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Oscar B. Castillo and Wil Sandss ongoing project BordersCruzadas: A Collaborative Story, on view at the new Community Engagement Hub on Columbia College Chicagos 600 S. Michigan campus, forces viewers to confront ingrained assumptions about American exceptionalism. Part photography, part archival material, BordersCruzadas features Castillo and Sandss documentarian work completed over the past year as they accompanied people fleeing Venezuela and other South American countries to the U.S.-Mexico border.

BordersCruzadas first opened in April 2023 at ART WORKS Projects (where I serve as a board member) as part of EXPO Chicago, when Chicago had received more than 8,000 asylum seekers, the majority from Texas. As of early October, Chicago has welcomed 18,000 total migrants since 2022, with upwards of 1,000 new arrivals a day projected, according to Governor J.B. Pritzker. Chicago has struggled to house everyone, though this lift has been supported robustly by mutual aid volunteers. One group, the Police Station Response Team, spent over $3.4 million of their own money on food, water, and supplies for migrants.

Sands and Castillo themselves initially bonded over a commitment to mutual aid when they met in 2002 squatting in Barcelonas unused buildings, which had been transformed into self-governing communes. It allowed for an incredible amount of creativity [which] then led to some sort of vision of an alternative way of living, recalled Castillo, a native of Venezuela who was in Spain after finishing a psychology degree at Central University of Venezuela. Sands arrived in Barcelona after graduating from Hampshire College to study identity formation amidst the Catalonia national liberation movement and ended up staying nearly a decade in squats with Castillo around Europe.

We were in DIY, punk spaces. . . . We had all this lived experience in spaces on the margins of the social realm and political critique, Sands said. This concept of identity, home, movement, that sort of fluctuation was all part of me . . . part of our reality.

The images and objects included in BorderCruzadas reflect the inclusive spirit of the duos previous work with marginalized and politicized populationsincarcerated folks, indigenous land activistswho are often not centered in discussions of which they are the subject. Both photographers have led participatory photography workshops with communities worldwide and, in Chicago, organized a workshop with Centro Romero for recent immigrants to explore identity through self-portraiture and collage. We are trying not to [leave] anyone out of the conversation who has something that can activate you more in some tender, reflective way, explained Castillo. That part of yourself that says, Okay, this is a human being and not only numbers.

The difference is evident between traditional media coverage of migrants that prioritize illustrating the scale of the crisisof tents dotting public parks, groups huddled in police stationsand Castillo and Sandss tender portraits, intimate enough to see the lines on a face and emotions held in a brow. The majority of images focus on just two to three families or individuals, capturing their miles trodden forward (and often backward) across a continent, threading a web of connections as the duo separates and reunites with familiar faces along their journey.

In one photo, a man reaches for his son on top of a windswept La Bestia (what migrants call a freight train that shuttles riders sitting on top of or between cars), as it snakes through the vast landscape between Chiapas, Mexico and various points on the U.S. border. In the middle of a bushy, burnt orange desert, a young couple and their toddler look straight into the camera as they pose in front of a white bedsheet stretched across two poles for a makeshift background.

Its a question as old as documentary itself: How could any photographer with a conscience take pictures of human suffering without lending a hand?

Their commitment to communal care towards their subjects came before the photography, said Castillo. Sleeping on shared mattresses, lifting each other up as they cross train cars, breaking bread togetherall these things were a no-brainer for the two photographers. It says to participants, You are doing the journey with us, and even if youre not part of us, you are the closest you can be, said Sands. The two keep in touch with several of the people they met along the way, connecting them to resources wherever those folks land and contributing themselves when they can.

Castillo does not see documentary photography as a sanitized, catalog medium. He is not approaching photography as merchandise, not approaching the histories as told to me as a currency that changes hands without the social implications and the commitment of people.

Though photography is a flexible and useful tool, it can be as limited as any medium, said Castillo, explaining the inclusion of materials, sounds, and videos taken from their journey to complement those capacities.

The exhibition includes a piece of a ladder Sands and Castillo found during their journey across South America. This archival material brings the border closer to the audience via the tools people used to evade it, evoking reflection on the porous nature of borders, and what it would take to effectively push against peoples movement. As we can see all over the world and all over history, people can [learn to] walk longer, run faster, and jump higher, Sands commented, on the increased militarization of borders. And its not what we need, we dont need to push people to the limits of their capacity.

