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Legal Issues Involved

Bush Administration:

Congressional Research Service:

Article II of the Constitution

Designates president as commander-in-chief and gives him authority over foreign affairs.

Says Article II gives the president "all necessary authority" to protect the nation from further attacks. Argues that the president's power to conduct secret surveillance for the conduct of foreign affairs has long been recognized.

Says broad claim of presidential power contradicts the will of Congress when it passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. That law intended for the government to seek warrants from a special FISA court before conducting such surveillance.

Authorization to Use Military Force

Resolution passed by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001, allows the president to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. Preamble asserts the president's constitutional authority "to deter and prevent" terrorist acts against the United States.

Asserts that communications intelligence is an essential part of waging war that "must be included in any natural reading" of the authorization. Engaging in warrantless surveillance is a common and critical practice for wartime presidents, the Justice Department says, citing George Washington's interception of British mail as an example.

Acknowledges that surveillance is an important facet of warfare. But the CRS analysis says that "it is not clear that the collection of intelligence constitutes a use of force" authorized under the resolution passed by Congress.

'Hamdi v. Rumsfeld'

The 2004 Supreme Court ruling found that the authorization to use force passed by Congress allowed the detention of an American citizen captured on a foreign battlefield -- in spite of a federal law prohibiting such detentions unless authorized by Congress. The high court's ruling recognized the right to detain combatants "based on longstanding law-of-war principles."

Interprets the Hamdi ruling to mean that Congress' force authorization implicitly gave the president the power to conduct any activity considered an essential aspect of waging war -- including warrantless electronic surveillance -- at home and abroad.

Argues that the Hamdi ruling merely confirmed the authority to capture enemy combatants on a foreign battlefield. Suggests it's a huge stretch to say that the force authorization also covers domestic surveillance as an essential aspect of waging war.

Law known as " FISA" created a legal process for authorizing foreign intelligence wiretaps. Allows a 15-day grace period for warrantless wiretapping during times of war and provides for retroactive warrants. Provides an exception to warrant requirements "where authorized by statute."

Argues FISA cannot take away the president's inherent constitutional power to wiretap in the name of national security. Contends that the 2001 congressional authorization to use force fulfills FISA's mandate that a warrant is required "except where authorized by statute."

Says FISA reflects Congress' view that it has the authority to regulate the president's use of any inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless surveillance. Suggests Congress did not intend for FISA's warrant exceptions to be expansive.

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Legal Issues Involved Bush Administration: Congressional Research Service: Article II of the Constitution Designates president as commander-in-chief and gives him authority over foreign affairs. Says Article II gives the president "all necessary authority" to protect the nation from further attacks. Argues that the president's power to conduct secret surveillance for the conduct of foreign affairs has long been recognized.

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The federal power to wiretap, a central issue during the Bush years, has made a comeback. The White House seems ready to endorse an expansion of wiretapping laws to give the federal government greater power to demand access to Web communications like Facebook chats. Meanwhile, the Associated Press just revealed that the Justice Department seized, without a warrant, two months' worth of its reporters' telephone records.

Critics are, unsurprisingly, up in arms about both matters. House Republicans, recently born again as staunch civil-rights defenders, are depicting the Obama Administration as, in the words of Zeke Miller and Michael Crowley, "a Big Brother-style tyrant in charge of a power-abusing surveillance state." Techies, for their part, simply hate the idea of Web-tapping. Julian Sanchez, for Wired, writes, "The Obama administration needs to dump this ill-conceived scheme on the trash heap where it belongs." But the issue, once you get into it, is actually rather complicated.

Wiretapping the Web provokes a visceral reaction for more than one reason. First and foremost, like any electronic surveillance, it's a massive invasion of privacy by the world's most powerful government. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, in 1928, "As a means of espionage, writs of assistance and general warrants are but puny instruments of tyranny and oppression when compared with wiretapping." A wiretapping law can incidentally create a terrible innovation policy. "Build your system this way" has rarely yielded good results, and never when Congress is involved. Finally, some technologists believe that a Web-tapping law will create new Internet security risks, because it would force firms to build backdoors into their systems, which malicious hackers could then exploit.

Nonetheless, the F.B.I. and other law-enforcement agencies present a persuasive argument for increased powers (in particular, increased sanctions for Internet firms who do not comply with wiretap orders). While it is easy to dislike government surveillance in the abstract, the case for tapping becomes extremely strong when facing the actual investigation of a serious crime, like a murder, a planned terrorist attack, or a powerful criminal organization (think "The Wire"). That need to gain evidence in individual cases has led us roughly to where we are (at least for criminal matters- anti-terrorism is a whole different story). Wiretapping is permitted, but usually limited to serious crimes, and only allowed when subject to appropriate protections and oversight, depending on the intrusiveness of the tap. A comprehensive set of laws and regulations governs when the F.B.I. can wiretap telephones, and they are mostly reasonable.

If wiretapping is strongly justified in individual cases, then, argues the F.B.I, as communication technologies change, so, too, must those laws and regulations. Hence, as new technologies emerge, or as existing ones become harder to tap, the wiretapping power needs to be adjusted to maintain roughly the same balance. This essential concept of balance is what's behind the F.B.I's argument that it needs more power lest its ability to wiretap "go dark."

But there are two essential conditions for this balance argument to make any sense. First, if it is to have more powers, the Justice Department should also agree that Web communications and stored records are generally subject to the strict standards demanded by the Fourth Amendment (as are the content of telephone calls). As it stands, the Justice Department has been evasive on this point. It has argued against the need for warrants for things like e-mail messages, and often appears to believe that a mere subpoena (a document issued by a prosecutor) should be sufficient to obtain any record stored on the Web or otherwise.

The F.B.I. and Justice Department cannot credibly declare that they need to restore balance with more warrant power, and at the same time campaign against the need for warrants in the first place, and abuse their subpoena powers. If the argument for preserving a balance between security and privacy compels a stronger wiretap power, it must also means a broader statutory warrant requirement, one that covers most of what we do on the Web and covers most records. Otherwise, the balance argument works against the Justice Department.

Consider the seizure of the A.P.'s calling records, which was accomplished not with a warrant but with subpoenas sent to the telephone companies. The legal fiction is that the reporters, when making phone calls, voluntary handed over their calling records to the phone companies; ergo the seizure of those records has nothing to do with the Constitution.

Relying on that fiction (which, unfortunately, was created by the Supreme Court in 1979), the Justice Department broadly believes that stuff stored on the Web has also been handed over to a third party and therefore merits very limited protection. But that old legal fiction-which, in the words of Wayne LaFave, a law professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, "makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment"-grows more indefensible every day, and becomes further at odds with personal and technological reality. Courts, especially the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, are ahead of the Justice Department in their recognition that the data we all store on the Internet nowadays has become core to American privacy.

What we store online is really more akin to the old home filing cabinet than the telephone. Yes, the telephone conversation may be intimate, but it at least has the feeling of an external projection: one reaches out to make calls. Records, writings, and personal correspondence are often more sensitive, whether they're stored at home or online. We often do as much if not more on the Web than we did on the telephone-writing personal thoughts, or dealing with matters that were previously handled in person and in private, like renting videos or researching embarrassing medical problems. The expectation of privacy in one's online records is obvious to anyone who lives in this century.

The second condition needed for the F.B.I.'s balance argument to work is the limitation of highly intrusive monitoring to cases of serious crimes with clear victims. Federal law is chock-full of offenses, which make everyone a potential criminal and, in turn, at least potentially subject to tapping. This is another problem with the A.P. investigation: while leaks of classified information can be important, their investigation cannot plausibly justify the mass seizure of the calling records of a major news organization.

The whole idea of balance in this area must also be put in the context of a growing " surveillance state," as Hendrik Hertzberg calls it. As intense as F.B.I. surveillance can be, at least the F.B.I. regards the Constitution as a serious constraint, unlike the National Security Agency, which has repeatedly spied on Americans without a warrant, reaching its maximum level of abuse during the Bush years. That doesn't mean we should be thankful, exactly, for F.B.I. monitoring, but let's just say things could be worse.

The bottom line is that we should demand the following: no increase in the power to wiretap without a statutory recognition of a broader warrant requirement that reflects the reality of the privacy interest in stuff stored on the Web. And we must demand some proportionality: that the most intrusive methods of federal surveillance be reserved for the most serious crimes. Finally, and ideally, we'd take a harder look at what actually constitutes a federal crime, but that's a whole different story.
Tim Wu, @superwuster on Twitter, is a professor at Columbia Law School and the author of "The Master Switch." Illustration by Seymour Chwast.

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The federal power to wiretap, a central issue during the Bush years, has made a comeback. The White House seems ready to endorse an expansion of wiretapping laws to give the federal government greater power to demand access to Web communications like Facebook chats.

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The Fourth Amendment Explained: US Government Review

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The Second Amendment: How the gun control debate went crazy | Kurt Anderson

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Abstract

We provide an overview of empirical evidence on the determinants of terrorism, in particular focusing on the origins and targets of transnational terrorism. We also assemble several broad theoretical families that relate terrorism to, e.g., economic, political and institutional and demographic factors. We provide a critical discussion of the existing empirical evidence and refer to a number of areas of future research before describing some modest policy implications.

Keywords

Determinants of terrorism Transnational terrorism Counter-terrorism policy

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We provide an overview of empirical evidence on the determinants of terrorism, in particular focusing on the origins and targets of transnational terrorism. We also assemble several broad theoretical families that relate terrorism to, e.g., economic, political and institutional and demographic factors.

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This research attempts to identify some of the causes of terrorism. I explore the levels of inequality, GDP, and the degree of democracy within a country and observe their influence on terrorist activity. I rely on the Global Terrorism Database, to discover the leading factor of terrorism.

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It's official: President Trump is pulling the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal.

Trump's Iran deal announcement was made in a Tuesday afternoon White House address, in which he announced that he would reimpose sanctions on Iran's oil sector that had been lifted as part of the agreement. This put the US in violation of its obligations under the agreement, and thus constitutes a unilateral American withdrawal from the deal.

"We cannot prevent an Iranian bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement," the president said in justifying his decision. "Therefore, I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal."

The problem, though, is that the deal wasn't "rotten": The best evidence we have suggests Iran was actually complying with the deal. Iran has dismantled a huge portion of its nuclear program and given international inspectors wide latitude to make sure it isn't cheating; the country is significantly further from a nuclear weapon than it was when the deal came into force.

Now, American withdrawal doesn't mean the deal is immediately dead. Technically, the nuclear deal is an agreement between Iran and what's called the P5+1 (the US, Britain, France, Russia, China, and Germany) - which means the US leaving the agreement doesn't end it. If the rest of the P5+1 keep their sanctions off, Iran may decide to continue to adhere to the deal's restrictions even after the US pullout. That's what Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said his country would do in a Monday speech.

But the truth is that nobody actually knows what the Iranians will do. It's possible they stay in the deal; it's equally possible that they slowly chip away at the deal's restrictions or even dash for a nuclear weapon. What's more, the sanctions also could precipitate a major crisis with America's European allies, as some of the sanctions could affect European companies that do business in Iran.

And that's what makes this decision of Trump's so scary. Trump took a major geopolitical flashpoint that had been contained and blew it wide open.

"Trump's pullout [makes] this thing an agreement in name only," says Hussein Banai, an expert on Iran at Indiana University Bloomington. "We don't even know how to judge anything anymore."

The Middle East just got a new crisis, and it's one entirely of Trump's making.

