The Right to Bear Arms…

…Shall not be infringed. While to most, that line seems pretty straightforward, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham lacks this basic understanding. On September 8, 2023, Governor Grisham announced a firearms order that essentially banned guns for 30 days in sections of New Mexico. While the order has since been scaled back after significant bipartisan […]

How the Government Started a Race War with Guns

Gun reform—suddenly the contention is palpable and explosive. The current hyperfocus is wholly attributable to the courageous and unyielding student survivors turned activists who survived the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting. For those of us with a modicum of melanin in our skin, however, gun violence and the resultant fight to mitigate it […]

Are Protests Powerful? (It Depends)

Black Lives Matters protesters in Missouri stand together along a highway, with locked arms, chanting and holding signs that read “black lives matter” and “say their names.” But they are surrounded. From above, the buzzing of helicopters compete with the cries of the crowd. On the ground, S.W.A.T. officers appear and the police threaten arrest […]

Of Miscreants and Malignancy

Something is rotten in the state of the Union. Our leaders are more concerned about making the other side look bad than they are about effective governance, and have forgotten that they were elected to make mature decisions about the nation’s future. Politicians use underhanded methods and baiting tactics to produce “gotcha” moments for the […]

Proposition 63 – Gun Control in the Golden State

After years of watching mass shootings happen in nearly every other state within the relative safety of their own, Californians were shocked last year when gunners opened fire on the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, killing 14 people in minutes and remaining on the loose for hours afterward, resulting in what is now the […]

Cracking Down On Gun Control In California

On January 1st, 2016, a new gun control statute regarding the seizure of firearms to allow for “law enforcement, or immediate family members to ask a judge for a restraining order if they feel that someone is a danger to themselves or others… and bar the person from purchasing firearms by placing them on the […]

The Critical Need to Enact Gun Control

This is one part of the larger debate on gun control in the U.S. The opposing article can be found here. Infuriating political stalemate aside, Congress must act to bring about gun control legislation.  The current trajectory of federal inaction in the wake of a record number of gun-related massacres suggests the likelihood that it […]

The Gun Violence Restraining Order: Necessity or Over-Prevention?

On September 30th, 2014, Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill titled “Gun Violence Restraining Order” (AB 1014), making California the first state to permit such a law. This bill allows Californians to petition to revoke firearms temporarily from relatives whom they fear might be mentally unstable or a threat to the public. Assemblywoman Barbara Skinner […]