Glock pistol Gun laws are as old as gun ownership. (more)

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Guns were omnipresent in the American Colonies, first for hunting and general self-protection and later as weapons in the American Revolutionary War. Several colonies mandated that heads of households (including women) own guns and that all able-bodied men enroll in the militia and carry personal firearms. A 1643 law in Connecticut and at least five other colonies required “at least one adult man in every house to carry a gun to church or other public meetings” in order to protect against attacks by Native Americans. A 1743 law inSouth Carolina required guns to safeguard against “insurrections and other wicked attempts of Negroes and other Slaves.” Other laws required immigrants to own guns in order to immigrate or own land. [105] Gun restrictions were just as common. They arose from a myriad of concerns tied to safety, crime, hunting, communal defense, and slavery. In fact, early American gun laws covered every imaginable type of regulation, from gun registration to outright gun bans. As Robert J. Spitzer of the State University of New York explained in an essay tellingly titled “Gun Laws Are as Old as Gun Ownership,” numerous groups were at one time or another banned from buying or possessing firearms, including: Native Americans, slaves, indentured servants, vagrants, non-Protestants, those who refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the government, felons, foreigners. . . . Early laws also regulated the manufacture, inspection, and sale of firearms, as well as gun storage and discharge restrictions. Others prohibited not only the firing of firearms in or near towns, but firing after dark, on Sundays, in public places, near roads and bridges or while under the influence of alcohol.[246][1][2] There were even regulations exempting members of certain professions (including doctors, teachers, clergy, and lawyers) from laws requiring gun ownership.[105] The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was ratified on December 15, 1791. The amendment promises that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The notes from the Constitutional Convention do not specifically mention an individual right to a gun for self-defense. Some historians suggest that the idea of an individual versus a collective right would not have occurred to the Founding Fathers because the two were intertwined and inseparable: there was an individual right to a gun in order to fulfill the collective right of serving in the militia. [105][106] A 1792 federal law required that every man eligible for militia service own a gun and ammunition suitable for military service, report for frequent inspection of their guns, and register his gun ownership on public records. Many Americans owned only hunting rifles or pistols instead of proper military guns, and though the fines were high for doing so (equivalent to thousands of dollars today), they were levied inconsistently and the public largely ignored the law. [101][105][106]

Slave Codes and the “Wild West” From the 1700s through the 1800s, slave codes and, after slavery was abolished in 1865, “Black codes” (and, still later, Jim Crow laws) prohibited Blacks from owning guns, and laws allowing the ownership of guns frequently specified “free white men.” For example, an 1833 Georgia law stated, “it shall not be lawful for any free person of color in this state, to own, use, or carry fire arms of any description whatever … that the free person of color, so detected in owning, using, or carrying fire arms, shall receive upon his bare back, thirty-nine lashes, and that the fire arm so found in the possession of said free person of color, shall be exposed for public sale.” [98][107] Contrary to images of the Wild West popularized in movies, cities on the frontier often required visitors to disarm and check their guns with the local sheriff or at a stable on the outskirts before entering the town. In October 1876, Deadwood, Dakota Territory passed a law stating that no one could fire a gun without the mayor’s consent. A sign in Dodge City, Kansas, in 1879 read, “The Carrying of Fire Arms Strictly Prohibited.” The first law passed in Dodge City was a gun control law that read “any person or persons found carrying concealed weapons in the city of Dodge or violating the laws of the State shall be dealt with according to law.” [108][109]

