Tag: hit&run

Today the Justice Department finalized its ban on bump stocks, which Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker claims merely “clarifies” federal law. It actually rewrites federal law, a function the Constitution assigns to Congress. Whitaker also wants us to believe that the bump stock ban shows “President Donald Trump is a law and order president.” To the contrary, it shows he is a president who ignores the law whenever it proves inconvenient.

The final rule defines “bump-stock-type devices” as “machineguns” under the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968 “because such devices allow a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger.” That understanding of the law contradicts the plain language of the NFA, the position repeatedly taken by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) during the Obama administration, and the interpretation endorsed by both supporters and opponents of a legislative ban.

The NFA defines a machine gun as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” A bump stock harnesses recoil energy to make a rifle slide back after it is fired, resetting the trigger. If the shooter maintains forward pressure on the barrel, the trigger will bump against his stationary finger, causing the gun to fire again, and so on. This technique increases the rate of fire, but the rifle is still shooting just one round for each function of the trigger.

The Justice Department had to find a way around the clear meaning of the law because the president promised to ban bump stocks by administrative fiat after they were used by the perpetrator of an attack that killed 58 people in Las Vegas last year. The DOJ accomplished that trick by defining “a single function of the trigger” as “a single pull of the trigger” and defining pull to exclude what happens during bump fire. According to this account, when the trigger is activated by bumping against the trigger finger, that is not, contrary to logic and appearances, a “function of the trigger.”

Another problem for DOJ was that a rifle equipped with a bump stock does not operate “automatically,” since the shooter has to maintain “constant forward pressure with the non-trigger hand on the barrel-shroud or fore-grip of the rifle, and constant rearward pressure on the device’s extension ledge with the shooter’s trigger finger,” as the rule notes. The Justice Department resolved that difficulty by treating the shooter as part of the rifle mechanism.

According to the rule, “these devices convert an otherwise semiautomatic firearm into a machinegun by functioning as a self-acting or self-regulating mechanism that harnesses the recoil energy of the semiautomatic firearm in a manner that allows the trigger to reset and continue firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter.” That gloss is accurate only if you ignore the role of the human who pushes the rifle forward to engage the trigger and if you insist that activating the trigger in that manner does not count as “physical manipulation of the trigger.” The DOJ claims this counterintuitive perspective reflects “the best interpretation of the term ‘machinegun,'” by which it means the interpretation that facilitates the result demanded by the president.

As Joshua Price and Adam Kraut, lawyers representing the Firearms Policy Coalition, noted in comments on the rule, the DOJ’s “interpretative jiggery-pokery” is “pure applesauce.” It not only is inconsistent with what everyone previously understood the law to mean, but it arbitrarily targets certain products when the DOJ’s reasoning would cover all manner of jury-rigged setups that make bump fire possible. “An individual does not require a bump-stock device in order to bump-fire a factory semi-automatic firearm,” Price and Kraut write. “ATF readily acknowledges that bump-firing can be lawfully achieved through the ‘use [of] rubber bands, belt loops, or [to] otherwise train their trigger finger to fire more rapidly,’ in a clear statement of its intent to unequally apply the law.”

Given those alternatives, not to mention the tradeoff between speed and accuracy for shooters using bump stocks, it is doubtful that banning them will have any noticeable impact on the lethality of mass shootings. At the same time, it seems like they ought to be covered by the Second Amendment as arms that are “in common use for lawful purposes,” even if they are by no means necessary to exercise the constitutional right to armed self-defense. But the question is not whether banning bump stocks is a good idea. The question is whether bump stocks are already banned.

Although the Obama administration was much more supportive of gun control than the Trump administration, it repeatedly declared that bump stocks were legal, meaning that banning them would require a new act of Congress. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a dogged gun controller, agreed. This is one of the few gun-related questions on which Feinstein sees eye to eye with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), leader of the Congressional Second Amendment Caucus. When you look at the law, you can see why: Only by stretching and distorting it can you achieve the end ordered by Trump.

Politically, a bump stock ban makes sense. Like most gun control measures, it creates the appearance of doing something about deadly violence. Furthermore, this particular measure won’t raise the hackles of the National Rifle Association, which pre-emptively endorsed an administrative ban on bump stocks, or open the door to more ambitious restrictions, as seeking new legislation from Congress might. Next to those benefits, the political cost of turning otherwise law-abiding gun tinkerers into felons if they fail to destroy or surrender their property seems negligible, notwithstanding the opposition of a few smaller gun rights groups.

