U.S. to close border wall gaps and clean up Trump-era work sites

Camilo Montoya-Galvez
Mon, December 20, 2021, 12:51 PM·4 min read

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced Monday it will use border security funding allocated by Congress to close wall gaps and pay for environmental and clean-up projects in areas of Arizona, California and Texas affected by barrier construction undertaken by the Trump administration.

The projects authorized by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas include installing drainage to prevent flooding, mitigating soil erosion, completing roads used by Border Patrol agents, demobilizing construction and equipment storage sites and discarding unused materials.

Mayorkas also authorized U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to erect barriers to close "small" gaps along some wall sections that were left open when construction was brought to a halt in January, saying the measures are necessary to mitigate safety concerns.

"There will be several places where barrier material will be used," a senior CBP official told CBS News. "We would say that that's existing barrier right there that we are addressing, like an open, unsafe construction situation, versus adding additional mileage, which would be adding new barrier."

The work will also include fixing and completing wall gates, including ones used by Border Patrol to rescue migrants trapped in irrigation canals. Citing pending site assessments, the CBP official, who requested anonymity to discuss the plans, said the overall cost for the new projects has not yet been determined.

Normandy fencing fills a gap in the border wall on the Johnson Ranch near Columbus, New Mexico, on Monday, April 12, 2021. / Credit: Bill Clark 

NORMANDY AS IN D DAY NORMANDY LANDING

The new construction and clean-up projects will take place in areas of the U.S.-Mexico border where the Army Corps of Engineers had been tasked to help build former President Donald Trump's wall. The corps is terminating wall construction contracts so DHS can assume control of the unfinished construction sites.

The projects approved by Mayorkas are part of a broader Biden administration plan to wind down the sprawling Trump-era border wall construction effort, which became one of the most expensive federal infrastructure projects in U.S. history.

Mr. Trump, who made construction of a border wall one of his main political aims, secured $15 billion to finance the project, most of which came from diverted military counternarcotics and infrastructure accounts. His administration ultimately built over 450 miles of border barriers, most of which replaced existing barricades.

On the campaign trail, President Biden criticized the border wall project as ineffective and wasteful, vowing that his administration would not erect "another foot" of barriers.

Hours after his inauguration, Mr. Biden ordered a halt to border wall construction and ended the national emergency his predecessor declared to divert military funds. Since then, his administration has been returning billions of unused Pentagon funds, many of which were initially allocated to finance construction at bases in the U.S. and overseas.

But Congress also allocated $6 billion for border barrier construction between fiscal years 2018 and 2021, complicating Mr. Biden's campaign pledge.

The Biden administration has urged Congress to cancel the unused funds, but has said that in the interim, it will focus on using the money to "address urgent life, safety, and environmental issues resulting from the previous Administration's wall construction."

Earlier this year, the administration announced it would use the money appropriated by Congress to repair a flood levee system in Texas' Rio Grande Valley and stabilize soil erosion at a wall construction site near San Diego. In July, Mayorkas also approved the repair of border barriers in San Diego.

Piles of unused border fence sit at one of the border wall construction staging areas on the Johnson Ranch near Columbus, N.M., on Monday, April 12, 2021. / Credit: Bill Clark

The projects announced Monday will take place within the Border Patrol sectors in San Diego and El Centro, California; Yuma and Tucson, Arizona; and El Paso and Del Rio, Texas. Work near El Paso, Tucson and Yuma will focus on closing wall gaps, adding gates and fixing barrier foundations, DHS said.

Work on the new projects is expected to commence during the first quarter of 2022, starting in the Tucson sector, CBP officials said. DHS said it will "work closely" with local, tribal and state officials, landowners and other federal agencies as it begins the projects.

"The Administration continues to call on Congress to cancel remaining border wall funding and instead fund smarter border security measures that are proven to be more effective at improving safety and security at the border," DHS said in a statement Monday.

The Biden administration's decision to stop most border barrier construction and terminate Trump-era contracts has faced criticism from congressional Republicans, who have tied the moves to the record number of migrant apprehensions this past fiscal year.

During a November hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn asked Mayorkas to explain "why a wall is effective and necessary at the White House and the Biden beach house but is not necessary at the southern border."

Mayorkas said the "key" to ensure border security is advanced surveillance technology, citing the "tremendous expanse" of the nearly 2,000 mile-long U.S.-Mexico border.

"We're not going to construct a border wall on the ragged and jagged cliffs in certain parts of the border," Mayorkas added.

CALIFORNIA

History: Little-known desert history of the Bradshaw Trail

Tracy Conrad
Sun, December 19, 2021

A portion of the Bradshaw Trail near Indio circa 1910.

The humble contribution of a scarce book by Francis J. Johnston entitled “The Bradshaw Trail” to the Palm Springs Historical Society was important. The book preserves a largely unknown part of the history of the Coachella Valley. Thoughtfully gifted by Bud Hoover — who has contributed to the entire desert in myriad ways, small and large — the little volume chronicles the taming of a daunting expanse of land, the New Mexico and Arizona Territories, which separated civilization on the East Coast and the emerging settlements of Southern California at the end of the 19th century.

Johnston explains it was “wild, barren and lonely, consisting of endless desert and great mountains. The white man found the land inhospitable and repelling. They looked upon its Indian cultures and civilizations as exotic, unpredictable and often very efficiently warlike.”

For centuries, the land was traversed by Indian tribes. The Spanish began colonizing it in the very early 17th century, unbeknownst to the fledgling settlers at Plymouth Rock. But the unforgiving desert prohibited any real connection or travel between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and San Bernardino, California, until enterprising frontiersmen blazed a trail.

Johnston explains: “By the 1820s this virtual ‘no-man’s land’ — free abode of the aboriginal American — was being penetrated by scouts and explorers of the eastern seaboard civilization. ... mountain men and trappers wandered into and out of Arizona, following no real route. A few ... came on to California and settled there under the Mexican regime. After the war with Mexico, still more Americans made their precarious way into this land which was without government and scarcely had legal status as part of the United States.”

The discovery of gold in Northern California made for through traffic en route to the gold fields. Southern cities promoted the overland passage for the commerce it brought along with it. According to Johnston: “New Orleans, Shreveport, San Antonio, Corpus Christi and Houston, Texas, all encouraged or sent parties overland to California by the southern route” from Santa Fe westward following old wagon trails.

But in early 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, the New Mexico and Arizona territories were a wild, untamed land.

William Bradshaw had come to California in the Gold Rush of 1849 to find his fortune. Realizing that the strike was playing out, in June 1862 he gathered a party of adventurers and headed eastward from Los Angeles to a rumored new discovery of gold in La Paz ahead of what he anticipated would be another rush for gold and the boom that might make him wealthy.

