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How a shooting long before Columbine changed the gun debate · Apple News Today

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  Mark Garrison, Narrating: Good morning! It's Tuesday, May 31st. Shumita Basu is off. I'm Mark Garrison and this is "Apple News Today." Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news, and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
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  Memorial Day weekend is a time that's meant to honor lives lost at war. But in Texas, the long weekend was about remembering the 19 children and two teachers killed in last week's school shooting. At a ceremony for student Maite Rodriguez, her cousin, Destiny Esquivel, spoke to the local CBS station.
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  Destiny Esquivel: She didn't deserve it, but I just know in that moment she was brave, she was telling people where to hide. But I hope the governor, the president, they learn. Because they wouldn't want it to happen to their kids, so why would you let it happen to others?
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  There's been growing criticism over the lack of initial action from law enforcement. We learned through reporting that authorities waited an hour before sending a team in to stop the gunman, and that officers restrained parents on site who wanted to go in themselves. Now, the Department of Justice is reviewing the police response.
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  In the wake of the tragedy, lawmakers seem as divided as ever over what to do to prevent the next one. "The Washington Post" reports there have been 15 mass shootings since Uvalde. Over the weekend, President Biden said he's limited by the Constitution and without Congress, there's only so much he can do on his own.
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  Meanwhile, "The Texas Tribune" has a story that gives a deeper understanding of the debate around guns. It goes back decades, long before Columbine and the mass shootings that make headlines today.
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  Dan Rather: In central Texas, scenes from a massacre, the deadliest mass shooting in American history.
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  That was 1991, when a gunman killed 23 people at Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas. Suzanna Hupp's parents were both killed. For the next three decades, she became a gun-policy activist. But she chose a different path than many other shooting survivors. She fought for dropping gun restrictions, not making new ones. And she was very successful in Texas, where she served in the state legislature. She also became a hero for the firearms lobby nationally. Gun advocates used her story to argue, the way to prevent mass shootings isn't more gun restrictions, it's more guns and easier access to them. Today in Texas, more than a third of households have a firearm, you can carry a gun without a permit, and cities are restricted from passing stricter gun laws.
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  "The Texas Tribune" story traces how that 1991 shooting was a surprising turning point in the debate over guns. Now, data shows Republican-controlled states are more likely to loosen gun laws after mass shootings, not tighten them. You can read the whole "Texas Tribune" article in the Apple News app, along with much more coverage of the Uvalde shooting.
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  There is a special kind of dull rage that you feel when you sink a lot of time into something that should've just taken five minutes. That sense of being held hostage by some bureaucratic process, that is how "Wall Street Journal" tax columnist Laura Saunders felt this month when she lined up at an IRS office to get some help.
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  Laura Saunders: I got there early because I wanted to be at the front of the line. I got there at 8:30 in the morning, in Harlem, in New York City. And I was number 48 in line. The line had started forming at 6:30. By 9:00, there were 100 people in line and none of them, just like me, none of them had been able to call the IRS.
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  She's a journalist, so of course, she's asking questions to people in line. She learned many of them were there for the same reason as her. They had to verify their identity so the IRS would pay their refunds. And like her, a lot of them tried calling first, but just couldn't get through, so they headed down to the office and that long line.
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  Saunders: We were all arranged down an entire city block. We thought maybe the line would move quickly at 9:00 when the office opened, but our hopes were dashed. A supervisor came out and said that for all about a hundred of us, there were five people working and 12 seats in the office.
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  She told us some people came prepared for an epic wait, with folding chairs, sandwiches, and drinks. Saunders ended up waiting about five and a half hours.
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  Saunders: The irony was that once I got upstairs and once I actually saw the IRS employee, she was very helpful, she was very courteous, and she solved my problem in less than ten minutes. And that was true for most of the people who waited in that long line. At least we got good results.
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  As the "Journal's" tax columnist, Saunders has reported on the IRS customer service problems, but this was personal.
