Un video en Facebook asegura que los residentes en Estados Unidos pueden conseguir en cuestión de minutos una licencia para portar armas ocultas.
“La administración acaba de aprobar este vacío legal, 100% legal, que permite a todos los residentes estadounidenses en buena posición obtener un permiso de portación oculta (de armas) válido en 2023”, dice la publicación del 17 de noviembre.
Esta añade que es “la última oportunidad para obtener el permiso de forma electrónica”.
La publicación fue marcada como parte del esfuerzo de Meta para combatir las noticias falsas y la desinformación en su plataforma. (Lea más sobre nuestra colaboración con Meta, propietaria de Facebook e Instagram).
La supuesta noticia a la que lleva el enlace de la publicación contiene una explicación más detallada. “El Congreso ha aprobado una nueva forma, 100% legal, de obtener su permiso de portación oculta”, dice la noticia. Añade que “todo el proceso se puede completar en línea en menos de 25 minutos desde la comodidad de su propia casa”.
La Segunda Enmienda de la Constitución de Estados Unidos protege el derecho a portar armas de fuego, pero no hay un permiso de portación de arma oculta que funcione para todo el país emitido por el gobierno federal.
Andrew R. Morral, director de la Colaboración Nacional para la Investigación de la Violencia Armada en RAND Corp., dijo a PolitiFact que los permisos de porte oculto son regulados por cada estado.
“No ha habido ninguna acción de la ‘administración’ ni del ‘Congreso’ que cambie eso, y no hay ningún sistema federal para obtener un permiso de portación oculta -electrónico o de otro tipo-, con pequeñas excepciones” dijo Morral. Una de las excepciones es para los agentes de la ley o retirados que tienen derecho a portar armas ocultas en todos los estados por la Ley de Seguridad de las Fuerzas de Seguridad de 2004.
En los 50 estados y Washington, D.C. hay leyes propias que regulan y permiten la portación de armas ocultas.
En un fallo de 2022 de la Corte Suprema de Estados Unidos declaró que era inconstitucional que los estados priven a las personas de un permiso de portar armas ocultas por motivos discrecionales.
Morral dijo que “en cierto sentido, el gobierno federal ha declarado que todo aquel que reúna los requisitos para obtener un permiso de portar armas ocultas debe recibir uno del estado”. Pero añadió que “los criterios de calificación varían según el estado”.
En 24 estados y Washington D.C., los gobiernos requieren que sus residentes obtengan un permiso para poder portar armas ocultas legalmente. Por lo general, estos requisitos incluyen un chequeo de antecedentes penales y recibir formación sobre armas de fuego.
En la página web de Giffords Law Center, una organización para la prevención de la violencia armada, también hay una lista detallada de los estados que requieren permisos para portar armas ocultas y los que no, así como la ley que los regula.
Una portavoz de la Agencia de Alcohol, Tabaco y Armas de Fuego y Explosivos (ATF, por sus siglas en inglés) dijo a PolitiFact que no emite permisos de portación oculta y que estos pueden ser expedidos por un gobierno estatal o local.
En julio de 2023, entró en vigor una nueva ley que el gobernador de Florida Ron DeSantis firmó el 3 de abril permitiendo la portación de armas ocultas sin permiso, pero esto solo aplica a su estado.
Nuestro veredicto
Una publicación en Facebook dice, “La administración acaba de aprobar este vacío legal, 100% legal, que permite a todos los residentes estadounidenses en buena posición obtener un permiso de portación oculta (de armas) válido en 2023”.
El gobierno de Estados Unidos no ha aprobado nada nuevo al respecto. Hay 24 estados que requieren permisos para portar un arma oculta.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) paints a grim picture of the collective mental health of the United States. More Americans are choosing suicide as the last solution to what ails them than ever before.
The overall results are sad enough, but the data is illuminating and surprising when broken down by demographics. As usual, men are more likely than women to end their lives; however, the age of those who are more likely to kill themselves is trending more toward the older generations versus America’s youth.
What could be causing this uptick in Americans in general and specifically senior citizens? According to experts, it’s guns. But is that the case?
By the numbers
Preliminary data from the CDC recently disclosed that more people in the United States died from suicide last year than any other year on record dating back to 1941. In total, 49,449 individuals chose suicide or, to put it into a number more manageable to digest, 14 out of every 100,000 people in the United States killed themselves last year.
Men were four times more likely to commit suicide than women, although twice as many women killed themselves in 2022 than the year prior. The sharp increase in female suicide was predominantly among white women aged 25 to 34.
Among men, the increase in suicides was within the white elderly group. The only bright side to this report is a surprising decrease in suicide rates among Americans aged 25 and younger.
It wasn’t that long ago that mental health and suicide rates were clipping upwards for the youngest of the population, so the decrease is a welcome surprise. Unfortunately, the highest rate of suicide overall was from the 75 and older population, at a staggering 21 deaths from suicide for every 100,000 Americans.
The experts were quick to warn that unless the United States starts restricting access to firearms, these numbers will continue to rise.
“Opportunity” is a choice word.
We reviewed the first two states with long-standing “red flag” laws and discovered that without mental health or substance abuse intervention, ERPO’s have no bearing on suicide rates.
The New York Times framed the accepted narrative behind suicide rates in the below headline:
“U.S. Rate of Suicide by Firearm Reaches Record Level”
This headline ignores the obvious statistical fact that anytime suicides increase, rates of suicide by any manner will inevitably increase to include by firearms.
The article quotes the executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, Michael Anestis, who drops this nugget of knowledge:
“When there are more firearms, there are more firearm suicides.”
Let’s see how that logic works in other situations:
When there are more cars, there are more car-related deaths.
When there are more drugs, there are more drug-related deaths.
When there is more war, there are more war-related deaths.
Policy advisor Ari Davis for the CDC jumped on the gun blame game wagon, stating:
“Gun suicides continue to take the lives of elderly white men at high rates. If we can put time and space between this lethal method and someone in crisis, it can save lives.”
Pay attention to the artful wording in the above. Put time and space between this lethal method and someone in crisis.
Otherwise known as restricting Second Amendment rights in favor of the illusion of safety and care.
Low hanging fruit
Harvard University psychiatrist Dr. Gonzalo Martinez-Ales said regarding suicide prevention strategies:
“firearms are the low-hanging fruit here”
What Dr. Martinez-Ales is trying to convey is that restricting access to firearms is an easy solution to the suicide epidemic in the United States. However, in the case of what is leading to the propensity for American suicides, attacking the “low-hanging fruit” is the worst option.
Americans aren’t killing themselves in record numbers because of easy access to guns. That just happens to be the most common modus operandi, particularly for men.
Women, on the other hand, tend to opt for much less explosive and physically painful ways to end their lives, such as poisoning. The way to combat America’s suicide rates isn’t by going after guns; it’s by going after the root causes of suicide.
People who commit suicide or who have suicidal ideations tend to get to that state out of a feeling of desperation. Desperate because they feel alone, they feel backed into a corner with no other way out, they feel insignificant or unwanted, and they believe that if they just weren’t alive anymore, the pain they feel would cease to exist.
What the hell caused this INSANE mental health crisis we’re seeing all across America?
Feeling lost, alone, insignificant, unwanted, and in perpetual internal pain is a tough place to be in, as I and many other veterans are intimately aware. I’ve lost friends to suicide and struggled myself with feelings of soul-crushing loneliness, isolation, and feeling unwanted and unloved.
I endured through these times thanks to a combination of mental health services, which weren’t easy to find, particularly while I was in uniform, and because of a deep feeling of purpose and connection I felt to something larger than myself. Is it any wonder that Americans feel lost and value their lives so little with less believing in a higher power?
A Pew Research Center study projects that the percentage of Christians in the United States will fall well below 50% by 2070 to a staggering 35%. Americans are missing a sense of purpose, shared identity, and belief.
If you don’t believe in anything, it’s easy to devalue everything, which leads to a belief that there isn’t much need to carry on when times are tough. Attacking “low-hanging fruit” is just as easy a way out of solving the suicide problem in our country as suicide itself is an easy way out of dealing with life.
American white men are told they are inherently bad due to their racist misogynistic ways, white women are told they are inherently bad due to their racist privileged ways, black men are told they can’t amount to anything due to an inherently racist system, and black women are told the same while having to raise the next generation alone. It is hard to feel optimistic when faced with those narratives.
Instead of addressing “low-hanging fruit,” it’s high time the experts focus on changing the narrative, advocating for shared beliefs and values, elevating Americans by pointing out their inherent value, and empowering them to make connections instead of focusing on disconnecting from one another.
Now is the time to support and share the sources you trust. The Political Insider ranks #3 on Feedspot’s “100 Best Political Blogs and Websites.”
A shooting in Dallas, Texas, claimed the lives of four people and left a 15-year-old girl hospitalized, according to local police.
A suspect is not in custody, the Dallas Police Department (DPD) said in a statement.
“At this time, this is believed to be an isolated incident and there is no threat to the public,” Dallas police said.