Johnston writes that the effect was to “awaken this virtually undisturbed giant of raw wealth. The route they followed, the trail they broke, has become firmly and rightfully named The Bradshaw Trail. From its inception, central Arizona became accessible to California. By 1864 the California connection had been extended eastward into New Mexico. By the end of the Civil War, the link was complete to the eastern states. Bradshaw had, in fact, opened Arizona and joined it to the United States.”

The route began in San Bernardino, California, through great Banning plateau that included Highland Springs, Gilman Ranch and Whitewater, through the San Gorgonio Pass to Agua Caliente, current day Palm Springs. Bradshaw established stagecoach stations every 15 to 30 miles or so.

“Palm Springs, called Sexhi by the Cahuilla and Agua Caliente by the Spaniard and Mexican, had an important stop built of adobe ...”

The earliest accounts mark the next stop at Sand Hole, an unreliable watering spot on the trail beyond Agua Caliente in what is now Palm Desert.

The route trekked eastward toward Point Happy. “Indian Wells was just that. First called Old Rancheria on the maps, it was originally a Cahuilla village, and the present name developed from the known presence of a deep well dug there by the Indians ... where a permanent station was built of stone and adobe.”

Probing further eastward to the Salton sink, the depression that would become a sea by the escape of the Colorado river from its banks some four decades later, Bradshaw was befriended by Cabazon a Cahuilla chief and a visiting Maricopa Indian from Arizona who shared their knowledge of the ancient trade routes through the Colorado Desert and the location of springs and water holes, where Bradshaw would establish stations.

From the sink, Bradshaw pressed on. “Meandering on around the jutting Santa Rosas the road reached Toro Spring at the mouth of Toro Canyon. This area was heavily occupied by Desert Cahuilla, and their villages were found throughout it. Cabazon lived here. ... Another permanent station was established here. ... It is listed as Toro Mail Station in one table. The name Martinez, that applies to part of the Indian Reservation which includes this section came from Martin’s House, a part of Toro Village ...” The road went on to “Palma Seca, a place of bitter water that could not be used for men or teams” recorded as "Bitter Spring" on some maps.

The trail continued through the Orocopia and Chocolate Mountains to Dos Palmas, a lush oasis a few miles east and south of Palma Seca. “It has been in use as a way point since prehistoric times. The ancient Cahuilla-Maricopa trail passes through this grove as it follows the mesas and desert pavement from Tucson to San Bernardino Valley. From the abundance of artifacts and potsherd still scattered through the swamp grass and among the gravel on the periphery of the grove, it appears that the early Cahuilla not only passed through but often stayed in semipermanent camp.”

Further, Canyon Spring, Chuckwalla Well, Mule Spring, Laguna and Willow Spring station stops were established until the arduous trail finally encountered the mighty Colorado River. Here, Bradshaw built a ferry to shuttle gold miners across the river. On Nov. 7, 1864, the territorial legislature permitted the ferry to charge $4 for a wagon and two horses, $3 for a carriage and 1 horse, $1 for saddle horse, $.50 for a man afoot, $.50 per head for cattle and horses, $.25 per head for sheep.

Two-hundred fifty miles east of Los Angeles in La Paz there was gold. The inevitable exodus of miners and fortune-seekers from Northern California would now follow, availing themselves of Bradshaw’s trail, stagecoach and ferry. Other companies, like Wells Fargo, leisure travelers and traders in all sorts of goods began using the trail and, having no alternative, were obliged to use Bradshaw’s expensive ferry service across the river.

By 1870, the gold at La Paz was pretty well exhausted, but the trail remained a vital connection through the southwest desert. Much of the route would be paralleled by the interstate highway in the 20th century, speeding motorists from Blythe to Los Angeles, blissfully unaware of the fortitude and ingenuity it took to find the way.

To explore a bit of the unpaved trail and cultivate an appreciation for the remarkable feat of William Bradford, hire on Evan Trubee of Big Wheel Tours, bwbtours.com, for a special outing on the very desert Bradshaw traversed and tamed.

Tracy Conrad is president of the Palm Springs Historical Society. The Thanks for the Memories column appears Sundays in The Desert Sun. Write to her at pshstracy@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: History: Little-known desert history of the Bradshaw Trail

China prepares new sexual harassment safeguards for women

A woman wearing a protective mask walks on a street, following the new cases of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Shanghai

Mon, December 20, 2021
By Yew Lun Tian

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's top lawmaking body on Monday debated legislation to give women more protection against gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace, state media reported, outlining rules including a clearer definition of inappropriate behaviour.

The standing committee of the country's parliament, the National People's Congress, deliberated a draft amendment to the "Women's Rights and Interests Protection Law," state television network CCTV reported.

The move came as China explores ways to maintain the labour force while its population is set to shrink, and after activist calls for gender equality that have accompanied a fledging #MeToo movement.

China ranks 107th among 153 countries in the World Economic Forum's annual ranking on global gender equality. Men dominate top echelons of politics and business. Women made up roughly one-quarter of the parliament and there is just one woman in the 25-member Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party.

Under the new rules, employers would not be allowed to ask female job applicants if they intend to get married or pregnant, or to make them take pregnancy tests, CCTV said.

CCTV is part of the Chinese government's publicity department and is an official channel in which the party and government releases information. The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the proposed legislation.

It was not clear how quickly the legislation could be passed. The discussion is expected to continue until at least Friday and the draft would not likely be voted on before that.

Under the new rules, employers would be breaking the law if they restrict female staff from getting married or having children, or if they explicitly prioritise male candidates over females.

In the clearest definition yet of sexual harassment in China, the draft amendment stipulates that it is unlawful to subject women against their will to verbal expressions with sexual connotations, inappropriate or unnecessary bodily behaviour, sexually explicit images, or hint at benefits in exchange for intimate relationships or sex.

China's #MeToo movement took off in 2018 when a college student in Beijing publicly accused her professor of sexual harassment. It spread to NGOs, media and other industries but faced a recent setback when a court in September ruled against the plaintiff in a high-profile sexual harassment case.

(Reporting by Yew Lun Tian; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)

A Maine clam could help fishermen as climate change pushes out other species

Bill Trotter, Bangor Daily News, Maine
Sun, December 19, 2021

Dec. 19—Some commercially fished species in Maine have seen their numbers decline in recent years due to climate change, but one of the state's clam fisheries is growing and could help provide another way for fishermen to earn a living.

Northern quahogs, also known as hard clams, are among a handful of fisheries including Maine oysters — most of which are grown at sea farms — seaweed, and baby eels whose harvest volumes and values have increased over the past decade. Meanwhile, others including northern shrimp, softshell clams — and even the state's still dominant lobster fishery — have shrunk.

