"How Trump attempted to use federal agencies to seize voting machines after 2020 election" PBS NewsHour 2/1/2022
Excerpt
SUMMARY: New York Times is reporting that six weeks after the 2020 election former President Trump directed his attorney Rudy Guiliani to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could take possession of voting machines in key swing states. New York Times congressional correspondent Luke Broadwater joins Geoff Bennett to discuss.
"The Supreme Court Abandons Voting Rights" by The Editorial Board, The New York Times 7/1/2021
The 1965 Voting Rights Act was one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history. By outlawing racial discrimination in voting and imposing federal oversight in states with histories of discriminating, it finally enforced the 15th Amendment and marked the first time the nation could call itself a truly representative democracy. Until the last decade, the law occupied a sacred spot in the American legal system. In 2006, Congress reauthorized the law nearly unanimously.
Since then, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been dismantling it, piece by piece.
The latest blow came Thursday, when all six conservative justices voted to uphold two Arizona voting laws despite lower federal courts finding clear evidence that the laws make voting harder for voters of color — whether Black, Latino or Native American. One law requires election officials to throw out ballots that were cast in the wrong precinct; the other bars most people and groups from collecting voters’ absentee ballots and dropping them off at polling places.
Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bars any law that discriminates on the basis of race, whether intentionally or not, the Arizona laws should have been invalidated. But the conservative justices dismissed the challenge because, they said, only a small number of people were affected. “The mere fact that there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily mean that a system is not equally open or that it does not give everyone an equal opportunity to vote,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in an opinion joined by the other conservatives.
That is a dismissive wave of the hand at precisely the sort of evidence that Congress told voting-rights plaintiffs to present in court. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in a dissent longer than the ruling itself, small numbers can make a big difference. In 2020, for example, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in Arizona by a little over 10,000 votes — fewer than the state threw out based on the out-of-precinct policy in two of the past three presidential elections.
Since the court is talking about “mere facts,” the conservative justices might have noted the mere fact that voting fraud, which lawmakers in a number of states claim they are trying to prevent with laws like the ones in Arizona, is essentially nonexistent. As one federal judge put it several years ago, such laws are akin to using “a sledgehammer to hit either a real or imaginary fly on a glass coffee table.”
That doesn’t appear to bother the conservative justices, who have given a free pass to state legislatures to discriminate, even as they demand more and more from voters trying to show that they are hurt by that discrimination.
This subverts the whole purpose of the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted because of the persistence of discriminatory state voting laws and policies, a point Justice Kagan made throughout her dissent. “What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses,” she wrote.
Those impulses have been on flagrant display over the past several years, as Republican-controlled legislatures across the country have raced one another to pass laws that make voting harder — whether through stringent voter-identification requirements, limits on early and absentee voting, hurdles to registration, indiscriminate purges of voter rolls and laws like Arizona’s. Many of these laws disproportionately hurt voters of color. Already this year, 28 laws restricting voting have passed in 17 states, according to a running tally by the Brennan Center for Justice.
The conservatives on the court choose to be oblivious to the function of these laws, perhaps because they and their colleagues created the conditions for them to thrive in the first place. In 2013, the court gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act, Section 5, which had required states and localities with a history of discriminatory voting practices — including Arizona — to obtain approval from the federal government before changing or adopting any voting law.
Section 5 was by far the most effective way to prevent voting discrimination, but according to Chief Justice John Roberts — who has been working to hobble the Voting Rights Act since he was a junior lawyer in the Reagan administration — the list of offenders was out of date. “Things have changed dramatically,” he wrote in his 2013 majority opinion, pointing to the increase in Black voter registration and turnout in the years since the Voting Rights Act was adopted. It didn’t seem to occur to him that this increase was precisely because of the law, and not in spite of it. As if to drive home the point, Republican-led states that had been under federal oversight began imposing strict new voting laws within hours of the ruling.