Legally, however, the precedent set by Trump’s bump stock ban is troubling, regardless of how you feel about the Second Amendment or define its scope. The president does not have the authority to rewrite laws that interfere with his agenda, whether the subject is guns or immigration. Principled critics of this administration should call Trump out whenever he oversteps his legal powers, even when they happen to like the outcome.

A few weeks after Kentucky’s pension reforms were ruled unconstitutional by the Kentucky Supreme Court, lawmakers are heading into a hastily arranged special session aimed at addressing one of the nation’s worst public retirement crises before the end of the year.

Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, called the special session on Monday evening and two pension bills were introduced late Monday night, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader. Both were subjected to committee hearings on Tuesday and could be prepared for a vote later this week, though Republican leaders in the legislature have not yet committed to voting on either bill—and may make significant changes to what’s been proposed, if they do vote on them.

Though there are two bills moving, most of the attention will be focused on House Bill 1, which is a slightly modified version of the pension overhaul package that passed earlier this year, in the midst of massive protests at the state capitol, only to be struck down by the state Supreme Court. Importantly, the court ruled the previous reform unconstitutional for procedural reasons—the legislature passed the bill without waiting three days—rather than on the merits of the changes.

Like that earlier package, House Bill 1 would move future public employees into a new retirement system using a so-called hybrid cash-balance retirement plan, which retains some elements of a traditional pension and includes individual investment options similar to a 401(k) plan. Future hires know they won’t lose their money—which makes the plans significantly less risky than 401(k) plans in the private sector—but taxpayers will no longer be responsible for making up the difference when the pension investments fall short of expectations. (The Pension Integrity Project at the Reason Foundation, which publishes this blog, provided technical assistance to Gov. Matt Bevin and state legislators as they crafted various pension reform proposals over the past year.)

The second bill, House Bill 2, would limit pension increases for local governments and school districts, and it would reduce a 3 percent pension boost given to teachers after 30 years of experience down to 2.5 percent.

Both are modest steps in the right direction that might help reduce long-term costs in the state pension system, but neither will solve the short-term problem of paying for benefits owed to current workers and retirees. Pensions for those groups of employees would be untouched.

“We have a legal and moral obligation to provide and deliver on the promises that have been made,” Bevin said in a statement announcing the special session. “The only chance we have of doing that, is to change the system going forward.”

The end of the year represents a significant deadline for the pension bills, thanks to an odd quirk in the procedural rules governing the Kentucky legislature. The state operates on a two-year budget, which is supposed to be passed during legislative sessions in even-numbered years. To ease the passage of the budget on time, the state legislature needs only a simple majority to pass appropriations bills in those years. But in odd-numbered years, like 2019, it takes supermajorities to pass those bills. In other words, passing the exact same pension bill could require a larger number of “yay” votes on January 1, 2019, than it would on December 31, 2018.

Kentucky has eight public sector pension plans, and none of them are in good shape. The state faces more than $62 billion in unfunded pension liabilities over the next few decades, and the teachers’ pension plan (the Kentucky Teachers Retirement System, or TRS) accounts for more than $33 billion of that debt.

By comparison, Kentucky taxpayers paid about $32 billion last year to fund the entire state government—everything from schools to road construction.

Depending on how you measure, Kentucky’s public sector pension plans are either the worst-funded or the third worst-funded in the country. A Standard & Poor’s report in 2016 ranked Kentucky dead last, with just 37.2 percent of the assets needed to cover current obligations, behind even such infamous pension basket cases as New Jersey (37.8 percent) and Illinois (40.2 percent). A Moody’s report published a month later measured states’ pension liabilities as a percentage of their annual tax revenue. Kentucky’s liabilities totaled 261 percent of annual tax revenue, well above the average burden of 108 percent and more than three times the median of 85 percent. Only Illinois and Connecticut were in worse shape.

According to an analysis from the Pew Charitable Trusts, only 15 states contributed sufficient funds to their pension systems in 2014 (the most recent year for which complete data is available) to avoid falling farther behind. Among the 35 states that failed to do so, Kentucky was by far the biggest deadbeat, chipping in less than 70 percent of what is required. In the decade between 2006 and 2016, the Kentucky teachers’ pension plan had negative cash flows in nine of those years, and hemorrhaged $634 million in 2016 alone.

This is a completely unsustainable course, as this chart from the state pension system makes pretty clear. If the state’s teacher pension system earns only 3.8 percent annually instead of the 6 percent returns that are baked into the plan’s assumptions, it will be out of money by the mid-2030s.