Police tape is pictured at a crime scene. Five people were shot in Dallas, Texas, leaving four dead and injuring one, according to local police. FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty
Around 4:20 p.m. on Sunday, police were called about a shooting in the 9700 block of Royce Drive in the Rylie neighborhood of Dallas, Texas, DPD said.
When officers arrived on the scene, they found five people suffering from gunshot wounds. Three adults died at the scene, and two juvenile victims, a 15-year-old female and a 1-year-old boy, were transported to a nearby hospital, the DPD said.
The little boy succumbed to his injuries. The teen who was wounded was last listed in stable condition, DPD said.
Additional details about the victims were not available at the time of publication. The motive for the mass shooting was unknown as of Sunday night.
The investigation is ongoing, DPD said.
Newsweek reached out via email on Sunday to DPD for an update on the incident.
This is a developing news story and will be updated.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Police in DeKalb County, Georgia, are on the hunt for gunmen who opened fire at a home in the early morning hours of Thanksgiving.
Four people were injured when the assailants opened fire, discharging more than 100 rounds at the home on Cascade Manor Drive in Decatur, Georgia, just before 3 a.m., Lieutenant. Shane Smith with the DeKalb County Police Department told Newsweek.
The victims, who range in age from 37 to 57, are all expected to survive. Three other people inside the home at the time of the shooting were uninjured.
“When officers arrived, they located four victims in the residence with various gunshot wounds,” Smith told Newsweek. “All four were transported to area hospitals for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries. While two patients had critical injuries, all four are expected to survive.”
Smith said initial information obtained at the scene indicates everyone involved in the shooting was inside the residence when unknown perpetrators fired more than 100 rounds into the house.
Decatur is 6 miles northeast of Atlanta. The crime rate in DeKalb County, where Decatur is located, is 44.35 per 1,000 residents, according to data from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The violent crime rate in DeKalb is 4.411 per 1,000 residents.
No arrests have been made, and Newsweek will continue to follow this story.
Stock image of police tape. Police in DeKalb County, Georgia, are searching for suspects in a shooting that occurred in the early morning hours of Thanksgiving in which 100 rounds were fired into a home, injuring four people. Andri Tambunan / AFP/Getty
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
A South Carolina sheriff said a “miracle” saved the life of a deputy who was shot in the head in the line of duty last week.
Oconee County Sheriff’s Office (OCSO) Corporal Lucas Watts was critically wounded amid gunfire as he was making a traffic stop on South Highway 11 in Oconee County, Thursday afternoon.
Gregory Wayne Maxwell, 50, is facing charges after Greenville County investigators found that he shot Watts and engaged in a shootout with deputies afterward, including five counts of attempted murder, according to a statement from the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office (GCSO).
“Maxwell remains in custody at the hospital due to sustaining injuries from at least one gunshot wound from law enforcement,” GCSO said in a statement. “Following a potential discharge from the hospital Maxwell will be arraigned by an Oconee County Magistrate and formally charged.”
Newsweek reached out via email on Tuesday night for comment.
Oconee County Sheriff Mike Crenshaw, speaking at Westminster First Baptist Church on Sunday morning, provided an update on Watts and recounted what he had witnessed at the hospital on Thursday.
Oconee County Sheriff’s Office Corporal Lucas Watts, 27, was shot in the head in the line of duty on November 16, according to the sheriff, who said a “miracle” saved Lucas’ life. Oconee County Sheriff’s Office
Crenshaw said he saw “a dead man come back to life,” according to a video of the sheriff’s roughly 10-minute remarks on Sunday shared on Facebook by the United Way of Oconee County.
“Just so you all understand the significance of his injuries, I’m not talking about a grazing wound to the head,” Crenshaw said. “I’m talking about a bullet to his brain so that you understand just how significant his injury was. I didn’t share that with my folks on the scene, it wasn’t the time.”
Newsweek reached out to OCSO via social media and email on Tuesday for comment.
Due to the location where the shooting occurred, Crenshaw said it would have taken an ambulance more than 30 minutes to get there, so deputies loaded Watts into the bed of a pickup truck and drove him to a nearby fire station. The deputy was too unstable to be transported via helicopter, so he was rushed via ambulance to Greenville Memorial Hospital.
While Crenshaw was at the shooting scene, he said he got a call that he was needed at the hospital, and when he arrived he said he was told that Watts’ “wound was not survivable.”
Watts’ wife, who recently gave birth to their baby, told the sheriff she needed to see her husband.
“They carried the wife in and she touches him and he starts moving,” Crenshaw told his church. “A tear rolls down his face.”
Watts was then rushed into a “very risky surgery” as Crenshaw said sheriffs from across the state were texting him saying they were praying.
“And Lucas makes it through,” he said. “His vitals are good. At that point, I didn’t know it, but social media had blown up, praying, praying, praying.”
On Friday, Watts continued to show improvement and started responding to verbal commands from nurses, Crenshaw said.
“Folks, I’m here to tell you from the time he got shot to the time his wife touched him, had to be two-and-half, three hours,” the sheriff said. “I saw a dead man come back to life… because of God, and because of intervening prayer, I really believe.”
Not sure how somebody can watch this story unfold and not believe in God. Nothing short of a miracle. Continue to pray for Lucas, his family, and our…
The deputy is in critical but stable condition, Crenshaw said.
“I don’t know what tomorrow holds, but I’m telling you, God performed a miracle Thursday night in Greenville, South Carolina,” Crenshaw said. “I’ve got no doubt in my mind.”
An update on Watts’ condition, shared on Monday by the family on the website CaringBridge, said he “continues to make slow progress.”
Watts joined OCSO in 2020 and was previously with the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office, where he served for more than two years. Watts currently works with the Pro-Active Community Enforcement team and the Marine Unit with Oconee County, according to a statement by OCSO.
Crenshaw set up a support fund for Watts and his family through Serve and Connect, a nonprofit in Columbia, South Carolina, focused on building sustainable police-community relationships. The fund has already raised more than $142,000 as of Tuesday night.
Watts and his wife welcomed their first child in September, the fund description states.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
That’s higher than most recent polls, though not by much. From today’s NBC News post by Alexandra Marquez:
More than half of American voters—52% [with a sampling error of +/-3% -EV]—say they or someone in their household owns a gun, per the latest NBC News national poll.
That’s the highest share of voters who say that they or someone in their household owns a gun in the history of the NBC News poll, on a question dating back to 1999.
In 2019, 46% of Americans said that they or someone in their household owned a gun, per an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. And in February 2013, that share was 42%….
In August 2019, 53% of white voters said that they or someone in their household owned a gun, and 24% of Black voters said the same.
This month, 56% of white voters report that they or someone in their household owns a gun and 41% of Black voters say the same ….
Almost half [of respondents]—48%—say they’re more concerned that the government will not do enough to regulate access to firearms, versus 47% who believe the government will go too far in restricting gun rights.
An Ohio mother and her two young children were fatally shot in an apparent murder-suicide by the woman’s husband, who had been previously arrested, accused of domestic violence, local police said.
Around 10 a.m. Sunday, officers were responding to a call about dogs running loose outside a residence on East 9th Street in Lorain, Ohio. When they went inside the second-floor apartment, they discovered the bodies of 29-year-old Tyler Young, his wife Skylar Young, 24, their 4-month-old son, Bandin Young, and Skylar’s 9-year-old daughter, Angel Issac, according to the Lorain Police Department (LPD).
Investigators believe that Tyler Young fatally shot his wife and the two children before killing himself, sometime from 1 a.m. to 10 a.m., LPD Lieutenant Jacob Morris said during a press conference on Monday.
Morris said investigators believe the incident was a murder-suicide, saying that Tyler Young was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head, and next to his body, investigators discovered a 9-millimeter firearm they believe was used in the killings. Two other firearms were found in the home, the lieutenant said.
“The shooting is still under investigation, and we have no final ruling, but we are not looking for any other suspects,” Morris said.
Police tape blocks off a crime scene. An Ohio man fatally shot his wife, 4-month-old son and 9-year-old stepdaughter before turning the gun on himself, local police said. Andri Tambunan / AFP/Getty
Newsweek reached out via email on Monday to the LPD for comment.
Tyler Young had been previously arrested on charges of domestic violence and strangulation in May, Morris said. During that incident, Skylar Young told police, she was physically and verbally abused, saying that she had been threatened and “slapped and choked” by her husband while she was 26 weeks pregnant with Bandin at the time, Morris said. However, the wife recanted her statement to police in June.
That case was presented to a Lorain County grand jury, which chose not to indict Tyler Young on any charges relating to the May incident.
While a family member told investigators that Tyler Young was having a “schizophrenic episode” when the May altercation occurred, according to a police report, Morris said it’s unclear whether he had been officially diagnosed with a mental illness.
Morris said that investigators did not have a suspected motive for the fatal shooting, but they believed Tyler Young’s mental issues could have played a role in the incident.
Skylar Young was the biological mother to both children, Morris said, noting that Tyler Young was the biological father to 4-month-old Bandin, but not to Angel, who attended the Horizon Science Academy, a charter school in Lorain, according to the LPD.