What Trump just did to the Iran nuclear deal

Prior to the Iran deal, the P5+1 had imposed a dizzying and complex set of international sanctions on Iran as punishment for its nuclear development. The basic gist of the deal was that the sanctions would be lifted in exchange for Iran agreeing to several serious restrictions on its nuclear development. Among the most important, the deal called for:

Reducing Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium by 97 percent, and banning them from possessing any uranium potent enough that it could be used to fuel a bomb

Capping its number of nuclear centrifuges, devices used to enrich uranium, at roughly 5,000 - and only permitting it to use old, outdated, and slow centrifuges

Stopping Iran from operating its Arak facility used to make plutonium that could fuel a bomb

Permitting wide-ranging and intrusive IAEA inspections designed to verify that Iran isn't cheating on any portion of the deal

These provisions, taken together, make it functionally impossible for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon so long as they are in place. And the IAEA has repeatedly confirmed that Iran is complying with all of its obligations under the deal.

"With the deal in place, it would be extremely difficult for Iran to build the bomb without being detected - and there would be a time frame that would allow the international community to respond," James Acton, director of the Carnegie Endowment's Nuclear Policy Program, tells me.

But the whole point of the deal is a quid pro quo: Iran agrees to nuclear restrictions in exchange for the financial benefits of sanctions relief, which would amount to billions and billions of dollars. What Trump did today was reimpose a major portion of the pre-deal sanctions regime - something called "secondary sanctions" targeting Iran's oil sector.

Secondary sanctions don't punish Iran directly, instead targeting international banks that do business with Iran's oil sector. Hence why they're "secondary": Instead of hitting the primary target, Iran, they cut off access to US markets for third parties that want to work with Iran. In effect, it forces foreign countries into a choice between importing large amounts of Iranian oil or doing business with the United States. Since America is the world's largest economy, it's not exactly a hard choice - and thus would end up punishing close US allies that want to do business with Iran.

Reimposing these sanctions puts the US in clear violation of its obligations under the deal, thus effectively withdrawing America as a participant - and significantly reducing Iran's incentive to stay in.

But the deal isn't dead, at least not yet.

If the rest of the countries don't reimpose their own sanctions, Iran may very well end up still having more access to international markets than it had before the deal was inked. It could thus still decide to stay in the deal, rather than kicking out inspectors or restarting large-scale uranium enrichment, in order to avoid angering these other parties - all of which opposed Trump's decision.

But we don't know that the Iranians will do that for sure. They may decide that without the US, the deal isn't really worth it. As a result, the issue of Iran's nuclear program - whether or not a rogue regime will attempt to pursue a nuclear bomb - is now all of a sudden back on the table.

Why Trump withdrew from the Iran deal - and what could happen next

What's weird about Trump's decision is that he presented no evidence that Iran wasn't complying with its obligations. Neither the president nor the foreign countries that support his decision, chiefly Israel and Saudi Arabia, have presented any evidence that Iran is technically in violation of the deal.

Instead, the president's case revolved around perceived defects in the deal itself. The first one is that the deal isn't entirely permanent; the restrictions on Iran's nuclear program start to relax about 10 years after the deal was signed (though the agreement not to build a nuclear weapon is permanent). The second is that the deal didn't cover other problematic things Iran was doing, including ballistic missile development and its support for violent militias around the Middle East (like Hezbollah in Lebanon).

French President Emmanuel Macron urged Trump to try to open up new negotiations on these issues while staying in the deal, thus keeping Iran's nuclear program in check for now while dealing with these other issues. But Trump rejected that approach, preferring instead to withdraw from the deal entirely. Trump has said he's open to negotiating a newer, tougher deal, but there's little chance that Europe and Iran - which spent years negotiating the current deal, and believe that it's working - would agree to do so.

It's hard to understand the motivation for doing this without looking beyond policy and into politics. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly called the Iran deal "the worst deal ever," once giving the headline speech at an anti-deal rally. And a priority for this administration has been tearing down accomplishments of the prior president, be they Obamacare or the Paris climate accord; the Iran deal fits squarely under this umbrella.

Trump's recent Cabinet reshuffle also made his decision seem inevitable. The president fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, both of whom thought the US should stay in the deal, and replaced them with Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, respectively. Both Pompeo and Bolton are Iran hawks who have long opposed the deal. In effect, Trump was surrounded by yes men while he made one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency.

Whether the logic was principally geopolitical or plain old political, the decision remains the same: America is out of the Iran deal. Now the question is what comes next.

Part of this hinges on how strictly Trump chooses to enforce the sanctions he's reimposing. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is the branch of the Treasury Department responsible for implementing US sanctions; it has a lot of leeway to shape which international companies will be hit by secondary sanctions and how strict those sanctions will be. The less stringent OFAC's guidance is, the less the new sanctions will hurt Iran.

Europe is unlikely to impose its own sanctions on Iran now, given that it believes the deal is working. If the US weren't too strict about its secondary sanctions, Iran's most important trading relationships would remain intact so long as Tehran adhered to the deal's nuclear limits - giving it more incentive to adhere by them.

But if the secondary sanctions are implemented very strictly, and European firms stop doing business with Iran to avoid the risk of American punishment, then Iran would have little reason to stay in the deal. The details of Trump's announcement aren't just details; in some ways, they're the most important part of the entire thing. And his announcement did little to clarify them.

Ultimately, though, no experts are really optimistic that the deal can survive this in the long run. US withdrawal creates too much uncertainty, and gives Iran too much of an incentive to try to push the limits of what it can get away with, for the deal to stay in place indefinitely. Even if it doesn't collapse today, and Iran pledges to stay in, the situation is just not stable.

"I think we get into a cycle of death by a thousand cuts," Acton says. "The US does a step to bring it into noncompliance with the deal. If diplomacy with Iranians fails to keep them in the terms, maybe they take a little step ... and then we go back and forth until the deal is dead."

And if the deal does, in fact, fall apart - well, then Donald Trump will face a stark choice: Either let Iran advance toward the capacity to build a nuclear bomb or go to war to try to stop it. That's the awful decision the Iran deal was designed to forestall, but it may very well be our future.

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Trump's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, explained

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It's official: President Trump is pulling the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal. Trump's Iran deal announcement was made in a Tuesday afternoon White House address, in which he announced that he would reimpose sanctions on Iran's oil sector that had been lifted as part of the agreement.

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Donald Trump says US will no longer abide by Iran deal - as it happened

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The president said the US will exit the nuclear agreement in violation of the landmark deal, describing the move as a 'withdrawal'

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In these exclusive interviews, we speak to Russell Simmons (Co-Founder of Def Jam, Chairman & CEO of Rush Communications - described by USA Today as one of the "Top 25 Most Influential People of the Past 25 Years") and Tricia Rose (Professor of Africana Studies and Director, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University). We discuss the story of hip-hop, its growth into a global phenomenon and how hip-hop reflects the extreme social realities of urban culture globally.

Hip-hop has been described as one of the most far-reaching cultural movements of the past three decades. A movement that began ( as Jeff Chang describes in his 2007 essay for Foreign Policy) on the " ...embattled streets of the Bronx" where " ...race riots, urban renewal, arson and government neglect wiped out educational and social service programmes, eviscerated housing stock, accelerated white flight and job loss, and created and international symbol of urban despair." " To the uninitiated..." he continued, " ...hip-hop hardly looks or sounds like a brave, new art form. It's more like a sonic jackhammer, a visual eyesore, and a conceptual nuisance. Critics often call hip-hop materialistic, misogynistic, homophobic, racist, vulgar and violent. It's a hot mess, the roar of total chaos. "

" A good deal of hip hop speaks and has always spoken openly and in depth about aspects of black urban poverty, particularly the grip that street culture has on many young people..." writes Tricia Rose in her seminal book 'The Hip Hop Wars', " ...Hip-hop gives a ground-level view (though not the only view, or a comprehensive view) of what it might mean to live under what are nearly warlike conditions in communities that face a myriad of daunting circumstances. Sometimes, rappers' lyrics really do offer gripping tales of loss, sorrow, exploitation, rage, confinement, hopelessness, and despair about conditions that are denied in the larger society. It is important to admit that these powerful stories far too often uncritically reflect attitudes and beliefs that many would consider destructive to achieving a socially just environment. But it is also true that society at large only sporadically pays attention to the extraordinarily despair-producing conditions in which young black poor youth attempt to survive. "

It's important to remember that hip-hop is not just about music. It's a unique era of culture where fashion, art, music and language became deeply pitted with metaphors that became consistent, ubiquitous and global. Hip-hop is unplanned- but a reflection of shared truths in communities ranging from the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the council estates of England, ghettos of New York, slums of Ghana and the towers of Shanghai. This is a mode of expression, a rebellion, communicated through the hijacking and transformation of elements of cultures- creating something new, owned by the generation from who it was manifest.

So what has accounted for hip-hop's growth from the streets of the Bronx to becoming a multi-billion dollar global phenomenon?

In these exclusive interviews, we speak to Russell Simmons (Co-Founder of Def Jam, Chairman & CEO of Rush Communications - described by USA Today as one of the "Top 25 Most Influential People of the Past 25 Years") and Tricia Rose (Professor of Africana Studies and Director, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University). We discuss the story of hip-hop, its growth into a global phenomenon and how hip-hop reflects the extreme social realities of urban culture globally.
View Interviewee Biography Q: Why has hip-hop grown to become such a significant part of culture?
[Russell Simmons] Honesty! It has a greater share of integrity than most pop phenomenon- and consistently. They coined an expression early, that people had this attitude of " ...keeping it real...". People always said they do art, but they don't do art for money... what was real was that they wanted to get ahead- so their poetry reflected what was in their hearts. When they went to work, it wasn't that they were selling out but rather the intention of human beings to chase things... material stuff... come out of the ghetto... achieve... they wanted their own reflection in pop culture... they didn't want any of this YMCA, Patrick Juvet 's - I Love America or any of these disco records that were out.... they didn't want to listen to that on black radio, it was insulting.... so they made their own. That's what Jazz, Blues and Rock and Roll were- they created something and by the time it became boring, they had created something else- that's how American pop-phenomenon evolve.

The difference between rap, jazz, blues, rock & roll, pop, r&b and all that is that the hip-hop artists held on to it.... MTV didn't play any people of colour until hip-hop came along. They had Michael Jackson then they had Run D.M.C. Run D.M.C's ' Rock Box ' and these records were honest and real reflections of what came from these people's communities- from a poetry and music standpoint. It was also what they were doing to rebel against the pop-culture stuff that was being pushed at them from radio- it was new expression.

[Tricia Rose] It's been constantly shocking how resilient and expansive Hip Hop is. Before I wrote my first book on the topic, I remember my advisor saying that it was suicide for me to write on this topic because when I finish the dissertation, it [ the genre] won't exist any more. To imagine a world without Hip Hop now, is hard to do!

Hip Hop is incredibly accessible. If you have any performing, rhyming or poetic talent - you can tell your life story, your community story, through rapping, background music and accessible means. This makes it globally significant- people can put their own regional and global spin! In the USA we have the ' dirty south,' ' west coast hip hop,' ' east coast hip-hop ' and more. This allows people to express their individuality, whilst being part of a collective.

The timing of Hip Hop's emergence also gave it an edge over other genres. It's extremely inexpensive to produce in its raw form, it was extremely easy to produce using technologies that were relatively easily available and you didn't need a studio orchestra or band to worry about. Being able to make music in your living room with a 4 track, 8 track or even tape!? New technologies expanded access and participation in unprecedented ways.

