SCOTUS hiding in plain sight

The best Supreme Court coverage (and coverage of any story, for that matter), is not without nuance—it’s true that some liberals have seen cause for hope in Barrett’s record, that some Trumpers (including, apparently, Trump himself) have been frustrated by it, and that there is at least some statistical grounding for such conclusions, according to The Columbia Journalism Review. Ultimately, though—as the Times journalist Jodi Kantor, who wrote the story with the aforementioned “confounding” headline and statistical analysis earlier this year, noted in a recent write-up of Barrett’s sit-down with Weiss—Barrett has almost never voted with the court’s liberals in “major cases.” And while her book tour is taking in mainstream outlets, Willis argued last week that she will mostly sit before friendly interlocutors. Barrett appears to understand “the particular political and ideological persuasions of people” who are willing to pay for her book, Willis wrote. “A publicity tour that kicks off with an exclusive excerpt in the Free Press is a publicity tour designed to appeal to people who approve of this Court’s agenda, and are glad to express their appreciation by opening their wallets.”

That’s a shame because, perhaps now more than ever, there are sharp questions for the justices to answer. Recently, the court has faced a slew of criticism for enabling Trump’s agenda—parts of which would appear to be out-and-out illegal—not least in a major ruling, for which Barrett wrote the majority opinion, that a majority of justices used to curtail the ability of lower courts to issue sweeping injunctions while failing to address the substance underpinning the case at hand: Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional order unilaterally ending birthright citizenship. At least in that case we got a clear rationale—the court has also recently been criticized for overturning rulings against Trump on its so-called “shadow docket,” sometimes without so much as a word of explanation. Last week, in a sight even rarer than Supreme Court justices sitting for media interviews, ten federal judges complained anonymously to NBC News that such behavior has not only left them struggling to divine the court’s will, but allowed for the impression that the justices think they’re a bunch of anti-Trump hacks. Over the weekend, Stephen Breyer, who retired as a justice in 2022, made an unusual public intervention defending a lower-court judge who had been rebuked from the bench for supposedly failing to follow Supreme Court precedent. Any criticism from Breyer was predictably indirect, but various prominent commentators have been more forthright. Last week alone, The New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser described the court as “Trumpified,” while Politico’s Ankush Khardori and Ezra Klein, of the Times, both attested to its extraordinary “deference” to Trump. Kate Shaw, a legal commentator and recent guest on Klein’s podcast, said that the court has, among other things, essentially allowed Trump to “refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress, remove heads of independent agencies protected by statute from summary firing, fire civil servants without cause, dismantle federal agencies, [and] call up the National Guard on the thinnest of pretexts.”

On the same episode of his podcast, Klein opened by referring to a widely shared essay that he published in the early days of this administration, making the case that observers shouldn’t take Trump’s various shocking actions at face value since, in doing so, they risk rhetorically imbuing him with powers he doesn’t have. Klein’s admonition was not aimed specifically at members of the press, but I noted at the time that it clearly applied to us; I broadly agreed that the media shouldn’t treat Trump’s power grabs as a fait accompli, but also noted a complicating factor: that time and again, Trump has been able to get away with things he really shouldn’t be able to do. One example that I cited was credulous coverage of the birthright citizenship order; fast-forward six months and Trump has not succeeded in implementing it, but neither has the idea been dismissed out of hand. Returning to his earlier essay last week, Klein noted that, for a time, his “bet looked sort of right,” with the courts intervening to curb Trump. The Supreme Court, however, has since reversed that trend.

A potential silver lining of this development, Klein argued, is that “maybe we’re not going to have the constitutional showdown many feared.” I also wrote about this fear in the early days of the administration, as talk of a “constitutional crisis,” and debate as to whether the US was in one or not, crested in the media; some experts argued that we were already at that point, with the administration appearing to have defied certain lower-court orders, but others cautioned that the sort of big-bang institutional conflict—the Supreme Court telling Trump to do something and him saying “make me,” for instance—that would signal a true crisis had yet to arrive, and straight-news reporters seemed reluctant to definitively use the term in their copy without attributing it to someone else. Since that moment, the debate seems to have quieted down somewhat, though from time to time, it gets revived. Search for the words “constitutional crisis” this morning, and the top results are all about Barrett: last week, Weiss prompted her to weigh in on the debate, and she dismissed the premise, adding, “I don’t know what a constitutional crisis would look like.”