Newsweek reached out via email Monday night to Horizon Science Academy for comment.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Blizzard revealed the latest hero to join the ever-growing roster of its shooter Overwatch 2 at Blizzcon 2023. During an interview at the convention, Polygon got more details about Mauga, what players can expect from him, and the process of creating a new tank.
“Mauga is a damaged-based tank, and how he sustains himself and his team is through damage,” said lead hero designer Alec Dawson. He was designed based on his weapons, with his abilities centered around doing as much damage as possible. The designers hope this focus on damage will make him more appealing to new players.
The team wanted to ensure his abilities felt good when using both chain guns, but they also wanted to make sure players couldn’t “wipe people out immediately.” To combat that, Mauga has a big spread on both of his guns. At the same time, this makes him a threat in close quarters. “You don’t want to play with Mauga up close unless you know you’re going to take him out,” said Dawson.
Mauga’s Overrun charging ability makes him virtually unstoppable, even against sleep darts. “He uses it to get where he wants to go,” said Dawson. For a nice cherry on top, whenever Mauga directly hits an opponent while using Overrun, he’ll slam them to the ground, stunning them while other nearby opponents will be sent flying.
Image: Blizzard Entertainment
Mauga’s ultimate, Cage Fight, creates a zone that traps opponents and blocks healing from the outside of it. What makes his ultimate even more dangerous is that Cage Fight stays active even if Mauga dies. Support hero Lifeweaver can pull Mauga out of the ultimate, but the enemy players will still be trapped inside until the ability runs out.
Even though he’s a tank, Mauga can do more damage than some DPS heroes, said Dawson. To counter that, opposing teams can attack Mauga while he’s reloading or has burned through his abilities. “He’s such a big body that he really needs support. He needs a high healing output to keep him up at times.”
When it came to creating Mauga, the dev team worked closely with a culture consultant team to ensure the studio displayed him in a way that would be respectful to the Samoan community. “We worked with a traditional tattoo artist from the Samoan culture to guide us. We tried to get as authentic as possible and as close to real as our engines could handle. And it turned out great,” said hero design producer Kenny Hudson.
Image: Blizzard Entertainment
When Mauga was first being tested, the team originally had one iteration where his right gun only dealt critical damage to enemies in the air to help tanks fight flying-based heroes. As time went on, the team scrapped that, and now the right gun deals critical damage whenever an enemy is set on fire first with his left gun. But the idea to have him use two big guns was something the dev team always intended to do. “We always kinda knew that he was going to be a tank with two big main guns, and we wanted to make them just as important and just as useful to players as the other one. We didn’t want one to outshine the other,” said Hudson.
One of the challenges the dev team faced was making the visual cues noticeable to players when Mauga uses his Cardiac Overdrive ability, which allows Mauga and his team members to heal whenever they damage an opponent. So the dev team revisited an old idea where Roadhog’s ability would heal everyone around him. This helped them find the “sweet spot” of not overwhelming the player with too much going on screen. “We don’t like throwing things away. Even if it doesn’t work out for a certain hero, it can come back later on for another one,” said senior test analyst Foster Elmendorf. To help further prove their point, Elmendorf explained how Mauga’s ultimate was originally D.va’s, which involved her making “a dome of lasers.”
The team has been working on Mauga for some time. Originally, he was supposed to be released in season 2 instead of Ramattra, “but the team really wanted to take some more time to get the kit just right,” said Dawson. Pushing Mauga back allowed the dev team to polish him up and ensure his abilities played smoothly with one another.
On July 25, Tarrant County District Court received a letter from Zackey Rahimi. He wanted to apologize.
The man at the center of a monumental Supreme Court case on gun rights allegedly shot guns in public at least six times over a three-month period: three times directly at people, once into a house and twice into the air. All of those alleged shootings occurred while he was under a protective order for domestic violence that prohibited him from possessing firearms.
In the letter, Rahimi pleaded with the judge to take mercy on him. Since his family immigrated to the United States from Afghanistan, he had grown up in poverty, he wrote. Shy and overweight, kids at school bullied him. A devoted gearhead, he found a way to help his family pay the bills in high school by flipping cars bought at auction after repairing and detailing them.
At some point, however, he drifted toward “the wrong crowd that was using me & trying to get me to go on a wrong path.”
“I started being intoxicated at all times by smoking marijuana, drinking alcohol, doing pills & all type of mess trying to get me to become a whole other person,” Rahimi wrote.
Now, he wanted to put the drugs behind him and focus on trying to earn an engineering certificate from a technical school, in the hope of landing a job in the automobile industry to help support his parents and his young son. He promised the judge he would “stay away from firearms & weapons, & never to be away from my family again.”
WASHINGTON D.C., UNITED STATES – SEPTEMBER 28: The Supreme Court of the United States building seen in Washington D.C., United States on September 28, 2023. The U.S. Supreme Court began its new nine-month term on Monday with a docket filled with significant cases covering a wide range of issues. These cases include matters related to gun rights, the authority of federal agencies, Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy settlement, the legality of electoral districts drawn by Republicans, and even one case that pertains to certain aspects of Donald Trump’s presidency. (Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Rahimi’s disavowal of firearms is an ironic twist for the man whose case may end up expanding gun rights after it is heard at the Supreme Court on Nov. 7.
It’s the federal case for possession of firearms while under a protective order, a felony since 1994, that turned Rahimi into the unlikely face of a gun rights movement he now wants little to do with. The Supreme Court promises to settle the question of whether the Constitution allows authorities to strip a domestic abuser’s gun rights on the basis of a civil order.
The court’s ruling will have repercussions far beyond Rahimi himself. A decision against him would mark the first time the conservative-dominated court sets limits on the sweeping reinterpretation of Second Amendment rights laid out by Justice Clarence Thomas last year. A ruling in Rahimi’s favor, on the other hand, would send shockwaves through the gun reform movement, with Thomas’ new standard threatening to overturn other long-standing laws passed in the name of public safety.
Gun rights groups have kept the case and its potentially unsympathetic defendant at arm’s length. But several of them have filed briefs arguing that the Supreme Court should uphold the decision to restore Rahimi’s Second Amendment rights, questioning why the state of Texas did not charge him criminally for several alleged acts of violence described in federal court records before he allegedly went on a shooting spree.
Documents and videos obtained by HuffPost from both state and federal courts, including the letter to the judge, shed new light on the events that eventually thrust Rahimi into the national spotlight, allowing the most complete reconstruction to date of his alleged misdeeds and self-professed remorse. Rahimi, 23, faces a total of 11 criminal charges in Texas, most of which have not been previously reported.The videos, which have not been publicly revealed before, show a man prosecutors say is Rahimi firing guns recklessly in public, including one incident that shows two small children were only feet away from the volley of bullets.
A Crucial Test For Gun Rights
In a landmark case last year, the conservative Supreme Court laid out a sweeping new vision for Second Amendment protections. Judges should no longer consider the government’s interest in public safety when weighing the constitutionality of gun restrictions, Thomas wrote in the majority opinion for New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen. Instead, gun restrictions are only constitutional if similar laws existed at some point roughly between 1791, when the Bill of Rights became law, and the end of the Civil War.
That decision led to chaotic lower court disputes over the constitutionality of dozens of long-standing gun restrictions, as judges struggled to interpret what many legal scholars view as an unusually vague and improbably expansive ruling.
Rahimi’s case was among the most controversial. Gun reformers and advocates for victims of domestic violence were appalled that the three-judge panel would prioritize protecting an abuser’s gun rights over a woman seeking protection or over public safety in general.
Rahimi faces a total of five felonies and six misdemeanors, most of them involving guns. Contrary to Second Amendment defenders’ assertions in amicus briefings to the Supreme Court, the state of Texas did charge Rahimi in criminal court for the string of abusive acts that resulted in his protective order.
The events began on Dec. 9, 2019, when Rahimi and his former girlfriend, who is the mother of their young son, got into an argument in a parking lot in Arlington, Texas, according to federal and state court records. As she tried to leave, Rahimi allegedly threw her to the ground, then dragged her by the hair toward a car and shoved her inside, bashing her forehead on the dash in the process. When a bystander tried to intervene, Rahimi opened fire at them.
On Feb. 5, a Tarrant County court issued a protective order barring Rahimi from contacting his former partner or their young son for two years due to Rahimi’s acts of family violence. The court informed him that possessing a firearm while under the protective order was a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
The next month, prosecutors in Tarrant County charged Rahimi with three offenses: terroristic threat of family/household, assault causing bodily injury and recklessly discharging a firearm. All three offenses are class A misdemeanors in Texas, the most serious non-felony offense level.
Police arrested Rahimi on March 9, 2020. A magistrate set a $2,500 bond for each of the three offenses, which Rahimi posted using a bail bondsman. The terms of the bonds also forbade him from possessing firearms or contacting his ex.
Despite his mounting legal troubles, Rahimi allegedly approached his ex-girlfriend’s house in violation of the protective order two months later, on May 10, according to state criminal records. Federal prosecutors later wrote in a brief to the Supreme Court that Rahimi also violated the protective order by attempting to communicate with his ex on social media.
