++Stone reunites with The Favourite director Yorgos Lanthimos for a lovable movie from one of our prickliest filmmakers. +
++Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos is famous for making strange and chilly movies: 2016’s eerie dramedy The Lobster; 2018’s The Favourite, a cynical comedy; movies about power games and humans hurting each other and brutal, unforgiving worlds, shot through with jarring visual non sequiturs (the lobster race in the royal bedchambers in The Favourite haunts me). +
++Poor Things, Lanthimos’s latest film, is a different story. It’s less vicious than his other work, more tender and approachable. It has plenty of the bizarre visual flair Lanthimos cut his teeth on, from his signature extreme wide angles up to and including a bulldog with the head of a duck frolicking through a grand living room. Yet Poor Things, based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, is joyous in its weirdness, joyous in its exploration and celebration of its strange, strange world. This movie is incredibly fun to watch. +
++Mostly that’s because of Emma Stone, reuniting here with Lanthimos after she was Oscar-nominated for her work in The Favourite. In Poor Things, Stone is doing some of the best work of her career as Bella Baxter, a grown woman with the brain (literally) of an infant. +
++This is a very physical, very grounded performance. Stone has a terrific walk: just a touch of Frankenstein jerkiness showing as Bella tries to control limbs she isn’t used to, head always on a swivel as she tries to take in more and more of the ever-fascinating brand new world. Faced with something she doesn’t care for, she glares her giant eyes up from under dyed-black beetled brows and then, usually, punches it. “Bluh,” she says gleefully, if the thing in question bleeds. +
++Bella lives with her guardian, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe, gently avuncular). She calls him God. Godwin is an experimental surgeon working at the very limits of steampunk 19th-century science, and he himself is the product of endless sadistic science experiments at his father’s hands. Bella likes him to crawl into her bed at night, but he assures his worried assistant that there’s nothing untoward going on there. For one thing, he’s impotent after his father’s experiments. For another thing, he considers Bella to be his daughter. +
++Godwin celebrates Bella’s natural curiosity, but only up to a point. He’s delighted to help her refine her speech and her movements, and he lets her experiment with him in his laboratory, as long as she is only cutting up corpses rather than living bodies. He even brings her a suitor, sweet Max (Ramy Youssef, in puppy dog mode). +
++Godwin will not, however, let Bella leave his home, a fantastical menagerie populated with his various experiments, which Lanthimos shoots in moody black and white. When Bella inevitably rebels enough to leave God behind and see the world, the screen blooms into hyper-saturated color, all the blues removed, so that Bella becomes Dorothy walking into a gilded Oz. +
++Bella runs away to see the world with the help of the rakish Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, enjoying himself), a lawyer with a well-oiled mustache and a permanent sneer. Duncan finds Bella’s naivete and hunger for the world intoxicating, while she is won over by his willingness to help her discover sex. (Max chastely declines when Bella proposes they rub their genitals together.) “Why do people not do this all the time?” she demands of Duncan, post-coital and mystified. +
++Once on the continent, however, Bella does what girls do in Europe and discovers philosophy. Her mind thus expanded, she looks askance on her lover’s myopia. “My heart has become dim towards your swearing, weepy person,” she informs Duncan. Surviving Europe without Duncan will require Bella to dabble in both socialism and sex work, which she does with a good will. +
++The allegory here is straightforward: Bella is infantilized Victorian femininity, a grown woman pushed by controlling men into living her life like a child. She finds redemption by taking control of her fate, body, and mind for herself. +
++The reason the allegory works, though, is how vividly we see Bella’s radiant newborn mind embrace all that life has to offer her: sex, food, music, travel. She seems to watch her own life with the fierce scientific detachment she must have learned from her God. Faced with a choice, it’s generally clear to Bella what the wise thing to do is. That’s the option she usually ignores. She goes for the interesting pathway instead. +
++Bella’s impulse to do the interesting thing leads her, in the final act of Poor Things, to investigate the life her body led before her child mind was implanted inside of it. This act is the weakest of the film by far, the point where the allegory becomes clunky rather than clever, the action takes a turn for the dull, and Bella more or less stops developing. It’s hard to avoid the sense that the movie could have ended twenty minutes earlier and be all the better for it. +
++Still, it is always joyful to watch Bella navigate her world: gorging on sugar pastries, swishing her hips in an avant-garde ballet of sorts, discussing the intricacies of consent with her johns. (Holly Waddington’s witty costumes are an especial pleasure, with their enormous ruffled collars framing Bella’s neck like a glam version of Frankenstein’s bolts.) Bella is an enormously lovable character, a fitting heart for this lovable movie from one of our prickliest directors. +
