The Civil War, which ended in the spring of 1865, claimed more lives than any conflict in U.S. history and required the establishment of the country’s first national cemeteries.
By the late 1860s, Americans in various towns and cities had begun holding springtime tributes to these countless fallen soldiers, decorating their graves with flowers and reciting prayers.
It is unclear where exactly this tradition originated; numerous different communities may have independently initiated the memorial gatherings. And some records show that one of the earliest Memorial Day commemorations was organized by a group of formerly enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865. Nevertheless, in 1966 the federal government declared Waterloo, New York, the official birthplace of Memorial Day.
Waterloo—which first celebrated the day on May 5, 1866—was chosen because it hosted an annual, community-wide event, during which businesses closed and residents decorated the graves of soldiers with flowers and flags.
Did you know? Each year on Memorial Day a national moment of remembrance takes place at 3:00 p.m. local time.
Decoration Day (Memorial Day)
On May 5, 1868, General John A. Logan, leader of an organization for Northern Civil War veterans, called for a nationwide day of remembrance later that month. “The 30th of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land,” he proclaimed.
The date of Decoration Day, as he called it, was chosen because it wasn’t the anniversary of any particular battle.
On the first Decoration Day, General James Garfield made a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, and 5,000 participants decorated the graves of the 20,000 Civil War soldiers buried there.
Many Northern states held similar commemorative events and reprised the tradition in subsequent years; by 1890 each one had made Decoration Day an official state holiday. Southern states, on the other hand, continued to honor the dead on separate days until after World War I.
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Health authorities and vaccine makers are moving toward targeting the next shot on one of the newest forms of the virus now dominant in the U.S., according to people familiar with the matter.
Under consideration for the next booster, the people said, are Omicron offshoots known as XBB.1.5 and XBB.1.16, which is nicknamed Arcturus. Also under consideration is XBB.2.3, though it isn’t as prevalent as the other two strains and is similar to XBB.1.16, one of the people said.
Vaccine experts advising the Food and Drug Administration are scheduled to meet next month to make a recommendation on the strain to target. Pharmaceutical companies would then make the shots in time for a fall vaccination campaign.
The health authorities and vaccine makers are completing the form of the next Covid-19 shot after the U.S. and the World Health Organization ended their states of emergency for the pandemic.
The plans for the booster, which Americans would take annually like a flu shot, are a sign that health authorities consider the coronavirus a threat though they have dropped many of the precautions recommended during the pandemic crisis.
Hospitalizations and deaths from the virus have fallen, but it is still killing hundreds of people a week in the U.S., and remains especially risky for the elderly and frail.
A new Covid-19 shot targeting a single strain would represent a shift from the latest version of the vaccine, called a bivalent vaccine because it aimed at both the original virus strain and an Omicron subvariant that was dominant in the U.S. at the time.
A WHO advisory panel last week recommended that updated booster shots target one of the dominant XBB variants circulating.
BioNTech plans to develop a vaccine targeting the XBB virus line, Chief Executive Ugur Sahin said this week at a company shareholder meeting. A Moderna spokesman said its fall boosters would target the latest variants of concern, as regulators advise.
Pfizer said it is looking forward to the FDA’s advisory meeting in June to share the company’s efforts and understand proposed next steps for the fall.
Novavax, which produces a vaccine that is authorized for use in the U.S. with a more traditional technology, is also working on a shot for the fall campaign. Novavax is focusing its development on the XBB.1.5 strain for the fall, a spokeswoman said.
The country’s booster campaign has been sluggish. Roughly 17% of the U.S. population has received the updated bivalent booster, with about 43% of people over age 65 getting a bivalent shot.
Surveys have cited pandemic fatigue and hesitancy as contributing to the vaccination pace that has lagged behind the initial campaign that began in late 2020.
The original Covid-19 shots that rolled out in 2020 targeted the ancestral strain of the virus.
The U.S. recently decided that people getting their first doses of mRNA vaccines would only need a single dose instead of two.