After 2013, Section 2 was the only meaningful tool left in the Voting Rights Act — indeed, Chief Justice Roberts pointed out this fact as supposed consolation when the court-eliminated Section 5. But its medicine was never as strong. Lawsuits alleging violations under Section 2 can only be brought after a new voting law has passed, and may have been discriminating against voters for years. The suits are expensive and time-consuming, which deters most potential plaintiffs. Even when plaintiffs show incontestable proof of discrimination, as they did in Thursday’s case, the odds are stacked against them.
This is bad news for upcoming legal challenges to Republican-enacted voter restrictions in other states. Just how bad will depend in part on the outcome of a lawsuit the Justice Department filed last week against a sweeping new voting law in Georgia. The suit contends that the Georgia Republicans who passed it, upset at Democratic victories in the state’s presidential and Senate contests, intentionally targeted Black voters, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Proving intentional discrimination is a high bar, but Georgia’s lawmakers worked hard to make the job easier, passing all kinds of restrictions that disproportionately hurt Black voters.
Congress has been debating a bill that would restore the heart of the Voting Rights Act by reimposing federal oversight of voting laws in states that have repeatedly discriminated in the last 25 years. Thanks to blanket opposition by Republicans and the existence of the filibuster, which allows a minority of senators to block a bill with majority support, the bill is a dead letter — unless Democrats decide to end the filibuster.
Even that step would not turn back the anti-democratic tide, which grew into a wave during the Trump administration. In Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere, Republican lawmakers driven by demonstrable lies about fraud in the 2020 election are changing the rules around how votes are counted and certified. They are stripping power from officials, like the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who did their jobs in 2020 and refused to succumb to pressure from Mr. Trump and his allies to “find” extra votes and overturn the results to help him win.
The strategy is so dangerous because it is so dull. It’s easy to be outraged by, say, making it a crime to give voters water while they wait in oppressively long lines to cast a ballot, as the new Georgia law does. It’s harder to get worked up about the arcane machinery of election administration. But these laws are of a piece with the voting restrictions being passed by the same lawmakers. Together, they are designed to keep Democratic-leaning voters away from the polls, and to the extent that fails, to deny victory to Democratic candidates, even when they win more votes.
The current conservative majority on the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roberts, shows no interest in thwarting this attack on democracy and protecting Americans’ fundamental constitutional right to vote. The ball is in Congress’s court, and time is fast running out.
"Brooks and Capehart on Biden’s new infrastructure plan, Georgia’s voting law" PBS NewsHour 4/2/2021
SUMMARY: New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week in politics, including President Biden’s infrastructure plan, the pace of COVID-19 vaccinations amid spikes in infections, and Major League Baseball's reaction to Georgia's new voting law.
Judy Woodruff (NewsHour): With the release of President Biden's infrastructure plan, states reopening, and boycotts brewing, we look to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart.
That is New York Times columnist David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart, columnist for The Washington Post.
Hello to both of you. So good do see you, as always, this Friday.
And there is, as always, a lot to talk about.
Jonathan, I want to start with you on the President's big infrastructure plan, over $2 trillion. What do you make of it? Does it meet the need or does it overshoot?
Jonathan Capehart, The Washington Post: Well, if you listen to progressives, Judy, it doesn't meet the need. It doesn't go far enough. If you listen to Republicans, it spends way too much.
I think the way you described the plan is perfect, actually, because you described it as an infrastructure plan. But the actual name of this package is the American Jobs Act. And that, I think, when you think of what the President proposed in terms of jobs, it all fits together. It all makes sense.
One of the knocks against the President's plan is that, well, only a certain amount of it is spent on infrastructure. Most people, when they think of infrastructure, they think of roads, bridges, seaports, airports, those types of things.
But what you see in the American Jobs Act is a broader definition of what infrastructure is. Yes, it's roads and bridges, but it is also wind turbines and solar, green energy things, wiring the country with broadband, having broadband be for 2021 what the interstate system was in the mid-'50s, connecting the country, but connecting the country electronically, and also the electric power grid.
