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Column: How a surgeon general's warning and a Supreme Court ruling may place gun control on the front burner
For decades, gun control policy in the U.S. has been virtually untouchable — except through efforts to make America’s gun culture deadlier, raising the toll of innocent victims.
Two recent developments suggest that the ground may finally be shifting toward rationality.
One is an “advisory” from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy identifying firearm violence as a public health crisis — the boldest statement from a government official calling attention to the horrific consequences of the nation’s turn away from common sense gun control.
Originalism tells judges not to consider the practical consequences of their interpretations.
— Former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer explains why America can’t pass workable gun laws
Murthy’s report is in the finest tradition of public health policy, akin to the 1964 report by Surgeon General Luther Terry that placed the links between smoking and cancer, bronchitis and coronary disease into the public record.
As Murthy himself observes, that initiative placed the U.S. on a course of tobacco regulation that reduced the prevalence of smoking from 42% of adults in 1964 to 11.5% in 2022.
The other is a June 21 Supreme Court decision finding that laws barring domestic abusers from possessing guns are constitutional. The ruling is an indication — albeit slight — that a majority on the court has concluded that earlier decisions that found almost any state and local restrictions violated the 2nd Amendment were far too indulgent.
Let’s take the advisory and ruling in order.
Murthy’s advisory is an extraordinary synopsis of the toll of America’s fascination with firearms and its failure to regulate gun ownership.
Firearms passed motor vehicles as the leading cause of death of children and adolescents in the U.S. in 2019.
(U.S. Surgeon General)
He reports that firearms are now the leading cause of death among children and adolescents, having passed motor vehicles in 2019. In 2022, guns killed more than 48,200 Americans through homicides, suicides and accidents, rising by about 16,000 over the previous 10 years.
Murthy’s report notes that guns are used in 55% of all suicide attempts and that their lethality in those cases is unmatched — nearly 90% end in death, higher than any other method.
The report treats mass shootings (defined as those with four or more victims, not counting the shooter) soberly. These account for only about 1% of all firearm deaths, but their impact is far greater due to their “outsized collective trauma on society” and their “strong negative effect on the public’s perception of safety.” One in three adults “say fear prevents them from going to certain places or events.”
Murthy’s report puts the lie to the familiar claim by Republicans and gun rights fanatics that the problem, especially when it comes to mass shooting, is mental health, not firearms.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), for instance, told Fox News anchor Sean Hannity in October, after a gunman killed 18 people in Lewiston, Maine: “Mental health, obviously, as in this case, is a big issue, and we have got to seriously address that as a society and as a government.”
Yet Murthy reports that “one’s mental health diagnosis or psychological profile alone is not a strong predictor of perpetrating violence of any type…. Importantly, most people with serious mental illness are not violent against others. In fact, people with serious mental illnesses are more likely to be victims of violence.”
For all their nattering about the need to address mental health, anyway, Republicans have never lifted a finger to promote any programs to do so.
Now to the Supreme Court.
The rate of firearm deaths of childen and adolescents in the U.S. vastly surpassed the rates in other developed countries.
(U.S. Surgeon General)
Rahimi v. United States, which yielded an 8-1 decision on June 21, is the first gun-rights case to come before the court since a 2022 decision known as Bruen, in which Clarence Thomas, writing for a 6-3 majority, essentially found that all modern efforts to regulate firearms are unconstitutional.
Thomas held, in effect, that the only legitimate basis for judging gun laws is historical — weighing the laws against the language of the 2nd Amendment to determine how the amendment was viewed by its drafters in 1789 and how their approach was dictated by the political and social context of that time.
In Bruen, Thomas ridiculed Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent (with which justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan concurred). Breyer had opened his argument with nine pages of statistics about gun ownership and its consequences for health and safety.
“It is hard to see what legitimate purpose can possibly be served” by Breyer’s figures, Thomas sneered. “Why, for example, does the dissent think it is relevant to recount the mass shootings that have occurred in recent years?”