XBB.1.16 is the name of an Omicron subvariant. An earlier version of this article misspelled the name as XBB.1.6 in one sentence. (Corrected on May 26)
Posted inHealth|Comments Off on The outlines of the next Covid-19 booster are taking shape
A disturbing, Seattle-relevant story in the New York Times traces the exodus of highly educated employees from “superstar cities.” Seattle and other expensive coastal cities are definitely on the list, and the story notes the loss of magnetism for the highly educated by Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. Seattle is dismissed with this sentence: “Seattle’s edge vanished during the pandemic.”
On the other hand, Seattle is the fastest-growing big city in the nation, according to new Census figures for the year ending July 2022. King County is losing population, and last year Seattle shed 4,300 people. So maybe that “edge” has not vanished, at least yet. (Other fast-growing cities are almost all in the sunbelt.)
There are many causes for urban flight: high costs of housing, the lure of remote work (particularly in tech), crime, stymied politics, poor schools, declining downtowns, traffic congestion. Related causes are the increasing urban attractions in smaller cities such as Charlotte, Denver, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Nashville, and once-lowly Louisville. The story notes, “The whole state of California has now become a net domestic loser of college graduates.”
The big question for Seattle is whether it is too late to reverse this tidal outflow, and whether Seattle’s diverse economy, gentle climate, unified-liberal politics, and outdoorsy attractions will create a northland exception to the sunbelt. Our region has historically benefitted by good luck, as when railroads, Asian trade, Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon decided almost by random to settle here. Sitting back and waiting for the next gold-laden ship to steam into the harbor has worked in the past, but luck is hardly a policy.
As a warning of how steep a recovery hill we have to climb, and how long has been the erosion of Seattle magnetism, here is a list of other factors, only a few of which might be correctable.
Kshama Sawant. She and her socialist activists intimidated the Seattle City Council into a series of foolish, extreme votes, including writing off downtown safety. That pulled the council away from the progressive business establishment and the mayor, resulting in political impasse.
Republicans Abandon Seattle. First GOP step to get elected was a suburban strategy, which failed as the Far Right alienated King County. Next came a statewide tactic of running against Seattle (strange people, extreme politics, high taxes, “socialism”) that also failed. One result is a non-urban GOP in Olympia, set on punishing Seattle, the University of Washington, and Seattle politicians who seek statewide office.
Defeat of the Commons. The plans for a 60-acre park in South Lake Union were narrowly defeated in two mid-1990s votes. It turned out to be a last hurrah for the Seattle Establishment (architects, parks advocates, housing activists, urbanists, developers), and it greatly discouraged the progressive forces and money. In retrospect, the proposed park was too large, and Paul Allen’s donation of land turned him into the Amazon of the campaign. The Central Waterfront Park is something of a consolation, but not with voter approval.
Defeat of Rob McKenna, 2012.Attorney General McKenna seemed the one hope of creating a modern, moderate Republican Party, recalling the Dan Evans era (governor, 1965-77). McKenna, who tried to get to the Democrats’ left on higher education and to wedge off some Democratic votes, instead lost to Jay Insleein 2012, and an entrenched special-interest lock on state government (since 1974) marginalized the GOP and drove it to rural extremes. As with Seattle, there is no effective statewide competition to hold one-party politics accountable. Seattle’s progressive business establishment was left with no place to go, so most gave up or became “Obama independents.”
Too Much Money Chasing Too Little Land. The combination of high-tech salaries and the restraint on land (Urban Growth Boundary and well-lawyered NIMBYs) drove up the price of housing, first in Seattle and then in the near-suburbs. We started late with transit, so it couldn’t keep up with suburban cities or with high costs of transit construction. Developers with their lock on local politics coped with high land costs by building to the affluent market. We created a city where young people cannot afford to dwell.
The Stranger. As the Post-Intelligencer shrank, the counterpoint to the Seattle Times became The Stranger. Its snark and alienation severed the generational continuity of Seattle politics. That divorce was amplified when Mayor Mike McGinn (Mayor, 2010-13) stiffed consensus liberalism and drove the city council into permanent opposition.
Depleted Farm Teams. Seattle used to be rich in training organizations where young people learned the ropes, met mentors, and got into effective civic life. Among those who did this well: the PTA, community councils (done in by Mayor Ed Murray), the League of Women Voters, Allied Arts, the Municipal League. Just look at the relatively unknown candidates for office, almost all self-starters, and few with broad appeal or pragmatic chops.
