California will ban people from carrying firearms in most public places while doubling the taxes on guns and ammunition sold in the state under two new laws Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Tuesday that will test the limits of the U.S. Supreme Court’s new standard for interpreting the Second Amendment.

The federal government already taxes the sale of guns and ammunition at either 10% or 11%, depending on the type of gun. The law Newsom signed adds another 11% tax on top of that — making California the only state with a separate tax on guns and ammunition, according to the gun control advocacy group Brady.

The money will pay for security improvements at public schools and a variety of gun violence prevention programs, including those geared toward young people in gangs. The money from the federal tax, which has been in place for more than 100 years, pays for wildlife conservation and hunter education programs. The laws were some of nearly two dozen gun control measures Newsom signed on Tuesday. But he acknowledged many of these laws might not survive legal challenges now that the U.S. Supreme Court has imposed a new standard on interpreting the nation’s gun laws.

Just last week, a federal judge struck down a California law banning guns with detachable magazines that carry more than 10 rounds — one of three major pending cases challenging California’s gun restrictions. “It may mean nothing if the federal courts are throwing them out,” Newsom said. “We feel very strongly that these bills meet the (new standard), and they were drafted accordingly. But I’m not naive about the recklessness of the federal courts and the ideological agenda.” The California Rifle and Pistol Association has already sued to block one new law Newsom signed on Tuesday that bans people from carrying guns in most public places.

The law overhauls the state’s rules for concealed carry permits in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen. It specifically bans people from carrying guns in 26 places, including public parks and playgrounds, public demonstrations and gatherings, amusement parks, churches, banks, zoos and “any other privately owned commercial establishment that is open to the public” unless the owner puts up a sign saying guns are allowed. “These laws will not make us safer.

They are an unconstitutional retaliatory and vindictive response to the Supreme Court’s affirmation that the Second Amendment protects an individuals’ right to choose to own a firearm for sport or to defend your family,” said Chuck Michel, president of the California Rifle and Pistol Association. “They are being challenged, and the second they are signed, the clock starts ticking towards a judgment striking them down.” Newsom — a potential Democratic candidate for president beyond 2024 — has a reputation as one of the country’s most liberal governors.

But he has often refused to raise taxes, even for causes he supports like combating climate change. However, Newsom said he viewed this tax differently than the other general increases he tends to oppose. He argued that gun violence already costs taxpayers a lot of money in health impacts and in the criminal justice system. “I think this is a pretty modest investment in prevention and reducing those costs, ultimately,” he said, later adding, “The carnage, it’s too much. We can’t normalize it, we can’t accept it. This is a small price to pay.” California has some of the lowest gun death rates in the country, ranking 43rd out of 50 states with 9 deaths for every 100,000 people, according to 2021 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But violent crimes have increased recently.

The violent crime rate increased by 6.1% in 2022, according to the California Department of Justice. No other state has a special tax just for guns and ammunition, although some local governments do. Tennessee once had a 10-cent tax on shotgun shells, but that tax was repealed in 2019. Pennsylvania collects a $3 surcharge on gun sales to pay for background checks. Fees on California gun purchases currently total more than $37, with most of that money paying for background checks. “Taxing firearm sales to fund violence intervention programs is essential to interrupting the cycle of violence and stopping gun violence before it begins, and we encourage other states to follow suit,” said Kris Brown, president of Brady.

The tax has some exceptions. It would not apply to police officers and it would not apply to businesses with sales of less than $5,000 over a three-month period. State officials estimate it would generate about $159 million annually. The law says the first $75 million of that money must go to the California Violence Intervention and Prevention Grant Program. The program has funded projects targeting young people in gangs, including sports programs, life coaching and tattoo removal. The next $50 million would go to the State Department of Education to boost security at public schools.

That includes things like physical security improvements, safety assessments, after-school programs for at-risk students and mental and behavioral health services for students, teachers and other school employees. That brought comfort to state Sen. Catherine Blakespear, a Democrat from San Diego, who said she was on the Senate floor earlier this year when she got a text message from her ninth-grader saying they were hiding under their desk. No one was injured. “I know that there are thousands of families that are going through this and normalizing the hardening of our schools,” she said. “The reality that we have to protect people by doing things like that is something that we don’t want in this state and in this country.”

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California will double the taxes on guns and ammunition and use the money to pay for more security at public schools and various violence prevention programs under a new law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Tuesday.