Barrett did then offer up a definition—“We would clearly be in one if the rule of law crumbles,” she said, “but that is not the place where we are”—but her initial skepticism was actually sound: the concept of a “constitutional crisis” is nebulous, so much so, I argued earlier in the year, that the media coverage organized around it risked coming across as fussy, at best, unhelpful at worst. As some journalists did point out at the time, a constitutional crisis need not be ushered in by a big bang to be a crisis: one wisely noted that the idea exists as “a slope, not a switch”; others suggested that the court rubber-stamping Trump’s behavior might represent an even graver crisis than all-out conflict between the two. It is, to be sure, still early in Trump’s second term, and the court has yet to substantively weigh in on a whole host of matters. But it seems peculiar to me—even if I didn’t love the initial constitutional-crisis news cycle—that the volume seems to have been turned down now, given that, by really any credible definition, such a crisis is now here. (Whether the rule of law has yet “crumbled” is, perhaps, debatable, but the administration weaponizing it to go after its bêtes noires looks pretty crumbly to me.) Klein declared over the weekend, in a compelling essay headlined “Stop Acting Like This Is Normal,” that we have already entered the “authoritarian consolidation stage of this presidency.” Inconveniently for a media industry that organizes coverage around defined “news pegs,” perceived novelty, and breathless “BREAKING NEWS” hype, such phases can be murky and repetitive and don’t always announce themselves explicitly (though Trump, a master of hype, announces his true intentions all the time). Many media critics have taken the press to task for not communicating the gravity of the threat with sufficient urgency or honesty. So far in Trump’s second term, I’ve been hesitant to endorse that conclusion, at least in its less nuanced forms. But it increasingly feels inescapable.

My hesitation was mostly grounded in the fact that it was still early, and in the clear-eyed coverage that I felt I had seen so far. But the latter often felt delayed itself, after years of more or less complacent media treatment of the institutional threat of Trumpism. And this observation did not apply only to Trump and his movement—as I wrote earlier this year, I also found the constitutional-crisis debate to be unhelpful because it risked obscuring the ways the US constitutional system might have been in crisis already, no few of which have been downstream of the flagrantly political conduct of the Supreme Court. Naive coverage of that conduct has been one form of long-running media complacency. There have been signs that such coverage has grown more hard-headed in recent years, though here, too, pinpointing a “big bang” inflection point is difficult. The death of Antonin Scalia, in 2016; the ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, in 2022; and the growing scandal around justices’ extracurricular entanglements, in 2023, could all plausibly stake a claim. But none marked a total rupture with the media practice of putting justices on pedestals.

On CBS yesterday, there were moments to like in Norah O’Donnell’s interview with Barrett; on the whole, O’Donnell teased out at least some of the tension between the public’s increasingly political conception of the justices and the justices’ explicitly apolitical conception of themselves. Equally, however, it was possible to imagine a much more aggressive version of the interview that would have better met this moment—albeit, perhaps, not one to which Barrett would have agreed to subject herself. At one point, O’Donnell pointed out that Barrett is a “scholar of the Constitution” before reading her a section on the power of Congress to levy tariffs. “You’re a scholar of the Constitution, Norah,” Barrett replied, with a beaming smile. “You’re making me one,” O’Donnell laughed. In this exchange, Barrett was dodging a question that O’Donnell was right to put to her. Numerous bigger questions about the state of that Constitution, sadly, went unasked.

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CREATORS: Jails and Prisons Responsible for Brunt of Mental Health Care

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
September 9, 2025

Milton Dusky was 33 years old and suffering from Schizophrenia. He was experiencing visual hallucinations, depression and alcoholism. He was under the influence of alcohol and drugs when he accompanied two teenage boys across state lines and raped a young girl.

He was arrested and charged with a federal crime. He had an evaluation that found he was "oriented to time, place, and person," and competent to stand trial. In 1958, he was convicted and appealed.