When police found Rahimi and arrested him three months later, they allegedly discovered fentanyl on him — yet another violation of the terms of his growing number of bonds.
Tarrant County prosecutors charged him on Sept. 1, 2020, with violating the protective order, his fourth class A misdemeanor, and a grand jury indicted him later that month with possession of fentanyl, his first felony charge.
This time, a Tarrant County magistrate recommended a bond of only $1,500 for violating the protective order, and released him for half of that. His bond for fentanyl possession was set for $1,500. Again, the county released him.
Shortly after that, Rahimi went on a string of at least six shootings over three months.
Increasing Violence
On Nov. 12, 2020, Rahimi asked a 25-year-old woman over Snapchat to meet him in a parking lot, saying he “had something for her,” according to police records obtained by HuffPost last month. When she arrived, she told police she saw Rahimi kneeling by the driver’s side of a car wearing all black clothes, including a black ski mask over his face. Rahimi appeared to carry a pistol with an extended magazine larger than the gun itself.
As she drove away, Rahimi allegedly fired a handful of times, with some of the bullets appearing to strike her car while she was inside.
It’s a pattern that would repeat itself. In two separate instances, Rahimi allegedly fired at other drivers in acts of apparent road rage.
Someone caught one of them on a cellphone camera. In the video, dated Dec. 8, 2020, a man whom federal prosecutors later identified as Rahimi exits what appears to be an auto shop garage in a silver sedan, then slams on the gas and fishtails into traffic as cars speed toward him. Another car plows into the back of the silver sedan, then pulls to the side.
The man then stops the silver sedan in the middle of traffic, walks toward the parked car that hit him, and fires 10 times directly at it — somehow managing not to strike anyone. He then runs back to the car and speeds off.
In another video obtained by HuffPost, two young boys drive along a residential neighborhood sidewalk in a toy car as a woman films them. A beige car pulls up beside them. A man identified by federal prosecutors as Rahimi briefly steps out of the car as one of the children steps toward him.
Then, the man gets back in the passenger seat and the car drives off. As it drives away, the woman behind the camera shifts her focus to the car. The man sticks his hand out of the passenger side window and fires six times into the air as he drives away.
Rahimi also fired into a person’s home the same month, according to a grand jury indictment. Federal prosecutors would later tell the Supreme Court he fired an AR-15 into the house of someone who had bought drugs from him over comments the customer made on social media.
And in January 2021, Rahimi fired into the air outside a Whataburger after his friend’s credit card was declined, federal court records say.
Fort Worth police arrested Rahimi on Jan. 14, 2021, according to state court records. When police from Arlington, where Rahimi was also wanted, searched his family home, they found a .45-caliber Glock with an extended magazine lying on his bedroom nightstand, a .308-caliber semi-automatic rifle under the bed, and a copy of the protective order prohibiting him from possessing either gun.
The detectives referred the case to agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who filed a criminal complaint in federal court the same day against Rahimi for possessing firearms while under a protective order for domestic violence.
Rahimi’s violent tendencies appeared to continue after his incarceration. On March 28, 2021, a police officer reprimanded Rahimi repeatedly for reaching out his hands to pass items to other inmates while walking past their units. The last time, the officer ordered Rahimi to place his hands on the bars. When Rahimi refused, the officer tried to physically guide him away. Rahimi struck the officer in the throat with his left hand.
‘That Is Truly Not Me’
But a few months later, as his sentencing drew near, Rahimi appeared to change.
His public defenders raised constitutional objections to the law from the beginning, which is common. But the issue had already been argued and decided in Texas, so Rahimi had little choice but to plead guilty.
The case stayed alive, however, because his public defenders and the U.S. attorney’s office remained at odds over the length of his sentence and whether he should serve it after or alongside whatever jail time he might end up serving for his state offenses.
“You’re talking about six separate shootings here,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Frank Gatto told Judge Mark Pittman on Sept. 23, 2021, as he weighed Rahimi’s sentence. “And to me, that first video, where he causes this accident, gets out and just starts shooting, is one of the most bone-chilling videos for me to watch and see. If that doesn’t send chills down anybody’s spine seeing that, I don’t know of much else that can.”
“To just come out and cause this accident, pull out your gun and just start emptying your clip into that other person’s car, to me, I think, that truly shows there is a grave and callous disregard of human life,” Gatto added.
Rahimi had yet to be convicted of anything else, other than a marijuana possession misdemeanor from three years before for which he had only served six days, assistant federal public defender Rachel Taft responded. He had a right to let the state cases play out before the court used the allegations against him to raise his sentence. He planned to seek anger management and educational opportunities while incarcerated, she said.
“Even with a five-year sentence, if Mr. Rahimi were to be released in his mid-20s, at that time we would see full formation of his frontal cortex and we would see, certainly, just by nature of maturity level, a different person when he is released,” Taft told the judge. “He’s talked to me about some of the inmates he’s met there, who don’t know their children, their parents have passed away and they weren’t able to be there, and he doesn’t want that for himself.”
Pittman then asked to hear from Rahimi.
The defendant said he realized his pre-sentencing report said “terrible things, but that is truly not me.”
“I am a very good human being, but it’s my mistake for being around those wrong people and not listening to my family,” Rahimi told the judge. “I’m a new man, having faith and seeking only the straight pathway and staying very close to the Lord.”
His plea failed to convince the judge. Noting that Rahimi had a criminal history dating back to age 11, his six alleged shootings, his history of domestic violence and his disregard for the protective order, Pittman sentenced Rahimi to 73 months in prison. The sentence would run concurrently to most of his misdemeanors, but consecutively to whatever sentence he received in the case of the aggravated assault in which he allegedly lured the woman into the parking lot.
Rahimi’s lawyers appealed the sentencing decision, which put the case before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after the Supreme Court’s bombshell ruling in Bruen. When a three-judge panel reviewed the case early this year, they overturned Rahimi’s conviction altogether — theoretically restoring his gun rights.
Rahimi is still locked up in Green Bay Jail in Fort Worth. He faces the looming possibility of sentences in his three aggravated assault cases that could range anywhere from two to 20 years.
All this makes him an unusual candidate for determining the future of gun rights. The Supreme Court has issued three major rulings that taken together have massively expanded the Second Amendment since 2008. Law-abiding citizens seeking to use firearms for self-protection filed the first two, while a firearms advocacy group filed the third. All three coursed their way through civil rather than criminal court.
Rahimi, on the other hand, only wants his freedom back — and now swears off guns as he tries to get it.
“I had firearms for the right reason in our place to be able to protect my family at all times especially for what we’ve went through in the past,” Rahimi wrote in his letter of apology to the Tarrant County Court. “But I’ll make sure to do whatever it takes to be able to do everything the right pathway.”
Whether you’re a sentient being or an Easy-Bake Oven that hasn’t worked since 1995, you likely know that most Republicans are steadfast in their resolution to do nothing about mass shootings in America—and that when they open their mouths to comment on the issue, all mannerof bullshitflies out. For instance, last week, in response to the recent Maine massacre that left 18 people dead, new Speaker Mike Johnson—who once blamed school shootings on abortion and the teaching of evolution—declared “the problem is the human heart, it’s not guns.” And on Sunday, Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis had equally absurd—and somehow more cringeworthy—things to say about the matter.
In an interview with Meet the Press, DeSantis initially tried to argue that there is no need for red flag laws—as those in his party are apparently contractually obligated to do—despite the fact that Maine officials, according to host Kristen Welker, have said that such laws could have prevented the suspect Robert Card from obtaining guns before the attack. “Well, yeah, I don’t think you would even need a red flag,” DeSantis told Welker, claiming that if someone is institutionalized, it will show up in a background check. Informed Maine doesn’t have strong background checks, DeSantis, well…he didn’t really have a response to that. And asked if he was supporting strengthening background checks, he simply said, “no,” and then insisted the suspect just needed to be committed to a mental health facility. When DeSantis was reminded that law enforcement received a warning about Card in mid-September—and could not locate him—the governor…did not have an answer for that, either.
“When you have an involuntary commitment, that triggers things to go into a background check system,” DeSantis told Welker, doubling down and ignoring basically all of the facts. “So, that should have been enough if that information was put into it. So that’s what I would do. I would focus on those individuals who’ve actually gone and either been involuntary committed, been adjudicated to be mentally ill. That’s really the approach that matters. I think you can look, you know, in Florida, our crime rate’s at a 50-year low, and our violent crime rate’s down 30% since I’ve been governor. So, we’re handling it strong.”
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At this point, Welker interjected to point out that, actually, Florida is not “handling it strong,” noting that, “statistically speaking, the CDC says that the firearm mortality rate is actually higher under your administration than it was under your predecessor’s administration.”
“—the what mortality rate?” DeSantis responded looking like a full-on deer in the headlights. “No, no.”
“The firearm mortality rate,” Welker repeated, slowly emphasizing the words.
“Well, right, well, because you had COVID and all that stuff,” DeSantis said, in a train wreck of an answer that got exponentially worse with each passing word. “Excess mortality, is that what you’re saying? That went up everywhere in the country from 2020 on. Our excess mortality went up less than anybody.” No, excess mortality was not, in fact, what Welker was saying.
