June, 14 2011, 11:01am EDT
Report: Gun Industry Militarization Drives Mexico Gun Trafficking
Widespread Sale of Military-Style Weapons Drives Illicit Traffic to Mexico, Increases Armed Attacks on U.S. Law Enforcement Officers, and Facilitates Mass Shootings
WASHINGTON
As the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform focuses on alleged failures of the U.S. Justice Department's program to stop gun trafficking to Mexico, a new study by the Violence Policy Center (VPC) identifies the major force driving the criminal cross-border gun traffic: the gun industry's cynical militarization of the U.S. civilian gun market.
"Today, militarized weapons--semiautomatic assault rifles, 50 caliber anti-armor sniper rifles, and armor-piercing handguns--define the U.S. civilian gun market and are far and away the 'weapons of choice' of the traffickers supplying violent drug organizations in Mexico" the study, "The Militarization of the U.S. Civilian Firearms Market" (https://www.vpc.org/studies/militarization.pdf), finds. The study also finds that the gun industry has become so dependent on militarized product lines that 11 of the top 15 gun manufacturers now market assault weapons, adding that "...the gun industry designs, manufactures, imports, and sells firearms in the civilian market that are to all intents and purposes the same as military arms. It then bombards its target market with the message that civilian consumers--just like real soldiers--can easily and legally own the firepower of militarized weapons."
The study documents a deliberate gun industry design and marketing strategy, begun in the 1980s, that has resulted in the easy availability and shockingly weak regulation of guns that are--
o Identical to sophisticated battlefield weapons used by the armed forces of the United States and other countries, such as the Barrett 50 caliber anti-armor sniper rifle.
o Slightly modified variants of military firearms that would otherwise be illegal to sell on the civilian market, including semiautomatic versions of military assault weapons, such as civilian AR-15 and AK-47 assault rifle models.
o Weapons capable of defeating body armor, specially designed for police and counter-terrorism units, such as the FN Herstal Five-seveN 5.7mm pistol.
"Your grandfather's shotgun has no place in today's civilian gun market," said the study's author, VPC Senior Policy Analyst Tom Diaz. "The gun industry has created a unique American civilian firearms bazaar which arms thousands of criminals, dangerous extremists, and drug traffickers throughout the world. If Congress wants to find the real causes of the gun traffic to Mexico, it needs to look upstream to the gun industry's callous transformation of the American gun market into one more suited to warfare than sport. The world's bad guys come here for their guns because they are cheap and plentiful."
The study describes how, plagued by declining gun ownership and the explosion of recreational alternatives such as electronic games, the faltering gun industry has relied on creating demand by designing and selling increasingly lethal military-style firepower.
Among the myriad lethal results of the gun industry's profit-driven choices, the study reports: "Semiautomatic assault weapons--especially inexpensive AK-47 type imports--are increasingly used in attacks against law enforcement officers in the United States."
The Violence Policy Center (VPC) works to stop gun death and injury through research, education, advocacy, and collaboration. Founded in 1988 by Executive Director Josh Sugarmann, a native of Newtown, Connecticut, the VPC informs the public about the impact of gun violence on their daily lives, exposes the profit-driven marketing and lobbying activities of the firearms industry and gun lobby, offers unique technical expertise to policymakers, organizations, and advocates on the federal, state, and local levels, and works for policy changes that save lives. The VPC has a long and proven record of policy successes on the federal, state, and local levels, leading the National Rifle Association to acknowledge us as "the most effective ... anti-gun rabble-rouser in Washington."
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Post-Dobbs Abortion Pill Surge Highlights Stakes of Looming Supreme Court Case
"Next week as we hear oral arguments in the FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine case, remember who will be impacted," said one group.
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Medication abortion represented 53% of all abortions in the U.S. in 2020, signifying a substantial increase since the court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.
The Guttmacher Institute released the results of its Monthly Abortion Provision Study on Tuesday, a week before the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in Food and Drug Administration, et al., Applicants v. Alliance For Hippocratic Medicine, et al., a case brought by the right-wing Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of anti-abortion doctors.
The group filed the case aiming to revoke the FDA's approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in medication abortions, more than two decades after it was approved following years of research.
"As our latest data emphasize, more than 3 out of 5 abortion patients in the United States use medication abortion," said Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy for Guttmacher. "Reinstating outdated and medically unnecessary restrictions on the provision of mifepristone would negatively impact people's lives and decrease abortion access across the country."
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Next week, the Supreme Court will hear the U.S. Department of Justice's appeal of Kacsmaryk's decision with a focus on two issues: whether the Alliance of Hippocratic Medicine has legal standing and whether the FDA did adequate research before it expanded access to mifepristone in 2016 and 2021. A ruling is expected this summer.
Guttmacher's research showed a 10% increase in all abortions in the U.S. between 2020-23, with a rate of 15.7 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age last year—the highest rate and number of abortions in more than a decade.
States without total abortion bans saw a 25% rise in abortion care compared to 2020, and the increase was even sharper in states bordering those with bans—37% between 2020-23.
"Next week as we hear oral arguments in the FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine case, remember who will be impacted," said Whole Women's Health, which runs reproductive health clinics in several states.
Rachel Jones, principal research scientist for Guttmacher, said the group's findings show that "as abortion restrictions proliferate post-Dobbs, medication abortion may be the most viable option—or the only option—for some people, even if they would have preferred in-person procedural care."