So, I think the President's going for a big, bold plan. The key question is, can that big, bold plan actually become law?
Judy Woodruff: And, David, Jonathan makes a points. There is more in here than what's traditionally been thought of as infrastructure, hundreds of billions for caregiving for seniors and others. What do you make of this?
David Brooks, New York Times: No, I do worry about the debt. We're spending almost $10 trillion, if all the Biden things pass.
That's a lot. It's just a historical fact that rising debt contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire, the decline of the Spanish, imperial Spain, France in the 18th century, China in the 19th century. History is replete with nations who hurt themselves by going into too much debt.
Nonetheless, I think, in these circumstances, the Biden plan is worth it. And I say that for a couple of reasons. One, we have simply underinvested in infrastructure and basic research and all such things for decades. And that's just a fact.
Second, if you ask me to tell the economic story of America over the last 50 years, I would say that we have built a gigantic funnel that has funneled money and resources and wealth to highly educated people in large metro areas.
This plan funnels money to all the people who are not in those categories. And so I think it rebalances our society in an important way.
And, finally, Jonathan and I were on a call with Anita Dunn, the President's adviser earlier in the week. And she made the point that listen, we're — we have got to show democracy works. There's a Chinese system out there that a lot of people think that's what works. And we're just in this contest to show that democracy can get big things done.
So, given the circumstances, I overcome my incredibly high aversion to all this debt.
Judy Woodruff: So Jonathan, does this look like it has a chance of getting — becoming law?
(LAUGHTER)
Jonathan Capehart: Judy, right now, no.
And I say no because the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, has already said that he's not going to support it. I have not heard one Republican in the Senate step forward and say that he or she will support it.
That means the President is going to have to depend on a couple things, one, maintaining all 50 Democrats to vote for this plan. But the other thing is that, in order for all 50 Democrats to have any say over this, the Senate parliamentarian has to rule whether the American Jobs Act, like the Recovery Act, can go through reconciliation, which is just a simple majority vote.
So, there are a lot of hurdles here. And that's why I say, right now, the American Jobs Act is big and bold. And, as necessary as it is, as it stands right now, I don't see how it becomes law.
Judy Woodruff: David, your forecast?
David Brooks: A tad more optimistic.
I hear a lot of moderates who are supporting it, moderate Democrats who are saying positive things about it. So that's a good sign.
I think one of the challenges is going to be, this is just going to take a long time. Nancy Pelosi said she hoped to get it out of the House by July 4, which is an ambitious timetable. Then it goes to the Senate. So we're looking at a six-month process.
And suppose we're generating 900,000 jobs a month, as we just did, over all that time. A lot of people are going to say, why are we spending all this money? The economy's really roaring.
And so that could drain away support.
Judy Woodruff: All right, two other things I want to ask you both about. We will try the squeeze them in.
First to you, Jonathan, on where we are with COVID. We see more people are getting vaccinated, good signs. What, over 100 million Americans now have been vaccinated. But we are also seeing rise in the number of cases. We're hearing talk about vaccine passports, requiring people to show a passport that they have been vaccinated before they can travel or go into a place of work, potentially.
And you also see states where the governors are opening up before Washington says they're ready for that. Where do you see all this headed?
Jonathan Capehart: I feel like Groundhog Day, because I believe I said this a few weeks ago.
We are so close. We're always so close to getting to the other side of this pandemic, in terms of cases going down, hospitalizations, deaths, businesses being able to reopen. And then states end up doing something to kind of mess it all up.
And for states to undue their mask mandates, open things wide open again, as cases are going up, as variants are running rampant across the land, when you have the CDC director going off-script and saying that she's extremely worried about what's going to happen, I don't think we're out of the woods yet.
And I think people are being a little too optimistic about how much they can do because of the vaccines. I, like anyone, would like to get the vaccine and get back to normal. But I would love for things to get back to normal when every — when the country can actually do it in a uniform way.
