DrDinD 🌊🇺🇲🇺🇦 @DrDinD
Replying to @RVAwonk
It's. The. Guns.
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1:32 AM · May 30, 2022

...The study went on to look at other variables, including urbanization, other types of crime, and poverty. Time and time again, researchers found a strong association between firearm prevalence and homicides after controlling for these factors. And the increase in overall homicides was driven by an increase in gun-related homicides — homicides that didn't involve guns didn't significantly increase as gun ownership did. In other words, more guns meant more homicides, particularly gun homicides. [snip]

With that said, it's probably true that this aspect of the gun control debate is not emphasized enough: Guns are a factor, not the only factor. The fact that you need to control for all these other variables is indicative of this — if guns were the single dominant issue when it came to gun violence, major statistical controls wouldn't be necessary.

This is why so many lawmakers, including President Barack Obama in recent remarks, have gone out of their way to say that gun control would make gun violence more rare, but not totally end it. And in fact, no single policy could stop all gun crime — there will always be a black market for guns, and humans have been killing each other since they began to exist. (More comprehensive solutions would, for instance, seriously consider solutions to poverty, excessive alcohol consumption, and the other variables that gun studies control for because they're known contributors to crime.)

But the tremendous number of guns in circulation is one of the issues that makes America — and some states in particular — unique in the world, and explains why the US seems to be so far ahead of its peers when it comes to lethal violence.

The US has the highest firearm homicide rate in the developed world

In 2019, the number of US deaths from gun violence was about 4 per 100,000 people. That’s 18 times the average rate in other developed countries. Multiple studies show access to guns contributes to higher firearm-related homicide rates.


[original chart is interactive]

Almost a third of US adults believe there would be less crime if more people owned guns, according to an April 2021 Pew survey. However, multiple studies show that where people have easy access to firearms, gun-related deaths tend to be more frequent, including by suicide, homicide and unintentional injuries.

It is then unsurprising that the US has more deaths from gun violence than any other developed country per capita. The rate in the US is eight times greater than in Canada, which has the seventh highest rate of gun ownership in the world; 22 times higher than in the European Union and 23 times greater than in Australia, according to Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) data from 2019.

As much as we love to talk about how we have "abolished" slavery in these here United States, there is an exception to the 13th Amendment — involuntary servitude is still legal if it's being used as punishment for a crime. In Arizona, as in many states, prisoners are required to work 40 hours a week for at little as 10 cents an hour, unless their health does not allow it (which is a very big possibility considering a federal judge just found the state's prison healthcare system to be "plainly grossly inadequate" and "unconstitutional" ).

Giving testimony on Thursday before the state Legislature's Joint Legislative Budget Committee about "a Request For Proposal for a contract to run the Florence West prison," Arizona Department of Corrections Director David Shinn explained that many Arizona communities would "collapse" without prison labor. [snip]

According to the ACLU, "charging misdemeanors as felonies, throwing thousands of people behind bars instead of offering drug treatment or diversion services, and abusing prosecutorial power to secure guilty pleas are just some of the tactics used that have led to Arizona’s exceedingly high rate of incarceration."

These things are all connected. They have to pay the private prisons, they have to fill the private prisons, they have to provide slave labor and in order to do that, they have to send a lot of people to prison for a very long time. The first private prisons started in Texas in 1985 and prison populations have since skyrocketed. That's not a coincidence.

[graph showing the rise in incarceration rates from 1925 to 2000]

Bindersfulohostbodies • 17 minutes ago
Closing the unused private prison is too burdensome for the local communities that their forced labor supports, but it’s also too burdensome to take the taxpayer money saved by closing them, and placing inmates in the empty beds of the state-owned prisons that taxpayers already paid for, and using the saved tax dollars to support those local communities that lost their forced labor support structures. Got it.

alwayspunkindrublic • 44 minutes ago
Douglas A. Blackmon's "Slavery By Another Name" should be required reading in this fucking country. It details how, in the case of Black folks in the South, slavery simply reinvented itself, incentivizing the arrest of Black citizens for the most ludicrous and petty of offenses, so that they could be leased at a profit to private businesses for forced convict labor. This is just another shithook wrinkle in a story that's been going on since Emancipation.

The Secret Service has a policy requiring employees to back up and store government communications when they retire old electronic or telephonic devices, but in practice, staff do not consistently back up texts from phones.

A similar issue came up in 2018, when the Justice Department inspector general said he used “forensic tools” to recover missing text messages from two senior FBI officials who had investigated Hillary Clinton and Trump and exchanged notes critical of the president. The missing messages generated criticism when GOP leaders and the president questioned how the FBI failed to preserve them.

The Secret Service has had a history of important records disappearing under cover of night and agency staff members refusing to cooperate when investigators came calling seeking information.

When a congressional committee was investigating assassinations and assassination attempts, it sought boxes of records that reportedly showed the Secret Service received ample advance warnings and threats before President John F. Kennedy’s death that white supremacists and other organizations were plotting to kill Kennedy using high-powered rifles from tall buildings. The Secret Service told investigators the records had been destroyed as part of a normal culling of old archives — days after investigators had requested them.