In other words, a new college grad hired as a teacher in a Kentucky public school is being told to trust a retirement program that will likely implode before he or she turns 40. Seems like a big leap of faith.

Yesterday saw the release of reports documenting attempts by the Russia-based, Putin-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) to influence the 2016 presidential election via social media messaging. Both reports were written for the U.S. Senate, one by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and analytics firm Graphika (online here) and the other by New Knowledge (online here), and both were written up by major papers such as The New York Times and Washington Post. They are being used as proof positive that American social media is dominated by foreign trolls who are duping American voters in all sorts of sinister new ways that call for sweeping new regulations of virtually all aspects of online life.

But while “The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012-2018” and “The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency” provide exhaustive catalogs of what Russian bad actors were up to on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and other platforms, they utterly fail to show that any of those efforts had much, if any, impact on Hillary Clinton’s unexpected and self-inflicted loss to Donald Trump. That omission—and a corresponding lack of interest in putting such efforts in a historical or contemporary context—means the studies provide little to no actual insight into electoral politics on the ground or online. We’re at a moment right now where Congress and the tech sector are both calling for all sorts of regulation in ways that will transparently benefit current market leaders while decreasing online freedom. The last thing we should do is let reports like these drive us more quickly in such a mistaken direction. In a world not simply of seamless “deep fakes” and undetectable, authentic-seeming AI-generated images, the only way forward is through what might be called mass, decentralized media literacy. To paraphrase The Whole Earth Catalog‘s credo, “We are as gods as readers and we might as well get good at it.”

Both reports note that the IRA, like traditional advertisers or political operatives, segmented potential voters into various different groups and adopted strategies mostly designed to reinforce negative perceptions toward Hillary Clinton. New Directions finds that the IRA spent a fair amount of energy targeting African Americans. Out of 81 Facebook pages the report discusses, 30 targeted black audiences and amassed 1.2 million followers. By comparison, 25 pages focused on conservatives, drawing about 1.4 million followers.

From the Times‘ account:

The report says that while “other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts, the black community was targeted extensively with dozens.” In some cases, Facebook ads were targeted at users who had shown interest in particular topics, including black history, the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X. The most popular of the Russian Instagram accounts was @blackstagram, with 303,663 followers.

The Internet Research Agency also created a dozen websites disguised as African-American in origin, with names like blackmattersus.com, blacktivist.info, blacktolive.org and blacksoul.us. On YouTube, the largest share of Russian material covered the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality, with channels called “Don’t Shoot” and “BlackToLive.”…

While the right-wing pages promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy, the left-wing pages scorned Mrs. Clinton while promoting Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The voter suppression effort was focused particularly on Sanders supporters and African-Americans, urging them to shun Mrs. Clinton in the general election and either vote for Ms. Stein or stay home.

The authors of “The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012-2018” conclude in part,

Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike.

Well, yeah, no. Terms such as social control can’t be thrown around so easily, especially when both Republicans and Democrats are getting all hot about regulating social media and Facebook and Twitter, facing declines in growth, are ready to play ball (Tim Cook, doubtless concerned about Apple’s flattening market capitalization, is also musing on the “inevitable” regulation of the tech sector more generally).

In 2016, black voter turnout, key to Democratic victory, was about 60 percent, or the same level it was for John Kerry in 2004. Was that due to Russian bots telling African Americans to stay home or Hillary Clinton’s patchy get-out-the-vote effort? I’m guessing it’s the latter. There’s no question that the leak of Clinton and Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails and former FBI Director James Comey’s actions during the closing weeks of the election hurt her campaign (and that the Russians played a hand in the release of the emails). But the leaks confirmed negative perceptions about Clinton, her penchant for secrecy, and the way the DNC was rigging the game against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.). And still, with all that in play, Trump won due to fewer than 80,000 votes cast in three states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin), all of which had gone for the Democratic candidate in 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012. You can argue that without the Wikileaks dump, which the U.S. intelligence community says was facilitated by the Russians, Clinton would have won. But she loaded the gun herself—and in any case, that has nothing to do with social media efforts by the IRA.