The federal government already taxes the sale of guns and ammunition at either 10% or 11%, depending on the type of gun. The law Newsom signed adds another 11% tax on top of that — making it the only state with its own tax on guns and ammunition, according to the gun control advocacy group Brady.

Newsom — a potential Democratic candidate for president beyond 2024 — has a reputation as one of the country’s most liberal governors. But he has often refused to raise taxes, even for causes he supports like combating climate change.

But it would have been difficult for Newsom to veto this tax increase, given his outspoken support for gun restrictions at the state and national level. Newsom is in the middle of a national campaign to amend the U.S. Constitution to restrict gun sales to people over 21, require extensive background checks, impose a waiting period for purchases and ban the sale of assault-style weapons. Restrictions like that are in place in some states, but not in the Constitution.

That campaign is unlikely to succeed, given the political makeup of the other state Legislatures Newsom needs to convince. But it has put him at the forefront of an issue at the top of many Democratic voters’ lists.

Newsom said he viewed the tax as different than other general tax increases that he tends to oppose. He argued that gun violence already costs taxpayers a lot of money in health impacts and in the criminal justice system.

“I think this is a pretty modest investment in prevention and reducing those costs ultimately … The carnage, it’s too much. We can’t normalize it, we can’t accept it. This is a small price to pay,” he said.

Also on Tuesday, Newsom signed a law overhauling the state’s rules for carrying concealed weapons. The new rules are a reaction to a new standard for interpreting the nation’s gun laws that the U.S. Supreme Court issued last year. California’s new law bans people from carrying guns in nearly all public places — including public parks and playgrounds — public demonstrations and gatherings, amusement parks, churches, banks and any place where alcohol is sold.

Newsom also signed a law that, starting July 1, 2028, would require all semiautomatic pistols sold in California to have microstamping technology. That means each bullet would have a unique marking making it easier for law enforcement to trace the gun it was fired from back to its owner.

Chuck Michel, president of the California Rifle and Pistol Association, criticized the new laws — calling them unconstitutional.

“These laws will not make us safer. They are an unconstitutional retaliatory and vindictive response to the Supreme Court’s affirmation that the Second Amendment protects an individuals’ right to choose to own a firearm for sport or to defend your family,” he said. “They are being challenged, and the second they are signed, the clock starts ticking towards a judgment striking them down.”

No other state has a special tax just for guns and ammunition, though some local governments do. Tennessee once had a 10-cent tax on shotgun shells, but that tax was repealed in 2019. Pennsylvania collects a $3 surcharge on gun sales to pay for background checks. Fees on California gun purchases currently total more than $37, with most of that money paying for background checks.

“Taxing firearm sales to fund violence intervention programs is essential to interrupting the cycle of violence and stopping gun violence before it begins, and we encourage other states to follow suit,” said Kris Brown, president of Brady.

The federal tax on guns has been in place since 1918 and has survived multiple lawsuits. The money from that tax goes to the states, who use it to pay for wildlife conservation and hunter safety programs.

The California Rifle and Pistol Association has promised to challenge California’s new tax in court. A legislative analysis of the law Newsom signed on Tuesday said it is now an “open question” whether a lawsuit challenging the tax would be successful.

The tax has some exceptions. It would not apply to police officers and it would not apply to businesses with sales of less than $5,000 over a three-month period. State officials estimate it would generate about $159 million annually.

The law says the first $75 million of that money must go to the California Violence Intervention and Prevention Grant Program. The program has funded projects targeting young people in gangs, including sports programs, life coaching and tattoo removal.

The next $50 million would go to the State Department of Education to boost security at public schools. That includes things like physical security improvements, safety assessments, after-school programs for at-risk students and mental and behavioral health services for students, teachers and other school employees.

California has some of the lowest gun death rates in the country, ranking 43rd out of 50 states with 9 deaths for every 100,000 people, according to 2021 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — As President Joe Biden embarks on his reelection campaign, just 33% of American adults say they approve of his handling of the economy and only 24% say national economic conditions are in good shape, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Public approval of Biden’s handling of the economy remains low in a time of high inflation, a difficult housing market and concerns about a potential U.S. government debt default. American opinion is also gloomy about Biden’s efforts on gun policy and immigration, with only 31% saying they approve of the president’s performance on those hot button issues. Overall, 40% say they approve of the way Biden is doing his job, similar to where his approval rating has stood for much of the past year and a half.