In Rahimi, however, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asserted that the consequences of unrestricted gun ownership were highly relevant. To be fair, this was easy. The record made clear that Zackey Rahimi, the gun owner at the center of the case, was one vicious specimen indeed. As Roberts laid out in the opening three pages of his majority opinion, Rahimi had beat up his girlfriend (the mother of his child) and fired in her direction or at a bystander as she fled his grasp.
After she got a restraining order against him, he stalked her, threatened a different woman with a gun, was suspected by police of at least five other shootings, fired at motorists in at least two road-rage incidents and fired his gun indiscriminately at least two other times. Police searched his home and found a pistol and a rifle. He was charged under a Texas law that criminalized possessing a gun while under a retraining order due to domestic violence.
Despite all that, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Rahimi’s conviction, citing Bruen.
Roberts’ decision in Rahimi is a step toward ratcheting back the Bruen effect, in which almost every gun regulation is suspect. That brings us to the “originalism” principle, which undergirds the court conservatives’ distaste for restrictions on gun rights. As expressed by Thomas in his Bruen opinion, originalism holds that interpreting the constitution must depend on the “public understanding of a legal text in the period after its enactment or ratification.”
As the now-retired Breyer put it in a recent essay, “the originalist, instead of looking to the text and asking what the words mean now, may well ask what they would have meant to an ordinary eighteenth-century person” and applies them to the world of today. (Breyer isn’t a fan of originalism.)
Scholars such as Stanford historian Jack Rakove argue that interpretations of the 2nd Amendment depend more on originalism than any other provisions of the Constitution. Its impact emerged most notably in the Supreme Court’s so-called Heller decision. In that 2008 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, a 5-4 majority overturned a Washington, D.C., ordinance largely barring citizens from possessing handguns for self-defense in their own home.
Heller overturned more than the D.C. law — it upended more than 200 years of scholarship about the meaning of the 2nd Amendment’s preamble, which links “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” to the establishment of “a well regulated Militia.”
As Breyer pointed out, historians and linguists had argued (in a friend-of-the-court brief in the Bruen case) that the phrase “bear arms” overwhelmingly referred to “war, soldiering, or other forms of armed action by a group” — not to an individual right. Heller, however, established an individual right to gun ownership for the first time.
Bruen expanded that right to gun ownership outside the home. The ruling deemed unconstitutional a New York law requiring citizens to have a license to carry firearms in public. America’s rising tide of gun violence can fairly be traced to Heller.
Scholars have pointed to numerous problems with originalism. One is that judges are (usually) not historians. They may be utterly at sea when trying to find the apposite historical application to contemporary conditions.
The drafters of the 2nd Amendment, as it happens, were concerned about the public threat of a government’s standing army; historians argue that the amendment was designed to prevent the federal government from interfering with the creation of state militias.
Firearms in the 18th century were “not nearly as threatening or lethal as those available today,” Rakove writes; people in that era were concerned not with threats from “casual strangers, embittered family members, violent youth gangs, freeway snipers, and careless weapons keepers.”
In other words, applying an 18th century mind-set to 21st century conditions is a fool’s errand. “Originalism” only interferes with judges’ responsibility to ponder the real-world impacts of their decision — their option, Rakove says, is to “ransack” the historical record for quotations that can support their preexisting goals.
“Originalism,” says Breyer, “tells judges not to consider the practical consequences of their interpretations.” Its product is the paralysis of federal, state, and local efforts to regulate gun ownership. It’s also responsible for the contraction of individual rights being rolled back almost gleefully by the current Supreme Court majority, notably abortion and other women’s reproductive healthcare rights, as originalists argue that the concept of privacy on which those other rights are based can’t be found in the Constitution.
It’s also proper to note that the public during the time the 2nd Amendment was drafted, enacted and ratified is very different from the public affected by its consequences today. In 1791, among other distinctions, enslaved people were not considered citizens and women could not vote. Who set the terms back then under which today’s Americans must live?