Perspective here is key. When it comes to foreign influence, the CIA says that Moscow has been trying to influence presidential outcomes via covert propaganda since at least since 1964, when Nikita Khrushchev threw his weight behind Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater due to the latter’s higher level of bellicosity toward the Soviet Union and communism in general. The amount of impressions, likes, retweets, shares, and rubles that get thrown around in the reports sound fantastic until you zoom out to the bigger picture. As TechCrunch reported a year ago, for instance, Clinton and Trump spent a combined $81 million on Facebook ads while the IRA ponied up $46,000, or 0.05 percent as much. Nate Silver writes:

What fraction of overall social media impressions on the 2016 election were generated by Russian troll farms? 0.1%? I’m not sure what the answer is, but suspect it’s low, and it says something that none of the reports that hype up the importance of them address that question.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 18, 2018

Unfortunately for those of us who prefer our internet less fettered, various panics are crossing streams, all of which are pushing to freeze the status quo. In politics, the old coalitions that worked for Republicans and Democrats are falling apart, so much so that both parties are at or near recent lows in self-identification. We’re in the thick of a modern “era of no decision,” in which neither party can maintain unified control of the government for very long. Both Democrats and Republicans have spent much of the past year attacking social media platforms for mostly imaginary crimes and threatening regulation or worse. Only a week ago, representatives of both parties invoked antitrust remedies in a discussion of Google. That’s a predictable response from politicians who feel their grip starting to slip. At the same time, a trans-ideological intellectual consensus also seems to be building that social media is harmful to young people, old people, lonely people, you name it. And then there’s the hysteria, particularly strong among liberals, Democrats, and #NeverTrump Republicans, that Russia is somehow an ascendant power.

The combined result of all this, plus trepidation about the economy and the general direction of the country, is almost certain to be a spasm of regulatory gestures toward the internet, to cleanse it not just of hate speech but political trolls, fake news, and bad actors generally. Sadly, what we really need to be doing right now is formulating new forms of media literacy that fit the reality of a “post-fact” world, one in which everything we see may well be a simulation.

The state of Maine has decided that all 6,168 of its registered Libertarian voters are now going to be “unenrolled” with any party. Why? Because according to the state’s rules, the Libertarian Party was no longer a qualified party with ballot access since it failed to have over 10,000 registered Libertarians vote in this year’s election.

In a peculiar twist, see this tweet from Maine’s secretary of state:

2/2 The Libertarian party has filed a declaration of intent to form a party by enrollment and has until Jan. 2, 2020 to gather at least 5,000 new enrollments. To re-enroll in the party, visit your municipal clerk to fill out a new voter registration card.

— MaineSOS (@MESecOfState) December 17, 2018

So, if the Libertarian Party still had all those voters legally registered as Libertarian, as those voters wished to be registered, then the party would already have the over 5,000 registered voters needed by law to be qualified to be on the ballot. I reported back in 2016 on the Maine L.P.’s eventually successful quest to win ballot access via getting that number of registrants.

The Libertarian Party of Maine, as the Independent Political Report notes:

filed a “Declaration of Intent to Form a Party” with the Secretary of State to begin a campaign to reregister existing Libertarians and add to Libertarian registration numbers to maintain ballot access and qualify for the 2020 primary. Julie Flynn, deputy secretary of state, wrote a December 11 letter to Chris Lyons, chairman of the Libertarian Party of Maine, acknowledging the declaration and clearing the way for the registration effort to begin January 1, 2019….

Previously, the Libertarian Party of Maine had to go to Federal Court to force the Secretary of State to recognize the party in 2016, and the party is currently in the process of taking legal action to keep the state from converting existing registered Libertarians to unenrolled without their permission….

“It’s just not right to unenroll voters – never mind doing it without telling them,” said Chris Lyons, chairman of the LPME. “It’s especially disturbing in these times when more than 60 percent of Americans say they want an alternative to the Democrats and Republicans.”

Ohio has been hit hard by the effects of opioid abuse, ranking as one of the top five states for rates of overdose deaths. The rate dramatically increased over the past few years, far above and beyond the proportions of the increase we’ve seen nationally. Last year Ohio saw more than 4,800 opioid overdose deaths, a record for the state.

But now the numbers are finally going down in some Ohio communities. Dayton has seen a dramatic 54 percent drop in opioid overdose deaths this year. Hamilton County (home of Cincinnati) is seeing a 31 percent drop in overdose deaths this year and on Monday was the focus of a CBS report.

There are several reasons why the overdose rates are dropping, but one thing seems pretty consistent: Harm reduction, not punitive responses by police and prosecutors, is what’s saving lives.