For Mark Cota, a Topsham fisherman who grew up in Harpswell, the money in quahogs (pronounced "ko-hogs") has been good enough that this year he started harvesting them full-time.

"I've done it for like four years," Cota, 33, said Friday, chatting on the phone while raking for the clams on the tidal New Meadows River, which separates the towns of Brunswick and West Bath. "The price is right, and I'm getting good at it."

The price fishermen get paid for their haul also has jumped markedly over the years, and not just because they are catching more. Fishermen get paid per quahog, which varies depending on how big the quahog is, but the average price per pound has gone from 40 cents per pound in the 1990s to close to or above $1.50 per pound for each of the past five years.

As recently as 2004, the value of the annual statewide harvest was valued at a little more than $10,000. In the past three years, from 2018 through 2020, the annual harvest values have gone from $2.6 million, to $3.7 million and then back to $2.6 million.

This comes at a time that the Gulf of Maine is getting warmer, which scientists say has made it less hospitable to some species and could be affecting its lobster population.

As the gulf warms, other species have been moving in. Increasing numbers of green crabs have been blamed for the decline in the state's softshell clam population, while longfin squid are believed to be eating and chasing away northern shrimp.

Marissa McMahan, director of fisheries for the ecological research organization Manomet, said Friday there is not much historical data about the state's quahog population, so it is hard to know for sure if more are living along the Maine coast. But many indicators suggest the shellfish is benefitting from changing conditions in the gulf.

The habitat for quahogs ranges from Maine to as far south as Florida and possibly to the Caribbean, which shows that their population likely won't suffer if the gulf continues to get warmer, she said. They also have thicker and tougher shells than either softshell clams or mussels, which should be more resistant to predators that feast on other bivalves.

"Anecdotally what we're hearing from harvesters is that there are more quahogs than there used to be," McMahan said.

On a good day, Cota says he can harvest nearly 4,000 quahogs, which this year have fetched him between 30 and 40 cents each. Sometimes he'll put in fewer hours and go home with maybe 1,500 quahogs, but usually he gets between 2,000 and 2,500 in a day's work, he said.

In Maine, historical annual quahog harvest totals have varied greatly from one year to the next, but they have increased substantially overall since the early 2000s. Back then, harvest quantities were measured in tens of thousands of pounds. Since 2014, the state's annual quahog haul has been close to or above 1 million pounds. In 2019, it surpassed 2 million pounds, the highest annual total ever.

There also is increasing market demand for quahogs, which means that there is more interest in harvesting them at the same time that there are more to be found, McMahan said. Outside Maine, this has led to aquaculture farmers cultivating quahogs for the seafood industry.

Smaller quahogs are more delicate, and often sell at sushi grade for higher prices, while larger quahogs are tougher, and so are usually processed to be used for chowder, she said. In addition to generally fetching a higher price, quahogs don't spoil as quickly as softshell clams, as long as they are kept cool, and so can be shipped further distances to reach more customers.

"Quahogs can be out of the water for weeks, while softshell clams last only a few days," McMahan said.

Manomet has been conducting research to see where quahogs are most prominent along the Maine coast, and to help local towns adopt ordinances that regulate how they are to be managed, she said.

Quahogs are mostly found in southern Maine, up to Sagadahoc county, but that is expected to change with time, she said. As waters in the gulf continue to get warmer, she said, Manomet will be able to help other towns and harvesters effectively manage local quahog populations.

"The market has a lot of potential to grow," McMahan said.

Cota said part of the reason he decided to get out of lobstering is because of the increasing number of restrictions in that fishery that are aimed at reducing its impact on whales. Other fisheries also are facing environmental or regulatory challenges, he said, but he is more optimistic about quahogs.

"Quahogging has been pretty good, and I hope it stays that way," he said. "I've seen plenty of seed [quahogs] out there. I think they'll be around for a little while."

Bangor Daily News writer and visual journalist Troy Bennett contributed to this report.

NASA records eerie ‘sounds’ on Jupiter’s moon: ‘It’s not scifi. It’s the real deal

Mark Price
Mon, December 20, 2021

NASA has recorded eerie “sounds” coming from one of Jupiter’s moons, and the audio is like something straight out of a 1950s science fiction movie.

This includes chirping, high-pitched whistling and hums. The noise also appears to speed up and build to a crescendo before mysteriously dropping.

“It’s not scifi. It’s the real deal,” NASA officials posted on Facebook.

The radio waves were recorded as NASA’s Juno mission “recently flew through the magnetic field of Ganymede, one of the gas giant’s many moons.”

Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton said the audio track was created when Juno’s instruments tuned “in to electric and magnetic radio waves produced in Jupiter’s magnetosphere,” according to a news release. The frequency was then “shifted into the audio range,” so we could “hear” Ganymede, scientists said.

“This soundtrack is just wild enough to make you feel as if you were riding along as Juno sails past Ganymede for the first time in more than two decades,” Bolton said in the release.

“If you listen closely, you can hear the abrupt change to higher frequencies around the midpoint of the recording, which represents entry into a different region in Ganymede’s magnetosphere.”

The radio wave emissions, collected on June 7, are considered one of the mission’s highlights, NASA said. The spacecraft “was within 645 miles (1,038 kilometers) of the moon’s surface and traveling at a relative velocity of 41,600 mph (67,000 kph).”

Analysis of the recording is ongoing, and some NASA scientists suspect the frequency changes might be due to the recorder “passing from the nightside to the dayside of Ganymede.”

NASA’s Facebook post announcing the recording has racked up 19,000 reactions and more than 800 comments, including some people who quoted the Bible (Isaiah 40:26). Meanwhile, the actual audio was posted on YouTube and has gotten more than 250,000 listens since Dec. 16.

“Listen. Sounds like a Beatles album,” Rick Tosches wrote on Facebook, referencing the White Album track “Revolution 9.”

“Once again, Star Trek was right!” Michelle Church Guzinski posted.

“I could be completely wrong but the sound seems to have a certain mathematical sequence to it. I have a Math degree,” Hank Mclaughlin said.

NASA recording of Jupiter's largest moon sounds like R2-D2

Li Cohen
Mon, December 20, 2021

NASA has spent years navigating Jupiter to understand the origin and evolution of our solar system's largest planet. And over the summer, researchers collecting radio waves from Ganymede made a surprising find — their recording of Jupiter's largest moon, when adapted to human ears, sounds like R2-D2.

The Juno mission, which launched in August 2011, arrived at Jupiter in July 2016. The Juno spacecraft has completed dozens of orbits around the planet, and on June 7, it flew closer to Jupiter's largest moon than any other in more than 20 years, coming within 645 miles of the moon's surface.

