Tag: violence
The Gun

A New Strategy: How Law Students Are Targeting The Gun Industry

Gun violence is widely seen as an epidemic in the United States. According to the American Public Health Association, it is the leading cause of premature death in the country, resulting in nearly 40,000 deaths every year. While Congress struggles to pass laws to restrict access to firearms, two gun safety advocacy organizations, whose specialty is traditionally to lobby lawmakers to change gun laws, are trying a different approach to put the squeeze on the gun manufacturing industry.

Giffords, the group formed by former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords that works to stem gun violence, and March for Our Lives, the movement against gun violence created by young people in the aftermath of the mass shooting at a school in Parkland, Florida, have launched a new effort this month aimed at recruiting law students to sign a pledge that they won’t represent the gun lobby.

The idea stems from the role that a handful of the biggest law firms in the country play in ongoing efforts to fight gun violence, according to David Pucino, Giffords’ deputy chief counsel. Law firms Kirkland & Ellis, Foley & Lardner, McGuireWoods, and Hunton Andrews Kurth and the legal arm of the National Rifle Association, among others, have fought in court against the stricter regulation of guns and have represented gun manufacturers in lawsuits filed against them over their role in mass shootings.

“[The issue of gun violence is] something that I think is pretty important to a lot of folks, but they don’t necessarily know how to action that, how to translate that into their work and their legal career,” Pucino told the American Independent Foundation. “And at the same time, there are these law firms that really take advantage of that, that represent some really reprehensible companies that have done some horrible things.”

Big law firms spend time and money recruiting law students to come work for them straight out of law school, often enticing them with glamorous perks, as an article on the website Balls and Strikes about law firms and the gun industry points out. They represent a wide variety of clients across all industries, but, as Pucino explained, they often omit their clients with ties to the gun lobby when recruiting law students, later assigning many of those young lawyers to represent those clients.

“There’s certainly the case that the legal system allows for and encourages for everyone to have representation, of course,” Pucino said. “But that fact doesn’t mean that anyone is entitled to your representation. And if your view is that you don’t want to support and aid and abet the gun violence epidemic, there needs to be an avenue for you to be able to express that and say that.”

To roll out the initiative, Giffords and March for Our Lives held events on the campuses of some of the country’s biggest law schools: UC Berkeley School of Law, Cardozo School of Law, CUNY School of Law, Vanderbilt Law School, and Yale Law School. But Pucino emphasized in an email to the American Independent Foundation that the event is “broad and national,” and both groups plan to hold similar events at other law schools when students reconvene in the fall.

At these events, organizers provide students with tools and prompts to use when they’re interviewing to work at law firms that may have ties to the gun industry, including asking whether they have gun industry clients or do any pro bono work representing the gun industry. If they do, prospective employees can make it clear that they have a personal conflict of interest representing such clients because of their opposition to gun violence.

“I think so much of what’s caught up in these issues is questions of power,” Pucino said. “If you’re a young lawyer at a giant law firm, you have so little power. But the moment when you do have that power is before you sign on the dotted line, before you say, I’m going to commit to go work at this place.”

Pucino said that the success of the effort will depend on convincing as many students as possible to sign the pledge. It’s easy for a big law firm to ignore that kind of gun safety dialogue from one prospective employee, he said, but if more law students looking to enter the workforce engage with recruiters in this way, firms might think twice about the kinds of clients they take on.

“So it’s not even necessarily, Don’t go work at this firm, but ask before you sign on: Would you force me to work on a gun case? Would you force me to represent somebody whose irresponsible actions have led to a mass shooting or other violent events?”

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

Alex Jones

'Kill Every Person You Need To': Alex Jones' Newest Conspiracy Foments Race War

Infowars host and chief conspiracy theorist Alex Jones warned on Sunday's show that "foaming-at-the-mouth Black people" would wage war on white populations after they flee "race-specific bioweapons" attacks in Africa later this decade. Jones issued these racist predictions while declaring himself a "vessel" of God.

