California’s effort to restrict sales of handguns that can be converted into fully-automatic machine guns drew an immediate federal challenge Wednesday, with the Trump administration suing the state over its new “Glock ban” law just hours after it took effect.

The U.S. Department of Justice is seeking a court order to block the controversial state law that limits where most Glock and Glock-style pistols can be sold. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, also aims to invalidate key parts of the state’s handgun roster — a list that dictates the types of firearms that Californians may legally purchase. In a statement Wednesday, acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche said that both policies “trample” the rights of law-abiding Californians.

“The Second Amendment is a sacred right belonging to all Americans, even those in California,” Blanche said. “California cannot ban the most popular type of handgun in America.”

California’s Assembly Bill 1127 does not explicitly name the Glock brand, but instead targets any handgun with a specific mechanism that can easily be converted by a black market device. These simple “Glock switches” convert semiautomatic handguns into a weapon capable of firing 20 rounds per second with a single squeeze of the trigger.

Advances in 3D printing have made the conversion devices widely available and cheap to produce. Federal authorities reported recovering 11,088 of them from crime scenes between 2019 and 2023. Switches have been used in several mass shootings, including one in Sacramento that resulted in six deaths and 12 injuries in 2022.

The new law does not prohibit the possession of affected handguns already owned by Californians, and includes exemptions for gun dealers, as well as law enforcement and military agencies.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill in October, and has maintained that firearm laws are responsible for California’s declining crime rates and gun deaths.

“The Trump administration is once again trying to dismantle California’s commonsense gun safety laws,” Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokesperson for the governor, said in a statement. “Our response is simple — these laws save lives.”

The federal government argues in its complaint that California can’t ban legal semiautomatic handguns simply because they could be illegally altered, adding that state and federal law already prohibit such pistol converters. The U.S. compared California’s approach to banning ordinary shotguns because they can be illegally shortened.

The lawsuit also challenges California’s decades-old handgun roster, which requires new handgun models to pass certain safety tests before they can be approved for retail sale. A federal judge tentatively blocked portions of the roster requirements in a separate 2023 case, which is being appealed before the 9th Circuit. That lawsuit was filed by the California Rifle & Pistol Assn. and other gun rights supporters following a landmark 2022 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that set new standards for evaluating firearm restrictions.

Under those new guidelines, the Trump administration wants a judge to find that California’s gun restrictions violate the 2nd Amendment, and is seeking an order to bar the state from enforcing them.

The Trump administration is relying on a federal civil rights law typically used against police departments accused of repeated constitutional violations, arguing that California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and state Justice Department agents qualify as peace officers and therefore violate gun owners’ rights whenever they enforce handgun restrictions.

Bonta, who is named in the suit, has a winning court record over the Trump administration, and has secured at least 12 final court rulings and more than 35 preliminary injunctions or emergency orders.

“California’s gun safety laws helped drive firearm death rates to record lows in our state and are a blueprint for reducing gun violence nationwide,” Bonta’s office said in a statement. “We will review the complaint and respond as appropriate in court.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani took aim at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, Elon Musk and what he described as the “arena of supremacy” in the United States during an immigration-themed America 250 speech on Friday ahead of Fourth of July weekend.

Flanked by eight recently naturalized U.S. citizens, Mamdani invoked the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and America’s history of immigration before turning his rhetoric on elements of today’s U.S. Mamdani also blasted the “world’s first trillionaire” — a milestone Musk achieved with the long-awaited Initial Public Offering (IPO) of SpaceX last month.

“We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more,” Mamdani said, without naming Musk. “We see monopolies that dominate every industry, and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans.”

“We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands, those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone. And we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few,” he added.

Mamdani, who was sitting at George Washington’s desk during the remarks, also praised the legacy of immigrants, claiming that they have overcome riots “aimed at their very existence,” to create lives in New York.

FETTERMAN WARNS MAMDANI RISKS ‘CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS’ BY VOWING TO DEFY SCOTUS IMMIGRATION RULING

“Over the years that followed, despite laws enacted by the federal government to bar their entry, despite sweatshop fires that killed hundreds of women, despite riots aimed at their very existence, immigrants made homes here in New York City, and they helped to make New York City,” the mayor said.

“That legacy of every generation of Americans insisting that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness extends to them, too, is no relic of the past. It carried millions of Black Americans north during the Great Migration. It drew hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to New York City after the Second World War. It invited countless others from the West Indies and South Asia and West Africa and across the world. And it is what brought my family to this city when I was seven years old,” he continued.

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Mamdani did not mention his own family’s wealth in the speech. His father was an elite Harvard academic, and his mother and acclaimed film director.

“My family did not arrive by boat, although we saw the Statue of Liberty from the window of the plane. Even from the air, we could make out the promise of America, the promise of the beautiful patriotic work of rendering America, year after year, a little more faithful to its founding ideals,” he said.

In his speech, Mamdani blasted those with “power and influence,” who he lamented have written American history.

“There is a term so often used to describe our nation and those who have shaped it. American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism, the conventional wisdom tells us, makes our freedom a little more free. It is how we dug the Erie Canal and irrigated the West. Is why children in faraway lands grow up dreaming of one day moving here. And yet, the irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth, that they were anything but exceptional,” Mamdani said. “For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best.”