Jimmy Jenkins @JimmyJenkins
Speaking of Rep. Kavanagh, an Arizona Republic investigation found that Arizona lawmakers invested more in private prisons after record-high campaign contributions from the industry in recent years.
[link below]
8:43 PM · Jul 14, 2022

While Republicans, including Gov. Doug Ducey, and the Department of Corrections have said closing [state-run] Florence would save taxpayers money, the Legislature’s new budget allocation includes plans to pay private prisons $85 per day for these prisoners — a rate far higher than the current $67 per-day average. It also is not clear why the department would turn the prisoners over to private prisons when there are more than 7,600 empty beds in public facilities across the state, as of July 23. [snip]

“There's a direct correlation between the awards of these contracts, and the campaign donations,” said John Fabricius, executive director for Arizonans for Transparency and Accountability in Corrections. “It doesn't take a genius to figure out what's going on here. ... It's out here in plain sight.”

Jimmy Jenkins @JimmyJenkins
The last private prison contract in Arizona was awarded to CoreCivic in December, 2021. The state agreed to pay CoreCivic $85.12 per prisoner, per day, with a guaranteed minimum 90% occupancy rate, generating millions of dollars in profits.
[link below]
8:47 PM · Jul 14, 2022

Arizona will transfer 2,706 prisoners from a state-run prison to a private facility in a move that’s expected to cost the state more money, while generating millions of dollars in profits for the private prison industry. [snip]

The five-year contract took effect on Dec. 29, 2021. The state will pay CoreCivic $85.12 per prisoner, per day for the contract, with the state guaranteeing a minimum 90% occupancy rate. But that cost could increase. According to the original request for proposals, the contractor “may be eligible to receive consideration for an annual cost adjustment ... subject to approval of funding and authorization.”

Incarcerated workers in the US produce at least $11bn in goods and services annually but receive just pennies an hour in wages for their prison jobs, according to a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Nearly two-thirds of all prisoners in the US, which imprisons more of its population than any other country in the world, have jobs in state and federal prisons. That figure amounts to roughly 800,000 people, researchers estimated in the report, which is based on extensive public records requests, questionnaires and interviews with incarcerated workers.

ACLU researchers say the findings outlined in Wednesday’s report raise concerns about the systemic exploitation of prisoners, who are compelled to work sometimes difficult and dangerous jobs without basic labor protections and little or no training while making close to nothing. [snip]

Public officials have acknowledged that the work of these unpaid and poorly compensated incarcerated laborers is crucial: “There’s no way we can take care of our facilities, our roads, our ditches, if we didn’t have inmate labor,” Warren Yeager, a former Gulf county, Florida, commissioner said to the Florida Times-Union.

Robinson is widely known for being the first openly gay priest to be consecrated a bishop in a major Christian denomination believing in the historic episcopate, a matter of significant controversy. After his election, many theologically conservative Episcopalians in the United States abandoned the Episcopal Church, formed the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) and aligned themselves with bishops outside the Episcopal Church in the United States, a process called the Anglican realignment.

McConnell wants to stop Democrats, including Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), from using a process known as “reconciliation” to pass that prescription-drug bill by a simple majority vote, immune from any GOP filibuster. And to stop Americans from getting cheaper prescriptions, he is willing to sabotage American manufacturers (and therefore assist China) by denying them $52 billion in support under the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act.

In both cases, Americans lose — because McConnell thinks it’s to Republicans’ advantage in the midterm elections. He is willing to hurt the country, and help the Chinese, in order to harm Democrats’ political standing.

Ryan J. Reilly @ryanjreilly
PHOTO: Mark Meadows escorting Rudy Giuliani off the grounds of the White House after the "UNHINGED" Dec. 18 meeting to "make sure he didn’t wander back to the mansion.”
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Text sent by Cassidy Hutchinson.
1:51 PM · Jul 12, 2022

MoveOn @MoveOn
Texts between former Trump campaign adviser Brad Parscale and spokesperson Katrina Pierson in the aftermath of the insurrection:
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#Jan6thHearing
3:26 PM · Jul 12, 2022

Kelly Meggs of Dunnellon, Florida was a “team leader” of the Oath Keepers group who stormed the U.S. Capitol in a “stack” military formation, the FBI alleges.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced Friday, February 19, 2021 that Meggs was indicted in the riots, along with eight other people that belong to the Oath Keepers. Meggs, 52, was arrested in Ocala, Florida following the filing of a superseding indictment. Also charged were Graydon Young, 54, of Englewood, Florida, Kelly Meggs’ wife, Connie Meggs, 59, of Dunnellon, Florida, Laura Steele, 52, of Thomasville, North Carolina, Sandra Ruth Parker, 62, and Bennie Alvin Parker, 70, both of Morrow, Ohio. Young was arrested Monday in Tampa, Florida, Connie Meggs was arrested along with Kelly Meggs Wednesday in Ocala, Steele was arrested Wednesday in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Parkers were arrested Thursday. The indictment details evidence of the group’s plot and text messages between its members.

Kelly Meggs allegedly wrote a post on Facebook in late December, which said “Trump wants us to make it wild” and told people to pack their bags for Washington, DC, planning to have between 50,000 to 100,000 people attending, according to the criminal complaint filed in the case. [more]

MEGGS, Kelly
Case Number:
1:22-cr-15
Charge(s):
Seditious conspiracy and other charges. See accompanying indictment that was filed 1/12/2022. The case now has a new case number, as indicated.