This morning, a recently-fired man went to his former workplace near the Empire State Building in New York City, shot his former boss in the face, and then opened fire on eight more people before he was shot and killed by police. This tragedy follows three other high profile shootings, the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado last month, the Sikh temple shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and a gunman’s invasion of a far right advocacy organization in Washington, DC.

Like these three other tragedies, this morning’s shooting also targeted an area that most people expect to be a sanctuary away from gun violence. Most Americans do not fear violence in a movie theater, or that they will be targeted in their workplace or their place of worship. Additionally, the neighborhood surrounding today’s shooting is one of the most privileged neighborhoods in the country. Median household income in the census tract that includes the Empire State Building exceeds $100,000 a year. Approximately half of the neighborhood’s residents are white, and African-Americans and Latinos make up only a small percentage of the area’s residents.

This morning’s shooting, however, was not the only mass shooting to occur during the present news cycle. To the contrary, 19 people were shot last night in Chicago alone — 18 of them in incidents that claimed more than one victim. Yet these events received only a tiny fraction of the wall to wall media coverage surrounding the Empire State Building shooting:

• Late Afternoon Shooting: Before the sun even set, at about 5:20 pm last night, four men were wounded in Chicago’s South Lawndale area. South Lawndale is about 80 percent Hispanic, and its median household earns about a third of what people who live in the Empire State Building’s neighborhood earn.
• Bronzeville Shooting: Two men were shot around 9:25 pm last night, one in the head and one in the right arm, in Bronzeville — one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. Median household income in Bronzeville was less than $12,000 in 2009, and the neighborhood is almost entirely African-American.
• Brighton Park Drive-by: Two men were wounded in a drive-by shooting at about the same time as the Bronzeville shooting in the Brighton Park neighborhood. Brighton Park is a mostly Hispanic neighborhood whose median household earns less than half what people who live near the Empire State Building earn.
• South Shore Shootings: Around 9:30 pm last night, eight people were shot in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, including two 14 year-old boys and a 15 year-old boy. About ten minutes later, in a separate incident just blocks away, a 24 year-old man was shot in the leg while talking on his phone. South Shore is an overwhelmingly African-American neighborhood where household income is less than a third of that in the neighborhood surrounding the Empire State Building.

It is understandable that the editors and top producers who decide which news events receive media coverage and which ones are largely ignored would find the Empire State Building shooting particularly jarring. Top news editors are fairly affluent, and this morning’s shooting is a reminder that no one is safe from gun violence, regardless of how privileged their lives may be.

But it is no less a tragedy when someone closer to the margins of society is the victim of such violence than it is when violence intrudes into the fortresses of the fortunate. The victims of last night’s Chicago shootings should not be ignored simply because top news editors might find it more difficult to identify with them.

Colorado voters will decide whether to legalize marijuana in their state this fall after supporters turned in twice the number of required signatures to get the issue on the November ballot. That state-level push for marijuana legalization picked up an endorsement from the NAACP yesterday when the local chapter of the organization endorsed Amendment 64 — not because the NAACP necessarily endorses drug use, but because its leaders are concerned about the Drug War’s disproportionately negative impact on the African-American community.

In a press statement on the issue, the NAACP reported that even though African-Americans made up just about 4 percent of the state’s population in 2010, they accounted for 9 percent of marijuana possession arrests and 22 percent of arrests for marijuana distribution. And those numbers jump even further in the Denver area, according to a report from the city’s police department. African-Americans made up more than 31.5 percent of all arrests for adult marijuana possession, even though they represent less than 11 percent of Denver’s overall population.

Rosemary Harris Lytle, the president of the NAACP-Colorado-Montana-Wyoming State Conference, explained:

Marijuana prohibition policy does more harm to our communities than good. That is why we have endorsed Amendment 64, which presents a more effective and socially responsible approach to how Colorado addresses the adult use of marijuana.

At a press conference announcing the endorsement, Harris Lytle pointed out that decriminalizing the adult use of marijuana could help to reduce the unjust mass incarceration of the black community.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker (D-NJ) — whose home state of New Jersey has legalized cannabis for medical purposes — has made similar statements about the Drug War’s disproportionate impact on African-Americans and the U.S.’s failed drug policies. Booker has pointed to the same kind of statistics about swelling rates of African-American incarceration in New Jersey, saying the situation “anguishes” him.

The Republican attorneys general of Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court arguing that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional. Significantly, the brief points to the fact that the Voting Rights Act impedes laws intended to make it more difficult for racial minorities to cast a ballot as a reason why Court should cast a skeptical gaze on the landmark voting rights law responsible for breaking the back of Jim Crow:

South Carolina and Texas, both Covered Jurisdictions, have not yet been permitted to enforce their voter-identification requirements, despite the fact that these laws are similar to the Indiana law upheld in Crawford. The DOJ denied preclearance for South Carolina’s voter-identification law. South Carolina has filed a declaratory judgment action, seeking reconsideration of DOJ’s preclearance denial. Trial begins on August 27, 2012.

Texas, like South Carolina, requested DOJ’s preclearance. Despite Texas’s responses to DOJ’s repeated requests for more information, DOJ still had not provided a preclearance decision six months after the State’s initial submission. By then, DOJ had rejected South Carolina’s similar law and, facing a likely similar rejection, Texas opted to file a declaratory judgment seeking preclearance. The DOJ eventually rejected Texas’s request for administrative preclearance nearly seven months after the initial submission. Trial was held from July 10 through 13, 2012, and Texas is awaiting a preclearance decision from the district court – more than a year after its legislature enacted the voter identification law.

Supporters of voter ID laws, which require voters to present ID at the polls, claim they are necessary to prevent an epidemic of voter fraud at the polls. This is false. In reality, a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit in-person voter fraud. One study of Wisconsin voters found that an vanishingly small 0.00023 percent of votes are the product of such fraud.

What voter ID laws will do, however, is disenfranchise thousands of American citizens who want to do nothing more than lawfully exercise their right to choose their own leaders. Although estimates vary on how many voters will be disenfranchised by these laws, conservative estimates suggest that these laws will prevent 2 to 3 percent of registered voters from casting a ballot. Moreoever, the voters disenfranchised by voter ID are disproportionately likely to be racial minorities, low-income voters or students — all of whom tend to favor Democrats over Republicans.

Which explains why six Republican officials are so eager to ensure that these laws take effect.

[HT: Rick Hasen]

Conservative super PACs have far outpaced their liberal counterparts in 2012, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics. Liberal super PACs spent a total of $31.1 million through the end of July while conservatives spent $137.1 million. In spite of modest gains in liberal super PAC spending, conservative groups have kept a steady lead. Conservative superPACs spent $27 million in July alone, nearly as much as the total amount spent by liberals.

The analysis also found that the top conservative SuperPACs, Restore Our Future and American Crossroads, rely heavily on funding from Wall Street and the chemical industry. The top liberal super PAC, Priorities USA, received most of its donations — $5.1 million — from the entertainment industry. In contrast, Restore Our Future received $26.1 million, more than Priorities has raised total, from Wall Street.