In 1960, Dusky's case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. The High Court made a significant ruling regarding competency to stand trial. The court moved away from an analysis that considered whether an accused is "oriented to time and place and (has) some recollection of events" to a finding that an accused has "sufficient present ability to consult with his lawyer with a reasonable degree of rational understanding — and whether he has a rational as well as factual understanding of the proceeding against him."

Competency is often confused with insanity. Competency is a determination of whether an accused can be tried for a crime. Insanity is a determination of whether an accused is responsible for a crime.

The M'Naghten Rule is the legal standard to determine a defendant's legal insanity and criminal responsibility at the time an offense was committed. It is not a clinical assessment of a person's basic awareness. It asks two central questions, based on the defendant's mental state at the time of the crime:

— Did the defendant know the nature and quality of the act they were doing?

— If they did, did they know that what they were doing was wrong?

Although the standards for competency and insanity are different, the impact on the accused can often be very similar and equally troubling. The Marshall Project recently examined what happens to an accused who is suspected of being incompetent. Some people can languish in jail for months and months waiting for a competency evaluation.

As The Marshall Project pointed out, "In the most severe cases, a court can issue a permanent finding of incompetence. Numerous states have long backlogs of criminal defendants waiting for 'competency restoration' before they can be tried in court."

Competency restoration is a term of art in the criminal justice system. An accused who is deemed incompetent is entitled to treatment that can stabilize the individual and enable that person, with medication and therapy, to aid in their defense and stand trial. Ideally, the treatment is provided at a forensic hospital. Unfortunately, those beds are scarce in most states, and individuals suffering from mental illness stay in jail until a bed is available.

One of the states with a waitlist for competency restoration is Pennsylvania. According to an investigation by Spotlight PA, "The (Pennsylvania) Department of Corrections and county jails have unintentionally become the largest providers of behavioral health services in the Commonwealth and are not sufficiently prepared and resourced to meet this population's needs."

To back up the findings, Spotlight PA teamed up with PrimeCare, a private contractor that provides healthcare to 37 jails across Pennsylvania, and the Lehigh Valley Justice Institute to review 10 years of mental healthcare data.

An analysis found that more than 60% of inmates screened for mental health problems needed services while incarcerated.

The nationwide shift away from civil commitment treatment beds toward forensic treatment is a huge part of the problem, Jerri Clark, a research and advocacy manager for the Treatment Advocacy Center, told The Marshal Project. "Punishment is never going to magically create insight for someone who is deeply unwell," Clark said. "You cannot punish someone out of their delusional thinking."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino 

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Mangino discusses Ohio cold case murder prosecution on WFMJ-TV

Watch my interview with Leslie Huff on WFMJ-TV21 concerning the long delayed murder trial of Robert Moore in Youngstown, Ohio.

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American prisons are fast becoming the world’s worst nursing homes

 German Lopez writing in The New York Times:

American prisons are fast becoming the world’s worst nursing homes, increasingly filled with aging criminals who can barely walk, let alone commit another crime. The idea that we should lock up people for life, even through old age, is often framed as being tough on crime. In reality, it gives years, if not decades, of shelter, food and health care to convicted criminals and redirects money from programs we know do a better job of protecting the public.

Older people are much less likely to commit crime than the young. They are also much more expensive to lock up. Federal prisons with the largest share of older prisoners spend five times as much per person on medical care and 14 times as much on medications as other facilities, according to the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit advocacy group.

States and counties, which oversee a vast majority of people in prison, cannot run deficits for long or print money, as the federal government can. Every buck that pays for one thing means a dollar less for another. Funds spent on locking up an old inmate could have helped pay for more police officers or other anti-crime initiatives or schools or roads or any of the myriad other demands on local governments.

I have reported on criminal justice issues for more than a decade. If I have learned anything, it’s that crime policy is all about trade-offs, more so than in most other areas. Releasing more old people from prison, however, is close to a free lunch. Not only could it save money, but if the savings are wisely reinvested, it also could improve public safety.

America is heading in the opposite direction. Over the past three decades, the share of prisoners who are 55 or older has multiplied fivefold. Two trends have accelerated the phenomenon: First, young people are committing far less crime, so they are less likely to fill up prisons. Second, tough-on-crime trends led to more life sentences and other long prison penalties, and time is now taking its toll.

