Tangle - The Supreme Court's bump-stock ruling.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

Starting point is 00:01:00 From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the bump stock ban and the Supreme Court, which struck that ban down. This was an interesting six to three ruling along ideological lines. We're going to have John jump in here and break it down for you before we do. And I'm going to keep doing this. A quick reminder to go subscribe to our new podcast channel, The Undecideds, where we're going to be posting all of the episodes from our limited series, The Undecideds.

Starting point is 00:01:57 We're doing our best to build out this independent podcast page because that's a good way to release limited series series limited edition stuff i hope you guys go do that take five seconds do it i'll wait one two three four and a half five that should be enough time to type in the undecideds and then just click follow and subscribe and with that, I'll pass it over to John to break down today's main story, and I'll be back for my take. Thanks, Isaac, and welcome, everybody. Here are your quick hits for today. First up, President Biden is planning to announce a new policy today that will protect roughly 550,000 undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens from deportation, so long as they have lived

Starting point is 00:02:50 in the U.S. for at least 10 years. Number two, Nihil Gupta, an Indian national accused of plotting to assassinate a U.S. citizen who campaigned for a breakaway state for Indian Sikhs, was extradited to the U.S. and pleaded not guilty to charges. Number three, in one of the largest executive orders of its kind, Maryland's governor will pardon 175,000 residents of marijuana convictions. Number four, the IRS is planning to end partnership basis shifting, a process that calls a major loophole for wealthy taxpayers aiming to raise $50 billion a year in revenue over the next decade.

Starting point is 00:03:26 At number five, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Adobe, saying it imposed an early termination fee and complicated the cancellation process for users. Now, to reaction this morning to a major Supreme Court ruling on gun laws, the high court rejecting a ban on bump stocks, the devices that make some rifles fire almost like machine guns. Bump stocks can be on store shelves and on firearms once again. A bump stock is an accessory for a semi-automatic rifle that uses the gun's recoil power to help a shooter fire faster and more accurately. It can help a semi-automatic hit similar rounds per minute as a machine gun. So the question before the Supreme Court was,

Starting point is 00:04:14 does this count as a machine gun under federal law? Tonight, the president is calling on Congress to ban bump stocks to, quote, save lives after the Supreme Court overturned a federal ban on the gun accessory, the device that allows a semi-automatic rifle to fire hundreds of rounds per minute. On Friday, a divided Supreme Court struck down a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, the gun attachment used to make semi-automatic weapons fire at a rate similar to fully automatic firearms. The court broke 6-3 along ideological lines, with all three liberal justices in dissent. In the majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas emphasized that Congress has not enacted a law to ban weapons capable of high rates of fire, so the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, or the ATF, was wrong to apply

Starting point is 00:05:05 a machine gun ban to bump stocks. As a reminder, in 2017, a mass shooter killed 60 people and injured over 500 more at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas using several semi-automatic rifles, some of which were equipped with bump stocks. Following the shooting, the ATF issued a rule defining firearms fitted with bump stocks as machine guns, making them illegal under federal law and requiring anyone owning a bump stock to destroy it or surrender it at an ATF office to avoid a penalty. Previously, the ATF banned only some kinds of bump stocks under the machine gun ban. One bump stock owner, U.S. Army

Starting point is 00:05:40 veteran and gun shop owner Michael Cargillill turned his bump stock into the ATF and then immediately challenged the rule. In January 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit sided with Cargill and struck the law down. Then Attorney General Merrick Garland appealed the case, Garland v. Cargill, to the Supreme Court. On Friday, the court upheld the Fifth Circuit's decision. Unlike other recent gun-related Supreme Court cases, Cargill has nothing to do with the Second Amendment. Instead, Cargill's challenge focused exclusively on whether the federal government's 1934 machine gun ban could apply to a gun fitted with a bump stock. Currently, the law defines a machine gun as a weapon that can fire more than

Starting point is 00:06:20 one shot automatically with the single function of a trigger. In his 19-page majority opinion, Thomas argued that semi-automatic rifles with a bump stock do not technically fit that definition. A bump stock reduces the amount of time between trigger finger actions, Thomas determined, but does not turn the firing of multiple rounds into a single or automatic action of the trigger. The bump stock replaces the stock, the part of the gun held against the shoulder, and works by leveraging the kickback of the weapon to slide forward and press the trigger into the shooter's finger. A skilled shooter can therefore use the modified weapon's mechanics to fire successive shots by maintaining just the right amount of forward pressure on the rifle's

