States divided over allowing firearms in capitol buildings
In the past year, insurrectionists have breached the US Capitol, and armed protesters have forced their way into statehouses across the country. But the question of whether guns should be allowed in capitol buildings remains political, and states are going in opposite directions.
In Montana, a law signed on Friday allows anyone with a permit to bring a concealed firearm into the statehouse, reversing a decades-long ban, and fulfilling a longtime hope of Republicans who took control of the governor’s mansion and the legislature this year.
GOP-dominated Utah passed a law this month allowing people to carry concealed weapons in its capitol and elsewhere in the state without a permit.
Guns are allowed in statehouses in some form in 21 states, according to a review by the Associated Press. Eight states allow only concealed firearms, while two states allow only open carry.
Montana and Utah are two of at least 13 states that do not have metal detectors at the entrances to their capitols. The statehouses are open to the public even as many have closed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Several other states, though, are moving to restrict guns inside their capitols.
In Michigan, where armed protesters forced their way inside the statehouse last year and the FBI said it uncovered a plot to kidnap the governor, a state panel banned the open carrying of guns after the January 6 riot in Washington, DC.
Vermont lawmakers, meanwhile, are considering expanding their statehouse ban on guns to other government buildings.
In Washington state, a measure that would ban the open carrying of guns in the capitol and near permitted demonstrations has cleared a committee and is awaiting a vote by the full senate.
‘‘The purpose of openly carrying a weapon is to chill other people’s voices. And it works,’’ said its sponsor, Democratic state Senator Patty Kuderer.
In neighbouring
Oregon, crowds opposed to the statehouse being closed to the public during a pandemic-related session last December stormed the building, including at least one person armed with an AR-15 assault rifle.
In Idaho, self-styled ‘‘patriots’’, anti-vaccination groups and others forced their way past police at the capitol last August, shattering a window as they pushed and shoved their way into a gallery.
In Montana, Republican Representative Seth Berglee said the US Capitol riot didn’t affect his thinking about the law he sponsored.
‘‘People that have a permit are extremely law-abiding, and they are the type of people I would want to have around. I see them as being a deterrent to bad things happening,’’ he said.
There is a similar proposal this year in Oklahoma, where gun rights advocates are again pushing to allow people with a licence to carry firearms inside the capitol.
Not everyone in Montana feels safer with the new law. Democratic House Minority Leader Kim Abbott said more guns could add a chilling new dimension to political debates in polarised times.
‘‘If you have more guns in the building when you’re talking about things that are so personal and intense ... you do worry about things escalating,’’ she said.
The world reached a turning point towards the tail end of the Stone Age. In Europe, our closest evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, vanished. In Australia, every animal larger than a kangaroo disappeared. Our species displayed a creative explosion of cave art.
A new study argues that this can be linked to one event – a sudden collapse of Earth’s magnetic field, which left the planet vulnerable to a blistering surge of cosmic radiation.
The research, published in the journal Science, points out that we are overdue for a repeat.
It looks at the most recent reversal of our magnetic field, which surrounds the world like an invisible balloon, defending us from a barrage of deadly particles emitted by the Sun.
About 42,000 years ago, the poles flipped and magnetic north essentially became south. The magnetic field, generated by the churning of molten iron in Earth’s outer core, faded to 6 per cent of its usual strength. The Sun began to emit intense bursts of radiation.
Earth was left open to the fury of these cosmic winds. The ozone layer was destroyed, tropical electrical storms raged, and unchecked solar winds generated spectacular auroras across much of the planet. Ice sheets and glaciers surged as weather patterns shifted violently.
‘‘It would have been an incredibly scary time,’’ Chris Turney, a professor of climate change at New South Wales University, said.
The polar switch, known as the Laschamp event, was identified in the 1960s but the timing and scale of its effects were not clear. The dates were fixed by analysing the carbon content of ancient kauri tree logs in New Zealand.
The planet’s magnetic field began to weaken hundreds of years before the poles were reversed. Scientists have called the period the Adams Transitional Geomagnetic Event, after author Douglas Adams, whose Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series suggested that 42 held ‘‘the meaning of life, the universe and everything’’.
The Adams event explained the disappearance of megafauna in Australia, previously home to marsupials the size of hippopotamuses, the researchers said.
They said increased lightning strikes would have sparked waves of wildfires. Neanderthals become extinct about the same time. The implication is that humans were able to adapt to the ravaged planet.
The scientists also suggest that the Adams event explains the explosion of cave art. Our ancestors took to sheltering in caves to avoid soaring ultraviolet radiation outside, they suggest, while the red ochre used for face painting made a good sunscreen.
‘‘The impacts of this event .. . . may have been pivotal to our evolutionary story,’’ said Christopher Fogwill, professor of glaciology and palaeoclimatology at Keele University in England and a co-author of the study.
‘‘The coincidence between the timing of the Laschamp event and the extinction of the Neanderthals and megafauna in Australia . . . highlights the global scale.’’
Scientists now wonder if history could be about to repeat as the north magnetic pole moves from Canada.
‘‘We suspect there is something on the way,’’ Fogwill said. ‘‘It’s logical.’’
Street protests in Spain over the imprisonment of a rapper for insulting the monarchy and praising terrorist violence turned violent for a fourth straight night, as political responses to the disturbances strained relations inside the country’s coalition government.
Police in the northeastern region of Catalonia, which has seen most of this week’s rioting, said some protesters pelted officers with bottles, stones, fireworks and paint in Barcelona and at least three other places. Other protesters set fire to large rubbish containers and used them to block streets.
In downtown Barcelona, some people broke into two bank branches and tried to set a fire inside, while others vandalised and ransacked stores, police said.
The pitched battles raged hours after Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said the violence was ‘‘inadmissible’’, in comments that accentuated a rift with his coalition government’s junior partner.
In impromptu remarks at the start of a speech about the economy, Sanchez addressed the rioting, which has ignited a heated debate over the limits of free speech in Spain, and a political storm over the use of violence by both the rapper’s supporters and the police.
‘‘Violence is an attack on democracy, and the government will take a stand against any form of violence to ensure people’s safety,’’ he said.
Interior Minister Fernando GrandeMarlaska also stepped into the row, thanking police for their efforts and saying they would continue to ‘‘guarantee the rights and freedoms of all society
against a minority whose misguided idea of rights makes them have recourse to violence’’.
About 80 people have been arrested and more than 100 injured since rapper Pablo Hasel earlier this week was arrested and began to serve a ninemonth prison sentence.
Sanchez and Grande-Marlaska belong to the Socialist party, which heads the coalition government. Senior members of the coalition’s junior partner, the far-left United We Can (Unidas Podemos) party, have spoken out in support of the protesters and criticised police after a protester lost an eye, allegedly
due to a foam bullet fired by riot police.
The party has filed a petition for a ‘‘total pardon’’ for Hasel and another rapper, Valtonyc, who fled to Belgium in 2018 to avoid trial on charges of ‘‘glorifying’’ terrorism.
Many Spaniards, including artists, celebrities and politicians, have expressed support for a change to the country’s so-called ‘‘Gag Law’’ covering freedom of expression. The government unexpectedly announced last week that it would change the law to scrap prison terms for offences involving freedom of expression.