Good morning. For the last three days, the National Rifle Association has been holding a macabre sort of pageant: a convention in celebration of guns in Houston, Texas, 200 miles away from Uvalde, where – last week – 19 children and two teachers were shot dead by a teenager. The NRA convention also coincided with the last of 10 funerals for the victims of the racist attack in Buffalo a fortnight ago.
As the convention unfolded, and Donald Trump spoke, hundreds of gun control protesters made their voices heard outside. They chanted, passed out water, held up wooden crosses for the Uvalde victims, and distributed voter registration forms. Yesterday, Joe Biden visited Uvalde and promised to do something. Few think he will be able to.
Moving though the protesters’ efforts were, to many they also felt like part of the normal, hopeless choreography. And they did not manifest the kind of radical zealotry that has long been a feature of, for example, the American anti-abortion movement, which has routinely intimidated and even been violent towards women whose healthcare choices it seeks to control.
So why is there this “intensity gap” in the brutal US culture war – and how far does it go towards explaining the NRA’s continuing ability to stymie meaningful gun control legislation? Today’s newsletter is about whether that will ever change, and what might happen if it did. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
Exclusive | The Windrush scandal was rooted in 30 years of racist immigration policy designed to reduce the UK’s non-white population, according to a leaked report that government officials have tried to suppress over the past year.
Liverpool | Hillsborough families have likened the “terrifying” treatment of Liverpool fans at the Champions League final to the disaster that scarred the city. Witnesses said people were scared for their lives as police fired teargas.
Partygate | Labour called for an investigation into leaked text messages suggesting there was a second gathering in Boris Johnson’s Downing Street flat during lockdown, held by his wife, Carrie, on his birthday.
Ukraine | More than 500 Ukrainian children who fled the war without their parents are waiting in limbo across Europe after applying to the Homes for Ukraine scheme, sources working closely with the Home Office say.
Exclusive | British authorities are pursuing the return of Kevin Spacey from the US to face sexual assault charges. An official familiar with the process told the Guardian the UK would seek the actor’s extradition unless he came voluntarily.
In depth: ‘Nothing else works. So what are we left with?’
On Friday night, Benjamin Hernandez was having dinner with his wife at Uptown Sushi in Houston when the Republican senator and NRA ally Ted Cruz walked in. Hernandez is not naturally combative. He had never attended a protest in his life before the election of Donald Trump. But things are different now. “After the Uvalde attack, I tweeted that we need to confront these hypocritical assholes,” he said. “But tweeting is easy, right? And here’s the guy. I thought, I gotta go and talk to him.”
Hernandez (pictured with Cruz above) approached the senator and asked for a photo. Instead, his wife started filming as the two of them smiled. Then Hernandez asked Cruz why he wouldn’t support new measures to limit the availability of guns.
In the video, Cruz barely flinches at this abrupt change of tone; he still has his arm on Hernandez’s shoulder as he tells him he combines “ignorance and hatred”. Then security guards intervene, and as his wife films, Hernandez raises his voice to a level that silences the restaurant. “19 children died!” he shouts, as he is dragged away. “19 children died! That’s on your hands! Ted Cruz, that’s on your hands!”
A bystander, filming another video which has now been viewed almost 9m times, laughs nervously. Cruz sits back down. Muzak continues to tinkle in the background. Even so, it feels like a tiny little tear is forming in the fabric of American political life. The genius of Hernandez’s intervention is in its selfie pretext: the way it twists a mode of obsequious civility into something awkward and confronting.
As a one-off, interventions like this aren’t much more than content. Viral videos can just as easily satiate the desire for action as activate it; when Sarah Sanders was kicked out of a restaurant because she worked for Donald Trump, it didn’t make a lot of difference to anything. But if they become a persistent part of a system of protest, they might have a meaningful effect.
“I would love this to be a playbook for others to do the same,” Hernandez said. “The moment for persuading people, that’s gone. Nothing else works. So what are we left with?”
One obvious test is to compare how effective progressive movements have been with their rightwing counterparts. Militant anti-abortion activists send hate mail, vandalise clinics, harass providers, and menace women. Opponents of gun control take automatic rifles to rallies (as did anti-lockdown groups, below) and threaten civil war. Their behaviour goes well beyond what anybody believes the gun control movement should adopt. It also works.
Last week, the US newsletter Today in Tabs resurfaced a 2015 article by Alex Pareene with a provocative headline: “The gun control movement needs its own pro-life fanatics”. In that piece, Pareene argued that gun control activists should march and protest constantly, make visiting a gunshop hugely uncomfortable, and “focus, up close and without flinching, on the goriest details of the carnage”.
In the seven years since, the gun control movement has started to close the financial gap with its opponents, and mobilised large numbers of people to march and fundraise. But a great deal of the money has come from the billionaire former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg – not exactly a radical figure. Those more shocking actions have not materialised on a mass scale, and not much has changed.
The problem with the status quo is that the cycle of protest in the aftermath of an event like the Uvalde shooting “actually demobilises”, said Patrick Blanchfield, an academic and author of a forthcoming book, Gunpower: the structure of American violence. “People are exhausted by it, and the horizon of possibility is so limited” – that is, confined to making murderous rampages in public places less frequent, and doing little to address the structural causes of the violence that kills 45,000 Americans each year.
“You hear a lot of liberals evoke the ‘unimaginable’, like, what are we supposed to do? Have cops in schools? Lock them down? But there are many schools that already look like prisons. A lot of people already live with these unimaginable things.”
Meanwhile, he adds, “the NRA and the gun manufacturers just wait the news cycle out. If you throw up enough verbal chaff, enough discursive squid ink” – suggestions of “man traps” at school entrances, or tax breaks for retiree security guards – “it lasts about two weeks”.
