06/17/24

Good morning! It’s Monday, June 17th.

National Take Your Cat to Work Day

Now… I record these at home, and work from home, so I don’t know for sure but you know… I’ve seen Ruth in a variety of interactions and I just can’t say she’d thrive in a work environment.

Also, she has terrible phone etiquette so I’m not quite sure what she’d be doing all day.

And now, the news.

Guns in America

-via ABC News (Texas), AP News and CNN (Michigan), BBC, NY Times, and CBS News (SCOTUS), NY Times (How a bump stock works), Gun Violence Archive

We start how we start here in America, with a special episode about guns in America, brought to us by a Supreme Court ruling and a weekend of shootings.

First – The Supreme Court.

On Friday, the Supreme Court struck down a ban on bump stocks.

A bump stock is an attachment on a semiautomatic rifle that replaces the stock, which is the part that rests against the shooter’s shoulder. In a normal semiautomatic rifle, the shooter has to pull the trigger for each shot. With a bump stock, the shooter holds the trigger and the bump stock basically, well, bumps between the shoulder and trigger finger.

Essentially, a bump stock turns a semiautomatic rifle into something that shoots at almost the same rate of a machine gun without turning into one, because it’s illegal for private citizens to own a fully automatic rifle.

Before I go on… if you’re new here – hey, I’m Kim. I don’t own any guns. I’ve shot guns before. But I don’t own any and that description of a bump stock is based on research, not on firsthand knowledge. I do get a little frustrated when the topic of guns and gun law comes up though because, what I just said there? I’m certain some gun enthusiast is going to find some tiny piece of technical error and immediately dismiss everything else I’m about to say. Meanwhile, we’ve got people who don’t know how ovaries work and can’t even say period without blushing, making laws that take away choice and bodily autonomy. Also, yes it’s possible there is a small technical error in what I just said, I’m willing to accept that, but it doesn’t change the truth of a bump stock – a bump stock makes a gun shooter much faster, without any additional physical exertion on behalf of the shooter.

Meanwhile, I get the 2nd Amendment repeated to me so often it’s almost as if that’s the only Amendment. But somehow those first four words, “a well regulated militia,” don’t seem to matter as much as making sure you get the tech right.

Okay, sorry, I needed to get that out of the way.

So bump stocks…

Bump stocks were banned in 2018 by President Trump after the 2017 Vegas Mandalay Bay shooting became one of the deadliest shootings in modern American history when the shooter used a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock to kill 60 people, injure almost 900 others (counting those hit by a bullet and injured in the panic that followed) at the Route 91 Harvest music festival.

60 people killed. Almost 900 more injured. And thanks to a bump stock – it all only took 10 minutes of shooting.

And on Friday, on a 6-3 vote along ideological lines, the Supreme Court voted down that bump stock ban.

Writing for the opinion, Historical Bad Man Justice Thomas wrote: “We hold that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machine gun’ because it cannot fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger.’”

Yes, thanks to the bump that occurs between the bump stock and the trigger, even though all the shooter needs to do is just hold the trigger down, there is still, technically, mechanically, more than one pull on the trigger.

And when I say that this opinion fell along ideological lines, I mean… seriously. Because normally Justices just hand over their opinions and dissents and they’re serious on their own. However, Justice Sotomayor summarized her dissent from the bench, which is how you know she dissents with her whole chest.

In her comments, she said; “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.” Adding, “a bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.’ Because I, like Congress, call that a machine gun, I respectfully dissent.”

That “respectfully” felt very sarcastic.

This has two ways of being dangerous.

First, practically. We are a nation that, for a variety of reasons, has a mass shooting epidemic. One that no one with real power has any desire to change. And now the Supreme Court just made a deadly weapon legally deadlier.

Also, because we have made so little progress in trying to curb this very serious, very American, deadly problem we have… striking down the ban undoes that tiny bit of progress. It tells the world that we don’t want to solve this. Not really.

And in case you’re looking for more proof of the way this country doesn’t truly want to fix this problem… this week, Senate Majority Leader Schumer will bring to vote a bill that will restore the ban.

And let’s just see how that goes. (Would love to be surprised though! Would be so stoked!)

And in the shadow of Friday’s ruling…

Two people are dead in Texas after a fight broke out at a Juneteenth celebration on Saturday. At some point, during the fight, someone pulled a gun and began to shoot.

At least six people were taken to the hospital with potentially serious injuries and the two people that died were not involved in the fight.

It’s not even known, right now, how many guns were at the scene.

In 2021, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, signed into law a bill that made it legal in Texas for most people over the age of 21 to carry a gun in a holster without a permit. And though it has to be in a holster, it can carried open or concealed. Without a permit.

And now two people are dead and we don’t even know how many guns were at the scene.

Also on Saturday – at least nine people were shot, including a four-year-old, after what appears to be a random shooting at a splash pad in a Detroit, Michigan neighborhood. The shooter was found dead in his home from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

There is currently no known motive, with the shooter having no connection to any of the victims.

That wasn’t the only shooting in Michigan - six people were shot in a residential neighborhood, also in Detroit. And in Massachusetts, seven people were shot at a party.

In fact, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter, this weekend saw eight mass shootings.

We’re 169 days into the year, and there have already been at least 220 mass shootings.

Now, this weekend’s shootings didn’t, to my knowledge, include use of a bump stock.

But the Supreme Court just told the country, and the world, that they’re not that worried about what guns are doing in this country.

More mass shootings than we’ve had days in the year.

It is long past time that we stop parsing language and putting dangerous weapons freely into the world based on technicalities.

And that’s it. That’s the news.

Hey! Guess what? I’m making some changes to the news!

If you’re hearing this as a podcast – no changes! Don’t worry, just… additions.

First of all, you can now find a video version of this podcast on YouTube. There will be a link in show notes.

If you’re watching this as a video – it’s a podcast too! Go to Kimmoffat.com/here’s what’s happening and you’ll find links there.

And as you may recall, there is also a Substack. In the past, those posts have been just an email version of this podcast. Going forward, starting with today’s post, that’ll be more focused on one big story of the day.

So new stuff! What’s not new? More than Substacks and podcasts and videos and putting a little bowtie on Ruth and bringing her to the office… I’m proud of you.