Starting point is 00:07:00 front grip. All five conservative justices joined Thomas's opinion, while Justice Samuel Alito penned his own shorter opinion emphasizing that the Congress which enacted the machine gun ban likely would have seen no difference between a machine gun and a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock. Still, Alito wrote, the court must follow the law's text, adding that Congress could resolve this issue by simply amending the 1934 machine gun ban to include bump stocks. Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the case easy in her dissent, arguing that Congress's aim in banning machine guns was to prohibit civilians from owning weapons that could fire continuously without the need for rapid trigger pulls. When I see a bird that walks like

Starting point is 00:07:41 a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck, Sotomayor said. A bump stock equipped semi-automatic rifle fires automatically more than one shot without manual reloading by a single function of the trigger, Sotomayor wrote, quoting the statute. I, like Congress, call that a machine gun. On Tuesday, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democrat from New York, is expected to request the Senate's unanimous consent to ban bump stocks. Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican from South Carolina, vowed to oppose the process. Today, we're going to examine some arguments from the right and the left about the ruling, and then Isaac's take.

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Starting point is 00:10:34 your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca. at fluselvax.ca. All right, first up, let's start with what the right is saying. The right supports the decision noting that the court has taken a consistent stance against federal agency overreach. Some question whether Congress has the authority to ban bump stocks even if it wanted to. Others agree with the leader's concurrence and urge Congress to take up the issue. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called it a welcome ruling. Why should Congress ever take a vote if lawmakers can simply defer hard policy choices to the regulatory state? That is the subtext of the Supreme Court's welcome 6-3 ruling Friday on bump stocks, the board said. Justice Thomas says the ATF, on more than 10

Starting point is 00:11:25 separate occasions, acknowledged that bump stocks did not qualify as machine guns. In 2018, the agency estimated that there could be up to 520,000 of them in circulation. The ATF does not get to turn something like half a million Americans into potential felons without any say-so from Congress. In doing so, it let Congress off the hook, as Justice Samuel Alito points out in a concurrence. This is an important message in an era when regulators in both parties have decided they can rewrite laws regardless of the plain language of the statutes, the board wrote. In this and other cases, the Supreme Court has been saying loud and clear that regulators can't exceed their authority and that Congress needs to get back in the business

Starting point is 00:12:04 of debating and writing laws rather than ducking difficult votes in favor of the administrative state. In reason, Stephen Halbrook said, the ruling has broad implications. While the court's decision of how the trigger, sear, disconnector, and bolt interact in the firing sequence is quite technical, the decision embodies broader implications that are significant in other contexts, Halbrook wrote. It is settled once and for all that semi-automatic weapons are not machine guns. That should be a no-brainer, but plaintiffs allege that AR-15s are machine guns in the Las Vegas, Highland Park, and Mexico civil lawsuits. The decision reinforces that any change in the criminal law should be made by Congress, not by administrative agencies, since that will now be on the table.

Starting point is 00:12:47 How Congress acts, if it is inclined to do so, really matters, Halberg said. Bills must already be in the works to ban bump stocks. Will they allow as many as 520,000 bump stocks, the ATF's higher estimate, to be registered? And if they do, what percentage of owners would register them, Halberg said. Whatever the future holds, Cargill sets a good omen for the court that won't be beholden to the administrative state. In City Journal, Robert Verbruggen wrote, this requires legislation, not executive order. The ruling offers a lesson in the perils of executive overreach and a chance for Congress to do what it should have done from the start, Verbruggen said. Congress knew that banning a gun accessory would be politically difficult.

Starting point is 00:13:29 The solution, backed by the National Rifle Association, was for the executive branch to pretend the law already applied to bump stocks, despite the statute's clear language and the fact that the ATF had been allowing these devices for years. Meanwhile, several bills to address bump stocks went nowhere. Any court serious about interpreting the law as written would come to the same conclusion. Bump stocks simply do not allow a gun to fire multiple times with one function of the trigger. They help a shooter pull a trigger faster. Any functional Congress, though, would see the problem and fix the law, given that practically no one wants automatic weapons to be readily available, and bump stocks make semi-automatic rifles their functional equivalent.