And I'm not seeing right now how we're going to be able to do that, in — by the time of the President's goal of July 4.
Judy Woodruff: David?
David Brooks: Yes, I think we need to make life a lot better for people who have had the vaccine.
I think we need vaccine passports, so they can go to gyms and restaurants. And I say that as one who is too young to have the vaccine, which — the last time I have been too young for anything.
(LAUGHTER)
David Brooks: It's…
(LAUGHTER)
David Brooks: But we have got to induce the people who are vaccine-hesitant to say, wow, it's really great on the other side of the vaccine.
And one way to do that is to have these vaccine passports, so people can go and enjoy life. The research has now, it's, as far as I understand it, become very clear. You do not get the disease — at least your chances are fantastic — and you do not spread the disease.
So, if that's the case, then I say to all of you with the shots, party on.
(LAUGHTER)
Judy Woodruff: David, Jonathan and I think of you as always young, so it's all good. It's all good.
(LAUGHTER)
Judy Woodruff: Just quickly, finally, we have talked about Georgia's voting law and the pushback against it, but now we have big corporations like Delta, Coca-Cola saying they don't like it.
And, today, Major League Baseball, Jonathan, announced they are pulling their All-Star Game out of Atlanta. It was going to take place this summer. They're going to find another home for it.
Is this kind of pressure likely to make a difference in Georgia and other states where they're looking at tightening voting?
Jonathan Capehart: Well, in terms of the law, the Georgia law is the law. And it is highly unlikely that Governor Kemp is going to go back or the legislature is going to go back and say, we will do — we will have a do-over.
But I do think it's very important for corporate America to take stands on issues that are of importance, not only to their customers, but to their employees. And so, for Delta and Coca-Cola and Major League Baseball to take the stands that they have taken, I think, is very important.
I think what is also important was the letter from the 72 Black business executives, from Ken Chenault and Ken Frazier, American Express and Merck respectively, the president of the Ford Foundation, Darren Walker, Ursula Burns a former CEO of Xerox, putting pen to paper and saying, what's happening in Georgia is an attack on democracy.
And where are the business leaders, all business leaders in raising their voices about this?
And I think what's happening in Georgia should be a template for all the other states where what's happened in Georgia is happening in those states right now.
Judy Woodruff: What effect, David, do you see this kind of corporate involvement having?
David Brooks: Yes, I spoke very negatively, critically of the law last week, and I'm still very much against it.
I worry about this. I worry about — we have seen one institution after another in American society get politicized, the church, the press. I worry about corporations suddenly taking political sides. I worry about boards of directors and CEOs who've got a lot of economic power wielding it in ways that's political.
And so I'm just nervous to see yet another institution gets super political. They just don't do it well. Delta, Coke, Major League Baseball, they all work in China, a country now committing genocide. What standards do we hold people to? So, I'm just a little nervous about people with a lot of power wielding it in this way.
I just — I'm more comfortable that we settle our differences, even if we hate the results, through politics and through persuasion and through votes and for activism and trying to get people to come out to the polls. I'm just more comfortable with that as a means of social change.
Judy Woodruff: A serious note to end on.
David Brooks, Jonathan Capehart, thank you both. And have a good weekend.
Jonathan Capehart: Thanks, Judy.
David Brooks: You too.
"New York’s governor faces backlash after revelations on nursing home deaths" PBS NewsHour 2/16/2021
Excerpt
SUMMARY: From the earliest days of the pandemic when New York was an epicenter of COVID, Gov. Andrew Cuomo often has been in the spotlight. But increasingly, there are questions about whether his administration was transparent enough about disclosing how many nursing home residents died. Jesse McKinley, Albany bureau chief for The New York Times, joins Amna Nawaz to discuss the backlash against Cuomo.