Rahimi won’t solve the mess in gun regulation created by the Heller and Bruen rulings. A multitude of pending cases might strengthen it or undermine it. But at least it’s a step back from the abyss.
Murthy’s advisory gives a similar impression of being a first step on a path that might lead nowhere. He calls for more research on violence prevention strategies and laws preventing children’s access to guns, universal background checks, banning assault weapons and restricting the carrying of loaded firearms in public.
The bottom line, of course, is that America’s gun violence crisis can only be solved by fewer guns. There’s a long road ahead to reaching that goal.
Robotaxis could be turning into robocops.
A self-driving Waymo reported two teens to San Mateo, Calif., police on Monday after they were found drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns in the back of the vehicle.
According to a social media post from the San Mateo Police Department, officers detained two 15-year-olds after the Waymo they were riding in contacted the department and stopped in a parking lot until law enforcement arrived.
“Parents do you know where your teens are?” the San Mateo Police Department wrote on Facebook following the incident. “Waymo does!”
Officers removed both teens from the vehicle and determined they were using toy guns to shoot Orbeez out the windows. Orbeez are small, water-absorbing beads sold at toy stores.
“Toy guns, water guns, and BB guns all pose real dangers, especially to an untrained eye,” the Police Department said. “The simple handling of them can cause fear in [passersby].” “
A video posted on Facebook shows at least five officers and a police dog responding to the scene and approaching the Waymo with their weapons raised.
Waymo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Waymo vehicles have internal cameras and microphones that may be used in an emergency or to “promote safety and security,” according to Waymo’s online support page.
The cameras are also used to ensure the vehicles are clean and to help find lost items, according to the support page.
The company said it does not use facial recognition or other biometric identification technologies to identify individuals.
“In more urgent circumstances, support may access live video during a trip,” the Waymo page said.
The San Mateo Police Department’s Facebook post has garnered nearly 60 comments, with one user accusing Waymo of “snitching.”
“At least they got a designated driver?!” one user commented.
Business
Commentary: How right-wing anti-transgender attacks led to a Supreme Court ruling upholding sex discrimination
At the Supreme Court, the unfounded fear of boys masquerading as girls in youth sports rolled the clock back on gender equality.
On the surface, the Supreme Court’s June 30 opinion upholding state laws barring transgender girls from women’s and girl’s sports teams looks like a victory for women’s rights.
The 6-3 opinion by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh certainly presents itself that way. “Females and males have inherent physical differences relevant to athletic performance,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Therefore, in contact sports, forcing female athletes to compete against males can create significant safety risks.” He also asserted that “forcing female athletes to compete against males can undermine competitive fairness.”
The ruling applied to prohibitions enacted in Idaho and West Virginia against “biological” males’ participation on women’s teams in public schools. Federal judges in both states overturned the bans. The Supreme Court majority restored them. The ruling essentially upholds similar bans enacted in 25 other states.
There was no record of any transgender person participating in school sports in the State, let alone any ‘problem’ with transgender students … creating unfair competition or unsafe conditions.
— Justice Sonia Sotomayor, demolishing the Supreme Court’s argument in favor of banning transgender girls from girl’s sports
Kavanaugh, like Donald Trump and others in the anti-transgender camp, maintained that one’s gender is an immutable fact of life, established even before birth.
Anything else, Trump stated in an executive order he issued on inauguration day 2025, could only be the product of “gender ideology extremism.” The U.S., his order stated, recognizes “two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” That’s a “biological truth,” he declared.
In his own version of this overconfident and factually insupportable conclusion, Kavanaugh wrote: “As all agree, females and males have inherent physical differences relevant to athletic performance.”
Science recognizes that some people are “born with sex traits that don’t fit into typical male or female patterns,” to cite a discussion on the Cleveland Clinic web page on the topic “intersex.” The condition “may involve chromosomes, hormones, reproductive organs or genitals.”
From a psychological standpoint, medical science recognizes “gender dysphoria” as a real condition often requiring counseling and medical intervention such as the use of puberty blockers and hormones to stave off the development of secondary sex characteristics until the condition can be resolved.