Starting point is 00:14:19 Alright, that is it for what the right is saying, which brings us to what the left is saying. The left criticizes the decision, but calls on Congress to reinstate the ban. Some say Thomas's opinion used faulty reasoning to reach a desired conclusion. Others say the ruling eschewed common sense on gun safety. The Washington Post editorial board wrote, the court misfired on bump stocks. Congress can still succeed. The majority opinion is a tour de force of statutory hair-splitting, which concludes that the bump stock does not, strictly speaking, make it possible to fire multiple rounds with a single pull of the trigger. Therefore, Justice Thomas wrote,

Starting point is 00:14:55 the device does not fall within the definition of a machine gun Congress established when it imposed tight limits on civilian possession of such weapons 90 years ago, the board said. The Thomas opinion feels like the ultimate triumph of form over substance, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion. She added accurately, we fear, today's decision to reject that ordinary understanding will have deadly consequences. The only problem is that Justice Thomas was correct to point out that the 2018 regulation issued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives did not represent that agency's consistent view.

Starting point is 00:15:31 In fact, it represented a 180-degree reversal of the ATF's position on bump stocks before the Las Vegas massacre, the board wrote. This history shows what can go wrong when such clearly legislative matters are left up to the bureaucracy and the courts. It would be far preferable for Congress to provide fresh guidance instead of relying on regulators and judges to parse a 90-year-old statutory text. In Slate, Mark Joseph Stern called the ruling indefensible. One might hope that a ruling that stands to inflict so much carnage would, at least, be indisputably compelled by law. It is not. Far from it. To reach this result, Justice Clarence Thomas' opinion for the court

Starting point is 00:16:09 tortures statutory text beyond all recognition, defying Congress' clear and, until now, well-established command, Stern said. The Supreme Court has decided that it understands firearms better than the ATF. Thomas' majority opinion reads like the fervored work of a gun fetishist, complete with diagrams and even a gif. To reach his preferred result, Thomas falsely accused the ATF of taking the position that bump stocks were legal, and then abruptly reversing course after the Las Vegas shooting. This account is dead wrong. The ATF took a careful case-by-case view of different bump stock-like devices as gun makers developed them, deeming some permissible and others unlawful. The gun industry pushed

Starting point is 00:16:50 these devices into the mainstream by deceiving ATF about their purpose, Stern wrote. A deep current gun fetishism runs through Thomas' opinion, but so too does an arrogant skepticism of federal agencies like the ATF and the experts who staff them. In the Los Angeles Times, Erwin Chemerinsky said, the Supreme Court went out of its way to ignore common sense on bump stocks. Isaac got a chance to talk with Erwin today about this article. Erwin Chemerinsky, thank you so much for coming on the show. We appreciate it. It's truly my pleasure.

Starting point is 00:17:24 So before we jump into some questions, maybe we could just start, if you could just give us kind of your two-minute top 30,000-foot reaction to this ruling from the Supreme Court and tell us a little bit about what you're seeing. I was disappointed by the ruling of the Supreme Court. A federal statute adopted in the 1930s prohibits machine guns. A machine gun is a weapon that, with the pull of a trigger, can fire a large amount of bullets in a short amount of time. A bomb stock allows a rifle to do exactly that, fire a large number of bullets in a very short amount of time. It serves no purpose other than to kill a lot of people in a short amount of time.

Starting point is 00:18:04 This occurred in Las Vegas. The ATF, part of the federal government, in the Trump administration, adopted a ban on bump stocks. This was even supported by the National Rifle Association. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court 6-3 invalidated that ATF rule, and now it'll take an act of Congress to outlaw bump stocks. I guess I'm curious. I mean, I'm feeling a little bit torn about this case. On the one hand, it resonates for me when I read some people out there, critics, law professors, folks like you

Starting point is 00:18:36 have said, look, this is, and Sonia Sotomayor said it in her ruling. I mean, it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck. And then on the other hand, there's this really technical, I guess, analysis that Justice Thomas did, which I want our justices to do. I want them to get in the details of the nitty gritty and try to suss out and separate, you know, what constitutes a single trigger function and what doesn't. I guess I'm curious, you know, when it comes to a Supreme Court case, when it comes to a law like this, how should we be thinking about what Justice Thomas just did? Because I'm sympathetic to the fact he's trying to go into the details and do the nitty gritty, but I'm also sympathetic to the fact that maybe he's, you know, so far down the rabbit hole, he's missing the forest for the trees. I believe that statutes should be interpreted to accomplish their legislative purpose. Congress had a clear purpose in the 1930s. It was to prohibit a weapon from being able to fire a large amount of bullets in a very

Starting point is 00:19:34 short amount of time. And I think what the Supreme Court's majority did was ignore that. I don't think we can ignore context here. The six conservative justices who favor gun rights take a very narrow reading of a statute to allow bump stocks to continue to exist. The three liberal justices who favor gun regulation interpret the statute so as to allow the government to prohibit bump stocks. I think that's what's involved here is underlying attitudes with regard to guns.