Lost Local Focus. The venture capital side of Seattle, dominant since the 1990s, is addicted to scaling up companies to national and international size, and those who work for such companies lose economic ties to the region. Many local companies (law firms, media, insurance, banks, downtown office towers) now have non-local owners, who do not feel a stake in the city and make harsh, bottom-line decisions. Local philanthropy is sometimes (as with Boeing) decided in other cities. The tech wealth, preferring to have “a large canvas,” thinks more about Africa problems than Renton problems and has brushed aside the civic agenda.
Complacency. We recovered before, as a new Amazon suddenly takes root. The mayor and the city council and the city attorney have awakened from the woke agenda. Times are good and jobs are plentiful. We still have no state income tax, a strong pull. Relax! Go Kraken!
In short, Seattle faces a long climb back. Seattle grabbed for some gold rings and having surprisingly caught many of them now must deal with the unforeseen consequences of what Danny Westneat of The Seattle Times calls “the prosperity bomb.”
By Emily Sohn on May 12, 2023 in The Scientific American. Thanks to Ed M.
The newest SARS-CoV-2 strain may cause red, watery eyes. But the symptom can have other causes, too
A new variant of the virus that causes COVID is drawing international attention, not just for its rapid spread but for its tendency to cause one unexpected symptom: conjunctivitis, or “pink eye.”
The strain, known officially as XBB.1.16 and colloquially as Arcturus, is a subvariant of Omicron. It was first detected in India, where it has been spreading quickly, but it has been identified in dozens of countries and now makes up more than 12.5 percent of cases in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The World Health Organization has categorized Arcturus as a “variant of interest,” which means it has genetic changes that could affect its behavior, along with an advantage over other variants in circulation.
Everywhere it goes, Arcturus has generated reports of red, irritated eyes, especially in children. While bloodshot eyes can look alarming, experts say, viral pink eye isn’t usually anything to worry about on its own, and Arcturus is not showing signs of being more dangerous than previous variants. Still, knowing that pink eye might result from a COVID infection can help people detect it sooner and prevent further transmission.
Scientific American asked experts about why Arcturus appears to be targeting the eyes and when you should consult a medical provider.
WHAT IS PINK EYE, AND WHAT CAUSES IT?
Pink eye, known to doctors as conjunctivitis, describes inflammation of the conjunctiva—a thin, transparent mucous membrane that covers the white part of the eyeball. This inflammation causes blood vessels to become engorged, which is what makes eyes looks red or pink, says Thomas Steinemann, a clinical spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
Other symptoms of conjunctivitis can include watery eyes and a sensitivity to brightness as a result of an inflamed cornea, which splits light like frosted glass, says Bhupendra Patel, a plastic surgeon and specialist in eye disorders at the University of Utah’s John A. Moran Eye Center.
An estimated six million people in the U.S. see a health care provider each year for conjunctivitis, often because of viral infections, Patel and a colleague wrote in a review paper. Adenovirus is by far the most common cause of viral conjunctivitis and is responsible for 90 percent of such infections. Influenza, herpesviruses and other viruses can also cause pink eye. In addition to viruses, bacterial infections, chemical exposures, allergies, compromised contact lenses and physical trauma can trigger the condition.
WHY DOES COVID SOMETIMES CAUSE PINK EYE?
Experts have known since the pandemic’s beginning that COVID can cause eye symptoms such as pain, itching, burning and the telltale pink hue of conjunctivitis. Like other coronaviruses, including the SARS virus that caused an outbreak in 2002–2003, the COVID-causing virus SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated in tears. And higher concentrations of the virus in tears are linked to more severe eye symptoms, says Rohan Singh, an ocular immunology fellow at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, a Harvard Medical School–affiliated teaching hospital.
In fact, one of the first people to flag the existence of SARS-CoV-2 was Li Wenliang, a Chinese ophthalmologist who experts suspect caught the virus from an asymptomatic glaucoma patient. He eventually died from the illness.
Riders waiting to take the bus in Boston may notice something new at their bus stop: a sticker on the ground with a QR code they can scan to enjoy free reading material from the public library.