“It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshiping the wrong gods, angering the wrong people. It sent peasants and serfs from slums and shuttles, who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land. It sent immigrants from whom power was something someone else had,” he continued. “We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else. The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here nothing is fixed into place.”

Mamdani referenced how he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2018. Mamdani was born in Uganda in 1991 and moved to New York when he was 7. The mayor is a dual U.S.-Ugandan citizen.

“Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American too. You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means,” the mayor said, speaking to the recently naturalized citizens by his side.

“The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy where only a select few are allowed freedom,” Mamdani said. “Where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal. At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another.”

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Mamdani also claimed ICE were invading New York neighborhoods.

“We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors without asking how long they have lived here or what papers they have as ICE invades our neighborhoods,” he added. “We see America each time those young and old stand in the beating rain or the stifling heat to cast their ballots. We see America each time working people demand more not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans.”

“There are some who respond to those who ask for more from America with a simple refrain. ‘Love it or leave it,’ they say. But patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws. Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent,” Mamdani said. “It is every March led under the heavy sun. It is every protest held a decade before its time. It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it.”

Mamdani ended his speech with a rousing call to America’s greatness.

“What power each of us holds to bring America ever closer to the greatness so many have seen when they looked upon these shores. The greatness that for 250 years has been America. Thank you. God bless America. God bless New York City. And happy Fourth of July,” he concluded.

WASHINGTON — Small towns across America had big plans to celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial this weekend. Local historical societies scheduled town square readings of the Declaration of Independence, hired bands to play patriotic tunes, organized parades and set up themed baking contests.

But many of their most ambitious plans were scrapped after the Trump administration cut $100 million in federal funding for humanities nonprofits and state councils at the start of its term. The decision severely hampered local planning for America’s 250th anniversary, disrupting history projects, museums and educational programs nationwide.

Instead, the Trump administration funneled tens of millions in federal dollars to Event Strategies, the firm behind Trump’s infamous rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, to organize anniversary events throughout the nation’s capital centered on President Trump.

The result, historians say, has become a centralized, more politicized spectacle, marking the national milestone as a celebration of an imperial presidency rather than a revolution from kingly rule.

The spectacular show that Americans will see features Trump at its center, culminating a year of concerted efforts by the president to put his face on passports and currency, national park passes and government buildings.

Yet, beyond the noise of the nation’s capital, historians and teachers, docents and curators, archivists, tour guides and reenactors have sustained the messy, organic discourse of the American story, less funded but no less vocal in their patriotism.

“The way history has been argued since Trump returned to office has been a reminder that governments and political figures have remarkable power to shape a society’s historical memory,” said David Ekbladh, a history professor at Tufts University and author of “Look at the World: The Rise of an American Globalism in the 1930s.”

Trump’s effort to control the anniversary narrative has reminded Ekbladh of one of George Orwell’s most famous quotes: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“The administration’s clear signals that it can and will restrict funding to institutions seems to have muted the way many institutions, like museums and universities, have approached the anniversary,” Ekbladh added. “With this said, Trump’s own direct, personal use of the 250th has been less about articulating a clear view of the nation’s history than using the moment itself to keep attention on him.”

The White House has taken a more active role in the festivities than initially planned, setting up its own Freedom 250 project to supplement America250, a bipartisan congressional effort to celebrate the occasion.

Fencing is seen around the Great American State Fair on the National Mall on Thursday.

(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

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The Trump administration has directed funding to events centered on the president’s attendance, primarily around Washington, and partnered with conservative organizations such as PragerU and Hillsdale College to present the country’s founding story through a conservative Christian lens.

Historians are in broad agreement that this year’s celebration has garnered far less attention than the bicentennial, marked in 1976, which generated blanket media coverage and widespread national excitement.

Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College and author of “The New Imperial Presidency,” attributed the lack of enthusiasm this time in part due to a more fragmented media landscape than existed 50 years ago, denying the country a “core curriculum” and a shared story.

“I don’t think it’s a lack of patriotism, so much as a determination that no presidential administration should be able to center itself as the focus of that patriotism,” Rudalevige said.

“There’s a lot to celebrate in the text of the declaration. But that’s not where the focus of the Freedom 250 efforts has been,” Rudalevige said. “It would have been interesting to see what the bipartisan America250 initiative could have come up with if its funding and energies had not been diverted.”

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is fenced off in preparation for Fourth of July fireworks.

(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

Trump has scheduled little national travel around the anniversary, visiting North Dakota this week for an event that allowed him to debut a new version of Air Force One, donated by Qatar and outfitted to the president’s tastes. Trump intends to keep the plane after leaving office for his personal use.

The jet will fly over the National Mall alongside the Defense Department’s most impressive equipment on Saturday, before the president delivers a speech in what is forecast to be a blistering heat wave. The evening will end, according to administration officials, with the largest fireworks display in U.S. history.

“The fundamental challenge that we face now is the fight between the historians — people who have been studying the past and who have been thinking about how to tell that story to the public — and government leaders over who gets to control that story,” said Peter Kastor, chair of the history department at Washington University in St. Louis.

“The people who are really on the front lines are museum professionals, the operators of historic sites and schoolteachers,” he said. “They face the responsibility for explaining the past to a general audience on a day-to-day basis, and they are the ones who most often face the backlash from people who want the story to be told differently.”