Starting point is 00:20:05 That's interesting. I guess, do you think it's more about the underlying attitude with regards to gun or it's more about the effort that I think we've seen from the court to sort of trim the reach of these agencies? I think from the conservative justices argument would be that this is consistent with what they've been doing, you know, as a majority, which is they want legislators to be explicit about what they're trying to do, and they don't want agencies to kind of, quote-unquote, legislate? My answer to that is yes, I think it's all of that. There is a principle that courts are to defer to federal agencies when they interpret the statutes they operate under? If so, then the courts should have deferred here to the ATF, and it didn't. Conservatives, though, don't like that

Starting point is 00:20:51 principle and don't want deference to agencies. And so I think that's part of what explains the decision. But I also think a lot of what explains the decision is the conservatives on this court are very pro-gun rights. We saw that in a decision a couple of years ago, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association of Bruin. We've seen it throughout the past 15 years. Liberals very much favor gun regulation. We've seen their dissents in these cases. We also see this difference throughout society. So it should surprise no one that the six conservative justices struck down a gun regulation, but the three liberal justices would have held it.

Starting point is 00:21:29 I'm curious, I guess you just said it should surprise no one. One of the things I was wondering was if this was how you expected this case to play out or before the ruling came down, what you were thinking was going to happen. I'm always reluctant to predict what the Supreme Court's going to do. And the oral argument in this case certainly provided no basis for prediction. But all of that said, given the combination of an unwillingness of the conservative just to defer to administrative agencies, and given the conservative just has still a good gun regulation, none of us should be surprised by the 6-3 split in this case. Now that we have a ruling, just looking ahead, I'm interested, what do you expect to happen from here? I mean, I know this is a little bit outside

Starting point is 00:22:18 your remit, but Congress obviously could do something. They could step in and amend the bill. could do something. They could step in and amend the bill. There was political momentum around this before after the Las Vegas shooting. It feels like that momentum is now gone. How do you think this impacts gun control in the long term? You point to something very important. This is not a decision about the Second Amendment. It's an interpretation of a federal statute. Congress, therefore, could revise the statute and Congress could outlaw bump stocks. I think, though, for political reasons, it is very difficult to get gun legislation through Congress. I don't foresee the current Republican-controlled House of Representatives adopting gun laws, including prohibiting bump stacks.

Starting point is 00:23:10 So my great fear is it's going to take another terrible tragedy like what occurred in Las Vegas, where somebody used a bump stack to kill a large number of people in a short amount of time, and then Congress will act. All right. Erwin Chemerinsky, he is a contributing writer for the Los Angeles Times and also the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. Erwin, thanks so much for spending some time with us today. I appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you. All right. So that is it for what the right and the left are saying, which brings us to my take.

Starting point is 00:23:46 is it for what the right and the left are saying, which brings us to my take. In yesterday's newsletter, I criticized the way conservative media outlets were discussing a conservative judge's ruling on Mifepristone and how it was a dead giveaway that the ruling was in the wrong. In particular, I pointed to the Wall Street Journal, saying that Judge Kazmarek made, quote, several legal leaps as a classic mealy-mouthed concession that he was basically ignoring the law. Today, there are some similar examples on the left. Mark Joseph Stern, for instance, under what the left is saying, wrote that Thomas's majority opinion, quote, reads like the fevered work of a gun fetishist, complete with diagrams and even a gif. The justice who worships at the altar of the

Starting point is 00:24:25 firearm plainly relished the opportunity to depict the inner workings of these cherished tools of slaughter, end quote. That's a pretty derogatory way of saying that the justice went to great lengths to explain his decision with details, visuals, and intimate knowledge of how bump stocks and automatic firearms actually work. Similarly, the Washington Post editorial board, under what the left is saying, described Justice Thomas's opinion as a tour de force of statutory hair splitting, which concludes that the bump stock does not, strictly speaking, make it possible to fire multiple rounds with a single pull of the trigger. Again, that's a really interesting way of describing a justice going into painstaking

