Up First from NPR - U.S. Destroys Its Chemical Weapons, Unpacking Bidenomics, Ghost Guns

Episode Date: July 8, 2023

The U.S. vowed to get rid of its chemical weapon stockpile decades ago...and finally fulfilled that promise this weekend. Also, pundits have labeled President Biden's economic plan "Bidenomics" - we look at what that plan includes, and how the president is using the moniker in his campaign. Plus, a lawsuit in Philadelphia targets the makers of the kits used to make ghost guns.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

No more chemical weapons. The U.S. has officially destroyed the last of its stockpile decades after it said it would. Although banned, chemical weapons are still used by a few rogue states. I'm Scott Simon. I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is Up First from NPR News. Also, you've been hearing a lot about Bidenomics, which is a slogan for President Biden's economic plan. Like Reaganomics was back in the 1980s.

Exactly. And the president is really leaning on the label in his speeches. Bidenomics is about the future. Bidenomics is just another way of saying restore the American dream. But are the American people buying it? Also, Philadelphia targets the makers of kits used to make ghost guns. Stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your weekend. Now Our Change will honor 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to Our Change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. The United States has finally destroyed the last of its stockpile of chemical weapons.

And this means it has fulfilled a promise made back in 1997. That's when the Senate ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, a treaty that was meant to get rid of all chemical weapons. Here's President Bill Clinton speaking at the time. The convention requires other nations to follow our lead, to eliminate their arsenals of poison gas, and to give up developing, producing, and acquiring such weapons in the future. But it turns out the U.S. didn't maintain that lead. Instead, it ended up as the last nation to eliminate its chemical weapons stockpile. And pure science correspondent Jeff Brumfield joins us now. Jeff, thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you. Why did it take so long? What happened? At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. had more than 30,000 tons of chemical weapons sitting in its stockpile. This was really nasty stuff like nerve agent, blister agent. And it was a nightmare to deal with. You had deadly chemicals, explosives sitting in bombs and artillery shells. They weren't designed to be taken apart. They were designed to be used, so you had to figure out how to do that.

Then disposal proved tricky. The Army's practice was to incinerate these agents, but at some sites, locals resisted, fearing dangerous pollution, so entirely new techniques had to be developed. But that wasn't the whole story. David Koplow is a law professor at Georgetown University who's tracked these processes over the years, and he says the program was also plagued by underfunding and poor management. The leadership for the

program changed repeatedly, and it was just never taken as seriously as it should have been. As a result, it dragged on for so long that the U.S. was actually in violation of the treaty for several years. But they finally did manage to get it done on Friday. What's been the overall effect of the treaty? You know, it's been very effective in some ways and less effective in others. So these large national stockpiles have been eliminated. But there have been some other

nations that continue to use chemical weapons, most notably Syria deployed chlorine and nerve agents in its civil war with some pretty terrible effects. Russia has also used chemicals for targeted assassination attempts. And North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un actually killed his half brother with a nerve agent. But those are isolated cases. More broadly, vast quantities of these weapons have been disposed of by nations all over the world. I spoke to Kingston Reif. He's the Pentagon official who's overseen this destruction process. He says this is really something to celebrate. These are awful weapons, and the world is a safer and more secure place without them.

Jeff, I wonder, because I think a lot of people in the world would not say it feels like a more secure planet at this point. New weapons are being developed. There are new worries of nuclear war. What can we learn, perhaps, from the Chemical Weapons Convention? I mean, I think the takeaway here is that arms control actually can work. I mean, the treaty has eliminated an entire class of really, really awful weapons from the battlefield. It's possible.

It just takes political will. And I think that's sort of the lesson. You know, the generals fight the wars, but politicians and ultimately citizens get to make the rules. And this is an important reminder that the world decides when a weapon is unacceptable and it can make a change. And Pierce Jeff Brumfield, thanks very much for being with us. Thank you.