Zoie Mosqueda, 24, who does not identify with any political party, said her family is ready to buy their first home but with the average mortgage interest rate hovering around 6.9%, that goal, at least for now, is out of reach.

The woman from West Texas said she also has been frustrated with Biden’s handling of gun policy and said he’s fallen short on his campaign promise to implement a fairer immigration policy.

A recent spate of mass shootings around the country, including this month’s shooting at an Allen, Texas mall that left eight victims dead and seven others wounded, has left her wishing that Biden and lawmakers in Washington would do more to address the scourge of gun violence.

Even among Democrats, the poll finds only about half approve of his handling of immigration and gun policy.

“Everything feels a bit crazy right now in this economy,” Mosqueda, a mother of two who works at a boutique and is looking to open her own business, said in explaining her disapproval of Biden’s performance. “My older daughter is in school now, and I just worry that this lack of gun policy stuff could affect her.”

Biden was set to return early Monday from a visit to Hiroshima, Japan, for the annual G7 summit where the global economic impact of Russia’s invasion in Ukraine was front-and-center.

The summit was shadowed by the Biden administration’s negotiations with Republican lawmakers to raise the U.S. borrowing authority to prevent a default in early June that could have severe impact on the global economy. Before departing for Japan, Biden canceled scheduled stops in Papua New Guinea and Australia so he could return to the U.S. to focus on the debt limit talks.

“It would be a total catastrophe for the country if they don’t agree to do something,” said Bob Vought, a retired auto parts warehouse manager in St. Petersburg, Florida. He said he strongly disapproves of Biden’s handling of the economy.

Vought, who lives on his Social Security benefit, said inflation is taking a toll on his personal finances.

The Biden administration oversaw two of the bigger Social Security cost-of-living adjustment in recent decades, with a 5.9% increase that took effect in 2022 and 8.7% in 2023. But Vought said that’s not enough to keep up with a rental increase at the trailer park where he lives with his father and the rising costs of food and other basic necessities.

Vought, an independent who typically votes Republican but voted for Biden in 2020, said he’s also been frustrated by the “out of control” rise in illegal crossings by migrants at the U.S. southern border.

In the 2022 budget year, which ended in September, agents apprehended immigrants a record 2.38 million times at the southern border.

Coronavirus restrictions implemented under President Donald Trump, which were known as Title 42, allowed border officials to turn away migrants to help stop the spread of COVID-19. The restrictions recently ended.

While Title 42 was used to deny asylum more than 2.8 million times, it carried no legal consequences, which encouraged repeat attempts by migrants to enter the United States. Border Patrol agents returned to pre-pandemic immigration laws on May 11 that impose stiffer penalties on migrants who enter the U.S. without permission than the emergency health order did.

Despite his frustrations with Biden, Vought said he’d probably vote for the Democrat again if Trump wins the Republican nomination.

“I agree with about half of Trump’s policies but I think the guy is a liar and is so arrogant,” Vought said. “If those were the only two candidates … I’d have to still vote Biden.”

John Billman, 79, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, said Biden doesn’t get enough credit for passage of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill and $280 billion CHIPS Act aimed at boosting the U.S. semiconductor history, or the historically low unemployment rate. The unemployment rate stands at 3.4%,

Billman, who approves of Biden’s performance, said he feels the political conversation has become even more toxic since the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

“Since January 6, there are so many that seem incredibly angry at the government, that think the government and Biden are only doing bad things,” Billman said. “I mean an infrastructure bill? It’s a bad thing? I have relatives who I respect and love and are intelligent people who say, ‘I hate Biden.’ I can understand disagreeing with him but how can you hate Biden? It’s scary.”

Biden underperforms on the economy even among Democrats: 61% approve of him on the issue, compared with 75% for his job overall. Democrats feel even more dour about the current condition of the nation’s economy, though they continue to be more likely than Republicans to say the country is headed in the right direction (36% vs. 7%) or to rate the economy as good (41% vs. 7%).

Some Democratic respondents who approve of the president’s performance said they felt flummoxed by life in post-pandemic America and what often seems like a total abandonment of bipartisanship in Washington.

