We begin today’s roundup with Nicholas Kristof at The New York Times writing about New Zealand’s quick response on gun safety:
[W]hile it’s true that white supremacy is deadly and needs to be confronted — something our vote-obsessed president blindly ignores — without the weapons of mass murder, 50 New Zealand worshipers would still be alive; 17 Parkland, Fla., schoolchildren and staff members would still be alive; nine Charleston, S.C., churchgoers would still be alive; 11 Pittsburgh congregants would still be alive; 58 Las Vegas concertgoers would still be alive; 26 Newtown, Conn., first graders and adults would. …
Why can’t leaders in America learn from experience, the way leaders in other countries do? After a massacre in Australia in 1996, the government there took far-reaching action to tighten gun policy. In contrast, every day in America, another hundred people die from gun violence and 300 more are injured — and our president and Congress do nothing.
Jared Savage at The New Zealand Herald provides local perspective on the reforms, including the fact that New Zealand has its own incredibly powerful gun lobby, that owning a gun is not a right in New Zealand and that the reforms carve out exemptions for the concerns of the rural community:
Time after time, political momentum petered out and nothing happened.
This led to a loophole where anyone with a basic A-category licence could purchase a semi-automatic, such as an AR-15, and easily upgrade the firearm into a more dangerous MSSA weapon.
Anyone, including the Christchurch shooter who killed 50 innocent people and wounded nearly as many. [...]
The announcement by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern successfully balances the tension between making New Zealand safer, and the legitimate concerns of the rural community.
By instantly changing the Arms Act to reclassify any semi-automatic with a calibre greater than .22 as MSSA firearms, weapons such as the AR-15 now require E-category licences.
These licence endorsements are much more difficult to obtain.
Here’s a good primer on the New Zealand/USA similarities and differences in the gun safety debate.
Meanwhile, on the topic of felon disenfranchisement in Florida, Igor Derysh at Salon summarizes attempts to enact barriers to voting by former felons:
The move could mean that up to 80 percent of the 1.4 million former felons who just had their rights restored could have them stripped away yet again, The Daily Beast reported. More than 10 percent of the state’s adults had been barred from voting, including more than 20 percent of African-Americans [...]
The bill would not only affect disenfranchised Florida residents but the country as a whole, since the state plays an outsize role in determining presidential elections. In a state where voter registrations are split nearly down the middle between Democrats and Republicans and key races are often so close that they trigger recounts, the addition of 1.4 million potential new voters likely to skew Democratic was widely perceived as a game-changer.
Former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, by the way, is working on signing up 1 million new registered voters in that state.
Here’s Nancy LeTourneau at Washington Monthly on the topic:
The reason this is such a big deal is that, even amidst all of the chatter about Rust Belt vs. Sun Belt, Florida remains the “swingiest” of swing states. The path to winning the White House is an arduous uphill climb for the party that loses the sunshine state. As Republicans attempt to stop ex-felons from voting, Andrew Gillum is about to announce the launch of a major voter registration drive.
The Washington Post looks calls for a rebalancing of power between the branches of government:
SOMETHING POSITIVE has come out of the otherwise troubling situation in which President Trump has managed — so far — to thwart the will of Congress and allocate funds to his proposed border wall. There is an increasing awareness on Capitol Hill that Mr. Trump is taking advantage of past lawmakers’ excessive delegation of power to the executive branch. Whether legislators override Mr. Trump’s veto of their termination of his emergency declaration or — as seems far more likely — fail to override it, the legislative branch needs to take back its legitimate powers.
On a final note, don’t miss Dana Milbank’s piece on Donald Trump Jr. and Brexit:
Trump the Younger went on to inform the land of the Magna Carta, John Locke and Oliver Cromwell that, in his expert view, “democracy in the U.K. is all but dead.”
[I]t’s not clear why anyone affiliated with the president would feel entitled to lecture other countries’ leaders about their domestic problems after President Trump, who enjoys a 39 percent approval rating in the latest Gallup poll, provoked the longest government shutdown in history, suffered a string of legal and legislative setbacks and has had his mental health questioned by a top aide’s spouse.