James.galbraith

By JM McNab Published: June 01st, 2022

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Saying the quiet part out loud — very loudly.

Politicians diverge from voters when it comes to preventing gun deaths.

The massacre of children at an elementary school in Texas is adding fresh urgency to the conversation about gun control in the United States, which has been politically fraught and lacking in progress. That’s not because of a lack of support for gun control. That support just needs a little bit of parsing.

To be clear: Americans’ views about guns are complicated, and vary significantly by political party and geography. Overall, the vast majority of Americans support the right for private citizens to own guns, and more than 40 percent of households own at least one firearm. That doesn’t mean they’re against tighter rules on their guns. Nearly three-quarters of Americans think that gun violence is a big or moderately big problem, according to a survey last year by Pew Research Center. And a majority of Americans think that the epidemic of school shootings could be stopped with drastic changes in legislation, according to a poll this week by YouGov.

Still, when Americans are asked broadly if they support stricter gun laws, their opinions volley back and forth, and it’s hard to see a consistent majority. Slightly more than half (52 percent) of Americans in a Gallup poll last year said laws regarding firearms sales should be stricter — a number that has actually gone down in recent years — and a Quinnipiac poll last year found that just under half (45 percent) support stricter gun laws. More recently, a Politico/Morning Consult poll last week found that 59 percent of registered voters think it’s very important (41 percent) or somewhat important (18 percent) for lawmakers to pass stricter gun laws.

But these might not be the right things for pollsters to be asking. That’s because of how drastically existing gun laws vary state by state.

“The thing about those sort of generic questions: Somebody in Vermont can say yes and someone in California can say no, and they favor the exact same thing,” Chris Poliquin, an assistant professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, who studies gun legislation after mass shootings, told Recode.

When asking Americans about their opinions on more specific gun policies, the results are clearer. A vast majority of Americans supports universal background checks, keeping people with serious mental health issues from buying guns, bans on assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, and so-called “red flag laws” that would allow police and family members to seek court orders to temporarily take guns away from those considered a risk to themselves and others. A majority of Americans, of both political parties, oppose carrying concealed weapons without a permit.

In the wake of tragedies like last week’s Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting, in which 19 children and two teachers were murdered at an elementary school, there have always been calls for stricter national gun legislation, but those measures rarely pass and are often very modest when they do pass. That said, federal gun laws — which are much more popular among Democrats than Republicans — remain a particularly high priority, since many of the guns used in crimes come from states with looser gun laws.

There’s much more action at the state level, but it doesn’t typically end with progress. Poliquin’s research found that state legislatures consider 15 percent more firearm bills in the year after a mass shooting, although the existence of more bills doesn’t typically lead to stricter gun laws. In fact, Republican legislatures pass more gun-related legislation in the wake of mass shootings — but they’re laws that make gun laws less strict.

America’s increased polarization makes things difficult.

“A lot of those [gun control measures] are actually supported in the abstract by gun owners, but often not in practice,” Matthew Lacombe, an assistant professor at Barnard and author of Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force, told Recode. “So people have a particular issue stance, but then that issue becomes salient and Democratic and Republican politicians start taking clear stances on it. And then people’s views tend to fall into line to match their partisan outlooks.”

Part of the issue is that Americans have somewhat conflicting stances on gun control. But what’s a bigger problem is that even when a majority of Americans agree, a simple majority of lawmakers agreeing on a bill is not enough to pass laws in our country. The Senate filibuster lets a minority of states — and Americans — veto national policy that the majority of Americans want. The result is a minority of people making the laws for the majority of Americans, regardless of what the population at large thinks.

Background checks

Background checks are by far the least controversial aspect of gun legislation, according to a whole lot of surveys. Roughly 80 to 90 percent of Americans support universal background checks, which would mean all sellers would have to verify that a person doesn’t have a history of violent crime or domestic abuse before they can buy a gun. As Robin Lloyd, managing director of the gun control advocacy group Giffords, put it, “Background checks on every gun sale polls higher than people who support ice cream.”

That overwhelmingly broad support, however, has not led to sweeping national requirements for background checks. There are currently laws requiring extended background checks for all people who buy guns in 21 states, but federal law only covers sales between federally licensed dealers. That means there’s a loophole in which about a fifth of gun sales — sold privately, online, and at gun shows — are done without that oversight. Even states that have expanded laws suffer from an influx of guns from those that don’t.

Of course, many mass shooters would have no trouble passing a background check. The 18-year-old Uvalde shooter, for instance, legally purchased his guns. The Buffalo shooter bought his guns legally. The Parkland shooter did. The list goes on. Still, according to a 2020 study, the odds of mass shootings are 60 percent lower in states with laws requiring permits for firearms — and, by extension, background checks.

Notably, many of these killers are young and don’t yet have a record. After the Parkland shooting in 2018, there was massive support for raising the legal age for buying a firearm from 18 to 21. Universal background checks are one of those rare issues that both Republicans (70 percent) and Democrats (92 percent) support, but partisanship in other areas keeps it from going anywhere. Republican senators would have to cross the aisle to vote for gun control laws — a move that would likely hurt them in their state primaries.

The Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2021, or HR 8, which would close the background check loophole, was sketched out in rough form after the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre a decade ago. Despite lawmakers from both sides of the aisle signaling support for such bills, these bills have repeatedly passed the House only to languish in the Senate.

Red flag laws

Americans overwhelmingly support red flag laws, otherwise known as extreme risk protection orders, which work similarly to restraining orders. Again, these laws allow police and family members to petition a court — which would determine whether there’s enough evidence to do so — to temporarily keep guns from people who might be a threat to themselves or others. Some 77 percent of Americans think that a family member should be able to petition a court to do this, while 70 percent think police should, according to a survey by APM Research Lab.

And this approach to gun control has been gaining traction in recent years. A number of states adopted such laws following the Parkland, Florida, shooting, in which the gunman, like many mass shooters, displayed obvious red flags. (An acquaintance said he’d introduce himself, “Hi, I’m Nick. I’m a school shooter.”) Some say the red flag approach might be less controversial with gun owners, specifically, because it seems like common sense.

“Red flag laws are promising because they’re specifically targeted at people or cases or instances in which there’s reason to believe that there might be a problem,” Lacombe said. “So it’s not like a blanket rule that treats gun owners like a particular class of citizen.”

Of course, for red flag laws to be useful, they have to be used. If police had decided to seek such an order against the shooter in the Buffalo supermarket earlier this month, who had been referred to police for threatening violence, 10 gun deaths could have been prevented. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has since announced an executive order that would compel police to do so.

Mental health restrictions

There’s also overwhelming support on both sides of the aisle (85 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of Democrats) for stopping those with mental illness from buying a gun. But in the case of gun sales that happen through a licensed dealer, that’s supposed to already be happening (though the same loopholes occur for online and private sellers). If a court has had someone involuntarily committed or otherwise determined that they are incapable of managing their life, that person is not supposed to be able to buy a gun, since they should be flagged by the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) database.

In practice, that has not always happened.

After a student with a documented history of court-ordered mental health treatment shot and killed 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech in 2007, there was a major push to make sure state-level records were entered into NICS. George W. Bush signed the NICS Improvement Act into law in 2008, but it still had huge holes where relevant state and federal records were not uploaded to the database. Some of those were remedied by the Fix NICS Act that was signed into law in 2018, but the system is far from perfect.

Additionally, mass shooters generally wouldn’t be considered to have mental illness severe enough to show up in the federal gun database in the first place.

“There’s sort of this perception about mass shooters that they are severely mentally ill people,” Poliquin said. “Although they might have mental health issues, the level of mental health issues doesn’t necessarily lead to institutionalization.”

Additionally, there’s a lot of debate over mental health and mass shooting coming from Republicans that might be in bad faith. It’s not as though Americans have a higher rate of mental health problems than other countries — what makes the US exceptional is the number of guns in the country and the corresponding number of gun deaths.

“I’m not aware of any instance in which a Republican saying that this is really a mental health issue has actually then come forward with a proposal to invest additional resources in our public health and mental health infrastructure, which I think sends a signal just how serious they are,” Lacombe said.

Assault rifles and high-capacity magazines

Bans on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines have an approval rating of over 60 percent in the US, according to Pew.

Assault weapons are a poorly defined class of firearms, but generally refer to military-style semi-automatic weapons. High-capacity magazines are generally ammunition clips that hold more than 10 rounds. AR-15s, the preferred style of weapon in recent mass shootings, are assault weapons, which can be modified to accept a number of after-market parts, including high-capacity magazines, that make it even deadlier.

While it has majority support, banning assault weapons is much more divided by political party. While 83 percent of Democrats approve of banning assault-style weapons, just 37 percent of Republicans do; 83 percent of Democrats would like a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines compared with 41 percent of Republicans.

Assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, both of which allow murderers to kill more people in a short span of time, used to be illegal in the US. A federal law passed in 1994 banned assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, but Congress let the legislation lapse in 2004. Even though the 1994 law had its issues — it didn’t make illegal or confiscate the 1.5 million assault weapons and 25 million large-capacity magazines that Americans already owned — the bans did significantly reduce death tolls while they were in effect.

“After that, we’ve just seen like an explosion of assault weapons all across the country,” Lloyd said, estimating the number to be in the tens of millions.

Cassandra Crifasi, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said gun laws should go beyond simply listing which specific guns are restricted or not by making it harder to get deadly gun accessories.