++Poor Things will be released in theaters on December 8, 2023. +
++The expelled rep used his time in Congress like a Real Housewife, and now he’s found his true calling making bank on Cameo. +
++Despite facing 23 federal charges for a litany of crimes, including the kind that involve stealing — wire fraud, credit card fraud, and aggravated identity theft — people, including at least one sitting US Senator, cannot give former Rep. George Santos money fast enough. +
++Since his expulsion from Congress, Santos has found a home on Cameo, a service that allows regular people to pay more famous people, usually of the reality television or character actor variety, to record video messages for their personal use. For a small fee, you could ask Santos to tell your mom that you love her or “roast” one of your friends. Santos initially charged $75 but, after serious demand, upped his price to $400, according to Cameo (Real Housewife of New York City Ramona Singer charges $125 per video). <a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/12/06/2023/george-santos-is-earning-six-figures-from-cameo-videos">According to Semafor</a>, Santos has made more money in four days of Cameo appearances than he would have in one year ($174,000) as a member of Congress. +
++A man who is facing possible prison time for theft and who got thrown out of Congress is now being given cash, hand over fist, to be that ex-congressional, money-stealing grifter on camera. +
++What is happening? Is there no better way for people to use their wallets? Is inflation not a problem? Perhaps we have too much money? +
++While we may never fully understand what would compel a person to send Santos $200 of their hard-earned cash, his final form as a Cameo star is a little easier to explain. Anyone who has followed Bravo’s “Scandoval” or The Bachelor could point out that this man’s career arc is that of a reality TV star. Those people, Santos’s Cameo cohort, go on TV with the aim of getting famous enough to launch a business, do social media influencing, or generate income via Cameo. Real Housewives Jen Shah and Teresa Giudice, like Santos, faced federal charges and are doing or have served prison time. +
++The only difference between Bravo celebrities and Santos is that the latter’s reality TV show was Congress. Perhaps there’s no difference at all. +
++“He’s obviously going to have to go on hiatus for a bit,” Vox senior politics reporter and Bravo watcher Christian Paz told me, humoring me with TV speak. Paz and I sat down to discuss the man on everyone’s minds from our respective fields of expertise — politics for him, reality TV for me. But as Paz explains, while Santos might seem like an anomaly, one of the best ways to succeed in government is to act like a reality TV star. It’s actually designed that way. +
++The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity. +
++Christian, on the Jen Shah scale of prison time, how much prison time is George Santos possibly facing? Is it more or less time than Jen Shah? [Editor’s note: Shah was sentenced to 6.5 years in prison.] +
++He has the potential to serve even more time. The big embarrassing stuff came out from this ethics report, but that’s just the House Ethics report. George Santos is still under indictment and facing pretty severe federal charges: wire fraud, identity theft, aggravated identity theft, lying to a federal office, money laundering, etc. Those are things that people go to jail for for a long time. +
++Wire fraud! Everything I know about wire fraud is from Jen Shah. If you had a Venn diagram of crimes real politicians do and crimes Real Housewives do, wire fraud is one of those crimes where there’s overlap. +
++I never thought we’d have federal charges against a congressman because of OnlyFans subscriptions. Though there was the misuse of taxpayer funds that happened with Aaron Schock, the congressman from Illinois, famously. +
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Drew Angerer/Getty Images
++He made his entire office like Downton Abbey! +
++Exactly. We’ve had some scandalous/reality TV-adjacent scandals in the past, but never as outright and just brazen. And posting through it, as Santos is? In the last 10 years, politics in general has just become much more reality TV-esque. +
++I mean, what a perfect segue into what I want to talk about! There’s that saying, “Politics is Hollywood for ugly people.” I think that the update to that saying should be, “Politics is reality television.” +
++Yeah, I totally agree. +
++That politicians are ugly? [laughs] +
++No. That politics is reality TV! +
++Think of some of the institutional limits in Congress. The way that you get access to better committee positions, the way that you get clout within government, the way to access power is through showing that you can fundraise, showing you have the connections to people who will help the party long term, having a big donor base, and one of the ways that you can do that is by getting attention. The attention economy is the most important way to get donor money from the grassroots. +
++While George Santos is a very specific kind of attention grab that involves crimes, I think this general concept is kinda bipartisan. The way AOC and “The Squad” are branded gets attention. Sen. John Fetterman’s social media presence too. On the other side of that, there’s Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert. Everyone’s on social media, and I think it’s just more obvious now — succeeding in politics is getting famous. +