Finally, black culture has always had an outsized impact on the world! The exact reason is an open question, but it's a combination of America's powers in the world to disseminate what it has, and also a measure of the richness and dynamic of the traditions of African American music, it has an infectious energy that engages participants.
Q: What has been the impact of Hip Hop on black culture in the USA?
[Tricia Rose] Hip Hop has advanced, set-back and reflected black culture in the USA.

There have been years of Hip Hop that have been catalytic, expressing frustrations in a culture around racism for example, in the late 1980's... much of what we hear about regarding police brutality, stop and frisk practices and the targeting of black youth were at the core of highly visible hip hop (e.g., Public Enemy) 25 years ago.

But Hip Hop has also consolidated rather than challenged injustices. Hip Hop is tremendously misogynistic- more so than any other black-music genre I've listened to. I can't imagine any other genre of music that I can randomly turn-on and hear the level of misogyny that Hip Hop consistently contains. We can't run from that, or blame anyone else for it. It's a serious issue.

And, Hip Hop has grown comfortable pandering to American consumerism and hyper-violence. This isn't about only expression of frustration or aspiration, but rather hip hop being amenable to doing the work of consumer capitalism.
Q: Is hip-hop a medium for social change?
[Russell Simmons] It's a reflection of reality so an artist may say, " f**k the police..." and the police will have to prick their ears up and everyone will start talking about brutality... Any subject that becomes a popular song becomes a discussion in the community. Those subjects come from the community and are recycled back into to the community- in other words, a commercial rap record is usually a reflection of what's going on in the community. People may say, " ...oh it's homophobic..." but guess what, we live in a homophobic society... people may say, " ...oh it's racist...." but guess what, it's a lot less racist than their parents.... people may say, " ...oh it's sexist... ", but while you may think the language sounds sexist- their parents and preachers are doing sh** they can't imagine.... treating women in ways they shouldn't be allowed to get away with. They talk about being sexist and macho, but they're not nearly as macho as the preacher that's a little bit older than them. The previous generation is much more sexist, homophobic and racist- and certainly our government and streets are more gangster than the poets who describe them. When you have a city like Chicago where 53 kids get shot in a weekend you wonder why a rapper would get in a fight, talk about fighting or violence. That's a reflection of what communities are doing, it's our sad reality that's in our face.

Rappers, as poets, have always been good reflection of the heart of community. They take ideas out of the community and spread them to the rest of the world. Sometimes it's stuff that's positive in the community that gets spread, and sometimes it's stuff that's in the community that's not so positive- but so what? they don't owe anybody anything! They say they poison the affluent happy people that buy into their music... f***k them!

I just looked at Jinx [ Jinx da Juvy], he's been shot so many times he's like Swiss cheese!. I adopted this kid when he was 15, he's a Def Jam artist... and he got shot at 15 for selling drugs in the wrong community, they took him in a hallway and shot him in his leg. He told me just now his cousin was paralysed from a bullet this weekend. Jinx is 25 now, his cousin is 15. Jinx has been to jail a few times, but he graduated high school and went to college. I look at him now and his friend are all gone, and he's only 25. I've saved one kid so far. He came in here with a producer just now with a new record- he makes records all day, it's what he's focussed on. I try and get him to make records that are more positive- but he has to see the world as more positive for that to happen. Obviously if he was my son raised and lived in my house it would be different from someone who comes visit me now and then. With some kids they come visit, they may read "", they may change their attitude. Jinx is doing the best he can, he is like so many kids from his community in Brooklyn - nobody in his peers even finished high-school, and he's just about to finish college- so for the few sessions and a little bit of money I spent over the years- I think it's good that he's still alive.

We talk about what poisons the community? well.. sending kids away for drugs who are poisoned by disease, teaching them to be criminals, sending them to jail, and then bringing jail culture into communities. All those kids went to jail for non-violent crimes and became criminals, became violent, became cycle offenders. Rap- when it's bad- is just a reflection of that truth, and is our fault as much as anyone's.

I look at the poets and I'm inspired by their still being here- like Jinx who's still making records and trying to survive. Was it not for music, he wouldn't be.

[Tricia Rose] At different times, Hip Hop has played varying roles in society. If you look at the period from 1986- 1991/92, this is considered the golden-era of Hip Hop... it was very political significant, and the dominant artists, such as Public Enemy were very political. The content was very left-wing, that is to say radical from the perspective of political expression.

You can have liberal politics, but during this era, it was a radical politics. Just have a look at who was being sampled, there was much more Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King... But you also had Nation of Islam and Black Nationalism being commercially successful and prominent in the art.

The commercial success of Hip Hop however came at a price, you started to see the emergence of more gangster narratives and more discussion of the business of being a gangster... the profitability and personal power of being a gangster, drug-dealer of pimp. It wasn't about having new-cars, jewellery, being able to throw $100 bills at strippers and things like that, it was about having the ability to do whatever you wanted especially if it fit the stereotypical image of black men as hyper violent and hyper sexist.... Many artists talked about having all the money, power and women they wanted, and talked about women as nearly entirely sexual objects. ... None of this was in the service of social-change, but rather- was survival capitalism.

In the early-days, Women started to challenge politics, but in commercial Hip Hop, around the late 1990s, women became largely invisible... they're still very-limited in numbers.

Hip Hop has declined in radical political impact, and hasn't been the voice at the centre of political change for some time. You have people like Kendrick Lamar showing up now who are speaking to a new generation of young people... His song, ' Alright ' has become used by many protesting against police brutality for example- it has become a movement anthem.
Q: What are your views on how various groups such as women are portrayed in hip-hop?
[Russell Simmons] I don't think it's any worse than what the preachers do- they just talkin' I'm using preachers as they're just as sexist as the rest of the community members and our society in general. President Obama passed an act that stated that women should get paid what men get paid- but how many of those women are in a position to get paid what men get paid for those roles? It's not right. Rappers aren't any worse! they're managed by women! It's the next generation who are coming through that matter.... and you know what? they're less sexist.
Q: How does Hip Hop address gender and sexuality?
[Tricia Rose] In the last 5-6 years, there's been a much greater embrace of ' non-normative ' sexualities. That has been a pretty-big change. The reduction of homophobia in Hip Hop has been significantly more successful than the reduction of sexism, which is an anchor to male social-identity of rhymes. It is- unfortunately- very important to position women as sex-objects that enhance the value of the male rapper. It's just constant, it doesn't seem to end. The more commercially main-stream you go, the more you see it. You have people underground, on the margins, and very smart MC's who try to counter-this in different ways- people like Lupe Fiasco and sometimes Drake.

Women are limited to the role of hyper-sexual performance, or hyper-masculine ( in the case of Missy Elliott for example). For the most part, Women are trying to use the role of a hyper-sex-object as a role of power, rather than allowing themselves to be exploited. Take Nikki Manaj, for example, the most popular and visible female MC in the world. Her sex doll image is critical to her success. Would she be as popular/successful if she didn't rely on this image as the context for her music? I say no.

Women in Hip Hop perpetuate this, they won't have a career otherwise. If someone tells you to get your hand in the window, and it's only a quarter-inch opening, you're not going to stick anything in that window that won't nail it! You will stick the thing in it that everyone wants to see! Even with this pandering, women have been mainly locked out of commercial hip hop. There are barely a handful of signed women MCs today as compared to dozens and dozens 15-20 years ago.

People have tried to push back against sexism in hip hop, but it seems to always snap-back; sexism is so resilient (and profitable!). On the upside, there has been more emotional richness in Hip Hop lately, more sexual-expansion and more vulnerability expressed by male rappers. It's possible a substantial -dare I say-more permanent change could be around the corner.

Women are complicit in the misogyny of Hip Hop just as men are complicit in the hyper-criminalisation of their peers. How many more rhymes about guns, drugs and pussy can we hear?!
Q: How does hip-hop relate to other art forms like dance, theatre, graffiti and so on?
[Russell Simmons] Everything is related. The difference between hip-hop and rock&roll, blues, jazz and so on is that although they communicated culture- they didn't have all the vehicles of expression that hip-hop has had to communicate greater insight into the culture surrounding the music. Not only do we have tonnes more visual, but we have tonnes more subject matter. Rappers have to rap, it's poetry- it's much deeper than another love song. It's a gut reaction. The talent is not always the voice, it's what's inside the heart- the poetry. Their experience becomes their art- it's not something they learned in church when they got dressed up... it's different. They really have an input on what car we drive, what outfit we wear, what movies we see, what's cool in an environment. They're spreading through poetry and encapsulating the time in which we live- spitting it back out again. Later on we can look back and say, " ...look at what they were doing back then!".. .but right now we can decide, "...look what the cool people are doing, we want to do it too! ".

Jay-Z said, " ...catch me in the kitchen like a Simmons cookin' pastry..." That sounds like cooking crack- but the double-entendre was that Angela and Vanessa sold $40 million more sneakers. Think about that, they sold $40 million more sneakers just because Jay-Z said, "...catch me in the kitchen like a Simmons cookin' pastry..." - I hope that the crack dealer' didn't do better too! ... that's what he meant by ' cookin' pastry '.... that's the double-edged sword. Every song that bears a product, that bears an idea, that bears a cultural link- furthers that link, inspires that idea.... that's the way reality is... it's an honest depiction.
Q: How important is language in hip-hop?
[Russell Simmons] Hip-hop has its own soul, its own language. Every generation has its own language. It's given America phrases like you know " cool, slick " and all that. Just as expressions from jazz, blues and rock&roll became mainstream- the hip-hop expressions became very big.

Taking the power out of the " N-word" for example... what an interesting debate! My father was a Professor of Black History.... eventually... When I grew up I thought the " N-word" was my name! " N***** go to church!", " N***** go to school! "... that's how it was. Now, putting it out into the mainstream... it changes. It's not that word anymore but all the other words which are associated with it. If you don't have a direct blood line to slavery, you probably shouldn't use the word period- but all these ideas are now seeping out there, into the world.

Even as hip-hop has grown, this authenticity has stayed the same. A lot of it may sound commercial ( musically) but the poetry is what really matters. It's from the same heart, the same locked-out community.
Q: To what extent has hip-hop raised awareness of the situation in urban communities?
[Russell Simmons] If you look at the plight of people in underserved communities, the awareness is so much greater now. All those post hip-hop urban graduates are progressive voters, are concerned with the plight of those people, are connected... it's got a strong base.
Q: How has the Internet impacted hip-hop?
[Russell Simmons] The Internet has changed the game for a lot of people. You don't have to buy music anymore, meaning it's spread more! It's been a catalyst for greater consumption in music- with a little bit less profitability. Chris Lighty pointed out that Diggy sold 100,000 records, but he's made millions of dollars on the road already... and he aint' even had a hit! There's also a lot more collaboration, meaning more people can make music and get involved.
Q: What are the social and economic realities facing the hip-hop generation?
[Russell Simmons] The situation out there has never been this bad. The amount of people getting killed and shot in communities..... 53 people shot in one weekend in Chicago ... it's unbelievable. It's also not even being broadcast, it's under the radar.

It's not that the wider economy is excluding some people, but that the wider economy is becoming more like those people. The fact that higher education is such a difficult thing to pursue amongst our kids means that we will not be a competitive society soon.... that should be pretty obvious. Who knows what the outcome will be when only a small number of people have access not just to education but economic opportunity.