Karen D’Andrea, 64, a Democrat from Port Lucie, Florida, was among the millions of Americans who lost their jobs at the beginning of the pandemic. She was able to land a new job at a tech startup, but was recently laid off as that sector is going through some of the most significant cost cutting since the Great Recession.

“I think people with the same mindset as me feel our best days are behind us,” said D’Andrea, who approves of Biden’s performance but believes the country is moving in the wrong direction. “Republicans like to say they want to make America great again. I think things can be wonderful now, but we got to work together.”

___

The poll of 1,680 adults was conducted May 11-15 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

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ATLANTA (AP) — The woman flying out of Philadelphia’s airport last year remembered to pack snacks, prescription medicine and a cellphone in her handbag. But what was more important was what she forgot to unpack: a loaded .380-caliber handgun in a black holster.

The weapon was one of the 6,542 guns the Transportation Security Administration intercepted last year at airport checkpoints across the country. The number — roughly 18 per day — was an all-time high for guns intercepted at U.S. airports, and is sparking concern at a time when more Americans are armed.

“What we see in our checkpoints really reflects what we’re seeing in society, and in society there are more people carrying firearms nowadays,” TSA administrator David Pekoske said.

With the exception of pandemic-disrupted 2020, the number of weapons intercepted at airport checkpoints has climbed every year since 2010. Experts don’t think this is an epidemic of would-be hijackers — nearly everyone caught claims to have forgotten they had a gun with them — but they emphasize the danger even one gun can pose in the wrong hands on a plane or at a checkpoint.

Guns have been intercepted literally from Burbank, California, to Bangor, Maine. But it tends to happen more at bigger airports in areas with laws more friendly to carrying a gun, Pekoske said. The top 10 list for gun interceptions in 2022 includes Dallas, Austin and Houston in Texas; three airports in Florida; Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta; Phoenix; and Denver.

Pekoske isn’t sure the “I forgot” excuse is always true or whether it’s a natural reaction to getting caught. Regardless, he said, it’s a problem that must stop.

When TSA staffers see what they believe to be a weapon on the X-ray machine, they usually stop the belt so the bag stays inside the machine and the passenger can’t get to it. Then they call in local police.

Repercussions vary depending on local and state laws. The person may be arrested and have the gun confiscated. But sometimes they’re allowed to give the gun to a companion not flying with them and continue on their way. Unloaded guns can also be placed in checked bags assuming they follow proper procedures. The woman in Philadelphia saw her gun confiscated and was slated to be fined.

Those federal fines are the TSA’s tool to punish those who bring a gun to a checkpoint. Last year TSA raised the maximum fine to $14,950 as a deterrent. Passengers also lose their PreCheck status — it allows them to bypass some types of screening — for five years. It used to be three years, but about a year ago the agency increased the time and changed the rules. Passengers may also miss their flight as well as lose their gun. If federal officials can prove the person intended to bring the gun past the checkpoint into what’s called the airport’s sterile area, it’s a federal offense.

Retired TSA official Keith Jeffries said gun interceptions can also slow other passengers in line.

“It’s disruptive no matter what,” Jeffries said. “It’s a dangerous, prohibited item and, let’s face it, you should know where your gun is at, for crying out loud.”

Experts and officials say the rise in gun interceptions simply reflects that more Americans are carrying guns.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade group, tracks FBI data about background checks completed for a firearm sale. The numbers were a little over 7 million in 2000 and about 16.4 million last year. They went even higher during the coronavirus pandemic.

For the TSA officers searching for prohibited items, it can be jarring.

In Atlanta, Janecia Howard was monitoring the X-ray machine when she realized she was looking at a gun in a passenger’s laptop bag. She immediately flagged it as a “high-threat” item and police were notified.

Howard said it felt like her heart dropped, and she was worried the passenger might try to get the gun. It turns out the passenger was a very apologetic businessman who said he simply forgot. Howard says she understands travel can be stressful but that people have to take care when they’re getting ready for a flight.

“You have to be alert and pay attention,” she said. “It’s your property.”

Atlanta’s airport, one of the world’s busiest with roughly 85,000 people going through checkpoints on a busy day, had the most guns intercepted in 2022 — 448 — but that number was actually lower than the year before. Robert Spinden, the TSA’s top official in Atlanta, says the agency and the airport made a big effort in 2021 to try to address the large number of guns being intercepted at checkpoints.

