Dear Progressive Reader,

On Friday, President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order aimed at responding to last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned the federal right to abortion guaranteed in the Roe v. Wade decision of fifty years ago. Biden was reportedly responding to increasing pressure from fellow Democrats, but it remains unclear how much the action can accomplish. According to The New York Times, “the order is vague about how the President hopes to accomplish those goals, leaving the details largely to Xavier Becerra, his secretary of health and human services, who has said the administration has ‘no magic bullet’ that can restore access to abortion.”

This response to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling follows the signing of a bill on gun law reform. This legislation, referred to as a “bipartisan compromise” in the House and Senate, was hailed as “the first major gun safety legislation passed by Congress in nearly 30 years.” However, just nine days after the signing ceremony, a twenty-one-year-old young man fired more than seventy rounds of ammunition from a high-powered rifle into a July 4 parade in Highland Park, Illinois, killing seven people. The state of Illinois, which has some of the toughest gun laws in the country, did not have a way to keep this known violent person from purchasing a deadly weapon. In addition, on the same day, there were gun violence deaths in almost every other U.S. state, with ten other incidents designated as “mass shootings” and a total of 220 fatalities across the country. As a BBC report recently noted, “Firearms deaths are a fixture in American life.” Indeed, when former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated on Friday, a BBC reporter began with the phrase “unlike in the United States, gun violence is extremely rare in Japan.” In fact, the report continued, “In 2014, there were just six incidents of gun deaths in Japan, as compared to 33,599 in the U.S.” This year’s U.S. death toll from gun violence in the first six months of 2022 exceeded 22,000.

This week, on our website, Kendra Love pens an op-ed noting that, “With Roe v. Wade overturned, abortion rights are now in the hands of state legislators. At the same time, some states are making guns more accessible.” Military historian Greg Daddis says that perhaps the media should show more gruesome images to move the opinion of the public and legislators to pass stricter firearm restrictions. “We need to be faced with the devastation wrought by weapons of war and use our sadness, anger, and disgust as motivation to ensure that atrocities like Uvalde won’t happen again,” he writes. Meanwhile, two groups are seeking to address the issues of war, militarism, and gun violence in our communities in new and creative ways. Kathy Kelly and Matt Gannon describe this weekend’s conference of the group World BEYOND War, which is looking at ways of both healing the planet and cultivating a culture of peace. And the National Council of Elders, has issued a statement calling on us all to “commit ourselves to protecting the children and helping them see the possibilities of a world where life is valued, protected, and cherished.”

Jeff Abbott provides a moving report on the recent deaths of a truck full of migrants found near San Antonio, Texas. And we sadly remember our longtime immigration reporter James Goodman who passed away suddenly last Saturday morning after a decades-long career of important and award-winning journalistic work, much of it in recent years for The Progressive. As I wrote this week in a tribute to Goodman, “Jim was truly a great writer and his articles meant so much to us. We were proud to have his voice in our pages and on our website.”

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. – The Progressive and A Room of One’s Own bookstore are hosting a live in-person book release event for Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers, by editor-at-large for The Progressive, Ruth Conniff. The event will be outdoors and is free and open to the public on Tuesday July 19 at 6:00 p.m. Central Time at 2717 Atwood Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin. It will also be streamed and archived on our YouTube and Facebook pages for later viewing. Donors of $50 or more to The Progressive can also receive a signed copy of the book by mail after the event.

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