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Many currently illegal drugs, such as marijuana, opium, coca, and psychedelics have been used for thousands of years for both medical and spiritual purposes. So why are some drugs legal and other drugs illegal today? It's not based on any scientific assessment of the relative risks of these drugs - but it has everything to do with who is associated with these drugs.

The first anti-opium laws in the 1870s were directed at Chinese immigrants. The first anti-cocaine laws in the early 1900s were directed at black men in the South. The first anti-marijuana laws, in the Midwest and the Southwest in the 1910s and 20s, were directed at Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans. Today, Latino and especially black communities are still subject to wildly disproportionate drug enforcement and sentencing practices.

Nixon and the Generation Gap

In the 1960s, as drugs became symbols of youthful rebellion, social upheaval, and political dissent, the government halted scientific research to evaluate their medical safety and efficacy.

In June 1971, President Nixon declared a "war on drugs." He dramatically increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies, and pushed through measures such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants.

A top Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, later admitted: "You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying. We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."Nixon temporarily placed marijuana in Schedule One, the most restrictive category of drugs, pending review by a commission he appointed led by Republican Pennsylvania Governor Raymond Shafer.

In 1972, the commission unanimously recommended decriminalizing the possession and distribution of marijuana for personal use. Nixon ignored the report and rejected its recommendations.

Between 1973 and 1977, however, eleven states decriminalized marijuana possession. In January 1977, President Jimmy Carter was inaugurated on a campaign platform that included marijuana decriminalization. In October 1977, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to decriminalize possession of up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use.

Within just a few years, though, the tide had shifted. Proposals to decriminalize marijuana were abandoned as parents became increasingly concerned about high rates of teen marijuana use. Marijuana was ultimately caught up in a broader cultural backlash against the perceived permissiveness of the 1970s.

This video from hip hop legend Jay Z and acclaimed artist Molly Crabapple depicts the drug war's devastating impact on the Black community from decades of biased law enforcement.

The video traces the drug war from President Nixon to the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws to the emerging aboveground marijuana market that is poised to make legal millions for wealthy investors doing the same thing that generations of people of color have been arrested and locked up for. After you watch the video, read on to learn more about the discriminatory history of the war on drugs.

The 1980s and 90s: Drug Hysteria and Skyrocketing Incarceration Rates

The presidency of Ronald Reagan marked the start of a long period of skyrocketing rates of incarceration, largely thanks to his unprecedented expansion of the drug war. The number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law offenses increased from 50,000 in 1980 to over 400,000 by 1997.

Public concern about illicit drug use built throughout the 1980s, largely due to media portrayals of people addicted to the smokeable form of cocaine dubbed "crack." Soon after Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, his wife, Nancy Reagan, began a highly-publicized anti-drug campaign, coining the slogan "Just Say No."

This set the stage for the zero tolerance policies implemented in the mid-to-late 1980s. Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates, who believed that "casual drug users should be taken out and shot," founded the DARE drug education program, which was quickly adopted nationwide despite the lack of evidence of its effectiveness. The increasingly harsh drug policies also blocked the expansion of syringe access programs and other harm reduction policies to reduce the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS.

In the late 1980s, a political hysteria about drugs led to the passage of draconian penalties in Congress and state legislatures that rapidly increased the prison population. In 1985, the proportion of Americans polled who saw drug abuse as the nation's "number one problem" was just 2-6 percent. The figure grew through the remainder of the 1980s until, in September 1989, it reached a remarkable 64 percent - one of the most intense fixations by the American public on any issue in polling history. Within less than a year, however, the figure plummeted to less than 10 percent, as the media lost interest. The draconian policies enacted during the hysteria remained, however, and continued to result in escalating levels of arrests and incarceration.

Although Bill Clinton advocated for treatment instead of incarceration during his 1992 presidential campaign, after his first few months in the White House he reverted to the drug war strategies of his Republican predecessors by continuing to escalate the drug war. Notoriously, Clinton rejected a U.S. Sentencing Commission recommendation to eliminate the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences.

He also rejected, with the encouragement of drug czar General Barry McCaffrey, Health Secretary Donna Shalala's advice to end the federal ban on funding for syringe access programs. Yet, a month before leaving office, Clinton asserted in a Rolling Stone interview that "we really need a re-examination of our entire policy on imprisonment" of people who use drugs, and said that marijuana use "should be decriminalized."

At the height of the drug war hysteria in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a movement emerged seeking a new approach to drug policy. In 1987, Arnold Trebach and Kevin Zeese founded the Drug Policy Foundation - describing it as the "loyal opposition to the war on drugs." Prominent conservatives such as William Buckley and Milton Friedman had long advocated for ending drug prohibition, as had civil libertarians such as longtime ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser. In the late 1980s they were joined by Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, Federal Judge Robert Sweet, Princeton professor Ethan Nadelmann, and other activists, scholars and policymakers.

In 1994, Nadelmann founded The Lindesmith Center as the first U.S. project of George Soros' Open Society Institute. In 2000, the growing Center merged with the Drug Policy Foundation to create the Drug Policy Alliance.

The New Millennium: The Pendulum Shifts - Slowly - Toward Sensible Drug Policy

George W. Bush arrived in the White House as the drug war was running out of steam - yet he allocated more money than ever to it. His drug czar, John Walters, zealously focused on marijuana and launched a major campaign to promote student drug testing. While rates of illicit drug use remained constant, overdose fatalities rose rapidly.

The era of George W. Bush also witnessed the rapid escalation of the militarization of domestic drug law enforcement. By the end of Bush's term, there were about 40,000 paramilitary-style SWAT raids on Americans every year - mostly for nonviolent drug law offenses, often misdemeanors. While federal reform mostly stalled under Bush, state-level reforms finally began to slow the growth of the drug war.

Politicians now routinely admit to having used marijuana, and even cocaine, when they were younger. When Michael Bloomberg was questioned during his 2001 mayoral campaign about whether he had ever used marijuana, he said, "You bet I did - and I enjoyed it." Barack Obama also candidly discussed his prior cocaine and marijuana use: "When I was a kid, I inhaled frequently - that was the point."

Public opinion has shifted dramatically in favor of sensible reforms that expand health-based approaches while reducing the role of criminalization in drug policy.

Marijuana reform has gained unprecedented momentum throughout the Americas. Alaska, California, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana for adults. In December 2013, Uruguay became the first country in the world to legally regulate marijuana. Canada legalized marijuana for adults in 2018.

In response to a worsening overdose epidemic, dozens of U.S. states passed laws to increase access to the overdose antidote, naloxone, as well as "911 Good Samaritan" laws to encourage people to seek medical help in the event of an overdose.

Yet the assault on American citizens and others continues, with 700,000 people still arrested for marijuana offenses each year and almost 500,000 people still behind bars for nothing more than a drug law violation.

President Obama, despite supporting several successful policy changes - such as reducing the crack/powder sentencing disparity, ending the ban on federal funding for syringe access programs, and ending federal interference with state medical marijuana laws - did not shift the majority of drug policy funding to a health-based approach.

Trump Era: DPA Pushes Forward Despite Challenges

The Trump administration threatened to take us backward toward a 1980s-style drug war. President Trump started building a wall to keep drugs out of the country, and called for harsher sentences for drug law violations and the death penalty for people who sell drugs. He also resurrected disproven "just say no" messaging aimed at youth.

2020 brought the additional challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic - a public health crisis that exposed the systemic issues within our society and revealed just how deeply the drug war permeates these systems. People who interact with these systems are unable to take the most basic of steps to prevent the spread of COVID-19 - including those in jail or prison, the homeless, people with substance use disorder, those who rely on access to medication-assisted treatment or medical marijuana, and immigrants. During this crisis, it is harder for them to engage in social distancing, and to access necessary medication assisted treatment - such as methadone or buprenorphine, or medical marijuana - as well as other health and harm reduction resources.

Despite these obstacles, we at the Drug Policy Alliance pushed forward with monumental drug policy reforms in the 2020 elections. In a historic, paradigm-shifting win and arguably the biggest blow to the war on drugs to date, Oregon voters passed Measure 110, the nation's first all-drug decriminalization measure. This confirms a substantial shift in public support in favor of treating drug use with health services rather than with criminalization.

Marijuana reform also won big. Voters in Arizona, New Jersey, Montana, and South Dakota passed measures to legalize marijuana for adult use. It was also a historic year for medical marijuana, with victories in Mississippi and South Dakota.

All across the country, in liberal states and conservative ones, people made their voices heard. And they said loud and clear that it is time to end the drug war.

New Administration, New Opportunities

Now Joe Biden is President of the United States - and with every new administration brings new opportunities.

Biden has stated that it was a "mistake" to support legislation that ramped up the drug war and increased incarceration, including the '94 crime bill, when he was in the U.S. Senate. He now says we need a compassionate approach to problematic drug use.

At the Drug Policy Alliance, we agree. And we're ready to make change. We look forward to working together on a humane approach to drugs that reduces the role of criminalization and increases access to health based treatment and harm reduction services for people who need them.

We look forward to a future where drug policies are shaped by science and compassion rather than political hysteria.
Learn about DPA's victories in marijuana reform, criminal justice reform, and harm reduction.

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Many currently illegal drugs, such as marijuana, opium, coca, and psychedelics have been used for thousands of years for both medical and spiritual purposes. So why are some drugs legal and other drugs illegal today? It's not based on any scientific assessment of the relative risks of these drugs - but it has everything to do with who is associated with these drugs.

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The data proves that school segregation is getting worse

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The data proves that school segregation is getting worse

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The predominant narrative among education activists is that school segregation has gotten worse in the past several decades. It's an argument backed by data - one I've stressed in my own work. And earlier this year, a New York Times op-ed also made this argument and cited that same data.

But there's now a handful of pundits pushing back on this notion, like the National Review's Robert VerBruggen. In response to the Times piece, he wrote that changing demographics makes the data misleading - and that ultimately, "we're not going in reverse" when it comes to segregation. Prominent journalists, like New York magazine's Jonathan Chait and my colleague Matt Yglesias, shared VerBruggen's post on Twitter.

The National Review piece isn't coming out of the blue. The idea that changing demographics - the US becoming less white - makes it harder to integrate schools is something that has picked up steam in recent years. In Connecticut, Gov. Dannel Malloy has pushed for more leniency in standards set by a court-ordered desegregation case.

So how could two sides look at the data and come to two different conclusions about school segregation trends?

On the surface, this is an argument about how we measure school segregation trends. But ultimately, it's a disagreement over how we should be thinking about school segregation.

Is school segregation not actually getting worse? It depends on how you measure it.

The core disagreement comes down to federal government data that was highlighted by the UCLA Civil Rights Project on the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Boar d of Education, the Supreme Court case that ruled segregated schools were unconstitutional.

The data shows that black students in the South are less likely to attend a school that is majority white than about 50 years ago:

National Review's VerBruggen sees this chart and argues that a smaller portion of black students are attending majority-white schools because the US is just less white than it was 40 or 50 years ago:

Both arguments are the products of some messy data work.

On one hand, if we're measuring segregation by how many children attend majority-white schools, then it's worth acknowledging that white people are now a smaller percentage of the US population. This is something I've admittedly left out of my work when presenting this data.

On the other hand, VerBruggen uses this flaw to argue that school segregation actually isn't getting worse - even though it's virtually impossible to make this argument from this data alone. VerBruggen does cite a study by Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon and USC sociologist Ann Owens that says school segregation hasn't changed that much in the past few decades. But Reardon and Owens specifically write that there are two ways they measure segregation:

1. Exposure or isolation, which looks at whether students attend schools with a high or low proportion of a given racial group

2. Unevenness, which measures how evenly distributed students of a given racial group are

Reardon and Owens write, "The debate about whether the last two decades can be characterized as a period of resegregation largely hinges on whether one uses exposure or unevenness measures of segregation."

The VerBruggen argument adopts the "unevenness" frame: School segregation hasn't gotten worse because students are just as unevenly distributed now as they were in the 1980s.

Reardon and Owens give this example:

... Consider a school district in which 90% of students are black. If all schools in the district had enrollments that were 90% black, we would have low unevenness but high black isolation (or, equivalently, low black-white exposure) because the average black student would attend a predominantly black school. Conversely, in a school district with very few black students, isolation might be low even if students were very unevenly distributed by race.

But if you care about more equity in education, this is an odd argument. It's essentially saying: Hey, we haven't made school segregation worse - and it's because of Asian and Hispanic immigrants.

This leads to the reason why people who care about equity balance it with the other measure: isolation.

A reason to measure racial isolation, not just unevenness

Let's just state this for the record: Racial segregation in schools was caused by white America's policies that kept schools and neighborhoods white-only. For black families, this meant their country engineered for them a second-class experience - one that put them in poor, segregated ghettos and poor, segregated schools.

And that's not getting better. Black children are now more likely to grow up in poor neighborhoods than they were 50 years ago.

This is important because a large body of research shows that growing up in heavily segregated, poor neighborhoods affects everything from your education level, your future earnings, and your happiness to your health and, ultimately, your life span.

But in many of these areas, where you live determines where you go to school. So when we see students who are racially isolated, it's describing both underlying residential segregation and how little school districts do to ameliorate that segregation.

As it turns out, things have been getting worse since the 1980s when we look at segregation using this isolation frame:

As Reardon and Owens point out, indices of exposure show black-white segregation have actually gotten worse since the 1970s:

This has caused a growing number of our schools to be predominantly black or Hispanic with a higher concentration of students in poverty:

This isn't even considering the growing charter school movement. An increasing number of charter schools are high-poverty and are predominantly black or Hispanic. Meanwhile, a growing number of charter schools are also low-poverty and predominantly white and Asian:

So, yes, there is a portion of America that is getting more diverse. And overall, the "unevenness" measure of segregation shows we're racially distributing students about as well as we were a few decades ago.

But we are also increasingly isolating the most vulnerable students in America. Things haven't been steady; they are getting worse.

Focusing on what's holding steady pushes a misleading narrative

VerBruggen is pushing back against a narrative that most experts agree with, which says that America went through a period of desegregation from the 1950s through the 1980s but then backslid in the decades since. VerBruggen is arguing that as immigration policies have diversified America in recent decades, our schools diversified as well.

But research by Cornell sociologist Daniel Lichter shows that segregation between white families and nonwhite families has actually changed very little since the 1980s. In fact, while segregation within cities has gotten slightly better, segregation between municipalities has gotten worse.

In other words, there is probably less segregation within the neighborhoods of your town. But there is probably more segregation in comparing your town and a neighboring one.

So if broader segregation has increased, it might be reflected in our schools, as school attendance zones are often drawn based on where you live.

This is partially what has entrenched the heavily segregated school attendance zones in virtually every American city:

But school boards can draw school attendance boundaries to lessen that segregation - to send kids to less racially segregated schools. We don't have to send kids to the nearest school, especially because it ends up recreating the underlying residential segregation:

But most school districts don't do anything to ameliorate this situation. We continue to recreate the residential segregation. (Here's an interactive that lets you look up your own district.)

In addition, research from Southern Methodist University's Meredith Richards shows that when neighborhoods don't experience much demographic change, they tend to draw school attendance zones that resegregate. Also, when neighborhoods experience a lot of demographic change, they defensively draw attendance zones that further segregate:

So let's rehash here:

We are increasingly isolating poor black and Hispanic children in segregated schools, both public and charter.

Residential segregation between cities is getting worse, and the Supreme Court in the 1974 case Milliken v. Bradley said surrounding cities could not be forced into school integration plans.

Meanwhile, segregation within cities is about the same as in the 1980s. It's still extremely high.

School districts are doing very little to ameliorate that segregation.

And when neighborhoods don't change or drastically change, school districts actually tend to make even more segregative attendance zones.

Yes, we can find metrics that show school segregation isn't getting worse; we can find metrics that show our schools are not any more segregated now than they were 30 years ago. These metrics are important, and they describe significant ways our schools are changing.

And, to be fair, VerBruggen writes in his piece that "this doesn't mean that this country's racial problems are over or that there's nothing we can do to spur further integration."

But using those metrics to paint a picture in which school segregation isn't getting worse misses the point of why we talk about school segregation. The American education system has vestiges of engineered inequities, and those inequities have created unequal opportunities for a huge chunk of black Americans. When we query the data using this framework, the answer is clear: We are going in reverse.

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The data proves that school segregation is getting worse

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This is ultimately a disagreement over how we talk about school segregation.

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Among other cherished values, the First Amendment protects freedom of speech. The U.S. Supreme Court often has struggled to determine what exactly constitutes protected speech. The following are examples of speech, both direct (words) and symbolic (actions), that the Court has decided are either entitled to First Amendment protections, or not.

The First Amendment states, in relevant part, that:

"Congress shall make no law...abridging freedom of speech."

Freedom of speech includes the right:

Not to speak (specifically, the right not to salute the flag).
West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943).

Of students to wear black armbands to school to protest a war ("Students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate.").
Tinker v. Des Moines, 393 U.S. 503 (1969).

To use certain offensive words and phrases to convey political messages.
Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971).

To contribute money (under certain circumstances) to political campaigns.
Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976).

To advertise commercial products and professional services (with some restrictions).
Virginia Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Consumer Council, 425 U.S. 748 (1976); Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, 433 U.S. 350 (1977).

To engage in symbolic speech, (e.g., burning the flag in protest).
Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989); United States v. Eichman, 496 U.S. 310 (1990).

Freedom of speech does not include the right:

To incite imminent lawless action.
Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969).

To make or distribute obscene materials.
Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957).

To burn draft cards as an anti-war protest.
United States v. O'Brien, 391 U.S. 367 (1968).

To permit students to print articles in a school newspaper over the objections of the school administration.
Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260 (1988).

Of students to make an obscene speech at a school-sponsored event.
Bethel School District #43 v. Fraser, 478 U.S. 675 (1986).

Of students to advocate illegal drug use at a school-sponsored event.
Morse v. Frederick, __ U.S. __ (2007).

Disclaimer: These resources are created by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts for use in educational activities only. They may not reflect the current state of the law, and are not intended to provide legal advice, guidance on litigation, or commentary on legislation.

DISCLAIMER: These resources are created by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts for educational purposes only. They may not reflect the current state of the law, and are not intended to provide legal advice, guidance on litigation, or commentary on any pending case or legislation.

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Among other cherished values, the First Amendment protects freedom of speech. Learn about what this means.