As it got close to Ganymede, NASA's Waves instrument collected data from electric and magnetic radio waves. Researchers then shifted the frequencies of these waves to make them audible, creating a 50-second moon track filled with chirps, beeps and boops that sound a lot like R2-D2 on its own mission in a galaxy far, far away.

Scott Bolton, the principal investigator of the Juno mission, debuted the audio track at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in New Orleans on Friday.

"This soundtrack is just wild enough to make you feel as if you were riding along as Juno sails past Ganymede for the first time in more than two decades," he said in a NASA statement. "If you listen closely, you can hear the abrupt change to higher frequencies around the midpoint of the recording, which represents entry into a different region in Ganymede's magnetosphere."

Willam Kurth, lead co-investigator for the Waves project, said that it's possible the change in frequency is "due to passing from the nightside to the dayside" of the moon.

Ganymede, which is bigger than the planet Mercury and the dwarf planet Pluto, is believed to have an underground saltwater ocean, according to NASA, and is thought to have more water than all the water on Earth's surface.

It's the only moon known to have its own magnetic field.

This image shows two of Jupiter's large rotating storms, captured by Juno's visible-light imager, JunoCam, on Juno's 38th perijove pass, on November 29, 2021. / Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing: Kevin M. Gill CC

At the conference, Bolton also unveiled "incredibly beautiful" new images of Jupiter.

"It's really an artist's palette. This is almost like a Van Gogh painting," he said during a conference news briefing. "You see these incredible vortices and swirling clouds of different colors."

Those vortices, researchers said, resemble vortices seen in Earth's oceans, and are believed to spontaneously emerge and "survive forever."

"Although Jupiter's energy system is on a scale much larger than Earth's, understanding the dynamics of the Jovian atmosphere could help

Peru community to attend mine blockade meet in reversal of decision


Peru's Andean rural residents complain of negative effects of mining activity

Mon, December 20, 2021
By Marco Aquino and Marcelo Rochabrun

LIMA (Reuters) -A Peruvian community blocking a road used by MMG Ltd's Las Bambas copper mine will attend a government-brokered meeting set for Tuesday, a representative said, backtracking from a previous decision to boycott it.

"In order to stop people from demonizing the communities as uncompromising, it's been decided to attend the meeting," said Victor Villa, a legal adviser for residents of Chumbivilcas, whose month-long blockade forced Las Bambas to suspend production last week.

Las Bambas said earlier on Monday it does not plan to initiate legal action against Peru "for the time being" over the blockade. The mining sector has previously called on the government to send law enforcement to remove the blockade.

The meeting is the government's latest attempt to defuse the situation without resorting to a state of emergency, which would suspend civil liberties.

The current blockade has been in place since Nov. 20 by residents of the Chumbivilcas province who complain that the mineral wealth of the mine simply bypasses them and want the company to provide more jobs and money for the area.

The government had tried to broker a meeting between the parties last week, but Villa called the available proposal "a joke" and did not attend.

Peru is the world's no. 2 copper producer and Las Bambas accounts for 2% of world copper supply.

Las Bambas' vice president of legal affairs, Claudio Caceres, said that company representatives were planning to attend the government-convened meeting on Tuesday with the Chumbivilcas communities.

"Currently we're mainly committed to being able to restart a constructive and real dialogue, at the moment we're not thinking of taking legal action," Caceres said in an interview with local radio station RPP.

The Chinese-owned mine has been a flashpoint of protests since it began operations in 2016.

(Reporting by Marco Aquino and Marcelo Rochabrun in LimaWriting by Anthony EspositoEditing by Bernadette Baum, Matthew Lewis and Sam Holmes)

A Grim, Long-Hidden Truth Emerges in Art: Native American Enslavement

Patricia Leigh Brown

NYT
Sun, December 19, 2021

An installation by Chip Thomas' second exhibition, "Unsilenced," at the Fort Garland Museum and Cultural Center in Fort Garland, Colo., Sept. 30, 2021.

 (Kalen Goodluck/The New York Times)

FORT GARLAND, Colo. — On a bitter, windy day, a long-overdue reckoning took place in the commandant’s quarters at Fort Garland, a former military outpost turned museum and cultural center. For most of its history, the museum has celebrated frontiersman Christopher Carson, known as Kit, who briefly commanded this far-flung garrison built during the American westward expansion to protect settlers from raids by tribes.

But now the museum was telling a far different story in an exhibition titled “Unsilenced: Indigenous Enslavement in Southern Colorado” — one of the first dedicated to highlighting the little-known and centuries-old system of Indigenous bondage that historian Andrés Reséndez called “the other slavery” in his landmark 2016 book.

On this October afternoon, the quarters were redolent with smoke from a healing ceremony performed by a Navajo spiritual leader for the descendants from many tribes who had gathered this day to honor the grim history of kidnapping, enslavement and forced assimilation of their ancestors. Though glorified for decades, Carson led a devastating 1864 U.S. military campaign to defeat Navajo resistance and remove Indigenous people from their homelands.

“We knew that historically our lives were distorted due to colonization,” said Shawn Price, a Navajo teacher or “wisdom keeper,” who offered to perform a traditional healing ceremony at its opening, with Dineh’ Tah Navajo dancers. “What they’re telling us is a long-hidden and suppressed truth.”

Some scholars now argue that the brutal trafficking in Indigenous people began with Christopher Columbus’ first voyage in 1492 and flourished in the Southwest. Many women and children were taken and traded, sometimes in retaliatory tribal raids or in attacks by Spanish colonists; and much later, they were obtained and exchanged by American settlers. While Indigenous enslavement was never legal, slaveholders resisted federal and state efforts to stop it.

Until relatively recently, it was an untold part of the southern Colorado story, an area of intricate political geography made more complex by deeply rooted histories. The region was once New Spain, then Mexico and then the northern frontier of the U.S. territory of New Mexico until 1861, when the territory of Colorado was created.

Fort Garland sits at the base of Mount Blanca, or Sisnaajini, a sacred mountain on the eastern boundary of Dinétah, the Navajo homelands. Inside, the creaky old floors of the commandant’s quarters lead to a hushed historical realm filled with images and documents of enslaved Native children who were stripped of their birth names and cultural identities. At the entrance is a photograph of Gabriel Woodson, a 12-year-old Navajo boy who was forcibly taken and then sold by Utes in 1860 to James Bernard Woodson, a businessman, and was gussied up in western attire for his portrait.

The creator of “Unsilenced,” as well as a second installation at a nearby slave site, is Chip Thomas, a 64-year-old Black physician who has spent 34 years working at a primary care clinic on the Navajo Nation. He is also an artist, known for deploying his black-and-white photographs of corn, sheep, elders, activists and others on abandoned water tanks, grain silos, Quonset huts and other structures. The intention of his work here is to “reflect the beautiful and strong parts of the culture back to the community,” he said.