"The pandemic’s toll in 2020 and the difficult road ahead" PBS NewsHour 12/31/2020
Excerpt
SUMMARY: Since the first reported case of COVID-19 a little more than a year ago, the pandemic has taken a devastating toll in the U.S. -- far worse than in many other developed countries. Donald G. McNeil Jr., a science and health reporter for The New York Times, joins Judy Woodruff to give some perspective.
SUMMARY: Tuesday marks a full century since the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which says that the right to vote “should not be denied or abridged” on the basis of sex. We look back to the path to that milestone, and Judy Woodruff talks to longtime activist and scholar Gloria Steinem about what challenges remain.
SUMMARY: The number of horrific images of sexual abuse against children being posted on the Internet has exploded in recent years. A New York Times investigation found that technology platforms like Facebook and Google reported some 45 million videos and photos last year — more than double the amount from the year before. Amna Nawaz discusses the problem with Donna Rice Hughes of Enough Is Enough.
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| WANTED - Dead or Alive |
SUMMARY: While one phrase of Syria's brutal nine-year civil war may be concluding, the systemic forced disappearance, torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of Syrians has not ceased. Amna Nawaz talks to Anne Barnard of the Council on Foreign Relations and formerly The New York Times about the staggering inhumanity of Bashar al-Assad's regime and what accountability, if any, it will face.
SUMMARY: Congressional Democrats are expected to decide Thursday whether to go to court to obtain President Trump’s recent tax returns. Though there has long been curiosity over Trump’s taxes, which he declined to release in 2016, interest in them resurfaced after a New York Times investigation uncovered past tax records and large business losses. William Brangham talks to Times reporter Ross Buettner.
SUMMARY: Amazon abruptly announced Thursday that it will not build a headquarters in New York, after some local politicians expressed strong opposition toward the company’s plan. The “stunning reversal” is a major blow to the politicians who helped broker the deal, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Judy Woodruff talks to J. David Goodman of The New York Times.
SUMMARY: From Pizzagate to George Soros conspiracies, “fake news” has become a noxious presence in public discourse, especially since the 2016 presidential election. A recent New York Times video series explores the long history of Russian disinformation and its origins in what the Soviets dubbed “active measures.” Nick Schifrin speaks to Adam Ellick, who created the series, for more.
Americans were confronted Tuesday with a profound problem, one that challenges our commitment to accountable democratic government and justice. It is an awful truth that we must face now that the New York Times has published a richly documented, 14,000-word expose alleging decades of deeply corrupt Trump family finances.
After 18 months of interviewing people who worked for or with the Trump family and scrutinizing more than 100,000 documents, the newspaper painted a portrait “unprecedented in scope and precision” of Trump family money, including “outright fraud” that enriched the man who is now the sitting President. Those extraordinary words require us to pay close attention.
Leaked financial records reveal decades of calculated tax cheating, according to the New York Times. Father Fred Trump created 295 revenue streams to transfer money to his children, many of which appear to have broken laws. A lawyer for the President claims the published allegations are false and the reporting “extremely inaccurate,” but the reporters cite bank statements, canceled checks, invoices and tax filings that reveal the apparent evasion of close to half a billion dollars of taxes in today’s money.
In one scheme the value of properties transferred from Fred Trump to his children was discounted by 94%. Prices paid for refrigerators and stoves were inflated 46%, which enabled dishonest tax deductions while cheating people in rent-stabilized Trump apartments by justifying higher rents.
Not a scintilla of verifiable evidence shows that Donald is anything like as rich as he claims.
As that paper’s former tax reporter and a journalist who has covered Donald Trump for more than 30 years, this was no surprise. In 1990 I broke the story that Trump was no billionaire. He called me a liar for months, until he had to put documents in the public record showing he was worth negative-$295 million.
Not a scintilla of verifiable evidence shows that Donald is anything like as rich as he claims. Candidate Trump said he was worth more than $10 billion, but his 2017 presidential disclosure statement shows just $1.4 billion.
