On Sunday, a stadium’s worth of Americans will stream into New Orleans’ Caesars Superdome, and a lot of others will camp out in the French Quarter, where just over a month ago a man ran his car through a crowd of people before dying in a shootout with police. More than a dozen people were killed, even more were injured, and the city was criticized for its security vulnerabilities.
As The Trace’s Jennifer Mascia reports, there are some things that New Orleans can’t control. Last summer, Louisiana enacted a law enabling anyone 18 or older to carry a gun, open or concealed, without a permit. While guns — including, for players, finger guns — will be banned at the Superdome, they can be carried freely outside of it. So freely, in fact, that police can’t check if firearms are being carried illegally.
The situation is parallel to this past summer’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, which took place barely after an attempt to assassinate Donald Trump. Like the RNC, coolers are banned outside the event space, but not guns; also like the RNC, the president plans to be in attendance. This time, he’ll watch the Philadelphia Eagles play the Kansas City Chiefs. Trump appears to be rooting for the latter; two of the team’s superstar players quickly welcomed his attendance.
“On any given Sunday,” the late NFL Commissioner Bert Bell supposedly once said, “any team can beat any other team.” It’s one of the most paradigmatic sayings in American sports, and in many ways it reflects an American ethos: Anything can happen. You can see it in football writ large, too: a complicated rulebook, a system of power and wealth behind it, and a bunch of middlemen to decide when it’s violated. And if you’re in the game, you could get hurt.
From The Trace
Coolers Are Banned Near This Year’s Super Bowl. Guns? They’re OK: New Orleans is part of a growing list of cities hamstrung by state legislatures hostile to gun regulation. Local police and officials have tried to find workarounds to protect citizens.
Appeals Court Says 18-Year-Olds Can Buy Handguns, Teeing Up SCOTUS Battle: The January 30 ruling is the latest in a series of divergent opinions on age restrictions for guns. Experts say the split means the justices are likely to intervene.
The Legacy of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention: Rob Wilcox, a co-director of the now-shuttered office, discusses what the Biden administration accomplished, and why he remains optimistic about gun violence prevention efforts.
What We’re Reading
Gun Lobbyists and Cambridge Analytica Weaponized Gun Owners’ Private Details for Political Gain: In 2016, the National Shooting Sports Foundation shared sensitive personal information about firearm owners with the now-disgraced consultancy Cambridge Analytica to help elect Donald Trump to the presidency and Republicans to the Senate. This investigation uncovers the details of how their data was used. [ProPublica]
How YouTube Is Changing American Gun Culture: A look inside the sprawling online community known as guntube. [The New York Times]
Democrats question diversion of federal law enforcement officers to Trump migrant crackdown: Three House members said the shift will allow “dangerous criminals” to remain free and expose “countless Americans to more violent crime.” [NBC]
Two women make sense of a lifetime of abuse and gun violence: ‘How did I get here?’: “As we parsed her story over dinner, she said it had become clear to her that the domestic and the community gun violence she had faced shared some root causes that had gone unaddressed, like a lack of financial resources, family stability and early exposure to physical conflicts. ‘There were no preventive or supportive measures for teenagers like me back then, so it made me grow very angry and very cold.’” [The Guardian]
Children joked about school shootings. Then the sheriff sent them to jail: At least 477 people, most of them students, were arrested over school threats after the mass shooting at Apalachee High School last fall. That’s more than were arrested after the mass school shootings in Oxford, Michigan; Uvalde, Texas; and the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, combined. [The Washington Post]
Mexico opens two-front war on U.S. guns: Mexico is pursuing diplomatic and legal solutions to the flow of illegal U.S. guns fueling crime and violence across the country. [Courthouse News]
Are We Thinking About Gun Violence All Wrong?: Ideas for countering gun violence are often framed in two competing buckets: putting more police on the street versus addressing the root causes of violence. Jens Ludwig, of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, argues that frame is a false dichotomy, and offers solutions ranging from urban design to AI-powered social programs. [The Atlantic]
Why This Physician Testifies in Favor of the Firing Squad: Dr. James Williams knows what guns do to a body: He’s a gun violence survivor, an ER doctor, a police trainer, and a sport shooter. That knowledge is precisely why he believes that, if the state is going to execute a person, firing squads are a more humane option than lethal injection. [The Marshall Project]
In Memoriam
James Stroud Sr., 80, was known all over Chicago — but most of all in Auburn Gresham, the South Side neighborhood where he’d lived with his partner, Fannie Mae Fields, since 1972. He was shot and killed in the city last month, while he was sitting in his parked car. He was tough when he needed to be, his son James Stroud Jr. told the Chicago Sun-Times, but he was the kind of guy who liked to call everybody “sweetheart.” Stroud Sr. had retired from his tow truck business a couple of months ago, which meant he had more time for the things he enjoyed: Playing chess at McDonald’s, chatting with his pals, and watching Westerns. “My dad was just a good guy,” Stroud Jr. said. “He enjoyed his life.”
Spotlight on Solutions
A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the U.S. House is reintroducing legislation that would provide a critical infusion of cash to services for millions of victims of domestic and sexual violence, Mother Jones reports. The Crime Victims Fund Stabilization Act had widespread support when it was introduced in the last session, but didn’t make it to the floor in the House or Senate. If passed, the bill would help support these services at a critical juncture. While funding for these programs has declined, rates of domestic violence have increased since the coronavirus pandemic, and victims — particularly those who are pregnant or postpartum — are at high risk of gun violence. More than half of all intimate partner homicides involve a firearm, and domestic gun violence is one of the leading causes of homicide death for women in America.
Pull Quote
“It shouldn’t be like this. Nowhere in America should it be normal that you see a group of like three to four soldiers in fatigues with a long rifle on every corner of the street.”
— Caleb Webb, an operations manager at a hotel near the French Quarter in New Orleans, on feeling grateful for enhanced security measures for the Super Bowl and the jarring visuals that come with them, to The Trace and Verite News