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The age-crime curve is the least-appreciated fact of criminal justice. If you chart a man’s likelihood to commit crime over his life, the line will hover near zero until he reaches his teens. Then his chance of committing a crime spikes, almost vertically, over the next decade. Nothing is more dangerous, in terms of crime, than a young man in his late teens or early 20s. But starting around his mid-20s, the line starts to drop. This continues for the rest of a typical man’s life. By the time he’s in his 50s, he is less likely to commit crime than he was as a young teenager.

Those trends are true for the general public. Do they apply to convicted criminals? Yes. One federal study tracked prison inmates after their release in 34 states. Nearly 57 percent of ex-inmates 24 or younger ended up back in prison within five years. Fewer than 15 percent of those 65 or older did. In other words, a vast majority of older inmates don’t reoffend.

On some level, we all recognize this. We know the brain doesn’t finish developing until a person’s mid-20s. Physicality matters, too. As a teenager, I could fall out of a tree, get back up and sprint after my friends without feeling a thing. Now, in my mid-30s, I feel my back hurting for days if I make a wrong turn picking up my cat. Crime follows the same facts of life. The kind of poor judgment that leads someone to commit more crime is more common among the young, and so is the physical ability to make good on that poor judgment.

Outliers do exist. But a vast majority of killers are not serial killers, and a vast majority of criminals are not lifelong offenders. Many criminals, maybe even most, committed a crime under the particular circumstances of their age and the moment. Keeping criminals locked up when they’re young absolutely can stop crime. Older inmates, however, pose little threat to the rest of us.

Supporters of the status quo raise two counterarguments: First, people who commit heinous crimes deserve to remain in prison, no matter their age, to demonstrate society’s moral condemnation. Second, long prison sentences, including those that last through old age and death, are good because they deter others from committing crimes.

The first counterargument is about values. I would argue that criminal justice policies should prioritize protecting the public over retribution. We don’t need to turn prisons into nursing homes to show our disapproval of a crime; decades-long prison sentences do a good enough job. But reasonable people can disagree.

The second counterargument, however, is simply wrong. A thorough review of the research found that longer prison sentences’ deterrence effect is “mild or zero.” As part of his analysis, the researcher, David Roodman, tried to replicate prominent studies that claimed evidence of long sentences deterring criminals. He found they contained serious problems that skewed their conclusions. All told, threatening to lock up people until their late 50s, 60s and beyond does little for public safety.

Lawmakers should address this problem with available policies: Governors should issue pardons for older inmates. Parole boards should put more weight on age. Officials should more aggressively use compassionate release laws that on a limited basis let out inmates who are ill. But lawmakers should go further. They should enact laws that require courts to revisit sentences after, say, 20 years. They should grant inmates the presumption of parole in more cases, meaning a parole board would keep a person locked up only with good reason. Broader reform should reduce the use of longer sentences in general.

Some caution is warranted. People deemed dangerous — the criminal justice system has ways of gauging that risk — should not be let out. Policies might exclude certain kinds of crimes.

With the savings from releases, lawmakers could pay for more effective approaches to public safety. Experts often say the United States is overincarcerated and underpoliced, particularly for violent crime. Police departments across the country have reported serious staffing shortages for years, and we know that having fewer officers around leads to more crime. These shortages are one reason nearly half of America’s murderers now get away with it.

You don’t have to mourn an older killer’s lifelong suffering in prison to think reform is a good idea. You can just think, as I do, that the criminal justice system should protect Americans as efficiently and effectively as possible. Paying for the housing, food and health care of someone unlikely to commit a crime should not make the cut.

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Budget cuts cause chaos for criminal justice practitioners

 From The Marshall Project:

The cuts have caused chaos in criminal justice grantmaking, creating a perception that the process is increasingly aligned with President Donald Trump and the Project 2025 agenda — even as some decisions contradict the administration’s own stated goals.

“We have seen the Department of Justice weaponized to be in service of President Trump's political agenda and weaponized to go after his opponents and critics and enemies,” Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, said.

DOJ funding under the second Trump administration now serves the president’s agenda of mass deportation and a “law and order” approach to reducing crime, Rahman said. The DOJ terminated $5 million in outstanding funds to Vera, who, for 64 years, has run on a platform of criminal justice reform achieved by research. Rahman said the nonprofit had unwavering support from the federal government in the past. Now, Vera is among those organizations that sued to reinstate the funding.