No one disputes that there are physical differences between the sexes. Few would dispute that on average or even at the median, males may be bigger and more powerful than females, or that in certain contact sports the difference may be telling and on occasion dangerous.
But that’s not the same as asserting that the physical differences between males and females invariably mean that men will invariably prevail over women in all competitions or that their participation will endanger women.
The International Olympic Committee — in a policy statement Kavanaugh cited incompletely — says that in “most running and swimming events,” males have a 10% to 12% advantage over women. That’s a range that would accommodate the full spectrum of outcomes — transgender females win, cisfemales win, they tie. (The “cis” prefix denotes those living consistent with their birth gender.)
West Virginia and Idaho addressed this ambiguity by banning transgender women from all girls’ teams. So under their rules transgender girls can’t play football or soccer with cisgirls. But what’s the argument in favor of banning them from the 100-yard dash, or cross-country track, or diving, or archery?
But something else is going on here. The Supreme Court’s ruling was almost preordained, given the years-long campaign by conservatives to demonize transgender individuals as if they’re members of an alien species.
It will be recalled that during his presidential campaign, Trump spun a despicable fantasy in which children were kidnapped in school and secretly subjected to sex-change operations.
Trump’s executive order wiped out policies aimed at protecting transgender adults from discrimination. He moved to outlaw gender-affirming medical therapies for anyone under 19 by cutting off federal funding for healthcare institutions that provide such care.
He banned transgender individuals from serving in the military and ordered federal prison officials to move transgender inmates into the general populations consistent with their birth genders, which exposes them to physical assault. (Federal Judge Royce Lamberth of Washington, D.C., has blocked the government from transferring three transgender women into the male prison population or terminating their hormone treatments.)
I wrote during Trump’s first term, when his anti-transgender policies were still gestating, that the goal was to show that “one can target any community, as long as it doesn’t have a strong political voice or political power. These are the actions of bullies and cowards, pretending to be strong.”
Last year, the Supreme Court struck its first blow against transgender rights by upholding a Tennessee law banning transgender care, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, for minors. Similar laws have been enacted in 25 other states. The majority in that ruling by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was identical to the one in the June 30 ruling — Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.
Who are the targets of this ideological campaign? They number only about 1.6 million U.S. adults, or one-half of 1% of the U.S. population. About 300,000 adolescents ages 13 to 17, or 1.4%, identify as transgender, according to a study by UCLA School of Law.
In West Virginia, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed in her dissenting opinion, “there was no record of any transgender person participating in school sports in the State, let along any ‘problem’ with transgender students … creating unfair competition or unsafe conditions.”
In endorsing the flat bans directed at transgender women in Idaho and West Virginia, Kavanaugh argued that any attempt to implement case-by-case judgments of students’ requests to join sports teams inconsistent with their biological gender would create “an enormous practical and administrability problem.”
Is that so? That wasn’t the case in Maine, where the annual K-12 population is more than 170,000. There, a committee was charged with determining whether a student’s participation in a sport consistent with their gender identity but inconsistent with their biological sex would “result in an unfair athletic advantage” or present a risk of injury to others. The committee held 56 hearings from 2013 through 2021, or an average of seven per year. During the entire time span, only four involved transgender girls. (The outcome of those hearings couldn’t be learned.)
It was Maine’s policy, one might recall, that provoked a confrontation between Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills at the White House last year, when Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from the state unless it barred transgender students from competing on women’s sports teams. “We’ll see you in court,” Mills snapped.
Whether the Idaho and West Virginia laws genuinely protect girls from unfair competition is questionable. (The Idaho law is styled the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.”) In practice, the laws may subject women in public schools to “invasive sex verification procedures,” as educational expert George Theoharis of Syracuse University wrote after the court ruling.