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Today at 11 AM ET | Cashing In Our CHIPS: Community Colleges and the CHIPS and Science Act
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Ending the War on Drugs: By the Numbers

A salvage crew found needles hidden between a box spring and a mattress in a foreclosed house in Sanford, Maine. (Getty/Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald)

See also:

Introduction

President Richard Nixon called for a war on drugs in 1971, setting in motion a tough-on-crime policy agenda that continues to produce disastrous results today. Policymakers at all levels of government passed harsher sentencing laws and increased enforcement actions, especially for low-level drug offenses. The consequences of these actions are magnified for communities of color, which are disproportionately targeted for enforcement and face discriminatory practices across the justice system. Today, researchers and policymakers alike agree that the war on drugs is a failure. This fact sheet summarizes research findings that capture the need to replace the war on drugs with a fairer, more effective model that treats substance misuse as a public health issue-not a criminal justice issue.

The war on drugs

Incarcerating people for drug-related offenses has been shown to have little impact on substance misuse rates.⁵ Instead, incarceration is linked with increased mortality from overdose. In the first two weeks after their release from prison, individuals are almost 13 times more likely to die than the general population.⁶ The leading cause of death among recently released individuals is overdose.⁷ During that period, individuals are at a 129 percent greater risk of dying from an overdose than the general public.⁸

Incarceration has a negligible effect on public safety. Crime rates have trended downward since 1990, and researchers attribute 75 to 100 percent of these reductions to factors other than incarceration.⁹

Racial disparities

In the federal system, the average black defendant convicted of a drug offense will serve nearly the same amount of time (58.7 months) as a white defendant would for a violent crime (61.7 months).¹⁵

Economic impact

Since 1971, the war on drugs has cost the United States an estimated $1 trillion. In 2015, the federal government spent an estimated $9.2 million every day to incarcerate people charged with drug-related offenses-that's more than $3.3 billion annually.¹⁹

In contrast, marijuana legalization would save roughly $7.7 billion per year in averted enforcement costs and would yield an additional $6 billion in tax revenue. The net total-$13.7 billion-could send more than 650,000 students to public universities every year. ²³

The opioid epidemic

Between 2014 and 2016, opioid overdose deaths increased by approximately 48 percent nationwide. Though whites have the highest rates of fatal opioid overdoses, fatalities are on the rise among communities of color. During the same period, opioid deaths rose by nearly 53 percent among Latinos and 84 percent among blacks.²⁹

The opioid epidemic costs the United States an estimated $504 billion per year, including the costs to the health care and justice systems as well as the economic impact of premature fatalities.³²

Impact of interventions

Harm reduction

Drug courts

A longitudinal study of drug courts in Multnomah County, Oregon found that the program had long-lasting benefits. Fourteen years after enrolling in the program, drug court participants were 24 percent less likely to be rearrested for a drug-related offense and nearly 30 percent less likely to recidivate overall.⁵²

Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion

Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) programs allow officers to divert individuals to treatment or social services, rather making low-level drug arrests. The model was pioneered in Seattle, where it has yielded positive results. Individuals diverted through the LEAD program were 58 percent less likely to be rearrested, as compared to similar individuals processed through the criminal justice system.⁵⁸

On average, LEAD participants spent 39 fewer days in jail per year and were 87 percent less likely to be incarcerated in prison than comparison groups.⁶²

For each participant, LEAD was associated with a $2,100 annual reduction in criminal and legal system costs. The average annual cost per nonparticipant increased by $5,961 in the same period.⁶³

Betsy Pearl is the campaign manager for Criminal Justice Reform at the Center for American Progress.

The positions of American Progress, and our policy experts, are independent, and the findings and conclusions presented are those of American Progress alone. A full list of supporters is available here. American Progress would like to acknowledge the many generous supporters who make our work possible.

Explore The Series

In this Smart on Crime Explainers series, the Center for American Progress will break down some of the most current issues in criminal justice reform, explain their importance, point to additional trusted sources for further reading, and highlight where reforms are taking place on the ground. This series is designed to be useful for everyone-from those newest to the reform movement to policymakers and practitioners. Learn more about what it means to be smart on crime by reading the fact sheets below.

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Today at 11 AM ET | Cashing In Our CHIPS: Community Colleges and the CHIPS and Science Act RSVP Now Ending the War on Drugs: By the Numbers See also: President Richard Nixon called for a war on drugs in 1971, setting in motion a tough-on-crime policy agenda that continues to produce disastrous results today.

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Must monsters always be male? Huge gender bias revealed in children’s books

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Must monsters always be male? Huge gender bias revealed in children’s books

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Must monsters always be male? Huge gender bias revealed in children’s books

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A thieving duck in Peppa Pig is one of the few female villains in the 100 most popular picture books. An Observer study shows that, from hares to bears, females are mostly sidekicks

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You may know what race you are, but how would you prove it if someone disagreed with you? The fact is, race is a social and political construct that has evolved in fascinating and often confusing ways over the centuries.

Race is a social construct

With the 1776 edition of his book, On the Natural Variety of Mankind, German scientist Johan Friedrich Blumenbach is credited with creating one of the first race-based classifications. He decided on five categories: "Caucasian, the white race; Mongolian, the yellow race; Malayan, the brown race, Ethiopian, the black race, and American, the red race." Each race was ranked, and he put "Caucasian" at the top. This seemingly arbitrary ranking was the impetus for centuries of discrimination and inequality.

The US Census proves race is subjective

The evolution of race in the US Census illustrates just how hard it is to categorize people in a way that is inclusive and accurate. For example, in 1929, people who were of Mexican birth or ancestry in the United States were considered white. In 1930, they were considered non-white. In 1942, they were switched back to white. These dates are interesting because they align directly with the shifting political and economic agendas of the time.

Racial categories are not backed by science

Dorothy Roberts, the author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century explains that when the medical community links race to health outcomes, it's really just using race as a proxy for other factors such as where your ancestors came from, access to healthcare, and socioeconomic status. Sickle-cell anemia is a prime example of this. Commonly linked to race, this adaption is actually a product of environments where Malaria is prevalent, including some parts of Europe and Asia, in addition to Africa.

Although race isn't real, racism certainly is

The racial categories to which we're assigned, based on how we look to others or how we identify ourselves, can determine real-life experiences, inspire hate, drive political outcomes, and make the difference between life and death. But these important consequences are a result of a relatively new idea that was based on shaky reasoning and shady motivations.
Will you support Vox's explanatory journalism?
Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we're trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

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So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

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You may know what race you are, but how would you prove it if somebody disagreed with you? Jenée Desmond Harris explains.

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The Scientific Importance of Free Speech

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The Scientific Importance of Free Speech

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The Scientific Importance of Free Speech

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These are merely tools that help us to accomplish a far greater mission, which is to choose between rival narratives, in the vicious, no-holds-barred battle of ideas that we call "science".

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Brexit trade deal: What does it mean for fishing?

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Brexit trade deal: What does it mean for fishing?

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The US has been fighting a global war on drugs for decades. But as prison populations and financial costs increase and drug-related violence around the world continues, lawmakers and experts are reconsidering if the drug war's potential benefits are really worth its many drawbacks.

What is the war on drugs?

In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon formally launched the war on drugs to eradicate illicit drug use in the US. "If we cannot destroy the drug menace in America, then it will surely in time destroy us," Nixon told Congress in 1971. "I am not prepared to accept this alternative."

Over the next couple decades, particularly under the Reagan administration, what followed was the escalation of global military and police efforts against drugs. But in that process, the drug war led to unintended consequences that have proliferated violence around the world and contributed to mass incarceration in the US, even if it has made drugs less accessible and reduced potential levels of drug abuse.

Nixon inaugurated the war on drugs at a time when America was in hysterics over widespread drug use. Drug use had become more public and prevalent during the 1960s due in part to the counterculture movement, and many Americans felt that drug use had become a serious threat to the country and its moral standing.

Over the past four decades, the US has committed more than $1 trillion to the war on drugs. But the crackdown has in some ways failed to produce the desired results: Drug use remains a very serious problem in the US, even though the drug war has made these substances less accessible. The drug war also led to several - some unintended - negative consequences, including a big strain on America's criminal justice system and the proliferation of drug-related violence around the world.

While Nixon began the modern war on drugs, America has a long history of trying to control the use of certain drugs. Laws passed in the early 20th century attempted to restrict drug production and sales. Some of this history is racially tinged, and, perhaps as a result, the war on drugs has long hit minority communities the hardest.

The question with these policies, as with the drug war more broadly, is whether the risks and costs are worth the benefits. Drug policy is often described as choosing between a bunch of bad or mediocre options, rather than finding the perfect solution. In the case of the war on drugs, the question is whether the very real drawbacks of prohibition - more racially skewed arrests, drug-related violence around the world, and financial costs - are worth the potential gains from outlawing and hopefully depressing drug abuse in the US.

Is the war on drugs succeeding?

The goal of the war on drugs is to reduce drug use. The specific aim is to destroy and inhibit the international drug trade - making drugs scarcer and costlier, and therefore making drug habits in the US unaffordable. And although some of the data shows drugs getting cheaper, drug policy experts generally believe that the drug war is nonetheless preventing some drug abuse by making the substances less accessible.

The prices of most drugs, as tracked by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, have plummeted. Between 1981 and 2007, the median bulk price of heroin is down by roughly 93 percent, and the median bulk price of powder cocaine is down by about 87 percent. Between 1986 and 2007, the median bulk price of crack cocaine fell by around 54 percent. The prices of meth and marijuana, meanwhile, have remained largely stable since the 1980s.

Much of this is explained by what's known as the balloon effect: Cracking down on drugs in one area doesn't necessarily reduce the overall supply of drugs. Instead, drug production and trafficking shift elsewhere, because the drug trade is so lucrative that someone will always want to take it up - particularly in countries where the drug trade might be one of the only economic opportunities and governments won't be strong enough to suppress the drug trade.

Sometimes the drug war has failed to push down production altogether, like in Afghanistan. The US spent $7.6 billion between 2002 and 2014 to crack down on opium in Afghanistan, where a bulk of the world's supply for heroin comes from. Despite the efforts, Afghanistan's opium poppy crop cultivation reached record levels in 2013.

On the demand side, illicit drug use has dramatically fluctuated since the drug war began. The Monitoring the Future survey, which tracks illicit drug use among high school students, offers a useful proxy: In 1975, four years after President Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs, 30.7 percent of high school seniors reportedly used drugs in the previous month. In 1992, the rate was 14.4 percent. In 2013, it was back up to 25.5 percent.

Still, prohibition does likely make drugs less accessible than they would be if they were legal. A 2014 study by Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested that prohibition multiplies the price of hard drugs like cocaine by as much as 10 times. And illicit drugs obviously aren't available through easy means - one can't just walk into a CVS and buy heroin. So the drug war is likely stopping some drug use: Caulkins estimates that legalization could lead hard drug abuse to triple, although he told me it could go much higher.

But there's also evidence that the drug war is too punitive: A 2014 study from Peter Reuter at the University of Maryland and Harold Pollack at the University of Chicago found there's no good evidence that tougher punishments or harsher supply-elimination efforts do a better job of pushing down access to drugs and substance abuse than lighter penalties. So increasing the severity of the punishment doesn't do much, if anything, to slow the flow of drugs.

Instead, most of the reduction in accessibility from the drug war appears to be a result of the simple fact that drugs are illegal, which by itself makes drugs more expensive and less accessible by eliminating avenues toward mass production and distribution.

The question is whether the possible reduction of potential drug use is worth the drawbacks that come in other areas, including a strained criminal justice system and the global proliferation of violence fueled by illegal drug markets. If the drug war has failed to significantly reduce drug use, production, and trafficking, then perhaps it's not worth these costs, and a new approach is preferable.

How does the US decide which drugs are regulated or banned?

The US uses what's called the drug scheduling system. Under the Controlled Substances Act, there are five categories of controlled substances known as schedules, which weigh a drug's medical value and abuse potential.

Medical value is typically evaluated through scientific research, particularly large-scale clinical trials similar to those used by the Food and Drug Administration for pharmaceuticals. Potential for abuse isn't clearly defined by the Controlled Substances Act, but for the federal government, abuse is when individuals take a substance on their own initiative, leading to personal health hazards or dangers to society as a whole.

Under this system, Schedule 1 drugs are considered to have no medical value and a high potential for abuse. Schedule 2 drugs have high potential for abuse but some medical value. As the rank goes down to Schedule 5, a drug's potential for abuse generally decreases.

It may be helpful to think of the scheduling system as made up of two distinct groups: nonmedical and medical. The nonmedical group is the Schedule 1 drugs, which are considered to have no medical value and high potential for abuse. The medical group is the Schedule 2 to 5 drugs, which have some medical value and are numerically ranked based on abuse potential (from high to low).

Marijuana and heroin are Schedule 1 drugs, so the federal government says they have no medical value and a high potential for abuse. Cocaine, meth, and opioid painkillers are Schedule 2 drugs, so they're considered to have some medical value and high potential for abuse. Steroids and testosterone products are Schedule 3, Xanax and Valium are Schedule 4, and cough preparations with limited amounts of codeine are Schedule 5. Congress specifically exempted alcohol and tobacco from the schedules in 1970.

Although these schedules help shape criminal penalties for illicit drug possession and sales, they're not always the final word. Congress, for instance, massively increased penalties against crack cocaine in 1986 in response to concerns about a crack epidemic and its potential link to crime. And state governments can set up their own criminal penalties and schedules for drugs as well.

Other countries, like the UK and Australia, use similar systems to the US, although their specific rankings for some drugs differ.

How does the US enforce the war on drugs?

The US fights the war on drugs both domestically and overseas.

On the domestic front, the federal government supplies local and state police departments with funds, legal flexibility, and special equipment to crack down on illicit drugs. Local and state police then use this funding to go after drug dealing organizations.

"[Federal] assistance helped us take out major drug organizations, and we took out a number of them in Baltimore," said Neill Franklin, a retired police major and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which opposes the war on drugs. "But to do that, we took out the low-hanging fruit to work up the chain to find who was at the top of the pyramid. It started with low-level drug dealers, working our way up to midlevel management, all the way up to the kingpins."

Some of the funding, particularly from the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program, encourages local and state police to participate in anti-drug operations. If police don't use the money to go after illicit substances, they risk losing it - providing a financial incentive for cops to continue the war on drugs.

Although the focus is on criminal groups, casual users still get caught in the criminal justice system. Between 1999 and 2007, Human Rights Watch found at least 80 percent of drug-related arrests were for possession, not sales.

It seems, however, that arrests for possession don't typically turn into convictions and prison time. According to federal statistics, only 5.3 percent of drug offenders in federal prisons and 27.9 percent of drug offenders in state prisons in 2004 were in for drug possession. The overwhelming majority were in for trafficking, and a small few were in for an unspecified "other" category.

Internationally, the US regularly aids other countries in their efforts to crack down on drugs. For example, the US in the 2000s provided military aid and training to Colombia - in what's known as Plan Colombia - to help the Latin American country go after criminal organizations and paramilitaries funded through drug trafficking.

Given the struggles of the war on drugs to meet its goals, federal and state officials have begun moving away from harsh enforcement tactics and tough-on-crime stances. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy now advocates for a bigger focus on rehabilitation and less on law enforcement. Even some conservatives, like former Texas Governor Rick Perry, have embraced drug courts, which place drug offenders into rehabilitation programs instead of jail or prison.

The idea behind these reforms is to find a better balance between locking up more people for drug trafficking while moving genuinely problematic drug users to rehabilitation and treatment services that could help them. "We can't arrest our way out of the problem," Michael Botticelli, US drug czar, said, "and we really need to focus our attention on proven public health strategies to make a significant difference as it relates to drug use and consequences to that in the United States."

How has the war on drugs changed the US criminal justice system?

The escalation of the criminal justice system's reach over the past few decades, ranging from more incarceration to seizures of private property and militarization, can be traced back to the war on drugs.

After the US stepped up the drug war throughout the 1970s and '80s, harsher sentences for drug offenses played a role in turning the country into the world's leader in incarceration. (But drug offenders still make up a small part of the prison population: About 54 percent of people in state prisons - which house more than 86 percent of the US prison population - were violent offenders in 2012, and 16 percent were drug offenders, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.)

Still, mass incarceration has massively strained the criminal justice system and led to a lot of overcrowding in US prisons - to the point that some states, such as California, have rolled back penalties for nonviolent drug users and sellers with the explicit goal of reducing their incarcerated population.

In terms of police powers, civil asset forfeitures have been justified as a way to go after drug dealing organizations. These forfeitures allow law enforcement agencies to take the organizations' assets - cash in particular - and then use the gains to fund more anti-drug operations. The idea is to turn drug dealers' ill-gotten gains against them.

But there have been many documented cases in which police abused civil asset forfeiture, including instances in which police took people's cars and cash simply because they suspected - but couldn't prove - that there was some sort of illegal activity going on. In these cases, it's actually up to people whose private property was taken to prove that they weren't doing anything illegal - instead of traditional legal standards in which police have to prove wrongdoing or reasonable suspicion of it before they act.

Since the beginning of the war on drugs, the general trend has been to massively grow police powers and expand the criminal justice system as a means of combating drug use. But as the drug war struggles to halt drug use and trafficking, the heavy-handed policies - which many describe as draconian - have been called into question. If the war on drugs isn't meeting its goals, critics say these expansions of the criminal justice system aren't worth the financial strain and costs to liberty in the US.

How has the drug war contributed to violence around the world?

The war on drugs has created a black market for illicit drugs that criminal organizations around the world can rely on for revenue that payrolls other, more violent activities. This market supplies so much revenue that drug trafficking organizations can actually rival developing countries' weak government institutions.

In Mexico, for example, drug cartels have leveraged their profits from the drug trade to violently maintain their stranglehold over the market despite the government's war on drugs. As a result, public decapitations have become a particularly prominent tactic of ruthless drug cartels. As many as 80,000 people have died in the war. Tens of thousands of people have gone missing since 2007, including 43 students who vanished in 2014 in a widely publicized case.

But even if Mexico were to actually defeat drug cartels, this potentially wouldn't reduce drug war violence on a global scale. Instead, drug production and trafficking, and the violence that comes with both, would likely shift elsewhere, because the drug trade is so lucrative that someone will always want to take it up - particularly in countries where the drug trade might be one of the only economic opportunities and governments won't be strong enough to suppress the drug trade.

In 2014, for instance, the drug war significantly contributed to the child migrant crisis. After some drug trafficking was pushed out of Mexico, gangs and drug cartels stepped up their operations in Central America's Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. These countries, with their weak criminal justice and law enforcement systems, didn't seem to have the capacity to deal with the influx of violence and crime.

The war on drugs "drove a lot of the activities to Central America, a region that has extremely weakened systems," Adriana Beltran of the Washington Office on Latin America explained. "Unfortunately, there hasn't been a strong commitment to building the criminal justice system and the police."

As a result, children fled their countries by the thousands in a major humanitarian crisis. Many of these children ended up in the US, where the refugee system simply doesn't have the capacity to handle the rush of child migrants.