“In response to some of these bans, you can buy a rifle that falls into the approved list, and then you can find accessories online or at gun shows that allow you to customize it and then it may become in violation of the ban,” she said. “Once you have the rifle, if you can then buy those accessories after-market, you can skirt around the ban.”

The Buffalo shooter, for example, purchased his AR-15-style gun legally but modified it to accept a large-capacity magazine that is illegal in New York.

However it’s defined, Lloyd says, limiting guns, ammo, and accessories would limit the extent of gun violence in mass shootings.

“It is impossible to ignore the fact that assault weapons are extremely dangerous because of how many people they can kill in such a short amount of time,” she said, referring to the death tolls in Buffalo and Uvalde.

There is proposed legislation, including the Keep Americans Safe Act (HR 2510 / S 1108), that would ban high-capacity magazines, and the Assault Weapons Ban of 2021, which would ban military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. All of these bills have been introduced but not voted on, and thanks to the filibuster, would be unlikely to pass without a lot more Republican support.

Concealed carry

Though it varies by party, the vast majority (81 percent) of Americans oppose laws that would allow people to carry concealed handguns without a permit, according to a recent poll this month by Marquette Law School. And generally, support for the wider ability to carry guns — in schools, without permits — has been declining, according to Crifasi.

At the same time, laws allowing people to carry weapons in public have become much more commonplace in the last decade. The effort, however, began decades before in the 1980s as the NRA, beginning in Florida, sought to get states to slowly roll back their concealed carry laws from something that was a special dispensation to something that was expected as a way for gun owners to express their Second Amendment rights. Just last year, the Texas legislature passed a law making it so that people no longer need a license or training to carry a handgun.

“The NRA put forth a pretty strategic, organized, and concerted effort to change state laws, one state at a time,” Lacombe said. “As it became increasingly normalized to be in the law, voters also became more likely to see it as acceptable.”

The thinking behind these Republican and NRA talking points is that having a concealed weapon would allow the “good guys” to take down the bad guys. In practice, that doesn’t actually happen. Though there are a handful of anecdotes in which a person with a concealed weapon successfully stops a mass shooter, adding more guns to the mix is more dangerous. To wit: a man who stopped a mass shooter with his concealed weapon last year in Colorado, only to be mistakenly shot and killed by police.

As the conceal carry issue shows, gun policy reflects the influence of NRA lobbyists more than everyday Americans.

“We have an exceptionally powerful gun lobby that works on behalf of gun manufacturers to make it easy for gun dealers and gun manufacturers to sell a lot of guns really easily,” Crifasi said. “And many of our elected officials are more beholden to the gun lobby than they are to their own constituents.”

Many of the gun control ideas above are part of kitchen table discussions being had right now across the country, as Americans mourn yet another senseless tragedy at the hands of a mass shooter. Specific gun control measures have bipartisan support and could go a long way toward stopping the next mass shooting before it happens.

Unfortunately, what Americans want is not being reflected in America’s laws. The ability of the minority in small, mostly rural, and mostly white communities to outweigh the majority has vast repercussions for the way we live and the way we die. The Senate filibuster is undermining democracy, and in turn is undermining the American government’s legitimacy. It’s possible tragic events like the one last week in Texas could help turn the tide, but for now. tide-turning would require support from Republican lawmakers that actually matches the desires of their Republican constituents.

For that to change, Republicans in addition to Democrats will have to vote out politicians whose stances on guns don’t align with theirs. If not, these conversations begin and end at the kitchen table.

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Joke's on you. The whole thing was a poem about life.

Today's News:

Say what you want about them, but Republicans can think long-term, having spent 50 years systematically using all tools at their disposal to get themselves the Supreme Court they wanted—a radical conservative court, vastly out of step with the American public, that is destroying all the freedoms we cherish, from our right to privacy (abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage, and even interracial marriage), to our right to vote, to our right to stay alive. For some reason, the “originalists” on the court conveniently skip over the words “well regulated” that describe the Founders’ vision of a militia—a key plank in their bid to make mass death more commonplace in our society. 

Joining me today on Daily Kos The Brief, our weekly show about politics, is Elie Mystal, the justice correspondent for The Nation, and author of Allow Me To Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution. You can watch the show live right here on Tuesdays at 1:30 PM PT/4:30 PM ET, while the podcast version goes live Wednesday mornings at all the usual places, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. A full list of places to download the show is available here.

Some of the topics we’ll discuss: 

Elie is one of the best observers of the absurdity of our Supreme Court. Don’t miss this episode.

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All that rhetoric about leaving decisions to the states? Forget about it.

The first courtroom test for Special Counsel John Durham ended in defeat Tuesday as a federal jury found a Democratic attorney not guilty of making a false statement to the FBI related to allegations of computer links between Donald Trump and Russia.

The jury deliberated for about six hours before acquitting Michael Sussmann, 57, on the single felony charge he faced: that he lied when he allegedly denied he was acting on behalf of any client in alerting the FBI to claims that a secret server linked Trump and a Moscow bank with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

During a two-week trial in federal court in Washington, Durham’s prosecutors argued that Sussmann was acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and an internet executive when he took two thumb drives of data and white papers on the purported link to FBI General Counsel James Baker about six weeks before the 2016 presidential election.

Sussmann’s defense said the case was flawed on a variety of grounds, including that prosecutors could not prove with certainty exactly what the cybersecurity lawyer and former federal prosecutor said to Baker.

Sussmann’s attorneys also stressed that there was no evidence the Clinton campaign authorized Sussmann to go to the FBI, although he and researchers working for Clinton appeared to have spent an extensive amount of time dealing with the server allegations and were actively encouraging The New York Times to write about the issue in the closing weeks of the presidential race.

In the courtroom, Sussmann showed no evident reaction to the not guilty verdict, although he was masked as most trial participants have been throughout. A prosecutor asked that all 12 jurors be polled and they all confirmed the acquittal.

After U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper gaveled out the trial, Sussmann’s two lead attorneys, Sean Berkowitz and Michael Bosworth, embraced.

In a brief statement outside the courthouse shortly after the verdict, Sussmann thanked his lawyers and said he views the not guilty verdict as a vindication.

"I told the truth to the FBI and the jury clearly recognized that with their unanimous verdict today," Sussmann told reporters. "Despite being falsely accused, I believe that justice ultimately prevailed in my case."

Sussmann's defense team declined to address the crowd of reporters and cameras at the court, but issued a written statement blasting the prosecution.

"Michael Sussmann should never have been charged in the first place. This is a case of extraordinary prosecutorial overreach. And we believe that today’s verdict sends an unmistakable message to anyone who cares to listen: politics is no substitute for evidence, and politics has no place in our system of justice," Berkowitz and Bosworth wrote.

Durham, who was not a member of the trial team but was present in the courtroom throughout, left the courthouse quietly and later issued a written statement expressing disappointment in the verdict. His prosecutors had described the evidence of Sussmann's guilty as "overwhelming."

"While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service. I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case," the special counsel said.

Several jurors declined to comment on the deliberations as they left the courthouse, but the foreperson spoke briefly with reporters and stressed the burden that the prosecution faced in the case.

"The government had the job of proving beyond a reasonable doubt," she said, declining to give her name. "We broke it down...as a jury. It didn't pan out in the government's favor."

Asked if she thought the prosecution was worthwhile, the foreperson said: "Personally, I don't think it should have been prosecuted because I think we have better time or resources to use or spend to other things that affect the nation as a whole than a possible lie to the FBI. We could spend that time more wisely."

Shortly before the verdict was returned Tuesday morning, the jury sent Cooper a note asking if they had to agree unanimously on the grounds for their verdict. The judge replied that they had to agree on the basis for a guilty verdict, but they could acquit even if jurors differed about which of the various defense theories they accepted.

Following Sussmann's outreach in 2016, the FBI concluded that the evidence Sussmann presented didn’t support the notion of a link between Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank. Some agents assigned to the investigation found that the hints of such contacts found in domain name system records were actually caused by a marketing email server sending out spam message, but during the trial, Sussmann’s defense called the FBI’s probe “shoddy” and at least one agent involved conceded it was “incomplete.”

Trump's aides denied any such link, and a computer security firm hired by Alfa Bank also concluded that the allegations were unfounded.

It’s unclear how the high-profile courtroom setback will impact Durham’s ongoing probe or his ability to bring future charges in his broad investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. Some Durham supporters have praised his pursuit of Sussmann as providing a useful vehicle to publicly air the involvement of the Clinton campaign in efforts to publicize the purported server link and for releasing evidence suggesting that some technical experts who advanced the allegations harbored doubts about them.

However, Justice Department policy generally bars prosecutors from using a criminal case to lay out a broader narrative unless they believe they have the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt evidence needed to get a conviction.

Senior Justice Department officials have been vague about what level of supervision is in place over Durham’s probe, which former Attorney General Bill Barr gave special-counsel status a few weeks before the 2020 election. Attorney General Merrick Garland has said the department is adhering to regulations governing the special counsel’s autonomy, but has declined to elaborate.

Some potential witnesses who declined to testify at Sussmann’s trial and were involved in handling of the server allegations cited concerns that Durham might try to prosecute them.

Durham’s probe, which began in May 2019, has produced two other criminal cases.

Last fall, Durham brought a broader, five-count felony case against a Russian-born researcher for allegedly feeding false information to the FBI in the Trump-Russia probe. The researcher, Igor Danchenko, has pleaded not guilty and is set to go on trial in October in federal court in Alexandria, Va.