++AOC and folks in The Squad were able to use social media very effectively, early on. And you mentioned this as a both-parties issue — it is. I’ve covered many freshman classes that enter Congress, and the number one thing that they want is obviously to win their next election, but they also want attention. They want stuff beyond just the traditional news coverage. They want the invites to the podcast. They want invites to the talk shows, to the daytime talk shows. They want to be talked about on cable news. The priorities tend to be to get attention, especially if you’re in the minority. +
++Because when you’re in the political minority, you don’t necessarily have policy-making power? +
++Especially in the House, you don’t have a lot of power when you’re in the minority. And that incentivizes cloud chasing — you know, little clips that go viral on TikTok, the interviews that get clipped from TV, cable news interviews that go viral on Twitter. +
++I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you saw a lot of these right-wing social media influencer types come to prominence when they were in the minority too. In 2020, Republicans were in the minority, they didn’t have a lot of power. And so what’s the alternative? It’s to get as much attention as you can. +
++You have these institutional frames that kind of force politicians to look for this attention because they don’t have political power. And then the attention will help them once they do get power and are able to rise. But then the other thing is that, in more recent years, it’s become harder for politicians in both parties to climb the ranks because so many people stay in powerful positions for so long. +
++When you don’t have a path to promotions within the government, the next best thing is fame. +
++I think we’d be remiss in not mentioning that the model for “reality television and politics are the same” was President Trump. A former reality television star who became president, right? +
++A lot has been written and a lot still remains to be written about the reality TV star turned president. A lot of attention has also been paid through the political lens to, “Who is the next Trump? Who will succeed him?” +
++A big part of that fails to see the reality TV star side. It’s not just a populist appeal. It’s also all the things that come with being a reality TV star that boost him, like the sense that he’s just like you or that his supporters view him through the lens of fandom and not through the lens of a political movement. A lot of politicians and people trying to posture as “the next Trump” don’t have that. +
++I keep wrestling with the idea of politics being reality TV, one aspect in particular: Over the last decade and maybe even longer, the whole idea behind reality TV and why people participate has shifted. +
++People go on shows like The Bachelor or Drag Race, but winning isn’t necessarily the end goal. It’s nice, sure, but more and more the goal of being on reality TV isn’t winning. The goal is to get as famous as you can, and then when you leave the show, get more famous and monetize that. +
++If you think about George Santos, it seems like — barring a prison sentence — that he’s essentially embodied this model. He’s pivoted in a way that made him more famous and more powerful than he would have been had he gone through his career as a congressman representing a district in New York. +
++The grift was the key to it all. I totally see what you’re saying. He is making money off Cameo now. Maybe it’ll be short-lived. But his stans are continuing, and now we have Democratic Senators using donor money to send to George Santos to troll political rivals on Cameo. At the root of it, it’s still money from Americans going into George Santos’s pockets that he gets to keep. +
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Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
++If politics is truly reality TV, has the press coverage changed at all? Is it still the same? +
++The DC press functions very similarly to Bravo blogs. I’ve written about this before, like, the interesting overlap in how pop culture coverage has bled into political coverage and covering serious hard news. The DC press loves to cover anything that is remotely scandalous in any way. And with all the profiles, all the following him around asking him questions, and all these memorable moments, they also helped to create this Santos persona. +
++Do you think politics is the end goal anymore for any of these politicians? And has that ever been true? It’s not hard to think of former politicians and press secretaries who get book deals, gigs on cable news, and other kinds of contracts. Maybe those things just look different now. +
++In the past, it used to be about getting on TV or getting on boards or getting cushy consulting jobs on K Street. +
++But in the digital current era, sometimes politics is not really what people are entering politics for. There’s ideological reasons for running. But, for example, how many members of Congress have podcasts? There are so many more options in the entertainment space to make a more creative career through politics or after politics. And even the people around Trump, for example, they all either found book deals, rehabilitated themselves to become commentators on cable news or launched their own podcasts. +
