Time (11/6/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Coverage of what is quite possibly not the most recent mass shooting, as we record the show, but the recent one in Lewiston, Maine, leaned heavily on a narrative of the assailant as a “textbook case” of a shooter, because he had some history of mental illness. FAIR’s Olivia Riggio wrote about how that storyline not only gets the relationship wrong—mental illness is not a predictor of gun violence, except in terms of suicide, but also underserves and even endangers those with mental illness, with at least one presidential candidate calling for a return to involuntary commitment.  What isn’t served is the public conversation around reducing gun violence.

The Supreme Court has just heard the case US v. Rahimi, which is specifically about whether those under domestic violence restraining orders should have access to guns. Most media did better than Time magazine’s thumbnail of Rahimi as pitting “the safety of domestic violence victims against the nation’s broad Second Amendment rights”—because, as our guest explains, Rahimi is much more about whether this Court’s conservative majority will be able to use their special brand of backwards-looking to determine this country’s future.

Scott Burris is a professor at Temple Law School and the School of Public Health, and he directs Temple’s Center for Public Health Law Research. We hear from him this week on the case.

Transcript: ‘Worship of the Holy Framers Offers Us Nothing to Deal With the Problems We Have Today’

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Gaza crisis, and at McCarthyism.