I was a participant in Occupy Wall St and heard many of the grievances- some more legitimate than others in content but all legitimate in terms of what they represent. The idea that corporations control our government is one key. I talk of the Prison Industrial Complex destroying the community but sh*t, who do you think pushed for the legislation that means that people go to jail for long periods of time for dealing small amounts of drugs? who do you think keeps them from examining the fact that 10 out of 11 kids that go to jail for drugs are people of colour? or that those people are 10 times more likely to go to jail for the same crime as their white counterparts? this kind of information is shocking.... and wouldn't be a factor in our legislation would it not be for the relatively small amounts of money, tens of millions of dollars, paid by the corporations to the legislators- which then flow back as billions of dollars in revenues to the prison industrial complex. Corporations are paying to strip ourselves of our own consumers! Even if we can legislate their way into selling them stuff that's hurtful, moving jobs overseas and paying less taxes... even if we do legislate our way into doing horrible, abusive things to our economy and general wellbeing- even the select few of the 1% will have nothing left to sell, because no-one will be buying...

There's no question that what we're seeing here is a contemporary form of racism... that's obvious. They don't really care about the colour of the people they exploit, but if they can get a group of people together and make them all subject to the same kind of exploitation- that's good too. It's racism in that it's systematic- but it's a horrible situation, and one where you see the potential for a transition to a more positive society becoming slimmer and slimmer.

I was talking today about voter disenfranchisement and how 40% of the Blacks who voted last time around won't be able to vote now. It's going to be disproportionate that people of colour- Latino and Black won't be able to vote because of these new laws. They don't realise that when they get to the polls on November 5th, they won't be able to vote... someone will say, " ...no, you don't have proper ID... go home... "
Q: What is the 'truth' in Hip Hop?
[Tricia Rose] The truth in Hip-Hop trades more on the idea of telling the truth than actually telling it. So, "keeping it real" is mainly a performance. The real question is more about why this or that version of "the truth" is portrayed and is believed.

Sure, there's plenty of truth to some portrayals of gang-violence, the sex trade and drug-use. But for goodness sake, there is so much missing from the vast range of life experiences in mainstream hip hop.

The question of truth is a cover-game for the particular set of stories that people consume about Black People, about Black Women and Black Men. The profitable stories tend to dovetail around the central-stereotypes about Black People that have existed for hundreds of years. That doesn't mean there isn't some truth, but to rely on the illusion that these are the truths is to rely on a lie being reinforced as THE truth.
Q: What would be the view of Hip Hop framed by a post civil rights era?
[Tricia Rose] There is a tremendous generational divide in terms of what people think about the public representations of black people. On one side you have those who support cultures of uplift, public-dignity, inspiration and so forth. But there's also another side which encourages people to be free, breaking all the barriers they want to, and to tell ugly vernacular truths however they want, no matter the context or consequences.

Until the late 1970s, there were so few images of Black People in the mainstream that there was a huge burden on black fame that their coveted limited space came with deep community responsibilities. Mainstream culture at the time was also much less vulgar, and so participation had stipulations; if you wanted to say something risky, you had to speak in metaphor. In the last 30 years the corporate mainstream has sought out new ways to get our attention and expanded ' what ' acceptable speech is, often manipulating actual movements' emphasis on telling uncomfortable truths to serve profit agendas. This has generated a political and generational gap.

Technically, Hip Hop emerged when I was a teenager. It wasn't on the radio when I was 12,13,14,15 - and it is important to note that even though I lived in the Bronx, most of the music I was listening to would not have forced me to confront the most disturbing aspects of adult street-culture as part of my pre-adolescence. There's something to be said for a conservative-sounding position that worries about what we feed our kids and each other in terms of images, ideas and experiences. Not simply to shut-down freedom of speech, but to explore how commercial capitalism is serving up black despair as entertainment and is destroying the cultural mechanisms for self-protection, self-esteem and political challenge under the guise of freedom of expression. Freedom requires access and availability; it's not just an abstract right. Given this, how much freedom do we have to easily consume a black love ethic in contemporary corporate black music?

A lot of young people want to defend Hip Hop culture because it is under attack even when it is indefensible. But, as I say in my 2008 book The Hip Hop Wars, "your enemies might be wrong, but that doesn't make you right".

The alienation of poetry and Hip Hop is telling, these art-forms should be first cousins, but their separation is symptomatic of the constant illiteracy about Black Culture, one we foster in our education system. If young people as a whole read Black poets, and understood they were important as part of our artistic and cultural tradition, they would be seen in-context of poetry, and not apart from it. African American culture is simply un-taught in the public school system for the most part. This means that many young black people don't understand the cultural legacy from which they come, and hence can't place Saul Williams ( for example) in a tradition of black poets such as Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar and others. Music classes rarely teach the black musical tradition, e.g., Jazz, Gospel, the Blues, R&B, Bebop and so on. This illiteracy cultivates a generational alienation and sometimes defensiveness about hip hop being entirely separate from everything that has come before.

The continuities between Hip Hop and black cultural traditions in the US, the Caribbean and the African Diaspora are so significant, but many are invisible to many people. I've had many students around the world ( mainly White), ask why I thought Hip Hop was part of Black Culture? That cultural illiteracy undermines the understanding of the genre and by extension black people as a whole.
Q: Can the arts change the world?
[Russell Simmons] We have no choice. The arts, artists and poets have to use their voices.

-----------------

" Generations are fictions..." writes Jeff Chang writes in his book 'Can't Stop Won't Stop', " The act of determining a group of people by placing a beginning and ending date around them is a way to impose a narrative. They are interesting and necessary fictions because they allow claims to be staked around idea. But generations are fictions nonetheless, often created simply to suit the needs of demographers, journalists, futurists and marketers. A generation is usually named and framed first by the one immediately preceding it. Up until recently, our generation has mainly been defined by the prefix "post-." We have been post-civil rights, postmodern, post-structural, postfeminist, post-Black, post-soul. We're the poster children of "post-" the leftovers in the dirty kitchen of yesterdays feast. "

This point is important. Our world has undergone a century of changes- economic, social, scientific, political and even cultural. These metamorphoses have brought many benefits but- for a significant proportion of our world's population- have created a much darker narrative where people have been left without identities, voiceless, excluded from an economy they find it increasingly more difficult to join. Hip-hop is ( amongst many things) a cultural manifestation of the challenges- the creation of a new identity, a new social structure- a new institution. Like any emergent art-form it jars at our senses and sensibilities, providing us a safe theatre in which to observe ourselves, and contemplate that which we face.

In his 2011 book ' Monoculture', F. S Michaels speaks of how, " ...the history of how we think and act is, for the most part, a history of dominant ideas. Some subject rises to the top of our awareness, grabs hold of our imagination for a generation or two, and shapes our entire lives." He elaborates, describing how, " The governing pattern that a culture obeys is a master story- one narrative in society that takes over the others, shrinking diversity and forming a monoculture.. Over time, the monoculture evolves into a nearly invisible foundation that structures and shapes our lives, giving us our sense of how the world works. It shapes our ideas about what's normal and what we can expect from life. It channels our lives in a certain direction, setting out strict boundaries that we unconsciously learn to live inside..."
Michaels notes how the nature of human experience means that it is wider and deeper than any single narrative. Over time, humans become hungry for something the monoculture isn't speaking to and isn't giving us- can't give us.

Hip-hop is the poetry of a generation, the lament of those who will inherit a world- which they will invariably have to change. As Margaret Mead once said, " ...never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. "

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In these exclusive interviews, we speak to Russell Simmons (Co-Founder of Def Jam, Chairman & CEO of Rush Communications - described by USA Today as one of the "Top 25 Most Influential People of the Past 25 Years") and Tricia Rose (Professor of Africana Studies and Director, Center for the Study of Race and Ethni...

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In announcing his decision, Trump is expected to allow new sanctions to go forward, crippling the touchstone agreement negotiated by his predecessor, according to a US official and a person familiar with the plan.

"The so-called Iran deal was supposed to protect the United States and our allies from the lunacy of an Iranian nuclear bomb, a weapon that will only endanger the survival of the Iranian regime," the President will say, according to a copy of his remarks obtained by CNN. "In fact, the deal allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium and over time reach the brink of a nuclear blackout."

The President will add: "Today, we have definitive proof that this Iranian promise was a lie."

The sanctions could take months to go into effect as the US government develops guidance for companies and banks. But reapplying the sanctions -- which were lifted in exchange for Iran's commitment to curb its nuclear program -- would cripple the 2015 accord that Trump has deemed "the single worst deal I've ever seen drawn by anybody."

The officials cautioned nothing is final until Trump makes his announcement from the Diplomatic Room of the White House at 2 p.m. ET and held out the possibility that he could change course.

Long a harsh critic of the nuclear accord, Trump has until now resisted taking steps to fully withdraw from the plan. His announcement Tuesday to allow sanctions to go ahead would amount to the firmest action yet toward fulfilling his campaign promise to rip it up.

It will further isolate Trump on the global stage, where he has angered even the staunchest US allies by reneging on US commitments to the Paris climate accord and pulling out of the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement.

The grace period until the sanctions are imposed may offer the deal's proponents an opening to negotiate. But the uncertainty is expected to forestall foreign investments in Iran that were made possible by the pact.

Trump was keeping his decision closely held on Tuesday morning. Marc Short, the President's legislative director, said lawmakers would be notified later Tuesday afternoon.

Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Capitol Hill midday to inform members of Congress of Trump's decision to withdraw, people familiar with the matter said.

Trump, meanwhile, spoke early in the day with Chinese President Xi Jinping and phoned French President Emmanuel Macron mid-morning.

A French source familiar with the call between Trump and Macron described the conversation as "very, very disappointing."

Macron was one of several European leaders who had lobbied Trump to remain in the deal, arguing it remains the best way to curtail Iran's nuclear ambitions. Both Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel flew to Washington to make their appeals in person.

Trump told them the deal failed to address Iran's ballistic missile program or its support of terror in the Middle East. They appeared receptive and began negotiations on a separate deal that would address his concerns. But European diplomats expressed only pessimism that their efforts would be successful.

"It's pretty obvious to me that unless something changes in the next few days, I believe the President will not waive the sanctions," one European diplomat told reporters on Monday.

Trump's final decision to withdraw from the deal was made over the weekend, according to a person familiar with the discussions, though it was long considered a foregone conclusion inside the White House.

National security adviser John Bolton, an Iran hawk who nonetheless told people he was committed to providing all options to Trump, offered a variety of paths, including reimposing all sanctions, applying new sanctions, or allowing for more time to negotiate with the Europeans.

Trump determined that more time would not bridge disagreements, most pointedly his demand that Iran's nuclear program be curbed past the current deal's sunset in 2030.

In his talks with Macron and Merkel, Trump left little doubt that he was planning to withdraw, according to Western diplomats. But he insisted he hadn't made a final decision and kept his precise plans guarded.

Some White House officials were caught off guard when Trump announced on Twitter Monday that he was planning to make the announcement. Most aides expected him to wait until closer to Saturday, when the deadline for issuing a sanctions waiver landed.

One US official suggested the timing was moved up so as not to impede next week's opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem, another move that could cause jitters in the Middle East.

The sanctions Trump is expected to allow to move forward target Iran's oil exports. The status of additional actions remained unclear, though some officials suggested Trump would leave additional sanctions for a later date.

A senior administration official said most of the work done behind the scenes in the West Wing leading up to the announcement was to prepare for a withdrawal, including developing communications strategies. But the official offered the same caution as others: no decision is considered final until Trump makes his announcement.