Twenty bus stops across the city will double as “digital libraries” where riders can borrow audiobooks, eBooks, e-newspapers, and e-magazines. The selection of free resources are meant to be read on-the-go, like poems and short stories, and include options for all ages. It doesn’t require a library card, and there’s no need to download a separate app.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said the initiative, which tentatively ends in August, “builds on our efforts to make public transportation more enjoyable, while also connecting our residents to the resources the Boston Public Library already offers.”
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The lack of affordable housing and homelessness are two of the primary challenges facing our state. In the last decade, roughly one million people moved to Washington, but only about 250,000 homes have been built. Our housing crisis wasn’t created overnight and it won’t be solved overnight, but I’m proud that the Legislature passed several significant bills and made historic investments this year that will help increase the supply of housing, protect tenants, prevent homelessness, and lower barriers to housing construction.
It is exciting to see housing investments from past legislative sessions take shape. I took this photo last week of the construction of Pride Place, a first-of-its-kind project on Capitol Hill by Community Roots Housing and GenPride. Pride Place will provide affordable housing to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer seniors as well as community space for the LGBTQ+ community.
Building more affordable housing
The passage of HB 1110, the “Middle Housing” bill, will help ensure that city land use policies allow building more homes people can actually afford to rent or buy. More duplexes, fourplexes, and sixplexes provide additional options for family housing to fill in the gap between small apartments and single-family homes. In cities with a population of more than 75,000, the bill allows fourplexes everywhere and sixplexes within a quarter mile of major transit stops. In cities within a population between 25,000 and 75,000, the bill allows duplexes everywhere and fourplexes within a quarter mile of major transit stops. Other major housing bills that passed this session include:
HB 1474 creates a Covenant Homeownership Program to provide down payment and closing cost assistance to help address the generational wealth gap in marginalized communities. Much of that gap arise from our shameful history of restrictive covenants that prevented racial and religious minorities from purchasing homes in certain neighborhoods.
HB 1349 will help protect vulnerable homeowners, particularly low-income households and seniors, from predatory foreclosures.
HB 1337 will reduce barriers to the construction of new accessory dwelling units (ADUs).
SB 5045 addresses the affordable housing shortage by incentivizing homeowners to rent ADUs to low-income households.
HB 1695 expands the definition of “public benefit” to include the use of surplus public property to create affordable housing, including rental and homeownership, targeting low-income households.
HB 1042 will help quickly increase housing supply, by allowing the addition of new dwelling units to existing commercial or mixed-use buildings.
SB 5058 will make it easier to construct small-scale condominiums.
HB 1046 increases the income limit for homes financed by public housing authorities to 80% of the area median income, up from 50% for for-profit entities and 60% for governmental or non-profit developers.
SB 5197 reforms Washington’s eviction process so tenants can use emergency rental assistance funds, allows remote participation in eviction proceedings, and expands judicial discretion around 14-day pay-or-vacate notices.
HB 1074 will help tenants who are moving out of their current rental by increasing transparency and accountability in the handling of their security deposits.
SB 5198 will protect vulnerable tenants in manufactured home communities by requiring owners to give two years’ notice of sale and give the tenants a fair chance to come together and make an offer to purchase the park themselves.
Housing investments
Thanks to state funding and the work of two local nonprofits, Blake House on First Hill now has its first tenants and will provide permanent supportive housing for seniors and veterans coming out of homelessness. The state’s next two-year operating and capital construction budgets adopted by the Legislature last month make significant new investments in more projects like Blake House that will increase affordable housing and reduce homelessness. Here are a few highlights:
$400 million, a record investment, in the Housing Trust Fund for construction and renovation of affordable housing units to serve low-income and special needs populations.
$150 million to start the Covenant Homeownership Program.
$141 million increase for emergency housing and shelter funding.
$60 million for homeless encampment response and rapid rehousing.
$30 million to address youth homelessness.
$27 million increase for the Housing and Essential Needs program.
I look forward to seeing these investments pay off with more affordable housing options for people here in the 43rd District and across the state.
I have been painting a picture of where we are heading if we fail to successfully intervene. That should not be taken to imply that, within decades, debilitation and collapse are inevitable. All you have been hearing is the first two parts of the physician’s three-part presentation to the patient, diagnosis and prognosis. They are not the full conversation. The third part is treatment plan. Shade. Cleanup. Building resilience. All as Manhattan Projects.
