Don’t Blame the Maine Shootings on ‘Woefully Weak’ Gun Laws
Five months before an Army Reserve sergeant killed 18 people at a bowling alley and a bar in Lewiston, Maine, his relatives told police he was increasingly paranoid, erroneously...
About: Jacob Sullum
Posts by Jacob Sullum
The Bipartisan Urge to Control Online Speech
According to the Biden administration, federal officials who urged social media companies to suppress “misinformation” about COVID-19 and other subjects were merely asking platforms like Facebook and Twitter to...
A Blatantly Unconstitutional Gun Edict Highlights the Hazards of Emergency Powers: New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham Thinks Violent Crime Gives Her a License to Rule by Decree
Grisham's stunt was widely condemned as blatantly unconstitutional, even by some leading supporters of gun control. ...
A Ruling Against a Man Arrested for a COVID-19 Joke Highlights the Influence of a Pernicious Analogy
Back in March 2020, a dozen or so sheriff’s deputies wearing bulletproof vests descended upon Waylon Bailey’s home in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, with their guns drawn, ordered him onto...
A Ham-Handed Bill Attacks the First Amendment in the Name of Protecting Minors From Online Harm
Late last month, a Senate committee considered a 50-page bill with a name that includes the word “kids” and approved it unanimously. Those two facts alone are enough to...
Methanol-Tainted Liquor and Xylazine-Tainted Fentanyl Illustrate the Same Prohibitionist Peril
When the celebrated Iranian artist Khosrow Hassanzadeh died of methanol poisoning this month, everyone but his country’s most ardent theocrats recognized that prohibition was the problem. Yet when the...
Critics of the Ruling Against Biden’s Anti-‘Misinformation’ Crusade See No Threat to Freedom of Speech
Last week, a federal judge in Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction that bars a long list of federal officials and agencies from encouraging social media platforms to suppress politically...
A Post-Clemency Prosecution Shines a Light on a Broken System
A month before he left office, then-President Donald Trump freed Philip Esformes, a Florida nursing home operator who had served nearly five years of a 20-year sentence for bilking...
Congress Considers Conditions on the Government’s License to Steal
Two years ago, the FBI seized the contents of safe deposit boxes used by hundreds of people at U.S. Private Vaults, a Beverly Hills, California, business that offered secure...
Ron DeSantis Dangerously Blurs the Line Between State and Private Action
Ron DeSantis, who officially launched his presidential campaign last week, presents himself as a champion of individual freedom against overweening government. But as governor of Florida, DeSantis has repeatedly...
The Perils of “Rule by Indefinite Emergency Edict”: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch Highlights a Vital Lesson From the COVID-19 Pandemic
On March 15, 2020, two days after then-President Donald Trump declared a national COVID-19 emergency, Cornell law professor Michael Dorf urged Congress to impose a nationwide lockdown and suspend...