They’re also based on a retrograde view of women as fragile creatures needing men’s protection, Theoharis wrote — “the same logic that has historically been used to justify excluding women from making their own healthcare decisions and girls from rigorous math and science; that physically demanding work is simply beyond them.” (There don’t appear to be any state laws barring transgender women from competing in men’s sports.)
Becky Pepper-Jackson, the plaintiff in the West Virginia case, in which she is identified only as B.P.J., is the only transgender girl who sought to join girl’s teams — track and cross-country — in the state. That was in 2021, just after West Virginia passed its law and she was about to enter sixth grade. She didn’t appear to pose any competitive risk to others on the track and cross-country teams she applied to join — her lawyers told the Supreme Court that on those no-cut teams, she “came in near the back.”
Anyway, she had not gone through male puberty, which theoretically might have endowed her with a competitive advantage, because she had been taking puberty blockers and female hormones.
Thanks to the court’s ruling, Sotomayor observed in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, West Virginia can deny Becky access to school sports “because it thinks they have an inherent athletic advantage, even if the facts show that they do not.”
B.P.J., Sotomayor wrote, “cannot practice on girls’ teams, even if she would not take anyone’s spot in an eventual competition, even if everyone who tries out for the team makes it, and even if having the chance to participate could aid immensely in treating B. P. J.’s gender dysphoria.”
So whose interest was really protected by the Supreme Court?
An Orange County real estate investor accused of criminally defrauding an Arizona bank of nearly $100 million pleaded not guilty Monday and remains in custody.
Mahender Makhijani, 44, of Corona del Mar — who also was ordered by an arbitrator to pay $1.34 billion in a separate civil fraud case — was arraigned in Santa Ana federal court on two charges.
He is accused of bank fraud and making a false statement to a bank in a June 8 case involving a $100 million real estate loan made by Phoenix-based Western Alliance Bank. He was taken into custody on June 10.
Makhijani is accused of providing bogus collateral for the October 2024 loan now in default. In a civil lawsuit, Western Alliance said the outstanding balance as nearly $99 million.
Prosecutors say he falsified title insurance policies that showed the bank would have a first lien on the underlying collateral if the loan went bad, when in fact it did not.
A trial was set for August 11 before U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in Santa Ana.
Michael Schachter, his criminal defense attorney, did not respond to messages seeking comment.
In the civil case, an arbitrator in May ordered Makhijani to pay Laguna Beach real estate mogul Mohammad Honarkar $1.34 billion after ruling he had fraudulently induced him into a 2021 joint venture — and then wrested control and lost to creditors more than two dozen properties Honarkar had owned.
Makhijani has not been criminally charged in that case, but prosecutors alleged in an affidavit in support of the bank fraud charges that he used “force and threats” in his dealings with Honarkar and others — including taking over the landmark Hotel Laguna in 2023 that Honarkar was renovating.
Prosecutors sought to hold Makhijani without bail after his arrest.
The affidavit noted he is a legal Indian immigrant with a home and bank accounts in that country, has access to private jets and threatened to “run away” if caught in a difficult situation.
The request was denied and he was granted $500,000 bail.
However, Makhijani remains in custody after a hearing sought by prosecutors last month before Magistrate Judge Autumn Spaeth.
The judge declined to accept a $450,000 cashier’s check submitted by a Makhijani associate for the bail, finding insufficient proof the source of the funds was legitimate, according to court records.
Makhijani is not prominent outside Orange County real estate circles, but he established a thriving distressed-assets business over the last decade that attracted prominent Southern California real estate investors.
Prosecutors said it paid for a lifestyle that included two multimillion-dollar homes in Corona del Mar, a luxury apartment in Newport Beach and various luxury vehicles.
As of last month, prosecutors had not fully traced his assets, which they believe are not held in his name and some of which may be in India.
The businessman employed an array of shell companies and strawmen to sign documents on his behalf, and to stand in for him as operators of his companies, according to the affidavit.
Makhijani told an associate he took extra precautions because wanted to insulate himself from litigation and that “they were sharks in the distressed world who took advantage of people,” the affidavit stated.
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