"They intend on making the world so hellish in the build-up to 2030 that everybody will just 'wink, wink' when they release the race-specific bioweapons starting with Africa that are gonna wipe that continent absolutely out. And you'll be under such invasion from the refugees of the economic warfare in Africa that you will quietly, while you're playing cards with your buddies say, 'well, it had to be done.' And when you go along with that metaphysically, spiritually, culturally, the devil's got your soul," said Jones.

"So I don't like the big giant African hordes being brainwashed against us and the left programming brown people to hate white people. It's all part of a plan, folks. It's all part of a very sophisticated plan and I don't just study history. I don't just study the New World Order," Jones continued. "I have the Holy Spirit. Doesn't mean I'm a perfect vessel, far from it. But I do have deep connection to God and God tells me that if I take part in wiping out the brown people, the Black people, that I will be cut off from God. We’re supposed to lift each other up."

Jones then encouraged responding through violence.

"Now that doesn't mean when a gang of racist, foaming-at-the-mouth Black people come to rape, rob, or kill you, which is just, it's out of control right now, that you don't defend yourself and kill every person you need to protect your family if they're attacking you," he suggested.

"That said though, just because they're brainwashed, some of them, and are being part of that doesn't mean we have to fall into the brainwashing either," the right-wing provocateur added. "And they tell you everything they're doing in the movie, the 'Kingsman,' where they send out the program through the cell phones and cell phone towers to make everybody start killing each other. That's what Klaus Schwab talks about, the angrier world, this is part of that plan. And so the Black people that have succumbed to this have succumbed to it through mind control. Doesn't make them any less dangerous."

Watch below via Media Matters for America or at this link.


Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

After Tyre Nichols, Can They Finally Say Those Three Simple Words?

After Tyre Nichols, Can They Finally Say Those Three Simple Words?

Black Lives Matter.

Now, can everyone understand the desperate, defiant power of those three words? Can all those who tried to act as though they didn’t get why the phrase needed to be said — over and over — finally stop pretending?

After viewing, listening to, reading about the video that laid bare the torture of Tyre Nichols by an armed gang, operating under the cover of law in Memphis, can anyone honestly insist that it’s the slogan that’s the problem?

Is there anyone out there still wondering that if only protesters’ signs had read “All Lives Matter,” the police would have looked at Tyre Nichols and seen a son and a father, a handsome young man who loved his mother’s home-cooked meals, who photographed sunsets and practiced skateboard tricks?

Would tacking a “too” onto the phrase have made the police listen to the 29-year-old on the night of January 7, or answer his questions about why he was being detained? Would it have stopped the police from barking out 71 confusing, conflicting commands in 13 minutes, as The New York Times calculated, from punishing his slight body mercilessly when he was unable to comply?

When politicians call for nonviolence from those weary of being treated as “less than,” where are the calls for nonviolence from those charged with keeping the peace?

America is a country steeped in violence — no explanation needed after a litany of mass shootings in this new year. And now, the country has experienced a countdown to the release of a horrific video of a Black man being treated, as one of his lawyers put it, like a “human piñata.”

More proof, though none was needed, that Black Lives Matter is not in the training in any of the 18,000 police departments with different rules and regulations but depressingly similar outcomes.

Just listen to the officers’ profane bragging about getting their piece of the disgusting action, all while the barely conscious body of Tyre Nichols leans slumped against a police car and no one bothers to render aid or comfort.

Who could be shocked, when this kind of behavior has been celebrated far beyond the confines of an “elite” unit of supposed crime-stoppers?

America may no longer advertise the public lynchings of Black citizens — as it did in a past that is not as distant as some would like to think — so whites could tote picnic lunches and children to public spectacles, memorialized and fetishized, with postcards and pieces of bodies saved as souvenirs.

But in the first month of 2023, the Republican Women’s Club of South Central Kentucky thought it was a great idea to promote and feature as guest speaker one of the officers who fired shots in the no-knock raid that resulted in the death of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor. This is after admissions that information that led to the warrant’s approval was falsified.