Federal and State Gun Laws: 2000-2019 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act and Child Safety Lock Act of 2005 was enacted on October 26 by President George W. Bush and gives broad civil liability immunity to firearms manufacturers so they cannot be sued by a gun death victim’s family. The Child Safety Lock Act requires that all handguns be sold with a “secure gun storage or safety device.” [114][118][119] The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) Improvement Amendments Act of 2007 was enacted as a condition of the Brady Act and provides incentives to states (including grants from the Attorney General) for them to provide information to NICS including information on people who are prohibited from purchasing firearms. The NICS was implemented on November 30, 1998, and later amended on January 8, 2008, in response to the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech University shooting so that the Attorney General could more easily acquire information pertinent to background checks such as disqualifying mental conditions. [114][120] On January 5, 2016, President Barack Obama announced new executive actions on gun control. His measures took effect immediately and included: an update and expansion of background checks (closing the “gun show loophole” that allowed private sellers to sell guns without performing background checks on the buyers); the addition of 200 ATF agents; increased mental health care funding; $4 million and personnel to enhance the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network (used to link crimes in one jurisdiction to ballistics evidence in another); creating an Internet Investigations Center to track illegal online gun trafficking; a new Department of Health and Human Services rule saying that it is not a HIPAA violation to report mental health information to the background check system; a new requirement to report gun thefts; new research funding for gun safety technologies; and more funding to train law enforcement officers on preventing gun casualties in domestic violence cases. [142][143] In addition to federal gun laws, each state has its own set of gun laws ranging from California with the most restrictive gun laws in the country to Wyoming with the most lenient, according to Giffords Law Center “Annual Gun Law Scorecard.” In fact, 43 of 50 states have a “right to bear arms” clause in their state constitutions. [101][121][226] The most common state gun control laws include background checks, waiting periods, and registration requirements to purchase or sell guns. Most states prevent carrying guns, including people with a concealed carry permit, on K-12 school grounds, and many states prevent carrying on college campuses. Some states ban assault weapons. [121][122] Gun rights laws include concealed and open carry permits, as well as allowing gun carry in usually restricted areas (such as bars, K-12 schools, state parks, and parking areas). Many states have “shoot first” (also called “stand your ground”) laws, which allow people to use deadly force when they believe their lives to be in danger. Open carry of handguns is generally allowed in most states (though a permit may be required). [121][122]

NEW YORK (AP) — To its fans, it’s an undeniable force for good in a corrupt world, a groundbreaking anti-bribery statute that has brought powerful businessmen to heel for secretly paying off foreign government officials to win contracts abroad.

To detractors, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act unfairly hobbles American companies while foreign rivals not so encumbered swoop in.

On Monday, President Donald Trump took a side.

“It sounds good on paper but in practicality, it’s a disaster,” Trump said while signing an executive order freezing enforcement of the law. “It’s going to mean a lot more business for America.”

The consequences could be dramatic, depending on Trump’s next move.

If he halts many prosecutions, essentially defanging the law, it could help U.S. businesses win deals abroad. But it also could tarnish America’s image, allow corrupt autocrats ruling over impoverished people to get even richer and lead France, Britain, Japan and other wealthy countries to weaken their own anti-bribery laws so their companies can make payments, too.

“We are facing a Wild West situation,” said Mark Pieth, a criminal law professor at the University of Basel in Switzerland and anti-bribery law expert. “It will be everyone against everyone.”

WHAT EXACTLY DOES THE LAW BAN?

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, or FCPA, prohibits people or companies operating in the U.S. from giving money or gifts to foreign officials to win or retain deals in those countries. The law doesn’t require that the bribe is actually paid, but only offered.

Punishment for conviction is imprisonment of up to 20 years, and companies face fines double their profits from the illicit deal. That has often meant hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes billions, in payments.

HOW OFTEN HAS THE LAW BEEN USED?

The law has been used hundreds of times in the past decade to stop bribes to win deals, leading to massive settlement payments from multinationals like Goldman Sachs, Germany’s Siemens and the Swiss commodities trader Glencore.

But it’s real impact, experts say, is arguably not in the headlines, but what happens behind the scenes as the fear of punishment deters businesses from even thinking about bribes in the first place.

WHAT SPECIFICALLY DOES TRUMP THINK IS WRONG WITH THE LAW?

In a nutshell, Trump is claiming that so many others are corrupt, we’re fools for playing by the rules.

Specifically, Trump said the law is being enforced in “excessive, unpredictable” ways that U.S. companies are competing on an uneven “playing field” with foreign rivals. He also said the law was “draining resources” from law enforcement and harming U.S. national interests because companies were being held back from deals that would give the U.S. access to deep water ports, critical minerals and other assets.

Trump’s statements are reviving a criticism of the law that was common decades ago before other developed countries enacted their own bribery laws. More recently both Republican and Democratic administrations have embraced the FCPA not just as a way to stamp out U.S. corruption but to fight the kinds of conditions abroad that allow cartels and terrorist groups that act against U.S. interests to thrive.

WHAT EXACTLY DID TRUMP DO UNDER HIS EXECUTIVE ORDER?