In “Unsilenced” his installations draw on a detailed and chillingly dispassionate survey from 1865, rendered in impeccable penmanship, of 149 Indigenous people who were taken from their communities into servitude. The youngest is a 3-year-old.

The list was compiled in the San Luis Valley by Maj. Lafayette Head, a federal agent who became the first lieutenant governor of Colorado. Head recorded the names and tribes of the enslaved, their “owners,” the date and source of purchase and their willingness (or not) to return to their tribes. The list, in the National Archives in Washington, was digitized by Estevan Rael-Galvez, a former New Mexico state historian and consultant to the museum who is assembling a database of enslaved Indigenous people.

In “Unsilenced,” fragments of what Thomas calls the “beautifully written document of horrible acts” are digitally printed on diaphanous fabric, with an image of an unknown Navajo captive boy looming behind it.

The presence of the lists in Carson’s quarters is grimly apt. The majority of “Indian Captives Acquired by Purchase” were Navajo, forcibly removed by Carson from their homelands. It was an act that Col. James H. Carleton, who gave Carson his orders, compared to a chase for wild game.

The disastrous 250- to 450-mile “Long Walk” to wretched internment in Bosque Redondo, New Mexico — what Navajo people have called “the Fearing time” — was a golden moment for slavers. Historians estimate that 1,000 to 3,000 Navajo, mostly women and children, were captured by Ute and Hispanic raiders and then traded, often for a horse or a gun.

For 70 years, the museum glorified Carson in period rooms stuffed with hunting trophies. “Unsilenced” introduces Juan Carson, his enslaved Navajo “son,” and one of three captive Indigenous servants in the household. Juan was 3 years old when Carson’s wife, Josefa Jaramillo, offered a horse for the child after the Utes threatened to kill him, or so the story goes. (Kit Carson Jr., the couple’s son by birth, indicated that his father had adopted Juan).

Forced assimilation was the modus operandi of Anglo and Hispano colonizers. Stolen children like Juan were baptized and given a Christian name. The justification was redemption, to transform them into “a white and delightsome people,” as Brigham Young, the Mormon church leader and first governor of Utah, put it.

“We are at a moment in which we’re looking at the hard history of our nation and these atrocities of the human experience,” said Mary Elliott, curator of American slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. “The history is there in the records. We’re illuminating that history and telling these more nuanced and complex stories.”

The stories reverberate across generations in what Galvez-Rael, the Fort Garland consultant, calls “a heritage of converging streams.” It is seen in the blanket that hangs above his dining table, woven by his mother’s ancestor, a Navajo captive who was abducted and taken to a household in Abiquiu, New Mexico, where “Genizaros,” or Indigenous people, were taken into Hispanic households as indentured servants.

Today, the resulting culture in the San Luis Valley and northern New Mexico is “a strange blend born of violence,” said James F. Brooks, a historian and the author of “Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship and Community in the Southwest Borderlands.”

Sitting at Fort Garland in a bright pink sweater, Theresa Valdez Maestas, 76, who came to take part in the healing ceremony, told of her 20-year search to untangle the history of her great-great-grandmother, Maria Rita Gallegos Chacon, known as Mama Rita. Rita, born Navajo, was found hiding behind a fallen tree after her mother was shot in the back with an arrow. The man who discovered Rita, Manuel Antonio Gallegos, and his wife, Bibiana, treated her as a daughter, Valdez Maestas said. “But she was always given to understand that she was a servant, a criada,” she added.

When the couple’s daughter Maria married, they sent Rita to be the newlywed’s maid. Maria died in childbirth and shortly thereafter, Rita became pregnant by Maria’s husband, Jose Prudencia Chacon. Chacon married Rita a week before the first of their six children was born. In “Unsilenced,” Mama Rita’s photograph sits above a fireplace, her hands folded neatly on her lap. “I kept looking and looking and looking for her,” Valdez Maestas said.

Laura Bertha Tolmich sewed a traditional ribbon dress for the healing ceremonies at the museum. Her great-great-great grandmother, Maria Guadalupe Benevidez Tolmich, was born Apache and kidnapped by another tribe. She was sold to and raised by a Spanish family and eventually married a Hungarian-born Union soldier in New Mexico territory. “She’s still in me,” said Tolmich, who tends her ancestors’ graves. “She brought me here so she could be cleansed.”

The Fort Garland exhibition, which Brooks calls “a courageous act of public history,” was developed by the museum in collaboration with community members. For several years, the institution had been grappling with “the generational trauma in the stories that have been passed down,” said Eric J. Carpio, its director. The museum became aware of Thomas through a 2018 installation he had done at a historical schoolhouse nearby.

A devotee of New York street art and a member of Justseeds, an international printmaking cooperative, Thomas grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, the son of a doctor and a teacher, and went to a Quaker school that immersed him in social justice issues. He received a scholarship to attend Meharry Medical College, a historically Black college in Nashville, Tennessee; in exchange he spent several years in a medically underserved community — the Navajo Nation — and wound up staying.

He considers medicine and art interwoven: both create “an environment of wellness,” he said. In 2012, he created the Painted Desert Project, in which fellow artists work with young people on the Navajo Nation and create public art.

“Chip isn’t afraid to show what real-life situations are on Navajo,” said Nonabah Sam, a museum curator at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona. “People see his photos going up on these buildings and they don’t touch them,” she added. “The respect for cultural life is definitely there.”

In Conejos, Colorado (population 23), where Lafayette Head lived while compiling his inventory of Indian captives, Thomas has turned the compound into his canvas, inside and out. Although Head called slavery a “barbarous and inhuman practice,” he conveniently left one slave-owning household off his lists — his own. Thomas transformed the earthen walls of the facade of what is believed to be the family’s slave dwelling with Head’s cursive writing, seeming to obliterate it. (Some peers accused Head himself of being a trafficker.)

The compound, which is private, was bought and is gradually being restored by Ronald Rael, an architect and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design, who grew up down the road. Thomas’ installation continues inside, where the light through periwinkle-blue windows throws Head’s bleak tally into bas-relief.

On the parade ground at Fort Garland, the descendants of those who had been enslaved gathered around a young white pine tree, a symbol of peace connecting to the sacred eastern mountain of the Navajo people. Women prepared and planted it in recognition of the violence that continues to plague Indigenous females. It was a means to begin burying the false narratives of the past, a tree of truth.