“The firearm mortality,” she said again, apparently hoping in vain that repeating the words once more would help them penetrate the governor’s brain. Unfortunately for him, and Floridians writ large, they did not.
“It sounded like a bomb went off in a movie. It was the loudest sound I’ve heard in my life, it was just a ringing,” Abigail Winters recalls, after being shot three times by her ex-boyfriend.
Winters, 23, from Kansas City, Missouri, was with her ex-boyfriend for several years, even welcoming a child together in 2021. She admits that there were red flags for a long time, but after their son, Staisles, was born, she made the decision to separate for his sake.
“He wanted to control who I was talking to on the phone, what I was doing, who my friends were, what I wore,” Winters told Newsweek. “I didn’t think leaving him was ever on the cards because I just wanted to help. I always thought that the world had wronged him, and I just wanted to be there for him.”
Several months after separating, the tattoo artist met her current boyfriend, Jordan Taylor, 23, on Tinder in February 2022. They instantly hit it off and Winters was grateful to finally be in a happy and healthy relationship.
Abigail Winters, 23, pictured during her pregnancy and after having her son, in 2021. Winters left her ex-partner shortly after her son was born in 2021 as she didn’t want to expose her son to any unhealthy behaviors. @snapbackssandtattoos / TikTok
When word got to her ex-partner that she was with someone new, he was blinded by jealousy and did everything he could to disrupt their relationship. This led to a shocking sequence of events on May 2, 2022, when Winters went to visit him at their old apartment where he shot her three times.
She continued: “I remember every single part of the shooting. I was texting my boyfriend, telling him I was sorry that I was there because I knew I wasn’t supposed to be. I heard something, and I looked up and I saw him behind the biggest gun I had ever seen.
“I put my hands up to try to protect my face and he shot me through my fingers. Then I remember looking at my hands and seeing the blood and thinking that in movies they put pressure on it. So, I took my hand and I tried to put pressure on my face, and when I did there was nothing there.”
Abigail Winters, 23, from Kansas City, pictured with her son Staisles. Winters was shot by her ex-partner in May 2022, requiring surgery on her heart, lung, spine, and face. @snapbackssandtattoos / TikTok
Intimate partner violence is a serious public health problem in the U.S which has a profound and lifelong impact on the victims. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that 41 percent of women and 26 percent of men will experience it at some point in their lifetimes.
Physical violence can include firearm offences, for which women are often targeted by perpetrators due to their sex, and it’s regularly by people they know. According to a study published in 2016, around 4.5 million women had been threatened by an intimate partner with a gun, and almost 1 million had been non-fatally shot.
Winters never expected to be part of those statistics, but state law in Missouri permits people to carry concealed handguns in public without a license, and without any background checks. There is also no part of the law which prohibits domestic abusers from possessing guns, often putting their victims at risk.
The new mom was immediately taken to hospital where she underwent two heart surgeries, as well as surgery on her lung, face, and spine. The gunshots to her face had broken her cheekbone, causing the whites of her eye “to fall out,” leaving her blind in one eye and requiring a prosthetic eyeball.
In the aftermath, Winters was informed by local police that her ex had turned the gun on himself and ended his own life. The news only compounded her grief because he would never know what he put her through or face the repercussions.
“I was supposed to die, there’s no medical reason I should be here. I deserve for him to understand what he put me through, he’s never going to see my face and what he did to me.”
Abigail Winters pictured in hospital following the shooting in 2022. Winters required numerous surgeries following the shooting, which left her with permanent scarring on her face and without one eye. @snapbackssandtattoos
Experiencing an abusive or controlling relationship is traumatic and devastating for any individual to go through, which can have reverberations for years thereafter. Mental health administrator Alea Jackson encourages people to recognize the signs of coercive control early and to take action.
“This type of relationship creates an unequal power dynamic between the perpetrator and the victim. Many people report not recognizing the signs of controlling behavior because it may not include physical violence,” Jackson, of Riverside University Health Systems, told Newsweek.
“It involves a pattern of behaviors that goes beyond physical violence and strips the individual of their autonomy, leaving them feeling trapped and powerless.”
Warning signs of a controlling relationship may include:
Isolation
Monitoring and Surveillance
Manipulation and Gaslighting
Jealousy and Possessiveness
Micromanaging
Financial Control
Emotional Abuse
Threats and Intimidation
Sexual Coercion
Lack of Boundaries
Blaming and Shifting Responsibility
Emotional Rollercoaster
She encourages anyone who fears they may be experiencing this to seek help, in order to prevent further harm. She added that the pattern of behavior can lead to physical violence down the line, so understanding the signs early on is vital.
Abigail Winters, 23, pictured in the hospital following the shooting that took place in May 2022. Following the shooting, Winters required surgery on her heart, lung, and on her face, leaving her with permanent scarring. @snapbackssandtattoos
‘I Could Not Understand Why Someone Would Love Me’
Overcoming that trauma has been a constant battle for Winters, both physically and mentally. She has been left wondering why she survived and struggling to recover her sense of identity after being changed forever.
Winters told Newsweek: “It’s very strange to be a medical mystery, and I don’t really know why I’m here. I think it has something to do with the fact that I wasn’t ready to leave my boyfriend or my son. I knew that life still had more for me, and I knew that I could help people.”
As she reflects on that day she’s left with countless questions, but the one person who has been able to help her find resolve is Taylor, who stayed by her side throughout.
At first, she feared that the only reason Taylor stayed with her was “out of pity” and because he didn’t want to look bad for leaving. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth, and the recovery would have been very different if he wasn’t there to support her.
“I physically could not understand why somebody would love me. It’s very hard for me to love myself and I’m very insecure, as I struggle a lot with depression and PTSD. But I can see myself being happy in the future now, and that isn’t something I could ever foresee before.
“I definitely think it helps for Jordan and I to rely on each other. At the end of the day, he is there for me, and he loves me and he’s going to show me the kindness that I deserve.”
Abigail Winters, 23, pictured with her boyfriend Jordan Taylor, also 23. The couple met online shortly after Winters ended her previous relationship, and she felt an instant connection with him and she knew it was right. @snapbackssandtattoos / TikTok
The shooting didn’t only affect Winters, as she added that Taylor has also had to overcome a sense of guilt that he wasn’t there when she was shot. The young couple have lived through something that very few can understand, and relying on each other has helped create an unbreakable bond.
Not only has it improved her mental state, but it’s changed her goals for the future too.
“My relationship has changed the way I view the world. I know there’s kindness and there’s gentle love. My ex and I never kissed, we never held hands, we had no physical connection, but I have all of that with my boyfriend now,” Winters said.
“I never wanted this before in my life, but I want to get married now. I never wanted to be tied to someone like that before, as I didn’t want to feel as though I couldn’t escape. But now I do want that.”
‘I Want to Save One Person From Being Me’
In 2023, a year after the shooting, Winters shared her story in a series of TikTok videos (@snapbackssandtattoos) to answer people’s questions, and to shed light on her experience.
One of her most popular videos has been viewed more than 5.4 million times, and received over 267,000 likes, as Winters explained that sharing her story is “the only justice [she] will ever get.”
Abigail Winters, 23, pictured in hospital after the shooting, and beside her new partner. Winters claims that her ex grew jealous of her current relationship, leading to his devastating actions. @snapbackssandtattoos
Being so vulnerable and personal was a difficult decision at first, but connecting with other survivors has been so rewarding.
Winters told Newsweek: “Usually, I get very positive responses. I get survivors saying that they understand and telling me that they’re here for me, and they’ve been through it too. We’re all here to share our stories with each other and grow.
“I want to save one person from being me, and to show what could happen with an abusive relationship. I never thought that this would happen to me. I never thought that I would live and have to overcome all of this. I just want to let all the survivors know that you can do this, and you deserve love.”
Anyone seeking help should call The National Domestic Violence Hotline, a free and confidential hotline available 24/7 that can be reached on 1-800-799-7233 or TTY 1-800-787-3224. The Hotline also provides information on local resources. For more information, visit https://www.thehotline.org/.
Newsweek reached out to Kansas City Police Department on 10/17/23 to provide comment, but did not receive a response.
Have you noticed any red flags that made you end a relationship? Let us know via life@newsweek.com. We can ask experts for advice, and your story could be featured on Newsweek.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
When done well, storytelling brings sterile data to life. But stories can also be told in ways that ignore data and perpetuate harmful myths. And when it comes to gun violence, the stories that loom largest threaten the hard-fought progress made in recent years on this issue.
We’ve all heard the classic, every-man-for-himself saying, “When seconds count and the police are minutes away.” Those nine words are as memorable as they are emblematic of Americans’ views on firearms—when polled by the Pew Research Center in July 2023, protection was the number one reason people decide to get a gun. In reality however, a gun at home makes families less safe—not safer. Wielding the family gun to stop an armed intruder? Unlikely. A household gun used to kill the gun owner or their loved ones? Far more likely. But the latter story has less of a probability to be shown in modern entertainment.