Trump can’t overturn the law, but as head of the executive branch he can change the way it is enforced and shift resources to other Justice Department priorities.

His order puts in place a 180-day “pause” to all investigations under the FCPA while they are being reviewed. He also ordered no new ones be opened during that period. The order also says it will halt other Justice Department “actions” under the law, which might mean ongoing prosecutions though that is unclear.

Trump said the pause is also necessary to give his administration time to come up with new “reasonable” guidelines on how to enforce the law that don’t put U.S. companies at a disadvantage in striking foreign deals.

Duncan Levin, a criminal defense attorney, said he expects Trump will essentially kill the law by neglect.

“He can’t get rid of the law, but he can refuse to enforce it,” said Levin, who has represented high profile defendants Harvey Weinstein and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. “I don’t think this is just a pause.”

WHAT KIND OF BRIBES WERE UNCOVERED UNDER THE LAW?

The FCPA was enacted after investigators at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in the 1970s found more than 400 American companies making questionable or illegal payments to foreign officials to win business.

Since then the list of bribes brought to light by prosecutions is long and varied.

Last year, the military contractor RTX, formerly Raytheon, paid more than $300 million to settle charges it had allegedly bribed officials in Qatar by using a sham contract and other devices to hide its tracks.

In 2019, Walmart paid $282 million to settle charges from a seven-year investigation into allegations it won approval to open stores in Mexico, India and Brazil by bribing local officials, including one contact called the “sorceress” who had an uncanny ability to make permitting problems disappear.

WHAT DO OTHER COUNTRIES DO TO STOP BRIBERY?

Since the FCPA was enacted nearly 50 years ago, U.S. businesses have complained that it was hurting more than helping and unfair because bribes were commonplace in some countries. Then under U.S. pressure, allies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development started enacting their own laws, especially after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and African and Asian countries formerly in the communist orbit opened their borders to business.

Eventually, 40 wealthy countries adopted anti-bribery laws based on the FCPA, according to University of Basel’s Pieth, including the ability to prosecute foreign companies operating in their countries for acts committed in a third country.

Therein lies another danger of Trump weakening the FCPA.

“If a U.S. company bribes because Trump is giving them the green light, the French and the British will jump on that company,” Pieth said. “It will be a mess.”

Privacy laws and enforcement are causing big changes to global commerce and have now arrived at our doorstep. The million dollar questions are how this will affect our businesses and what, if anything, do we need to do about it? While the first answer may vary by vertical and use case, the second answer most definitely involves reducing our risk in multiple areas inclusive of how we collect, store and use data.

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Why am I seeing this?

Texas is the Wild West when it comes to injecting carbon dioxide emissions into the earth.

The Lone Star State has yet to pass laws regulating such long-term storage for CO2 emissions. And that’s the way rancher Ashley Watt likes it.

Watt has been working for months to ink a deal with an energy company that wants to inject carbon dioxide into the geologic formations that lie beneath her land in West Texas. But she is ready to walk away if the Texas Legislature passes a new bill that would allow companies to pass on their liability to the state 10 years after their injections end.

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“Are we willing to bet the proverbial and literal ranch on this carbon capture working?” she said. “There’s real consequences to that carbon in the ground — are we willing to take that bet?”

As oil and gas companies rush to build carbon sequestration projects — in hopes of taking advantage of increased tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act — states are scrambling to answer questions about how to regulate the new industry.

The climate law’s incentives encourage carbon capture, as part of the Biden administration’s goal to achieve net-zero emissions by midcentury. Companies hope to inject that captured CO2 in unprecedented quantities deep underground into the tiny holes within rocks and geologic formations known as the pore space.

But who owns that pore space? What happens to companies hoping to extract oil or gas on the same land? And who pays for remediation if injecting millions of tons of CO2 into the earth creates problems?

Only a handful of states, including North Dakota, Wyoming, Louisiana and Mississippi, have laws on the books that clearly tackle some of these issues.

The carbon sequestration industry has only just begun to take off, with numerous carbon sequestration projects waiting for EPA approval before their operators can begin construction. Only two states — North Dakota and Wyoming — can authorize permits for carbon dioxide sequestration wells. Projects in other states have to wait out the EPA backlog.