President Biden and his team have been fanning out across the country in the last few weeks, touting his economic wins. And they got a tagline for those achievements, Bidenomics. The president seems to have taken a liking to that name. Here he is speaking in Chicago last month, contrasting his plan to trickle down economics, which essentially favored the wealthy. I came into office determined to change the economic direction of this country, to move from trickle-down economics to what everyone on Wall Street Journal and Financial Times began to call Bidenomics. I didn't come up with a name. I really didn't. I now claim it, but they're the ones who used it first. But what does Bidenomics actually entail? And

are voters taking to it? And here's Eric McDaniel joins us. Eric, thanks for being with us. Hi, Scott. Seems like anytime anyone from the administration's in front of a microphone, they work in the phrase Bidenomics. What is it? Well, first and foremost, and probably even mostly, Scott, it's a campaign message. Biden's out making the case that the economy is strong and that he's the one to thank for that. Inflation continues to fall. We've emerged from the pandemic. Unemployment is near historic lows. But Bidenomics is also a sort of bumper sticker way for the administration to talk about all of the president's economic

legislation at once. So that's the Trillion Dollar Inflation Reduction Act, which invested in climate jobs and American manufacturing. It's also the Bipartisan Infrastructure Plan, which, as you might guess, invest in infrastructure, roads, bridges, internet, and the CHIPS Act, which is about incentivizing domestic semiconductor manufacturing. So rather than tick through all of that, like I just did, it's much quicker and maybe more accessible to, say, Bidenomics. Any sign it's catching on is a phrase. Well, admittedly, I haven't heard it on TikTok yet, but the administration really is pushing the term. And I actually do think there's some risk here to the president. In a lot of ways, the economy is quite strong. The U.S. has had what might be the world's most robust recovery from COVID.

But people tell us they still don't feel great about the economy. And in polls, we've heard that folks tend to trust Republicans more to handle the business of running the economy. I talked to Simon Rosenberg about all of this. He's a Democratic strategist who's worked for the Democratic National Committee and plenty of other places. He told me he thinks that a lot of that wariness is more about a kind of hangover from COVID than it is about the economy itself. I think COVID was remarkably disruptive in people's lives. People don't feel necessarily secure that we're on the other side of it. It was a massive disruption to everyday

life here for a long time. It was a major event in the life of the country. And I think there's some evidence that people are still feeling weary and tired and worried about things. And look, Rosenberg also told me that he thinks the president has a strong case to make that the economy is good and that it's the president's job to get out on the road and spread the good news to help people end an era of bad feelings. But Eric, we're still a long ways out from Election Day. Plenty of time for things to change. By putting his name on the economy, does President Biden risk being blamed if problems develop closer to the 2024 election? Right. So the president could embrace this Bidenomics label and anything could happen. There could be a real recession. We got some new jobs numbers. The U.S. economy kept adding jobs, but fewer than expected. And the Federal Reserve is probably

going to have to raise interest rates again. That's going to make it more expensive to borrow money for houses and cars and could slow hiring. And there's also just straight up political risk. This label could come to mean something less rosy than it does now in the eyes of the Biden administration. Republican presidential hopefuls like Tim Scott are already out using the term Bidenomics to attack President Biden, saying that people still think prices are too high on the things they need to buy. And that's Bidenomics. But, you know, like you said, we're still more than a year out from when folks start casting ballots. And we just don't know what the economic news will look like by then. But Bidenomics is the president's bet that things will look pretty good. And here's Eric McDaniel. Thanks so much.