In 2020, Durham obtained a guilty plea from a former FBI attorney, Kevin Clinesmith, to a charge that he deliberately altered an email used to obtain secret-court surveillance warrants against Carter Page, an energy analyst who had formerly served as a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.

Clinesmith conceded altering an email he received and forwarded, but insisted that he believed the information he inserted was true. Durham’s team urged that Clinesmith receive between three and six months in prison, but a judge sentenced him to one year of probation instead.

In an awkward attempt to show empathy to Uvalde victims at the NRA convention held days after the massacre, Donald Trump struggled through a list of the young victims’ names, with each followed by a bizarre Hunger Games gong. He then immediately launched into a speech that called reasonable efforts to put a halt to selling assault rifles to 18-year-olds “grotesque.” Trump predictably blamed everything but guns for gun violence: liberal teachers, school administrators, and “broken homes.” (Trump, of course, has left two of his wives—so far.)

Trump also reminded NRA members that he still thinks they are awesome, because in his warped mind, it’s the gun nuts who need the consoling after a massacre, not those impacted by it.

Somehow, though, the speech got even worse.

This was how his speech ended:

Of course, crassness is nothing new for Trump. As a reminder of how awful he has always been, this is Trump during a tasteless photo op with a baby who was orphaned after the El Paso massacre, behaving like the baby is a donor at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser. 

Then there’s Trump in the wake of the Parkland massacre.

Wow. What Lucy said.

Although every speaker at the NRA horror show predictably said that the answer to gun violence is more guns, guns were banned at the convention. It was literally the only gun-free zone in Texas, making it clear that even the NRA doesn’t believe what it’s peddling. 

Rot in hell, NRA.

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OTTAWA, Ont. — The Canadian government is hoping for speedy passage of new firearm-control measures meant to fight rising gun violence in Canada, in the wake of last week’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday announced a national freeze on handgun sales.

“It will no longer be possible to buy, sell, transfer or import handguns anywhere in Canada,” Trudeau said during a late afternoon press conference, surrounded by Cabinet ministers, Liberal MPs and gun control advocates.

“In other words, we’re capping the market for handguns.”

The Liberal government also aims to yank firearms licenses from perpetrators of domestic violence or criminal harassment, and a press release promised a “red flag” law that would allow judges to force gun owners “considered a danger to themselves or others” to surrender their firearms.

The government will also mandate that long-gun magazines be altered to carry no more than five rounds.

“We need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action, firmly and rapidly, it gets worse and worse and more difficult to counter,” Trudeau said when asked if the legislation goes too far.

Shortly before the press conference, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino tabled Bill C-21 in the House of Commons.

Monday’s announcement in Ottawa marks a sharp contrast to the political fallout in the United States from the tragedy in Uvalde, where a gunman killed 19 schoolchildren and two teachers at Robb Elementary School.

In the wake of the shooting, President Joe Biden pleaded for change, asking, “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?”

Biden visited Uvalde on Sunday and was met with demonstrators chanting at him to “do something” about gun violence. Biden responded, “We will,” and later tweeted that his administration is “committed to turning this pain into action.” It’s not clear what he meant, given the political hurdles that face any proposed gun laws.

In Canada, however, there is broad public support for gun control measures, including a complete ban on civilian possession of handguns.

In April 2020, a gunman posing as a police officer went on a rampage in the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia, killing 22 people in the deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history. The tragedy prompted Trudeau to announce an immediate ban on 1,500 types of what his government calls “assault-style” weapons, including semi-automatic firearms designed to fire quickly.

The government promised to create a buyback program for the newly prohibited firearms, but a proposed gun-control bill died on the order paper before last year’s federal election, which returned the Liberals to power with another minority government. Gun-control advocates criticized the bill for proposing a buyback program that was merely voluntary.

During the 2021 election campaign, the Liberals promised even stricter gun-control measures if they were reelected, including a mandatory program that would require owners of assault-style weapons to sell them back to the government.

“I can confirm the imminent launch of the initial phase of this program as we begin consultations with industry on compensation,” Mendicino said Monday. “We intend to publish further details about the compensation system this summer.”

The minister promised to start buying back AR-15 rifles before the end of 2022. “It's going to be hard. But we are going to get it done,” he said.

The Liberals also promised to provide at least C$1 billion in funding to provinces and territories that ban handguns.

Canada has seen an increase in gun violence in recent years. A new report from Statistics Canada, released Friday, shows firearm-related violent crime has been on the rise since 2015. The report also finds the proportion of homicides involving a firearm rose to 37 percent in 2020 from 26 percent in 2013.

Still, that’s much lower than in the United States, where nearly 80 percent of murders in 2020 involved a firearm. And gun violence accounted for less than three percent of all violent crime reported to police in 2020, according to Statistics Canada.

Public opinion polling also sheds light on why the Liberals see gun control as a winning political issue. Earlier this month, survey results from the Angus Reid Institute showed that 60 percent of respondents believe gun violence is rising in Canada. Moreover, 44 percent said Canada’s existing laws aren’t strict enough, compared to just 17 percent who said gun laws are too strict.

The opposition Conservatives, however, criticize the Liberals’ approach as targeting law-abiding gun owners while failing to address the trade of illegal weapons, which they say is responsible for the majority of gun crime in Canada.

“The Trudeau Liberals are not serious about stopping dangerous criminals from getting their hands on illegal guns and they are not serious about making our streets safer,” the Conservatives said in a recent statement. “They only care about wedging and dividing Canadians.”

The Statistics Canada report pointed to data gaps around gun violence, including whether the weapons were legally obtained. “Of particular concern, there is currently little information available to determine the source of firearms used in crime: for example, whether a gun used in a crime was stolen, illegally purchased or smuggled into the country,” it reads.

Liberia found a stunningly effective way to reduce violent crimes. Now the US is trying a similar experiment.

What if someone told you that you could dramatically reduce the crime rate without resorting to coercive policing or incarceration? In fact, what if they said you could avert a serious crime — a robbery, say, or maybe even a murder — just by shelling out $1.50?

That’s such an incredibly good deal that it sounds too good to be true. But it’s been borne out by the research of Chris Blattman, Margaret Sheridan, Julian Jamison, and Sebastian Chaskel. Their new study provides experimental evidence that offering at-risk men a few weeks of behavioral therapy plus a bit of cash reduces the future risk of crime and violence, even 10 years after the intervention.

Blattman, an economist at the University of Chicago, never intended to conduct this study. But in 2009, he was hanging out with an acquaintance in Liberia named Johnson Borh, who showed him around the capital city of Monrovia. Since Blattman studies crime and violence, Borh took him to visit the pickpockets, drug sellers, and others living on the margins of society.

Along the way, they kept running into guys who were sitting on street corners, eking out a meager living by shining shoes or selling clothes. When these men spotted Borh, they’d run to give him a hug. Blattman recalls that when he asked the men how they knew Borh, they’d say something like, “I used to be like them,” and point to the nearby pickpockets or drug sellers. “But then I went through Borh’s program.”

That’s how Blattman learned about the program Borh had been running for 15 years: Sustainable Transformation of Youth in Liberia. It offered men who were at high risk for violent crime eight weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT, as it’s called, is a popular, evidence-based method of dealing with issues like anxiety, but Borh adapted the therapeutic strategy to deal with issues like violence and crime.

Meeting with a counselor in groups of around 20, the men would practice specific behavioral changes, like managing anger and exerting self-control. They’d also rehearse trying on a new identity unconnected to their past behavior, by changing their clothes and haircuts and working to reintegrate themselves into mainstream society through community sports, banks, and more.

Blattman wanted to formally study just how effective this kind of program could be. He decided to run a big randomized controlled trial with 999 of the most dangerous men in Monrovia, recruited on the street. The results were so promising that they’ve already inspired a sister program in a very different city: Chicago.

In Chicago, the murder rate is troublingly high, and the police fail to solve 95 percent of all shootings. Finding a way to prevent shootings and other violent crimes is an urgent priority — not only in that city, but across the US, as the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, remind us. Given that direct interventions like removing guns are largely blocked by political polarization, and trying to crack down on crime after the fact carries with it risks of policy brutality, we desperately need new solutions to the problem of violence.

Therapy plus cash was a surprisingly successful combo

The 999 Liberian men were split into four groups. Some received CBT, while others got $200 in cash. Another group got the CBT plus the cash, and finally, there was a control group that got neither.

A month after the intervention, both the therapy group and the therapy-plus-cash group were showing positive results. A year after the intervention, the positive effects on those who got therapy alone had faded a bit, but those who got therapy plus cash were still showing huge impacts: crime and violence were down about 50 percent.

But Blattman didn’t dare to hope that this impact would persist. Experts he surveyed predicted that the effects would steeply diminish over the years, as they do in many interventions.

So it was a great surprise when, 10 years later, he tracked down the original men from the study and reevaluated them. Amazingly, crime and violence were still down by about 50 percent in the therapy-plus-cash group.

Blattman estimates that there were 338 fewer crimes per participant over 10 years. Given that it had cost just $530 per participant to implement the program, that works out to $1.50 per crime avoided.

In short, it worked extremely well. But why did the combination of CBT and some cash work?

Practice makes perfect

The most plausible hypothesis, according to Blattman, is that the $200 in cash enabled the men to pursue a few months of legitimate business activity — say, shoe shining — after the therapy ended. That meant a few extra months of getting to cement their new non-criminal identity and behavioral changes. “Basically, it gave them time to practice,” Blattman told me.