Although the child migrant crisis is fairly unique in its specific circumstances and effects, the series of events - a government cracks down on drugs, trafficking moves to another country, and the drug trade brings violence and crime - is pretty typical in the history of the war on drugs. In the past couple of decades it happened in Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, and Ecuador after successful anti-drug crackdowns in other Latin American countries.

The Wall Street Journal explained:

Ironically, the shift is partly a by-product of a drug-war success story, Plan Colombia. In a little over a decade, the U.S. spent nearly $8 billion to back Colombia's efforts to eradicate coca fields, arrest traffickers and battle drug-funded guerrilla armies such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Colombian cocaine production declined, the murder rate plunged and the FARC is on the run.

But traffickers adjusted. Cartels moved south across the Ecuadorean border to set up new storage facilities and pioneer new smuggling routes from Ecuador's Pacific coast. Colombia's neighbor to the east, Venezuela, is now the departure point for half of the cocaine going to Europe by sea.

As a 2012 report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime explained, "one country's success became the problem of others."

This global proliferation of violence is one of the most prominent costs of the drug war. When evaluating whether the war on drugs has been successful, experts and historians weigh this cost, along with the rise of incarceration in the US, against the benefits, such as potentially depressed drug use, to gauge whether anti-drug efforts have been worth it.

How much does the war on drugs cost?

Enforcing the war on drugs costs the US more than $51 billion each year, according to the Drug Policy Alliance. As of 2012, the US had spent $1 trillion on anti-drug efforts.

The spending estimates don't account for the loss of potential taxes on currently illegal substances. According to a 2010 paper from the libertarian Cato Institute, taxing and regulating illicit drugs similarly to tobacco and alcohol could raise $46.7 billion in tax revenue each year.

Is the war on drugs racist?

In the US, the war on drugs mostly impacts minority, particularly black, communities. This disproportionate effect is why critics often call the war on drugs racist.

When black defendants are convicted for drug crimes, they face longer prison sentences as well. Drug sentences for black men were 13.1 percent longer than drug sentences for white men between 2007 and 2009, according to a 2012 report from the US Sentencing Commission.

The Sentencing Project explained the differences in a February 2015 report: "Myriad criminal justice policies that appear to be race-neutral collide with broader socioeconomic patterns to create a disparate racial impact... Socioeconomic inequality does lead people of color to disproportionately use and sell drugs outdoors, where they are more readily apprehended by police."

One example: Trafficking crack cocaine, one of the few illicit drugs that's more popular among black Americans, carries the harshest punishment. The threshold for a five-year mandatory minimum sentence of crack is 28 grams. In comparison, the threshold for powder cocaine, which is more popular among white than black Americans but pharmacoligically similar to crack, is 500 grams.

As for the broader racial disparities, federal programs that encourage local and state police departments to crack down on drugs may create perverse incentives to go after minority communities. Some federal grants, for instance, previously required police to make more drug arrests in order to obtain more funding for anti-drug efforts. Neill Franklin, a retired police major from Maryland and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, said minority communities are "the low-hanging fruit" for police departments because they tend to sell in open-air markets, such as public street corners, and have less political and financial power than white Americans.

In Chicago, for instance, an analysis by Project Know, a drug addiction resource center, found enforcement of anti-drug laws is concentrated in poor neighborhoods, which tend to have more crime but are predominantly black:

"Doing these evening and afternoon sweeps meant 20 to 30 arrests, and now you have some great numbers for your grant application," Franklin said. "In that process, we also ended up seizing a lot of money and a lot of property. That's another cash cow."

The disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates have clearly detrimental effects on minority communities. A 2014 study published in the journal Sociological Science found boys with imprisoned fathers are much less likely to possess the behavioral skills needed to succeed in school by the age of 5, starting them on a vicious path known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

As the drug war continues, these racial disparities have become one of the major points of criticism against it. It's not just whether the war on drugs has led to the widespread, costly incarceration of millions of Americans, but whether incarceration has created "the new Jim Crow" - a reference to policies, such as segregation and voting restrictions, that subjugated black communities in America.

What are the roots of the war on drugs?

Beyond the goal of curtailing drug use, the motivations behind the US war on drugs have been rooted in historical fears of immigrants and minority groups.

As the New York Times explained, the federal prohibition of marijuana came during a period of national hysteria about the effect of the drug on Mexican immigrants and black communities. Concerns about a new, exotic drug, coupled with feelings of xenophobia and racism that were all too common in the 1930s, drove law enforcement, the broader public, and eventually legislators to demand the drug's prohibition. "Police in Texas border towns demonized the plant in racial terms as the drug of 'immoral' populations who were promptly labeled 'fiends,'" wrote the Times's Brent Staples.

These beliefs extended to practically all forms of drug prohibition. According to historian Peter Knight, opium largely came over to America with Chinese immigrants on the West Coast. Americans, already skeptical of the drug, quickly latched on to xenophobic beliefs that opium somehow made Chinese immigrants dangerous. "Stories of Chinese immigrants who lured white females into prostitution, along with the media depictions of the Chinese as depraved and unclean, bolstered the enactment of anti-opium laws in eleven states between 1877 and 1900," Knight wrote.

Cocaine was similarly attached in fear to black communities, neuroscientist Carl Hart wrote for the Nation. The belief was so widespread that the New York Times even felt comfortable writing headlines in 1914 that claimed "Negro cocaine 'fiends' are a new southern menace." The author of the Times piece - a physician - wrote, "[The cocaine user] imagines that he hears people taunting and abusing him, and this often incites homicidal attacks upon innocent and unsuspecting victims." He later added, "Many of the wholesale killings in the South may be cited as indicating that accuracy in shooting is not interfered with - is, indeed, probably improved - by cocaine. ... I believe the record of the 'cocaine n----r' near Asheville who dropped five men dead in their tracks using only one cartridge for each, offers evidence that is sufficiently convincing."

Most recently, these fears of drugs and the connection to minorities came up during what law enforcement officials characterized as a crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s and '90s. Lawmakers, judges, and police in particular linked crack to violence in minority communities. The connection was part of the rationale for making it 100 times easier to get a mandatory minimum sentence for crack cocaine over powder cocaine, even though the two drugs are pharmacologically identical. As a result, minority groups have received considerably harsher prison sentences for illegal drugs. (In 2010, the ratio between crack's sentence and cocaine's was reduced from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1.)

Hart explained, after noting the New York Times's coverage in particular: "Over the [late 1980s], a barrage of similar articles connected crack and its associated problems with black people. Entire specialty police units were deployed to 'troubled neighborhoods,' making excessive arrests and subjecting the targeted communities to dehumanizing treatment. Along the way, complex economic and social forces were reduced to criminal justice problems; resources were directed toward law enforcement rather than neighborhoods' real needs, such as job creation."

None of this means the war on drugs is solely driven by fears of immigrants and minorities, and many people are genuinely concerned about drugs' effects on individuals and society. But when it comes to the war on drugs, the historical accounts suggest the harshest crackdowns often follow hysteria linked to minority drug use - making the racial disparities in the drug war seem like a natural consequence of anti-drug efforts' roots.

What about the band The War on Drugs?

They're pretty great, though they don't have much to do with the actual war on drugs.

But since you mentioned them, take a break and listen to a couple songs from their latest album, .

The War on Drugs, "Red Eye":

The War on Drugs, "Under the Pressure":

Bonus from their 2011 album, Slave Ambient: The War on Drugs, "Best Night":

What are the most dangerous drugs?

This is actually a fairly controversial question among drug policy experts. Although some researchers have tried to rank drugs by their harms, some experts argue the rankings are often far more misleading than useful.

In a report published in , a group of researchers evaluated the harms of drug use in the UK, considering factors like deadliness, chance of developing dependence, behavioral changes such as increased risk of violence, and losses in economic productivity. Alcohol, heroin, and crack cocaine topped the chart.

There are at least two huge caveats to this report. First, it doesn't entirely control for the availability of these drugs, so it's likely heroin and crack cocaine in particular would be ranked higher if they were as readily available as alcohol. Second, the scores were intended for British society, so the specific scores may differ slightly for the US. David Nutt, who led the analysis, suggested meth's harm score could be much higher in the US, since it's more widely used in America.

But drug policy experts argue the study and ranking miss some of the nuance behind the harm of certain drugs.

Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, gave the example of an alien race visiting Earth and asking which land animal is the biggest. If the question is about weight, the African elephant is the biggest land animal. But if it's about height, the giraffe is the biggest. And if the question is about length, the reticulated python is the biggest.

"You can always create some composite, but composites are fraught with problems," Caulkins said. "I think it's more misleading than useful."

The blunt measures of drug harms present similar issues. Alcohol, tobacco, and prescription painkillers are likely deadlier than other drugs because they are legal, so comparing their aggregate effects to illegal drugs is difficult. Some drugs are very harmful to individuals, but they're so rarely used that they may not be a major public health threat. A few drugs are enormously dangerous in the short term but not so much the long term (heroin), or vice versa (tobacco). And looking at deaths or other harms caused by certain drugs doesn't always account for substances, such as prescription medications, that are often mixed with others, making them more deadly or harmful than they would be alone.

Given the diversity of drugs and their effects, many experts argue that trying to establish a ranking of the most dangerous drugs is a futile, misleading exercise. Instead of trying to base policy on a ranking, experts say, lawmakers should build individual policies that try to minimize each drug's specific set of risks and harms.

Why are alcohol and tobacco exempted from the war on drugs?

Tobacco and alcohol are explicitly exempted from drug scheduling, despite their detrimental impacts on individual health and society as a whole, due to economic and cultural reasons.

Tobacco and alcohol have been acceptable drugs in US culture for hundreds of years, and they are stillthe most widely used drugs, along with caffeine, in the nation. Trying to stop Americans - through the threat of legal force - from using these drugs would likely result in an unmitigated policy disaster, simply because of their popularity and cultural acceptance.

In fact, exactly that happened in the 1920s: In 1920, the federal government attempted to prohibit alcohol sales through the 18th Amendment. Experts and historians widely consider this policy, popularly known as Prohibition, a failure and even a disaster, since it led to a massive black market for alcohol that funded criminal organizations across the US. It took Congress just 14 years to repeal Prohibition.

Alcohol and tobacco are also major parts of the US economy. In 2013, alcohol sales totaled $124.7 billion (excluding purchases in bars and restaurants), and tobacco sales amounted to $108 billion. If lawmakers decided to prohibit and dismantle these legal industries, it would cost the economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs.

Lawmakers were well aware of these cultural and economic issues when they approved the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. So they exempted alcohol and tobacco from the definition of controlled substances.

If these drugs weren't exempted, tobacco and alcohol would likely be tightly controlled under the current scheduling regime. Mark Kleiman, one of the nation's leading drug policy experts, argued both would be considered schedule 1 substances if they were evaluated today, since they're highly abused, addictive, detrimental to one's health and society, and have no established medical value.

All of this gets to a key point about the war on drugs: Policymakers don't evaluate drugs in a vacuum. They also consider the socioeconomic implications of banning a substance, and whether those potential drawbacks are worth the gains of potentially reducing substance use and abuse.

But this type of analysis of the pros and cons is also why critics want to end the war on drugs today. Even if the drug war has successfully brought down drug use and abuse, its effects on budgets, civil rights, and international violence are so great and detrimental that the minor impact it may have on drug use might not be worth the costs.

How much of the war on drugs is tied to international treaties?

If lawmakers decided to stop the war on drugs tomorrow, a major hurdle could be international agreements that require restrictions and regulations on certain drugs.

There is a lot of disagreement among drug policy experts, enforcers, and reformers about the stringency of the treaties. Several sections of the conventions allow countries some flexibility so they don't violate their own constitutional protections. The US, for example, has never enforced penalties on inciting illicit drug use on the basis that it would violate rights to freedom of speech.

Many argue that any move toward legalization of use, possession, and sales is in violation of international treaties. Under this argument, some governments - including several US states and Uruguay - are technically in violation of the treaties because they legalized marijuana for personal possession and sales.

Others say that countries have a lot of flexibility due to the constitutional exemptions in the conventions. Countries could claim, for instance, that their protections for right to privacy and health allow them to legalize drugs despite the conventions. When it comes to individual states in the US, the federal government argues that America's federalist system allows states some flexibility as long as the federal government keeps drugs illegal.

"It's pretty clear that the war on drugs was waged for political reasons and some countries have used the treaties as an excuse to pursue draconian policies," said Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of the Open Society Global Drug Policy Program. "Nevertheless, we've seen a number of countries drop criminal penalties for minor possession of all drugs. We've seen others put drugs into a pharmaceutical model, including the prescription of heroin to people with serious addictions. This seems completely possible within the treaties."

Even if a country decided to dismantle prohibition and violate the treaties, it's unclear how the international community would respond. If the US, for example, ended prohibition, there's little other countries could do to interfere; there's no international drug court, and sanctions would be very unlikely for a country as powerful as America.

Still, Martin Jelsma, an international drug policy expert at the Transnational Institute, argued that ignoring or pulling out of the international drug conventions could seriously damage America's standing around the world. "Pacta sunt servanda ('agreements must be kept') is the most fundamental principle of international law and it would be very undermining if countries start to take an 'a-la-carte' approach to treaties they have signed; they cannot simply comply with some provisions and ignore others without losing the moral authority to ask other countries to oblige to other treaties," Jelsma wrote in an email. "So our preference is to acknowledge legal tensions with the treaties and try to resolve them."

To resolve such issues, many critics of the war on drugs hope to reform international drug laws in 2016 during the next General Assembly Special Session on drugs.

"There is tension with the tax-and-regulate approach to marijuana in some jurisdictions," Malinowska-Sempruch said. "But it's all part of a process, and that's why we hope the UN debate in 2016 is as open as possible, so that we can settle some of these questions and, if necessary, modernize the system."

Until then, any country taking steps to revamp its drug policy regime could face criticisms and a loss of credibility from its international peers.

How do other countries deal with drugs?

There is a lot of variety in how different countries have adopted the UN conventions, ranging from levels of enforcement even more stringent than US drug laws to outright decriminalization. Here are a few examples:

China carries out some of the harshest punishments for illicit drug trafficking. In the lead-up to International Anti-Drug Day, Chinese officials unveiled executions and other harsh punishments for drug traffickers in 2014, 2013, 2012, 2010, and 2009.

The United Kingdom maintains a classification system similar to America's scheduling system, with criminal penalties set based on a drug's classification. For example, selling class A substances can get someone up to life in prison, while class B sentences are limited to a maximum of 14 years.

Portugal in 2001 decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin.A 2009 report authored by Glenn Greenwald for the libertarian Cato Institute found drug use fell among teenagers in Portugal following decriminalization, but use ticked up for young adults ages 20 to 24.

Uruguay in 2012 legalized marijuana for personal use and sales to eliminate a major source of revenue for violent drug cartels. The government is now working to establish regulations for the sales and distribution of pot.

The varied approaches show that even though the US has been a major leader in the global war on drugs, its model of combating drug use and trafficking domestically is hardly the only option. Other countries have looked at the pros and cons and decided on vastly different drug policy regimes, with varying degrees of success.

What's the case for focusing more on rehabilitation and addiction treatment?

The most cautious reform to the drug war puts more emphasis on rehabilitation instead of locking up drug users in prison, but it does this without decriminalizing or legalizing drugs.

This is the approach recently embraced by the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, which plans to increase funding for rehabilitation programs in the coming years. The Obama administration also approved several legal and regulatory reforms, including Obamacare, that increased access to addiction treatment through health insurance. (However, the federal government still spends billions each year on conventional law enforcement operations against drugs.)

Other countries have taken even more drastic steps toward rehabilitation, some of which acknowledge that not all addicts can be cured of drug dependency. Several European countries prescribe and administer, with supervision, heroin to a small number of addicts who prove resistant to other treatments. These programs allow some addicts to satisfy their drug dependency without a large risk of overdose and without resorting to other crimes to obtain drugs, such as robbery and burglary.

Researchers credit the heroin-assisted treatment program in Switzerland, the first national scheme of its kind, with reductions in drug-related crimes and improvements in social functioning, such as stabilized housing and employment. But some supporters of the war on drugs, such as the International Task Force on Strategic Drug Policy, argue that these programs give the false impression that drug habits can be managed safely, which could weaken the social stigma surrounding drug use and lead more people to try dangerous drugs.

For drug policymakers, the question is whether potentially breaking this stigma - and perhaps leading to more drug use - is worth the benefit of getting more people the treatment they need. Generally, drug policy experts agree that this tradeoff is worth it.

What's the case for decriminalizing drugs?

Mark Kleiman, one of the leading drug policy experts in the country, once opposed the idea of decriminalization, but he warmed up to it after looking at the evidence. "What I've learned since then," he said, "is nobody's got any empirical evidence that shows criminalization reduces consumption noticeably."

Kleiman said decriminalization could be paired with a focus on rehabilitation. He advocated for policies like 24/7 Sobriety Programs that require twice-daily alcohol testing for every single person convicted of drunk driving; anyone who fails the test is swiftly sent to jail for a few days. In South Dakota, alcohol-related traffic deaths declined by 33 percent between 2006 and 2007 - the highest decrease in the nation - after implementation of a 24/7 Sobriety Program.

In a paper, Kleiman analyzed a similar program in Hawaii for illicit drug users. Participants in that program had large reductions in positive drug tests and were significantly less likely to be arrested during follow-ups at three months, six months, and 12 months.
"Nobody's got any empirical evidence that shows criminalization reduces consumption noticeably"
A 2009 report from the libertarian Cato Institute found that after Portugal decriminalized all drugs, people were more willing to seek out rehabilitation programs. "The most substantial barrier to offering treatment to the addict population was the addicts' fear of arrest," Glenn Greenwald, who authored the paper, wrote. "One prime rationale for decriminalization was that it would break down that barrier, enabling effective treatment options to be offered to addicts once they no longer feared prosecution. Moreover, decriminalization freed up resources that could be channeled into treatment and other harm reduction programs."

As with heroin-assisted treatment programs, supporters of the war on drugs argue decriminalization legitimizes and increases drug use by removing the social stigma attached to it. But the research doesn't appear to support this point.

Some drug policy reform advocates and experts, however, are critical of decriminalization without the legalization of sales. Isaac Campos, a drug historian at the University of Cincinnati, argued that keeping the drug market in criminal hands lets them maintain a huge source of revenue. "The black market might even be fueled somewhat by the fact that people won't be arrested anymore, because maybe more people will use," Campos said. "We don't know if that's the case, but it's possible."

The concern for decriminalization supporters is that letting businesses come in and sell drugs could lead to aggressive marketing and advertising, similar to how the alcohol industry behaves today. This could lead to more drug use, particularly among problem users who would likely make up most of the demand for drugs. The top 10 percent of alcohol drinkers, for example, account for more than half the alcohol consumed in any given year in the US.