In addition to grassroots anti-violence nonprofits, local police departments, prosecutors and courts, state departments of corrections, national criminal justice nonprofits and researchers had to pause or scale back programs, find other sources of funding, leave positions open or lay off staff. Equal Justice USA (EJUSA), a national nonprofit whose work included funding grassroots organizations supporting victims of violent crime or working to prevent violence also shut down.

“The opportunity to support a President’s agenda may be greater through OJP grant funding than it is through any of the federal government’s other grant-making components,” Gene Hamilton, a DOJ official during Trump’s first administration, wrote in the chapter about the department in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership.

Since its creation in 1984, OJP has aimed to make the federal government a major supporter of state and local governments’ efforts to reduce crime, often through research, evaluation and development — and grants to encourage new programs, or to support promising models. The office is responsible for grants that transfer billions of federal dollars to state and local agencies making up the criminal justice system, as well as research and nonprofit organizations.

OJP provides site-based grants, which fund local governments or nonprofits to implement programs in particular places, research grants to study the effectiveness of programs, as well as training and technical assistance grants that share expertise to help local programs best use their funding. Training and technical assistance grants, often to national nonprofits like EJUSA or Vera, were the hardest hit in the April cuts. They accounted for more than $578 million in original funds, the Council on Criminal Justice found.

The Justice Department told grant recipients that were terminated that their work “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” A termination letter reviewed by The Marshall Project said the department was focusing on direct support and coordination for law enforcement, “combatting violent crime”, “protecting American children,” and supporting victims of trafficking and sexual assault.

However, many of the grant cuts were in these areas. While police departments were not the primary recipients of terminated grants, the Justice Department ended grants aimed at supporting police. The department ended a grant that expanded police officer safety wellness training as part of a broader police mental health and wellness initiative. It also terminated a training and technical assistance grant to help rural law enforcement agencies implement plans to reduce violence. Beyond technical assistance, that grant also funded a few small, focused agency programs to confront violent crime problems.

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DC grand juries resist Trump 'crackdown' on crime

In the three weeks since President Trump flooded the streets of Washington with hundreds of troops and federal agents, there have been only a few scattered protests and scarcely a word from Congress, which has quietly gone along with the deployment, reported The New York Times.

But one show of resistance has come from an extraordinary source: federal grand jurors.

In what could be read as a citizens’ revolt, ordinary people serving on grand juries have repeatedly refused in recent days to indict their fellow residents who became entangled in either the president’s immigration crackdown or his more recent show of force. It has happened in at least seven cases — including three times for the same defendant.

Given the secretive nature of grand juries, it is all but impossible to know precisely why this has been happening, but the persistent rejections suggest that grand jurors may have had enough of prosecutors seeking harsh charges in a highly politicized environment.

Courthouse wits have long quoted Judge Sol Wachtler, the former New York jurist who said that prosecutors are in such complete control of grand juries that they could get them to indict a ham sandwich. But that old saw did not hold true in the rebellion in Federal District Court in Washington, where grand jurors seem to have taken a stand in defense of their community.

“First of all, it is exceedingly rare for any grand jury to reject a proposed indictment because ordinarily prosecutors use discretion in only bringing cases that are strong and advance the interests of justice,” said Barbara L. McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in Detroit who teaches at the University of Michigan Law School. “I have seen this maybe once or twice in my career of 20 years, but this is something different.”

“My guess,” Ms. McQuade went on, “is that these grand jurors are seeing prosecutorial overreach and they don’t want to be part of it.”

While crime has fallen in Washington since National Guard troops and federal agents started to police the streets in large numbers in mid-August, the deployment has chafed many local residents, who have found their presence to be a source of anxiety, not security. And because of the deployment, a flurry of defendants have been charged with federal felonies in cases that would typically have been handled at the local court level, if they were brought at all.