An incident in November 2021 reinforced the need for their efforts. A TSA officer noticed a suspected gun in a passenger’s bag. When the officer opened the suitcase the man reached for the gun, and it went off. People ran for the exits, and the airport was shut down for 2 1/2 hours, the airport’s general manager Balram Bheodari said during a congressional hearing last year.

Officials put in new signage to catch the attention of gun owners. A hologram over a checkpoint shows the image of a revolving blue gun with a red circle over the gun with a line through it. Numerous 70-inch television screens flash rotating messages that guns are not allowed.

“There’s signage all over the airport. There is announcements, holograms, TVs. There’s quite a bit of information that is sort of flashing before your eyes to just try to remind you as a last ditch effort that if you do own a firearm, do you know where it’s at?” Spinden said.

Miami’s airport also worked to get gunowners’ attention. The airport’s director told Congress last year that after setting a gun interception record in 2021 they installed high-visibility signage and worked with airlines to warn passengers. He said the number of firearms intercepted declined sharply.

Pekoske said signage is only part of the solution. Travelers face a barrage of signs or announcements already and don’t always pay attention. He also supports gradually raising penalties to grab people’s attention.

But Aidan Johnston, from the gun advocacy group Gun Owners of America, said he’d like to see the fines lessened, saying they’re not a deterrent. While he’d like to see more education for new gun owners, he also doesn’t think of this as a “major heinous crime.”

“These are not bad people that are in dire need of punishment,” he said. “These are people who made a mistake.”

Officials believe they’re catching the vast majority, but with 730 million passengers screened last year even a miniscule percentage getting through is a concern.

Last month, musician Cliff Waddell was traveling from Nashville, Tennessee, to Raleigh, North Carolina, when he was stopped at the checkpoint. A TSA officer had seen a gun in his bag. Waddell was so shocked he initially said it couldn’t be his because he’d just flown the day before with the same bag. It turned out the gun had been in his bag but missed at the screening. TSA acknowledged the miss, and Pekoske says they’re investigating.

When trying to figure out how the gun he keeps locked in his glove compartment got in his bookbag, Waddell realized he’d taken it out when he took the vehicle in for repairs. Waddell said he recognizes it’s his responsibility to know where his firearm is but worries about how TSA could have missed something so significant.

“That was a shock to me,” he said.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Abortion, guns and religion — a major change in the law in any one of these areas would have made for a fateful Supreme Court term. In its first full term together, the court’s conservative majority ruled in all three and issued other significant decisions limiting the government’s regulatory powers.

And it has signaled no plans to slow down.

With former President Donald Trump’s appointees in their 50s, the six-justice conservative majority seems poised to keep control of the court for years to come, if not decades.

“This has been a revolutionary term in so many respects,” said Tara Leigh Grove, a law professor at the University of Texas. “The court has massively changed constitutional law in really big ways.”

Its remaining opinions issued, the court began its summer recess Thursday, and the justices will next return to the courtroom in October.

Overturning Roe v. Wade and ending a nearly half-century guarantee of abortion rights had the most immediate impact, shutting down or severely restricting abortions in roughly a dozen states within days of the decision.

In expanding gun rights and finding religious discrimination in two cases, the justices also made it harder to sustain gun control laws and lowered barriers to religion in public life.

Setting important new limits on regulatory authority, they reined in the government’s ability to fight climate change and blocked a Biden administration effort to get workers at large companies vaccinated against COVID-19.

The remarkable week at the end of June in which the guns, abortion, religion and environmental cases were decided at least partially obscured other notable events, some of them troubling.

New Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in Thursday as the first Black woman on the court. She replaced the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, who served nearly 28 years, a switch that won’t change the balance between liberals and conservatives on the court.

In early May, the court had to deal with the unprecedented leak of a draft opinion in the abortion case. Chief Justice John Roberts almost immediately ordered an investigation, about which the court has been mum ever since. Soon after, workers encircled the court with 8-foot-high fencing in response to security concerns. In June, police made a late-night arrest of an armed man near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Maryland home, and charged him with attempted murder of the justice.

Kavanaugh is one of three Trump appointees along with Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett who fortified the right side of the court. Greg Garre, who served as President George W. Bush’s top Supreme Court lawyer, said when the court began its term in October “the biggest question was not so much which direction the court was headed in, but how fast it was going. The term answers that question pretty resoundingly, which is fast.”

