How the AR-15 Became an American Brand | A New Era of American Policing | America’s Advanced Manufacturing Problem, and more

Musk Ousts X Team Curbing Election Disinformation  (Clothilde Goujard, Politico)
Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter) said overnight that a global team working on curbing disinformation during elections had been dismissed — a mere two days after being singled out by the EU’s digital chief as the online platform with the most falsehoods.
Responding to reports about cuts, the tech mogul said on X, “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”
Vice President Vera Jourová this week warned that EU-supported research showed that X had become the platform with the largest ratio of posts containing misinformation or disinformation. The company under Musk left the European Commission’s anti-disinformation charter in late May after failing its first test.
Jourová also urged tech companies to prepare for numerous national and European elections in the coming months, especially given the “particularly serious” risk that Russia will seek to meddle in them. Slovakia will hold its parliamentary election on Saturday. Poland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands will also head to the polls in the coming weeks.

How the AR-15 Became an American Brand  (Emily Witt, New Yorker)
The shooting at the Route 91 concert in Las Vegas on 1 October 2017 was the deadliest mass shooting carried out by one person in American history. As Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, the authors of American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15, a new history of the rifle, observe, more Americans were killed that night than in any single battle in twenty years of war in Afghanistan. In the mass shootings in Las Vegas and Uvalde; in the mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, ten days before Uvalde; and in the mass shooting less than two months after, at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, the perpetrators used the same kind of gun, the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. (In Vegas, to be more precise, Paddock had fourteen AR-15s, which he loaded and lined up in a row in his hotel room, and he modified the guns with bump stocks to make them mimic automatic fire.) There are many makes and models of AR-15s, and in McWhirter and Elinson’s usage the term refers to a style of rifle rather than the original ArmaLite brand from which it gets its name. Extremely deadly and easily obtainable, the AR-15 has become a political symbol, both among people who believe that such weapons should have no part in civilian life and those who consider owning one a constitutional right. Its sale in the United States is minimally restricted. Stephen Paddock bought thirty-one of them in a year.
McWhirter and Elinson are business reporters, and American Gun is, in part, a book about how an industry strategized to market a gun to a type of person—usually a man—whom it could convince that AR-15s were an integral part of his identity. To do this, mainstream gunmakers began courting a very particular demographic. The AR-15 looked tough, but it was light and easy to shoot. Marketers played on what one executive called the “wannabe factor” of weekend warriors whom prior generations had mocked as “couch commandos.” “In many ways,” the authors write, “the AR-15 was the ideal firearm for the modern American man: it looked macho, but he didn’t have to put much effort into shooting it.” American Gun examines the phenomenon of the mass shooter armed with a semi-automatic rifle, and our continued inability to generate the political will to prevent such shootings from happening, as an ordinary business story: the AR-15 is a consumer product to which advertisers successfully attached an identity—one that has translated to a politics so intractable that in some circles it seems to have more power than the fear of death.

Anti-Vaxxers Are Now a Modern Political Force  (Jessica Piper, Politico)
For years, groups at the vanguard of the anti-vaccine movement had been operating with relatively small budgets and only a handful of staff.
Now, they’re awash in cash.
The Covid-19 pandemic has produced a remarkable financial windfall for anti-vaccine nonprofits.
“Covid vaccines have been the foot in the door for the more general anti-vaccine movement. And unfortunately, that door is open pretty wide now,” said Dr. Dave Gorski, a Michigan-based oncologist who has been tracking anti-vaccine efforts for two decades.
Earlier this year, a lawsuit funded by the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network forced Mississippi to allow religious exemptions for mandatory childhood vaccinations for the first time in more than four decades.
That case, perhaps the greatest policy achievement for the movement to loosen vaccine requirements in schools or workplaces, alarmed public health experts. Depressed vaccination rates have led to more deaths from Covid-19, and have the potential to enable the return of potentially fatal childhood diseases such as measles.
Groups that predated the pandemic have provided a “template” for newer anti-vax efforts, said Gorski, the oncologist. Longstanding myths propagated about previous vaccines were used to question the Covid-19 vaccine. And questions about the newly developed Covid-19 vaccine became a gateway into the broader anti-vaccine movement.
“Increasingly there’s less and less difference between old school and new school anti-vaxxers,” Gorski said. “New anti-vaxxers are lapping up the same old conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.”

Congressional Staffers Created Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria. And That’s a Good Thing.  (Allison Berke and Jassi Pannu, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist)
Over the US congressional recess this past summer, when schedules had freed up enough to permit cross-country travel, a group of staffers travelled to a community bio lab in Oakland, Calif., known as BioCurious. There they would grow antibiotic resistant bacteria, and, along the way, learn how CRISPR technology works and how easy it might be for an individual to genetically engineer a pathogen. Over at a biotech company in Menlo Park, Antheia, another group of staffers had escaped Washington to learn how synthetic biology can speed up the process of manufacturing medicinal compounds.
The field trips were part of programs run by Stanford University and the Institute for Progress that bring policy makers—like these congressional staffers—to labs and university campuses and immerse them in the biosecurity issues they need to understand if they are to develop effective policy about, for instance, identifying when research has the possibility to make pathogens dangerous, or the development of US biomanufacturing and efforts to expand the resilience of our medical supply chain.
Similar programs on cybersecurity policy and AI policy have operated for the past eight years. But biosecurity is a new focus for a research community that continually walks the line between promoting the fantastic discoveries of biomedical science (and synthetic biology in particular) and attempting to prevent these same tools from being used to spread pandemics or create bioweapons.

A New Era of American Policing  (Jillian Snider, National Affairs)
To balance the competing demands for public safety and the fair and equal treatment of all citizens, today’s law-enforcement agencies have to find ways to be creative and agile. The history of policing demonstrates that departments will only be able to take on these challenges if they rebuild public trust and promote more cooperation with the communities they serve.