While grounded in the individual experience, the collection still situates migration as a global crisis bigger than any one countrys bordersa big-picture perspective that Sands and Castillo have always kept in mind. The two cofounded Fractures Photo back in 2011, a collective that explores critical fractures in these critical systems around the world, namely ecological, economic, political, and social, that will define the 21st century. Were entering a new phase of human migration. In many ways it ties back to what we presented as the premise of Fractures as a collective, said Sands.

As of May 2023, more than 110 million individuals have been forcibly displaced as a result of persecution or conflict mixed with the impacts of climate changethe highest level ever recorded. While Europe hosts one in three of the worlds refugees, the U.S. has only admitted 3.5 million since 1975. Today, struggles and tragedies that once seemed far away are arriving at American doorstops, including Chicago, and yet U.S. sanctions imposed on Venezuela, the degradation of Central American land by American companies, and economic exploitation of immigrant labor have always been part and parcel of American prosperity and security. A lot of times, people that are actually being impacted and living these experiences are part of the construction of America, said Sands.

BorderCruzadas was originally commissioned by AWP, with enhanced support for this next phase of the project through the Columbia Colleges Diane Dammeyer Fellowship in Photographic Arts and Social Issues, which was inaugurally awarded to Castillo and Sands this year to further their ongoing project. Indeed, the two photographers embody socially engaged art through their lived reality and work, by blurring the line between personal and political, outsiders and insiders, advocating and documenting, but through it all, making tangible the abstract spaces of migration, borders, and identity.

BordersCruzadas: A Collaborative Story Through 10/27: Mon 12:30-6 PM, Tue 9 AM-noon, Wed 1-4 PM, Thu 10 AM-3 PM, Sat 9 AM-2 PM or by appointment, pfitzpatrick@colum.edu, Community Engagement Hub, Columbia College Chicago, 600 S. Michigan, 1st Fl., everyvoicechicago.com/community

Hortensia Bussi held back tears as she addressed a crowd of more than 2,000 people gathered at DePaul University on a December afternoon in 1973. She was in Chicago because, on September 11, 1973, with spring in the air and Chiles national holiday on the horizon, military aircraft launched from the port city of Valparaso

Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities at the DePaul Art Museum explores a forgotten nationwide solidarity movement. The future was on Lucy Lippards mind in 1982. That year, the art historian, critic, and organizer christened the opening of all-star art collective Group Materials New York exhibition LUCHAR! An Exhibition for the

Brian Herreras magazine features the work of nine artists creating in a world that wont let them represent themselves.

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An art project visualizes the migrant crisis - Chicago Reader

A looming Supreme Court decision involving firearms and domestic violence will have wide-ranging implications on how gun laws are interpreted and enforced nationwide, and a Fordham Second Amendment expert may play a role.

Research from Saul Cornell, the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham, is included in the scholarship being published by the Fordham Urban Law Journal before the scheduled oral arguments in United States v. Rahimi on Nov. 7. In the case, the court will decide whether a 30-year-old law banning firearms for people subject to domestic violence restraining orders violates the Second Amendment on its face.

Just over a year ago, the Supreme Court ruled in another case (NYSRPA v. Bruen) that gun regulations must reflect the ways such laws were applied at the time of the Second Amendment, which led the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the ban on domestic abusers.

Saul Cornell, Ph.D. , the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History Photo by Gina Vergel

The Fifth Circuit said, well, domestic violence has been around for a long time. They didnt take away peoples guns. Therefore, you cant take away peoples guns.

But Cornell argued there is a good reason why guns werent taken away in the 18th Century. Although domestic violence is not new, at the time of the Second Amendment, domestic violence perpetrated with guns was just not an issue, because guns took too long to load and were not a good choice for impulsive acts of violence.

Theres a lot of complicated problems with how you would even begin to in good faith apply their method, Cornell said. Theres a huge opening for some kind of scholarship to give the court some direction, Cornell said.

The work being published includes statistical analyses, historical analyses such as Cornells, and descriptions of the ramifications of different legal decisions from some of todays most influential experts in the fields of gun violence, public health, gun regulation, and the Second Amendment. These scholars author amicus briefs, which judges rely on for insight, and serve as expert witnesses in court.

The Fordham Urban Law Journals editor-in-chief, Joseph Gomez, said he expects their work to be used as source material when the justices write their opinions in Rahimi. These scholars will be the most relevant source of expertise, he said.