Public health officials in these areas have flooded the communities with Narcan, the brand name for naloxone, the drug that reverses the effects of opioid overdoses. Over the course of a year, the office of Hamilton County Public Health has handed out more than 37,000 doses. It’s had a huge impact. Last year emergency responders in Hamilton County say they responded to eight overdose calls per day. This year that number is five. When a CBS correspondent rode along with paramedics during a visit, they didn’t have any overdose calls at all.

It’s also worth noting the impact on emergency services themselves. The county reported during this time a 42 percent drop in emergency visits and a 37 percent drop in emergency calls to respond to drug overdoses. So while taxpayers are likely shouldering the costs of providing Narcan, it can’t help but be cheaper than the cost of sending out crews to respond to overdoses. Another benefit is the impact it has ha on availability of doctors and nurses in emergency rooms.

Watch CBS’s report on Hamilton County’s successes here. The New York Times explored Dayton’s decline in November here. Note in the Times coverage that Dayton’s Police Department and its chief are on board with the pursuit of harm reduction rather than arrests, and that’s been vital to Dayton’s successes.

Today Surgeon General Jerome Adams issued an advisory that urges state and local governments to fight “the epidemic of youth e-cigarette use” by “implementing price policies” and banning indoor vaping. Those measures directly attack products that even Adams concedes “have the potential to reduce risk for current smokers” in the name of preventing underage vaping, which itself may be driving down tobacco-related morbidity and mortality.

While raising the price of e-cigarettes may deter teenagers from buying these products (which they are not legally allowed to do in any case), it will have a similar effect on adult smokers interested in making a switch that could save their lives. One major advantage of e-cigarettes, in addition to a dramatic reduction in risk, is that they cost substantially less per dose than the combustible kind. A Juul pod, which sells for about $4, is roughly equivalent to a pack of cigarettes, which can cost as much as $10.45, depending on the state. The “price policies” Adams is advocating would undermine that advantage.

Another selling point of e-cigarettes is that they can be used in many settings where smoking is prohibited. Adams wants to eliminate that advantage as well, based on the dubious premise that e-cigarettes “can potentially expose” bystanders to “harmful substances” such as “heavy metals” and “volatile organic compounds.” These “harmful substances,” even when they can be detected in e-cigarette aerosol, are typically present at very low levels, which is one reason vaping is so much less hazardous than smoking.

A recent analysis of the aerosol generated by eight Juul pod flavors, commissioned by Juul Labs, looked for 22 potentially harmful constituents. In every case, the substance either was not detected or the level was too low to quantify. “Even breathing e-cigarette aerosol that someone else has exhaled poses potential health risks,” Adams’ office warns. The implication is that bystanders are endangered by minute quantities of chemicals that probably pose no measurable risk to vapers themselves. Since Adams frames bans on indoor vaping as a way to discourage underage consumption, it’s clear that his real goal is not to protect bystanders from imaginary risks but to make e-cigarette use less convenient, which is bound to have an impact on adult vapers who would otherwise be smoking.

The same can be said of Adams’ fearmongering about the dangers that e-cigarettes pose to vapers. As is typical of public health officials, he obscures the health advantages of e-cigarettes by erroneously describing them as “tobacco products,” even though they do not contain tobacco. He links to an FDA “fact sheet” that claims the “e-cigarette use surge” led to an “uptick in overall tobacco use” by teenagers, as if vaping and smoking are interchangeable from a public health perspective.

The reality is that the “epidemic” of adolescent vaping has coincided with the lowest levels of smoking ever recorded in government-sponsored surveys. A recent analysis in the journal Tobacco Control, based on data from five national surveys, found that downward trends in smoking by teenagers and young adults accelerated as e-cigarette use in those groups took off. That correlation strongly suggests that young people who would otherwise be smoking are vaping instead, which represents a huge improvement in terms of health risks.

The Surgeon General’s Office advises parents whose kids ask about the relative hazards of vaping and smoking to dodge the question. “Aren’t e-cigarettes safer than conventional cigarettes?” a hypothetical child asks. “It’s still risky,” Mom or Dad is supposed to respond, while mentioning nicotine’s potential impact on developing brains and noting that “some e-cigarette batteries have even exploded and hurt people.” In other words, the surgeon general wants parents to obscure the enormous difference between the dangers of vaping and the dangers of smoking.

“Vaping can expose the user’s lungs to harmful chemicals like formaldehyde, diacetyl, and acrolein, as well as toxic metal particles like nickel, tin, and lead,” says an FDA lesson plan that Adams recommends. Again, that is highly misleading, judging from chemical analyses of the aerosol produced by the leading brand.