The decision would strike a blow to the nuclear deal, though other signatories to the plan, including Germany, France and the UK, have said they will maintain their commitments.

But new US sanctions would undoubtedly cause companies to reconsider investments in Iran and European firms may have no choice but to scale back or risk running afoul of US rules.

The grace period could allow for further negotiations between US allies on a side agreement that addresses Trump's concerns about the missile program and Tehran's support for terror groups. But even if a deal is struck, it's not clear how they would convince Iran to sign on, or whether Russia and China -- two other partners to the deal -- would agree.

CNN's Jim Acosta, Sarah Westwood and Phil Mattingly contributed to this report.

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expected to allow sanctions - cnnpolitics

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Trump plans to quit Iran deal, expected to allow sanctions

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President Donald Trump plans to announce Tuesday he is quitting the Iran nuclear deal, pitting him against the United States' closest allies and leaving the future of Tehran's nuclear ambitions in question, multiple US officials and others familiar with the matter said.

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A new book warns that even with Roe v. Wade intact, the procedure is still effectively banned in some places.

In 2013, 22-year old Beatriz Garcia found herself in the middle of the global abortion debate, a symbol and a lightning rod for what happens when a woman who lives in a country with a total abortion ban faces a life-threatening pregnancy. Beatriz was from El Salvador, which has one of the harshest and most notorious abortion bans in the world. She suffered from lupus nephritis, an autoimmune disease where the body's immune system targets its own body tissues, and her first pregnancy almost killed her. Doctors warned Beatriz of the danger of having another baby, but when her son was eighteen months old, she found out she was pregnant again. Making matters worse, the fetus was anencephalic, meaning it did not have a brain. If it did not die in utero, it would die shortly after birth. Faced with the prospect of dying and leaving an infant son behind for a fetus with no chance of survival, Beatriz and her doctors agreed that the safest course of action was what they called an "interruption," a euphemism for abortion. However, the hospital's lawyer said that interrupting the pregnancy would violate Salvadorian law. An international firestorm ensued.

Beacon Press, 216 pp., $27.95

Michelle Oberman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, opens her new book Her Body, Our Laws: On the Front Lines of the Abortion War, From El Salvador to Oklahoma, with Beatriz's story. The case gives grounding to this ambitious book, which looks at the effects of abortion restrictions in Latin America and the United States. Oberman has spent her career studying the murky ethical waters of pregnancy and motherhood. She's done research about pregnant women who abuse drugs and written two books about mothers who have killed their children. Her mission with this book is not to argue whether or not abortion should be legal, but to interrogate the impact of laws that restrict it.

This might seem like a surprising quest for a liberal, Jewish, pro-choice law professor from California-as Oberman repeatedly notes-but she'd seen how "abortion's legal status didn't make much of a difference" for many of the women she studied in El Salvador and rural parts of the U.S.- women who are poor, ill, and marginalized. To them, the polarized, zealous rhetoric around "choice" and "life" was mostly irrelevant. Just because abortion is legal doesn't mean it's accessible, and just because it's illegal doesn't mean it's inaccessible. Which begs the question: Does it matter if abortion is legal?

When a local women's group found out about Beatriz's case, they secured her a team of lawyers who petitioned the Salvadorian Supreme Court for permission to terminate the pregnancy. Local newspapers published editorials, government agencies threw in their two cents, and international organizations, including the UN and Amnesty International, took notice. Everyone had an opinion. Beatriz and her son went into hiding to avoid the TV cameras staked outside their home.

"For those who opposed the abortion law, her case was the utmost example of the law's absurdity, and a perfect case with which to challenge the ban," Oberman says. "For those who supported the ban, Beatriz's case tested the moral and legal integrity of their position that life begins at conception."

By the time the government reached a decision, fifty-five days after her initial petition, Beatriz was almost seven-months pregnant. The medical panel, which did not include a high-risk obstetrician, determined that Beatriz was not quite close enough to death for an abortion to be justified. The perverse catch was that the longer doctors waited to perform a cesarean, the more complex and risky the procedure would be and the greater her chance of permanent organ damage. At twenty-seven weeks, Beatriz started having contractions and doctors delivered the baby, which died five hours later.

Beatriz's story exemplifies the cruelty of total abortion bans. She endured months of profound psychological and physical trauma while the media debated her most intimate needs and government gambled with her life-she was lucky that she even survived. What was gained by any of this? The purpose of El Salvador's abortion ban is to enshrine a religious belief into law, consequences be damned. But laws that ignore consequences in favor of making a statement represent, as Oberman puts it, "a fanatic's position."

Just because abortion is legal doesn't mean it's accessible, and just because it's illegal doesn't mean it's inaccessible.

One hoped-for outcome of legal abortion bans is that they reduce the number of abortions. But no one actually thinks that abortion bans get rid of abortion-or if they do, they are ignoring mountains of evidence to the contrary. As Oberman points out, abortions still happen regardless of legality, and in fact, abortion rates in countries with the most restrictive abortion laws far exceed countries with more liberal laws. In El Salvador, there are tens of thousands of illegal abortions every year.

If abortions are crimes, then who is the criminal and how are they caught? Abortion pills have made these questions trickier. A botched surgical abortion is easy to spot; Coat hangers and cassava sticks perforate uteruses. However, a medical abortion looks a lot like a miscarriage, and the pills (with varying degrees of efficacy and safety) are accessible on the internet. In some countries that ban abortion, women can simply walk into a pharmacy and buy Misoprostol, an abortifacient drug that is also used to treat ulcers. On the other hand, while pills have made clandestine abortions safer, easier, and more difficult to detect, they can still have side effects. Complications from illegal abortions are the leading cause of death for young women in Latin America.

If women are self-inducing abortions with pills, then doctors aren't the criminals, as most abortion bans are designed to make them. The criminals are the women. Moreover, the police need help from doctors to catch them. This puts doctors in a compromising position, with doctor-patient confidentiality on one side and the law on the other. It also asks them to distinguish between an abortion and a miscarriage, and evidence is hard to come by, especially in the first-trimester. Between 2001 and 2011, El Salvador investigated one hundred and twenty-nine women for abortion-related crimes, mostly "suspicious" miscarriages. Forty-nine women were arrested, and thirteen were convicted and sent to prison. That's thirteen too many. Oberman discovers that it was doctors working in Salvadoran public hospitals who turned women into the police, while private doctors, who served wealthier women, did not report their clients. The result is that abortion is only functionally illegal for the patients who cannot pay for privacy.

In the second half of the book, Oberman turns her lens on Oklahoma, where abortion is legal, but people wish it wasn't. Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established abortion as a constitutional right in the U.S., Oklahoma, like other states, has dedicated fathomless amounts of time, money, and energy to establish as many limits to that right as possible. Oberman feels like a fish-out-of-water there, writing about the oddness of seeing Christian references in "cliched billboards and bumper stickers" and visiting a shooting sports store filled with an "astonishing array" of taxidermy.

"Images of fetuses became part of the landscape, like American flags or the crimson and cream of the University of Oklahoma Sooners," Oberman says. "The pro-life messages were so ubiquitous that they faded into the background. But it's not a tranquil background." Oberman listens to State Representative Mike Reynolds tell her about his crusade to save "unborn children," and make factually inaccurate claims about women's bodies. When Oberman asks him about the purpose of abortion law, he responds that it's to send a moral message about the wrongness of abortion. The details-like whether there should be exceptions for rape, incest, maternal life-and how the law would be enforced, were less important to him.

After getting an earful from politicians, Oberman visits Birth Choice, a crisis pregnancy center that operates a shelter for pregnant women and offers mental health counseling, drug abuse treatment, and vocational training to its residents on the condition that they carry their pregnancies to term. While the founders of Birth Choice are opposed to abortion, they claim their mission is to support vulnerable, pregnant women, rather than shame them. However, abortion laws aren't the only policies that impact whether or not a woman decides to keep a pregnancy: so do paid family leave laws, affordable medical care, educational access, living wages, and food security. And still, there are plenty of women who want to end pregnancies simply because they don't want to have a baby, and no amount of maternity leave, vocational training, or free diapers can change that. And that's their right.

Her Body, Our Laws emphasizes that the issue of abortion legality is not black and white: Other factors come into play in determining how abortions happen and who is able to get them. "Of the many things dividing the United States, none seems more salient than the divide between pro-life and pro-choice forces. At the heart of the dispute is the assumption that, if Roe is reversed and abortion becomes illegal, things will change. We talk about banning abortion as if we all understand how things will change if abortion becomes a crime." We don't.

We talk about banning abortion as if we know how things will change if abortion becomes a crime. We don't.

If Roe falls- which it well may-it will be up to the states whether abortion is legal. Women in states with bans will have to travel to access abortion care, which means that it will primarily be available to women of wealth and privilege. Furthermore, it stands to reason that women will be thrown in jail for abortion-related crimes, because that's already happening. Hundreds of women in the U.S.-people like Bei Bei Shuai, Purvi Patel, Anna Yocca, and Jennifer Whalen, to name a few-have been charged with crimes relating to pregnancy or abortion over the past few years.

Abortion bans are about moral truth for those who oppose abortion. For people who support legal abortion, legalization reflects the moral truth that women are people, and that their rights aren't sublimated just because a sperm happened to fertilize an egg. The flip side of understanding the impact of abortion bans is to understand the impact of legalized abortion, which is largely responsible for the social gains American women have made over the past four decades. Women deserve physical safety, and freedom from the fear of having their health arbitrarily imperiled by the state or being jailed for having a miscarriage. But they also deserve more than mere survival: Women deserve education, the opportunity to work, and legal and social recognition of their personhood. None of this is possible without legal abortion. It's not only the negative consequences of abortion bans that matter; the positive impact of abortion access matters, too. But only one side of the debate considers those consequences worthy of discussion.

Read More

Politics, Books, Abortion, Abortion Rights, abortion restrictions, Abortion Ban, El Salvador, Oklahoma, miscarriage, Reproductive Rights, Reproductive Health

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A new book warns that even with Roe v. Wade intact, the procedure is still effectively banned in some places. In 2013, 22-year old Beatriz Garcia found herself in the middle of the global abortion debate, a symbol and a lightning rod for what happens when a woman who lives in a country with a total abortion ban faces a life-threatening pregnancy.

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The debate over whether abortion should be a legal option has long divided people around the world. Split into two groups, pro-choice and pro-life, the two sides frequently clash in protests.

Proponents of legal abortion believe abortion is a safe medical procedure that protects lives, while abortion bans endanger pregnant people not seeking abortions, and deny bodily autonomy, creating wide-ranging repercussions.

Opponents of legal abortion believe abortion is murder because life begins at conception, that abortion creates a culture in which life is disposable, and that increased access to birth control, health insurance, and sexual education would make abortion unnecessary. Read more background...

Pro & Con Arguments

Pro 1

Abortion is a safe medical procedure that protects lives.

The death rate for legal abortions is 0.7 deaths for every 100,000 abortions. By contrast, there are one to two deaths per 100,000 plastic surgery procedures, three deaths for every 100,000 colonoscopies, and three to six deaths per 100,000 tonsillectomies. Childbirth has nine deaths per 100,000 deliveries.

Pregnancy-related maternal deaths could increase 20% in US states with abortion bans. Amanda Stevenson, Sociology Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, explained, "People with resources are more likely to make it out of state or find out about medication abortions. People who can't are more likely to have health issues, to live in poverty and have less access to resources." People of color are especially likely to be in the latter category and, thus, negatively impacted by abortion bans.