Decriminalization, then, is a bit of a compromise in reforming the war on drugs. It would reduce some of the incarceration caused by the drug war, but it would continue operations that seek to reduce drug trafficking and hopefully make a drug habit less affordable and accessible.

What's the case for legalizing drugs?

Given the concerns about the illicit drug market as a source of revenue for violent drug cartels, some advocates call for outright legalization of drug use, possession, distribution, and sales. Exactly what legalization entails, however, can vary.

Drug policy experts point out that there are several ways to legalize a drug. For example, in a January 2015 report about marijuana legalization for the Vermont legislature, some of the nation's top drug policy experts outlined several alternatives, including allowing possession and growing but not sales (like DC), allowing distribution only within small private clubs, or having the state government operate the supply chain and sell pot.

The report particularly favors a state-run monopoly for marijuana production and sales to help eliminate the black market and produce the best public health outcomes, since regulators could directly control prices and who buys pot. Previous research found that states that maintained a government-operated monopoly for alcohol kept prices higher, reduced access to youth, and reduced overall levels of use - all benefits to public health. A similar model could be applied to other drugs.

But Jeffrey Miron, an economist at Harvard University and the libertarian Cato Institute, supports full legalization, even it means the commercialization of drugs that are currently illegal. This, he said, is the only complete answer to eliminating the black market as a source of revenue for violent criminal groups.

When asked about full legalization, Mark Kleiman, a drug policy expert who supports decriminalization, pushed back against the concept. He said full legalization could foster and encourage more problem drug users. For-profit drug businesses, just like alcohol and tobacco companies, would prefer heavy users, because the heavy users tend to buy way more of their product. In Colorado's legal marijuana market, for example, the heaviest 30 percent of users make up nearly 90 percent of demand for pot. "They are an industry with a set of objectives that flatly contradicts public interest," Kleiman said.

Miron argued that even if sales or distribution are legalized, the harder drugs could be taxed and regulated similarly to or more harshly than tobacco and alcohol, although he personally doesn't support that approach. "You could absolutely legalize it and have restrictions on commercialization," Miron said. "Those should be separate questions."

Kleiman argued the alcohol model has clear pitfalls. Alcohol still causes health problems that kill tens of thousands each year, it's often linked to violent crime, and some experts consider it one of the most dangerous drugs.

Still, some evidence suggests the alcohol model could be adjusted to reduce its issues. In a big review of the evidence, Alexander Wagenaar, Amy Tobler, and Kelli Komro concluded that increasing alcohol taxes - and, as a result, getting people to drink less alcohol - would significantly reduce violence, crime, and other negative repercussions of alcohol use.

But there's evidence that the drug war increases prices and decreases accessibility far beyond taxes and regulation could. A 2014 study by Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, found that prohibition multiplies hard drug prices by as much as 10 times, so legalization - by eliminating prohibition and allowing greater access to drugs - could greatly increase the rates of drug abuse.

The question of legalization, then, goes back once again to considerations about balancing the good and the bad: Is reducing the rates of drug abuse, particularly in the US, worth the carnage enabled by the money violent criminal organizations make off the black market for drugs? This is a common refrain of drug policy that's repeated again and again by experts: A perfect solution doesn't exist, so policymaking should focus on picking the best of many bad options.

"There are always choices," Keith Humphreys, a drug policy expert at Stanford University, explained. "There is no framework available in which there's not harm somehow. We've got freedom, pleasure, health, crime, and public safety. You can push on one and two of those - maybe even three with different drugs - but you can't get rid of all of them. You have to pay the piper somewhere."

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The US has been fighting a global war on drugs for decades. But as prison populations and financial costs increase and drug-related violence around the world continues, lawmakers and experts are...

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Jazz Jennings talks 'Life as a (Transgender) Teen'

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Jazz Jennings talks 'Life as a (Transgender) Teen'

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Jazz Jennings is your average teenage girl, except she happened to be born in a boy's body.

The transgender teen - who was diagnosed with gender dysphoria at age 3 and appeared on at age 6 - has since raised the visibility of trans youth through her TLC docu-series, (Wednesday, 10 p.m. ET) and her work as a youth ambassador for the Human Rights Campaign. But her new memoir, Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen (Crown), sees the 15-year-old getting more personal than ever. We spoke with Jazz about the book, which hits shelves Tuesday.
Q: You co-wrote a children's book, I Am Jazz, in September 2014. What made you want to do a memoir next?
A: I Am Jazz was more for children to understand what it means to be transgender, but with Being Jazz, I wanted to get the universal message across that we are all just people and we have to live our lives authentically.
Q: What are the biggest misconceptions about the trans community that you were looking to debunk?
A: One of the biggest is that people think it's a choice, but it's not. It's the way we were born.

Another misconception is that it's all about what's between your legs rather than what's between your ears. Being transgender isn't a medical transition. It's a process of learning to love yourself for who you are. And the last is this: A lot of people think I was too young to transition. I was 2 years old when I first started expressing myself but from the start, I knew I was a girl. And I think most children out there just know - whether they gravitate toward Barbies rather than trucks - they know.
Q: In an ideal world, how would we handle gender?
A: I wish everything was gender neutral. I wish we weren't separated by boundaries like pink and blue and little things like that. I wish we could choose how we express ourselves without hate.
Q: How does it feel to see public figures addressing discrimination and standing in solidarity against laws like House Bill 2?
A: The hate is real, and it's not just people hiding behind their computers. Now, it's politicians. But the fact that so many people are rallying in support of the transgender community means so much. Look at the Obama administration - they've put out a directive (on the use of bathrooms by transgender students), telling states they can't discriminate against kids on the basis of gender identity. So many people are finally understanding that this is not OK.
Q: You've been called brave for speaking on trans issues but in your book, you admit that you were privileged to have the resources and support that you had. What would be your advice to trans kids who don't have that?
A: Those are the people with true courage. I'd tell them to stay strong and keep moving forward... and know that one day things will get better. And I'd also tell them to try to find one peer, one adult, one person in your community that you can be yourself around.

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Jazz Jennings talks 'Life as a (Transgender) Teen'

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The 15-year-old's book hits shelves Tuesday, one day before her show's Season 2 premiere.

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Native American Rights Hunting And Fishing Rights

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Native American Rights Hunting And Fishing Rights

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Hunting And Fishing Rights

Hunting and fishing rights are some of the special rights that Native Americans enjoy as a result of the treaties signed between their tribes and the federal government. Historically, hunting and fishing were critically important to Native American tribes. Fish and wildlife were a primary source of food and trade goods, and tribes based their own seasonal movements on fish migrations. In addition, fish and wildlife played a central role in the spiritual and cultural framework of Native American life. As the Court noted, access to fish and wildlife was "not much less necessary to the existence of the Indians than the atmosphere they breathed" ( United States v. Winans, 198 U.S. 371, S. Ct. 662, 49 L. Ed. 2d 1089 [1905]).

When Native American tribes signed treaties consenting to give up their lands, the treaties often explicitly guaranteed hunting and fishing rights. When the treaties created reservations, they usually gave tribe members the right to hunt and fish on reservation lands. In many cases, treaties guaranteed Native Americans the continued freedom to hunt and fish in their traditional hunting and fishing locations, even if those areas were outside the reservations. Even when hunting and fishing rights were not specifically mentioned in treaties, the reserved-rights doctrine holds that tribes retain any rights, including the right to hunt and fish, that are not explicitly abrogated by treaty or statute.

Controversy and protest have surrounded Native American hunting and fishing rights, as state governments and non-Indian hunters and fishers have fought to make Native Americans subject to state hunting and fishing regulations. The rights of tribal members to hunt and fish on their own reservations have rarely been questioned, because states generally lack the power to regulate activities on Indian reservations. Tribes themselves have the right to regulate hunting and fishing on their reservations, whether or not they choose to do so. Protests have arisen, however, over the rights of Native Americans to hunt and fish off of their reservations. Such rights can be acquired in one of two ways. In some instances, Congress has reduced the size of a tribe's reservation, or terminated it completely, without removing the tribe's hunting and fishing rights on that land. In other cases, treaties have specifically guaranteed tribes the right to hunt and fish in locations off the reservations. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, treaty provisions commonly guaranteed the right of tribes to fish "at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations," both on and off their reservations. Tribes in the Great Lakes area also reserved their off-reservation fishing rights in the treaties they signed.

These off-reservation rights have led to intense opposition and protests from non-Indian hunters and fishermen and state wildlife agencies. Non-Indian hunters and fishermen resent the fact that Indians are not subject to the same state regulations and limits imposed on them. State agencies have protested the fact that legitimate conservation goals are compromised when Indians can hunt and fish without having to follow state wildlife regulations. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, has consistently upheld the off-reservation hunting and fishing rights of Native Americans. In the 1905 case United States v. Winans, it ruled that treaty language guaranteeing a tribe the right to "tak[e] fish at all usual and accustomed places" indeed guaranteed access to those usual and accustomed places, even if they were on privately owned land.

The most intense opposition to Native American off-reservation hunting and fishing rights has occurred in the Pacific Northwest, where tribal members have fought to defend their right to fish in their traditional locations, unhindered by state regulations. In a series of cases involving the state of Washington and local Native American tribes, the federal courts ruled on aspects of the extent and limits of tribal fishing rights. In a 1942 case, Tulee v. Washington, 315 U.S. 681, 62 S. Ct. 862, 86 L. Ed. 1115, the Court ruled that tribal members could not be forced to purchase fishing licenses because the treaties that their ancestors had signed already reserved the right to fish in the "usual and accustomed places."

That case was followed by a series of cases involving the Puyallup Indian tribe that became known as Puyallup I, Puyallup II, and Puyallup III. In the first of those cases, the Court ruled that the state of Washington has the right, in the interest of conservation, to regulate tribal fishing activities, as long as "the regulation meets appropriate standards and does not discriminate against the Indians" ( Puyallup Tribe v. Department of Game, 391 U.S. 392, 88 S. Ct. 1725, 20 L. Ed. 2d 689 [1968]). In the second case, the Court ruled that the state's prohibition on net fishing for steelhead trout was discriminatory because its effect was to reserve the entire harvestable run of steelhead to non-Indian sports fishermen ( Department of Game v. Puyallup Tribe, 414 U.S. 44, 94 S. Ct. 330, 38 L. Ed. 2d 254 [1973]). In its ruling, the Court declared that the steelhead "must in some manner be fairly apportioned between Indian net fishing and non-Indian sports fishing." Finally, in Puyallup III, the Court ruled that the fish caught by tribal members on their reservation could be counted against the Indian share of the fish ( Puyallup Tribe v. Department of Game, 429 U.S. 976, 97 S. Ct. 483, 50 L. Ed. 2d 583 [1976]).

This notion of a fair APPORTIONMENT of fish was clarified by United States v. Washington, 384 F. Supp. 312 (W.D. Wash. 1974), in which the court determined that treaty language guaranteeing tribes the right to take fish "in common with all citizens of the Territory" guaranteed the Indians not just the right to fish but also the right to a certain percentage of the harvestable run, up to 50 percent. This decision set off a firestorm of controversy throughout the Pacific Northwest. Hundreds of legal disputes erupted over the allocation of individual runs of salmon and steelhead, and state and non-Indian fishing interests attacked the decision. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld the decision in a collateral case, Washington v. Washington State Commercial Passenger Fishing Vessel Ass'n 443 U.S. 658, 99 S. Ct. 3055, 61 L. Ed. 2d 823 (1979). In that case, the Court upheld the district court's ruling and went on to clarify the details of the way the fish should be apportioned. Writing for the majority, Justice JOHN PAUL STEVENS stated that the treaties guaranteed the tribes "so much as, but no more than, is necessary to provide the Indians with a livelihood-that is to say a moderate living." A "fair apportionment, " he said, would be 50 percent of the fish, emphasizing that 50 percent was the maximum, but not the minimum, amount of fish to which the Indians were entitled.

The Court resolved a decade-old legal dispute in 1999 involving Indian fishing and hunting rights with the decision in Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, 526 U.S. 172, 119 S. Ct. 1187, 143 L. Ed. 2d 270 (1999). It ruled in favor of the Chippewa Indians' right to fish and hunt in northern Minnesota without state regulation. By a 5-4 vote, the Court upheld an appeals court decision finding that the tribe's rights under an 1837 treaty were still valid. The ruling marked a final victory for the tribe in its long fight to assert its treaty rights and to defend its cultural traditions.

Brought by the tribe in 1990, the lawsuit proved highly controversial in Minnesota, which regarded it as a threat to the $54 million in tourism revenue generated by the Mille Lacs Lake resort industry. But two lower federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the state's arguments that the 162-year old treaty had been invalidated by presidential order, later treaties, and even by Minnesota's gaining of statehood. The U.S. Supreme Court's majority opinion, written by Justice SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR, detailed the history of the treaty and subsequent actions that the state, nine counties, and landowners claimed had rendered the treaty invalid. She found nothing in this historical information that had bearing on the continued validity of the treaty.

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Native American Rights - Hunting And Fishing Rights

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Hunting And Fishing Rights Hunting and fishing rights are some of the special rights that Native Americans enjoy as a result of the treaties signed between their tribes and the federal government. Historically, hunting and fishing were critically important to Native American tribes.

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Should More Gun Control Laws Be Enacted? 

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Should More Gun Control Laws Be Enacted? 

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History of Gun Control Laws
Gun control laws are just as old or older than the Second Amendment (ratified in 1791). Some examples of gun control throughout colonial America included criminalizing the transfer of guns to Catholics, enslaved people, indentured servants, and Native Americans; regulating the storage of gun powder in homes; banning loaded guns in Boston houses; and mandating participation in formal gathering of troops and door-to-door surveys about guns owned.

Guns were common in the American Colonies, first for hunting and general self-protection and later as weapons in the American Revolutionary War. Several colonies' gun laws required that heads of households (including women) own guns and that all able-bodied men enroll in the militia and carry personal firearms. Read more history...

Pro & Con Arguments

Pro 1

The Second Amendment is not an unlimited or individual right to own guns.

Further, the Second Amendment was intended to protect the right of militias to own guns, not the right of individuals to own guns. Former Justice John Paul Stevens, in his dissenting opinion for District of Columbia et al. v. Heller, wrote, "the Framer's single-minded focus in crafting the constitutional guarantee 'to keep and bear arms' was on military use of firearms, which they viewed in the context of service in state militias," hence the inclusion of the phrase "well regulated militia."

Michael Waldman, President of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, stated there is nothing about an individual right to bear arms in the notes about the Second Amendment when it was being drafted, discussed, or ratified; the US Supreme Court declined to rule in favor of the individual right four times between 1876 and 1939; and all law articles on the Second Amendment from 1888 to 1959 stated that an individual right was not guaranteed.
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Pro 2

More gun control laws would reduce gun deaths.

Approximately 50% of unintentional fatal shootings were self-inflicted; and most unintentional firearm deaths were caused by friends or family members.

Five women are murdered with guns every day in the United States. A woman's risk of being murdered increases 500% if a gun is present during a domestic dispute. During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, 5,364 US soldiers were killed in action between Oct. 7, 2001 and Jan. 28, 2015; between 2001 and 2012 6,410 women were killed with a gun by an intimate partner in the United States.

Researchers found that a "general barrier to firearm access created through state regulation can have a significant deterrent effect on male suicide rates in the United States. Permit requirements and bans on sales to minors were the most effective of the regulations analyzed."

Gun licensing laws were associated with a 14% decrease in firearm homicides, while increases in firearm homicides were seen in places with right-to-carry and stand-your ground-laws.

More gun control leads to fewer suicides. When US gun ownership goes down, overall suicide rates drop; meanwhile, each 10 percentage-point increase in gun ownership is linked to a 26.9% increase in the youth suicide rate. In Indiana and Connecticut, after "red flag" laws to remove guns from people who may pose a threat were enacted, gun suicides decreased by 7.5% and 13.7% respectively, while suicides by other means did not decrease during the same time. A person who wants to kill him/herself is unlikely to commit suicide with poison or a knife when a gun is unavailable.

The US General Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that 31% of total accidental shooting deaths could have been prevented by installing safety devices on guns: 100% of deaths per year in which a child under 6 years old shoots and kills him/herself or another child could be prevented by automatic child-proof safety locks; and 23% of accidental shooting deaths by adolescents and adults per year could be prevented by loading indicators showing when a bullet was in the chamber ready to be fired.

Marjorie Sanfilippo, PhD, Professor of Psychology at Eckerd College who has researched children's behavior around guns, stated, "We put gates around swimming pools to keep children from drowning. We put safety caps on medications to keep children from poisoning themselves.... [B]ecause children are naturally curious and impulsive, and because we have shown time and again that we cannot 'gun-proof' them with education, we have a responsibility to keep guns out of the hands of children."
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Pro 3

The presence of a gun makes a conflict more likely to become violent.

The FBI found that arguments (such as romantic triangles, brawls fueled by alcohol or drugs, and arguments over money) resulted in 1,962 gun deaths (59.9% of the total).

An editorial published in the American Journal of Public Health noted, "gun-inflicted deaths [often] ensue from impromptu arguments and fights; in the US, two-thirds of the 7,900 deaths in 1981 involving arguments and brawls were caused by guns." A study published in the same journal found that "the weapons used [in altercations]... were those closest at hand." And thus, according to another study, "[r]ather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance."

Common sense gun control laws can decrease the likelihood of a violent situation turning deadly. President Ronald Reagan and others did not think the AR-15 military rifle (also called M16s by the Air Force) should be owned by civilians and, when the AR-15 was included in the assault weapons ban of 1994 (which expired on Sep. 13, 2004), the NRA supported the legislation. A Mother Jones investigation found that high-capacity magazines were used in at least 50% of the 62 mass shootings between 1982 and 2012.When high-capacity magazines were used in mass shootings, the death rate rose 63% and the injury rate rose 156%.
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Pro 4

A majority of adults, including gun owners, support common sense gun control such as background checks, bans on assault weapons, and bans on high-capacity magazines.

According to a Feb. 20, 2018 Quinnipiac Poll, 97% of American voters and 97% of gun owners support universal background checks. 67% support a nationwide ban on assault weapons, and 83% support mandatory waiting periods for gun purchases.

As much as 40% of all gun sales are undocumented private party gun sales that do not require a background check (aka the "gun show loophole").

53% of all adults surveyed approve of high-capacity magazine bans. 89% of adults with a gun in the home approve of laws to prevent the purchase of guns by the mentally ill, and 82% approve of banning gun sales to people on no-fly lists.

77% of Americans support requiring a license to purchase a gun.