While these warnings are ostensibly aimed at scaring teenagers away from e-cigarettes, they have an impact on adults as well. The share of American adults who incorrectly believe that vaping is just as hazardous as smoking is already on the rise, thanks in no small part to overwrought, misleading, and sometimes flat-out inaccurate warnings from activists and public health officials. In one survey, the share of adults who incorrectly said vaping is as harmful as or more harmful than smoking tripled between 2012 and 2015, from 13 percent to 40 percent. The surgeon general’s propaganda can only encourage that trend, making it less likely that smokers will switch to vaping and more likely that those who have switched will resume smoking.

This is the second advisory Adams has issued, USA Today notes. The first “urged people to carry the overdose antidote naloxone” as a way of preventing opioid-related deaths. In that case, Adams was promoting harm reduction. Now he is actively undermining it.

Recent debate over a criminal justice reform bill has resurrected a bad idea: getting the federal government involved when a local law enforcement officer is murdered, for purposes of imposing the death penalty. This proposal is not just in contravention of the constitutional principles upon which America was founded—it’s also part of a disingenuous effort to manufacture outrage against the bill.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) has been one of the most outspoken critics of the FIRST STEP Act, which will likely be voted on by the Senate this month. Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah)—a former federal prosecutor and staunch advocate for criminal justice reform—did a stellar job dissecting Cotton’s objections at National Review. Undeterred, Cotton has continued to oppose the bill to the extent that he’s been accused of supporting amendments not to achieve better reforms, but to serve as a “poison pill” to tank the bill’s chance of passage, writes Sarah Rumpf for Reason.

View this article.

With a little over three days to go before a partial government shutdown, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested the Trump administration is willing to compromise.

President Donald Trump has demanded that a spending package to keep the federal government fully funded after Friday include $5 billion for construction of his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. “I am proud to shut down the government for border security,” he said last week during a televised Oval Office meeting with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.), who generally oppose the wall funding.

But today, Sanders appeared to reverse course. “We have other ways that we can get to that $5 billion,” she said on Fox News. “We will work with Congress if they will make sure we get a bill passed that provides not just the funding for the wall, but there’s a piece of legislation that’s been pushed around…that provides roughly $26 billion for border security including $1.6 billion for the wall,” she said.

As Politico notes, Sanders was likely referring to a compromise bill pushed for by Senate Democrats but rejected by Republicans who wanted the full $5 billion. Democrats no longer support that deal, instead proposing $1.3 billion. However, it’s conceivable they could reconsider.

“That’s something that we would be able to support as a long as we can couple that with other funding resources,” Sanders said regarding $1.6 billion in wall funding. “At the end of the day, we don’t want to shut down the government, we want to shut down the border.”

Of course, it’s not exactly clear what those “other funding sources” would be. A person briefed on talks between congressional Republicans and the White House suggested to The Washington Post that reallocating money that’s already been approved could be one option. According to Politico, the money could come from the Pentagon’s budget.

The New York Times, meanwhile, reported that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) met with Schumer today and proposed setting aside $1.6 billion for non-wall-related border security, in addition to $1 billion that Trump could spend however he likes on immigration. However, a senior Democratic aide told the Times that Democrats probably won’t support this plan.

Clearly, things are still up in the air when it comes to a spending package that would keep the government fully funded. Different numbers are being thrown around as both parties in Congress and Trump try to come to an agreement. What does seem clear, however, is that the Trump administration wants to avoid a shutdown.

This is significant, especially in light of Trump’s previous declaration that he would be “proud” to let a shutdown happen. As recently as Sunday, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller was saying publicly that his boss would “absolutely” shut down the government over border wall funding.

The fact that negotiations are happening at all is a sign that Trump is folding. His previous position was that any sort of deal would have to include $5 billion in border funding. Now he appears to be backing off, with Sanders talking very generally about “other funding sources.”

This is a positive development. As I wrote on Friday, both building Trump’s border wall and shutting down the government are bad ideas. Ideally, Trump would give in completely, thus stopping a shutdown and preventing money from going to the border wall. In the end, Trump may get some money for the wall, but it probably won’t be $5 billion. And as long as a deal can be reached before midnight on Friday, the shutdown will be a crisis averted.

Janice Dotson-Stephens, 61, died in jail on Friday after living there for months because nobody paid $30 to a bondsman to cover her bail.