The predicted 20% maternal death rate does not include those who will die from "back alley" or illegal abortions because legal options were not available.

Globally 45% of abortions are unsafe, 97% of which take place in developing countries. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), "Evidence shows that restricting access to abortions does not reduce the number of abortions; however, it does affect whether the abortions that women and girls attain are safe and dignified. The proportion of unsafe abortions are significantly higher in countries with highly restrictive abortion laws than in countries with less restrictive laws."
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Pro 2

Abortion bans endanger healthcare for those not seeking abortions.

Medical treatment for nonviable pregnancies is often exactly the same as an abortion.

Ectopic pregnancies occur when a fertilized egg implants somewhere other than the uterine cavity. About one in 50 pregnancies are ectopic, and they are nonviable. Bleeding from ectopic pregnancies caused 10% of all pregnancy-related deaths, and ectopic pregnancies were the leading cause of maternal death in the first trimester.

One out of every ten pregnancies ends in miscarriage. The drugs used for medication abortions are the only treatment recommended for early miscarriages. For later or complicated miscarriages, the same surgical procedure used for abortions is recommended.

While some abortion bans include specific exceptions for nonviable pregnancies and miscarriages, other bans are too vague to be practicable. Healthcare providers may refuse to perform a procedure that could be interpreted as an "on-demand" abortion for fear of liability or prosecution.

Further, bans are a slippery slope to contraceptive and other healthcare restrictions. For example, some already wrongly view Plan B (the morning after pill) as an abortifacient and are thinking of including it in abortion bans.
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Pro 3

Abortion bans deny bodily autonomy, creating wide-ranging repercussions.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated, "eliminating the rights of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades.... In many cases, abortions are of teenage women, particularly low-income and often Black, who aren't in a position to be able to care for children, have unexpected pregnancies, and it deprives them of the ability often to continue their education to later participate in the workforce."

After being denied an abortion, household poverty increased and lasted four or more years, resulting in an inability to cover basic expenses including food, housing and transportation. A denied abortion was associated with a lowered credit score, increased debt, and an increase in negative public records including evictions and bankruptcies. The households were also more reliant on government assistance. Transgender and nonbinary people denied abortions may face even worse outcomes.

And the consequences can be much more dire. "If a woman of childbearing age dies, it has enormous economic consequences.... It's someone who society has invested in and who has many productive economic years ahead of them," according to David Slusky, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Kansas. Often, death also removes a wage-earner and caregiver from the household.

60% of women seeking abortions already had other children. Being denied an abortion worsened the well-being of their older children, including not meeting childhood development markers.

The Turnaway Study concluded, "Abortion does not harm women," and "Women who receive a wanted abortion are more financially stable, set more ambitious goals, raise children under more stable conditions, and are more likely to have a wanted child later."
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Con 1

Life begins at conception, making abortion murder.

Conception is the moment a sperm cell fertilizes an egg cell, which begins the process of cell division that creates a human.

Tara Sander Lee, Senior Fellow and Director of Life Sciences at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, stated, "life begins from the moment of conception when the sperm fertilizes the egg, because there is the creation of a new, totally distinct, integrated organism or a human being, which is going to be biologically distinct from all other life forms on this planet." The first cell is biologically distinct because it has its own DNA that is different from either biological parent and all other humans.

Ending a life is murder legally and ethically, even a life that is only a few growing cells at the time of death.

Pope Francis explained, "Abortion is murder. Those who carry out abortions kill.... At the third week after conception, often even before the mother is aware (of being pregnant), all the organs are already (starting to develop). It is a human life. Period. And this human life has to be respected. It is very clear.... Scientifically, it is a human life."

That people may face difficulties without abortion as an option does not excuse or justify murder. A reader of The Atlantic, who gave only the initial K., clarified the moral dilemma: "I wish that I could be pro-choice because the awful circumstances so many women face-that I can't even imagine facing-seem so much more real to me than the rights of a fetus who doesn't even always look human. But abortion is the intentional killing of a human being and we look back with horror at anyone in history who decided a group of people did not actually count as people. We cannot solve the problem of injustice against women with more injustice. We need solutions that support women without killing fetuses."
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Con 2

Legal abortion promotes a culture in which life is disposable.

Echoing a 2014 remark by Pope Francis that connected abortion to " throwaway culture," Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, stated, "abortion represents a failure to recognize the sanctity of human life and promotes a culture in which human life in its most vulnerable moment is perceived as disposable. Such a proposal targets poor women as needing an expedient solution to a complex problem."

Tobin previously declared legal abortion a "brutalization of the American heart" on par with the "dehumanization of the undocumented" immigrants.

Alveda King, former Georgia state representative and niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., also connected abortion to other societal ills: "Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness. We create the deceptions that the other person is less important, less worthy, less human. We are all fully human. When we face this truth, there is no justification for treating those who look different than us as lesser beings. If we simply treat other people the way we'd like to be treated, racism, abortion, and other forms of inhumanity will be things of the past."

As King notes, some fetuses are treated as less than human. This ideology combined with legal abortion could create a slippery slope to designer babies, gender selection, termination of disabled but healthy fetuses, and other trait-selection-based abortions. The slippery slope can then extend to the mentally disabled and elderly in general.

"[A]bortion is an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation," according to US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. "Technological advances have only heightened the eugenic potential for abortion, as abortion can now be used to eliminate children with unwanted characteristics, such as a particular sex or disability."
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Con 3

Increased access to birth control, health insurance, and sexual education would make abortion unnecessary.

Experts largely contribute the decline in abortions in the United States and elsewhere to the improved safety and availability of LARC (long-acting reversible contraception) including IUDs and contraceptive implants that can last up to 10 years.

Access to health insurance to pay for contraceptives also contributed to a drop in abortions. With the passage of Obamacare (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), more people were insured with access to free or low-cost contraceptives and reproductive care.

Linda Rosenstock, Public Health Professor of Health Policy and Management at UCLA, summarized the simplicity of the connection: "In the United States each year, about half of pregnancies are unintended and about 40% of those lead to abortion. Access to birth control leads to fewer abortions."

Further, teens are having sex later in life than their parents. 38.4% of American high schoolers reported they have had sex (down from 54% in 1991) and only 27.4% reported they were currently sexually active (37.5% in 1991).

Because teen birth control use has not increased significantly, experts attribute the decline in part to better sex education. A 2021 study found that students who received comprehensive sexual education initiated sex later than students who did not participate in sex ed. The later teens have sex, the less chance there is for them to become pregnant unintentionally, which leads to fewer abortions.
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Did You Know?

1. Throughout much of Western history, abortion was not considered a criminal act as long as it was performed before "quickening" (the first detectable movement of the fetus, which can occur between 13-25 weeks of pregnancy).

2. In 1821, Connecticut became the first US state to criminalize abortion.

3. The death rate for legal abortions is 0.7 deaths for every 100,000 abortions. By contrast, there are one to two deaths per 100,000 plastic surgery procedures, three deaths for every 100,000 colonoscopies, and three to six deaths per 100,000 tonsillectomies. Childbirth has nine deaths per 100,000 deliveries.

4. Abortion rates in the United States have fallen at what the CDC called a "slow yet steady pace" since a peak in 1981. That year there were 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44. The rate fell to 11.4 abortions per 1,000 women in 2019.

5. 60% of women seeking abortions already had other children.

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Abortion - Top Arguments For and Against - ProCon.org

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The Pro Choice side says women should have control of their bodies. Pro Lifers say abortion is murder. Explore both sides of the debate.

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Conflating the two hurts those who need help most

After Columbine High School, Sandy Hook Elementary, or the recent mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, many people question the link between mental health and gun violence. The connection is not what these reports would have you think.

Research shows that mental illness is deceptively common, while violence by people who are mentally ill is exceedingly rare.

One in five Americans experience mental illness in a given year. People with mental illness are actually dramatically less likely to inflict gun violence than those considered mentally healthy. Instead, they are more likely to be victims. People with severe mental illness are eleven times more likely to be victims of violence than the general population. This risk is particularly high when it comes to interactions with police. One study found that at least half of the people shot and killed by police each year have mental health issues.

Drawing associations between mental health and gun violence, particularly in the case of mass shootings, is commonplace after these events. Seeking answers in the wake of tragedy, many are comforted by the idea that "only a mad man" could carry out such an act. Gun rights advocates focus on this stereotype to stymie the passage of effective methods of preventing gun violence. Using demonstrably false information, the National Rifle Association has long blamed violence on " insane killers," and advocated for a national registry of the mentally ill. As a result, the disabled community has long been battling policies that ignore evidence and instead stem from long-held fears.

In truth, the biggest mental health issue associated with gun violence is suicide. Suicides with guns are both the most common method of suicide and comprise the majority of all gun-related deaths. Most people with serious mental illness are never violent, but are at dramatically higher risk of suicide.
Far more than mental illness, gun violence is linked with a history of intimate partner violence, while white supremacist beliefs are associated with higher rates of gun ownership.
The shooter's race also factors into allegations of mental illness. The picture of a lone gunman with a mental illness is a recent development following the rise of mass shootings - shootings perpetrated predominantly by white men. Prior to this development, in the 1960s and 1970 s, the media linked mental illness and violence to black political activists, laying the blame at the feet of "black culture." Now, as we experience the rise of spree killings - at the hands of white men - the popular diagnosis has changed to suggest that these are individuals suffering from individual illnesses. This has allowed policymakers to focus the discussion solely on limiting gun rights to people diagnosed with mental illness and avoid addressing the broader associations between white males, gun violence, and gun availability.

Despite attempts to fight the stigmatization of mental illness, media coverage of general mental health issues has declined over time, instead highlighting stories that link mental illness and violence.

Casting mental health in this light - with close associations to deadly violence - actually makes people less likelyto support proposals to strengthen mental health care. This stigmatization has been codified: the federal regulation prohibiting the sale of weapons or ammunition to people who are mentally ill uses the language "those adjudicated as a mental defective." This is exacerbated by media reports. Over the past twenty years, news reports have grown consistently more likely to refer to mental illness while reporting on gun violence stories. Additionally, reports mention mental illness as a possible cause for a mass shooting far more often than is actually the case.

While the majority of media coverage links mental illness and gun violence as cause and consequence, evidence suggests that the causal arrow points in the reverse direction. Exposure to gun violence is an increasingly frequent root cause of post-traumatic stress disorder. Just as soldiers involved in combat suffer PTSD, studies suggest that the majority of people exposed to mass shootings will later meet the criteria for PTSD. Children exposed to gun violence commonly show symptoms of trauma later in life, including anxiety and depression.

As a preventive measure, placing responsibility for stopping mass killings at the hands of psychiatric professionals and social workers by identifying potentially dangerous patients is not a tenable solution. It serves to turn individuals into scapegoats instead of addressing the complex societal causes of violence or easy accessibility of deadly weapons. Legal requirements to report ask mental health professionals to make challenging predictions that run counter to their efforts to treat patients, and are accurate at a rate only slightly better than chance. Even in instances where these reports are correct in retrospect, they rely on full cooperation from law enforcement. Failure to follow up on such reports was recently seen in the recent shooting in Parkland, FL.

However, we can take definite steps to improving mental health care in the U.S. One avenue is strengthening the mental health "safety net," making mental health care easily available and affordable to those who need it. 60% of people with mental illness won't receive treatment each year, often as a result of access and affordability issues or fear of stigmatization. People with mental illness are more likely to be uninsured than those without, making care harder to come by. Particularly in rural areas, patients face shortages of behavioral health providers. Simultaneously, addressing mental health issues is a challenge for the health care system, as often providers must address the presence of one or more comorbid conditions.