To reduce gun violence, the stories we tell about guns should be based on what’s true: Most of the time, the presence of a gun makes people less safe.
As the narrative of the “good guy with a gun” took hold, public opinion about guns shifted. In the early 2000s, most people believed that having a gun made them less safe and household gun ownership was on the decline. By 2018, nearly 6 in 10 Americans believed the myth that having a gun would make them safer.
It’s likely that an increasingly ferocious gun industry and its lobbying groups played a role in this shift, as did a rise in public mass shootings. It’s also true that there’s more gun violence in pop culture now than there was two decades ago. One 2021 study in the research journal PLOS One looked at how regularly prime time dramas depicted gun violence in 2000 versus 2018 and found that scenes featuring gun violence had doubled.
Regardless of the cause, the data around the effect is quite clear. As more people began to believe the myth that guns made them safer and chose to purchase firearms to address their fears, rates of gun violence increased too. More guns make us less safe.
Whether it’s local news or a beloved tv series or documentary, the stories we tell about guns and gun violence impact people’s views on the subject. Last year, the gun violence prevention group I founded, Project Unloaded, surveyed 1,000 members of Gen Z and asked them how they learned about guns. Most young people name family and friends as their main source for information about guns, but more than half of the young people polled cited television and film as a source of information. The influence of television and film is particularly strong for young Black people, who are disproportionately impacted by gun violence. Black children are more than 17 times as likely to die in a shooting as a white child of the same age according to CDC data.
If reducing gun violence is the goal, the path forward must include taking a careful look at the stories we tell and the messages they send—particularly to young people, who are still making up their minds about whether or not they’ll own a gun.
A 2021 report produced by Sundance Institute and the Kendeda Fund offers strategies filmmakers can take to produce stories relevant to our nation’s gun violence crisis that are both compelling and effective at driving change. Some documentaries are already putting its recommendations to work. But as the report highlights, we shouldn’t expect every project to appeal to every person—and in fact, we are more likely to persuade and shift culture when we tailor our outputs.
At Project Unloaded, we focus our efforts on reaching young people with fact-based narratives about guns before they’ve made up their minds on the topic. We primarily work through social media campaigns on platforms like Snapchat and TikTok. On those platforms, we partner with Gen Z influencers to share the facts about how guns make us less safe without the partisan, polarized debate that often comes with talking about guns. So far, our results indicate this approach is working. We’ve reached over 3 million young people with our Safer Not Using Guns (SNUG) campaign.
Project Unloaded also runs community partner programs in select cities. Together with Chicago Public Schools, last summer, we worked with 50 high school students from some of the neighborhoods most impacted by gun violence. We showed students the data on how guns make them less safe and brought in marketing experts to help the teens craft their own social media campaigns that could reach their peers with that message. Almost all the participants had a personal experience with gun violence, and at the start of the program most said they were considering gun ownership.
One young woman, whose brother was shot to death and whose father is behind bars, expressed skepticism – she was sure that no one cared what she thought, and that gun violence couldn’t be stopped. By the conclusion of the program, she told us that we’d helped her see how she and her peers could be part of the solution, and the percentage of students who said they were definitely or probably getting a gun fell by more than 20 points.
Adults are unlikely to shift their coffee order, let alone their views on a topic like guns after so many years of exposure to powerful yet false narratives around guns and safety. But young people are open to considering the facts on this issue and changing their minds as a result. In our 2022 survey, 17% of young people shifted away from the belief that guns made them safer after exposure to simple fact-based messages about gun risks.
In that finding is the path forward: human-centered, data-backed stories about gun violence can shift views and behaviors around guns and eventually, save lives.
To some, a 17% shift in views may sound small. But we shouldn’t expect one set of facts, or any one piece of media to resonate with everyone who sees it. Thankfully, culture change doesn’t require that. It only requires that a message stays with enough of its audience that the message can then spread organically through peer-to-peer conversation. That’s how teen use of cigarettes dropped by 20 points in 20 years. A similar shift can happen on guns.
The more we can use creative outputs such as visual art, film, and even social media campaigns to spread the message that guns make us less safe, the safer we all will eventually be. With data-based work and thoughtful, humanistic storytelling, we can change the narrative on guns and finally slow our nation’s gun violence epidemic.
A youth football coach in St. Louis, Missouri, was hospitalized after he was shot multiple times by a parent upset at their son’s lack of playing time, police said.
Shaquille Latimore, 30, was shot multiple times Tuesday evening while coaching kids during a youth football practice, according to a probable cause statement by the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office.
The suspect, 43-year-old Daryl Clemmons, turned himself in and was charged with first-degree assault and armed criminal action. Authorities said Clemmons was upset that his son hadn’t gotten more playing time on the team of 9 and 10-year-olds.
“I didn’t see his gun until it was already too late,” Latimore told the St. Louis Dispatch from his hospital bed. “I ran, and he shot me in the back. I fell, and he shot me a couple more times.”
Latimore said that Clemmons was previously a coach for the team and would often critique Latimore’s performance.
“Some parents try to live through their kids,” Latimore told the publication.
He added, “It’s more psychological than anything else.”
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A man illegally brought a handgun into the Wisconsin Capitol on Wednesday, demanding to see Gov. Tony Evers, and returned at night with an assault rifle after posting bail, a spokesperson for the state said.
The man, who was shirtless and had a holstered handgun, approached the governor’s office on the first floor of the Capitol around 2 p.m. on Wednesday, state Department of Administration spokesperson Tatyana Warrick said Thursday. The man was demanding to see the governor, who was not in the building at the time, Warrick said.
A Capitol police officer sits at a desk outside of a suite of rooms that includes the governor’s office, conference room and offices for the attorney general.
The man was taken into custody for openly carrying a firearm in the Capitol, which is against the law, Warrick said. Weapons can be brought into the Capitol if they are concealed and the person has a valid permit. The man arrested did not have a concealed carry permit, Warrick said.
The man was booked into the Dane Count Jail but later posted bail.
He returned to the outside of the Capitol shortly before 9 p.m. with an assault-style rifle, Warrick said. The building closes to the public at 6 p.m. He again demanded to see the governor and was taken into custody.
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN – AUGUST 19: This file photograph shows Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers waiting to address the virtual Democratic National Convention, at the Wisconsin Center on August 19, 2020 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Photo by Melina Mara – Pool/Getty Images)
Madison police reported Thursday that the man, who was not named, was taken into productive custody and taken to the hospital. A spokesperson for the police department did not return an email seeking additional details.
Evers’ spokesperson Britt Cudaback declined to comment. The governor’s office typically does not respond to questions about security issues.
The incident is just the latest in a series of violent threats against public officials.
Evers, a Democrat, was on a hit list of a gunman suspected of fatally shooting a retired county judge at his Wisconsin home in 2022. Others on that list included Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Whitmer was the target of a kidnapping plot in 2020.
Warrick said no immediate changes to security in the Capitol or for the governor were planned. The public has free access to the Capitol daily from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. There are no metal detectors.
When a grand jury indicted Hunter Biden last week for buying a gun in 2018 despite using crack cocaine, the legal logic was clear: You can’t own a gun if you use illegal drugs, and he clearly did both.
The Navy Reserve had discharged the president’s son four years earlier after he tested positive for cocaine, and he discussed his crack addiction in his 2021 autobiography, “Beautiful Things.”
That gives special counsel David Weiss substantial proof that Biden lied when he signed the required ATF form pledging that he did not use illegal drugs so that he could buy a .38-caliber revolver — and that he possessed the gun illegally because of his drug use.
But the seemingly straightforward case is also very unusual. Federal prosecutors almost never file stand-alone charges against drug users who buy or possess guns.
In the rare cases in which they do, prosecutors usually have hard evidence in the form of physical guns and drugs that were discovered in the defendant’s possession. It’s usually after a drug search or traffic stop turns up those guns and drugs.
In this case, law enforcement never apprehended Biden with drugs, or even the gun.
“I can’t recall a single case like this,” said former U.S. Attorney for North Dakota Tim Purdon, who has both prosecuted and defended dozens of federal firearms cases. “I was an active practitioner in that space for 20 years.”
Stanford Law School professor John Donohue said it was “incredibly unusual” for the gun and drug possession charge against Hunter Biden to be prosecuted, “especially since he didn’t do anything wrong with the gun, other than possess it.”
SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
The list of celebrities who have openly discussed possessing firearms during times that likely overlap with illicit drug use includes podcaster JoeRogan, actor BradPitt, and members of hip-hop group Cypress Hill, whose first album describes possessing guns and marijuana simultaneously in nearly every song.
In theory, the FBI could go chase any of these people down based on that information alone. In practice, federal law enforcement rarely charges these crimes at all.
“It’s hard to find cases where they just charge someone with this,” said Dru Stevenson, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. “It’s almost always incident to a drug bust. That can happen because of a traffic pullover and they find drugs in the car. They do the drug arrest and they find the guy with a gun, so it’s an extra charge.”
Without such hard evidence, proving that drug abuse coincided with a gun purchase or possession can become tricky.