If any good can come of the terrible circumstances of the Uvalde attack, where the police response is now under investigation after officers waited outside a classroom for 45 minutes even as the children trapped inside with the gunman called 911, Blanchfield suggests that it may be “that it is a very clear case where, if people think the police are the solution to gun violence, they are not”. If so, that might help to knit the momentary horror after Uvalde into the bigger movement, and allow new ways of thinking about how to respond.
Catherine Koebel started out as a gun control activist after the 2007 murder of 32 people at Virginia Tech (above), the university in the town of Blacksburg where her father was a professor. “At the time, I thought, we just need to get those middle of the road people on board, make them feel warm and fuzzy and we’ll win,” she said. “Many years later, I learned that actually, it’s the urgency that’s generated on the fringes that really controls the tenor of the debate.”
Over time, Koebel moved towards more confrontational tactics. She made placards from graphic images of the child victims of gun violence; she targeted an NRA lobbyist at his home and protested at his wife’s interior design business. In 2020, the activism of her and her allies helped secure the toughest package of gun laws in Virginia for a generation.
Koebel repeatedly emphasises that a commitment to non-violence is essential – “it’s moral discomfort I want to provide, not physical fear”. Even so, “I don’t like the feeling of doing it. I don’t like shouting at people. You feel sick to your stomach. It drains you”.
Recently, Koebel said: “I do think more people understand that you have to be willing to be blunt, that the 100% nice guy approach doesn’t work.” She remembers protesting a gun rights stall at a local festival in Blacksburg, which was handing out stickers to kids saying that “guns save lives”. Years of polite protest failed – until she held up a picture of a child who had been shot in the head next to the stall. “People were really mad at me,” she said. “But the gun guys didn’t come back.”
When she thinks about the prospects for a more radical form of activism in general, she thinks of her mother. “My mom does not feel comfortable with what I do. But after that, she said to me: ‘I cannot argue with the results’.”
What else we’ve been reading
After two decades of trying, Milton Keynes has finally been awarded city status. John Harris examines the odd history of this city and talks to the residents of the former town to get a sense of how they feel about their newly re-categorised home. Nimo
If you needed confirmation that the idea of reviving imperial measurements in the UK is pretty stupid, listen to what the wise residents of Shrewsbury tell Nicola Slawson. “Why change something that works?” says Chris Carter. “It makes no sense.” Archie
We all love the longer summer days, but the heat and light can make it almost impossible to have a restful sleep. Emine Saner gets the best tips from sleep experts to help you get your full eight hours. Nimo
Martin Kettle is interesting on “the Andy Burnham problem”: the Manchester mayor could be a candidate for Labour leader – but he’s not an MP. For Burnham and politicians like him, that represents the UK’s “abject failure” “to either understand or adapt to devolution.” Archie
It’s been 70 years since Fred Perry first released its now iconic polo shirt. Fleur Britten takes a look at what it has meant over to people over the years, and where it sits in the British cultural psyche. Nimo
Sport
Football | Nottingham Forest returned to the Premier League after 23 years by beating Huddersfield 1-0 in the Championship playoff.
Formula One | Red Bull’s Sergio Pérez won the Monaco Grand Prix in a heavily rain-affected race. Ferrari title contender Charles Leclerc finished fourth after two crucial mistakes by his team, losing ground to rival Max Verstappen, who finished third.
Horse racing | Lester Piggott, the outstanding jockey of the postwar era and a figure who transcended the sport of racing when the popularity of the Derby was at its height, has died aged 86. He was champion jockey 11 times between 1960 and 1982.
The front pages
The Guardian leads with “Home Office report decries 30 years of racist laws”, which is based on a leaked report into immigration policy. The paper also carries a large picture of the late Lester Piggott on the front, calling him “A genius on a racehorse”. The Mail notes that the jockey was the Queen’s favourite rider and combines the story with a royal lead: “12m to share jubilee lunch with Queen!”. According to the Mirror, Piggott was the “housewives’ choice” and it has a tribute to the “shy, complex genius”. Its lead story, however, is on the chaos of the Champions’ League final: “Riot cops even tear-gassed my son”.
The FT leads with “Global inflation fight spurs widest push to raise rates in two decades”, the Telegraph goes with “UK opens door to world’s top graduates”, and the Times has “Millions warned of power cuts”. The Metro asks “Carrie party no 2?” amid leaks about more Partygate revelations, but the i goes on a different political angle with “PM plans bonfire of eight laws to appease rebel MPs”. The Express splash is “Calls to fine patients who miss GP visits”, and the Sun has a story about the Sussexes renewing the lease on their Windsor cottage: “Megging a return”.
Today in Focus
Ryan Busse, a senior executive in a US gun company for two decades, left the industry in 2020 after becoming disillusioned with its direction. Following the shooting last week in Uvalde, he tells Nosheen Iqbal how the gun industry became less regulated, and the weapons more lethal.
Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Earlier this year, the McDermid Ladies - a women’s football team based in Fife, Scotland - decided to break away from Raith Rovers in protest after the club signed David Goodwille, a player who was found in civil court to have raped a woman in 2017. The fallout was significant: the team went viral, Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon publicly condemned the club and the club’s shirt sponsor, the crime writer Val McDermid (pictured above), withdrew support. Through their defiance, a new sense of community and solidarity has been fostered among the women’s team (which has the financial backing of McDermid, hence the name). “They will always be the players who followed their conscience,” writes Dani Garavelli, “win or lose, they should hold their heads high.”
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Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s crosswords to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
