A wholesale repudiation of gun safety

Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported the nasty guy and his minions are eliminating three dozen gun safety regulations. It’s a “wholesale repudiation of gun safety.” Some of the regulations that are disappearing: Yanking licenses of gun dealers who break the law. Gun show dealers must do background checks on their customers (closing the gun show loophole). Preventing a person with mental illness from owning a gun. Why do this? Gun sales have dipped. People tend to buy guns when conservatives scream that Democrats want to take their guns away. But no one is screaming that about the nasty guy. Gun makers and their trades people want even more regulations removed, such as the one requiring dealers to keep their records indefinitely. Ken B. Morales, in an article for ProPublica posted on Kos, reported that in the Supreme Court term that ended in October 2025 (I think that translates to the last ruling issued in June 2025)...

For the first time, it decided more cases by secret ballot, and with few signed opinions, than it did for cases argued in open court. These decisions, which make up the court’s “shadow docket,” are a fast-track way to get a decision from the top court. They rarely include arguments, have limited briefings and have expedited timetables, and justices infrequently provide explanation of how they voted or to cite legal precedent.

The ProPublica team analyzed two decades of requests for rulings. They didn’t count the ones that were procedural requests and requests for a stay of execution. These are more than three-quarters of all requests. The rest were counted as being on the shadow docket.

We found that when the last court term ended, justices had issued 63 orders on the shadow docket, as opposed to 56 orders on the more traditional merits docket — where the court hears oral arguments scheduled months in advance and the justices issue signed opinions.

This is a record for the number of decisions made in secret. Most of them show a political bias and helped the nasty guy. It’s a blow to the court’s credibility. Part of the high number is because whenever the nasty guy doesn’t like a court decision he runs to the Supremes. Alex Jones and his InfoWars site spread the lie that the Sandy Hook School shooting was staged to improve the chances of passing gun safety legislation. He prompted his listeners to harass the families. The Sandy Hook parents sued for defamation and, after multiple court cases, were awarded $1.4 billion. InfoWars was forced into bankruptcy. Oliver Willis of Kos reported on what happened next – InfoWars was bought by the satirical site The Onion. The remade site now satirizes Jones and his previous tirades. They kept the old name though now the “o” is replaced with The Onion logo. And a vile site is off the internet. Another important part of the takeover – InfoWars paid out $100,000 to the Sandy Hook families, surely with more to come. Sounds like satire can be quite lucrative. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer:

The killing of Salgado — family man, essential worker, and American dreamer who was doing everything the right way after joining the 1990s mass migration of undocumented Mexicans — is a crime against humanity that makes anyone who still has a functioning moral compass want to scream in outrage. Still, what happened after Salgado was gunned down is deeply troubling in a different way. America seemed to mostly shrug at a killing no less senseless than this winter’s Minneapolis ICE fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, let alone other law enforcement murders like George Floyd in 2020, which sparked days of nationwide protest. The implosion of now ex-Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner or Donald Trump’s inane prattle at a NATO summit took up most of the hour on cable-TV news, with reporting on yet another ICE killing squeezed in at the end. A fascist regime cutting down our law-abiding neighbors in the streets is becoming background noise. Just how they want it.

Down in the comments are several memes joking about Mitch McConnell’s medical condition being kept a secret. Between weekend performances and travel next week I won’t post again until Monday, July 20.