Surgeons and oncologists often have this conversation with a patient who has waited until stage 3 cancer develops before getting started on an intervention. Many such patients survive. Possible climate fixes are a topic unto itself, but it is clear that all of them will require design and field-testing on the scale of a Manhattan Project. ↓
Let me summarize:
We need to retire the notion that going on a fossil fuel diet will fix our climate problem. (It is still a good idea for other goals.) If we were actually cleaning up CO2, then emissions reduction would speed up the process somewhat. However, we have yet to start a cleanup. We have our priorities backwards. ↓
Many people think that “Zero Emissions” or “Net Zero” will make the accumulation go away. No. Too little, too late. ↓
After 1985, the land temperature rose three times faster than the ocean surface. Alter the temperature contrast over coastlines and that may change the winds and where they deliver rain—producing droughts here and floods there. ↓
There indeed has been more global drought: the land area in drought doubled between 1983 and 2003. ↓
Global drought and the 21st century surges in extreme weather pose a much more immediate threat than another fractional degree rise in average surface temperature. ↓
There are now reasons why climate action needs to be big, quick, and sure to work the first time. We are in a new danger zone from which we must escape; collapse will kill faster than heat. Climate action now needs to focus on the short term via creating shade and removing CO2.
The climate crisis has been a lot to wrap our hearts, heads, and strategic policy around. But we now need big interventions before we miss even more exits on the Freeway to Hell.
Posted inUncategorized|Taggedclimate|Comments Off on My “Rethinking Climate” talk, up on YouTube
Thanks to Bob P who wrote: “Many years ago, Pam, myself, and two of my relatives from Sweden spent a pleasant time there, with Jan Johnson. It is an interesting place to visit.”
This historic site is memorialized in the wonderful 2009 novel: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (Author)
n August 1910, the Panama Hotel opens at 605 1/2 S Main Street, in the heart of Seattle’s Nihonmachi (Japantown). The builder and designer is Sabro Ozasa, a Japanese American architect and graduate of the University of Oregon. The Panama is a five-story workingman’s hotel, with businesses located on the first floor. The businesses include a laundry, a dentist, a tailor, a pool hall, a book store, a florist, and a sushi shop. The upper floors contain single occupant residences. In the basement, there is (and remains to this day) a “sento,” a Japanese-style public bathhouse. The Panama Hotel’s sento, named the Hashidate-Yu, is the only such bathhouse remaining intact in the United States today (2010).
The Sento
The Hashidate-Yu drew on a 1,200-year-old tradition of Japanese bathing. Japanese sentos were a central feature of Buddhist temples, used in purification rites. The temples also provided baths for the general public, since many homes at the time did not have private facilities. Eventually, the religious implications faded, but the sentos continued to be used as gathering places. Japanese immigrants sought out sentos upon arrival in their new communities. The Hashidate-Yu had separate baths — one for men and one for women and children.
Over the years the Panama Hotel served as a home for generations of Japanese immigrants, Alaskan fishermen, and international travelers. The combination of businesses, hotels, and bathhouses provided necessary services for the community. Facilities like the sentos allowed the Japanese immigrants to share their cultural traditions. Before World War II, there were at least four sentos in Seattle: the Hashidate-Yu, the Shimoji, the Hinode, and the Naruto. Most of Seattle’s Nihonmachi, like many across the western United States, disappeared during World War II when the United States government forced 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry into internment camps. In Seattle many families packed their belongings into trunks and suitcases and stored them for safekeeping in the hotel’s basement.
Abandoned Property
Sadly, many of the families never returned to collect their belongings. Takashi Hori (who was himself interned from 1942 to 1945), owned and ran the Panama Hotel from 1938 to 1985. He found more than 50 trunks of property and made several attempts to reunite the items with their owners. After the war the Hashidate-Yu bathhouse in the hotel basement was re-opened and was run by Fukuo and Shigeko Sano until the mid-1950s. Sentos gradually fell out favor, as many Japanese Americans felt compelled to abandon their traditions during and after the war. Also, modern houses usually included bathing facilities.