“Beyond reasonable doubt is a very high standard,” Purdon said. “To prove that someone was a drug user in possession of a firearm, an ideal case would be a blood test taken within an hour of a person handling a firearm that showed the presence of a drug. Without evidence of that sort, I think a lot of prosecutors would be concerned about carrying the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The Justice Department does not routinely publish prosecution data broken down by charging statute. But of the 7,373 firearms offenders sentenced in 2021, the U.S. Sentencing Commission identified only 5.3% as prohibited possessors of firearms because they were drug users. That amounts to about 390 offenders nationwide, or a little more than half a percent of the federal criminal caseload at the district level.
“It’s incredibly unusual for this to be prosecuted, especially since he didn’t do anything wrong with the gun, other than possess it,” said Stanford Law School professor John Donohue. “And he only had the gun for a matter of days ― it wasn’t a long period.”
Hallie Biden, the widow of Hunter Biden’s brother Beau, discovered the gun within a couple of weeks of the purchase and threw it in a dumpster behind a grocery store. A man later found it in the trash while looking for recyclables.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that the fact that he’s related to the president is harming his prospects here,” Donohue added. “Probably hundreds of thousands or millions of people have done what Biden has done, and no one has prosecuted them or thought to prosecute them.”
“I can’t recall a single case like this. I was an active practitioner in that space for 20 years.”
– Former U.S. Attorney for North Dakota Tim Purdon
Even half a percent of the federal criminal caseload likely exaggerates the Justice Department’s focus on drug-using gun possessors. Prosecutors often decline these cases.
Prosecutors are most likely to pursue charges for possessing guns while using drugs when they suspect the alleged offender is involved in more serious criminal conduct. Federal prosecutors havecharged suspected drug dealers and potentially violent political extremists with possessing guns and drugs at the same time, either to secure a conviction or ratchet up pressure for a plea deal, according to the Dallas Morning News.
“When you dig into this and you try to find when this case gets charged, it looks like it gets charged as a tag-along charge to more serious cases of felon-in-possession and things like that,” Purdon said.
Lying on ATF Form 4473, the other major charge that Biden faces, is almost never prosecuted at all, according to data made public by The Washington Post through the Freedom of Information Act.The form requires gun buyers to pledge that they can legally own firearms.
One disqualification that applicants have to answer “yes” or “no” to is whether they are “an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance.”
In Delaware in fiscal year 2019, the same state and time frame of Biden’s alleged firearm offenses, the U.S. attorney didn’t prosecute a single case against someone lying on ATF Form 4473 about drug use.
When prosecutors did pursue cases against people lying to buy guns, they were usually more serious, typically involving straw purchases.
One woman bought two pistols for her boyfriend, a felon under investigation for attempted murder at the time. Investigators recovered one of the guns after he died in a shootout with police.
Another man bought a Ruger 10/22 in a straw purchase, then handed the rifle off to someone who used it in a home invasion. A third woman bought a pair of pistols at a pawnshop to give to her drug dealer as payment.
Explosive Second Amendment Law
Complicating matters further, the Biden indictment comes in the midst of a Supreme Court-mandated overhaul of Second Amendment rights.
In last year’s landmark case New York State Rifle and Pistol Assn. v. Bruen, the conservative-dominated court held that New York could not keep qualified applicants from obtaining a concealed handgun permit by requiring them to name a specific threat to their safety.
The majority opinion, penned by Justice Clarence Thomas, went on to contend that courts do not have to weigh states’ interest in public safety at all when assessing the constitutionality of gun restrictions. Instead, the Bruenstandard only considers gun laws constitutional in cases where they fit within a tradition of gun regulation that can trace its origins to sometime between 1791, when the Bill of Rights was signed, and the end of the Civil War.
That novel and vague standard has created a tidal wave of new constitutional challenges to long-standing gun laws, with lower courts overturning state assault weapons bans, age restrictions for handgun purchases and regulations on possessing firearms with scrubbed serial numbers.
One of the clearest targets for Second Amendment challenges is the provision of the Gun Control Act of 1968 that banned drug users from owning guns.
The wave of marijuana legalization since California legalized medical use in 1996 has created a situation in which many otherwise law-abiding gun owners become felons if they use cannabis, even in legal states. Major cases in several states have challenged the law barring marijuana users from possessing firearms as unconstitutional.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a conviction last month on constitutional grounds against Mississippi man Patrick Daniels, who was apprehended in his vehicle with a semi-automatic rifle, a pistol and some marijuana. The 11th Circuit will hear oral arguments next month in a constitutional challenge to gun restrictions on medical marijuana patients filed by a group of plaintiffs including former Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried.
Winning gun rights for crack users has less of a social movement behind it, but the energy behind marijuana could have implications for Hunter Biden.
The Supreme Court will give public signals about its evolving thinking on gun rights on Nov. 7, when it’s slated to hear USA v. Rahimi, in which the 5th Circuit overturned a decades-old federal law barring domestic abusers from possessing guns.
There’s no guarantee that the case will go very far, however. Federal defendants almost never take their cases to trial. Last year, about 8% of them had their cases dismissed, while almost 90% pleaded guilty.
Biden himself almost avoided indictment on the gun charges through a plea deal that fell apart. He still faces federal prosecution for alleged tax violations and the looming possibility of future legal problems tied to his business dealings overseas. That pressure may give him and his legal team an incentive to keep working toward a new plea deal.
And special counsel Weiss also has an incentive to avoid pushing too hard on a prominent case with the potential to rewrite gun law.
“I don’t think that the government wants to settle this question,” Purdon said. “I think they’re afraid of what the answer might be.”
Like many legal scholars, Donohue, the Stanford law professor, sees the Bruen decision as vague and impractical, making it hard to guess whether the Supreme Court will ultimately uphold, limit or overturn prohibitions on drug users possessing guns.
“The problem with the Bruen decision is it literally makes no sense in any way,” Donohue said. “I have a feeling that they may want to pull back a little bit on Bruen. But you never know with them. They seem so confused. They might just double down on Bruen and say, ‘You can’t prohibit any of this stuff.’”
Justice Thomas’ requirement in the Bruen ruling for a historical analog to uphold a gun restriction, however, could work in Biden’s favor in the unlikely event that the Supreme Court does take the case.
“In 1791, there was no crack cocaine,” Donohue said.
As gun-running networks help arm Mexican drug cartel members, an intelligence program called “Project Thor” seeks to stop the flow of firearms. Adam Yamaguchi takes an in-depth look at the program and how it works.
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A Washington state man was fatally shot outside of his home by a “scared” driver after he slowed down traffic to help deer pass, according to a police report.
Dan Spaeth, 37, was standing outside his home in Snohomish County on Sept. 7 with his wife to alert passing drivers that deer were crossing the road, according to an affidavit of probable cause first obtained by The Seattle Times.
Just before 8 p.m., Spaeth’s wife called 911 to report her husband had been shot a single time by someone in a passing vehicle. His wife said the two were on their property when she heard a loud “pop” and turned to see her husband lying in the road with a gunshot wound to his chest, according to the affidavit. Spaeth died at the scene.
The next day, on Sept. 8, officers with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office arrested 22-year-old Dylan Picard in connection to the shooting, The Washington Post reported Friday. When a sergeant asked if Picard knew why he was being arrested, Picard allegedly told the officer, “I shot somebody.”
Picard later told investigators he saw Spaeth yell at a passing vehicle and hit the car with his hands. Picard became “scared” and grabbed his loaded gun, according to the affidavit.
Picard allegedly fired one shot out of his open passenger window to “scare the male and female” but did not know he had hit someone. He has been charged with second-degree murder.
A GoFundMe has been set up “to help the Spaeth family in this very difficult time and the difficult times to come,” according to the organizer.
Watch the CBS Reports documentary “Arming Cartels: Inside the Mexican-American Gunrunning Networks” in the video player above.
Mexican drug cartels have been smuggling a vast arsenal of even military-grade weapons out of the U.S. with the help of American citizens, a CBS Reports investigation has found.
Exclusively-obtained U.S. intelligence documents and interviews with half a dozen current and former officials reveal that the American government has known this for years but, sources said, it’s done little to stop these weapons trafficking networks inside the United States, which move up to a million firearms across the border annually, including belt-fed miniguns and grenade launchers.
Dozens of cartel gunrunning networks, operating like terrorist cells, pay Americans to buy weapons from gun stores and online dealers all across the country, as far north as Wisconsin and even Alaska, according to U.S. intelligence sources. The firearms are then shipped across the southwest border through a chain of brokers and couriers.
This infographic was created by the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Operations Division as a visual representation of intelligence findings, to depict how an American supply chain provides firearms and ammunition to Mexican cartels.
Project Thor / Obtained by CBS News
WhenCBS News pressed the Justice Department about its findings, a senior official confirmed that “We absolutely recognize the problem here that … the lion’s share of firearms trafficked to Mexican cartels are coming from the United States.”
For more than 50 years, the U.S. government has waged an unsuccessful war on drug traffickers, who are now fueling a deadly fentanyl epidemic. The free flow of American guns across the southern border empowers the cartels to protect their drug operations and outgun Mexican authorities, U.S. officials said.