Reproductive rights advocates and medical experts including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have long warned that restrictions on mifepristone—adopted by the FDA under pressure from the pro-forced pregnancy movement—are medically unnecessary and aim only to stop people from receiving care.
Advocates fear that the Supreme Court could rule that the FDA's 2021 decision to allow mifepristone to be dispensed via telemedicine and the mail violates the Comstock Act, a law that dates back to 1873 and prohibited the distribution of "obscene" materials through the mail.
"The modern anti-abortion movement wants to reinvent the Comstock Act as an abortion ban," University of California, Davis, law professor Mary Ziegler toldMs. magazine on Tuesday.
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Ahead of the Supreme Court's hearing in the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine's "groundless case challenging FDA approval of mifepristone," said Guttmacher, "mifepristone is available and the facts remain clear: medication abortion is safe, effective, widely used, and critical to bodily autonomy for all."
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Steven Donziger, Lawyer Targeted by Chevron, Appeals to Biden for Pardon
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After exhausting his options in the judicial system, American attorney Steven Donziger on Wednesday launched a campaign seeking a pardon from U.S. President Joe Biden for his misdemeanor conviction—the result of a process that experts worldwide have condemned as retaliatory for his climate justice work and an abuse of the nation's judiciary.
"No matter where one stands on the political spectrum, we should all be able to agree that what happened to me in the United States should not happen to anybody in any country that adheres to the rule of law," Donziger said in a statement announcing a letter to Biden signed by 14 prominent lawyers and a leader at the advocacy group Amazon Watch.
"Corporations should not be allowed to take direct control of a public prosecution from the government and lock up their critics, as happened to me," asserted Donziger, who spent 993 days in federal prison and on house arrest. "It's an outrageous abuse of power that not only wrecked me and my family's life for three years but also embarrassed our country in the eyes of the world."
"As far as we can tell, this was the nation's first private corporate prosecution and is an obvious violation of the rule of law."
Donziger is a Harvard Law School graduate known globally for representing farmers and Indigenous people in a lawsuit targeting Chevron for polluting communities in Ecuador that resulted in a $9.5 billion judgment against the oil giant. After nearly two decades of battling the attorney in Ecuadorian courts, the company went after him directly in U.S. federal court.
The attorneys backing his pardon request detailed in their letter how Donziger endured a "patently biased prosecution by a group of three Chevron-linked lawyers" for refusing to comply with an order from a U.S. judge—an ex-corporate attorney with investments in the oil giant—to turn over his electronics and client communications to the company.
"As far as we can tell, this was the nation's first private corporate prosecution and is an obvious violation of the rule of law," they wrote to Biden. "As a result of the private prosecution, Mr. Donziger, a resident of New York City, spent close to three years in detention at home and in prison even though the maximum sentence under the law for his misdemeanor offense level was 180 days."
"A pardon would bring a measure of justice to a prosecution that has been widely criticized as a violation of international law by respected international and U.S.-based jurists, and as a grave threat to free speech by a multitude of political leaders and over 120 respected civil society organizations including Amnesty International, Global Witness, and Greenpeace," the lawyers argued.
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Water Protector Legal Collective director Natali Segovia, one of the lawyers who signed on, similarly condemned legal tactics used by corporations to target environmental campaigners.
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Along with thanking "from the bottom of my heart the many distinguished lawyers who have agreed to represent me in this campaign," Donziger called on the Biden administration to investigate Chevron for abusing the U.S. legal system.
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The new tailpipe standards would strengthen emissions limits more slowly than the EPA's original proposal, which came under fire from the auto industry and Big Oil. The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) falsely claimed the EPA's proposed standards amounted to an effort to "ban new gas, diesel, and flex-fuel vehicles from the U.S. market."
AFPM and the American Petroleum Institute threatened to challenge the finalized standards in court.
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Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Safe Climate Transport Campaign, said in a statement that "this rule could've been the biggest single step of any nation on climate, but the EPA caved to pressure from Big Auto, Big Oil, and car dealers and riddled the plan with loopholes big enough to drive a Ford F-150 through."
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Public Citizen also accused the Biden EPA of weakening the vehicle emissions standards to appease the auto industry. One industry trade group, Alliance for Automotive Innovation, applauded the administration for "moderating the pace of EV adoption in 2027, 2028, 2029, and 2030."
Chelsea Hodgkins, a senior policy advocate for Public Citizen, said that while "more vehicle pollution will be avoided and more lives saved" under the new rules "than would have been under current regulations," the EPA's new standards fall "far short of what is needed to protect public health and our planet."
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Transportation is the largest single source of air pollution in the U.S., spewing benzene and other toxins into the environment to the detriment of the climate and public health.
The EPA estimates its standards would help the U.S. avoid more than 7 billion tons of carbon emissions and reap $13 billion worth of public health benefits "due to improved air quality."
Steven Higashide, director of the Clean Transportation Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, described the EPA's new rules as "the strongest standards ever finalized and vital for meeting U.S. climate goals" and said they would "shift the trajectory of the automobile market and put us on a path to real emissions reductions."
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The EPA unveiled its finalized standards weeks after the agency opted in the face of industry pressure to delay a regulatory crackdown on existing gas-fired power plants, exempting them from a separate anti-pollution rule.
The EPA's moves come during a critical election year in which the presumptive Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, and his allies are threatening to undo any climate progress the Biden administration makes if they regain power.
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