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  Saunders: Well, it is like a second job navigating all this. I had to give up an entire Saturday. Part of the problem is the pandemic because Congress kept giving the IRS more and more to do, changing the tax law in the middle of tax season. And that has made enormous amounts of extra work. And so, they're playing catch up now.
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  What Saunders just said about stuff like this being like a second job, if that's resonating with you, we've got another article for you. It's one we talk about on the team a lot, from Annie Lowrey at "The Atlantic" on what she calls "the time tax." It looks into how certain government programs make us spend a lot of our own time doing admin work to get the benefits we are entitled to as taxpayers. It's a sharp and provocative argument about the unfairness of the system, one that'll probably stick with you for a while. We've curated the piece for you on the Apple News app.
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  We are supposed to spend a big chunk of our lives asleep. But there's plenty of evidence that we are doing a bad job of getting enough rest and it's hurting our bodies and minds. One in three of us don't get enough sleep. Stress and digital distractions can be a part of that. But a new study points to something else keeping us up.
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  Zoya Teirstein: This is a phenomenon that's part of the climate crisis. It's obviously getting hotter during the day. That's what we notice.
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  Zoya Teirstein writes about this for "Grist."
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  Teirstein: But nighttime temperatures are rising faster, and so what you have is people going to bed and having a hard time falling asleep because it's so hot out.
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  She spoke with us about the largest study ever done on the relationship between climate and sleep. Researchers looked at 10 billion sleep observations from wearable devices. They found higher temperatures are cutting back 45 hours of sleep per person per year. The heat makes us fall asleep later and wake up earlier. It adds up to 10 or 11 extra nights of bad sleep each year. Tierstein walked us through some of the ripple effects of poor sleep.
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  Teirstein: There's evidence that sleep, that short sleep, affects all types of things that we don't even think about normally. So the way that students perform on tests, violence. During the summer, violent crime rates go up. And researchers think that sleep plays a really important role in that.
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  The study found people in low-income countries, women, and the elderly are getting the worst of the sleep disruptions from climate change. As far as what we can take away from this research on a personal level, Tierstein left us with this.
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  Teirstein: Have you ever flipped over your pillow to the cold side and rested your head on it? It is just… That feeling, that coolness, there's a reason we like that. There's a reason that's a thing that people do. We enjoy, humans, myself included, enjoy sleeping in cooler temperatures. The problem with climate change, of course, is that you can't just flip over the pillow. So this affects all of us.
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  "Top Gun: Maverick" broke Memorial Day box office records, bringing in $156 million over the long weekend. It's not all fighter jets. It's a Tom Cruise movie, so there has to be scenes of Tom Cruise running. That's because in virtually all of his movies, at some point, he runs. By one running blog's count, he runs in 44 of his 52 movies.
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  Maybe you remember him running in a business suit with a briefcase in the "The Firm."
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  Or sprinting through Shanghai in "Mission: Impossible III."
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  ESPN decided to answer the most ESPN question possible on Cruise: is he any good at running? It pulled together a panel of elite track athletes, including three-time Olympic gold medalist Jackie Joyner-Kersee. And the verdict is: Tom Cruise can run, and his form has actually gotten better over time.
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  The athletes say early in his career, his hands are balled up, tense. But in recent years, his palms are open, slicing through the air. A track coach tells ESPN that's good because open hands can help sprinters relax, which actually helps them run faster.
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  The elite runners are especially impressed that he has to do something they don't: run in suits and regular shoes across multiple takes. But one tip they have for him, they think he can be even faster if he would just lean forward a bit when he runs. But Joyner-Kersee concedes that directors probably tell him to stay upright since it looks better on film.
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  Tom Cruise turns 60 this year, but he's literally not slowing down. The new trailer for the "Mission: Impossible" movie out next year confirms he will keep on running.
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  You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News+ partners. Shumita is back with us tomorrow.
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