++There’s just this ecosystem that makes it lucrative for you to go into politics and not for politics’ sake. And what we’re seeing now is a lot of it is drifting into a purely entertainment direction. +
++If there’s a parallel to that, it’s how many Real Housewives have weird side businesses. And wire fraud! +
++A book deal for a politician is like a Housewife selling a candle or athletic wear. But George Santos got caught, whereas there are so many other folks who are and will get away with it. And they’ll be around for another season. +
++As someone who covers politics, is this turn really depressing to you? Or has politics always been like this? +
++It’s definitely been a reality. But it’s depressing in the sense that I’m firmly in the camp that is trying to protect democracy and get people to believe in the system. +
++These kinds of grifts delegitimize the whole institution. It reminds folks that there is a huge class divide in America. And that’s one of those things that always becomes apparent when we see money grifts in politics because it’s often people trying to get out of whatever stratification they’re in because of class. That’s why you grift and steal money to find ways to better yourself. And you’re using the public and the electoral system to do it. +
++You’re just harming that system even more. +
++The factors that lead to tragedies like the University of Nevada, Las Vegas shooting are deeply ingrained in US politics, culture, and law. +
++Three people were killed and another injured in a mass shooting at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas on Wednesday. +
++The shooter, a former college professor in his 60s who reportedly had applied for a job at the university, was killed in a shootout with police. Further details about his motive and the gun used in the attack were not immediately known. +
++The shooting was one of several hundred mass shootings this year, and it took place not far from the site of the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, in which 58 people were killed and hundreds others injured at a Las Vegas music festival in 2017. +
++No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,375 per year. According to the latest available analysis of data from 2015 to 2019, the US gun homicide rate was 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate was nearly 12 times higher. Mass shootings, defined as attacks in which at least four people are injured or killed excluding the shooter, have been on the rise since 2015, peaking at 686 incidents in 2021. There have been 632 mass shootings in the US in 2023 as of early December, including the Las Vegas shooting, and at the current pace, the US is set to eclipse the 2021 record this year. +
++Despite that sheer carnage, however, the political debate over how to ensure that guns don’t fall into the hands of people who may hurt themselves and others has long proved intractable. Last year, Congress reached a deal on limited gun reforms for the first time in nearly 30 years in the wake of a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas — the deadliest school shooting since 2012. +
++But those narrow reforms clearly haven’t stopped America’s gun violence epidemic. The US’s expansive view of civilian gun ownership has been so ingrained in politics, in culture, and in the law since the nation’s founding that there’s no telling how many more people will die before federal lawmakers take further action. In that absence, many red states have loosened their gun laws over the last few years, rather than making it harder to obtain a gun. +
++“America is unique in that guns have always been present, there is wide civilian ownership, and the government hasn’t claimed more of a monopoly on them,” said David Yamane, a professor at Wake Forest University who studies American gun culture. +
++The US has a lot of guns, and more guns mean more gun deaths +
++It’s hard to estimate the number of privately owned guns in America since there is no countrywide database where people register whether they own guns, there is a thriving black market for them in the absence of strong federal gun trafficking laws, and people can manufacture their own guns with DIY kits or 3D printers. The gun lobby has also vehemently opposed federal legislation to track gun sales and establish a national handgun registry. +
++One estimate from the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based research project, found that there were approximately 390 million guns in circulation in the US in 2018, or about 120.5 firearms per 100 residents. That number has likely climbed in the years since, given that one in five households purchased a gun during the pandemic, though the 2018 estimate remains the most recent available. There has also been a significant increase in the number of guns manufactured and imported in the years since. But even without accounting for that increase, US gun ownership is still well above any other country: Yemen, which has the world’s second-highest level of gun ownership, has only 52.8 guns per 100 residents; in Iceland, it’s 31.7. +
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Scott Olson/Getty Images
++American guns are concentrated in a tiny minority of households: just 3 percent own about half the nation’s guns, according to a 2016 Harvard and Northeastern University study. They’re called “super owners” who have an average of 17 guns each. Gallup, using a different methodology, found that 45 percent of Americans lived in a household with guns in 2022. +