Many of these cases have recently been downgraded or dismissed altogether after failing in grand juries, a tacit acknowledgment by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington that they were overcharged to begin with. The most prominent example is the case of Sean C. Dunn, a former Justice Department paralegal who was charged with felony assault after he threw a sub-style salami sandwich at a federal agent on patrol near the corner of 14th and U Streets. His charges were knocked down to a misdemeanor last week after prosecutors were unable to indict him. 

While Mr. Dunn’s case has become a cause célèbre, inspiring Banksy-style images of figures hurling hoagies on walls across the city, other cases have also crashed and burned, without as much publicity.

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Gun industry found 'positive feelings' among gun owners to reform

 In 2019, with the horrors of the Parkland mass shooting still fresh in most Americans’ minds, the gun industry funded a study to “determine the most effective ways of communicating with the American public about the benefits of firearm ownership,” reported The Trace/Rolling Stone.                                  

Its findings, which were not shared with the public, indicated that Americans who support gun ownership could be persuaded by the value of reforms that are vigorously opposed by the gun industry, gun rights groups, and Republican lawmakers. Those reforms include universal background checks, red flag laws, and even a gun registry, which vocal gun rights advocates have falsely claimed made the Holocaust possible.

The study, titled “Communicating With The American Public About Firearm Ownership,” was commissioned by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a nonprofit that serves as the gun industry’s trade group, founded to ensure the survival of its dues-paying members, which include firearms manufacturers, retailers, and ranges. An online survey administered to more than 4,000 Americans tested the power of 24 pro-gun and 24 anti-gun messages. The respondents were divided into multiple categories, including those who had a “positive feeling” about gun ownership.

While the study does not cite Parkland or any mass shooting as a reason for its undertaking, it was conducted at a moment when substantial reforms seemed possible. The indiscriminate killing of students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had galvanized the nation in a manner not seen since Newtown, and the pressure for regulation and accountability was high. Many young Americans, in particular, who had come of age as mass shootings became commonplace, held a negative view of firearms, according to industry research, and that posed a problem for future business. There was a need, it seemed, to find the most resonant ways to convey the value of gun ownership.  

“While the sports shooting industry devotes substantial funding and effort to communications initiatives to boost participation in and support for sport shooting and firearms,” the study notes, “little reliable data exists indicating which messages and communications themes work best.” 

The Trace and Rolling Stone obtained a copy of the study for an ongoing series that seeks to unearth what the gun industry conceals about its customers and practices from public view. The NSSF declined to provide a comment for this story.

On Wednesday, August 27, a 23-year-old shooter, who legally purchased three firearms recovered by law enforcement, opened fire at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, murdering two children and injuring 14 more before taking their own life. The setting and the ages of the victims evoked the 2022 massacre in Uvalde, Texas. That year, President Joe Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act into law, a gun bill that contained politically safe reforms, such as the allocation of funds for mental health resources and school safety. 

After decades of congressional gridlock on the issue, the package was hailed as an epic breakthrough, a valiant example of bipartisan compromise that still mostly relied on Democrats for passage. The NSSF study, then, raises a key question: Why have Republican lawmakers largely stood against more significant reforms, let alone any reform at all? As the study indicates, many people with a favorable view of gun ownership appear open to going further than the lawmakers and special interests who represent them.

For people who the study says have a “positive feeling” about gun ownership, the study ranks the top five arguments for and against it. The top arguments in favor almost all revolve around rights, beginning with “Self-defense is a basic right,” followed by “Americans have the right to own a gun,” “It’s people’s right as Americans to own a gun,” and “Gun ownership is protected by the Constitution.” The remaining argument, which came in at No. 3, states, “Owning and training with a firearm teaches important skills, including responsibility, accuracy, safe gun handling, self-defense, and strategies to avoid dangerous situations.”

When told to rank the “most effective arguments against firearm ownership,” these same respondents chose policies that the gun industry and Republican lawmakers actively oppose. The argument the group found to be most effective is: “Universal background checks for gun sales and transactions are supported by approximately 85 percent of Americans.” 

Other statements deemed highly effective by these respondents included “Guns should be licensed just like cars,” “State red flag laws to remove guns from those who show warning signs of violence keep guns out of the hands of those who would harm themselves or others,” “Gun violence is an epidemic in the U.S.,” and “Common sense gun laws to close loopholes in current gun laws will save lives and prevent gun violence.”

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