A couple of caveats: The study relied largely on self-reported data about what behaviors participants were and weren’t engaging in, which could raise concerns of experimenter demand (where participants tell experimenters what they want to hear). Also, of the 999 men initially recruited into the study, 103 had died by the time of the 10-year follow-up.

That might make you wonder whether the more violent men, who could have been more resistant to the effects of the program, were just missing from the reevaluation, artificially making it look as if violent crime had dropped more than it really had.

But there are caveats to the caveats. For one thing, the study authors didn’t rely only on self-reported data; they also observed how participants acted in incentivized games where, for example, they’re given a choice between getting $1 now or $5 next week (a good example of self-control and future-oriented thinking). “Our treatment effects are strong and persistent in these outcomes,” the study notes.

By interviewing friends and relatives of each participant who died, the authors also determined the cause of death. They identified only 26 violent deaths. And even when they modeled what would happen to their results if they plugged in “good” outcomes for missing control group members and “bad” outcomes for missing treatment group members, the positive treatment effect for therapy-plus-cash largely remained.

Upending the mainstream approach to crime

Inspired by the program in Liberia, Chicago has been implementing a similar but more intensive program called READI. Over the course of 18 months, men in the city’s most violent districts participate in therapy sessions in the morning, followed by job training in the afternoon. The rationale for the latter is that in a place with a well-developed labor market like Chicago, the best way to improve earnings is probably to get people into the market, whereas in Liberia, the labor market is much less efficient, so it made more sense to offer people cash.

“We’ll have more results this summer,” said Blattman of the READI program, which he is helping to advise. So far, “it doesn’t look like a slam dunk.”

Still, Chicago is eager to try these therapy-based approaches, having already had some success with them. The city is also home to a program called Becoming a Man (BAM), where high schoolers do CBT-inspired group sessions. A randomized controlled trial showed that criminal arrests fell by about half during the BAM program. Even though effects dissipated over time, the program looks to be very cost-effective.

But this isn’t just a story about the growing recognition that therapy can play a useful role in preventing crime. That trend is part of a broader movement to adopt an approach to crime that is more carrot, less stick.

“It’s all about a progressive, rational policy for social control. Social inclusion is the most productive means of social control,” David Brotherton, a sociologist at the City University of New York, explained to me in 2019.

Brotherton has long argued that mainstream US policy is counterproductively coercive and punitive. His research has shown that helping at-risk people reintegrate into mainstream society — including by offering them cash — is much more effective at reducing violence.

To give one striking example from Brotherton’s research: In 2007, the crime-riddled nation of Ecuador legalized the gangs that had been the source of much of the violence. The country allowed the gangs to remake themselves as cultural associations that could register with the government, which in turn allowed them to qualify for grants and benefit from social programming.

Can you guess what happened to the murder rate over the next few years?

That’s right. It plummeted.

As he wages war against Liz Cheney, his 2024 campaign promises to be his ugliest yet.

Employers are missing out by calling workers back to the office.

For the minority of Americans who’ve been fortunate enough to work from home over the past couple of years, the ride might seem like it’s coming to an end. Employers big and small are asking their employees to return to the office — just as those employees have gotten really good at working from home.

People who work remotely are reporting being more productive than they were early on in the pandemic, according to data from Stanford University professor Nicholas Bloom. Bloom, who’s been studying remote work since before it was cool, has teamed up with other academics from the University of Chicago, ITAM, and MIT since May 2020, to conduct a huge ongoing survey about employees’ work arrangements and attitudes toward remote work. In April, people who worked remotely at least some of the time reported being about 9 percent more efficient working from home than they were working from the office. That’s up from 5 percent in the summer of 2020.

Why? Bloom says we’ve gotten better at it.

“When we flipped to working from home back in March 2020, we were completely unprepared,” Bloom told Recode. “We didn’t have management systems, performance review systems, meeting structures, workflows, equipment.”

Now we’re much better set up, and productivity should continue to improve as technology makes it easier, according to Bloom.

Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, as the worst parts of the pandemic fade, our support systems outside of work — day care, friends and family, the ability to do literally anything besides staying home — have largely returned, too.

“Whatever you were doing during the pandemic and its stilted aftermath, it was not working from home,” Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel note at the start of their book Out of Office: The Big Problem and the Bigger Promise of Working from Home. “You were laboring in confinement and under duress.”

Of course, this data on productivity is self-reported, and most people report wanting to keep working from home, so take it with a grain of salt. There is, however, objective data — like more calls per minute for call center workers, engineers submitting more changes to code, and Bureau of Labor Statistics data on growing output per hours worked — that has generally shown that people are, in fact, more productive working from home. But even the idea that people feel more productive is important.

Around 40 percent of American workdays are currently done from home, according to Bloom’s data. This figure tracks with data from the office keycard company Kastle, which is seeing office buildings at 43 percent occupancy. Bloom expects it to remain at around 25 to 30 percent after the pandemic, meaning that working from home will by no means go away. So while traffic has mostly returned to pre-pandemic levels at hotels, movie theaters, and restaurants, the offices remain a holdout.

Many employers have conceded that productivity is fine at home, but they’re still worried about other immeasurables, like workers’ ability to collaborate and to be creative from home. A December report from Northeastern University found that over half of C-suite executives across industries were concerned about their workforce’s ability to be creative and innovative while working remotely. They also worry about how continued remote work will affect their company culture and loyalty. Interestingly, Slack’s Future Forum found that executives are more likely to say they want to work from the office than non-executives, but are less likely to be doing so full time. The study also found that since a third of office workers have returned to the office five days a week — the highest since the survey began in June 2020 — these workers are also reporting their worst employee experience.

But in this current tight labor market, many workers are getting their way with remote work, and bosses aren’t exactly in a position to push back. Interest in remote jobs is consistently higher than that of onsite work. About 20 percent of paid job listings on LinkedIn were remote in March, but they saw the majority of applications (52 percent), according to the company. And some 60 percent of knowledge workers said they would quit their job for a fully remote one.

Indeed, employers seem to be conceding to employees’ desire to work from home. According to the Bloom surveys, office workers say their employers are planning to let them do so on average 2.3 days per week after the pandemic. That’s up from 1.6 days in the summer of 2020.

Apple had said it would make workers come into the office three days per week, but has since postponed and modified that plan after worker pushback and after a prominent machine learning engineer resigned over the company’s lack of flexibility. Even the office stalwarts like big banks are changing their tune and increasingly offering remote work. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who has been vocal about his disdain for remote work, said in his latest shareholder letter that only half of the company’s workers would be in the office full time.

Anecdotally, we’re hearing from people who are required to go into the office a few days per week that it’s not actually happening. Tech companies, law offices, and insurance firms are telling employees to come in two or three days per week, and they’re showing up one or two. Companies could, of course, fire workers for failing to comply with office mandates, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.

It’s less clear what happens when the economy turns sour and when people don’t have as much leverage as they do now. In that case, employers might be better able to force workers back into the office — or perhaps they’ll go the other way and get rid of more office space.

As it stands, 52 percent of the 185 office companies recently surveyed by the real estate services company CBRE said they intend to decrease their office real estate in the next three years, compared with 39 percent who say they’re expanding (9 percent say they’re maintaining their existing footprint). The survey found that most companies, 73 percent, plan to follow a hybrid work plan wherein people work from home and the office, while 19 percent are office only and 8 percent are fully remote. Amid the uncertainty, coworking spaces, which can be unloaded much more quickly than traditional office space, are thriving.

For now, many office workers are doing a pretty good job of working from home.

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Gas-powered vehicles "have hundreds of moving parts and other components" that keep mechanics busy, argues CalMatters (which describes itself as a "nonpartisan and nonprofit news organization.") "By 2040, the state projects that nearly 32,000 auto mechanics jobs will be lost in California, since electric vehicles need far less maintenance and repair than conventional combustion engines." And they base that prediction on statistics from the state's own Air Resources Board (part of California's Environmental Protection Agency): Throughout the economy, an estimated 64,700 jobs will be lost because of the mandate, according to the California Air Resources Board's calculations. On the other hand, an estimated 24,900 jobs would be gained in other sectors, so the estimated net loss is 39,800 jobs, a minimal amount across the state's entire economy, by 2040. But no single workforce in the state would be hurt more than auto mechanics: California has about 60,910 auto service technicians and mechanics, and more than half of those jobs would be lost over the next two decades if the mandate goes into effect, the air board calculates.... Some industries gain jobs while others lose them as the state shifts to zero-emission vehicles. The retail trade sector, which includes gas station workers and automobile and parts dealers, would lose 38,669 jobs by 2040 or about 2% of the retail workforce. Most of the losses would be at gasoline stations. As the electric vehicle fleet grows, air board officials project gas stations could provide charging to offset the losses.... Another 20,831 jobs in state and local government would be eliminated because of the decrease in gas tax revenue. But the transition to electric cars also will create thousands of jobs. Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and other power industry companies would benefit most, with the creation of about 5,600 jobs by 2040 as car owners spend more on electricity to power their vehicles. Insurance carriers will benefit from about 1,700 new jobs, while the construction industry is expected to gain about 3,600.... Mechanics who work on internal combustion engines would still have plenty of work: The rule would not ban sales of used cars, and it wouldn't force the state's residents to stop driving the roughly 29 million gas-powered cars that are already on the road. Californians also could keep importing new or used vehicles from out of state. That means Californians will still own a lot of gas-powered cars past 2035, softening the blow for car mechanics and industries dependent on fossil fuels, said James Sallee, an economist and research associate at the Energy Institute at University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Sallee said the changes wouldn't occur fast enough to trigger a sharp economic slowdown within the auto repair industry. One 67-year-old mechanic still tells CalMatters that "The electric vehicle repair market is just about nonexistent." But another mechanic tells them "I'm not against electric vehicles. I've always loved cars and I'll work on them until I can't anymore. So we have to adjust. We have to get out of our comfort zones."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Editor's note: This piece contains graphic descriptions of the horrific Uvalde massacre.

