I nvestigate Police Shootings; End Cash Bail; "Fundamental" Gun Rights; and Vaporizing Juul

 #Johiah Bates, "Create an independent body..." TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - "The solution proposed by activists: appoint investigate bodies to decide whether to prosecute police shootings." "During her 2019 campaign for the presidency, now-Vice President Kalama Harris proposed what might be a complementary body, 'a national Police Systems Review Board,' which would collect data and review police shootings..." 

#Katurah J. Herron, ACLU head in Kentucky, "Abolish cash bail," TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - "Nearly half a million people in the U.S. -- 43% of them Black -- are currently detained before trial. The bail system, which often requires defendants or their families to [gather] up large sums of cash in a short window, is reminiscent of 19th century debtors' prisons." "Combined with these measures, ending cash bail is one way to dismantle inequities faced by people who enter the U.S. criminal-justice system." 

#Kelefa Sanneh, "Guns and Butter," The New Yorker, May 31, 2021. - "For decades, the group [N.R.A. board] found ways to portray its product as a defense of liberty, shifting its focus from guns to gun rights, more generally." "Starting in the nineteen thirties, the N.R.A. turned its attention to fighting proposed laws that would limit the sale or use of guns." N.R.A. editorials that cited the Second Amendment, that Matthew Lacombe, the political scientist who authored 'Firepower' (Princeton University Press), reviewed, tended to portray guns as a means with which to resist tyranny from one's own government." 

Carol Anderson, the historian who wrote the 'Second Amendment: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomberg), argues that the Second Amendment is 'steeped in anti-Blackness,' but it does not follow that every effort to curtail its publications is therefore pro-Black. 

Jamall Greene, a legal scholar at Columbia University, worries that the endless search for 'fundamental' rights makes disputes like this one more intractable problem. "But the legalization of same-sex marriage was the kind of sweeping and definitive victory that naturally leads advocates to wonder how many more might be attainable. "Observing these reversals, one can see what Greene calls 'rightsism' is less a philosophy than a strategy, by which a minority cause can achieve a fuller political victory than might otherwise be possible." 

#Jamie Deauchame, "How Juul got vaporized," TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - There are hundreds of lawsuits against Juul: "They claim that Juul purposely designed its stylish, flash-dive-like device and favored nicotine e-liquids to appeal to teenagers." "In 2020, about 2,000 high school students and 5% of middle-school students said they had vaped some sort of cigarette in the past month." "In 2015, the World Health Organization commissioned a report that warned e-cigarettes might damage the lungs and expose users to carcinogens."

"To this day, health experts and anti-vaping advocates often point to Juul's ill-fated Vaporized campaign as evidence that it purposely hooked teenagers, and engineered a brand-new addiction." "If the company kept marketing in ways that could be seen as targeting kids, Juul was going to be lumped in with Big Tobacco, an industry infamous for preying on young people with its marketing." 

ADDENDUM:

*Jamine Aguilira, "End Family Detention," TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - "The U.S. has three detention centers specifically for immigrant families."