The speed also revealed that the chief justice no longer has the control over the court he held when he was one of five, not six, conservatives, Garre said.

Roberts, who favors a more incremental approach that might bolster perceptions of the court as a nonpolitical institution, broke most notably with the other conservatives in the abortion case, writing that it was unnecessary to overturn Roe, which he called a “serious jolt” to the legal system. On the other hand, he was part of every other ideologically divided majority.

If the past year revealed limits on the chief justice’s influence, it also showcased the sway of Justice Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving member of the court. He wrote the decision expanding gun rights and the abortion case marked the culmination of his 30-year effort on the Supreme Court to get rid of Roe, which had stood since 1973.

Abortion is just one of several areas in which Thomas is prepared to jettison court precedents. The justices interred a second of their decisions, Lemon v. Kurtzman, in ruling for a high school football coach’s right pray on the 50-yard line following games. It’s not clear, though, that other justices are as comfortable as Thomas in overturning past decisions.

The abortion and guns cases also seemed contradictory to some critics in that the court handed states authority over the most personal decisions, but limited state power in regulating guns. One distinction the majorities in those cases drew, though, is that the Constitution explicitly mentions guns, but not abortion.

Those decisions do not seem especially popular with the public, according to opinion polls. Polls show a sharp drop in the court’s approval rating and in people’s confidence in the court as an institution.

Justices on courts past have acknowledged a concern about public perception. As recently as last September, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.” Barrett spoke in at a center named for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who engineered her rapid confirmation in 2020 and was sitting on the stage near the justice.

But the conservatives, minus Roberts, rejected any concern about perception in the abortion case, said Grove, the University of Texas professor.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his majority opinion that “not only are we not going to focus on that, we should not focus on that,” she said. “I’m sympathetic as an academic, but I was surprised to see that coming from that many real-world justices.”

The liberal justices, though, wrote repeatedly that the court’s aggressiveness in this epic term was doing damage to the institution. Justice Sonia Sotomayor described her fellow justices as “a restless and newly constituted Court.” Justice Elena Kagan, in her abortion dissent, wrote: “The Court reverses course today for one reason and one reason only: because the composition of this Court has changed.”

In 18 decisions, at least five conservative justices joined to form a majority and all three liberals were in dissent, roughly 30% of all the cases the court heard in its term that began last October.

Among these, the court also:

— Made it harder for people to sue state and federal authorities for violations of constitutional rights.

— Raised the bar for defendants asserting their rights were violated, ruling against a Michigan man who was shackled at trial.

— Limited how some death row inmates and others sentenced to lengthy prison terms can pursue claims that their lawyers did a poor job representing them.

In emergency appeals, also called the court’s “shadow” docket because the justices often provide little or no explanation for their actions, the conservatives ordered the use of congressional districts for this year’s elections in Alabama and Louisiana even though lower federal courts have found they likely violated the federal Voting Rights Act by diluting the power of Black voters.

The justices will hear arguments in the Alabama case in October, among several high-profile cases involving race or elections, or both.

Also when the justices resume hearing arguments the use of race as a factor in college admissions is on the table, just six years after the court reaffirmed its permissibility. And the court will consider a controversial Republican-led appeal that would vastly increase the power of state lawmakers over federal elections, at the expense of state courts.

These and cases on the intersection of LGBTQ and religious rights and another major environmental case involving development and water pollution also are likely to result in ideologically split decisions.

Khiara Bridges, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, law school, drew a link between the voting rights and abortion cases. In the latter, Alito wrote in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that abortion should be decided by elected officials, not judges.

“I find it to be incredibly disingenuous for Alito to suggest that all that Dobbs is doing is returning this question to the states and that people can battle in the state about whether to protect fetal life or the interest of the pregnant person,” Bridges said. “But that same court is actively involved in insuring that states can disenfranchise people.”

Bridges also said the outcomes aligned almost perfectly with the political aims of Republicans. “Whatever the Republican party wants, the Republican party is going to get out of the currently constituted court,” she said.

Defenders of the court’s decisions said the criticism misses the mark because it confuses policy with law. “Supreme Court decisions are often not about what the policy should be, but rather about who (or which level of government, or which institution) should make the policy,” Princeton University political scientist Robert George wrote on Twitter.