Yet millions of Americans believe Trump is a modern Midas. They believe the President will lift them out of hard times, after a half-century during which the super-rich flourished and their incomes were mostly flat. The awful truth is that the man in the Oval Office is not a wealth-building entrepreneur, but a financial vampire who extracts cash from enterprises, leaving behind unpaid workers, vendors and governments.
The President’s father got his start profiteering, to the tune of millions of dollars, from programs to help returning GIs get housing, which prompted President Eisenhower to throw a fit. Donald Trump is already a proven tax cheat. He admitted to sales tax fraud in 1983. He lost two income tax civil fraud trials. His own tax lawyer, Jack Mitnick, testified that Trump’s 1984 tax return was fraudulent.
Court records show how Trump and his children misled investors in failed condo projects in Baja California and Florida. Trump promised strivers who paid tens of thousands of dollars to attend Trump University that he would hand-pick a faculty and give them a better education than the best business schools. That’s not what happened. In the end, Trump gave back $25 million after insisting he had done nothing wrong.
A Trump project in New York employed hundreds of workers who were in America without permission, paid them laughably low wages and worked them beyond legal limits. He denied knowledge of the situation, but a judge said Trump’s testimony was not credible. Trump promised to show voters that his immigrant third wife, Melania, always worked legally. Business records show she worked illegally as a model.
Trump’s longtime fixer, Michael Cohen, is talking to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. So is his former campaign manager, who along with Trump’s first son and son-in-law eagerly embraced the Kremlin’s offer of campaign help. Trump’s first national security advisor has pleaded guilty to being an unregistered agent for Russian interests in Turkey. Son-in-law Jared Kushner sought to use Russian diplomatic channels to communicate secretly with Moscow.
For many Americans the truth too horrible to consider is that Donald Trump could be a criminal, a wildly successful con artist. He may well be disloyal. For those who grasp what Trump is, the corollary truth is that our Constitution’s checks and balances are failing us.
The Republican majority in Congress refuses to properly investigate Trump. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is rushing a vote on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, whose legal writings indicate he might protect Trump from law enforcement.
Prosecutors, tax authorities, casino regulators and other government officials appear to have let the Trump family get away with dishonest conduct again and again. Trump has bragged that in return for campaign donations politicians always obeyed his wishes, and it seems many did.
The latest expose focuses mainly on the 1950s through the 1990s. We need to see Trump’s tax returns, and the books and records behind them, from this century. And if they show cheating, we need to enforce the laws Trump violated.
David Cay Johnston, a former Los Angeles Times and New York Times reporter, is the author of “The Making of Donald Trump” and “It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.”
SUMMARY: The New York Times has published a special investigation that digs deep into the Trump family finances. It paints a detailed picture of how the President used potentially illegal tax schemes to acquire millions from his father. The account contradicts President Trump's long-repeated narrative that he was a self-made man. Judy Woodruff talks with Susanne Craig, a Times investigative reporter.
SUMMARY: Recently, NewsHour analyst David Brooks wrote a New York Times column arguing that it's time for a resurgence of localism, flipping power and decision-making away from the federal government. Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, another NewsHour regular, says that idea fails to take account of the elephant in the room in America: race. They both join Judy Woodruff to talk about it.
SUMMARY: Award-winning writer Jesmyn Ward joins Jeffrey Brown to answer readers’ questions about her novel “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” the first selection in the Now Read This book club, plus we announce what we’ll be reading for next month.
SUMMARY: President Trump reportedly ordered the dismissal of special counsel Robert Mueller last June, but backed down after White House counsel Don McGahn said he would quit rather than carry out the order, according to The New York Times and others. In Davos, the President dismissed the report as "fake news." John Yang reports and Judy Woodruff talks to Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School.
SUMMARY: U.S. bombing played a major role in driving the Islamic State group from cities in Iraq and Syria. But a report by The New York Times finds that thousands more civilians were killed in those bombing runs than originally admitted by the Pentagon. Hari Sreenivasan learns more from investigative reporter Azmat Khan.
When the world looks at the United States, it sees a land of exceptions: a time-tested if noisy democracy, a crusader in foreign policy, an exporter of beloved music and film.