The field of weapons and gun law historians is small, and Cornell is in high demand as an expert witness in firearms regulation cases across the country. He said he currently is involved in 20 active cases ranging from extreme risk protection order decisions to whether people applying to be foster parents should have to lock up their weapons.

Ive been working on gun regulation and the Second Amendment now since 1999, said Cornell. And because the Supreme Court last year issued this opinion that has created chaos in the lower courts, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association Inc. versus Bruen, it was clear to me and lots of people I talked to that since they changed the framework for evaluating laws, nobody knows how to implement the framework.

Before the Bruen decision in 2022, lower courts looked to both historical tradition of gun regulation and important government interest, such as public safety considerations, he said. But in the Bruen decision, the Supreme Court said public safety can only be considered if there were comparable laws at the time of the Second Amendment that took public safety into account. Cornell said this basically means you either have to find an analogous law, or at least a tradition, that seems to resemble the law in question today. And the big problem is life was very different in the 18th Century.

Lower courts must rely on the Supreme Courts guidance when interpreting gun laws. The pending Rahimi case provides the court with an opportunity to clarify how lower courts should apply the new framework laid out in Bruen, according to Kelly Roskam, J.D., the director of law and policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, who participated in the scholarship as well as the 2023 Cooper-Walsh Colloquium on Public Health, History, and the Future of Gun Regulation After Bruen that Cornell helped organize at the Fordham School of Law on Oct. 13.

The Fordham Urban Law Journal, Northwell Health Center for Gun Violence Prevention, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Gun Violence Solutions co-hosted the event.

Cornell said, I know a lot of people in the gun violence prevention community, and many of them were concerned that if history is whats going to drive [the decision], does that mean all this great research we do about what actually is the problem and what is the solution is now irrelevant? It would be kind of crazy that they would just rely on what was known back then. I mean, thats usually not how we do things.

The Supreme Court is expected to announce its decision next June.

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OPINION:

Hamas attacked as Israelis were wrapping up the seven-day Jewish festival of Sukkot on Oct. 7. As many as 1,200 Israelis and some Americans were murdered, thousands wounded, and hundreds more taken hostage. Hamas terrorists went into civilian areas and attacked defenseless people who were walking down the street or shopping in stores.

A Sept. 20 Jerusalem Post headline prophetically warned: Israelis should carry guns on Yom Kippur, police say. But as of 2022, only 148,000 Israelis carried permitted guns in public for protection just 3% of the adult Jewish population. Twenty years earlier, more than 10% of adult Jews in Israel had permits.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid called the recent police statement dangerous. He echoed sentiments common among Democrats in the United States: Calling the citizens of Israel to come with weapons to the synagogue on Yom Kippur is not a security policy. It is dangerous populism.

Concealed carry is much more widespread in the United States than in Israel. In 2022, 8.5% of American adults had permits. Outside of the restrictive states of California and New York, about 10.2% of adults had permits. And these numbers dont even account for the fact that there are now 27 constitutional carry states where it isnt necessary to have a permit to carry.

California, with one of the lowest concealed handgun permit rates and the strictest gun control laws in the country, shouldnt hold itself out as a model for the rest of the country to follow. The periods after 2000, 2010 and 2020 show a consistent pattern: Californias per capita rate of public shootings is always much greater than in the rest of the country.

On Sunday Oct. 8, the day after the attack, Israel radically changed its policy on who could carry guns publicly. Today, I directed the Firearms Licensing Division to go on an emergency operation in order to allow as many citizens as possible to arm themselves. The plan will take effect within 24 hours, Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir posted on X.

In response to terrorist attacks for decades, Israel put more police and military to protect people, but they found that no matter how much money they spent, they couldnt cover all the possible targets.

Before Israel began letting civilians carry handguns in the 1970s, terrorists committed attacks in Israel almost entirely with machine guns. Afterward, terrorists usually used bombs.

The reason was simple: Armed citizens can quickly immobilize a gun-wielding attacker, but no one can respond to a bomber once the bomb explodes. Still, armed citizens have occasionally succeeded in preventing bombings.

Like their Israeli counterparts, American police recognize their own limitations.

A deputy in uniform has an extremely difficult job in stopping these attacks, said Sarasota County, Florida, Sheriff Kurt Hoffman. These terrorists have huge strategic advantages in determining the time and place of attacks. They can wait for a deputy to leave the area or pick an undefended location. Even when police or deputies are in the right place at the right time, those in uniform who can readily identify as guards may as well be holding up neon signs saying, Shoot me first. My deputies know that we cannot be everywhere.