For now, there is no sign that either the justices or Republican and conservative interests that have brought so many of the high-profile cases to the court intend to trim their sails, Grove said.

That’s in part because there’s no realistic prospect of court reforms that would limit the cases the justices could hear, impose term limits or increase the size of the Supreme Court, said Grove, who served on President Joe Biden’s bipartisan Supreme Court commission on court reforms.

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File # Y221730012

Details:

On June 22, 2022, at 7:00 A.M., members of the Coachella Community Action Team (CCAT), with the assistance of the Southern Coachella Valley Community Service District Team (SCVCSDT), the La Quinta Special Enforcement Team (SET), and the California Highway Patrol, served a search warrant at a residence located in the 86-200 block of Pinot Noir in the city of Coachella. The search warrant stemmed from a narcotics and weapon investigation CCAT was conducting. During the search of the residence, CCAT deputies located approximately 300 Fentanyl pills, powder Fentanyl, methamphetamine, a stolen handgun, and items indicative of narcotics sale. Ty Welty, a 43-year-old resident of Coachella was arrested for being a felon in possession of a firearm, felon in possession of ammunition, possession of a stolen firearm, and possession of narcotics while armed. Charges of narcotic sales will be filed on another subject who was not present during the search warrant.

Anyone with any information regarding this incident is urged to contact Deputy Nevins with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department at (760)863-8990, or Crime Stoppers at (760)341-STOP (7867).

For media inquiries regarding this incident please contact the Media Information Bureau.

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However, they only cite a part of the amendment. It says, “In order to have a well-maintained militia…” When that amendment was added to the constitution, we did not have a militia capable of destroying every living soul on the globe. Now we do. The two words “gun control” seem to scare the daylights out of the NRA and its cohorts. Guns kill. Cars can kill.

That’s why we are required to take written and road tests before we’re let loose on the streets and highways. A motor vehicle with an unstable person behind the wheel can kill. Same for a gun. It is so easy for an unstable teenager (or adult) to obtain an AK-47, Luger or Rossi 38 caliber handgun. I constantly hear, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” Wrong – “Guns in the hands of people kill people.” As Paul Harvey used to say on the radio, “Now you know the rest of the story.

Now, part two. Roe vs. Wade settled the abortion matter in 1973, a Supreme Court ruling that has been reaffirmed several times since. So here we go. It is wrong for a woman to control her own body, but any kid, not old enough to obtain a driver’s license can obtain a gun and kill your kid. There used to be a common expression, “Mother knows best.” Women are better equipped to control their bodies than a bunch of old fogies.

Every day the country seems to become more divided. No two issues have caused the chasm to continue to separate us. I believe we should control gun distribution on the streets of America and let women control their bodies.

Raymond Strait | Hemet

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear an appeal to expand gun rights in the United States in a New York case over the right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense.

The case marks the court’s first foray into gun rights since Justice Amy Coney Barrett came on board in October, making a 6-3 conservative majority.

The justices said Monday they will review a lower-court ruling that upheld New York’s restrictive gun permit law. The court’s action follows mass shootings in recent weeks in Indiana, Georgia, Colorado and California.

The case probably will be argued in the fall.

The court had turned down review of the issue in June, before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death.

New York is among eight states that limit who has the right to carry a weapon in public. The others are: California, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island.

In the rest of the country, gun owners have little trouble legally carrying their weapons when they go out.

Paul Clement, representing challengers to New York’s permit law, said the court should use the case to settle the issue once and for all. “Thus, the nation is split, with the Second Amendment alive and well in the vast middle of the nation, and those same rights disregarded near the coasts,” Clement wrote on behalf of the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association and two New York residents.

Calling on the court to reject the appeal, the state said its law promotes public safety and crime reduction and neither bans people from carrying guns nor allows everyone to do so.

Federal courts have largely upheld the permit limits. Last month an 11-judge panel of the federal appeals court in San Francisco rejected a challenge to Hawaii’s permit regulations in an opinion written by a conservative judge, Jay Bybee.

“Our review of more than 700 years of English and American legal history reveals a strong theme: government has the power to regulate arms in the public square,” Bybee wrote in a 7-4 decision for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The issue of carrying a gun for self-defense has been seen for several years as the next major step for gun rights at the Supreme Court, following decisions in 2008 and 2010 that established a nationwide right to keep a gun at home for self-defense.