But when the federal government starts approving more of these projects — and gives more states the authority to permit them — project operators, landowners and oil and gas producers will begin to run up against a series of thorny legal issues.

“It’s a clusterfuck,” said Ted Borrego, an oil and gas industry lawyer and an adjunct professor of law at the University of Houston who teaches courses on advanced oil and gas contracts. “I hate to use legal language like that, but it gets into some oddball issues.”

The ownership issue

North Dakota has had carbon sequestration laws on the books since 2009, said Reice Haase, deputy director of the North Dakota Industrial Commission.

Those who own the surface land also own the pore space beneath, according to statute. Carbon sequestration project developers must receive approval from those that own 60 percent of the pore space by acreage.

That issue of ownership has bred some controversy among landowners, Haase said. One large landowner, for example, could own 60 percent of the land above a geologic formation that a project operator would like to use for carbon storage. That one person’s approval could greenlight the project, even if potentially dozens of landowners who own the remaining 40 percent don’t want carbon dioxide stored beneath their property.

“When we codified it originally in 2009, it wasn’t as controversial. It wasn’t until recently that landowners started speaking up,” he said. “It’s a landowner versus landowner issue.”

Some landowners have called for that 60 percent figure to be increased, Haase said. Wyoming requires approval from those that own 80 percent of acreage, while Texas’ proposed legislation would set that figure at 67 percent, revising it up from 60 percent after complaints.

Landowners have less of a say in some other states. Louisiana law authorizes carbon storage operators to exercise eminent domain “to acquire surface and subsurface rights” for their projects once they obtain state permits and a certificate of public convenience and necessity from the commissioner of the Office of Conservation.

Then there’s the issue of how carbon injection rights interact with mineral rights. For some pieces of property, one person may own the surface land while someone else owns the rights to extract minerals from beneath the ground. That mineral rights owner can lease those rights to companies to extract oil and gas or other minerals that have laid there for eons.

Issues of mineral rights are especially important in major energy-producing states such as Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico.

In Texas, for example, mineral rights have almost always trumped landowner rights, Borrego said. Surface owners there cannot impede mineral rights owners from accessing what lies beneath the property and often are legally required to allow companies to construct well pads and pump jacks.

But Kentucky is the only state that specifies that mineral rights owners, along with surface owners, own a property’s pore space. Some Texas courts have found the same, although the issue of ownership remains unsettled there.

Some oil and gas companies argue that carbon dioxide injections could complicate or prevent their efforts to produce crude or natural gas.

Bruce Gates, founder and president of Ageron Energy, says carbon dioxide can quickly corrode even some of the strongest pipes used for extracting oil and gas. At one of his company’s wells in McMullen County, about 85 miles south of San Antonio, a mix of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide chewed a large hole in a steel pipe with an inch-thick protection wall within 12 hours, he said.

He said when carbon dioxide mixes with ancient salt water deep underground, it can create corrosive carbonic acid. And the earth beneath much of Texas is full of the extra briny, ancient seawater.

Carbonic acid is “fairly weak” compared to other chemical compounds, like hydrochloric acid, but it alone can still cause corrosion issues with steel and polymers, said Hugh Daigle, a petroleum engineering professor with the University of Texas, Austin.

“This is certainly a concern for the injection wells where CO2 is actually being injected,” he said.

He said oil and gas companies have experience with carbonic acid, especially when they drill through earth that has already had carbon injected into it for enhanced oil recovery. The key to avoiding issues, Daigle said, is knowing carbonic acid is there and choosing the right drill bits, pipes and casings to try to mitigate corrosion.

That could be more difficult for smaller companies. Gates said it would be prohibitively expensive for his company to extract oil and gas from below pore space filled with CO2.

“Even with wells with 10 percent carbon dioxide, natural amounts, you have to do special stuff and use special pipe just to keep your pipe from being eaten up — and that’s with 10 percent,” Gates said. “With 100 percent? I can’t imagine.”

Oil and gas support

Still, Texas’ most influential oil and gas lobby — the Texas Oil and Gas Association — firmly supports laws they say will help to start and expand the carbon sequestration industry, as have other major oil and gas groups across the country.

Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, said the proposed Texas bill — S.B. 2107 — creates protections for mineral rights owners. It would require that CO2 storage “not endanger or injure any oil, gas, or other mineral formation in any material respect,” or that there be an arrangement between the carbon dioxide sequestration project operator and the mineral rights lessee or owner.