Police1, the largest private organization for law enforcement officers, surveyed its 749,000 members and found that 86% of them believed that casualties from mass public school shootings could be reduced or avoided altogether if citizens had carried permitted concealed handguns in public places. An incredible 94% of mass public shootings occur in places where civilians are banned from having guns.

And 77% of Police1 members supported arming teachers and/or school administrators who volunteer to carry at their school. No other policy to protect children and school staff received such widespread support.

When a life-threatening crisis strikes, there might not be time for police to arrive. Amid such a massive assault by Hamas, it was simply impossible for the Israeli police and military to protect all civilians.

Unfortunately, some lessons are learned the hard way. If only more Israelis had been armed at the time of the attack, more of them would be alive today.

John R. Lott Jr. is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and the author most recently of Gun Control Myths.

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Second Amendment matters in a time of crisis - Washington Times

Continuing his push to protect hunter safety and Montanans Second Amendment rights, U.S. Senator Jon Tester today spoke with outdoor industry leaders and hunters in Billings to discuss his bipartisan law that requires the Department of Education to restore school districts ability to use federal resources for school archery, gun safety, and hunter education programs.

In Montana, safe and responsible hunting is a part of our outdoor heritage and Ill stand up to anyone who tries to get in the way of that,said Tester.When the Department of Education came out with this decision, folks in Billings and across Montana spoke up, and together we were able to get my bipartisan bill swiftly signed into law that will protect hunter safety courses and our Second Amendment rights for generations to come. Montanans sent me to the Senate to stand up for our rural way of life, and I wont let any unelected D.C. bureaucrat threaten our outdoor traditions.

Hunters ed is something thats woven into the fabric of who we are as a people,said Jake Schwaller, Montana Backcountry Hunters and Anglers Board Member. As we have an influx of new people coming into our state to become part of this community, the ability to educate them and bring them up to speed on this long heritage that we hold is so important and our public schools are the place that we do that. Keeping the federal funding available is so crucially important So with a full heart from our 3000 dues-paying members and every hunter in Montana, thank you Senator.

Ive been hunting with my dad ever since I was five years old, and I completed hunters safety when I was twelve. I shot my first deer when I was twelve and that was only because of hunter safety,said Even Trewhalla, a young Billings hunter who has completed Montana hunter safety courses. I want to say thank you Senator Tester for advocating for hunter safety.

As part of his efforts to protect Montanans Second Amendment rights, Tester led the charge to push back against the Biden Administrations initial decision to strip funding from these longstanding safety classes. Tester quickly expressed his concerns to the Biden Administration in an Augustletter to theDepartment of Education. Tester then filed hisDefending Hunters Education Actand worked tosecure the bipartisan supportof Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Susan Collins (R-Maine), John Boozman (R-Arkansas), Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) and Mike Braun (R-Indiana). Senator Testers bipartisan bill was endorsed by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Boone & Crockett Club, National Wildlife Federation, Congressional Sportsmens Foundation, and Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.

To drum up additional support for his bipartisan bill, Testerpenned a columnin Montana state-wide newspapers arguing that the Biden Administration had made a poor decision that will hurt thousands of students who benefit from these resources every year.

Tester thenspoke on the Senate floorahead of the final passage of his bipartisan bill and urged his colleagues to join him to defend Montanas way of life.

President Bidensigned Testers bipartisan bill into lawon October 6th, 2023.

As a proud gun-owner and strong supporter of the Second Amendment, Tester has repeatedly opposed banning assault weapons and will always protect the rights of law-abiding Montana gun owners.

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PHOTO RELEASE: In Billings, Tester Talks Impacts of his Law to ... - Jon Tester

The Center for the Study of Guns and Society at Wesleyan brought together historians, museum curators, legal scholars, journalists, filmmakers, and other subject-matter experts for the Centers second-annual flagship conference, Current Perspectives on the History of Guns and Society, which took place October 13-14. Through panel discussions, a film screening, and other sessions, the conference shed fresh light on the ever-expanding role of history in Americas contemporary gun discourse.

[See photos from the event.]

How have the uses and meanings of guns changed over time? asked Jennifer Tucker, professor of history and the Centers founding director. How does historical knowledge inform how we grapple with questions about firearms in society, culture, and courts of law? Today, as never before, there is a great contemporary demand for this kind of rigorous historical analysis.