© 2021 The New York Times Company

The Hideous People Behind a ‘Heinously Ugly’ Confederate Statue


Mark Potok
Sun, December 19, 2021

Brent Moore/Flickr Creative Commons

One of the most hideous, outrageous, and storied Confederate statues in the nation came crashing down in Tennessee this month, marking a new chapter in the ongoing reevaluation of the history of slavery and the Civil War.

It was a long, long time coming.

The rearing equestrian statue a few miles south of Nashville was perhaps ugliest for the man it lionized—Nathan Bedford Forrest, millionaire antebellum slave trader, Confederate general and war criminal, and first national leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

But it was also hideously ugly from an aesthetic point of view—what one writer justly described as “our nation’s ugliest Confederate statue.” At 27 feet tall and built of polyurethane coated with supposedly graffiti-proof paint, it appeared to have been crafted by a cross between a demented adolescent, a lover of brutalist Hitlerian “art,” and an unhinged cartoonist on a bad LSD trip.

The monument stood on a knoll just off Interstate 65, at the hub of a double ring of 13 Confederate battle flags and 13 Confederate state flags, an enduring embarrassment at the gateway of a city that sees itself as part of the New South. Its final demise was the culmination of countless efforts to remove it, destroy it, hide it behind a screen of vegetation, or simply cover it in mocking graffiti.

But first, some people had to die.

First to go was Jack Kershaw, a bizarre character who was a lifelong segregationist described in his Tennessean obituary as a “gold plated eccentric.” Kershaw, a lawyer, conspiracy theorist, pro football quarterback in the 1930s, racist activist, and purported “artist,” died in Nashville in 2010 at the age of 96. He was the creator of the statue, taking 18 months to sculpt it and reportedly using a butcher’s knife to shape it and then painting the horse gold and Forrest silver. With the help of money donated by racist groups, he finished it in 1998.

Kershaw was indeed eccentric, but he was also a committed white supremacist. He was a highly active member of the Nashville White Citizens Council—one of the groups Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall called “the uptown Klan”—as well as a founder of the notoriously segregationist Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, and, later, a co-founder and board director of the League of the South, a racist hate group that still functions today. “Someone needs to say a good word for slavery,” Kershaw once told a reporter. “Where in the world are Negroes better off than in America?”

That wasn’t all. Kershaw also was at one point the lawyer for James Earl Ray, who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Although Ray’s first lawyer saved him from an automatic death penalty by negotiating a plea bargain that included a 99-year sentence, under Kershaw’s advice Ray recanted his confession and instead blamed the murder on a nonexistent character named “Raul.”

Did the Klan Kill MLK? A New Book Argues Wide Conspiracy

Kershaw said that Ray had indeed bought the rifle that killed King, but merely as part of a gun-smuggling ring led by Raul. It was Raul, a man whose last name he said he didn’t know, who pulled the trigger. Kershaw even told reporters that he had a photo of Raul that he would show them down the line—but he never did, and all his efforts to convince the courts, congressional investigators, and others came to naught. Kershaw was representing Ray when he escaped from prison in 1977 with four other inmates but was recaptured three days later. He then convinced Ray to grant a Playboy interview, as part of which he would take a lie detector test. Unfortunately for Ray, the test showed that his recantation was false.

Ray wasn’t happy about that, but he didn’t fire Kershaw until he discovered his lawyer had snagged an $11,000 payment from Playboy for the interview, none of which made it to Ray. Bizarrely enough, Ray hired as a replacement lawyer Mark Lane, a wild-eyed John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist. Lane, who was Jewish, was also known for representing Liberty Lobby, a once-leading antisemitic group, and, later, its leader, Willis Carto, in an ultimately failed battle to reinstall Carto as head of a Holocaust denial organization he had founded.

Kershaw—whose other well-known sculpture was a weird rendering of Joan of Arc “in the flames”—died in 2010. But that wasn’t the end of the saga. The Forrest monstrosity was erected on a 3.5-acre parcel of land owned by local businessman Bill Dorris, another area racist, and Kershaw left it to Dorris. (He also left $5 million that he didn’t actually have for his pet border collie Lulu.) Over the years, Dorris fended off attempt after attempt to bring the statue down.

It wasn’t that he loved the art. “As an artist, mediocre,” Dorris said of his longtime friend. But, he added, “As a thinker, he was way ahead of his time.”

The Most Hideous Confederate Statue by the Man Who Defended MLK’s Killer

At one point, Nashville city leaders tried to get the state Department of Transportation to plant trees to shield the statue from interstate passersby. Dorris in turn threatened to raise it on stilts and move the flags to 100-foot flagpoles—a plan that turned out to be unnecessary because the state refused to add vegetation. Later, one vandal splashed the statue with pink paint, while a second took up the task by spray painting the word “Monster” on the rearing horse’s flank. Someone tried unsuccessfully to pull the whole thing down with a rope. Someone else put up a banner next to it—“Trump 2016, Make AMERIKKKA Great Again.”

Dorris battled them all, denying he was a racist as he did. “Now, if I’m a racist, why do I have so many blacks working for me?” he asked one local radio reporter. To another, he described slavery as “the first form of Social Security.” Black people, Dorris added, “never had it so good as far as job security.”

Finally, in November 2020, Bill Dorris died as well. But Dorris had planned for this, too, leaving the statue and the land under it to a local nonprofit group.

But the Battle of Nashville Trust, which works to preserve landmarks of the 1864 Battle of Nashville, knew nothing of the bequest—and wanted nothing to do with it. In a statement, the group said Forrest had not participated in the battle of Nashville; that “the statue is ugly and a blight on Nashville”; that it had been “vandalized, is in disrepair, and is dangerous,” and that maintaining the Forrest statue “would be and has been divisive in the city we all cherish.”

And so the Dorris will’s executor decided to end it all.

Why Women Put Up So Many Confederate Statues After the Civil War

When the cranes arrived to do the deed this Dec. 7, the 23-year-old Kershaw masterwork didn’t fare too well. The horse’s head broke off. Parts of Forrest were broken or dismembered. Various plans to store the thing and perhaps give it away, or sell it, seemed to go the way Forrest himself had gone—into oblivion.

“This has been a national embarrassment,” state Sen. Heidi Campbell (D-Nashville), a longtime Forrest foe, told The Tennessean. “I’m so excited. This is great news. It’s just so hurtful to people, not to mention heinously ugly.”

This was only the latest insult to General Forrest.

In Georgia, a bust of Forrest was removed from a cemetery in Rome. In Tennessee, which only a few years ago had 31 Forrest memorials, the last Nathan Bedford Forrest Day was celebrated in 2019. This July, after a long controversy, a bust of the cavalry general was removed from the Tennessee state Capitol. And in September of this year, Middle Tennessee State officials said that they planned to strip Forrest’s name from a building on its campus in Murfreesboro.