Thank you, Scott. If you were following the news, you already know that the Fourth of July holiday this year was once again marred by a series of mass shootings around the country, including a horrific rampage in Philadelphia on Monday night that killed five people. The alleged shooter was arrested on the scene. Philadelphia police were troubled by the nature of his weapons. Here's Deputy Commissioner of Investigations Frank Veneur. We've confirmed through our lab both of those weapons were privately made firearms. They don't have any markings. They're not traceable. So if he would have dropped that weapon and got away, we would have had no way to trace that weapon back. Essentially, they were what are at times referred to as ghost guns, a trend that's catching on so quickly Philadelphia is suing over them. Joining us now to explain that lawsuit and the legal status of these do-it-yourself guns

is NPR's Martin Koste. Good morning, Martin. Hi. Talk to us about these lawsuits. If these are ghost guns, who is the city suing? Well, there are two kinds of ghost guns out there. They're sometimes also called privately made firearms. There's the truly homemade kind where people might use a 3D printer or something, but that's not what Philadelphia is suing over. The city is targeting the much bigger category, which is the kinds of guns that you make from a kit. These are metal machine parts, but they're not technically quite a gun under federal rules. This week, Philadelphia sued two companies that have big business selling

those kits, JSD Supply and Polymer 80. The city accuses the two companies of selling these almost guns to Philadelphians in violation of state law. And they say that this kind of commerce has fueled violence and cost the city a lot of money. Do we know how many of these guns are out there? Well, we can't really say the number in circulation by the very nature of these. These are, the manufacturers consider them unregulated parts, so they don't have serial numbers. The buyers don't do background checks. These are the things we normally use to try to count guns, but the police can count guns that they recover from crimes, and the count of those is going up. The ATF says the number of privately made firearms

used in crimes jumped from almost none six years ago to about 20,000 nationally a couple years ago in 2021. And you see that kind of jump in Philadelphia, where they say now that almost 10% of all the guns they recover from crimes are privately made firearms. So the city announced this lawsuit on Wednesday. Was it because of the two ghost guns recovered from the Monday shooting? No, the city was already preparing these lawsuits with the help of the Giffords Law Center, the gun control group, before that happened. Philadelphia is just the latest in a series of Democratic-run jurisdictions who have tried this lawsuit route. We've seen similar actions from New York, New Jersey, California, D.C.

In some of those cases, the lawsuits are pending. In other cases, the manufacturers have agreed to stop selling kits in those jurisdictions and even pay out some money. Philadelphia's Mayor Jim Kenney says he was so frustrated with Congress and state government for not reining in these gun kit sellers. That's why he decided to try the route of suing. We're just looking for sanity. We're looking for them to abide by state law. I mean, Pennsylvania state law is one of the weakest in the nation to start with. These guys go around even that. So what we're looking to do is a change in behavior. Besides the lawsuits by these cities and states, what's happening on this question at the federal level? So the Biden administration made it a priority to clamp down

on the gun kits, and they did that by having the ATF broaden some of the technical definitions of which kinds of parts actually count as a firearm under federal law for purposes of requiring a serial number or a background check when you buy it, that kind of thing. But as you might imagine, this redefinition was instantly challenged in court by gun rights groups. I talked to Adam Kraut. He's the executive director of the Second Amendment Foundation. They're involved in a lawsuit over this in a federal court in Texas. The right to self-manufacture arms is something that, you know, there is no historical basis either in law or tradition to restrict people from doing. And, you know, he says the administration overstepped its bounds when it basically rewrote the federal definition of what a gun is to address this issue.

He says that's something that should be left to Congress. That federal court in Texas, by the way, seems to agree. It just vacated the Biden administration's new definitions of what a gun is because of this situation. And the assumption, though, of course, is the government will probably appeal. But for now, people who track this commerce say the gun kits are still being widely sold across the country. That's NPR's Martin Kosty. Thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome. And that's a first for Saturday, July 8th, 2023. I'm Scott Simon. And I'm Aisha Roscoe.

Today's podcast was edited by Roberta Rampton, Amina Khan, Katie Arrido, Hadil Al-Shaouchi, Matthew Sherman, and Dee Parvaz. It was produced by Danny Hensel and directed by Michael Radcliffe, with engineering support from Hannah Glubner. Evie Stone is our senior supervising editor. Our executive producer is Sarah Oliver. And our deputy managing editor is Jim Kane. And there's a Sunday up first, too.

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