++Researchers have found a clear link between gun ownership in the US and gun violence, and some argue that it’s causal. One 2013 Boston University-led study, for instance, found that for each percentage point increase in gun ownership at the household level, the state firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9 percent. And states with weaker gun laws have higher rates of gun-related homicides and suicides, according to a study by the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. +
++The link between gun deaths and gun ownership is much stronger than the link that gun rights advocates often seek to draw between violence and mental health issues. If it were possible to cure all schizophrenia, bipolar, and depressive disorders, violent crime in the US would fall by only 4 percent, according to a study from Duke University professor Jeffrey Swanson, who examines policies to reduce gun violence. +
++There’s still a pervasive idea, pushed by gun manufacturers and gun rights organizations like the National Rifle Association, that further arming America is the answer to preventing gun violence — the “good guy with a gun” theory. But there have been relatively few instances in which police or armed bystanders have been able to successfully stop an active attack. +
++According to a database maintained by Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University, there were 520 active attacks — defined as when one or more people are “actively killing or attempting to kill multiple unrelated people in a public space,” including but not limited to shootings — between 2000 and 2022. In many of those cases, police were unable to stop the attacker, either because the attack had already ended by the time they arrived or because the attacker surrendered or committed suicide. Only in 160 cases were police able to successfully intervene by shooting or otherwise subduing the attacker. +
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++Another 2021 study from Hamline University and Metropolitan State University found that the rate of deaths in 133 mass school shootings between 1980 and 2019 was 2.83 times greater in cases where there was an armed guard present. The researchers argue the results suggest the presence of an armed guard increased shooters’ aggression and that because many school shooters have been found to be suicidal, “an armed officer may be an incentive rather than a deterrent.” +
++“The idea that the solution to mass shootings is that we need more guns in the hands of more people in more places so that we’ll be able to protect ourselves — there’s no evidence that that’s true,” Swanson said. +
++The prevalence of the self-defense narrative is part of what sets apart the gun rights movement in the US from similar movements in places like Canada and Australia, according to Robert Spitzer, a professor at SUNY Cortland who studies the politics of gun control. +
++Self-defense has become by far the most prominent reason for gun ownership in the US today, eclipsing hunting, recreation, or owning guns because they’re antiques, heirlooms, or work-related. That’s also reflected in ballooning handgun sales, since the primary purpose of those guns isn’t recreational, but self-defense. +
++American gun culture “brings together the hunting-sporting tradition with the militia-frontier tradition, but in modern times the hunting element has been eclipsed by a heavily politicized notion that gun carrying is an expression of freedom, individuality, hostility to government, and personal self-protection,” Spitzer said. +
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Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images
++That culture of gun ownership in the US has made it all the more difficult to explore serious policy solutions to gun violence after mass shootings. In high-income countries lacking that culture, mass shootings have historically galvanized public support behind gun control measures that would seem extreme by US standards. +
++Canada banned military-style assault weapons two weeks after a 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia. In 2019, less than a month after the Christchurch massacre, New Zealand lawmakers passed a gun buyback scheme, as well as restrictions on AR-15s and other semiautomatic weapons, and they later established a firearms registry. The 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Australia spurred the government to buy back 650,000 firearms within a year, and murders and suicides plummeted as a result. +
++By contrast, nearly a decade went by after the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, before Congress passed a new gun control law. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the law passed in June 2022, was relatively limited: It incentivized states to pass red flag laws, enhanced background checks for gun buyers under 21, and closed the “boyfriend loophole,” which allowed some people with domestic violence convictions to purchase guns. But it did not ban any types of weapons, and certain studies suggest that even truly universal background checks may have limited effects on gun violence. +
++At the same time, many states have sought to expand gun ownership in recent years. At least 27 states have now passed laws allowing residents to carry a handgun without a permit and allow school staff and teachers to carry guns on campus. +
