Tag: weapons

Background Briefing: May 31, 2022

 

Amid Growing Outrage Over Police Inaction as Kids Were Slaughtered, What Might The Senate Do About Guns?

We begin with the growing outrage over the police mishandling of the latest gun massacre at the elementary school in Texas and assess whether senate deliberations initiated by Senator Murphy might yield some new gun laws that failed to pass after the Sandy Hook school shooting 10 years ago. Joining us is Patrick Blanchfield, a journalist and Faculty Member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. His writing on gun violence, mass shootings, and the politics of gun control have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, Bookforum, Dissent, n+1, and elsewhere and his forthcoming book is, Gunpower: The Structure of American Violence. With the Supreme Court poised to strike down New York’s laws restricting guns, we examine the 2005 Supreme Court case in which Antonin Scalia ruled against a woman whose husband had violated a protective order and killed her 3 children, ruling that police have no duty to protect the public unless they have specifically promised to do so in writing.

 

Biden Decides Not to Send Offensive Weapons Systems to Ukraine

Then, we discuss how we are at an inflection point in the war in Ukraine now that the Biden administration has decided not to send the MLRS and HIMARS offensive weapons systems to Ukraine and speak with Nicholas Heras, deputy director of the Human Security Unit at the New Lines Institute and the former Middle East Security Program Manager at the Institute for the Study of War where he was Director of Government Relations responsible for Russia and Eurasia. From 2016-2017, Nicholas served as the tenth 1LT Andrew J. Bacevich, Jr., USA Fellow at Center for New American Security.

 

The E.U. Will Block Most Russian Oil Imports by the End of the Year

Then finally, with the EU announcing they will block most Russian oil imports by the end of the year, we speak with Emma Ashford, a resident senior fellow with the New American Engagement Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at The Atlantic Council as well as a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point. With expertise in the politics of the Middle East, Russia and Europe, her work focuses on questions of grand strategy, international security, and the future of US foreign policy. She is author of the forthcoming book, Oil, the State, and War: The Foreign Policies of Petrostates, and we discuss her op-ed at Bloomberg, “NATO Should Think Twice Before Accepting Finland and Sweden.”