Don Macalady, member of Hunters against Gun Violence, stated, "As a hunter and someone who has owned guns since I was a young boy, I believe that commonsense gun legislation makes us all safer. Background checks prevent criminals and other dangerous people from getting guns."

Many would like to see the U.S. enact more laws like other countries, citing the fact that countries with restrictive gun control laws have lower gun homicide and suicide rates than the United States. Both Switzerland and Finland require gun owners to acquire licenses and pass background checks that include mental and criminal records, among other restrictions and requirements. In 2007 Switzerland ranked number 3 in international gun ownership rates with 45.7 guns per 100 people (about 3,400,000 guns total). In 2009 Switzerland had 24 gun homicides (0.31 deaths per 100,000 people) and 253 gun suicides (3.29 deaths per 100,000 people). Finland ranked fourth in international gun ownership rates with 45.3 guns per 100 people (about 2,400,000 guns total). In 2007 Finland had 23 (0.43 deaths per 100,000 people) gun homicides and 172 gun suicides (4.19 deaths per 100,000 people).
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Con 1

The Second Amendment of the US Constitution protects individual gun ownership.

The Second Amendment of the US Constitution reads, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Lawrence Hunter, Chairman of Revolution PAC, stated, "The Founders understood that the right to own and bear laws is as fundamental and as essential to maintaining liberty as are the rights of free speech, a free press, freedom of religion and the other protections against government encroachments on liberty delineated in the Bill of Rights."
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Con 2

Gun control laws are discriminatory and infringe on citizens' rights

Current gun control laws are frequently aimed at inner city, poor, black communities who are perceived as more dangerous than white gun owners. Charles Gallagher, Chair of Sociology at LaSalle University, stated that some gun control laws are still founded on racial fears: "Whites walking down Main Street with an AK-47 are defenders of American values; a black man doing the same thing is Public Enemy No. 1."

Background checks and micro-stamping are an invasion of privacy. Background checks require government databases that keep personal individual information on gun owners, including name, addresses, mental health history, criminal records, and more. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) worried that Senator Harry Reid's 2013 proposed background check legislation (the bill failed 54-46) would have allowed the government to keep databases of gun purchases indefinitely, creating a "worry that you're going to see searches of the databases and an expansion for purposes that were not intended when the information was collected." Micro-stamping similarly requires a database of gun owners and the codes their personal guns would stamp on cartridge cases. Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Ted Cruz (R-TX) wrote that they would oppose any legislation that infringes "on the American people's constitutional right to bear arms, or on their ability to exercise this right without being subjected to government surveillance."

Gun control laws infringe upon the right to self-defense and deny people a sense of safety. The police cannot protect everyone all of the time. 61% of men and 56% of women surveyed by Pew Research said that stricter gun laws would "make it more difficult for people to protect their homes and families." Nelson Lund, Professor at George Mason University School of Law, stated, "The right to self-defense and to the means of defending oneself is a basic natural right that grows out of the right to life" and "many [gun control laws] interfere with the ability of law-abiding citizens to defend themselves against violent criminals." A Pew Foundation report found that 79% of male gun owners and 80% of female gun owners said owning a gun made them feel safer and 64% of people living in a home in which someone else owns a gun felt safer. Even Senator Dianne Feinstein, a gun control advocate, carried a concealed gun when her life was threatened and her home attacked by the New World Liberation Front in the 1970s.

Gun control laws, especially those that try to ban "assault weapons," infringe upon the right to own guns for hunting and sport. In 2011, there were 13.7 million hunters 16 years old or older in the United States, High-powered semiautomatic rifles and shotguns are used to hunt and in target shooting tournaments each year. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, "So-called 'Assault weapons' are more often than not less powerful than other hunting rifles. The term 'assault weapon' was conjured up by anti-gun legislators to scare voters into thinking these firearms are something out of a horror movie... [T]he Colt AR-15 and Springfield M1A, both labeled 'assault weapons,' are the rifles most used for marksmanship competitions in the United States. And their cartridges are standard hunting calibers, useful for game up to and including deer." According to a Feb. 2013 Pew Research report, 32% of gun owners owned guns for hunting and 7% owned guns for target or sport shooting.
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Con 3

Gun control laws simply do not work.

Gun control efforts have proved ineffective. According to David Lampo, Publications Director of the Cato Institute, "there is no correlation between waiting periods and murder or robbery rates." Banning high-capacity magazines will not necessarily deter crime because even small gun magazines can be changed in seconds.The "gun show loophole" is virtually nonexistent because commercial dealers, who sell the majority of guns at shows and elsewhere, are bound by strict federal laws. According to a Mar. 10, 2016 Lancet study, most state-level gun control laws do not reduce firearm death rates, and, of 25 state laws, nine were associated with higher gun death rates.

Mexico has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world and yet, in 2012, Mexico had 11,309 gun murders (9.97 gun homicides per 100,000 people) compared to the United States that had 9,146 gun homicides (2.97 per 100,000 people). The country has only one legal gun store (the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales), compared to at least 63,709 legal gun stores and pawn shops in the United States as of Feb. 10, 2014. Mexico's gun store is on a secure military base and customers must present a valid ID, go through a metal detector, and turn over cellphones and cameras to guards. To actually buy a gun, customers have to show proof of honest income, provide references, pass a criminal background check, prove any military duties were completed with honor, and be fingerprinted and photographed. If allowed to purchase a gun, the customer may buy only one gun (choosing from only .38 caliber pistols or lower) and one box of bullets. Between 2006 and 2010, Mexico's one gun shop sold 6,490 guns, yet as of 2012, Mexicans own about 15,000,000 guns, or about 13.5 guns per 100 people.

The main reason gun control doesn't work is because laws will not prevent criminals from obtaining guns or breaking laws. Of 62 mass shootings in the United States between 1982 and 2012, 49 of the shooters used legally obtained guns. Collectively, 143 guns were possessed by the killers with about 75% obtained legally. A Secret Service analysis found that of 24 mass shootings in 2019 at least 10 (42%) involved illegally possessed guns.

The logical conclusion is that gun control laws do not deter crime; gun ownership deters crime. A study in Applied Economics Letters found that "assault weapons bans did not significantly affect murder rates at the state level" and "states with restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons had higher gun-related murders." While gun ownership doubled in the twentieth century, the murder rate decreased. Journalist John Stossel explained, "Criminals don't obey the law... Without the fear of retaliation from victims who might be packing heat, criminals in possession of these [illegal] weapons now have a much easier job... As the saying goes, 'If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.'"

More gun control is not needed; education about guns and gun safety is needed to prevent accidental gun deaths. 95% of all US gun owners believe that children should learn about gun safety. The Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute, Inc (SAAMI), stated, "Whether in the field, at the range or in the home, a responsible and knowledgeable gun owner is rarely involved in a firearms accident of any kind." According to Kyle Wintersteen, Managing Editor of Guns and Ammo, studies show that "children taught about firearms and their legitimate uses by family members have much lower rates of delinquency than children in households without guns" and "children introduced to guns associate them with freedom, security, and recreation-not violence." [82] [85] [154]
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Con 4

Gun control laws give too much power to the government and may result in government tyranny and the government taking away all guns from citizens.

57% of people surveyed by Pew Research in Feb. 2013 said that gun control laws would "give too much power to the government over the people."

The NRA's Wayne LaPierre stated, "if you look at why our Founding Fathers put it [the Second Amendment] there, they had lived under the tyranny of King George and they wanted to make sure that these free people in this new country would never be subjugated again and have to live under tyranny."

Concurring, Alex Jones, radio host, stated, "The Second Amendment isn't there for duck hunting, it's there to protect us from tyrannical government and street thugs... 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms!"

Marco Rubio (R-FL), US Senator, speaking about gun control laws during his 2016 presidential campaign, stated, "If God forbid, ISIS visits our life, our neighborhood, our school, any part of us, the last thing standing, the last line of defense could very well be our ability to protect ourselves."
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Did You Know?

1. A Pew Foundation report found that 79% of male gun owners and 80% of female gun owners said owning a gun made them feel safer, and 64% of people living in a home in which someone else owns a gun felt safer.

2. The US General Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that 100% of deaths per year in which a child under 6 years old shoots and kills him/herself or another child could be prevented by automatic child-proof safety locks.

3. The Centers for Disease Control listed firearms as the #12 cause of all deaths between 1999 and 2015, representing 1.3% of total deaths. They were also the #1 method of death by homicide (67.3% of all homicides) and by suicide (51.9% of all suicides).

4. Mexico has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world and yet, in 2012, Mexico had 11,309 gun murders (9.97 gun homicides per 100,000 people) compared to the United States that had 9,146 gun homicides (2.97 per 100,000 people).

5. Carrying a concealed handgun in public has been permitted in all 50 states since 2013, when Illinois became the last state to enact concealed carry legislation.

6. Five women a day are killed by guns in America. A woman's risk of being murdered increases 500% if a gun is present during a domestic dispute.

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Proponents say the Second Amendment is not an unlimited right to own guns. Opponents say the amendment protects individual gun ownership.

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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9 Battles The LGBTQ Community In The US Is Still Fighting

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9 Battles The LGBTQ Community In The US Is Still Fighting

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9 Battles The LGBTQ Community In The US Is Still Fighting

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Here are some of the battles for LGBTQ equality that are still being fought across the country.

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Four countries with gun control—and what America could learn from them

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Four countries with gun control—and what America could learn from them

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Thirty people will be shot dead in America today. On average. It could be more. If it's less, then more will die tomorrow. Or the next day.

The United States's gun homicide rate is 25 times higher than other high-income countries, according to a recent study.

Americans are divided on whether the country's gun deaths could be reduced through tougher laws on gun ownership. Liberals argue that legal restrictions on gun ownership could save lives. Conservatives say that tougher gun laws would do nothing to change the behaviour of violent criminals.

Even the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting that left 20 first-graders dead was not enough to convince American lawmakers to pass new gun control laws, with many people seeing the ownership of guns as a crucial check on government tyranny. The country's highest court has ruled that outright bans on civilian ownership of handguns are unconstitutional.

After similar mass shootings, other countries have taken more dramatic steps to regulate gun ownership. A look at four countries show that tougher gun laws have been central to these efforts, but that enforcement and culture may also play important roles in preventing violence.

UK

From the moment 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton unloaded his legally held arsenal of handguns on children and staff at Dunblane primary school on 13 March 1996, gun control was on the cards.

Nothing like Dunblane - a massacre of 16 five- and six-year-olds, along with the teacher who tried to protect them - had taken place before in Britain. The shock and collective grief of the whole nation resonated from the northernmost point of Scotland to the tip of Cornwall. This was not the United States, where by 1996, classroom shootings had occurred in many places including Nashville, San Diego and South Carolina.

Gwen Mayor died with 16 of her young pupils at the school in Dunblane, Scotland. Photograph: PNR/PA

As grief turned to a national anger, public debate focused on how someone like Hamilton, a former Scout leader who had been ostracised because of his suspicious behaviour with young boys, had been allowed to own such lethal weapons.

Public petitions, most notably by the Snowdrop Campaign, founded by friends of the bereaved families, called for a total ban on the private ownership and use of handguns in the UK. Signed by 750,000 people it was symbolic of the weight of public opinion.

Nine years before Dunblane, there had been Hungerford, where Michael Ryan went on a rampage through the Berkshire town, killing 16 people in a series of random shootings before turning the gun on himself. He had been carrying a handgun and two semi automatic rifles, for which he had firearms certificates.

The aftermath of Hungerford brought to an end the right to own semi-automatic firearms in Britain; they were banned along with pump action weapons, and registration became mandatory for shotgun owners.

With Dunblane the focus turned to handguns - held by tens of thousands who took part in pistol shooting across the country. The Conservative then prime minister, John Major, passed the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 after the Cullen inquiry into the massacre. It banned all cartridge ammunition handguns, except 22 calibre single-shot weapons.

But with the landslide election of Labour and Tony Blair the same year, the law was tightened further, and the remaining .22 cartridge handguns were also banned. The decision, supported by a majority of the public, all but wiped out target shooting as a sport in the UK.

Dave Thompson, chief constable of the West Midlands, and the lead on gun crime for the National Association of Chief Constables, said: "The legislation coincided very well with a culture."

Overnight, however, about 200,000 owners of handguns, most of whom kept them for pistol shooting, found their weapon banned and their pastime wiped out. All small-bore pistols and rifles used by target shooters were included in the ban. Penalties for anyone in possession of an illegal firearm were tough - from heavy fines to prison terms of 10 years.

The hostility of those involved in the sport to what they term the draconian legislation is still strong, 20 years after Dunblane. Mike Wells, secretary of the Sportsman's Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, set up in 1996 to counter public pressure for a ban on handguns, said politicians had been driven by a need to show they were doing something but their actions did nothing to stop the criminal use of guns. "It never, never has any effect. The criminal underworld in England, the drug dealers ... have all got guns, but they are illegal guns," he said.

Mark Mastaglio, an expert on firearms who worked for the Forensic Science Service for 20 years, said there was no evidence that the ban on handguns after Dunblane had done anything to cut the criminal use of firearms. "It was very rare that there was ever leakage from the licensed gun owners to the criminal fraternity. Most guns used by criminal are either illegally imported or converted weapons. And that remains the case today," said Mastaglio.

Crime statistics in the years after the ban was introduced appear to support the theory that it had little impact. Gun crime rose sharply, to peak at 24,094 offences in 2003/4. After that the number of crimes in which a firearm was involved fell consistently, to 4,779 offences in 2013. In the year ending September 2015 there was a small rise of 4% to 4,994 offences.

Thompson said the legislation was only part of it: law enforcement agencies had to prove they would carry through on the tough penalties and there was also poor policing of gang areas, and poor ballistics records and analysis. Both were addressed in the early 2000s, when there was a huge decline in gun crime, he said.

But there has been only one mass shooting in the UK - in Whitehaven, Cumbria, in 2010, during which Derrick Bird killed 12 people - since Dunblane.

Mastaglio said: "Dunblane was certainly a turning point. It was a huge piece of legislation, and had a huge impact on registered gun owners in the UK. We now have one of the most stringent set of firearms legislation in the world - only Japan has tougher laws."

Japan

Japan has what may be the closest any country comes to "zero-tolerance" of gun ownership - a policy that experts say contribute its enviously low rates of gun crime. As of 2011, legal gun ownership stood at 271,000, according to police records, in a country of 127 million people.

There were six reported gun deaths in Japan in 2014, according to the National Police Agency. In 2006 just two people were killed in gun attacks; when the number rose to 22 in 2007 it prompted a bout of national soul-searching.
In his seminal 1993 paper for the Asia Pacific Law Review, whose conclusions still hold true more than 20 years later, David Kopel described Japanese gun control laws as "the most stringent in the democratic world".

The 1958 law on the possession of swords and firearms states: "No one shall possess a firearm or firearms or a sword or swords." Among the few exceptions are shotguns, but here too, the restrictions would cause outrage among American gun owners.

Before they can even lay hands on a shotgun for hunting and sport shooting, prospective owners must attend classes and pass written and practical exams. They must then undergo psychological assessments to determine they are fit to own a firearm. Police background checks are exhaustive and even extend to the gun owners' relatives.

The aim, according to Kopel, is to make possession of a shotgun so complex and drawn out that few people believe it worthwhile applying for one.

Civilian ownership of handguns is banned. The few violations reported in the media usually involve members of the country's many crime syndicates who have managed to smuggle them in from abroad.

But Japan was not always a low-crime, gun-intolerant nation. Guns quickly became the weapon of choice for feuding warlords after Portuguese traders introduced them to the country's south-west in the early 1500s. Over time, Japan improved the design and performance of firearms and began mass producing them.

The beginning of the end of widespread gun ownership came when the feudal warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598) unified Japan, then disarmed the peasant population by banning civilians from owning swords and firearms in 1588.

Seized plastic handguns which were created using 3D printing technology are displayed by police in Yokohama, south of Tokyo. Photograph: Kyodo/Reuters

"The shogunate banned them because they were fearful of the consequences of having guns in hands of an angry populace," said Robert Whiting, author of Tokyo Underworld. The quid pro quo, Whiting added, was that the general population's safety would be assured provided they paid their taxes.

The notion that gun ownership should be limited to the authorities survived Japanese militarism and carried through to the postwar period. Japanese police officers did not begin carrying pistols until 1946, with the permission of the US-led occupation authorities.

Despite sporadic outbreaks of gun violence, Japan's yakuza crime syndicates are reluctant to build up caches of firearms. Threatening a rival with a gun is often seen as an "unmanly" departure from the yakuza's traditional code of honour, to which even modern-day mobsters try to adhere, according to Whiting.

Kopel says Japan's gun laws do not necessarily prevent criminals - especially the yakuza - from acquiring guns. But, he added, even gangsters "see themselves as within the social system, in a broad sense. Even when breaking the law, they still play by certain rules of society."

Australia

Eerily, Australia's moment of truth also occurred almost exactly 20 years ago, when a shooting spree in a gift shop in Port Arthur, Tasmania, resulted in 35 people dying in about half an hour. It was the worst mass shooting by one person in Australia's history. The killer, Martin Bryant, received a sentence of 35 terms of life imprisonment.

Less than two weeks later, Australia's then prime minister, John Howard, announced a sweeping package of gun reforms in a country where guns had long been considered an essential prop in the national mythology of life in the bush.

"Port Arthur we acted on," said Tim Fischer, then Howard's deputy prime minister. "The USA is not prepared to act on their tragedies."

Before Port Arthur, most states had a weak licensing system and no requirement to register guns. Howard proposed each state and territory should introduce and enforce a firearm licensing and registration system which required people to have a "genuine reason" for having a firearm, such as sport or target shooting, recreational hunting or being a farmer.

Howard also introduced a national gun buyback policy for all weapons that did not comply, which led to the buying and melting down of more than 650,000 firearms at a cost of A$350m (now £185m). One study said the buyback cut the rate of firearm suicides by 74% in the first 10 years.

There have been no mass shootings in the 20 years since Port Arthur; in the 20 years before the massacre there had been 13.

However, since the 1996 National Firearms Agreement, four states have moved to wind back the mandatory 28 days "cooling off" period between applying for and buying a gun, a trend Howard has described as disturbing.

One of those states was Tasmania.

Germany

Germany's relationship with firearms is intriguing: while there are a lot of guns in the country, they don't seem to kill a lot of people.

Germany has one of the highest weapons-per-head rates in the world. In 2014, 5.5m legal weapons were registered as being in the hands of 1.45 million private individuals. The country's police union estimates the number of illegal weapons in the country to be considerably higher, around 20m. According to GunPolicy.org, this puts Germany at 15th place out of 175 nations in terms of guns per capita.

