From TPM Reader MH …

I think you are right about public opinion and guns but for the wrong reason.  
It’s not that half of Americans are pro-assault rifles or whatever. It’s that half the country — namely Republicans — is willing to turn a blind eye to the carnage. Similarly it’s not that half of Americans are anti-free and fair elections. It’s just that half the country — namely Republicans — is willing to turn a blind eye to the obvious lies of their leaders.

About a decade ago, more or less, I was talking to a quite right wing and very prominent conservative who I sometimes chat with. I think this was around the time of the Newtown shooting. But perhaps it was in the aftermath of some other massacre. Painful as it is to say, the massacre aftermaths kind of run together. In any case, if it wasn’t Newtown it was generally in that time frame. He told me that while he was politically or publicly pro-gun he in fact hated guns. Didn’t want them in his house. Didn’t want them near his kids. It was an interesting instance of how our public or political selves may be out of sync with our experience of the world.

In my previous post I got at one of the evolutions of the gun issue over the last decade. There’s another, over a considerably longer period, which seldom gets discussed but is, I believe, extremely important. As strange as it may seem today, one of the biggest supporters of restrictive gun laws used to be police unions. On its face this is hardly surprising. A central feature of the state is that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. That state sanctioned violence is primarily exercised by the police. Who wants to be outgunned? Police unions as a consistent supporter of gun laws remained the case as recently as the Clinton era. But that has shifted markedly over the last twenty to thirty years.

The New York Times has a very informative and powerful visual timeline of the 78 minutes it took police in Uvalde, Texas to storm that elementary school classroom. That’s the whole post. Go look at it.

TPM Reader JT flagged this Uvalde/mass shooting editorial from The National Review. I found it notable for two very different reasons. The first is that the editorial states with a clarity, both horrifying and admirable, what we have been discussing over recent days: for pro-gun advocates child massacres are simply the very unfortunate price of being free. Here’s the key text: “We must reiterate that the Second Amendment protects a foundational individual right and that, however heartbreaking the behavior of their heinous criminals might be, free countries do not wantonly limit foundational individual rights that are, in well over 99 percent of cases, exercised by law-abiding citizens.”

With the one time frontrunners both now removed from the ballot, a new poll shows that the new leader in the Michigan GOP gubernatorial primary is Ryan Kelley, a man recorded in multiple videos as literally part of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6th, 2021. It’s not much of a lead. He’s currently pulling 19% support in what is now clearly a highly unsettled race. He’s followed by Kevin Rinke at 15% and Tudor Dixon — the candidate now backed by the DeVos family — at 9%.

I wanted to update you on recent developments in Ukraine. As I hinted at a week or two ago, we’re now seeing signs of limited but steady Russian progress against the Ukrainian military. That in turn has spawned a series of articles asking whether Russia is now “winning” the war after months in which the Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion seemed to go from success to success. The question is one of perspective. So it’s worth getting into some details about the last three-plus months.

It’s hard to know what there is bad enough to say about the John Durham probe, which just saw its cause celebre indictment of lawyer Michael Sussmann drop kicked to eternity in a rapid acquittal. This was a corrupt effort from the git-go. Durham’s own deputy, who had worked with or for him for decades, felt obliged to resign because of pressure to produce meritless indictments to save Trump’s bacon in the dying days of his presidency.

A recent report from MIT Technology Review sheds light on the ways in which anti-abortion activists have collected data on-site at abortion clinics over the past several decades to go after doctors and others carrying out the procedure.

Just yesterday a federal jury essentially toppled ex-President Trump’s victimhood-laced line of attack against the Russia probe when it acquitted DNC-connected lawyer Michael Sussmann.

The acquittal was a significant swing and a miss, not just for special counsel John Durham, who was handpicked by then-Attorney General Bill Barr to look into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, but for Trumpers everywhere who have built a brand off of the long-unsubstantiated belief that the Mueller probe was nothing more than a politically motivated conspiracy of the elites to undermine Trump’s legitimacy as president.