“We have allowed the cartels to amass an army,” said Chris Demlein, who served as a senior special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — the ATF — until 2021.
Guns and ammunition seized by U.S. law enforcement at the border.
U.S. government photo
Demlein led the first interagency intelligence project aimed at identifying and dismantling the cartels’ international weapons supply chains across the U.S. Within months of its launch on July 25, 2018, the initiative, known as Project Thor, connected the dots between hundreds of disparate law enforcement cases, uncovering vast networks that give these criminal groups on-demand access to American guns. They briefed hundreds of government officials on their discoveries, including the National Security Council and senior Justice Department leadership.
This illustration, based on an intelligence map generated by DEA Special Operations Division Project Thor, depicts the smuggling paths of a “supernetwork” of interconnected gun supply chains that were illegally funneling military-grade firearms at the direction of the Jalisco New Generation cartel in Mexico.
CBS News
Project Thor found that the problem of cartel weapons smuggling was far worse than previously understood. They estimated that cartels were trafficking between 250,000 and 1 million weapons every year, with a retail value of up to $500 million, not including ammunition and tactical supplies, according to intelligence analysis reviewed by CBS News.
Project Thor concluded that American guns were being used to fuel an unprecedented spike in violence across Mexico. Up to 85% of firearms found at those crime scenes traced back to the U.S.
Without Project Thor, U.S. law enforcement “bureaucracies were more interested in defending their turf than prosecuting criminal organizations,” said Edwin Starr, who retired from the ATF as a senior special agent in December 2022. Starr credited the interagency program with leading to a major breakthrough in one of his firearms trafficking cases that, according to Demlein, helped take down an entire cartel gunrunning network.
On Dec. 8, 2021, ATF chief of staff Daniel Board praised Project Thor’s “insight, initiative and hard work” as he presented the team with the agency’s Distinguished Service Medal.
But Project Thor was denied funding for fiscal year 2022, according to internal documents and sources with direct knowledge, effectively shutting it down. The Justice Department and ATF would not disclose how much money is dedicated to the mission of countering international firearms trafficking to Mexico.
Over the course of four months in 2023, CBS Newsrepeatedlyasked the Justice Department about its efforts to combat international gun trafficking. When senior officials finally agreed to speak, they said they were “not familiar” with Project Thor, even as they agreed with its findings about the magnitude of cartel gun running operations on U.S. soil.
The Biden administration signaled a new commitment to tackle the issue at a June 14 press conference, pointing to the ATF’s Operation Southbound, an investigative and prosecutorial “nationwide initiative” designed to “disrupt the trafficking of firearms from the U.S. to Mexico” focused on border states. Officials also pointed to funding for gun tracing and ongoing diplomatic efforts to train and equip Mexican law enforcement with that technology.
However, other law enforcement, intelligence and diplomatic officials told CBS News they doubt their own agencies’ commitment to dismantling cartel gunrunning networks across the U.S., and criticized the ongoing approaches as “ineffective.”
“Any U.S. strategy that depends, for its success, on Mexican law enforcement efforts in Mexico is doomed to failure,” warned Christopher Landau, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico until 2021. “We’ve been talking about this for 10, 20 years. Nothing is changing. … This has been a major bipartisan failure of the U.S. government for many decades.”
Senior officials defended their approach to countering weapons smuggling out of the country.
“ATF is committed to stopping as many guns as possible from being illegally trafficked into Mexico,” ATF Director Steven Dettelbach told CBS News in a statement, touting the prosecution of 100 people in the past year. “Investigating straw purchasers is just one tool that we use. Our efforts also include large scale, long term, complex investigations of entire trafficking networks.”
Neither the Justice Department nor ATF provided evidence to demonstrate that their efforts have meaningfully reduced the flow of American firearms to Mexico. U.S. law enforcement seized 1,720 firearms in the first six months of fiscal year 2022. According to Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, “that’s a more than 65% increase over the same period last year.” But it accounts for less than 1% of all firearms being smuggled across the border, based on estimates by Project Thor and the Mexican government.
-Adam Yamaguchi and Sarah Metz contributed reporting.
Hunter Biden, the son of President Biden, was indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury in Delaware on three felony gun charges related to a 2018 purchase of a firearm during a time in which he admitted to being addicted to drugs. The indictment comes less than two months after a plea agreement on gun and tax charges between Biden’s attorneys and federal prosecutors fell apart. Catherine Herridge has the details.
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New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public in and around Albuquerque drew an immediate court challenge from a gun-rights group Saturday, as legal scholars and advocates said they expected.
The National Association for Gun Rights and Foster Haines, a member who lives in Albuquerque, filed documents in U.S. District Court in New Mexico suing Lujan Grisham and seeking an immediate block to the implementation of her order.
The challenge was expected, but even so, the governor’s action Friday was an attempt to “move the debate,” said Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Marymount’s Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, after Lujan Grisham announced that she was temporarily suspending the right to carry firearms in her state’s largest city and surrounding Bernalillo County.
The governor, a Democrat, said the 30-day suspension, enacted as an emergency public health measure, would apply in most public places, from city sidewalks to parks.
She said state police would be responsible for enforcing what amount to civil violations and carry a fine of up to $5,000.
Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman, who once served as a Democratic party leader and was appointed by Lujan Grisham, on Saturday joined Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller and Police Chief Harold Medina saying they wouldn’t enforce the order.
“As an officer of the court, I cannot and will not enforce something that is clearly unconstitutional,” said Bregman, the top prosecutor in the Albuquerque area. “This office will continue to focus on criminals of any age that use guns in the commission of a crime.”
Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen said he was uneasy about how gun owners might respond.
“I am wary of placing my deputies in positions that could lead to civil liability conflicts,” Allen said, “as well as the potential risks posed by prohibiting law-abiding citizens from their constitutional right to self-defense.”
Medina noted that Albuquerque police made more than 200 arrests of suspects in killings in the last two years. Police spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said enforcing the order also could put Albuquerque police in a difficult position with a U.S. Department of Justice police reform settlement.
Lujan Grisham said she was was compelled to act following recent shootings including the death this week of an 11-year-old boy outside a minor league baseball stadium and gunfire last month that killed a 5-year-old girl who was asleep in a motor home. The governor also cited the shooting death in August of a 13-year-old girl in Taos County.
Democratic New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham talks prior to President Joe Biden speaking about the economy at Arcosa Wind Towers factory Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2023, in Belen, N.M. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
“No person, other than a law enforcement officer or licensed security officer, shall possess a firearm … either openly or concealed,” the governor’s order states.
Levinson told The Associated Press Friday over the phone that Lujan Grisham would draw a court fight, saying the governor was “bumping up against the Second Amendment, no doubt about it.”
“And we have a very conservative Supreme Court that is poised to expand Second Amendment rights,” Levinson added.
Dudley Brown, founder and president of the Colorado-based gun-rights group, called the governor’s action unconstitutional.
“She needs to be held accountable for stripping the God-given rights of millions away with the stroke of a pen,” he said in a statement announcing the lawsuit and request for a restraining order. A court hearing was not immediately set.
The top Republican in the New Mexico Senate, Greg Baca of Belen, also denounced Lujan Grisham’s order as an infringement on the gun rights of law-abiding citizens. Dan Lewis, who serves on the nonpartisan Albuquerque City Council, called the order an unconstitutional edict.
Lujan Grisham said gun owners still would be able to transport guns to private locations such as a gun range or gun store if the firearm is in a container or has a trigger lock or mechanism making it impossible to discharge.
The governor’s order calls for monthly inspections of firearms dealers statewide to ensure compliance with gun laws and for the state Department of Health to compile a report on gunshot victims at hospitals that includes age, race, gender and ethnicity, along with the brand and caliber of firearm involved.
Levinson said she was not aware of any other governor taking a step as restrictive as Lujan Grisham. But she pointed to a proposal by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, to amend the U.S. Constitution to harden federal gun laws.
“I don’t think it will be a political loss for (Lujan Grisham) to be overturned,” Levinson said. “She can say she did everything she could but was stopped by the courts.”
Jacob Charles, a law professor at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law who studies the Second Amendment, noted that the Supreme Court, in the June 2022 Bruen case, expanded the right of law-abiding Americans to carry guns in public for self-defense.
He said that ruling takes away the ability to take into account arguments about a compelling government interest, like the gun violence that Lujan Grisham said prompted her order. Now, judges must solely rely on whether any similar historical examples exist.
“They can’t assess whether or not this is going to reduce gun violence. They can’t assess whether or not there are other alternatives that government could have done,” Charles said. He later added, “What it means is that contemporary costs and benefits aren’t part of the analysis.”
Ritter reported from Las Vegas. Stern and Sonner reported from Reno, Nevada. Associated Press writers Rio Yamat in Las Vegas, Morgan Lee in Santa Fe., New Mexico; Terry Tang in Phoenix and Felicia Fonseca in Flagstaff, Arizona, contributed to this report. Stern is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America places journalists in local newsrooms across the country to report on undercovered issues.
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