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++“Other countries look at this problem and say, ‘People walking around in the community with handguns is just way too dangerous, so we’re going to broadly limit legal access to that and make exceptions on the margins for people who might have a good reason to have a gun,’” Swanson said. “Here we do just the opposite: We say that, because of the way that the Supreme Court interpreted the Second Amendment, everybody has the right to a gun for personal protection, and then we tried to make exceptions for really dangerous people, but we can’t figure out who they are.” +
++While the majority of Americans support more gun control restrictions, including universal background checks, a vocal Republican minority unequivocally opposes such laws — and is willing to put pressure on GOP lawmakers to do the same. Alongside the NRA, and a well-funded gun lobby, this contingent of voters sees gun control as a deciding issue, and one that could warrant a primary challenge for a lawmaker who votes for it. +
++The gun lobby has the advantage of enthusiasm. “Despite being outnumbered, Americans who oppose gun control are more likely to contact public officials about it and to base their votes on it,” Barnard College’s Matthew Lacombe explained in 2020. “As a result, many politicians believe that supporting gun regulation is more likely to lose them votes than to gain them votes.” +
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Sarah Reingewirtz/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images
++The Supreme Court has made it impossible to cure America’s gun violence epidemic +
++In 2008, the Supreme Court effectively wrote NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s “good guy with a gun” theory into the Constitution. The Court’s 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was the first Supreme Court decision in American history to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm. But it also went much further than that. +
++Heller held that one of the primary purposes of the Second Amendment is to protect the right of individuals — good guys with a gun, in LaPierre’s framework — to use firearms to stop bad guys with guns. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in Heller, an “inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right.” +
++As a matter of textual interpretation, this holding makes no sense. The Second Amendment provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” +
++We don’t need to guess why the Second Amendment protects a right to firearms because it is right there in the Constitution. The Second Amendment’s purpose is to preserve “a well-regulated Militia,” not to allow individuals to use their weapons for personal self-defense. +
++For many years, the Supreme Court took the first 13 words of the Second Amendment seriously. As the Court said in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias. And thus the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view.” Heller abandoned that approach. +
++Heller also reached another important policy conclusion. Handguns, according to Scalia, are “overwhelmingly chosen” by gun owners who wish to carry a firearm for self-defense. For this reason, he wrote, handguns enjoy a kind of super-legal status. Lawmakers are not allowed to ban what Scalia described as “the most preferred firearm in the nation to ‘keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family.” +
++This declaration regarding handguns matters because this easily concealed weapon is responsible for far more deaths than any other weapon in the United States — and it isn’t close. In 2021, for example, a total of 14,616 people were murdered in the US, according to the FBI. Of these murder victims, at least 5,992 — just over 40 percent — were killed by handguns. +
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Allison Dinner/AFP via Getty Images
++In 2021, the Supreme Court made it even harder for federal and state lawmakers to combat gun violence. In its decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, it massively expands the scope of the Second Amendment, abandons more than a decade of case law governing which gun laws are permitted by the Constitution, and replaces this case law with a new legal framework that, as Justice Stephen Breyer writes in dissent, “imposes a task on the lower courts that judges cannot easily accomplish.” +
++Bruen has since allowed handguns — which are responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun murders in the United States — to proliferate on many American streets. That’s because Bruen strikes the types of laws that limit who can legally carry handguns in public, holding that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” Amid a flurry of activity in the courts over the last year, more than a dozen state and federal gun control laws have been invalidated in whole or in part as a result. +
++Under this new legal regime, the future of firearm regulation looks grim for anyone who believes that the government should help protect us from gun violence. +
++Update, December 7, 2023, 11:25 am: This story was originally published on May 26, 2022, and has been updated multiple times, most recently with the latest details from the December 6 shooting in Las Vegas. +
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