Wesleyans Center for the Study of Guns and Society is doing unique and vital work to enrich our national conversation on firearms. The Centers annual conference connects experts from a huge range of backgrounds so we can learn from one another, said Brian DeLay, the Preston Hotchkis Chair in the History of the United States in UC Berkeleys History Department.

The history of firearms use, regulation, and place in American culture is a largely neglected academic subject. Yet since the Supreme Court handed down its watershed NYSRPA v. Bruen decision in 2022and, in effect, began requiring modern-day firearms restrictions to have regulatory counterparts in early American historyprofessional historians have become increasingly common in courtrooms that hear Second Amendment cases. On a panel entitled Use and Abuse of History in Second Amendment Litigation, historians spoke of logging seven-day workweeks in the wake of the Bruen decision, applying their expertise in cases pertaining to high-capacity firearm magazines, self-assembled weapons colloquially known as ghost guns, and other present-day issues without easy precedents.

The way that I have tried to approach it as an expert witness and a historian, instead of just trying to answer the basic questionwhats an analogous law to firearms on a subway?is to step back and ask a broader question and try to show the court the change over time thats happened, said Brennan Gardner Rivas, a historian and independent scholar. That context can make a big difference in sorting out some of the arguments that are just silly.

In another session moderated by CNNs Richard Galant, a panel of working journalists drew on their own experiences to share the global resonance of Americas relationship with guns as well as the ways in which reporters approach covering gun violence, from conveying its public health dimensions to weighing whether to publish images of its consequences.

Theres a deep, deep problem in gun culture in the United States that has little to do with law-abiding gun owners, said Mike McIntire, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The New York Times (and an avowed gun owner), who in 2013 co-authored a series of investigative stories on gun violence in America. It gets into a whole milieu of overlapping thingsnot just ideology but also the psychology behind why people desire certain kinds of guns to begin with, the marketing, the commercial aspects of it. In some ways, its kind of this unholy merging of the free market and politics and ideology.

As in the Centers 2022 inaugural conference, this years event examined firearms from a range of atypical angles, from the intentional design behind firearms exhibits in museums, to a deeper exploration of the role of faith in firearms history, to a screening of the 2023 film Good Guy with a Gun.

Discussions at the conference covered a variety of subjects related to guns in U.S. history from the colonial era to the present, including presentations by 15 eminent historians. For example, Jonathan Obert (Amherst) spoke on the markets and manufacture of 19th century small arms; Antwain Hunter (UNC Chapel Hill) discussed firearms, race and community in antebellum North Carolina; and Lindsay Schakenbach Regele (Miami University) explored some of the myths and realities of guns and westward expansion.

In another session, historians Jessica Dawson (West Point), Michael Grigoni (Wake Forest), and Jenny Legath (Princeton)all of whom are doing cutting-edge research on how religious identities shape individuals relationship with firearmsprovided much-needed historical and sociological context. I did not realize the degree to which the NRA utilized religious rhetoric to reshape its advocacy of firearms in the latter half of the 20thcentury, said Joseph Slaughter, assistant professor of history and associate director of the Center for the Study of Guns and Society.

Historian Caroline Light (Harvard), whose research has traced the entwinement of the nations ideals of armed citizenship and concepts of race and gender, and Brian DeLay (UC Berkeley), a leading historian of the U.S. arms trade, presented research on the historical record of guns in 19th and 20th century U.S. history and law.

The conference also offered a glimpse of firearms-focused research underway at Wesleyan. Maryam Gooyabadi, assistant professor of the practice in quantitative analysis, detailed a range of firearms data analysis projects at the Hazel Quantitative Analysis Center (QAC) in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Guns and Society. Projects include analyzing representations of firearms in media; marshalling data from different federal agencies to explore the factors influencing gun deaths; and tracking technological advances in firearms by examining patent records.

The conference closed with a roundtable discussion on current and future initiatives with presenters and attendees, including presentations by epidemiologist Matthew Miller (Northeastern/Harvards Firearm Injury Prevention Center) on current public health research relating to the effects of extreme risk protection orders, and historian Renee Romano (Oberlin), on a new effort to activate exhibits to address gun violence.

As the Centers most recent conference showed, our reckoning with firearms is as old as the Republic and as recent as todays front page. I dont think we need to wait for some sort of far-out moment in the future where you can look back into the mists of time to understand whats going on, said McIntire, the Times reporter. Its happening to us right now.

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Center for the Study of Guns and Society Explores History's Growing ... - Wesleyan University