In June, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, complained that rather than take on the constitutional issue, “the Court simply looks the other way.”

But Barrett has a more expansive view of gun rights than Ginsburg. She wrote a dissent in 2019, when she was a judge on the federal appeals court in Chicago, that argued that a conviction for a nonviolent felony — in this case, mail fraud — shouldn’t automatically disqualify someone from owning a gun.

She said that her colleagues in the majority were treating the Second Amendment as a “second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.”

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Anyone with any information regarding this incident is urged to contact Deputy Molina with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department at (760)863-8990, or Crime Stoppers at (760)341-STOP (7867).

For media inquiries regarding this incident please contact the Media Information Bureau.

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Enrique Marquez Jr. supplied the weapons that Syed Rizwan Farook and Farook’s wife, Tashfeen Malik, used on Dec. 2, 2015, to open fire on a meeting and holiday gathering of San Bernardino County employees who worked with Farook. Minutes later, a post on a Facebook page associated with Malik pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State terror group. The couple fled and died later that day in a gunbattle with authorities.

Marquez, 28, showed no emotion during a federal court hearing as relatives of the victims asked the judge to give him a lengthy sentence for providing Farook the guns years before the shooting, which at the time was the deadliest terror attack in the United States since 9/11.

Gregory Clayborn, whose daughter Sierra was killed, said Marquez should be held responsible for the massacre though he wasn’t the gunman.

“He’s a terrorist, your honor,” Clayborn told the judge. “And if you let him out, he’s going to do it again.”

Prosecutors sought a 25-year sentence for Marquez, arguing that he gave semiautomatic weapons and explosives to Farook though he knew Farook was inspired by violent extremists and had plotted with him years earlier to kill large numbers of people in attacks on a highway and college campus.

At the hearing, federal prosecutor Melanie Sartoris said Marquez has a high IQ and the mental capacity to understand the likelihood of an attack once he had bought the weapons.

“He knew all along that this would happen,” but he did nothing, she said.

The defense had asked for a five-year term. Marquez’s attorney, John Aquilina, said his client had been manipulated by Farook since he was 13, when they met as neighbors.

Marquez was desperate to socialize with others and needed to escape abuse at home. He had stopped speaking to Farook years before the attack and didn’t know it was going to happen, Aquilina said.

“Mr. Marquez’s sentence should not be reflective of what happened in San Bernardino,” he said.

In determining the sentence, U.S. District Judge Jesus Bernal said he took into account that Marquez had called 911 and cooperated with authorities.

“In a legal sense, I cannot punish Mr. Marquez for your loss,” Bernal told the families in his courtroom. “He is not responsible for the murders.”

Hilario Venoya Jr., whose son was shot twice and survived, said he wished Marquez received a longer sentence. His son didn’t attend the hearing because he is trying to move on.

“He’ll never be the same,” Venoya said.

Marquez and his family moved next door to Farook’s family in 2005. Authorities said that by 2011, Marquez was spending time at Farook’s house, watching videos involving what they said was “radical Islamic content.’”

Several years before the shooting, authorities said Marquez and Farook plotted terrorist attacks on Riverside City College and a highway, State Route 91.

But Marquez abandoned the idea and distanced himself from Farook in 2012 after three other Southern California men were arrested on suspicion of planning to go to Afghanistan to kill U.S. troops. Eventually, the three and a fourth man were sentenced to federal prison for conspiracy.

Farook met Malik, who lived in Pakistan, online. She traveled to the United States to marry Farook in 2014.

To carry out the shooting, the couple left their 6-month-old daughter with Farook’s mother, saying they were going to a doctor’s appointment. Afterward, police chased the pair through San Bernardino, which is 60 miles (97 kilometers) east of Los Angeles. Soon after they were killed, Marquez called 911 to say the shooter was his neighbor and had used his gun.

The next day, Marquez went to a hospital emergency room and was placed in a psychiatric ward. He was later arrested, and in FBI interviews, described his research into terror attacks, purchase of explosives and the plans he had made with Farook, according to U.S. authorities.

Marquez pleaded guilty in 2017 to conspiring with Farook to provide material support to terrorists and making false statements regarding the rifles he had purchased in his name using Farook’s money. He later tried to withdraw his plea to one of the counts, but the request was denied by the court.

STEFANIE DAZIO Associated Press

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