Starting point is 00:25:05 detail to prove his point. Actually, statutory hair-splitting is precisely what I want Supreme Court justices doing. Kudos to the Post editorial board at least for conceding that Thomas was correct to note that the ATF's position amounted to a reversal of long-standing policy and blaming the ATF's decision to broadly interpret an 83-year-old law on the inaction of federal legislators. Like the Post, I think Thomas' opinion, which you can read for yourself and you should, is a deliberate and thorough explanation of why the bump stock ban issued by the ATF should not stand up to legal scrutiny. Unlike the Post, I'm happy to concede that without lamenting the decision because it isn't the outcome I wanted. Over the post, I'm happy to concede that without lamenting the decision because it

Starting point is 00:25:45 isn't the outcome I wanted. Over the last few years, I've done my best to take the court's cases as I think anyone should, one by one. But one of the overarching themes of this Supreme Court is their willingness to insist that legislators do more legislating, which would allow agencies to enforce clearer and more specific laws and the court to do less broad interpretation. When the court has seen the bureaucratic reach of a federal agency overextend, they've pushed back. And I appreciate the court for that. Contrary to so much fear-mongering about the outcome of those cases, federal agencies haven't collapsed and regulations haven't gone up in smoke. The message left for the left, and for all legislators, is as simple as it seems. Legislate. If you want a federal policy to be law, don't pretzel decades

Starting point is 00:26:31 old statutes to provide your legal framework. Pass a law. I don't think that's particularly complicated, and in this case it's quite straightforward. The court made it clear that a bump stock ban would be perfectly constitutional. It just can't come from the ATF reinterpreting a rule in a new way. As is often the case, the issue with this ruling isn't with this court, which I think is doing its job. The issue is with Congress, which isn't. I say all of this, by the way, as somebody who absolutely supports a bump stock ban. Justice Sonia Sotomayor is right that from the perspective of a citizenry that would simply not benefit from civilians being able to fire hundreds of rounds per minute, bump stocks shouldn't be legal. And while federal legislators have to prevent them from being legal, many state legislatures from Florida to Vermont have succeeded in doing just that. Machine guns have been banned since the 1930s, and no private citizen is allowed to own a fully automatic weapon made after 1986. While many useful gun control laws are either ignored or implemented poorly,

Starting point is 00:27:31 the prohibition on machine guns has been a very effective piece of gun control legislation, but the bump stock modification effectively provides a loophole. In other words, I would have been happy if the court upheld the ban solely because that outcome is the one I preferred. But I don't think it's particularly mystifying why they didn't, nor do I think it's the sign of some corrupt court that six of the justices landed where they did. The solution, quite obviously, is for Congress to amend the 1934 law to include bump stocks, something Democrats and Republicans should be able to come together and do. Indeed, if they hadn't relied on the ATF rulemaking process to get what they want, that might have happened back in 2017. It's worth reiterating that Trump pushed the bump stock ban, and even the NRA supported a more limited version of the rule. So it's not as if the political will isn't there. We just need to

Starting point is 00:28:20 muster it now before another mass shooting provides the impetus. We'll be right back after this quick break. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season?

Starting point is 00:29:10 Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to your questions answered. This one is one of our notes to self from March 26, where we said, what is the latest on the humanitarian aid situation in Haiti? When we cover humanitarian incidents, we like to follow up several months later to see how the

Starting point is 00:29:56 impacted area is recovering. On March 26, we covered the violence and unrest in Haiti. At the time, the violence led to the U.S. evacuating over 230 of its citizens and led to the displacement of 362,000 Haitians, according to the U.N.'s estimates. Here's what we wrote at the time, quote, On the evening of March 3rd, gangs in Haiti stormed a major prison at the capital, Port-au-Prince, freeing 3,700 inmates and leading the government to declare a state of emergency. The prison attacks followed calls by gang leader Jimmy Cherizeri to overthrow President Ariel Henry, who came to office shortly after the assassination of President Hovind El Moussi in July 2021. Henry had pledged

Starting point is 00:30:38 to step down by early February 2024, but later said that security must be re-established before Haiti could hold free and fair elections. The clashes began while Henry was in Kenya, finalizing the details of a UN-sponsored mission to contract 1,000 police officers to help Haiti's security situation. So, how are things going now? Well, not well. In April, over 80% of the capital city was controlled by gangs. In that environment, a transitional council was sworn in with the goal of stabilizing the country enough to hold elections. The council appointed Michel-Patrick Beauvoir as interim prime minister on April 26, then appointed Gary Kniell as prime minister on June 1. Kniell has been UNICEF's regional