But there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America's fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings?
Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad.
These explanations share one thing in common: Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion.
The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.
What Explains Mass Shootings
The top-line numbers suggest a correlation that, on further investigation, grows only clearer.
Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world's guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American, according to a 2015 study by Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama.
Adjusted for population, only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people — a distinction Mr. Lankford urged to avoid outliers. Yemen has the world's second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States.
Worldwide, Mr. Lankford found, a country's rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience a mass shooting. This relationship held even when he excluded the United States, indicating that it could not be explained by some other factor particular to his home country. And it held when he controlled for homicide rates, suggesting that mass shootings were better explained by a society's access to guns than by its baseline level of violence.
What Doesn't: Crime, Race or Mental Health
If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. But the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita and the rate of severe mental disorders are all in line with those of other wealthy countries.
A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues. And Mr. Lankford, in an email, said countries with high suicide rates tended to have low rates of mass shootings — the opposite of what you would expect if mental health problems correlated with mass shootings.
Whether a population plays more or fewer video games also appears to have no impact. Americans are no more likely to play video games than people in any other developed country.
Racial diversity or other factors associated with social cohesion also show little correlation with gun deaths. Among European countries, there is little association between immigration or other diversity metrics and the rates of gun murders or mass shootings.
A Violent Country
America's gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, which also corresponds with differences in gun ownership.
Americans sometimes see this as an expression of deeper problems with crime, a notion ingrained, in part, by a series of films portraying urban gang violence in the early 1990s. But the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley.
Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.
They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.
More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.
This suggests that the guns themselves cause the violence.
Mass Shootings Happen Everywhere
Skeptics of gun control sometimes point to a 2016 study. From 2000 and 2014, it found, the United States death rate by mass shooting was 1.5 per one million people. The rate was 1.7 in Switzerland and 3.4 in Finland, suggesting American mass shootings were not actually so common.
But the same study found that the United States had 133 mass shootings. Finland had only two, which killed 18 people, and Switzerland had one, which killed 14. In short, isolated incidents. So while mass shootings can happen anywhere, they are only a matter of routine in the United States.
As with any crime, the underlying risk is impossible to fully erase. Any individual can snap or become entranced by a violent ideology. What is different is the likelihood that this will lead to mass murder.
In China, about a dozen seemingly random attacks on schoolchildren killed 25 people between 2010 and 2012. Most used knives; none used a gun.
By contrast, in this same window, the United States experienced five of its deadliest mass shootings, which killed 78 people. Scaled by population, the American attacks were 12 times as deadly.
Beyond the Statistics
In 2013, American gun-related deaths included 21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides and 505 deaths caused by an accidental discharge. That same year in Japan, a country with one-third America's population, guns were involved in only 13 deaths.
This means an American is about 300 times more likely to die by gun homicide or accident than a Japanese person. America's gun ownership rate is 150 times as high as Japan's. That gap between 150 and 300 shows that gun ownership statistics alone do not explain what makes America different.
The United States also has some of the world's weakest controls over who may buy a gun and what sorts of guns may be owned.
Switzerland has the second-highest gun ownership rate of any developed country, about half that of the United States. Its gun homicide rate in 2004 was 7.7 per million people — unusually high, in keeping with the relationship between gun ownership and murders, but still a fraction of the rate in the United States.
Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that can be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own.
The Difference Is Culture
The United States is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that begin with the opposite assumption: that people have an inherent right to own guns.
The main reason American regulation of gun ownership is so weak may be the fact that the trade-offs are simply given a different weight in the United States than they are anywhere else.
After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 incident. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.
That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.
“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”
SUMMARY: Investigators say they have "very important" clues to what drove an attacker to bomb a concert in Manchester, England. But they face an unwelcome obstacle; intelligence leaks to the American press, fueling a diplomatic fight, and a pause in intelligence sharing. Ciaran Jenkins of Independent Television News reports, and William Brangham talks to former FBI counterterrorism investigator Ali Soufan.