Dotson-Stephens was arrested in Bexar County, Texas, in July for criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor. Her bail was set at $300. But she didn’t arrange for payment ($30 if she had gone through a bail bondsman), and according to court records she was simply refusing to talk or be interviewed.

A psychiatric evaluation was ordered in August, but she remained in jail until she died, reportedly of natural causes, in the jail infirmary on Friday afternoon.

On Monday, family members said they didn’t even know she was in jail or they would have come bail her out. Dotson-Stephens, it turns out, does have a history of mental illness. She’s been arrested before, her daughter-in-law told KSAT12 in San Antonio, but they always transferred her to a state hospital after evaluation rather than prosecuting her. That’s actually where her family thought she was all this time.

A spokesperson for Bexar County told the station that Dotson-Stephens hadn’t indicated a next of kin, and transferring her to the state hospital requires a court order. That response raises the question of why they didn’t have her next of kin, given her apparent previous run-ins with police. And what happened after she was ordered to a psychiatric evaluation?

Her curious imprisonment and death also implicates the thoughtless, mechanized way that court systems make pretrial detention decisions and why exactly so many criminal justice advocates have been pushing for reduced dependency on (or the complete elimination of) cash bail. Why was any money demanded of Dotson-Stephens in order to be free from jail at all? She didn’t have a record and her previous arrests were all tied to mental health issues and handled outside of the criminal justice system. Did a judge or magistrate consider her a flight risk? In all likelihood she was never actually considered at all and her pretrial detention was the result of a clockwork system where courts simply assign dollar amounts to various crimes (even low-level ones) and tell people to pay up or rot in jail for days, weeks, even months.

In this case, poor communication kept Dotson-Stephens in jail, but there are thousands of Americans stuck in pretrial detention in jails across the country. They haven’t been convicted yet, but they’re essentially serving time because they lack the money to pay for their freedom. The end result here is that poorer people frequently end up pleading guilty and accepting harsher punishments for crimes than they would have otherwise simply to get out of jail, and end up getting saddled with a record and other bad consequences.

And in Dotson-Stephens’ case, the thoughtless mechanisms of Bexar County’s pretrial system highlights exactly why these same criminal justice reform advocates want to see bolstered resources available in pretrial services. They want in place ways to intervene early to help people who have drug addictions find resources to help them when they get arrested. And they want the courts to react more quickly when somebody with mental health issues like Dotson-Stephens ends up in police custody. Jails are generally not well equipped to deal with mental health issues. And yet, many get shoved into cells, often for minor crimes just as what happened with Dotson-Stephens, and avoidable tragedy is the end result.

The circumstances behind Dotson-Stephens’ death are now under investigation by county officials and the police department of the nearby town of Converse, Texas. An interesting detail that explains the Converse Police Department’s involvement: People may recall the suicide of Sandra Bland, who hanged herself in a Texas jail cell in 2015 after a state trooper arrested her following a petty argument at a traffic stop.

In 2017, Texas lawmakers passed the Sandra Bland Act, which requires that outside law enforcement agencies investigate jail deaths. That’s why Converse’s police are being brought in. The law also requires that county jails divert people with mental health and substance abuse issues to treatment. According to the text of the law, this process was supposed to start within 24 hours of Dotson-Stephens’ arrest. The magistrate was supposed to have a written assessment of Dotson-Stephens’ mental health situation within 10 days and can order an uncooperative defendant (which they claim she was) to an examination at a mental health facility within 21 days. That doesn’t seem to have happened here. The question is why and whether she’d still be alive if the county had followed what the law demands.

A federal court ruled Friday that the state of New York’s 44-year-old ban on nunchucks infringes on the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

The ruling is a victory for Jim Maloney, a maritime attorney and adjunct professor at the State University of New York’s Maritime College. He’s also a martial arts enthusiast, having created his own style of fighting called “Shafan Ha Lavan.” Maloney wanted to pass along Shafan Ha Lavan to his twin sons, but was legally prohibited from doing so.

Why? It’s all thanks to the state’s 1974 ban on nunchucks, which are “integral” to Shafan Ha Lavan, wrote Judge Pamela K. Chen of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Nunchucks, for those who don’t know, usually consist of two sticks of wood or other material connected by a chain or rope. They were widely used in Kung Fu movies back in the ’70s, particularly by martial arts film star Bruce Lee:

Concerned that young people would try to copy what they saw in the movies, New York lawmakers decided to completely ban nunchucks, or chuka sticks. “As a result of the recent popularity of ‘Kung Fu’ movies and shows,” the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York wrote in a 1974 letter, according to The Washington Post, “various circles of the state’s youth are using such weapons. The chuka stick can kill, and is rightly added to the list of weapons prohibited by section 265.00 of the Penal Law.” For decades, the possession, manufacture, and transport of nunchucks was banned in the state.

