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• At
the White House media briefing, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders sought to nip questions regarding gun control in the bud, insisting "there will certainly be a
time for that policy discussion to take place, but that’s not the place that
we’re in at this moment.” But in the same session, she raised a right-wing
strawman, pointing to Chicago homicide statistics as supposed proof that
gun control measures don’t necessarily save lives.
“Apparently it also is hard for Trump’s team to resist talking
about policy, even when it insists that ‘today is a day for consoling
the survivors and mourning those we lost,’” wrote my colleague Callum
Borchers.
President Trump, of course, is at this point notorious for his
relative insensitivity in the wake of terror attacks. He sought to scold London’s Muslim mayor in June as terror hit the British capital and, on the campaign trail, pointed
to a mass shooting in Orlando carried out by a U.S. national of Afghan origin
as justification for his ban on Muslims entering the United States.
• Regarding
racial politics and gun rights in the U.S., Adam Winkler, a
UCLA Law School professor, wrote a fascinating piece on the topic for The Post last year. Here’s an excerpt:
“The founding generation that adopted the Second Amendment
also enacted racially discriminatory gun laws. Fearing slave revolts, early
American lawmakers prohibited slaves — and often free blacks, too — from
possessing weapons of any kind. Even in states where blacks were allowed to
have guns, such as Virginia, they had to first obtain the permission of local
officials. And while the ‘well regulated Militia’ mentioned in the
Constitution largely fell out of military use, such groups continued to be
employed to capture runaway slaves.
"After the Civil War, the question of guns and race
changed: Many blacks from the South had obtained firearms when they fled to
join colored units of the Union Army. When the war ended, the Army allowed
them to keep their guns as compensation for unpaid wages. As many of those
black soldiers returned to their home towns, those guns were seen by white
racists as a threat to the enforcement of white supremacy. Armed blacks could
fight back.
"So Southern states passed the Black Codes, which among
other things barred the freedmen from possessing firearms. Racists formed
groups like the Ku Klux Klan, riding at night to terrorize blacks and take away their guns.
Congress, still controlled by the North, reacted by proposing the 14th Amendment
to make the Bill of Rights, which previously limited only the federal
government, a limit on the states, too. It was the greatest expansion of
constitutional rights in American history — and, as historians have shown,
it was prompted in part by the desire to protect the right of freedmen to
have guns for self-defense."
• Over
the weekend, Jagmeet Singh, a charismatic, 38-year-old Sikh Canadian,
won the leadership race for the progressive New Democratic Party, the
third-largest in Canada. He cuts a fascinating figure on the electoral scene,
and is gearing up to challenge Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He is the first
“visible minority,”as the Globe and Mail put it,
to lead a major Canadian federal party. Last month, a video of Singh calmly
talking down a racist protester who thought he was Muslim went viral and won him online acclaim. But he has a hard job ahead of him, the Canadian daily reports:
"His success is rooted in the large following he has
amassed in the South Asian community. But Mr. Singh's win is also being
celebrated by many in the party's old guard who see the Ontario politician as
a force for renewal: someone who can capture the imagination of voters and
invigorate the New Democratic rank-and-file after the demoralizing losses of
the past election.
"The sharply dressed, cosmopolitan, multilingual lawyer
was drawn to the New Democrats through his social activism. At the age of 38,
he is inheriting a party that is starved for money and has fallen
significantly behind the Liberals and Conservatives in terms of donations
with just two years to go before the next federal election."
• The
Guardian’s soccer
writer in Spain, Sid Lowe, wrote a terrific dispatch on the role that soccer giant FC Barcelona plays in the larger drama of Catalan nationalism.
(For more on what has followed the region’s turbulent independence
referendum, scroll down.) Here’s an excerpt from Lowe’s essay:
“They say sport and politics shouldn’t mix, by which they tend
to mean other people’s politics. It’s a line Spain’s secretary of state for
sport has used… but sport and politics do mix, especially with Barcelona, who the Marxist
writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán described as the ‘symbolic unarmed army of
Catalonia.’
"That identification with Catalonia, while nuanced,
shifting, unevenly embraced, sometimes vague and often problematic, is part
of what gives Barça an explicitly socio-political dimension. It comes
together, of course, in the slogan: mes
que un club, more than a club. And that meant this was always
going to be more than a match even if in the end it was less than one.
"In September 1976, Las Palmas came to the Camp Nou for
the first Barcelona game broadcast in Catalan on Radio Barcelona. In October
1977, they were again the visitors when Barcelona invited Josep Taradellas,
former head of the Catalan government, in exile since 1939, to preside over
the game. ‘I’ll come on one condition,’ he said: ‘You win.’ Before the match,
he told supporters they shared the ‘same faith’ he had 40 years earlier,
insisting they had inherited a Barcelona ‘rooted in Catalanism’. Later in
1978, Las Palmas were again their opponents when they won the Cup for the
first time since the transition to democracy, Johan Cruyff collecting the
trophy from Juan Carlos. And then on Sunday, the day of the referendum, Las Palmas arrived
once more. This time they said they didn’t want to be silent witnesses: they
came with special shirts, Spain flags stitched to their chests."
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