In one of the most harrowing personal accounts of the Uvalde tragedy yet, an 11-year-old described to a CNN reporter that she had survived the mass shooting by smearing blood on herself and playing dead.

"She had a friend next to her that she was pretty sure was already dead and was laying on the ground bleeding out," explained CNN reporter Nora Neus, who had interviewed the fourth grader. "And she put her hands in her friend's blood, and then smeared it she said all over her body. She wanted to look like she was dead. She was scared that the gunmen was going to come back, through that adjoining door, back into the classroom and she wanted to be able to play dead."

I do not relay this account lightly. It is simply too gutting for words. But it is critical to hear the terror these children endured as the "good guys with guns" waited outside the classroom.

I will not assign blame for the Uvalde response in this piece, but rather leave that for another day. For now, my purpose is to make it perfectly clear that all the "good guys with guns" in the world didn't help those two teachers and their classrooms filled with defenseless children.

If the new timeline provided by Texas Department of Public Safety officials holds up (a moving target, at best), agents from Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived sometime between 12 PM and 12:10 PM.

The authorities now say that local officers first entered the school at 11:35, two minutes after the gunman, and that there were 19 officers in the hallway by 12:03 PM, but that they did not breach the door and kill the gunman until 12:50, even as they continued to hear him firing.

That means the federal tactical team that finally neutralized the gunman was on the scene for at least a half-hour while kids from within the classroom dialed 911 and begged for help.

“Please send the police now,” said one little girl, who had already called several times during the shooting. She survived the attack.

Following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, the National Rifle Association—which is currently holding its annual fundraiser several hundred miles from Uvalde in Houston—rolled out the lie that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

That did not work in Uvalde, nor did it work weeks ago in Buffalo, where an armed, off-duty security guard and former police officer was unable to stop the racist slaughter of nine Black grocery store shoppers. The guard was also killed.

Yet, so far, we have yet to hear even one Republican lawmaker admit that it's time to put to rest the failed 'good guys with guns' myth that has been perpetrated on the American people. It's the very least Republicans can do to honor the 21 innocents who were left to fend for themselves inside those two classrooms while 19 armed officers waited outside.

“It was the wrong decision. Period,” Steven C. McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), admitted during a press conference on Friday morning.

But asked if the grieving parents who lost their precious children in the tragedy were owed an apology, McCraw offered, “If I thought it would help, I'd apologize.”

Honest to god, those kids and two teachers are gone—an entire community shattered—why not apologize, even if it's too little too late?

At least some of the Texas politicians who helped perpetuate the "good guys" myth as they blocked gun safety laws and slashed restrictions decided to bail on the NRA event after being scheduled to attend.

Gov. Greg Abbott canceled but tried to have his cake and eat it too by pre-recording a video for the event. Among other Texas lawmakers who ran into sudden scheduling conflicts were Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and Sen. John Cornyn, who was reportedly taking part in bipartisan talks with Senate colleagues around potential compromise legislation on gun safety.

Naturally, Sen. Ted Cruz, who still thinks he's a presidential contender, emerged as the most loathsome of them all.

"I’m going to be there, because what Democrats and the press try to do in the wake of every mass shooting is they try to demonize law-abiding gun owners, try to demonize the NRA,” Cruz said ahead of a speech he planned to deliver Friday afternoon.

Did we mention that Donald Trump is also speaking but “firearms, firearm accessories, knives, and other items WILL NOT BE PERMITTED in the General Assembly Hall," according to Secret Service. Far too dangerous.

Look, the "good guys with guns" is patently false—exposed over and over again as a pure fallacy. But the idiots, the liars, and perverse opportunists are still selling it.

"We know from past experience that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus," Cruz told reporters Wednesday.

False. Cruz's persistent lying didn't prove out in Uvalde (which had a resource officer, though official reports have varied on whether they engaged the shooter), it didn't prove true at a Santa Fe school shooting in 2018 (where there were two resource officers), and it didn't prove true at the massacre at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that same year (when the resource officer took cover as the shooting unfolded).

The truth is, law enforcement seems very very afraid of the firepower now pulsing through America—turns out AR-15s are uniquely scary killing machines. It's not just the resource officers.

DPS Lt. Chris Olivarez explained to CNN Wednesday that local officers hesitated to do their jobs because they were being shot at.

“Don’t current best practices, don’t they call for officers to disable a shooter as quickly as possible, regardless of how many officers are actually on-site?” Wolf Blitzer asked Olivarez.

"The active shooter situation, you want to stop the killing, you want to preserve life, but also one thing that—of course, the American people need to understand—that officers are making entry into this building. They do not know where the gunman is," Olivarez responded. "They are receiving gunshots. At that point, if they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed, and that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school.

They could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed.

So sicko Cruz and the NRA are entitled to their lies, but they're still lying—they're just doing it at expense of the hundreds of murdered children who are already dead and will continue to die due to their craven lies.

Guns are now the leading cause of death among kids in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2020, firearm-related deaths surpassed motor vehicle accidents as the No. 1 killer of kids and teens, though statistics for 2021 and 2022 aren't available yet.

When President Barack Obama delivered a somber speech in Newtown following the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, he reflected as a parent on the responsibility we all share in raising the country's children.

It comes as a shock at a certain point where you realize, no matter how much you love these kids, you can’t do it by yourself.  That this job of keeping our children safe, and teaching them well, is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community, and the help of a nation.  And in that way, we come to realize that we bear a responsibility for every child because we’re counting on everybody else to help look after ours; that we’re all parents; that they’re all our children.

This is our first task—caring for our children.  It’s our first job.  If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right.  That’s how, as a society, we will be judged.

We are desperately failing America's children. And Ted Cruz may not care about the carnage. The NRA may not care about the carnage. The Republican Party clearly doesn't care about the carnage. But for god's sake, no one who pushes the "good guy with a gun" myth should be taken as making a good-faith effort to protect America's kids.

They used the deaths of 20 children and six adults to elevate that lie after Sandy Hook and, 10 years later, they are using it again following what was obviously a botched law enforcement response by every possible measure.

Not this time. Guns didn't save those precious kids, but they sure as hell killed them.

The 11-year old girl, trapped in that classroom, concluded that the cavalry waiting outside the door with guns wasn't going to save her, but rather her best chance was unimaginable: she would have to play dead. And she was right.

CNN reporter Nora Neus relayed the graphic story here:

At Friday’s NRA event:

Rep. Kurt Schrader, a seven-term centrist Democrat from Oregon, has lost his primary to a progressive challenger, handing a massive win to the party’s left flank.

Jamie McLeod-Skinner, an attorney and business owner endorsed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), benefited from the decennial redistricting process, which left Schrader running in a district that was largely new territory to him. And progressives turned their energy on the incumbent, in part, because they blamed Schrader and other Democratic moderates blocked the passage of two big party priorities on social spending and drug pricing.

The Associated Press called the race Friday morning, roughly a week and a half after the May 17 primary day, after a protracted vote count in one of the district's largest counties.

Schrader is the third incumbent to fall in the 2022 cycle and the first Democrat, following Reps. David McKinley (R-W.Va.) and Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.). (Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux of Georgia, another moderate Democrat, was also defeated in a member-vs.-member primary held a week after Schrader's race.)

He took the threat seriously, spending $3.5 million in the primary and landing an endorsement from President Joe Biden. He also got outside support from a pair of groups aligned with moderate Democrats: Center Forward and a new super PAC called Mainstream Democrats.

But McLeod-Skinner attacked Schrader for getting support from corporate interests, and she herself earned support from several Democratic county organizations in the district, which includes the Portland suburbs. McLeod-Skinner previously ran against former Republican Rep. Greg Walden in 2018 in a deep red Oregon district, losing but holding strong in parts of that seat that were redrawn into Schrader’s district.

McLeod-Skinner will face Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the former mayor of Happy Valley, Ore., in the general election.

Republicans are already targeting the new district, which Biden would have carried by 9 points in 2020. And they relish the prospect of running against a candidate less moderate than Schrader.

First elected in 2008, Schrader is one of the most centrist members of the House Democratic caucus. And Schrader has relished being a thorn in leadership’s side, particularly this term as Democrats confronted ultra-thin margins in the House.

The Blue Dog Democrat, for instance, infuriated many in his party when he worked with other moderates to derail the party’s signature drug pricing reform bill last fall.

He was also among the nine Democratic moderates who mutinied over party leaders’ plans to link two of Biden’s biggest priorities together. Ultimately, only the White House’s bipartisan infrastructure plan passed.

Schrader is known as an outspoken member, who was forced to apologize when he compared the second impeachment of former President Donald Trump to a “lynching.”

Progressives were also eyeing an upset in South Texas, where attorney Jessica Cisneros trails Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), the last antiabortion House Democrat, by fewer than 200 votes in Tuesday's primary runoff. The Associated Press has not declared a winner in the race.

Cisneros also notched an endorsement from Warren and other big names on the left like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and the Justice Democrats.