And then there is the general himself. In Memphis, a bronze equestrian statue of Forrest was removed from a city park in 2017. The city got around a state law prohibiting the removal of such memorials without permission by deeding the park to a local nonprofit group, which then put the statue in storage. But underneath the plaza, just in front of where the statue had stood, lay the mortal remains of Forrest and his wife.

But that, too, was finally resolved.

In June, what was left of the Forrests’ bodies was disinterred and taken away by a local funeral director—a man who understood that those remains might attract anti-racist demonstrators to protest wherever they were stored.

So the director had his employees put the remains in two vehicles and drive off in different directions. Only after 40 minutes did he call his workers and direct them to a funeral home in Munford, where they were secretly stored in a room with newly changed locks. Then he had them reburied them in a local cemetery while awaiting a decision from the Forrest family about where they would be reinterred permanently. Finally, he got word that all concerned had agreed that they would be reburied at the Sons of Confederate Veterans headquarters in Columbia.

The funeral workers had been asked to stop by Chapel Hill, Forrest’s boyhood home, for a public ceremony on the way to Columbia. But that, too, was derailed when the FBI called to warn that they had word of a credible threat and asked that the Forrests be delivered straight to Columbia, according to the funeral director. The director also told reporters that he learned something else from the FBI—that they had agents at several recent Forrest events with facial recognition devices they were using to try to identify people who had joined the Jan. 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol by Trump enthusiasts. Apparently, agents believed that it was likely that Forrest admirers might also be insurrectionists.

Finally, in September, the pair were reburied in Columbia.

For once, as the entire Nathan Bedford Forrest saga demonstrates, the Lost Cause finally had actually lost something—a sign that the elevation to hero status of a violent and incredibly vicious racist may actually be coming to an end.

Stay or go? Louisiana residents are being forced to face climate crisis threats

Joe Rizzo, Joey Bullard and Michael Sanders
Mon, December 20, 2021

As Hurricane Ida rapidly grew in strength, crabbers Stacia Johnson and Justin Smith were left with just three days to relocate their $100,000 supply of crab traps. Knowing the traps could be severely damaged or stolen if left on land, the siblings dropped their traps in the Biloxi Marsh, said a prayer and evacuated to Arkansas. Days later, unsure how many traps would be left, they found that not only were all of the traps intact, but they were also filled to the brim with crabs.

Johnson called the event a miracle in a string of unfortunate events due to the worsening effects of climate change. Rising water temperatures, disappearing islands and rapidly changing salinity levels have severely altered their fishing routes and the migration patterns of the crustaceans they catch. These changes have significantly hindered their success as commercial fishers.

Siblings Justin Smith and Stacia Johnson on a boat on Lake Pontchartrain.

The Johnson-Smith family is not alone. As ocean temperatures rise, hurricane seasons become longer and more intense, and residents across the state are being forced to face the existential threats of the climate crisis.

Since the catastrophic damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, people across South Louisiana have faced greater anxiety about what could happen next. And the damage from Hurricanes Ida and Laura has turned that anxiety into dread, once again prompting families who have lived here for generations to reconsider calling Louisiana home.

Dr. George Xue, a marine science professor at LSU, said the Gulf of Mexico is a great conductor of energy for “monster storms,” or hurricanes that reach categories four or five.

Xue said that with rising sea levels and warmer ocean temperatures due to climate change, Louisiana will begin to see more hurricanes that will gain power fast and become even more unpredictable than the five major ones that hit the Gulf region over the last five years.

“There will be no safe harbor from major hurricanes in the Northern Gulf,” Xue said.

A new survey, led by LSU geology professors, of 2,780 scientists studying climate change shows that 91% of them believe that the Earth is warming because of human-related greenhouse gas emissions. Although this number has risen by 10 percentage points since 2009, according to the Pew Research Center, fewer than half of Americans believe that humans are causing climate change.

And while two-thirds of Baton Rouge residents surveyed by a local foundation agreed recently that the weather is becoming more extreme, they were split along partisan lines about whether climate change was the cause.
To Stay or Leave?

Dr. Michael Castine and his wife Brigette have lived in Baton Rouge for 22 years, and Michael was born and raised in New Orleans. Due to hurricanes, freezes and floods in recent years, the Castines have begun preparations to move to Texas in the coming years.

“It is going to be too much for us to take care of,” said Dr. Castine, who is 55. “After the freeze, we had major stuff we had to do, and after the flood we had major stuff to do. There is just constant upkeep.”

This exodus out of state is uncommon in Louisiana. The Castines said that with large families and a predominant Catholic culture, many people tend to stay and work and live where they grew up in. Out of Dr. Castine’s entire family, he was the only one to leave New Orleans.

“People from New Orleans in particular might go temporarily but will always return,” Brigette said. “I didn't understand how after Katrina people would want to move back, but they did. They could not wait to go back and rebuild.”

Beth and Todd Lacoste expressed a similar sentiment.

Beth, a nurse, and Todd, an attorney, have lived in New Orleans their entire lives, and before Katrina, they were reluctant to evacuate for storms. Katrina forced them to move away for four months with their three children, and after returning home, they had to cook dinner in a microwave in the laundry room while they rebuilt the ground floor.

Now they are quick to evacuate if there is any chance a storm will hit New Orleans, but they also are adamant they would never move given their family ties and identity of being from New Orleans.

“I hope we’re a family of faith, and that will help us through anything,” Todd Lacoste said.

Some people new to the state also have experienced the hardships.

McNeese State University soccer player Alexis Miller and Michael Terblanche, who was then a golfer at McNeese, were displaced from Lake Charles for months after Hurricane Laura made landfall in 2020. Both returned to find damaged apartments, buildings and athletic facilities.

Michael Terblanche, then a golfer at McNeese State University, was displaced by Hurricane Laura and later transferred to the University of Missouri.

“Driving into Lake Charles was almost like driving into a war zone, to be honest,” Terblanche said. “Trees that you’d seen and gotten used to driving around were not there anymore. Houses were torn to shreds.”

Terblanche, who is from South Africa, had never experienced a natural disaster like that. He said that the kindness he experienced from Louisianans after the storm was incredible, but when McNeese canceled its golf program, he transferred to the University of Missouri. He said that the constant fear of losing a home was too much for him to consider returning to Louisiana after college.

Hurricane Laura displaced Miller for six months. She described a chaotic housing market when she returned from her parents’ home in North Carolina, and a race against the clock for her and her neighbors to find a home repaired enough to live in as prices skyrocketed.