I just read that the Trump administration has filled only 22 of the 553 key positions that require Senate confirmation. This makes me worry that the administration will not have enough manpower to produce the same volume and standard of incompetence that we've come to expect so far.
Granted, in its first few months the administration has produced an impressive amount of ineptitude with very few people.
On his worst days Sean Spicer can produce more errors than 10 normal men on their best days. Kellyanne Conway can flail her way through television confrontations 24/7 and still have the stamina to lose to the Teletubbies on Saturday morning.
The White House staffing system is successfully answering the question, 'How many scorpions can you fit in a bottle?' And in general, the personnel process has been so rigorous in its selection of inexperience that those who were hired on the basis of mere nepotism look like Dean Acheson by comparison.
But still, I worry that at the current pace the Trump administration is going to run out of failure. So far, we've lived in a golden age of malfunction. Every major Trump initiative has been blocked or has collapsed, relationships with Congress are disastrous, the President's approval ratings are at cataclysmic lows.
But can this last? By midsummer, during the high vacation and indictment season, we could see empty hallways in the West Wing and a disorienting incompetence shortage emanating from Washington.
The executive branch could simply go dark. CNN's ratings will plummet. Columnists will wither and die. Liberals will have to go without the delicious current of schadenfreude and their daily ritual baths of moral superiority.
Now I'm not underestimating the President's own capacity for carrying on in an incompetent manner almost indefinitely. I don't think we've reached peak Trump.
The normal incompetent person flails and stammers and is embarrassed about it. But the true genius at incompetence like our President flails and founders and is too incompetent to recognize his own incompetence. He mistakes his catastrophes for successes and so accelerates his pace toward oblivion. Those who ignore history are condemned to retweet it.
Trump's greatest achievements are in the field of ignorance. Up until this period I had always thought of ignorance as a void, as an absence of knowledge. But Trump's ignorance is not just an absence; it is a rich, intricate and entirely separate universe of negative information, a sort of fertile intellectual antimatter with its own gravitational pull.
It's not so much that he isn't well informed; it's that he is prodigiously learned in the sort of knowledge that doesn't accord with the facts of our current dimension.
It is in its own way a privilege to be alive at the same time as a man who is the Albert Einstein of confirmation bias, a man whose most impressive wall is the one between himself and evidence, a man who doesn't need to go off in search of enemies because he is already his own worst one.
But even Trump will eventually hit the limits of human endurance. I know what it is like to be profoundly incompetent, and it is exhausting.
Just to take a small example by way of illustration, in the days before GPS I was (and remain) profoundly incompetent at comprehending driving directions. I would ask for directions and all would start off normally: “Go down Fourth Street and take a right on Poplar.”
But then all would slide into a fog of incomprehensibility and I would keep nodding furiously to try to persuade the person that I could follow what was being said: “Then you toggle over that spur of the thruway that goes under the overpass before the six roundabouts of the gargle.”
By this time entire hemispheres of my brain had shut down, and as the person kept talking, my entire existence slipped into a catatonic mist: “After that it's just six wheedles up the perplex and after a quick stop at the bolint it's the 27th driveway on the right.”
The incompetent person in the Trump administration has to live in that stupor shroud every day.
So I hope the Trump team learns to delegate — carelessness in one office, backbiting in another. I hope the president continues to play golf (I don't get those progressive critics who say Trump is ruining the world and then they complain because he takes time off). I hope his team continues to take advantage of the fact that it takes only one inexperienced stooge to undo the accomplishments of 100 normal workers.
And I hope it continues to negatively surpass all expectations. I remain a full-fledged member in the community of the agog.
One of the things I've learned about incompetence over the past few months is that it is radically nonlinear. Competent people go in one of a few directions. But incompetence is infinite.
The human imagination is not capacious enough to comprehend all the many ways the Trumpians can find to screw this thing up.