In 1985, Jan Johnson bought the Panama Hotel from the Hori family and began renovations. She too attempted to find the owners of the property left in the hotel. She then took the belongings that were left unclaimed and created a small museum in the basement of the hotel. The artifacts include old Japanese American photographs, a dusty footlocker, a cloth coat with a fur collar, a pair of men’s socks, and other pieces of everyday life. Many of the items have been included in temporary exhibitions at Ellis Island and the Japanese American National Museum.
Blake House makes up the bottom third of this affordable housing highrise on First Hill.
This week, people who used to live outside began moving into a new building on First Hill. It’s the first new affordable housing high-rise tower Seattle has seen in 50 years.
It represents a different approach — in terms of scale and strategy — for addressing homelessness in the region.
Kevin Thomas Kiso smiles in a sunlit lobby, inside a concrete, steel and glass high-rise apartment building on First Hill. He has just finished signing his lease, and now holds a new set of keys.
“This is the coolest day of my adult life, and I’m 57 … I spent 20 years sleeping right out here, at the Stimson Green Mansion by the park … the mansion over here,” Kiso says as he gestures out the window. “I spent 14 years in my sleeping bag, with my laptop here. And then I would go to the library and read French literature, like Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean Paul Sartre, and Camus.”
Reading the French Existentialists helped Kiso get through a dark time in his life. He got addicted to heroin and spent time in prison. He’s been trying to stay clean ever since. For the last two years, he’s been living in a cubicle at a Salvation Army shelter.
“It was people milling around, and walking by, and rapping, and singing, and talking, and yakking, and you never got a moment of peace and tranquility,” Kiso said of living on the street. “And I know that that’s what I’m being granted here. And silence is going to be kind of frightening at first for me, I believe. The tranquility and … I’m not sure how I’m going to react without sirens blaring and incessant traffic and things telling me to walk and don’t walk.”
Homelessness is a problem with many faces. There are people who need help getting off the streets, and there are many people on limited incomes who need affordable housing, so they don’t get pushed into a cycle that can lead to homelessness. Experts say you have to work at the problem from both directions. The 17-story apartment tower in First Hill is therefore divided into two parts, each with its own entrance and lobby.
The bottom part is called “Blake House.” It provides “permanent supportive housing” for seniors and veterans coming out of homelessness. It’s run by a nonprofit called Plymouth Housing.
The top part is called “The Rise,” and it’s for people on modest incomes, such as teachers, nurses and other health care workers. Another nonprofit, Bellwether Housing, runs this portion.
Kiso is part of the first cohort to move into Blake House. In a few months, he’ll have 112 new neighbors. Above Blake House, another 250 families will live in the Bellwether Housing section.
The tower has a common area lounge with a view of the First Hill neighborhood, including its many hospitals. Paul Schumann uses the lounge as he studies from a medical textbook on his laptop. He moved into this top part of the high rise in March.
Posted inhappiness, Health, Homeless|Comments Off on Seattle’s first affordable housing high-rise tower in 50 years welcomes its first residents (and it’s on First Hill)
Heather Cox Richardson May 7 Share For years now, after one massacre or another, I have written some version of the same article, explaining that the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority. The idea that massacres are “the price of freedom,” as right-wing personality Bill O’Reilly said in 2017 after the Mandalay Bay massacre in Las Vegas, in which a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 others, is new, and it is about politics, not our history.
The Second Amendment to the Constitution, on which modern-day arguments for widespread gun ownership rest, is one simple sentence: “A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” There’s not a lot to go on about what the Framers meant, although in their day, to “bear arms” meant to be part of an organized militia.
As the Tennessee Supreme Court wrote in 1840, “A man in the pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms; much less could it be said that a private citizen bears arms because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.”
Today’s insistence that the Second Amendment gives individuals a broad right to own guns comes from two places.
One is the establishment of the National Rifle Association in New York in 1871, in part to improve the marksmanship skills of American citizens who might be called on to fight in another war, and in part to promote in America the British sport of elite shooting, complete with hefty cash prizes in newly organized tournaments. Just a decade after the Civil War, veterans jumped at the chance to hone their former skills. Rifle clubs sprang up across the nation.
