed that he and his wife did not cross police lines at the US Capitol, they were caught on video doing just that.) The House Jan. 6th Committee subpoenaed him for being part of a plan to send pro-Trump electors to Congress, and he responded with loyal silence.
Mastriano also has an increasingly familiar religious profile. He has described the Gulf War, in which he served in 1991, as a “holy” war — a belief reflected in his bizarre 2002 graduate thesis, “Nebuchadnezzar’s Sphinx.” He has attended events of the Charismatic Christian dominionist movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation. He shares anti-Muslim memes, hangs out with militia members to guard Confederate statues at Gettysburg, and constantly hits all the main themes of Christian nationalist discourse in his speeches and other activities. In one particularly tasteless moment, he announced his gubernatorial candidacy while wearing a tallit and blowing a shofar—Symbols that Christian nationalists have appropriated from the Jewish tradition and used to declare apocalyptic spiritual war.
Survival – Global Politics and Strategy:
A Brutal Examination: Russian Military Capability in Light of the Ukraine War
Russian armed forces’ lack of performance in Ukraine has surprised military analysts. Shortcomings have included breakdowns in logistics, poor equipment and morale, abysmal communications, and muddled command and control, as well as a weak showing by the Russian Aerospace Forces, air defense, and cruise and ballistic missiles. Chief among the contributing factors are wishful political thinking, overreliance on esoteric doctrine and endemic corruption. War, however, brutally exposes peacetime cheating. Consequently, estimates of Russian military capabilities – in particular, for large-formation combined-arms operations, logistics, air defense and intangibles such as morale – need to be carefully reassessed. Earlier analyzes of a Russia – NATO conflict appear to have overstated the challenge of defending Europe. Looking ahead, the conventional threat from Russia seems less daunting than previously thought, and the country faces a formidable task in repairing depleted capabilities. That said, President Vladimir Putin’s appetite for risk is greater than anticipated.
Eleanor Klibanoff /The Texas Tribune:
A gun and a prayer: How the far right took control of Texas’ response to mass shootings
The “God-given right” to self-defense has become a rallying cry in Texas politics, further cementing gun ownership as a holy cause and political identity. The state’s Republican leadership has spent decades carrying the banner.
As the gunman approached her family in the corner of the restaurant, Suzanna Hupp wanted nothing more than a gun in her hand.
But Texas law in 1991 did not allow that, leaving her defenseless. Her father was fatally shot when he ran at the gunman, unarmed. Her mother died holding him on the floor of that Luby’s restaurant in Killeen. Twenty-one other diners and the gunman also died that day.
The Luby’s shooting, as it became known, shocked the nation and galvanized Hupp, who escaped through a window. She spent the next 30 years, including 10 in the state Legislature, fighting to give others the option she did not have.
Unlike other mass shooting survivors who advocate for gun restrictions – the parents of Sandy Hook Elementary students or the teenagers who watched their classmates die at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School – Hupp’s goal has been eliminating gun regulations.