When these genteel, I’ll wager churchgoing, ladies brought in Jonathan Mattingly — formerly of the Louisville Metro Police Department — to share his tale of being as much of a victim as Taylor, unsuspecting patrons of the restaurant where the event was held were subjected to the amplified sounds of gunshots and images of that night. And the club’s statement to Spectrum News that Mattingly “has the right to share his experience” makes pretty clear their members’ regard for Breonna Taylor’s life — and death.

In Memphis, the responding officers, most of them Black, obviously have absorbed the lessons on who counts in America, and have proved that something is fundamentally wrong with the culture of policing, when “law and order” too often becomes the rationale for how officers see and oversee minority communities that only want to be served and protected.

A change in how Americans view one another and how too many police see Black citizens as perps, even when they’re calling for their mothers, might be a long time coming, at least if legislation is part of the solution.

After George Floyd was murdered by law enforcement in Minneapolis, Americans marched, and there were calls for police reform. Then, attention waned. Republicans returned to a “soft on crime” attack on opponents in the other party, and with a weaponized “defund the police” charge that the majority of Democrats never supported but still feared, it was predictable that all but the most committed would back off.

Talks and action plans on police reform led by Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and then-Rep. Karen Bass of California, both Democrats, and GOP Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina fell apart in 2021, with the issue of “qualified immunity” — how much and whether to hold officers responsible for civil rights violations — a sticking point.

In a divided Congress, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) forecast future progress when he dismissed the effectiveness and, presumably, the need for any new laws on Meet the Press. Jordan, like most everyone except those on the fringe who will always blame the victim when the victim is Black, said he thinks the videos were awful.

But Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, also said, "I don’t know that there’s any law that can stop that evil that we saw,” perhaps forgetting Dr. Martin Luther King’s quote that “while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless.”

If something does not change, expect more heartlessness, perhaps not captured on videos, but experienced by those who have been witness for far too long. The Tyre Nichols video hopefully will be the “this time” that will help his mother heal, knowing her son’s death made some difference, even in the hearts and minds of those who can’t imagine such scenes in “their” America.

But know that for many, those scenes were no surprise.

The surprise is that anyone ever doubted the necessity of a chant asserting the basic humanity of Black Americans.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call “Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis” podcast. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Poll: Americans Increasingly Regard Republicans As Party Of Violence

Poll: Americans Increasingly Regard Republicans As Party Of Violence

A new poll from the progressive consortium Navigator Research finds that a plurality of Americans agree that “people who support the Republican Party are inclined to resort to violence when they’re pushing their agenda or worldview.”

The survey found that 44 percent of respondents agree with the statement, while 34 percent disagree. The numbers are nearly mirror opposite for Democrats, with just 35 percent saying Democrats' supporters are likely to resort to violence, while 45 percent disagree.

Independents were 19 points more likely to view Republican supporters as likely to use violent means (40 percent agree) than Democratic supporters (21 percent agree).

The findings of the survey come as House Democrats have shifted toward a strategy of emphasizing the extremism of both Republican candidates and the MAGA movement. The January 6 hearings appear to be helping their case.

When the survey asked those who viewed GOP supporters as more violence-prone an open-ended question about why, the dominant themes centered around “January 6th,” “Trump,” “white groups,” and “Proud Boys.”

By a 20-point margin, the Navigator survey found Americans support the Justice Department filing criminal charges against Donald Trump for his involvement in January 6 (56 percent support, 36 percent oppose). Independents support filing charges by a 24-point margin (50 percent support, 26 perdent oppose). The data also indicatee that support for filing charges increases— by nine points among independents and 13 points among Republicans—after respondents read recent revelations from the select committee’s inquiry into January. 6. So the more people know, the better.

An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll similarly found a 57 percent majority of Americans say Trump bears either a great deal or good deal of responsibility for the January 6 insurrection.

But the NPR poll found that just half of the respondents think Trump should be charged with a crime, while 45% say he shouldn't—a much smaller divide than Navigator found. However, the number of Americans who think Trump actually will be charged sits at just 28 percent in the NPR survey.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.