“It’s just absolutely horrific,” Sen. Joe Manchin told reporters Tuesday, responding to the massacre at  Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. “You all know where I stand—I’ll do anything I can.” Except, of course, vote to end the filibuster on legislation to save lives. Because, he said in the same interviews, “The filibuster is the only thing that prevents us from total insanity.”

Like law enforcement standing by for an entire hour while little children were calling 911 begging for help? That kind of total insanity?

Also, this: 

It feels “different” this time, he says, attempting to pretend he has any human feelings by invoking his grandchildren. It’s different this time. Except it was also different for Manchin after Sandy Hook.

“I can do something,” an emotional Manchin told parents who lost children in the attack, CNN reported back in 2013. He told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC that Sandy Hook “has changed me.” He told Joe Scarborough on MSNBC that “seeing the massacre of so many innocent children has changed everything,” he said. “Everything has to be on the table.”

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It’s been quite the week for law enforcement proving themselves useless, though that’s always been the case—just usually not in such high-profile circumstances. Direct your rage toward yet another shooting that preceded the most recent one: the attack at a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York on May 14. According to the Buffalo News, officials are looking into whether a retired federal agent may have known about the gunman’s plans in advance, as the agent was one of six people who communicated with the suspect regularly. The agent, believed to be from Texas, was invited by the suspect into a chatroom in which the 18-year-old shared his plans around half an hour before he opened fire, killing 10 people and injuring three others.

Officials aren’t sure if the agent accepted the invitation, but they said they’ll be conducting interviews with the six people in regular communication with the suspect, who frequently posted in a white supremacist chat with other white supremacists. “These were like-minded people who used this chat group to talk about their shared interests in racial hatred, replacement theory, and hatred of anyone who is Jewish, a person of color, or not of European ancestry,” an official told the Buffalo News. “What is especially upsetting is that these six people received advanced notice of the Buffalo shooting, about 30 minutes before it happened.”

Ultimately, 15 people accepted the suspect’s invitation into a Discord chat room in which he laid out his plans and sent a link to his live stream of the attack—none of whom apparently notified law enforcement. In addition to seeking information from those who knew about the shooting ahead of time, officials are looking to identify someone known as “Sandman” who apparently offered advice to the gunman on his choice of weapons ahead of the attack. The suspect has been charged with first-degree murder and was indicted by a grand jury.

The immediate reports during and in the hours following a mass shooting are always messy, always confused and contradictory. It makes reporting these stories that much harder, trying to suss out what’s rumor, what’s an eyewitness account, whether that account is reliable, and who to trust. In Uvalde, the site of an elementary school massacre that’s taken the lives of 19 children and it’s becoming increasingly clear that “who to trust” in telling the story is not Texas law enforcement or Texas political officials.

The New York Times is reporting that agents from Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the team that eventually killed the shooter) had arrived at the site sometime between 12:00 and 12:10 PM, about 20 minutes after local police. Two official briefed on the events told the NYT that local police “would not allow them to go after the gunman who had opened fire on students inside the school.”

“The officials said that members of the Uvalde Police Department kept the federal agents from going in sooner,” apparently instead focused on securing a perimeter and, inexplicably, detaining parents who were trying to save their children. What is becoming increasingly clear was that Texas law enforcement was a total clusterfuck, and as a result, more children needlessly died.

In a CNN interview Thursday evening, DPS Lt. Chris Olivarez told Wolf Blitzer that those local responding officers were cautious about entering the school to take out the shooter because “they could’ve been shot.” The situation demanded caution, he said, because “ if they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed, and that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school.”

This all further upends the timeline of events provided by police and Texas officials immediately following the shooting and through the following days has been shifting dramatically, even on-the-fly in press conferences. The Washington Post has tracked the changes we’ve seen in the official story so far, detailing the “varied timelines and explanations of the massacre and law enforcement’s response,” as well as the “sometimes inconsistent or contradictory announcements about key details, such as how the shooter entered the school or how long he was inside.”

That includes changing their story entirely on whether anyone tried to stop the killer from entering the school. Early in the day Wednesday, the story was that a school resource officer exchanged gunfire with the killer, and was shot and wounded. Later that same day, the story changed to a school officer “engaging” the shooter, but with no exchange of gunfire. As of Thursday, Victor Escalon Jr., a regional director with the Texas Department of Public Safety, significantly altered that story. “It was reported that a school district police officer confronted the suspect that was making entry,” Escalon said of the information provided by his agency the day before. “Not accurate. He walked in unobstructed.”

Sit with that a moment. “He walked in unobstructed.” So much for good guys with guns. Does a lot of good if they’re AWOL.

That was after, as the Post clarifies, we now know he was able to hang around outside the school for 12 minutes, shooting at people and at the school. That’s 12 minutes after he crashed his vehicle, not the story we heard on Wednesday from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott that ”he ran into the school” right after the accident. In that 12 minutes, law enforcement received a phone call from the shooter's grandmother saying he had just shot her in the face and took off. They have a wrecked vehicle and a young man wandering around a school with an AR-15 shooting at things for 12 minutes before going through what appeared to be an unlocked school door, “unobstructed.”

What happened inside that school, specifically what happened inside that fourth grade classroom over the next HOUR is the most horrifying, tragic, infuriating part. For an hour, officials are now admitting—an hour!—the shooter was in that classroom. Parents were rushing to the school, hearing the shots, hearing their children be shot.

One official said Wednesday that in that time officers had “continued to keep him pinned down in that location” while they waited for reinforcements. Then another official admitted that he wasn’t actually pinned down so much, but had put law enforcement “at a disadvantage” when he “was able to make entry into a classroom, barricade himself inside that classroom.” We’ve learned since that it wasn’t so much a barricade as a locked door that school staff had the key to. On Thursday, an official admitted that “the gunman was inside for about an hour before law enforcement officials confronted him.” That’s an hour on top of the 12 minutes before he entered the school in which law enforcement didn’t engage him.

That hour killed children.

One child in that classroom, 11-year-old Miah Cerrillo, likely saved herself when she smeared herself with the blood of her friend who had just been killed, and played dead. She had bullet fragments in her back, but has survived physically, her aunt Blanca Rivera told NBC News.

Another, a boy, told reporters that the shooter came into the classroom and said, “It’s time to die.” He, his best friend, and three other children hid beneath a table that was covered with a tablecloth, concealed from the gunman. They listened to their classmates and their teachers die. “They were nice teachers,” the boy said. “They went in front of my classmates to help. To save them.”

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Jimmy Kimmel has used his late-night platform to call out the hypocrisies and grotesqueness of the right-wing media machine. He has openly challenged the fascist lies of people like Marjorie Taylor Greene. He has attempted to speak to the MAGA crowd and tried to use humor in pointing out the … inconsistencies between Trump’s promises and his actions.

On Wednesday night, Kimmel opened his show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, by speaking without jokes to the audience and addressing GOP leadership and their unwillingness to move out of the way and allow “common sense” gun laws to pass. In the bloody wake of the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered, Kimmel’s powerful monologue to open the show did not go out over Texas’ local ABC affiliate, WFAA. According to them, there were “technical issues,” that “prevented the entirety of Kimmel’s monologue from airing in full.” They have now posted a link to Kimmel’s YouTube channel.

Kimmel went to his Twitter account to point out that he’s been contacted about the strange coincidence that WFAA, which serves enormous markets like Dallas, seemed to have “cut away” from Kimmel’s opening monologue, writing that he wasn’t sure if this happened “intentionally or inadvertently, but [he] will find out.”

Kimmel held back tears as he talked about how we are once again mourning as a nation for “the little boys and girls whose lives have been ended and whose families have been destroyed, while our leaders on the right, the Americans at Congress and at Fox News and these other outlets, warn us not to politicize this.” Kimmel went on to juxtapose how these very same Republicans in the very same breath then criticized President Biden for “even speaking about doing something to stop it.”

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Kimmel rightly points out that the only reason they “don't want to speak about it” is “because they know what they've done and they know what they haven't done, and they know that it's indefensible. So they'd rather sweep this under the rug.” He goes on to remind his audience that the overwhelming majority of Americans, nearly 90% of them regardless of their political affiliations, want universal background checks and other “common sense” gun safety laws. This, Kimmel  reminds the audience, is “the very least we can do.”

He references the same bipartisan bill Golden State Warrior’s head coach Steve Kerr railed about Tuesday night, that has been sitting on a shelf in the Senate for over a year because “our cowardly leaders just aren't listening to us they're listening to the NRA they're listening to those people who write them checks who keep them in power.”

Kimmel then detailed how gun laws work and we have proof around the world of elected officials taking action after serious gun violence visited their citizens. He attempts to speak to Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. Greg Abbott directly, appealing to their humanity (yes, he also recognizes that many of the people viewing are not interested in hearing this kind of appeal), but his point is clear: “It's okay to admit you made a mistake. In fact, it's not just okay—it's necessary to admit you made a mistake when your mistake is killing the children in your state. It takes a big person to do something like that. It takes a brave person to do something like that, and do I think these men are brave people? No, I don't. But, man, I would love it if they surprised me.”

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Kimmel reiterates, as others have, that the “moments of silence” are insufficient right now. “This is time to be loud and stay loud,” he says before emotions overtake him again, wondering aloud how this assault on our children, all of our children, ends with no meaningful action on the part of our “leaders.” Kimmel calls the GOP bluff of “mental health” being the number one factor here, and says we agree that “both” mental health issues in our country and gun issues in our country need mitigating. Let’s work on something, anything, to address both of those things and see if we can make a positive change in the public health and safety of all our children.