She slept on a teammate’s couch while she waited, which she said was “perhaps the hardest part, mentally.” Miller stayed at McNeese, but “now with every weather event, I’m convinced it’s coming here,” she said with lament.
Climate change and the fishing industry

Stacia Johnson, 54, has lived on Lake Pontchartrain in Slidell since she was a child, and a typical day revolves around her 18-foot crab boat. Johnson accompanied her father on fishing trips, and now she and her son Mark speed around the marshes dropping and pulling crab traps. They separate males, females, hard-shell crabs and soft-shells. The catching process for soft-shells is intricate; they are attracted to a specific water temperature and salinity. Once they are caught, they need to be kept on ice to prevent them from regenerating their shells.

“The soft crabs have taken a significant toll because of the water temperature,” Johnson said. “The water temperature is 7- to 8 degrees warmer than five years ago. “Five years ago I would shed 15- to 20 dozen a day. Last year, I did not shed 20 dozen all season.”

Stacia Johnson’s house after Hurricane Ida with her crab boat underneath her dock.

Deoxidized water has also affected her business. As water temperatures rise, oxygen levels decrease. This leads to massive amounts of sea creatures suffocating.

“We’ll be running 37 mph on the boat and come into huge 3-mile stretches of dead fish,” said Johnson.

Her brother, Justin Smith, spends his days on a 38-by-16-foot shrimp boat. Barry Labruzzo, Smith’s longtime friend and coworker, and his one-eyed pit bull named Duke, venture out with Smith on fishing trips, which can last up to five days.

Barry Labruzzo’s shrimp boat that he and Justin Smith use for trips of up to five days.

Their boat, named Madison Alexis after two of Labruzzo’s daughters, houses bunk beds, a kitchen and a shower underneath a remarkably complex system of ropes, nets and pulleys that they use to haul in sharks, shrimp, crabs and a plethora of other sea creatures that the bayou has to offer.

Since the BP Deepwater Horizons oil spill in 2010, burnt crab shells, two-headed shrimp, fish with no eyes and animals with tumors have become much more common, and researchers and fishers alike attribute these deformities to the dispersant chemicals released to combat the oil spill.

For Hurricane Ida, Labruzzo and Smith tied the boat to a tree to keep it upright against the wind gusts and pounding waves. And they were yet again forced to acknowledge the devastating power that the weather, including the almost-daily summer thunderstorms that blast wind and waves at their boat on each fishing trip, have over their livelihoods.

“You gotta have a high tolerance to be out here,” Labruzzo said. “When it comes to the weather, a lot of people would be bothered. You just gotta deal with it.”

Still, these fishers have no qualms about trying to maintain their livelihoods despite climate change.

Labruzzo’s 14-year-old daughter Morgan often goes out with him on fishing trips. She is already skilled at constructing crawfish traps, and she can climb and operate the various rope and pulley systems that appear foreign and nonsensical to the inexperienced shrimper. She plans on following her father into the fishing industry, creating another multi-generational fishing family in southeast Louisiana.

And just as her father taught her, Johnson has taught the next two generations of her family how to fish as well.

“Fishing is our way of life, and despite the challenges,” she said, “I can’t expect my family to change what’s been in our blood for years.”

This article originally appeared on Lafayette Daily Advertiser: Louisiana residents face climate change threats, must choose to stay or go

A conservative solution to America's gun safety problem

EVEN MANCHIN COULD AGREE WITH

Bryan Waldman and Barry Waldman, guest writers
Mon, December 20, 2021

There was a time that, whenever liberals called for limitations on gun rights, conservatives were quick to correctly point out that automobiles killed more people than guns. However, that argument lost ground in roughly 2015 when, after years of declining auto-related deaths and years of increasing gun deaths, the numbers of deaths caused by guns and vehicles were essentially the same. Since that time, gun deaths have continued to rise and auto deaths have trended downward.

Bryan Waldman

Even though the statistics no longer create a good argument for gun advocates, the comparison is still fair. The Constitution of the United States allows Americans to enjoy individual rights and freedoms. However, there can be no dispute that we sometimes must limit individual rights to protect the public from being harmed. So, it makes sense that we, as a society, should use the model that worked to increase automobile safety (and decrease auto deaths) to increase gun safety (and decrease gun deaths). We certainly aren’t the first to suggest this approach.

Barry Waldman

Others have argued that if we treated guns like cars, we would be looking at things like technology to make guns safer. However, as two people who have dedicated their lives to the law, we see the problem as one with a legal solution.

As an example, in Michigan, we have approximately 400 laws that make up what is known as the Michigan Vehicle Code. It tells motorists on which side of the road to drive, when they need to stop at an intersection, and how fast they can drive.

Importantly, it also requires all motorists to purchase insurance — and the law requires insurance companies to include coverage for intentional acts that harm innocent victims. It does so, because — like conservatives correctly point out regarding gun use — cars are typically driven safely, but they also have the ability to severely injure or kill people.

Some car owners recklessly increase the risks, but even responsible drivers can make mistakes. Very few people have the financial resources required to even begin to compensate victims and their families for the harm they have caused by their recklessness or honest mistakes. Indeed, this is exactly what insurance was designed to do: pay a loss that a person can’t afford on their own, in the unlikely occurrence of worst-case scenarios.

Auto insurers assess the true risk of owning and driving a car, and consumers are required to pay a premium which accurately reflects that risk. If a person has a history of reckless behavior, their insurance premiums go up. If their prior behavior is bad enough, they may become uninsurable.

Additionally, if an insurance company prices an individual’s coverage too high, that person has the right to shop for the same insurance coverage with different companies and get the best rate. This system of requiring all vehicle owners to buy insurance puts a price on the risk that comes with car ownership, and it does so in a way that conservatives should embrace — it allows the free market to decide what is fair and help solve a problem, rather than the government.

This free-market system to improve safety could be easily implemented for guns. Every gun would need to be insured. All those in a household would need to be identified. Insurers could give discounts for things that make guns safer, like trigger locks, just as they do for safety features in cars, like airbags.

Prior bad acts, like drunk driving violations, would increase premiums. Other risk factors, like age and whether one has taken a gun safety class, would be considered — as would the kind of gun being insured. A Ford F-150 costs less to insure than a Corvette. Likewise, a hunting rifle should cost less to insure than a semi-automatic handgun.

There is no doubt that in America individuals have the right to bear arms. Like it or not, the U.S. Supreme Court has made that point clear. But with any right comes a cost, and it is time to let the free market tell us the true cost of gun ownership.

Bryan Waldman is president of the Sinas Dramis Law Firm, where he handles cases involving auto collisions and auto insurance issues. He also teaches auto insurance law at Michigan State University College of Law. 

Barry Waldman was the president of the Sachs Waldman Law Firm, and retired after handling product liability cases against truck and auto manufacturers for 50 years.

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Gun safety vs car safety, the solutions are similar