Gun ownership is more widespread in the west of the country than in the former East Germany, where private gun ownership was illegal before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Recent reports suggest that gun ownership is rapidly increasing still: between November 2015 and February 2016 alone, 20,000 applications were filed for new gun licences.

Yet in Germany gun homicide rate is one of the lowest in Europe: a death rate of 0.05 per 1,000 people, compared with 3.34 in the US. In fact, incidents of gun crime, including both weapons being fired and used to threaten people, have declined by almost a quarter since 2010 (pdf).

Experts put this trend down to a number of tweaks to gun law in the wake of high-profile shootings.

In 2002, a 19-year-old student in the Thuringian state capital, Erfurt, shot dead 16 people at the school that had recently expelled him, using weapons he had obtained from his gun club.

Within a year, the law regulating access to guns had been changed: Germany is the only country in the world where anyone under the age of 25 who applies for their first firearms licence must undergo a psychiatric evaluation with a trained counsellor, involving personality and anger management tests.

Experienced hunters or sports shooters over the age of 25 may be called in for psychiatric tests if they display certain kinds of behaviour, such as being caught drink-driving.

A further tweak to the gun law in 2008 means that inherited guns have to be fitted with a state-of-the-art blocking mechanism, making them unusable.

A tribute to the victim of the school shooting in Winnenden, near Stuttgart, by 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer. Photograph: Alex Grimm/Getty Images

There were calls for even more stringent laws after 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer shot dead 15 at a school in Winnenden near Stuttgart in March 2009. Kretschmer had obtained his weapons from an arsenal of 15 guns kept by his father, who was a member of a shooting club.

Under the newly amended weapons act, it is now harder for individuals to own multiple weapons. A national gun register was established for the first time in 2013 - previously, records of gun ownership were kept only at regional level.

Police officers can now also visit registered gun owners' home for spot checks without warning. Guns in private possessions have to be locked away in a safe, with the security code or location of the key known only to the owner of the gun.

A number of politicians went even further in the wake of the Winnenden massacre, calling for a complete ban on the storage of firearms in private homes. Even hunters or sportsmen, they argued, should have to deposit their arms at centralised depots.

The proposal was rejected after protests from hunters, who argued that they frequently need access to weapons at short notice, such as when wildlife was involved in traffic accidents.

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Four countries with gun control - and what America could learn from them

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The UK, Australia, Japan and Germany have all taken measures to reduce gun homicides. Can the US learn anything from them?

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Issue Overview: Why mass incarceration looms as a campaign issue

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Issue Overview: Why mass incarceration looms as a campaign issue

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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15 LGBTQ Activists of the Past and Present You Should Know

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15 LGBTQ Activists of the Past and Present You Should Know

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It's LGBTQ Pride Month - a time to celebrate love, but also to champion equality and LGBTQ rights.

Throughout June, cities around the world have been hosting marches in honor of LGBTQ pride. In many countries today, people are free to join these marches, marry whomever they choose, and openly show their love. But that's still not the case for LGBTQ communities in every country, and even in countries where it is safe to march, there is still a long way to go before true equality is achieved.

Without these incredible activists, the LGBTQ rights movement would not be where it is today.

In honor of Pride Month, Global Citizen is celebrating the brave activists fighting for LGBTQ rights in places where it can be dangerous to do so, and the inspiring champions for change, without whom there might never have been a Pride Month.

While certainly not an exhaustive list by any means, these are 15 LGBTQ activists you should know.

1. Marsha P. Johnson

Marsha P. Johnson is sometimes referred to as the "Rosa Parks of the LGBT movement," but Johnson is a celebrated icon in her own right. Johnson was an activist, drag performer, sex worker, and model for Andy Warhol. She was black, queer, and trans - and fearlessly advocated for her rights and the rights of the LGBTQ community at a time when doing so put her safety in jeopardy.

"As long as gay people don't have their rights all across America, there's no reason for celebration," she once said.

Johnson was a key figure of the 1960s gay rights movement in the US and, as legend has it, threw the brick that ignited the infamous Stonewall riots, which were the catalyst for the movement and have inspired many Pride marches ever since.

In 1992, Johnson's body was found in the Hudson River. Her death was ruled a suicide, but those who knew her disagreed. A recent Netflix documentary, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, celebrates Johnson's life and investigates the mysterious circumstances of her death.

2. Sylvia Rivera

Sylvia Rivera was a Latina trans activist, who, together with Marsha P. Johnson, co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), an organization that provided housing and other services to homeless LGBTQ youth in New York City.

Born in New York City, Sylvia turned to sex work after her mother died by suicide when Rivera was just 10 years old. Rivera lived a turbulent life, struggling with drug addiction and homelessness, but Rivera was always a vocal and, at times, forceful advocate for change. She was once arrested for attempting to climb through a window (in a dress and heels) into a room where the New York City Council was debating a gay rights bill, NBC reported.

"Sylvia's role in gay history was that she was one of the first people to highlight that our movement needed to be more inclusive of people who did not fit in the mainstream," Carrie Davis, Chief Programs and Policy Officer at New York City's LGBT Community Center, told NBC News.

3. Harvey Milk

Harvey Milk, the subject of the Oscar-winning film Milk, was the first openly gay politician to be elected in California. Milk was assassinated in 1978, but during his short tenure in office he pushed legislation to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, housing, and public accommodations.

The bill passed with just one dissenting vote by Dan White, the city supervisor who would go on to shoot and kill Milk. In 2009, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger designated May 22, Milk's birthday, as a day of recognition for the late politician and activist.

4. Edith Windsor

In 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right - a landmark decision that would not have been possible without Edith Windsor.

After a 40-year engagement, Windsor married Thea Spyer in Canada in 2007. Spyer passed away just two years later, leaving everything to her wife. Because the US did not recognize their same-sex marriage, Windsor was asked to pay taxes on Spyer's estate far beyond what a heterosexual spouse would be required to pay on the estate of their deceased spouse.

Windsor took her case to court and in 2013, the Supreme Court ruled in her favor. Two years later, the court expanded on that ruling in another case that led to federal recognition of same-sex marriages.

5. Alice Nkom

Alice Nkom is a human rights lawyer and LGBTQ activist from Cameroon, where homosexuality is still criminalized. In a country where police officer entrap members of the LGBTQ community through text messages and beat those they perceive to be gay, Nkom bravely fights for rights on behalf of the LGBTQ community.

Though Nkom identifies as heterosexual, she has dedicated her work to fighting for Cameroon's LGBTQ community and founded the Association for the Defence of Homosexuality in 2003. Though she and her colleagues are sometimes in danger because of the work they do, Nkom remains undeterred.

"These threats are in fact proof that our fight must continue," Nkom told Amnesty International.

6. Laverne Cox

Laverne Cox, best known for playing Sophia Burset on Netflix's Orange Is the New Black, is a black, trans woman, the first trans person to be nominated for an Emmy, and a proud advocate for LGBTQ rights. Cox has been outspoken about access to health care for LGBTQ communities and has particularly championed the rights of trans people and people of color.

"We must lift up the stories of those most at risk, statistically trans people of color who are poor and working class," Cox wrote in a Tumblr post in 2015. "I have hoped over the past few years that the incredible love I have received from the public can translate to the lives of all trans folks."
Read more: 33 Quotes That Show Laverne Cox Just Gets It
7. Alexya Salvador

Alexya Salvador is a trailblazer. She is a trans woman in Brazil, where violence against LGBTQ people has reached an all-time high. More than 380 LGBTQ-identifying people were murdered in Brazil in 2017 and 58 died by suicide, the Guardian reported.

And she's a pastor. Salvador calls herself the " first transgender shepherd of Latin America," and, with other trans pastors from around the world, held a groundbreaking LGBTQ-friendly mass in Cuba last year.

Salvador is a mother of two, including a trans daughter, and is the first trans person to adopt a child in Brazil, according Al Día.

8. Lena Waithe

Actress, writer, and producer Lena Waithe made history in 2017 as the first black woman to win an Emmy for comedy writing. But rather than reveling in her historic win, Waithe, who identifies as queer, used her acceptance speech to deliver an inspiring message to her "LGBTQIA family."
Read more: Lena Waithe Made a Bold Statement at the Met Gala and the Internet Is Here for It
"The things that make us different, those are our superpowers," she said. Waithe often uses her spotlight moments to advocate for the LGBTQ community. Earlier this year, she wore a rainbow cape to the Met Gala, a bold statement in the face of the event's religious theme.

9. Arsham Parsi

Arsham Parsi is a gay man who first began secretly working to support members of the LGBTQ community in his native Iran. But in 2005, the queer activist was forced to flee his country, where homosexual activity remains illegal.

Today, Parsi lives in exile in Canada, where he has founded the Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees, which supports and provides guidance to LGBTQ asylum seekers from the Middle East.

10. Michael Sam

Michael Sam became the first openly gay football player to be drafted by an NFL team in 2014. While his draft was a historic first, Sam's time in the NFL was discouraging. He was passed from team to team, and eventually found himself without a team. About a year after he was first drafted, Sam retired from the NFL citing mental health reasons.

His struggle highlighted the discrimination and homophobia still rampant in the sports world, but Sam has gone on to share his story and continues to champion change.

11-15. 'Queer Eye's' Fab Five

The all-star cast of Netflix's new Queer Eye series - a reboot of Bravo's early 2000s series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy - may be all fun when it comes to makeovers, but they're serious about making a difference in the world.
People globally face many intersecting forms of discrimination and marginalization every day, for many different reasons. Unjust social, political, and economic systems perpetuate this discrimination and keep people trapped in poverty. This June, take our Equity Month Hero Challenge to learn how we can all be champions for equity and justice every day, and earn your Equity Month Hero badge to wear proudly on your Global Citizen profile. Take the Challenge now.
The "Fab Five" - Tan France, Jonathan Van Ness, Bobby Berk, Karamo Brown, and Antoni Porowski - speak openly on Queer Eye about their personal struggles and experiences with homophobia and discrimination. And the stars hope to use their newfound fame to empower LGBTQ communities.

"Just the idea that my being who I am [on Queer Eye] has made people, both younger than me and older than me, feel more comfortable about the space that they take up ... that is something I never saw coming," Van Ness told Refinery29 in an interview. "But also, when people are so effusive about how my role in Queer Eye makes them feel, it really opened my eyes to the amount of repression we still have."

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15 LGBTQ Activists of the Past and Present You Should Know

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15 brave activists inspiring champions for change and fighting for LGBTQ rights in places where it can be dangerous to do so.

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What You Need to Know About Hate Speech and Free Speech

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What You Need to Know About Hate Speech and Free Speech

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Hate speech is when a person or a group of people is attacked based on factors such as their gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, or disability. According to the Centers for Educational Justice & Community Engagement at the University of California Berkeley, hate speech includes written and verbal communication.

Of course, where the First Amendment becomes tricky is when it comes to people who have discriminatory ideologies against others, as they are also protected under the law. For example, one can vehemently disagree with the views of the Ku Klux Klan, which believes in white supremacy, but unless members of the Klan act on those words, their speech and right to assemble is protected under the Constitution.
When does hate speech become a crime?
Given that even hate speech is seen as a right, it's been largely protected in the courts. Some college campuses, for example, have tried to implement "speech codes," typically with good intentions of making campuses inclusive and ridding them of discriminatory language. In court, however, these acts have typically been found unconstitutional, as they violate the First Amendment and the right for people to speak freely.

While typically hate speech has to be acted on to turn into a crime, there is a special exception called the "fighting words" clause, which stipulates that if someone uses words to "incite an immediate breach of peace", then it's no longer protected. The example the ACLU gives is if a white student directed a racial slur at a black student, one could argue that the person did so as a means of racial harassment. This reasoning, however, hasn't been argued in the Supreme Court before, so it's hard to tell if it would be successful in the future.

Additionally, hate speech can violate certain freedom of speech laws like slander (trying to damage someone's reputation with false spoken words) or libel (trying to damage someone's reputation through writing). In some cases, hate speech could also violate rules as technical as copyright violations or non-disclosure agreements depending on how and where those opinions are articulated.

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What You Need to Know About Hate Speech and Free Speech

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A recent protest at UC Berkeley against online troll Milo Yiannapoulos brought up questions concerning how hate speech differs from free speech.

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The Early Gay Rights Movement

In 1924, Henry Gerber, a German immigrant, founded in Chicago the Society for Human Rights, the first documented gay rights organization in the United States. During his U.S. Army service in World War I, Gerber was inspired to create his organization by the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, a "homosexual emancipation" group in Germany.

Gerber's small group published a few issues of its newsletter "Friendship and Freedom," the country's first gay-interest newsletter. Police raids caused the group to disband in 1925-but 90 years later, the U.S. government designated Gerber's Chicago house a National Historic Landmark.

The Pink Triangle

The gay rights movement stagnated for the next few decades, though LGBT individuals around the world did come into the spotlight a few times.

For example, English poet and author Radclyffe Hall stirred up controversy in 1928 when she published her lesbian-themed novel, The Well of Loneliness. And during World War II, the Nazis held homosexual men in concentration camps, branding them with the infamous pink triangle badge, which was also given to sexual predators.

Additionally, in 1948, in his book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Alfred Kinsey proposed that male sexual orientation lies on a continuum between exclusively homosexual to exclusively heterosexual.

The Homophile Years

In 1950, Harry Hay founded the Mattachine Foundation, one of the nation's first gay rights group. The Los Angeles organization coined the term "homophile," which was considered less clinical and focused on sexual activity than "homosexual."

Though it started off small, the foundation, which sought to improve the lives of gay men through discussion groups and related activities, expanded after founding member Dale Jennings was arrested in 1952 for solicitation and then later set free due to a deadlocked jury.

At the end of the year, Jennings formed another organization called One, Inc., which welcomed women and published ONE, the country's first pro-gay magazine. Jennings was ousted from One, Inc. in 1953 in part for being a communist-he and Harry Hay were also kicked out of the Mattachine Foundation for their communism-but the magazine continued.

In 1958, One, Inc. won a lawsuit against the U.S. Post Office, which in 1954 declared the magazine "obscene" and refused to deliver it.

The Mattachine Society

Mattachine Foundation members restructured the organization to form the Mattachine Society, which had local chapters in other parts of the country and in 1955 began publishing the country's second gay publication, The Mattachine Review. That same year, four lesbian couples in San Francisco founded an organization called the Daughters of Bilitis, which soon began publishing a newsletter called The Ladder, the first lesbian publication of any kind.

These early years of the movement also faced some notable setbacks: the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality as a form of mental disorder in 1952.

The following year, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order that banned gay people-or, more specifically, people guilty of "sexual perversion"-from federal jobs. This ban would remain in effect for some 20 years.

Gay Rights in the 1960s

The gay rights movement saw some early progress In the 1960s. In 1961, Illinois became the first state to do away with its anti-sodomy laws, effectively decriminalizing homosexuality, and a local TV station in California aired the first documentary about homosexuality, called The Rejected.

In 1965, Dr. John Oliven, in his book Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, coined the term "transgender" to describe someone who was born in the body of the incorrect sex.

But more than 10 years earlier, transgender individuals entered the American consciousness when Christine Jorgensen came out as a trans woman, following gender confirmation surgery.

Despite this progress, LGBTQ individuals lived in a kind of urban subculture and were routinely subjected to harassment and persecution, such as in bars and restaurants. In fact, gay men and women in New York City could not be served alcohol in public due to liquor laws that considered the gathering of homosexuals to be "disorderly."

In fear of being shut down by authorities, bartenders would deny drinks to patrons suspected of being gay or kick them out altogether; others would serve them drinks but force them to sit facing away from other customers to prevent them from socializing.

In 1966, members of the Mattachine Society in New York City staged a " sip-in "-a twist on the "sit-in" protests of the 1960s-in which they visited taverns, declared themselves gay, and waited to be turned away so they could sue. They were denied service at the Greenwich Village tavern Julius, resulting in much publicity and the quick reversal of the anti-gay liquor laws.

The Stonewall Inn

A few years later, in 1969, a now-famous event catalyzed the gay rights movement: The Stonewall Riots.

The clandestine gay club Stonewall Inn was an institution in Greenwich Village because it was large, cheap, allowed dancing and welcomed drag queens and homeless youths.

But in the early hours of June 28, 1969, New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn. Fed up with years of police harassment, patrons and neighborhood residents began throwing objects at police as they loaded the arrested into police vans. The scene eventually exploded into a full-blown riot, with subsequent protests that lasted for five more days.

Christopher Street Liberation Day

Shortly after the Stonewall uprising, members of the Mattachine Society split off to form the Gay Liberation Front, a radical group that launched public demonstrations, protests and confrontations with political officials.

Similar groups followed, including the Gay Activists Alliance, Radicalesbians, and Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR).

In 1970, at the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, New York City community members marched through local streets in commemoration of the event. Named the Christopher Street Liberation Day, the march is now considered the country's first gay pride parade. Activists also turned the once-disreputable Pink Triangle into a symbol of gay pride.

LGBTQ Political Victories

The increased visibility and activism of LGBTQ individuals in the 1970s helped the movement make progress on multiple fronts. In 1977, for instance, the New York Supreme Court ruled that transgender woman Renée Richards could play at the United States Open tennis tournament as a woman.

Additionally, several openly LGBTQ individuals secured public office positions: Kathy Kozachenko won a seat to the Ann Harbor, Michigan, City Council in 1974, becoming the first out American to be elected to public office.

Harvey Milk, who campaigned on a pro-gay rights platform, became the San Francisco city supervisor in 1978, becoming the first openly gay man elected to a political office in California.

Milk asked Gilbert Baker, an artist and gay rights activist, to create an emblem that represents the movement and would be seen as a symbol of pride. Baker designed and stitched together the first rainbow flag, which he unveiled at a pride parade in 1978.

The following year, in 1979, more than 100,000 people took part in the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.

Outbreak of AIDS

The outbreak of AIDS in the United States dominated the struggle for gay rights in the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report about five previously healthy homosexual men becoming infected with a rare type of pneumonia.

By 1984, researchers had identified the cause of AIDS-the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV-and the Food and Drug Administration licensed the first commercial blood test for HIV in 1985. Two years later, the first antiretroviral medication for HIV, azidothymidine (AZT), became available.

Gay rights proponents held the second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1987. The occasion marked the first national coverage of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power), an advocacy group seeking to improve the lives of AIDS victims.

The World Health Organization in 1988 declared December 1 to be World AIDS Day. By the end of the decade, there were at least 100,000 reported cases of AIDS in the United States.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

In 1992, Bill Clinton, during his campaign to become president, promised he would lift the ban against gays in the military. But after failing to garner enough support for such an open policy, President Clinton in 1993 passed the " Don't Ask, Don't Tell " (DADT) policy, which allowed gay men and women to serve in the military as long as they kept their sexuality a secret.