By the 1920s, rifle shooting was a popular American sport. “Riflemen” competed in the Olympics, in colleges, and in local, state, and national tournaments organized by the NRA. Being a good marksman was a source of pride, mentioned in public biographies, like being a good golfer. In 1925, when the secretary of the NRA apparently took money from ammunition and arms manufacturers, the organization tossed him out and sued him.
NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. In 1931, amid fears of bootlegger gangs, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons; prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children; to require all dealers to be licensed; and to require background checks before delivery. It backed the 1934 National Firearms Act, and parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act, designed to stop what seemed to be America’s hurtle toward violence in that turbulent decade.
But in the mid-1970s a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later it elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”
This was the second thing that led us to where we are today: leaders of the NRA embraced the politics of Movement Conservatism, the political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War II.
Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors.
Leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater personified the American cowboy, with his cowboy hat and opposition to government regulation, while television Westerns showed good guys putting down bad guys without the interference of the government.
In 1972 the Republican platform had called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns,” but in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Movement Conservative hero Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun control. In 1980, the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms, and the NRA endorsed a presidential candidate—Reagan—for the first time. When President Reagan took office, a new American era, dominated by Movement Conservatives, began. And the power of the NRA over American politics grew.
In 1981 a gunman trying to kill Reagan shot and paralyzed his press secretary, James Brady, and wounded Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty. After the shooting, then-representative Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced legislation that became known as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, or the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases. Reagan, who was a member of the NRA, endorsed the bill, but the NRA spent millions of dollars to defeat it.
After the Brady Bill passed in 1993, the NRA paid for lawsuits in nine states to strike it down. Until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun. But in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA had begun to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that.
In 1997, when the Brady Bill cases came before the Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court declared parts of the measure unconstitutional.
Now a player in national politics, the NRA was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers. By 2000 it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election. In that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.
Increasingly, NRA money backed Republican candidates. In 2012 the NRA spent $9 million in the presidential election, and in 2014 it spent $13 million. Then, in 2016, it spent over $50 million on Republican candidates, including more than $30 million on Trump’s effort to win the White House. This money was vital to Trump, since many other Republican super PACs refused to back him. The NRA spent more money on Trump than any other outside group, including the leading Trump super PAC, which spent $20.3 million.
The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party’s ideology of individual liberty. Lawmakers and activists have not been able to overcome Republican insistence on gun rights despite the mass shootings that have risen since their new emphasis on guns.
Posted inGuns, History|Comments Off on Brief history of the NRA’s position on gun control
BERKELEY, Calif. — To kick off homecoming weekend last fall, the University of California, Berkeley, held a groundbreaking ceremony for its new data sciences building, known as the Gateway. At a cost of over half a billion dollars, the 367,270-square-foot building, with “extended sightlines and natural light-filled corridors,” is being billed as a hub for research in artificial intelligence, data analytics and machine learning.
That may represent the future, but the past is just a short walk across campus in the stacks of the anthropology library. For decades, the repository has served generations of scholars in a space as modest as the Gateway is grand: a 1,500-square-foot corner on the second floor of the anthropology department’s building, with a cozy reading area of armchairs and computer terminals along one wall.
For days now, the library has become a scene of occupation. Students have filled it with tents, sleeping bags and air mattresses in a last-ditch effort to save the 67-year-old institution dedicated to anthropology, which encompasses the study of humanity, societies and cultures. The university is preparing to move the collections of archaeological field notes and books — about 80,000 volumes in total, on subjects as varied as folk tales, Black culture and Mexican American social movements — to a nearby warehouse and the main library, saving $400,000 annually.
For the student occupiers, the fight is as much a battle over a library as it is over humanities and social sciences in an age when the world is obsessed with technology and seems eager to replace the physical world with virtual experiences driven by A.I.
“It’s about fundamentally writing a different story about what education is, what the university is for,” said Jesús Gutiérrez, a graduate student who works at the library and is writing a dissertation about folk art forms of the African diaspora.
In the past five years alone, the number of Berkeley undergraduate students choosing to major in anthropology has dropped by about a quarter, part of a generation that has struggled to pay student loans and flocked toward science and engineering in the lucrative shadow of Silicon Valley.
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