There are also proactive measures we could take using the public health model that improve learning and mental health for children. Introducing mental health promotion into school curriculums or after-school activities is an investment in kids' social and emotional learning. This serves to promote health mental and social development for all children and provide easily-accessible support to at-risk children or demonstrating early signs of mental health problems.

Bolstering the health care system to support mental health patients would improve care and quality of life for millions of Americans. As Monica Kriete says, "our emotional environment is the equivalent of John Snow's water pump." However, this addresses issues broader than gun violence and does not address the omnipresence of firearms. It doesn't 'feel' like gun control, and despite calls to improve mental health, is a low priority. As an example, the Trump administration has proposed eliminating $400 million in federal funding used to provide mental health assistance to students, as well as defunding the School Emergency Response to Violence program. Instead, in the panic after mass shootings, politicians opt for strict prohibitions for people with mental illness, which serves to further stigmatize mental illness.

Instead of the common picture of mental illness leading to gun violence, they are two interdependent problems. If anything, widespread firearm deaths lead to a greater mental health burden in the rest of society. The real issue at hand is that our mental health system is not suited to the task of preventing gun violence, and should not be expected to. By strengthening mental and behavioral health resources, making care affordable and providers accessible, we can improve the country's mental health care. To curb the epidemic of shooting deaths, we have to take steps to correct for a uniquely American problem: living in a country with nearly as many firearms as people.

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Mental health and gun violence - Healthcare in America

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Conflating the two hurts those who need help most After Columbine High School, Sandy Hook Elementary, or the recent mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, many people question the link between mental health and gun violence. The connection is not what these reports would have you think.

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After a shooting, once the dust has settled, and the initial shock and panic has abated somewhat, fearful minds begin to cast about for explanations. Given the frequency with which gun deaths occur in the United States, "Why did this happen?" and "Who could do something like this?" are questions the country faces with grim regularity.

Unfortunately, a consistent and dangerous narrative has emerged-an explanation all-too-readily at hand when a mass shooting or other violent tragedy occurs: The perpetrator must have been mentally ill.

"We have a strong responsibility as researchers who study mental illness to try to debunk that myth," says Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University. "I say as loudly and as strongly and as frequently as I can, that mental illness is not a very big part of the problem of gun violence in the United States."

The overwhelming majority of people with mental illnesses are not violent, just like the overwhelming majority of all people are not violent. Only 4 percent of the violence-not just gun violence, but any kind-in the United States is attributable to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or depression (the three most-cited mental illnesses in conjunction with violence). In other words, 96 percent of the violence in America has nothing to do with mental illness.

A study from 1998 that followed patients released from psychiatric hospitals found that they were no more prone to violence than other people in their communities-unless they also had a substance abuse problem. So mental illness alone was not a risk factor for violence in this study.

Those are the facts. But cultural narratives are often more powerful than facts, and that 4 percent gets overblown in people's minds.

A new study published in Health Affairs shows how the news perpetuates this narrative, with a look at how several prominent newspapers and broadcast networks covered mental illness from 1995 to 2014. More than half of the stories they looked at during that period-55 percent-mentioned violence in conjunction with mental illness. That proportion was pretty much consistent across the 19 years. But stories connecting mental illness with mass shootings specifically increased from 9 percent between 1994 and 2004 to 22 percent between 2005 and 2014.

Perhaps this can be partially attributed to high-profile shootings like the Tucson shooting in 2011, in which the killer did have schizophrenia. "That's an event that is newsworthy, but the fact that it was linked to mental illness is not representative of most people who have schizophrenia, or most violence," says Emma McGinty, the lead author on the study and a professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins University. "[And yet] that link pervades the public psyche."

It pervades so much so that people speculate about killers' mental states, even in the absence of any evidence that they were living with any disorder. For example, in an article about the gunman who recently killed a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, New York magazine writes: "Police do not know for sure yet if Sarkar had a history of mental illness." Why does this particular absence of information bear mentioning? It seems mental illness is so linked to gun violence in people's minds that we have to address it even when it's not there.

And when there is evidence that a killer also happened to have a mental illness-like the pilot who crashed a Germanwings plane in 2015, who had a history of depression-the media seize upon it like a bear trap. "We've got it now! This is what was wrong with him," is the message portrayed.

This is a really tricky needle to thread, because something was clearly wrong with him. Of course someone who is perfectly healthy and well-adjusted in every way would not go out and kill a bunch of people.

"This is one of the hardest distinctions to make," McGinty says. "Anyone who kills someone else in a mass shooting scenario or otherwise is not what we would consider mentally healthy. But that does not mean they have a clinical diagnosis and therefore a treatable mental illness. There could be emotional regulation issues related to anger, for example, which are a separate phenomenon. There could be underlying substance use issues. There could be a whole host of other risk factors for violence going on."

"I think we have a long way to go in terms of brain science to really understand [those] distinctions," adds Ron Honberg, a senior policy advisor at the National Alliance on Mental Illness

But when the news reinforces these easy narratives, as McGinty's study shows it often does, that can have serious consequences. Other research shows that reading stories about mass shootings by people with mental illnesses makes people feel more negatively toward the mentally ill. This only heightens stigma, which could lead to more people going untreated.

"Do we not risk creating further barriers?" Honberg asks. "People [may] feel like, 'Oh my gosh, if I get identified as having a psychiatric diagnosis, people are going to draw certain conclusions.' It's hard enough to get people to seek help when they need it."

Shootings seem to inevitably lead to people calling for better mental health screenings for guns, or for better mental health care generally. Which would be great, lord knows we need it. But again, better mental health care is not going to have much of an impact on interpersonal violence.

This is a misframing of the issue. There is a compelling reason to adjust policy to better keep some seriously mentally ill people from accessing guns. It's not because they might hurt others, but because they might hurt themselves.

Though big, scary mass shootings get the most attention when it comes to gun violence, 60 percent of deaths caused by firearms are suicides. And another new study in this same issue of Health Affairs emphasizes that suicide, not homicide, is the major public health problem for mentally ill people with guns. In it, Swanson and his colleagues looked at 81,704 people getting public health services for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depressive disorder in two large Florida counties. They tracked these people's death records, as well as whether they were barred from owning guns.

In that group, the rate of people who died by suicide was four times higher than that of the general population. The violent crime rate was just under two times higher. But consider that this is a group of people receiving government care, who "might have other risk factors for violence, including poverty and social disadvantage, unemployment, residential instability, substance use problems, history of violent victimization, exposure to neighborhood violence, or involvement with the criminal justice system," the study reads. So you can't reasonably attribute the higher violent crime rate in this group to mental illness alone.

Maybe also because many people in the group likely lived in poverty, they were less likely to commit suicide by gun than the general population (perhaps they could not afford one). But 72 percent of the people who did kill themselves with a gun were "legally eligible to purchase a gun on the day they used a gun to end their life," Swanson says. "That suggests a problem with the criteria we have for identifying people at risk." And the 28 percent who were not allowed to purchase guns managed to find one anyway, so the laws we do have are not perfectly enforced.

"It's a big public health opportunity to limit access to guns," Swanson says. And it could make a big difference for suicide attempt survival rates. Among people who've survived a suicide attempt, more than 90 percent do not go on to kill themselves later. But guns are the most common method of suicide, and people who try to kill themselves with a gun usually succeed- 85 percent of the time. "They don't get that second chance," Swanson says.

Overall, the study concluded, "[the results] would seem to suggest that suicide, not homicide, should be the crux of gun violence prevention efforts focused on people with serious mental illnesses in public systems of care."

That is not typically the case, though. Both Honberg and Swanson say that in their experience, people talk about increasing gun background checks for people with mental illness in the context of preventing homicide, not suicide. This is a conversation that plays out in the media and among politicians time and time again after a prominent shooting tragedy, perhaps because talking about mental illness is easier than talking about the guns.

"We're a pretty violent society here in America and the conversation really ought to focus on what can be done to make America a less violent society," Honberg says. "But because that discussion is so fraught with emotion and divisiveness and political disagreements, it almost seems like the conversation has devolved to a relatively small subset of people who engage in violence, namely people with mental illness. We can at least agree about what to do with guns and mentally ill people rather than what to do about guns generally. But that's really passing the buck."

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Source:

Julie Beck, The Atlantic

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Untangling Gun Violence from Mental Illness

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After a shooting, once the dust has settled, and the initial shock and panic has abated somewhat, fearful minds begin to cast about for explanations. Given the frequency with which gun deaths occur in the United States, "Why did this happen?" and "Who could do something like this?"

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Checking Facts and Falsehoods About Gun Violence and Mental Illness After Parkland Shooting (Published 2018)

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Paul Ryan, Bernie Sanders and others stated facts and falsehoods in the wake of the Parkland Shooting.

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The Islamic State has suffered setbacks, horrendous terrorist attacks on the scale of 9/11 and the Nov. 26, 2010 attacks in Mumbai are few and far between these days and lone wolf operations are frequently thwarted by vigilant authorities. So, have we triumphed over terrorism and can we declare mission accomplished? Sadly, no.

While we all agree that this requires concerted action from authorities and citizens alike, including countering immediate threats to our safety and welfare, targeting combatants, bringing to justice those who harbor and assist attackers, cutting off terror financing, and so on, the root causes of terrorism must also be addressed if we are to truly make headway against this scourge.

It is no secret that the militants of ISIS, al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations are indoctrinated in hate at a very young age. When children grow up thinking only their ideology is correct, and all others are wrong and will go to hell, it is potentially an explosive situation waiting to happen.

Educationists will have to play an active role and promote education in peace so that the coming generations are both sensible and sensitive to life. Religious leaders will have to come together to promote the common good of mankind and reform the misguided. I strongly believe this is all doable in our generation.

Often, people who feel very passionately for a cause feel justified in adopting violent means in its pursuit. They are driven by a sense of righteousness, though misplaced, and committed to their cause. Some of them are willing to resolve differences through dialogue if approached in the right way.

We have been able to successfully bring back many extremists from a life of violence and rehabilitate them in mainstream society. In fact, many tribal schools in terrorist-affected regions in India are being run by former extremists. They were hostile in the beginning and threatening to volunteers, but when they saw that these efforts were benefiting their own communities, they became volunteers themselves.

Based on our experience, I believe that the global community should come together in:

Steering youth away from a culture of death to that of life; inculcating a more expansive view of life, its wonders and all its blessings; and broadening one's understanding of the Divine, justice, history, science, the arts, human rights and love.

Providing education in human values that focuses on the benefits and strengths of diversity, compassion and friendship.

Teaching methods to release stress, tension, anger and anxiety in a safe, healthy manner.

Educating about all the different religious and cultural traditions of the world. Today's youth need a broad understanding of other faiths. Deepening our roots and broadening our perspectives in this way will help prevent narrow interpretations of the will of God.

Educating and emphasizing the need for making non-violence and peaceful means the baseline for resolving disputes and achieving objectives in life.

By taking these measures, we can help plant the seeds of humanity in today's youth and lower terrorist recruitment. Weeding out the hate-filled and destructive ideology of the extremists will help to address the root causes of terror while working toward spiritual upliftment.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is the founder of the Art of Living Foundation and the International Association for Human Values which collaborate on humanitarian initiatives worldwide. Sri Sri's work includes armed conflict resolution, U.S. Veteran PTSD relief, prisoner rehabilitation, addiction treatment, poverty alleviation and human rights advocacy. His programs have reached an estimated 370 million people in 155 countries.