Gay rights advocates decried the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, as it did little to stop people from being discharged on the grounds of their sexuality.

In 2011, President Obama fulfilled a campaign promise to repeal DADT; by that time, more than 12,000 officers had been discharged from the military under DADT for refusing to hide their sexuality. Don't Ask, Don't Tell was officially repealed on September 20, 2011.

Gay Marriage and Beyond

In 1992, the District of Columbia passed a law that allowed gay and lesbian couples to register as domestic partners, granting them some of the rights of marriage (the city of San Francisco passed a similar ordinance three years prior and California would later extend those rights to the entire state in 1999).

In 1993, the highest court in Hawaii ruled that a ban on gay marriage may go against the state's constitution. State voters disagreed, however, and in 1998 passed a law banning same-sex marriage.

Federal lawmakers also disagreed, and Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which Clinton signed into law in 1996. The law prevented the government from granting federal marriage benefits to same-sex couples and allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriage certificates from other states.

Though marriage rights backtracked, gay rights advocates scored other victories. In 1994, a new anti-hate-crime law allowed judges to impose harsher sentences if a crime was motivated by a victim's sexual orientation.

The Matthew Shepard Act

In 2003, gay rights proponents had another bit of happy news: the U.S. Supreme Court, in Lawrence v. Texas, struck down the state's anti-sodomy law. The landmark ruling effectively decriminalized homosexual relations nationwide.

And in 2009, President Barack Obama signed into law a new hate crime act. Commonly known as the Matthew Shepard Act, the new law extended the reach of the 1994 hate crime law.

The act was a response to the 1998 murder of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard, who was pistol-whipped, tortured, tied to a fence, and left to die. The murder was thought to be driven by Shepard's perceived homosexuality.

In 2011, President Obama fulfilled a campaign promise to repeal DADT; by that time, more than 12,000 officers had been discharged from the military under DADT for refusing to hide their sexuality.

A couple of years later, the Supreme Court ruled against Section 3 of DOMA, which allowed the government to deny federal benefits to married same-sex couples. DOMA soon become powerless, when in 2015 the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot ban same-sex marriage, making gay marriage legal throughout the country.

Transgender Rights

One day after that landmark 2015 ruling, the Boy Scouts of America lifted its ban against openly gay leaders and employees. And in 2017, it reversed a century-old ban against transgender boys, finally catching up with the Girl Scouts of the USA, which had long been inclusive of LGBTQ leaders and children (the organization had accepted its first transgender Girl Scout in 2011).

In 2016, the U.S. military lifted its ban on transgender people serving openly, a month after Eric Fanning became secretary of the Army and the first openly gay secretary of a U.S. military branch. In March 2018, President Donald Trump announced a new transgender policy for the military that again banned most transgender people from military service. On January 25, 2021-his sixth day in office-President Biden signed an executive order overturning this ban.

Though LGBTQ Americans now have same-sex marriage rights and numerous other rights that seemed farfetched 100 years ago, the work of advocates is far from over.

Universal workplace anti-discrimination laws for LGBTQ Americans is still lacking. Gay rights proponents must also content with an increasing number of "religious liberty" state laws, which allow business to deny service to LGBTQ individuals due to religious beliefs, as well as "bathroom laws" that prevent transgender individuals from using public bathrooms that don't correspond to their sex at birth. Additionally, several states have passed legislation targeting transgender youth (and, in Texas, their parents), preventing them from competing in school-sponsored athletics that correspond with their gender identity and accessing gender-affirming medical care.

Gay Marriage Legalized

Massachusetts was the first state to legalize gay marriage, and the first legal same-sex marriage was performed on May 17, 2004-a day when seventy-seven other couples across the state also tied the knot.

Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer wed in Ontario, Canada in 2007. The State of New York recognized the residents' marriage, but the federal government did not. When Spyer died in 2009, she left her estate to Windsor; since the couple's marriage was not federally recognized, Windsor didn't quality for tax exemption as a surviving spouse. Windsor sued the government in late 2010 in United States v. Windsor. Months later, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Barack Obama administration would no longer defend DOMA.

In 2012, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that DOMA violates the Constitution's equal protection clause, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments for the case. The court ruled in favor of Windsor.

Gay marriage was finally ruled legal by the Supreme Court in June 2015. In Obergefell v. Hodges, the plaintiffs-led by Jim Obergefell, who sued because he was unable to put his name on his late husband's death certificate-argued that the laws violated the Equal Protection Clause and Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy sided with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in favor of same-sex marriage rights, ultimately making gay marriage legal across the nation on June 2015. The ruling read, in part:

"No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization's oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right."

On December 13, 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law. The law requires that individual states recognize same-sex and interracial marriages that were lawfully performed in other states.

Sources

How WWI Sparked the Gay Rights Movement: Smithsonian.

First gay rights group in the US (1924): Chicago Tribune.

Chicago's Henry Gerber House Designated a National Historic Landmark: U.S. Department of the Interior.

Harry Hay, Early Proponent of Gay Rights, Dies at 90: The New York Times.

Transgender: Transgender Studies Quarterly.

American Psychological Association.

LGBT Rights Milestones Fast Facts: CNN.

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The gay rights movement in the United States began in the 1920s and saw huge progress in the 2000s, with laws prohibiting homosexual activity struck down and a Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.

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Bill of Rights

During the summer of 1787, a group of politicians, including James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, gathered in Philadelphia to draft a new U.S. Constitution.

Antifederalists, led by the first governor of Virginia, Patrick Henry, opposed the ratification of the Constitution. They felt the new constitution gave the federal government too much power at the expense of the states. They further argued that the Constitution lacked protections for people's individual rights.

The debate over whether to ratify the Constitution in several states hinged on the adoption of a Bill of Rights that would safeguard basic civil rights under the law. Fearing defeat, pro-constitution politicians, called Federalists, promised a concession to the antifederalists-a Bill of Rights.

James Madison drafted most of the Bill of Rights. Madison was a Virginia representative who would later become the fourth president of the United States. He created the Bill of Rights during the 1st United States Congress, which met from 1789 to 1791 - the first two years that President George Washington was in office.

The Bill of Rights, which was introduced to Congress in 1789 and adopted on December 15, 1791, includes the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

First Amendment Text

The First Amendment text reads:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
While the First Amendment protected freedoms of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition, subsequent amendments under the Bill of Rights dealt with the protection of other American values including the Second Amendment right to bear arms and the Sixth Amendment right to a trial by jury.

Freedom of Speech

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech. Freedom of speech gives Americans the right to express themselves without having to worry about government interference. It's the most basic component of freedom of expression.

The U.S. Supreme Court often has struggled to determine what types of speech is protected. Legally, material labeled as obscene has historically been excluded from First Amendment protection, for example, but deciding what qualifies as obscene has been problematic. Speech provoking actions that would harm others-true incitement and/or threats-is also not protected, but again determining what words have qualified as true incitement has been decided on a case-by-case basis.

Freedom of the Press

This freedom is similar to freedom of speech, in that it allows people to express themselves through publication.

There are certain limits to freedom of the press. False or defamatory statements-called libel-aren't protected under the First Amendment.

Freedom of Religion

The First Amendment, in guaranteeing freedom of religion, prohibits the government from establishing a "state" religion and from favoring one religion over any other.

While not explicitly stated, this amendment establishes the long-established separation of church and state.

Right to Assemble, Right to Petition

The First Amendment protects the freedom to peacefully assemble or gather together or associate with a group of people for social, economic, political or religious purposes. It also protects the right to protest the government.

The right to petition can mean signing a petition or even filing a lawsuit against the government.

First Amendment Court Cases

Here are landmark Supreme Court decisions related to the First Amendment.

Schenck v. United States, 1919: In this case, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Socialist Party activist Charles Schenck after he distributed fliers urging young men to dodge the draft during World War I.

The Schenck decision helped define limits of freedom of speech, creating the "clear and present danger" standard, explaining when the government is allowed to limit free speech. In this case, the Supreme Court viewed draft resistance as dangerous to national security.

New York Times Co. v. United States, 1971: This landmark Supreme Court case made it possible for The New York Times and Washington Post newspapers to publish the contents of the Pentagon Papers without risk of government censorship.

The Pentagon Papers were a top-secret Department of Defense study of U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. Published portions of the Pentagon Papers revealed that the presidential administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson had all misled the public about the degree of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Texas v. Johnson, 1990: Gregory Lee Johnson, a youth communist, burned a flag during the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas to protest the administration of President Ronald Reagan.

The Supreme Court reversed a Texas court's decision that Johnson broke the law by desecrating the flag. This Supreme Court Case invalidated statutes in Texas and 47 other states prohibiting flag-burning.
Freedom of Religion:
Reynolds v. United States (1878): This Supreme Court case upheld a federal law banning polygamy, testing the limits of religious liberty in America. The Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment forbids government from regulating belief but not from actions such as marriage.

Braunfeld v. Brown (1961): The Supreme Court upheld a Pennsylvania law requiring stores to close on Sundays, even though Orthodox Jews argued the law was unfair to them since their religion required them to close their stores on Saturdays as well.

Sherbert v. Verner (1963): The Supreme Court ruled that states could not require a person to abandon their religious beliefs in order to receive benefits. In this case, Adell Sherbert, a Seventh-day Adventist, worked in a textile mill. When her employer switched from a five-day to six-day workweek, she was fired for refusing to work on Saturdays. When she applied for unemployment compensation, a South Carolina court denied her claim.

Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971): This Supreme Court decision struck down a Pennsylvania law allowing the state to reimburse Catholic schools for the salaries of teachers who taught in those schools. This Supreme Court case established the "Lemon Test" for determining when a state or federal law violates the Establishment Clause-that's the part of the First Amendment that prohibits the government from declaring or financially supporting a state religion.

Ten Commandments Cases (2005): In 2005, the Supreme Court came to seemingly contradictory decisions in two cases involving the display of the Ten Commandments on public property. In the first case, Van Orden v. Perry, the Supreme Court ruled that the display of a six-foot Ten Commandments monument at the Texas State Capital was constitutional. In McCreary County v. ACLU, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that two large, framed copies of the Ten Commandments in Kentucky courthouses violated the First Amendment.
Right to Assemble & Right to Petition:
NAACP v. Alabama (1958): When Alabama Circuit Court ordered the NAACP to stop doing business in the state and subpoenaed the NAACP for records including their membership list, the NAACP brought the matter to the Supreme Court. The Court ruled in favor of the NAACP, which Justice John Marshall Harlan II writing: "This Court has recognized the vital relationship between freedom to associate and privacy in one's associations."

Edwards v. South Carolina (1962): On March 2, 1961, 187 Black students marched from Zion Baptist Church to the South Carolina State House, where they were arrested and convicted of breaching the peace. The Supreme Court ruled in an 8-1 decision to reverse the convictions, arguing that the state infringed on the free speech, free assembly and freedom to petition of the students.

Sources

The Bill of Rights; White House.
History of the First Amendment; The University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Schenck v. United States; C-Span.

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First Amendment - Rights, U.S. Constitution & Freedoms

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The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the freedom of speech, religion and the press. It also protects the right to peaceful protest and to petition the government.

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Emma González on Why This Generation Needs Gun Control

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Emma González on Why This Generation Needs Gun Control

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In an exclusive op-ed for Teen Vogue's gun control issue, Parkland survivor and activist X González shares why young people are stepping up for gun control.

On Wednesday, February 14, 17 students and faculty at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, were gunned down on the campus where I also attend school. Their names were Alyssa Alhadeff, Scott Beigel, Martin Duque, Nicholas Dworet, Aaron Feis, Jaime Guttenberg, Chris Hixon, Luke Hoyer, Cara Loughran, Gina Montalto, Joaquin Oliver, Alaina Petty, Meadow Pollack, Helena Ramsay, Carmen Schentrup, Alex Schachter, and Peter Wang. Our lives and our community are forever changed due to this senseless tragedy - one we know could have been prevented.

Since that day, many fellow survivors and I have not kept quiet. We have taken the media by storm through appearances and interviews, met with state and federal lawmakers to beg them to enact much stricter gun control laws, and been joined in protest by students around the nation and the world who've held school walkouts and demonstrations that exhibit the energy and power of young people in full force.

In just a few weeks' time, we, the youth of the United States, have built a new movement to denounce gun violence and call for safety in all of our communities.

And this is only the beginning.

A Generation Raised on Violence

I was born in 1999, just a few months after 13 people were left dead after a shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. From 1966 to the Valentine's Day that my school proved to be less than bulletproof, nearly 1,100 people have been killed in mass public shootings in the U.S.. From the deaths of 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, to the 2016 massacre of mostly Latinx people at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, to the loss of 58 lives at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas last year, we've seen mass shootings play out again and again and again.

Gun violence has torn up many communities across the country, mainly due to negligence on behalf of local and national government to properly regulate access to guns, ignorance to their constituents' varying situations, and willingness to take money from organizations that very clearly do not have the best intentions for the future of the United States.

The problem of gun violence goes beyond the countless demographic differences between people. Any way you cut it, one of the biggest threats to life as a teen in the U.S. today is being shot. People have been shot to death en masse in grocery stores, movie theaters, nightclubs, and libraries, on school campuses and front porches, and at concerts - anywhere and everywhere, regardless of socioeconomic background, skin color, age, ethnicity, religion, gender, geographical location.

Young people in this country have experienced gun violence for their entire lives, only to be faced with a number of representatives and officials who have been seduced by the gun lobby or have generally failed to make effective change. The pro-gun propaganda peddled by the National Rifle Association feeds myths about gun ownership, and these myths arguably perpetuate the suffering of thousands of Americans each year.

After all of this pain and all of this death caused by gun violence, it seems as if the kids are the only ones who still have the energy to make change.

What Do We Mean When We Say "Change"?

Parkland youth are working to end gun violence through actions like the March for Our Lives event in Washington, D.C., on March 24 and the ongoing #NeverAgain movement. I'm one of them. Fed up with the apathy pervading this country, we realized that we don't need to wait around to have our voices heard or for someone else to make change - we have to be the change we need to see.

The mass walkouts held around the country on March 14, which marked the one-month anniversary of the mass shooting at our school, weren't even organized by March for Our Lives. They were efforts led by students around the world who were speaking in the most influential way they knew how: civil disobedience, marching in the streets with signs and chanting truth to power. Efforts to mobilize young voters are widespread, and many are being conducted by first-time organizers.

Students around the country have already shown commitment to doing their part. Now it's on the adults to join us.

Many companies have broken ties with the National Rifle Association, and the House of Representatives passed a bill to fund more security measures in schools. That's great, but it's not enough.

We need to digitize gun-sales records, mandate universal background checks, close gun-show loopholes and straw-man purchases, ban high-capacity magazines, and push for a comprehensive assault weapons ban with an extensive buyback system.

It would also benefit us to redefine what assault weapons are so that when we call for a ban against them, it's clear that we aren't trying to ban all guns. No one needs to use an assault weapon to protect themselves while walking home at night. No one should be allowed to use an AR-15 to strategically hunt people, which, in case anyone forgot, is what made us speak out in the first place.

Rather than engage with this logic, many are suggesting that a possible solution to increasing school safety would be arming teachers. This doesn't make any rational or logical sense. For those who don't agree, I have questions:

How would arming teachers work, logistically?

Would they have to buy their own guns, or would there be armories in schools? Would students be able to break into armories?

While teaching, would a teacher keep their weapon on their person or in a lockbox?

If it was in a lockbox on the other side of the room when a threatening person walked in, would the teacher be able to get to their gun in time?

If the threat and the teacher were in close proximity, would the threat not be able to disarm the teacher and turn the pistol on them and in turn the students?

Why would a student shooter even need to worry about metal detectors or getting patted down if they already know they can overpower the teacher and take that gun for their own use?

If the teacher wasn't in close proximity, what would stop the teacher's bullets from hitting other students who might be in the way and obscured by gunsmoke?

And since there was a resource or police officer on campus to help protect students and teachers, why didn't that stop 17 people from getting killed and 15 from getting injured on February 14?

At Stoneman Douglas, the entire shooting lasted roughly six minutes. In that time, the shooter - a former student who conducted this violence in a three-story building known as the freshman building - fired at least 100 shots, which hit walls, windows, classrooms, and 32 people. Seventeen people's lives ended far, far too soon, and each of them had ties and connections to countless other individuals, and all of those people have to grapple with the fact that these students and faculty - our friends, our teachers, our coaches, our family - are gone.

This is the reality we face as young people in America today: the constant fear of being gunned down in the places we should feel the most secure. We have grown up in this country and watched violence unfold to no resolution. We have watched people with the power and authority to make changes fail to do so.

And that's why we are stepping up. Some of us are new to this fight, but across America there are people, young and old, who have been fighting for gun safety and an end to gun violence of all kinds.

This month, Teen Vogue is dedicating its digital cover to rising voices in the gun control movement, young people who are working on the issue in different ways, all of them impacted by gun violence.

There is 21-year-old Howard University student Clifton Kinnie, who, in 2014, mobilized teenagers to organize against gun violence and register to vote after 18-year-old Mike Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Natalie Barden, a 16-year-old sophomore at Newtown High School in Connecticut, was a preteen when she lost her younger brother, Daniel, in 2012, during the Sandy Hook shooting. She's been asking for change for more than five years as part of a family that has become vocal anti-gun-violence organizers, and she is now courageously stepping up to mobilize her peers.

Jazmine Wildcat, a 14-year-old member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe, is part of a gun-owning family in Riverton, Wyoming, and she started writing letters to her lawmakers after the students were killed in Parkland. In her community, where gun ownership is considered a fact of life and a point of pride, she's bravely taking a stand as one of the few voices advocating for change in her area. Kenidra Woods, a 17-year-old junior from St. Louis, was already advocating for more discussion of self-harm and mental health among teens before Parkland, after which she sprang into action to help conduct a walkout at her school in February in solidarity. She and her classmates faced resistance from administrators after students were barred from returning to class, and she's since become one of the most vocal young activists in this nationwide movement.

Nza-Ari Khepra of Chicago founded Project Orange Tree after a friend, 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, was shot and killed in 2013. She's now 21 and a student at Columbia, continuing her efforts to end gun violence; her smart work was the inspiration for the nationwide "Wear Orange" campaign.

Then there are those of us representing Parkland: Fellow Stoneman Douglas student Nick Joseph lost one of his best friends, Joaquin Oliver, on February 14, and is speaking out in his name by organizing and marching, rising to a challenge no 16-year-old in mourning should have to face. Sarah Chadwick, 16, has been organizing the March for Our Lives event set for March 24, and she is loudly denouncing critics like the NRA's Dana Loesch on Twitter. Jaclyn Corin, 17, who lost her friend Jaimie Guttenberg on February 14, planned a trip to meet lawmakers at the very start of the movement and has been a crucial member of #NeverAgain.

