After Nashville, Congress confronts limits of new gun law
Featured Articles
Nine months ago, President Joe Biden signed a sweeping bipartisan gun law, the most significant legislative response to gun violence in decades.
“Lives will be saved,” he said at the White House.
The law has already prevented some potentially dangerous people from owning guns. Yet since that signing last summer, the tally of mass shootings in the United States has only grown. Five dead at a nightclub in Colorado. Eleven killed at a dance hall in California. And just this past week, three 9-year-olds and three adults were shot and killed at an elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee.
A day after that school shooting, Biden’s tone was markedly less optimistic than it was the signing ceremony.
“What in God’s name are we doing?” he asked in a speech Tuesday, calling for a ban on so-called assault weapons like those that were used to kill at The Covenant School in Nashville. “There’s a moral price to pay for inaction.”
Biden and others had hailed last year’s bipartisan gun bill — approved in the weeks after the shooting of 19 children and two adults at a school in Uvalde, Texas — as a new way forward.
Several months in, the law has had some success: Stepped-up FBI background checks have blocked gun sales for 119 buyers under the age of 21, prosecutions have increased for unlicensed gun sellers and new gun trafficking penalties have been charged in at least 30 cases around the country. Millions of new dollars have flowed into mental health services for children and schools.
Related listings
-
Supreme Court remembering Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Featured Articles 03/17/2023Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion for women’s rights whose death ahead of the 2020 election allowed the Supreme Court to become more conservative, will be remembered during ceremonies Friday at the high court.Ginsburg, who served as a jus...
-
Executive gets 15 months in prison in doomed nuclear project
Featured Articles 03/12/2023A former executive utility who gave rosy projections on the progress of two nuclear power plants in South Carolina while they were hopelessly behind will spend 15 months in prison for the doomed project that cost ratepayers billions of dollars.Ex-SCA...
-
German woman risks tougher sentence over Yazidi girl’s death
Featured Articles 03/08/2023A German appeals court on Thursday ordered a new sentencing hearing for a German convert to Islam who was given 10 years in prison on charges that, as a member of the Islamic State group in Iraq, she allowed a 5-year-old Yazidi girl she and her husba...
USCIS Issues Clarifying Guidance on NAFTA TN Status Eligibility for Economists
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced today that it is clarifying policy guidance (PDF, 71 KB) on the specific work activities its officers should consider when determining whether an individual qualifies for TN nonimmigrant status as an economist.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) TN nonimmigrant status allows qualified Canadian and Mexican citizens to temporarily enter the U.S. to engage in specific professional activities, including the occupation of economist. The agreement, however, does not define the term economist, resulting in inconsistent decisions on whether certain analysts and financial professionals qualify for TN status as economists.
TN nonimmigrant status is intended to allow a limited number of professionals and specialists to work temporarily in certain specifically identified occupations in the United States. This updated guidance provides USCIS officers with a specific definition of one such category – economists – allowing them to adjudicate applications in a way that complies with the intent of the agreement. This policy update clarifies that professional economists requesting TN status must engage primarily in activities consistent with the profession of an economist. Individuals who work primarily in other occupations related to the field of economics — such as financial analysts, marketing analysts, and market research analysts — are not eligible for classification as a TN economist.