He finished by saying we must hold our elected officials accountable. It’s our children’s lives that are literally at stake. “So if you care about this, and we all do, it doesn't matter what party we vote for—we all care about this. We need to make sure that we do everything we can to make sure that, unless they do something drastic ... let's make sure that not one of any of these politicians ever holds office again.”

His show then cut to a reel of Texas politicians, like Abbott and Cruz, making moves to deregulate gun safety measures, juxtaposed with the real-world mass murders that come in their wake.

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Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked legislation intended to combat domestic terrorism. And they’re all over the place on whether homegrown extremism even needs more federal attention.

In the wake of a recent racist shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer scheduled a vote on House-passed legislation that would set up offices at the Justice Department, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to focus on domestic terrorism. The procedural vote on the measure failed to reach the required 60 votes on Thursday, as the GOP widely views the legislation as unnecessary and an attempt by Democrats to politicize the killing of 10 people, mostly Black.

But when asked how they should address domestic extremism, the answer depends on the Republican senator. Some argue, as they do on abortion, that deterring future attacks like Buffalo — and the 2015 massacre of Black churchgoers in South Carolina, as well as other racist shootings — should be entirely left to the states.

“The problem we have is that we have a bunch of people who define anyone they disagree with as terrorists, as extremists,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “We’ve reached a point in America now where the term ‘extremist’ is applied too liberally to people, that there’s deep concern about how these entities will be used. … That’s the concern that people have.”

As Rubio laid out, Republicans have adopted a slippery-slope argument in response to the domestic terrorism bill, contending it could be misused based on ideology to go after political opponents of the party in power. But Democrats are homing in on “replacement theory” — a racist far-right rallying cry cited by the Buffalo gunman — and sought to use Thursday’s debate as an opening to tackle gun violence after this week’s Texas school massacre, a clear attempt to squeeze the GOP for its anticipated filibuster.

The domestic terrorism measure took on greater heft this week after a gunman killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. While there’s no evidence that the Texas shooting was motivated by racism, Democrats saw Thursday's vote as part of a broader conversation about gun violence — and Republicans largely viewed it as a political maneuver that won’t spur bipartisan breakthroughs.

“I just think if you look at the bill, the president’s not asking for it. He says he’s got the authority. Same thing from the Justice Department,” Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said. “I think it’s a lot of stuff they already have authority to do. I think this is … more of a show vote.”

Thune added that, while Republicans and Democrats are having early conversations about a response to the Texas massacre, “there are a lot of people grieving.”

Frustrated by the lack of federal action in response to various hate crimes in recent years, Democrats noted that all House Republicans supported a nearly identical domestic terrorism bill less than two years ago, when it passed by voice vote.

“This is a party that is falling apart at the seams, if their path forward is to make it easier for white supremacists to get away with crimes in this country,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said of Republicans. “This is a super anodyne, inoffensive, apolitical piece of legislation that just seeks to be more coordinated in taking down violent white supremacists.”

“I mean, if we can’t find consensus on fighting white supremacists, what can we find consensus on?” he added.

Schumer had suggested Wednesday he would allow votes on amendments if the GOP agrees to advance the domestic terrorism legislation, floating it as the vehicle for a potential bipartisan compromise on guns.

But there's more happening on gun safety in the aftermath of Tuesday’s shooting in Texas. Murphy has vowed to try to find 10 Republicans who could support a gun-control bill, saying on Wednesday that he would work for the next week or so to see if he could find common ground with enough GOP senators to avoid a filibuster.

It’s a tough path ahead. When the Senate considered bipartisan background checks legislation in 2013 from Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), only four Republicans — including Toomey — supported the bill. And of those four, Toomey and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) are the only ones still in office.

GOP Sen. Rick Scott, who previously served as Florida’s governor, signed gun-control legislation in the days following the 2018 massacre at a high school in his state. But on Wednesday, Scott said the focus should be on mental health and information-sharing at the federal level rather than domestic terrorism, and suggested he would support “red flag” laws like those on the books in Florida. (They allow law enforcement officials to temporarily confiscate guns from people who could be threats to others or themselves, if deemed so by a federal court or medical professionals, depending on the state.)

“We need to stop and say what’s the real cause of the problem and start addressing that. We have a mental health crisis in this country,” Scott said. “The first thing everyone wants to do is say, ‘oh, we need to take away everybody’s guns.’ … Every case is different, but in almost every case, there’s red flags. I mean, what are we doing with it?”

Scott met with Murphy on Wednesday night to discuss the actions he took in Florida and how they might be modeled at the federal level, but there’s still a long way to go before senators can reach a compromise.

Meanwhile, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said he’d support federal legislation boosting sentencing for shootings like the Texas massacre, but was cool to both a federal “red flag” law and the legislation coming up on Thursday.

“I think that it’s dangerous. I don’t think any administration should have that power and I think, quite frankly, it is a purely political stunt by the Democrats — and it’s a dangerous one,” Hawley said, referring to the domestic terrorism bill.

In addition to creating new offices, the domestic terrorism bill would require biannual reports to Congress assessing threat levels and analyzing incidents or attempted incidents.

When asked whether Republicans would support the legislation, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the lead sponsor of the bill, replied “I don’t know” but added, “They were all for it the last time we called it.”

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.

The timeline of events in the Robb Elementary School mass shooting was horrific from the beginning. At 11 AM on Tuesday morning, the shooter logged on to Facebook, where he posted a now-removed message announcing that he was going to kill his grandmother. He followed this up a short while later with a second post saying: “I shot my grandmother.” At around 11:15, he posted again, saying: “I am going to shoot an elementary school.”

At 11:30, someone called the police to report that a man had crashed a gray Ford pickup into a wall near Robb Elementary School. Within the next two minutes, a school safety officer “engaged” with the shooter, who was carrying a rifle and wearing a “tactical vest” filled with ammunition. Police arrived on the scene, and two officers exchanged fire with the shooter. Those two officers were injured in this exchange. At some point during these confrontations, the shooter entered the school, proceeded down multiple hallways, and entered a classroom. He shut the door, locked it, and began killing children and teachers. A general lockdown of the school was announced at 11:43 AM. It’s not until 1:06 PM that police announced an “all clear” and said that the suspect “is in custody.”

This is the timeline of events as presented in a press event on Wednesday by the Texas Department of Public Safety, an event at which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott praised the Uvalde police and Border Patrol agents involved. 

But a day later, everything on that timeline seems to be in question. “We're trying to establish every single timeline as far as how long the shooter was inside the classroom, how long did the shooting take place, but as of right now, we have not been able to establish that," a Department of Safety spokesman said Thursday morning.

The Uvalde Police Department serves a low-income community of just 13,000 people. However, that department advertises itself as having a SWAT Team. It also sent out promotional information in the past year showing its officers supposedly being trained to respond to an active shooter situation.

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The training they received would be something very close to that described in this report at Policeforum.org titled “The Police Response to Active Shooter Incidents.” It’s training that became standard in the wake of an ineffective response at Columbine High School, where waiting for a large team to assemble and get organized gave the shooters time to carry out more murders unobstructed.

Here is what that presentation says about waiting around for some specialized team to intervene in an active shooter situation:

In the Columbine incident, police from various Denver-area agencies responded but did not enter the school to stop the shooters for more than 30 minutes. That reflected their training, which was based on the concepts of containing the situation and waiting for SWAT team members to arrive, mobilize, and respond. This type of training reflected the thinking at the time. ... Columbine brought a realization by law enforcement leaders that a much faster response was needed for active-shooter incidents.

In response to an active shooter situation, many police departments encourage the first officer on the scene—even if they’re alone, even if they are a School Resource Officer with limited experience—to immediately move on the shooter. That’s especially true in cases where “an officer arrives at the scene and can hear shooting, screams, or other indications that the perpetrator is actively shooting or threatening victims.” 

Some police departments suggest that officers wait until a minimum number of officers, usually two to four, have arrived to form a “contact team.” However, even these departments recommend moving on the shooter sooner “if it is apparent that a full contact team cannot be assembled quickly.” 

“Quickly” is the key word. All training around an active shooter situation emphasizes that preventing a massacre requires fast action, even if that action puts officers at risk. It’s safe to say that no police department is trained to sit on its hands and wait for the Border Patrol to put together a team, then drive 75 miles to react an hour after the incident began.

According to the police timeline, an announcement of the active shooter situation went out at 12:17 PM, informing the community that “There is an active shooter at Robb Elementary. Law enforcement is on site.” It was presumably this announcement, or calls made by teachers after the 11:43 AM lockdown, that brought parents to the school, desperate to get their kids out. However, in videos from the scene, bursts of gunfire can still be heard from inside the school. This certainly seems to indicate that the shooter was still killing children or teachers in the classroom, well after that door was shut.

The initial report that the classroom door had been “barricaded” and that Border Patrol officers “broke it down” with “difficulty” seems to have been replaced with the Border Patrol simply asking for a key and unlocking the door. The initial report that the shooter was killed by the Border Patrol team has also come into question. Even the initial report that two officers were “shot” before the shooter entered the classroom seems to be in question.

At this point, it’s hard to tell just what happened and who—other than the shooter—is at fault for the deaths at Robb Elementary School. But there seem to be discrepancies in the timing and sequence of events as reported by the police, and definite issues with how the police handled the situation once they were aware of the shooter.