We Stoneman Douglas students may have woken up only recently from our sheltered lives to fight this fight, but we stand in solidarity with those who have struggled before us, and we will fight alongside them moving forward to enact change and make life survivable for all young people. People who have been fighting for this for too long, others who were never comfortable enough to openly talk about their experiences with gun violence, or still others who were never listened to when opening up about their experiences with gun violence or were afraid to speak out - these are the people we are fighting with and for.

The media afforded a group of high school students the opportunity to wedge our foot in the door, but we aren't going through this alone. As a group, and as a movement, it's vital that we acknowledge and utilize our privilege, use our platforms to spread the names of the dead and the injured, promote ideas that can help spread kindness rather than hostility, support those who aren't being heard, take our voices and use them together with the megaphones provided.

We the Wounded of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Future, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common People, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Generations to Come, do ordain and establish this March for the United States of America.
This story is a part of Teen Vogue's ongoing coverage on gun violence and the growing movement for gun control. Be sure to check out the other features: Meet the Young Activists Fighting to End Gun Violence A Roundtable Talk With 5 Young Gun Control Activists Where to Join the March For Our Lives How the NRA Came to Influence America The Truth About Mental Illness and Gun Violence How to Survive a School Shooting Real Students Read the Haunting Text Messages Sent During Mass Shootings

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In an exclusive op-ed for Teen Vogue's gun control issue, Parkland survivor and activist X González shares why young people are stepping up for gun control.

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The terrible numbers that grow with each mass shooting

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The terrible numbers that grow with each mass shooting

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Editor's Note: On Oct. 30, 2023, The Post published a new project tracking mass shootings nationwide.

The places change, the numbers change, but the choice of weapon remains the same. In the United States, people who want to kill a lot of other people most often do it with guns.

Related

The number of U.S. mass shootings depends on how you count

Public mass shootings account for a tiny fraction of the country's gun deaths, but they are uniquely terrifying because they occur without warning in the most mundane places. Most of the victims are chosen not for what they have done but simply for where they happen to be.

There is no universally accepted definition of a public mass shooting, and this piece defines it narrowly. It looks at the public shootings in which four or more people were killed, usually by a lone shooter. It does not include shootings tied to robberies that went awry, and it does not include domestic shootings that took place exclusively in private homes. A broader definition would yield much higher numbers.

Public mass shootings are a small slice of gun deaths

Source: Gun Violence Archive. Excludes the roughly 22,000 annual gun suicides, which are not publicly reported in real time.

This tally begins Aug. 1, 1966, when a student sniper fired down on passersby from the observation deck of a clock tower at the University of Texas. By the time police killed him, 17 other people were dead or dying. As Texas Monthly's Pamela Colloff wrote, the shooting "ushered in the notion that any group of people, anywhere - even walking around a university campus on a summer day - could be killed at random by a stranger."

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More than 50 years of U.S. mass shootings: The victims, sites, killers and weapons

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The places change, the numbers change, but the choice of weapon remains the same. In the United States, people who want to kill a lot of other people most often do it with guns.

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Understanding key terms in the gun control debate

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Understanding key terms in the gun control debate

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Why White School Districts Have So Much More Money

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Why White School Districts Have So Much More Money

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In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools are unconstitutional.

In 2018, on the 64th anniversary of that ruling, a lawsuit filed in New Jersey claimed that state's schools are some of the most segregated in the nation. That's because, the lawsuit alleged, New Jersey school district borders are drawn along municipality lines that reflect years of residential segregation.

The idea that school district borders carry years of history is the premise of a new report from the nonprofit EdBuild, which studies the ways schools are funded in the U.S.

The report starts with a number: $23 billion. According to EdBuild, that's how much more funding predominantly white school districts receive compared with districts that serve mostly students of color.

"For every student enrolled, the average nonwhite school district receives $2,226 less than a white school district," the report says.

EdBuild singles out 21 states - including California, New Jersey and New York - in which mostly white districts get more funding than districts composed primarily of students of color.

More than half of students in the U.S. go to segregated or "racially concentrated" schools, according to the report. Those are schools in which more than three-quarters of students are white, or more than three-quarters are nonwhite.

Researchers found that high-poverty districts serving mostly students of color receive about $1,600 less per student than the national average. That's while school districts that are predominately white and poor receive about $130 less.
What's causing the disparity?
As Rebecca Sibilia, founder and CEO of EdBuild, explains, a school district's resources often come down to how wealthy an area is and how much residents pay in taxes.

"We have built a school funding system that is reliant on geography, and therefore the school funding system has inherited all of the historical ills of where we have forced and incentivized people to live," she says.

Public schools are primarily funded by local and state sources - the federal government pays for less than 10 percent,on average, of K-12 education. States sometimes step in to provide extra funding for districts that need it most. But not all states have been able to keep up with that demand.
The relationship between funding and teacher strikes
In some of the states with the worst funding disparities, teachers have gone on strike in the past year. In Arizona, poor, primarily white school districts get about $19,000 per student - while high-poverty, nonwhite districts get about $8,000, according to EdBuild.

That means high-poverty districts made up of mostly students of color - about a third of the school districts in the state - receive almost $11,000 less per student than the state's high-poverty, predominantly white districts.

Sibilia also points to the #RedForEd movements in Oklahoma and Colorado. Because those states have placed limits on their taxes, she says, they simply don't have the income to step in and fund the school districts that need it most.
Why funding in Southern states looks more equal
According to EdBuild researchers, predominantly white districts are often smaller than districts with mostly students of color: The former serves an average of just over 1,500 students, and the latter over 10,000, or three times the national average.

That size disparity matters. Sibilia says districts serving mostly students of color "rely more on the decisions that are being made at the state level, but there are fewer voices representing them. And that's where you really start to see the shift in power."

This power dynamic looks different in the South, where school district lines are often drawn along county lines, making districts larger across the board. Researchers found that funding looks more equal in states like Georgia and Alabama.

"This confirms a theory that we've had, which is that the larger the tax base - the larger the actual geography of the school districts - the more you can actually balance out the difference between a wealthy white suburb and a less wealthy rural or urban area," Sibilia says.

EdBuild researchers looked at data from a variety of sources - including the Education Department and the U.S. Census Bureau - to find school system demographics and district funding levels. They compared the funding across districts after taking cost of living into account.

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Why White School Districts Have So Much More Money

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According to a new report, predominantly white school districts receive $23 billion more than districts that serve mostly students of color in the U.S.

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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How federal law draws a line between free speech and hate crimes

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How federal law draws a line between free speech and hate crimes

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WASHINGTON - Incendiary rhetoric has seeped into 2016 presidential politics, surfaced in the public debate over accepting Syrian refugees into the U.S. and popped up repeatedly following terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch has expressed concern about the potential for an anti-Islam backlash similar to one that followed the Sept. 11 attacks and vowed that the Justice Department would punish "actions predicated on violent talk."

"Advocates are certainly reporting to us an increased concern around incidents, threats and potential hate crimes that they're bringing to our attention," Vanita Gupta, the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

But the spectrum of hateful expression is broad, encompassing acts that are clearly illegal - such as firebombing a mosque - as well as vague and distant threats that, while noxious, might well be protected by the First Amendment.

Establishing the line between protected speech and a federal hate crime can be challenging for prosecutors and courts and depends on the facts of each particular case. Here's a look at how federal law treats hate speech:
WHAT DO FEDERAL LAWS HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THIS?
The signature hate crime statute - the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act - makes it illegal to physically harm someone based on their race, religion, national origin, gender or sexual orientation, among other characteristics.
DOESN'T THE CONSTITUTION ALLOW ME TO SAY WHATEVER I WANT?
To a large degree, yes. The First Amendment offers broad free speech protections and permits membership in organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, that espouse hateful ideologies.

But while the Constitution gives latitude to hate speech and offensive rhetoric, court decisions in the last century have carved out notable - though narrow - exceptions to free speech guarantees and authorized prosecution for language deemed to fall out of bounds.

Comments intended as specific and immediate threats brush up against those protections, regardless of a person's race or religion. So do personal, face-to-face comments meant to incite imminent lawlessness, such as a riot.

A 1942 Supreme Court decision called Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire - which involved a Jehovah's Witness who cursed at a city marshal, calling him a "damned fascist" - articulated a "fighting words" doctrine that restricted insults intended to provoke an "immediate breach of the peace."
ARE THREATS AGAINST THE LAW?
They certainly can be, but that depends on various factors. Determining what constitutes an actual threat - as opposed to a vague and far-off remark - is a tricky, fact-specific question.

In Virginia v. Black, a seminal 2003 Supreme Court decision on cross-burning, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor described "true threats" as statements in which "the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals."

In other words, the more specific and immediate the threat, the more likely it'll be regarded as illegal.

"It's one thing to say, 'Kill all the Jews,' versus 'Kill that Jew who was my kid's school teacher who gave him an F,'" said James Weinstein, a constitutional law professor at Arizona State University.

Justice Department officials say context matters greatly in such cases, making it hard to generalize too broadly. Hateful threats that the target interprets as a joke, or that are discussed among friends but not leveled at anyone in particular, likely would be harder to prosecute federally.

"It requires specificity, it requires intent and it requires a certain sense of imminence," Gupta said.
HOW OFTEN ARE SUCH CASES INVESTIGATED?
The FBI says local law enforcement agencies reported 5,479 hate crime incidents in 2014.

In a Dec. 3 speech to the Muslim Advocates organization, Lynch said that more than 220 defendants had been charged with hate crime offenses in the last six years. Those include a Utah man who threatened an interracial family with death and a man who admitted tying a rope around the neck of a James Meredith statue on the University of Mississippi campus.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the attorney general said, the Justice Department has headed more than 1,000 investigations into acts of "anti-Muslim hatred" and bigoted behavior, leading to more than 45 prosecutions - including of a New York man who e-mailed death threats to an employee at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and of a Texas man convicted in 2013 of threatening to bomb an Islamic center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Among incidents in the last two months: a caretaker at a Philadelphia mosque said he found a severed pig's head outside on the sidewalk, and CAIR, a Muslim advocacy group, reported getting a hate letter with a white powdery substance at its Washington offices.

"I think, sadly, that number is going to continue," Lynch said.

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How federal law draws a line between free speech and hate crimes

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WASHINGTON - Incendiary rhetoric has seeped into 2016 presidential politics, surfaced in the public debate over accepting Syrian refugees into the U.S. and popped up repeatedly following terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.

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Should Hate Speech be Protected as Free Speech?

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Should Hate Speech be Protected as Free Speech?

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Native Americans and Freedom of Religion

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Native Americans and Freedom of Religion

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Newsela | Native Americans and freedom of religion

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Freedom of religion for some ... but not others

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Native Americans resisting efforts to limit their voting rights

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Native Americans resisting efforts to limit their voting rights

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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The Trail of Tears and Indian Removal Act

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The Trail of Tears and Indian Removal Act

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The 'Indian Problem'

White Americans, particularly those who lived on the western frontier, often feared and resented the Native Americans they encountered: To them, American Indians seemed to be an unfamiliar, alien people who occupied land that white settlers wanted (and believed they deserved).

Some officials in the early years of the American republic, such as President George Washington, believed that the best way to solve this "Indian problem" was to simply "civilize" the Native Americans. The goal of this civilization campaign was to make Native Americans as much like white Americans as possible by encouraging them convert to Christianity, learn to speak and read English and adopt European-style economic practices such as the individual ownership of land and other property (including, in some instances in the South, enslaved persons).

In the southeastern United States, many Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek and Cherokee people embraced these customs and became known as the "Five Civilized Tribes."

Did you know? Indian removal took place in the Northern states as well. In Illinois and Wisconsin, for example, the bloody Black Hawk War in 1832 opened to white settlement millions of acres of land that had belonged to the Sauk, Fox and other native nations.

But the Native Americans' land, located in parts of Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Florida and Tennessee, was valuable, and it grew to be more coveted as white settlers flooded the region. Many of these whites yearned to make their fortunes by growing cotton, and often resorted to violent means to take land from their Indigenous neighbors. They stole livestock; burned and looted houses and towns; committed mass murder; and squatted on land that did not belong to them.

Worcester v. Georgia

State governments joined in this effort to drive Native Americans out of the South. Several states passed laws limiting Native American sovereignty and rights and encroaching on their territory.

In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the U.S. Supreme Court objected to these practices and affirmed that native nations were sovereign nations "in which the laws of Georgia [and other states] can have no force."

Even so, the maltreatment continued. As President Andrew Jackson noted in 1832, if no one intended to enforce the Supreme Court's rulings (which he certainly did not), then the decisions would "[fall]...still born." Southern states were determined to take ownership of Indian lands and would go to great lengths to secure this territory.

Indian Removal Act

Andrew Jackson had long been an advocate of what he called "Indian removal." As an Army general, he had spent years leading brutal campaigns against the Creeks in Georgia and Alabama and the Seminoles in Florida-campaigns that resulted in the transfer of hundreds of thousands of acres of land from Indian nations to white farmers.

As president, he continued this crusade. In 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act, which gave the federal government the power to exchange Native-held land in the cotton kingdom east of the Mississippi for land to the west, in the "Indian colonization zone" that the United States had acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase. This "Indian territory" was located in present-day Oklahoma.

The law required the government to negotiate removal treaties fairly, voluntarily and peacefully: It did not permit the president or anyone else to coerce Native nations into giving up their ancestral lands. However, President Jackson and his government frequently ignored the letter of the law and forced Native Americans to vacate lands they had lived on for generations.

Trail of Tears

In the winter of 1831, under threat of invasion by the U.S. Army, the Choctaw became the first nation to be expelled from its land altogether. They made the journey to Indian Territory on foot (some "bound in chains and marched double file," one historian writes), and without any food, supplies or other help from the government.

Thousands of people died along the way. It was, one Choctaw leader told an Alabama newspaper, a "trail of tears and death."

The Indian-removal process continued. In 1836, the federal government drove the Creeks from their land for the last time: 3,500 of the 15,000 Creeks who set out for Oklahoma did not survive the trip.

Treaty of New Echota

The Cherokee people were divided: What was the best way to handle the government's determination to get its hands on their territory? Some wanted to stay and fight. Others thought it was more pragmatic to agree to leave in exchange for money and other concessions.

In 1835, a few self-appointed representatives of the Cherokee nation negotiated the Treaty of New Echota, which traded all Cherokee land east of the Mississippi - roughly 7 million acres - for $5 million, relocation assistance and compensation for lost property.

To the federal government, the treaty (signed in New Echota, Georgia) was a done deal, but a majority of the Cherokee felt betrayed. Importantly, the negotiators did not represent the tribal government or anyone else. Most Cherokee people considered the Treaty of New Echota fraudulent, and the Cherokee National Council voted in 1836 to reject it.

John Ross

"The instrument in question is not the act of our nation," wrote the nation's principal chief, John Ross, in a letter to the U.S. Senate protesting the Treaty of New Echota. "We are not parties to its covenants; it has not received the sanction of our people." Nearly 16,000 Cherokees signed Ross's petition, but Congress approved the treaty anyway.

By 1838, only about 2,000 Cherokees had left their Georgia homeland for Indian Territory. President Martin Van Buren sent General Winfield Scott and 7,000 soldiers to expedite the removal process. Scott and his troops forced the Cherokee into stockades at bayonet point while his men looted their homes and belongings.

Then, they marched the Indians more than 1,200 miles to Indian Territory. Whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, cholera and starvation were epidemic along the way. Historians estimate that more than 5,000 Cherokee died as a result of the journey.

Legacy of the Trail of Tears

By 1840, tens of thousands of Native Americans had been driven off of their land in the southeastern states and forced to move across the Mississippi to Indian Territory. The federal government promised that their new land would remain unmolested forever, but as the line of white settlement pushed westward, "Indian Country" shrank and shrank. In 1907, Oklahoma became a state and Indian Territory was considered lost.

A 2020 decision by the Supreme Court, however, highlighted ongoing interest in Native American territorial rights. In a 5-4 decision, the Court ruled that a huge area of Oklahoma is still considered an American Indian reservation.

This decision left the state of Oklahoma unable to prosecute Native Americans accused of crimes on those tribal lands - only federal and tribal law enforcement can prosecute such crimes. (A later 2022 Supreme Court decision rolled back some provisions of the 2020 court finding.)

The Trail of Tears - actually a network of different routes - is over 5,000 miles long and covers nine states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Today, the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail is run by the National Park Service and portions of it are accessible on foot, by horse, by bicycle or by car.

Sources

Trail of Tears. NPS.gov.
Trail of Tears. Museum of the Cherokee Indian.
The Treaty of New Echota and the Trail of Tears. North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
The Treaty That Forced the Cherokee People from Their Homelands Goes on View. Smithsonian Magazine.
Justices rule swath of Oklahoma remains tribal reservation. Associated Press.
Justices limit 2020 ruling on tribal lands in Oklahoma. Associated Press.

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Trail of Tears: Definition, Date & Cherokee Nation - HISTORY

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The Trail of Tears was the deadly route Native Americans were forced to follow when they were pushed off their ancestral lands and into Oklahoma by the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

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The Texas Parks and Wildlife Outdoor Annual includes regulations for recreational freshwater and saltwater fishing and hunting in Texas. While Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) strives to provide accurate information in the Outdoor Annual, hunting and fishing regulations may change due to legislative or Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission actions. The Outdoor Annual Mobile App may automatically update to reflect published changes upon establishment of a data connection, but users should independently check the associated statutes and regulations to verify their accuracy. For commercial fishing regulations, see the "Commercial Fishing Guide". For more detailed information on game and fish regulations, contact the Texas Parks and Wildlife Law Enforcement offices, or the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department at 800-792-1112 or 512-389-4800 (Mon-Fri 8AM - 5PM).

TPWD receives funds from the USFWS. TPWD prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, disability, age, and gender, pursuant to state and federal law. To request an accommodation or obtain information in an alternative format, please contact TPWD on a Text Telephone (TTY) at 512-389-8915 or by Relay Texas at 7-1-1 or 800-735-2989 or by email at accessibility@tpwd.texas.gov. If you believe you have been discriminated against by TPWD, please contact TPWD, 4200 Smith School Road, Austin, TX 78744, or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Office for Diversity and Workforce Management, 5275 Leesburg Pike, Falls Church, VA 22041.

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The Texas Parks and Wildlife Outdoor Annual includes regulations for recreational freshwater and saltwater fishing and hunting in Texas. While Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) strives to provide accurate information in the Outdoor Annual, hunting and fishing regulations may change due to legislative or Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission actions.