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The Islamic State has suffered setbacks, horrendous terrorist attacks on the scale of 9/11 and the Nov. 26, 2010 attacks in Mumbai are few and far between these days and lone wolf operations are frequently thwarted by vigilant authorities. So, have we triumphed over terrorism and can we declare mission accomplished?

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Teens across the U.S. are standing by their mailboxes, waiting anxiously for the envelopes that will seal their academic fate. It's college admissions season and for many students a lot hinges on how well they performed in standardized testing.

But how much should exams like the SAT and ACT really matter?

A study published Tuesday that probed the success of "test-optional" admissions policies in 33 public and private universities calls into question the need for such testing.

Former Dean of Admissions for Bates College William Hiss led the study which tracked the grades and graduation rates of students who submitted their test results against those who did not over several years.

Hiss' data showed that there was a negligible difference in college performance between the two groups. Only .05 percent of a GPA point set "submitters" and "non-submitters" apart, and the difference in their graduation rates was just .6 percent.

There are about 850 test-optional colleges in the U.S., and the trend is growing slowly.

What should college admissions officers look for instead? Hiss says GPA matters the most.

"The evidence of the study clearly shows that high school GPA matters. Four-year, long-term evidence of self-discipline, intellectual curiosity and hard work; that's what matters the most. After that, I would say evidence that someone has interests that they have brought to a higher level, from a soccer goalie to a debater to a servant in a community to a linguist. We need to see evidence that the student can bring something to a high level of skill," Hiss said.

According to the data, if high school grades are not high, good testing does not promise college success. Students with good grades and modest testing did better in college than students with higher testing and lower high school grades.

"The human mind is simply so complex and so multifaceted and fluid, that trying to find a single measurement tool that will be reliable across the enormous populations of American students is simply a trip up a blind alley. I would never say the SATs and ACTs have no predictive value for anybody; they have predictive value for some people. We just don't find them reliable cross populations," says Hiss.

But the dreaded test was born of good intentions.

The SAT started in the 1930s as a scholarship test for Ivy League schools. Based off of an Army IQ test, it was meant to help those who came from more humble backgrounds to be noticed by prestigious schools. Many other universities followed suit.

But standardized testing may now be hurting rather than helping disenfranchised students.

The study found that non-submitting students were more likely to be minorities, women, students with Learning Differences, Pell Grant recipients and first-generation college-goers.

According to Hiss' data, the test-optional policy could even help to level the playing field.

"We need thousands of students going through higher ed. Optional testing is one of the ways that that could happen. Optional testing is a potential route to getting many more students through higher education who normally would not be admitted or would not apply in first place," Hiss said.

The study comes at a time of renewed debate about college admissions, after President Barack Obama pledged in January to get more low income students into higher education.

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Do ACT and SAT scores really matter? New study says they shouldn't

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Teens across the U.S. are standing by their mailboxes, waiting anxiously for the envelopes that will seal their academic fate. It's college admissions season and for many students a lot hinges on how well they performed in standardized testing. But how much should exams like the SAT and ACT really matter?

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WILLIAM MERCER MCLEOD FOR TIME

For the past two weeks, Time has been asking famous and accomplished people to tell us their SAT scores. Most of them declined — which is a little strange, since the big bad test couldn't possibly hurt Alan Greenspan or Oprah Winfrey. But the SAT occupies a central place in the American psyche, lying at the terrifying intersection of ability, class and pride. As TV's Conan O'Brien put it, "It has taken 20 years to forget the trauma of that damned test, and looking up my scores would be like going back to Vietnam."

The test's prominence ensures that shouting matches will erupt over it regularly. Usually one side says the SAT should die because it's racist; the other says it should flourish because it maintains standards. Their arguments are important but had started to seem pointless, since the number of SAT takers has increased virtually every year since Pearl Harbor.

Then, in a Feb. 18 speech to his fellow college presidents, the psychologist who runs the University of California suggested something radical: Scrap the thing. Richard Atkinson says the test hurls kids into months of practicing word games and math riddles at the expense of studying chemistry or poetry. He wants to make SAT scores an optional part of the application for all 90,000 kids who want to go to U.C. each year. "The SATs have acquired a mystique that's clearly not warranted," he proclaims. "Who knows what they measure?" Those of us who wanted to stick a No. 2 pencil in our eye while puzzling the meaning of "mendacious" gave a cheer.

Last week U.C.'s faculty and regents started what will be a long, fiery debate over his proposal. Since Atkinson began attacking the test, college administrators across the U.S. have reopened old fights about the SAT and started new ones. President John Peters of Northern Illinois University says the reaction of the hundreds of college officials to the speech was "extremely positive"; he plans to suggest a review of his school's standardized-test requirements at the next faculty meeting. The Georgia board of regents is reviewing admissions criteria, as are the University of Texas, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the College of Wooster in Ohio.

Most universities have no immediate plans to stop asking for SAT scores. But at those schools that were having second thoughts about the test, Atkinson's stance will embolden anti- SAT forces. "It's gutsy," says Florida International University admissions chief Carmen Brown, "and a lot of other places will follow." The College Board, which oversees the SAT, was worried enough after the speech to e-mail colleges a defense of its test.

The board had plenty of reasons to worry before then. The California rumblings come at a precarious time for the SAT. To be sure, it remains a key part of the college-application process. Last year 44% of the kids who graduated from high school took it, up from 41% in 1995. In all, more than 2 million students took the SAT in 2000. The second-biggest admissions test, the act, had 1.8 million takers last year. Published by an Iowa testing company, the act started as a rival to the SAT and focuses more on subject matter than general reasoning. But the act never developed the sat's aura of quality and rigor. Whenever a college suggests dropping its SAT requirement, traditionalists on campus inevitably say doing so would lower standards.

Over the past few years, however, the test's defenders have started to lose ground. About 280 of the nation's 2,083 four-year colleges and universities make the SAT optional for some or all applicants; a handful of prestigious colleges, including Franklin and Marshall and Mount Holyoke, have joined their ranks since the early '90s and say they aren't admitting idiots as a result. Hamilton College is considering making the SAT optional. Countless other schools have de-emphasized the SAT in more subtle ways — continuing to ask for scores but weighing other factors more heavily.

Granted many of the SAT-optional schools sit on utopian campuses in liberal New England villages. But it's getting hard to find an admissions officer anywhere who says an SAT score alone tells you anything important. Deans at prestigious, traditional bastions such as Vanderbilt support the SAT, but some of the test's assumed proponents aren't guarding it against the barbarians. Even conservatives at the Weekly Standard have written about how the SAT has "shaped — and misshaped — modern American life."

But if we drop the SAT, by what means should we allot membership in the nation's lite? Of course, plenty of people make movies and play in the major leagues and run companies and write for magazines without high SATs. But good scores sure don't hurt. Besides, don't they measure something valuable — something beyond the diligence it takes to memorize the details of the Franco-Prussian War for a history exam? Much of the debate over the SAT boils down to this: Assuming we can measure innate intelligence, do we want a society that rewards genes? Are we afraid of what kind of society that might be? Or should we instead reward only the achievements of a life — what we do with our gifts, not what we start with?

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Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews - TIME.com

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For the past two weeks, Time has been asking famous and accomplished people to tell us their SAT scores. Most of them declined - which is a little strange, since the big bad test couldn't possibly hurt Alan Greenspan or Oprah Winfrey.

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Clara Cox was always good test-taker, and when she applied to college, she scored high on the SAT.

"I grew up in the New York state system, so I've done standardized testing since the time I could walk," said Cox, 26, who graduated from the University of Vermont with a degree in linguistics and French.

"But I do understand that some people don't test well," she told NBC News. "And there is a huge fear of the SAT."

Some of her friends, including her own twin sisters, struggled with poor standardized test results; it would limit their college choices.

"We took the same classes and had the same grades," said Cox. "But I've seen students with low test scores and high GPAs - and those with SAT scores that were incredible that did not do so well."

Today, she is an admissions counselor at The University of New England in Maine, which still requires either the SAT or ACT, but a growing number of institutions do not.

Nearly 1,000 accredited four-year colleges and universities have test-optional or test-flexible admission policies, according to The National Center for Fair and Open Testing or FairTest.

The Massachusetts-based nonprofit promotes educational evaluations that strive to eliminate "misuse and flaws" of standardized testing at all grade levels. They say that these tests have inherent cultural and racial biases.

"We're not opposed to the use of testing, only the misuse of testing," said Robert A. Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest. "We are 'fair test' not 'no test.' Tests can have a role."

Leveling the academic playing field

The first standardized test was launched in 1920 by the United States Army and was used to measure IQ. In 1926, a Princeton psychologist adapted the so-called Army Alpha test to use in college admissions.

A decade later, when Harvard University began a nationwide scholarship program to find talented students outside the usual East Coast boarding school pool, it turned to what had evolved into the Scholastic Achievement Test or SAT. In 1946, with the founding of the College Board, it became the universal testing tool.

Bowdoin College in Maine was the first to eliminate SAT and ACT testing requirements in 1969. A 20-year Bates College study of admitted students revealed that those who submitted tests did not show any better academic performance or graduation rates than those who didn't.

The SAT was meant to help level the academic playing field, but FairTest's Schaeffer says that was before admissions officers had detailed information about the rigor of particular high schools to compare students.

"That was back...before multiple studies proved that high school grades were a better predictor of undergraduate success than any test, before research showed a very strong correlation between test results and family income, and before the explosion of high-priced test-prep courses gave well-to-do families an opportunity to purchase the equivalent of steroids to improve their teenagers' scores," Schaeffer told NBC News.

Grades are a better predictor of success in college, he said.

But Philip Ballinger, assistant vice president for enrollment at the University of Washington, says the SAT is still a vital tool in the admissions process. Ballinger has held multiple positions with the College Board - the organization that administers the SAT - during his career.

Washington still requires either the SAT or ACT as part of a "holistic review" of an applicant.

Test-optional schools argue the policy helps promote diversity, but Ballinger said, "My fear is a lot of schools go test-score optional for competitive reasons and rankings."

Bates, for example, said its testing policy saw an increase in students of color and international students. But, its study showed white students were taking advantage of the policy 5 to 1.

As a public university, Washington offers admission to students from a wide range of backgrounds; 38 percent are first-generation college students and about one-third are from low-income families.

"That test score helps me understand what we are obligated to offer in support for them to be successful," said Ballinger. "If I just went on their GPA, I would be doing a disservice to the student."

He advises high school students to take the SAT or ACT, even if they plan to apply to a school that does not require it. The tests give the student an opportunity to see their weaknesses and do more preparation.The free online education service Kahn Academy is one way to not only improve scores, but to "learn," said Ballinger. Meanwhile, Clara Cox agrees, "even if students think they might do poorly or intend to apply to a test-optional school."

In the end, her sisters did some prep, retook the SAT and did well. One was accepted to competitive Mount Holyoke College and the other attended University of New England. Both were stellar students.

"The SAT doesn't make you," said Cox, who now reviews applications and test scores. "There are so many other moving parts to your story. You are not just a test. You are a lot more - the essay, your high school grades, your GPA and your activities."

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Does the SAT still matter if nearly 1,000 colleges are test-optional?

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Clara Cox was always good test-taker, and when she applied to college, she scored high on the SAT. "I grew up in the New York state system, so I've done standardized testing since the time I could walk," said Cox, 26, who graduated from the University of Vermont with a degree in linguistics and French.