Starting point is 00:31:23 director for Latin America and the Caribbean since January 2023, and from October 2011 to May 2012, served as Haiti's prime minister. Days after his appointment, Conil was hospitalized for unknown reasons. Meanwhile, gangs still control most of the capital. Roughly half a million people have been internally displaced,

Starting point is 00:31:41 and over 2,500 others have died in Haiti as a result of the unrest. That's according to reporting from the Associated Press. Additionally, the first deployment of 200 police officers from Kenya was delayed for logistical issues, with one senior official saying the bases where the Kenyan officers would operate from were still only 70% completed. The Transnational Committee has committed to holding Haitian elections no later than February 2026. Haiti has not had a president since 2021, and its last election was 2016. All right, that is it for our reader question today, which was really one of our lookbacks. I'm going to pass it back

Starting point is 00:32:18 to John for the rest of the pod, and we are off tomorrow for Juneteenth, but stay tuned for a very special video we're going to be releasing on our YouTube channel and a video coming out in the newsletter. I think you guys are going to like this one. So keep an eye out for that. Tangle News on YouTube is the place to find us. And if you don't go there and subscribe, you won't hear from us tomorrow. So you should do that. I'll see you guys on Thursday. Thanks, Isaac.

Starting point is 00:32:49 Here's your Under the Radar story for today, folks. A record number of NATO's 32 members are meeting the military alliance's defense spending target this year, according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. 23 NATO members are spending at least 2% of their gross domestic product on defense, a fourfold increase from 2021, when only six nations were meeting that goal. The surge in spending is spurred by a fear that Russia's war in Ukraine indicates Vladimir Putin's broader regional ambitions, Poland spending more than 4%, and Estonia each border Russia, and both are spending a larger percentage of their GDP on national defense than the U.S. The Associated Press has this story, and there's a link in today's episode description.

Starting point is 00:33:35 All right, next up is our numbers section. The number of U.S. states, including Washington, D.C., with laws banning the use of bump stocks is 17, including California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. The number of U.S. states with laws regulating the use of bump stocks is four. That includes Colorado, Indiana, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The number of rounds per minute that a semi-automatic weapon modified with a bump stock can fire is 400 to 800, compared to the 700 to 950 rounds per minute of a fully automatic weapon. The estimated number of bump stocks in circulation in the U.S. when the ATF issued its ban in

Starting point is 00:34:21 2017 is 520,000, according to court records. The percentage of registered voters who supported a bump stock ban in October 2017, shortly after the Las Vegas mass shooting, was 72%, according to a Morning Consult poll. The percentage of Democrats who favored a bump stock ban in 2017 is 79%. The percentage of Republicans who favored a bump stock ban in 2017 is 68%. And the percentage of Americans who supported banning bump stocks in March of 2018, shortly after the Parkland school shooting, was 81%, according to an NPR Ipsos poll. And last but not least, our Have a Nice Day story. 65-year-old Beau Pedersen from Washington State is enjoying an unlikely claim to fame on TikTok thanks to his youngest daughter, Emily. At first, she just asked him for a piece of advice to record and put online.

Starting point is 00:35:16 Then, when Bo's advice on how to back up a trailer received over 5,000 comments, she kept hitting record. 5,000 comments, she kept hitting record. On the Instagram account DadAdviceFromBeau, he now shares fatherly wisdom as well as practical lessons like how to change a spark plug or hang something heavy on a wall, with many commenters who had lost their fathers saying they found comfort in Beaux's posts. And when Emily needed medical treatment for an illness, the account's followers stepped up with donations to reciprocate her positivity. Nice News has this story and there's a link in today's episode description. please go to readtangle.com and sign up for a membership. And as Isaac reminded us all at the top of the podcast, we have moved our limited series, The Undecideds, to its own dedicated podcast page.

Starting point is 00:36:11 So if you could, please, if you haven't already, take the time, go sign up on that page, leave a five-star review, leave a great comment. All that helps with the algorithm and delivering the podcast out to other listeners who might not normally get a chance to hear it. So do us a favor, head on over to that page and show some support. We are off tomorrow, but a new video is coming out tomorrow on our YouTube channel specifically about Juneteenth. There's going to be a link in a brief newsletter that we'll send out tomorrow.

Starting point is 00:36:38 We'll talk to you again on Thursday. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Maul signing off. Have a great day, y'all. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by John Law. The script is edited by our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will Kabak, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bokova, who is also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. If you're looking for more from Tangle, please go to readtangle.com and check out our website.

Tangle - The Supreme Court's bump-stock ruling.

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