That’s where Maloney comes back into the story. In August 2000, police were called to his home because a telephone company worker believed Maloney had pointed a rifle at him. (Maloney claimed in a 2009 blog post that it was really a telescope). Nonetheless, police found Maloney’s nunchucks in his home, and he was charged with a misdemeanor. The charges were dismissed in January 2003 after he pleaded guilty to a violation—”not a crime,” as his blog post clarifies.

But the fact that nunchucks were banned in the first place irked Maloney. “How could a state simply ban any and all possession of a weapon that had a long and proud history as a martial-arts weapon, with recreational, therapeutic and self-defense utility?” he told Reason in an email. “Not only that, but it can be used in self-defense in a more merciful manner, respectful of human life, far more effectively than any penetrating weapon, like a gun or sword or knife.”

In February 2003, motivated by “outrage,” Maloney filed a legal complaint against the ban. For years, he had very little luck. Then in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in McDonald v. City of Chicago that the Second Amendment applies to state laws restricting the possession and use of weapons. Chen wrote that the Supreme Court remanded Maloney’s case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, who remanded it back to the District Court.

Maloney did not seek for the court to rule on the constitutionality of nunchucks in general. Rather, he simply wanted them to agree that New York cannot ban people from using nunchucks in their own homes. Chen pointed out that she could not do this. “To achieve the remedy Plaintiff argues that he is seeking would require the court to write in an exception to the complete ban on nunchaku,” she wrote. “This the Court cannot do here,” she added, explaining that it’s not the court’s job to rewrite the law.

Instead, Chen ruled that the ban as a whole is unconstitutional. She applied a two-part standard that asks whether a weapon is “in common use” and whether it’s “typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.” Chen dealt with the latter part first. The defendant in the case, Nassau County District Attorney Madeline Singas, “has not met her burden to exclude nunchaku from the ambit of Second Amendment protection,’ Chen wrote. “Simply put, Defendant does not contradict the contention that the nunchaku’s primary use, which Defendant concedes is as ‘a tool from the sphere of martial arts’…is a lawful one.” Chen also cited testimony from Maloney and other witnesses in concluding that “the typical possession of nunchaku in this country is for recreational and other lawful purposes.”

Not only are they used by law-abiding citizens, but Chen noted “there is virtually no evidence that nunchakus are associated with, or have been used to engage in, criminal conduct since” the ban was implemented. For the most part, nunchucks can’t be modified to give them a “special propensity for criminal use.”

“In fact,” Chen wrote, “its intended use as a weapon for recreational martial arts practice and training appears to greatly outstrip its use in crime.”

Chen also concluded that nunchucks are “in common use,” citing the fact that nearly 65,000 of them have been sold in the U.S. between 1995 and 2018. She explained:

The Court finds that based on this magnitude of sales—especially given the outright bans on nunchaku (in New York and Massachusetts), the other restrictions placed on nunchaku ownership and use in the states where they may be lawfully possessed, and the apparent incompleteness of Defendant’s nunchaku sales data—and the relevant, albeit limited, case comparators, Defendant has failed to establish that nunchaku are not in common use.

Ultimately, Chen said the Constitution protects Maloney’s right to possess nunchucks. “The centuries-old history of nunchaku being used as defensive weapons,” she wrote, “strongly suggests their possession, like the possession of firearms, is at the core of the Second Amendment.” Also protected by the Second Amendment is the right to transport, manufacture, or dispose of nunchucks, she ruled.

In light of Chen’s ruling, Maloney says he plans to get back to training “at home for the first time in nearly 20 years.” Maloney says he’s “had half a dozen pairs of sticks sitting around unstrung for all that time,” so his first step will be to restring them.

Regarding the ruling as a whole, Maloney says Chen “displayed true wisdom,” which he greatly appreciates.

“I can see from the findings of fact and conclusions of law, and from all that led up to the production of that document,” he says, referring to the ruling, “that a huge amount of thought and effort went into refining and rendering the final decision, and it makes me happy to see that our federal courts can and do (albeit not always) ‘deliver the goods’ in applying the law to protect individual rights.”