That regulatory certainty is needed for the industry to grow and flourish, Staples said. If there’s an absence of it in Texas, he said, carbon sequestration companies may look elsewhere for their projects.

“I talked to one company that is pursuing a project in Louisiana because they’ve already passed a regulatory framework and are providing certainty. Texas hasn’t,” he said. “Will some [projects] occur here anyway? Probably so. Will having a predictable and fair and equitable policy in place facilitate benefits to landowners and many others alike? I think so. Our goal is to not have the Texas economy miss out on the vast number of jobs this industry can bring to the state.”

Gates disagreed and said the statute flips the state’s long-held deference to mineral rights’ lessees and owners on its head.

“They want to support a fledgling industry that doesn’t exist yet, without regard to the money maker — the cash cow — that has made Texas as rich as it is,” Gates said. “I don’t think that’s intentional, but don’t think [lawmakers] have thought this through.”

But the oil and gas industry has a strong reason to support S.B. 2107: It sets a time limit on their liability for anything that goes wrong with CO2 sequestration wells.

The Texas bill would allow operators to pass on their liability to the state 10 years after their injections end. Similar laws are already in place in North Dakota and Wyoming.

Under S.B. 2107, Texas would require companies that sequester carbon dioxide to pay a fee per ton that would feed into a liability fund, which the state’s oil-and-gas regulator would use to remediate any issues or compensate anyone affected by problems.

Wyoming assumes ownership and liability 20 years after injections end, and North Dakota assumes that responsibility after 10 years. In both cases, companies must show their injection sites follow state laws, do not have issues of leakage and are in relatively good shape, among other stipulations.

‘Why hand it out?’

Environmental groups and landowners have raised concerns over the risk of injecting vast quantities of carbon dioxide deep underground. They point out that injections of this quantity and depth have never been done before — and that previous incidents relating to carbon dioxide transportation and injection prompt reasons for concern.

In February 2020, for example, a pipeline carrying compressed carbon dioxide mixed with hydrogen sulfide ruptured near the small town of Satartia, Miss. The gas released was heavier than air; a U.S. Department of Transportation investigation later found that the gas took longer than expected to dissipate because of weather conditions and topography.

Local first responders were unaware of the rupture but received reports of a “green gas” with a “rotten egg smell” overtaking the town. Two hundred people were evacuated, and 45 people were sent to local hospitals, including two people who initially “passed out” when they investigated the green plume near their home.

Federal investigators said the incident cost a total of $3.95 million for remediation, emergency costs and other expenses.

Scott Anderson, senior director of energy for the Environmental Defense Fund’s Texas branch, said his organization supports carbon capture and sequestration. But passing liability to the state could present more than legal problems, he said.

“We’re worried it will diminish public support for CCS,” he testified at a Texas Senate hearing on S.B. 2107.

Staples, of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, said incidents like the one in Mississippi are especially rare in carbon sequestration. For decades, companies across Texas and the country have injected carbon into existing oil wells to squeeze more oil out of the earth.

“The concerns about the safety of carbon dioxide storage are not substantiated with the facts and history of 50 years of success storing carbon dioxide,” Staples said. “I think the scientific review process is extensive and thoughtful, especially in the development of how the monitoring and oversight will occur.”

The wells used in enhanced oil recovery, however, are in shallower ground than those proposed for permanent carbon sequestration.

Watt, the West Texas rancher, is skeptical that companies or the state would be up to the task of remediating and investigating problems related to carbon dioxide sequestration.

Her property in West Texas is already home to a handful of orphaned wells and other previously plugged wells that she says have started to leak. Watt said the company that owns the plugged wells has unsuccessfully tried to get the Texas Railroad Commission — which oversees the state’s oil and gas industry — to fix them with public funds.

The Railroad Commission voted against fixing one of the wells last month after their inspector found no visual evidence of issues, rejecting soil samples collected by Watt and photos and videos she submitted showing the well leaking.

In Watt’s view, companies will pursue carbon sequestration — given the financial incentives — even if the state doesn’t promise to take over future liability.

“There’s going to be carbon sequestration in Texas, regardless of the long-term liability transfer,” Watt said. “So why hand it out?”