At best, the shooter was confronted by three armed officers, and still made his way into a classroom that he was able to secure with the simple act of turning the lock. He was then given somewhere over 40 minutes to execute children and teachers while police milled about outside. Some of the parents who arrived, begging to get into classrooms, likely heard the shots that killed their child.

Advocates suggesting that the solution to school shootings is having more guns on site should note that the shooter had no problem confronting armed officers, including officers specifically trained to deal with an active shooter event. 

Those suggesting that the solution to this problem is to have “just one door” to a school might want to consider that locking just one door is exactly what the shooter did before picking off children at his leisure. Also, that idea is ridiculous.

Putting together an accurate timeline may take days. An accurate report of what happened may never come.

Meanwhile, the literal heartbreak is still ongoing.

US public policy is a disaster on guns — and so much more.

In ways big and small — in schools, in homes, in every facet of life — the United States fails to protect and support its children.

School shootings, like the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, that has left 19 students and at least two adults dead this week, are one of the most visceral examples of that failure. A second generation is now growing up in a world where school shootings are part of life. Columbine didn’t lead to meaningful policy change; neither did Sandy Hook; neither did Parkland; and the terrible truth is that Uvalde may not either.

The number of children killed by guns every day in the United States, in incidents that never make national news, is much higher than the death toll of victims in school shootings. The firearm homicide rate for US children ages 0-14 is astronomical compared to other wealthy nations, according to data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, with hundreds of budding American lives lost every year. Suicides by gun and accidental firearm deaths among kids are also far higher in the United States than its economic peers. Guns now kill more kids than car accidents, in part because, through design changes and new regulations, cars have gotten safer while guns have only become more accessible and lethal.

Dylan Scott/Vox

But this country’s inability to support and protect its own kids extends far beyond gun deaths, which can also be seen as part of a broader failure to prioritize the well-being of children and families.

“From the very beginning of life, we expect families to take care of their own children,” Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at Indiana University who studies child and family policy, said. “The government is essentially telling families: You’re on your own. We don’t care.”

Many of these failures are long term. But the past few months have made them inescapable. Less than six months ago, Congress allowed the expanded child tax credit — one of the most successful policy experiments in reducing child poverty in US history — to expire. Children are still waiting for a Covid-19 vaccine, as frustration with the regulatory agencies overseeing that process grows. And America is currently importing baby formula from Europe because its own market has allowed an enormous shortage to develop in the last year, putting the health of infants and children at risk.

Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images

By the end of the summer, federal funding that has provided free school lunches to almost every American student for the past two years will run out without being renewed. Emergency Medicaid provisions that were instituted during the pandemic could expire too, leading to as many as 6.7 million children losing health coverage.

The consequences of the collective policy shortcomings are everywhere. One is the terrible annual toll of US children and young adults killed by guns: 10,186 in 2020. Another is that one in five children in the US live in poverty, comparable to Chile and Romania, and double (or more) the rate of child poverty of Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany. Infant mortality is higher than in the rest of the wealthy world.

The OECD published an analysis in November 2017, evaluating how the US compared to other rich countries on various metrics of child well-being. America ranked in the top third for just three of the 20 categories they covered. It was in the bottom third for 10 of them.

Academics have an ironic term for this phenomenon: “American exceptionalism.”

“We stand alone and we have for decades in terms of our disinvestment in children,” Jennifer Glass, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “You muck it up for the first 20 years of that kid’s life, you can’t come back and remedy it.”

The reasons for this uniquely American failure are multifold. The solutions will not be easily attained. But until we resolve to fix it, our future will be that much dimmer.

American public policy doesn’t value children

Rhetoric is cheap. If you want to know where a society’s priorities truly lie, look at how it spends its money.

About 9 percent of the federal budget is being spent on children, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The elderly, on the other hand, are afforded more than one-third of federal spending.

“It’s very little,” Isabel Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution who focuses on child and family programs, said of federal spending on children. “We haven’t been doing enough for our kids.”

Spending for elderly programs like Medicare and Social Security is automatic; Congress never has to pass a new bill to make sure those benefits reach Americans over 65. But most of the spending for children is discretionary; Congress must vote to appropriate those dollars every year and, if there is a lapse in funding, there will be a corresponding lapse in benefits.

Taken together, the federal welfare programs for children and families — everything from food stamps to cash assistance to health coverage — are a pittance compared to what our economic peers spend. Australia spends about 2.1 percent of its GDP on public policies and programs that support families. Norway spends 3.2 percent, as does the United Kingdom. The US spends 0.6 percent, less than Costa Rica and Mexico.

Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

Child welfare programs are also means-tested, accessible only for those who complete a burdensome application process, which creates a uniquely American stigma around government assistance, as Jack Meserve wrote in an essay for Democracy last year. Calarco said she has interviewed families who declined to apply for free or reduced-price school lunches because they didn’t want their children looked down on. (High-poverty schools can offer free lunch to all students without needing to prove eligibility, but that doesn’t help all poor kids and families.)

Schools — even schools whose names don’t become cultural bywords for the mass death of children — are another forum for America’s failures.

In the aggregate, the US spends a comparative amount of money on children’s education to other wealthy nations — but that money is not spent equitably. School funding is a patchwork of federal, state, and local dollars; much of the local money is dependent on local property values (read: taxes). And school funding differs dramatically from state to state and district to district; some school districts spend as little as $6,000 every year for each student and some spend close to $30,000; in some states, low-income districts get less money than high-income ones. The actual education outcomes that American students attain for that spending are middling.

The way our public policies affect parents also affects their children. The United States is also the only wealthy nation without guaranteed paid family leave or paid sick leave, both of which limit a parent’s ability to bond with and take care of their child.

Two other American crises, the opioid crisis and mass incarceration, provide another example: A recent study from researchers at the University of Maryland and UCLA found that higher local rates of opioid overdose deaths corresponded to a lower rate of children living with two married parents, a family structure associated with better life outcomes. Another paper from sociologists at Washington University in St. Louis and Duke University found that families with a family member imprisoned were worse off, even accounting for preexisting disadvantages: they are more likely to face financial hardship, and their children are more likely to have mental health and behavioral problems and to do worse in school than their peers.

America is capable, in a moment of crisis, of providing better support for children and families. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress temporarily approved an expanded child tax credit that functioned as a monthly stipend for many families and funded universal school lunches. Emergency Medicaid provisions also ensured health coverage for millions of children and their family members.

Andrea Morales/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Child poverty and hunger fell, even amid the most catastrophic public health emergency of our lives. It was a wildly successful policy experiment. And yet soon, those programs will be allowed to lapse.

“It’s telling that that’s what we got rid of,” Calarco said. “We got rid of the programs we made universal during the pandemic.”

Why the US is so negligent in its treatment of its own kids

America’s policy negligence toward its children is, in some ways, a symptom of its general conservative attitude about government assistance. We have a stingy safety net for the childless poor too.

“To my mind, the lack of US social policy pertaining to the safety and well-being of families and children boils down to our distrust of government and our belief that family life is a private and personal matter,” said Daniel Carlson, a sociologist at the University of Utah. “We see children not as the public good that they are but as an individual choice, and thus a personal responsibility.”

That ideology places an enormous burden on parents — and mothers in particular — to carry the weight of raising their children. In the US, about 70 percent of mothers are the primary support for their children in their first year, Glass said. That dependence lasts for five years on average, about a third of their childhood.

“What we’ve seen over time: more and more and more of this burden falling onto mothers,” Glass said. “We expect that mothers will do all of this labor of creating and reproducing the next generation for free because they always have.”

But Australia is also a country with an individualistic spirit and a self-mythology about pioneers conquering the frontier, and that country still spends four times as much money on public programs for children and families, as a share of its GDP, as America does. Germany used to be much more conservative in its public support for families, Carlson said, until its declining birth rate in the 1990s and early 2000s led the country to start remaking its social safety net for children.

Some experts see more nefarious forces at work. For one, a smaller safety net benefits the rich and corporations, who would be called upon to pay higher taxes if the US decided that it would provide more financial support for children and families.

Elise Amendola/AP

Then there is old-fashioned American racism, which almost every expert I spoke cited as an influence. There is a perception, even among white working-class families who also rely on government benefits, that these social programs primarily benefit Black and brown families. Sawhill said she had participated in focus groups in which that sentiment became apparent.

Though they might not articulate it in exactly this way, she said, she got the impression that many white people, even poorer ones, thought that “we wouldn’t have so much poverty and inequality if we weren’t such a heterogenous country.”

There is something self-destructive about America’s negligence of its own children. Supporting children — feeding them, educating them, protecting them from violence — is self-evidently good. But it is also necessary to securing a next generation of American adults, who will perpetuate our economy, our culture, our society.

And yet, the United States seems to be self-sabotaging through its failure to do so. The children who grow up hungry and in poverty, whose schools fail to fully educate them, will on average live shorter lives with dimmer economic prospects.

“Generation after generation, you start to see the United States slipping,” Glass said. “These are the kinds of things that over time are going to hurt a nation.”

One explanation won’t suffice. But what is clear is that the structural forces that stand in the way of so many policy reforms have also made America a worse place for our children.

That fact is unavoidable at times like this, when the US’s failure to meaningfully constrain gun ownership and the number of guns in circulation has contributed to the deaths of 19 innocent children in Uvalde, Texas. But it was true on Monday, the day before the shooting, and it will continue to be true until the nation’s leaders decide to change it.