The Brief

Tenants in the city of Los Angeles could soon face eviction over unpaid rent from early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

So far, the city of L.A.’s COVID-19 regulations have given renters protections from eviction over pandemic debts. But rent was never canceled — only delayed. And landlords have long complained about financial hardships stemming from unpaid rent.

Now, tenants have until Tuesday, Aug. 1 to pay landlords all of the rent they missed between March 1, 2020 and Sept. 30, 2021. If they don’t pay those debts in full, they could face eviction.

“I am very worried about the deadline,” L.A. Mayor Karen Bass told LAist. “I'm concerned that we're going to have another spike in homelessness.”

In the interview with LAist, Bass deferred questions on actions the city will take to help renters before the deadline to the head of the city council’s housing committee, and the CEO of the Mayor’s Fund, a nonprofit aligned with the Bass administration’s housing goals.

The city has put funding toward programs that provide legal aid and limited rental assistance for tenants facing eviction. And the Mayor’s Fund is pledging to step up ongoing homelessness prevention efforts. But other funding through the city’s new “mansion tax” will not be available to tenants by the Tuesday deadline.

Eviction filings have already been rising across L.A. County for many months. And landlord advocates say more are coming after the pandemic rent debt protections go away.

“We're doing tons [of eviction cases] now, but there will be many new evictions that we have in the pipe to start on Aug. 2,” said prominent L.A.-area eviction attorney Dennis Block.

Block said the city’s COVID-19 restrictions have unfairly prevented many of his clients from taking action over debts that in many cases stretch back more than three years.

“When does it stop?” Block said. “And why is it the landlord's responsibility to be financially responsible for someone else's debt?”

Tenant advocates worry thousands of L.A. households — including those who applied to the state’s COVID-19 rent relief program but got caught in bureaucratic limbo and have yet to receive aid — could soon end up struggling to defend themselves in eviction court.

“There are still a lot of people, especially in the L.A. area, who are waiting on the government relief to pay off the debt to their landlords,” said Legal Aid Foundation of L.A. staff attorney Jonathan Jager. “They're not going to get the check before next week.”

For many renters, 'trying to rebuild is not easy'

Many tenants who struggled to pay rent in earlier phases of the pandemic are in the clear, because they applied for and received rent relief funding from the state. California’s $5.2 billion program to cover pandemic rent debts up to April 2022 delivered almost $1.4 billion to tenants just within the city of L.A.

But other L.A. renters are still shouldering debts that in some cases run into the tens of thousands of dollars. According to recent U.S. Census Bureau survey data, about 339,000 households in the L.A. metro area have rent debt totaling close to $1.3 billion.

“The economic impacts definitely aren't over,” said Cesar Alvarez, a camera operator for documentary film and TV projects who has about $18,000 due on Tuesday. “We're still crawling out of holes. Trying to rebuild is not easy.”

Alvarez remembers the day in March 2020 when all his work suddenly disappeared.

“Everything dried up, all within less than 24 hours,” he said. “My phone wouldn't stop ringing. Emails were coming and talking about all projects being canceled until further notice.”

Cesar Alvarez stands outside his Highland Park bungalow. If he’s evicted over COVID-19 rent debt, he said, “There's no way I could afford Highland Park again.”

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After his income vanished, Alvarez informed the landlord of the Highland Park bungalow — where he has lived for the past seven years — that he would need to use the city’s protections allowing tenants to defer rent because of pandemic hardship.

He went to apply for rent relief, but by then work was picking up again, and he said the state’s website suggested he wasn’t eligible for assistance under the program’s income limits.

Alvarez is now back to regular work and paying his full rent. He adds a couple hundred extra dollars each month to chip away at his debt. But he said for tenants in his situation, repaying all of their past-due rent in one lump sum is impossible. He worries about what comes next.

“It's going to lead to a wave of massive evictions,” Alvarez predicted. “It's going to lead to a wave of massive homelessness. If you think it's bad now just give it three more months.”

Second repayment deadline is coming next year

The city’s rules give tenants with more recent pandemic rent debt additional time to pay back their landlords. Unpaid rents from Oct. 1, 2021 through Jan. 31, 2023 must be paid by Feb. 1, 2024. Other parts of L.A. County have different COVID-19 repayment rules.

For tenants still struggling to pay off rental debt, limited rental assistance is available to some living in the city through the city-funded StayHousedLA.org program.

In addition, the nonprofit Mayor’s Fund For Los Angeles recently launched a $6.5 million homelessness prevention effort called “We Are L.A.” that aims to give thousands of vulnerable tenants legal assistance and get them signed up for health care, food and other public aid programs.

Mayors Fund leaders said the program does not directly pay down COVID-19 rent debt, but it has already connected more than 10,000 tenants with caseworkers who know how to buy renters more time in legal proceedings to find solutions.

“It's another way that, at very low cost and very efficiently, the whole outreach and case management process can help avoid evictions,” said Conway Collis, chief executive officer of the Mayor’s Fund.

But other funding that could be used to clear tenants’ remaining COVID-19 debts won’t be available by the Tuesday deadline.

The city’s housing department expects to help about 3,000 households with about $20 million in emergency rental assistance during the first year of funding from Measure ULA, the voter-approved tax on property sales valued at $5 million or more. That funding could cover up to six months of back rent for eligible tenants. But the portal to apply for that funding will not be online before Tuesday’s repayment deadline.

Existing ULA tax revenue has been lower than expected. Supporters of the ballot initiative originally projected it would raise up to $1.1 billion per year. But wealthy homeowners scrambled to sell their properties before the tax took effect on April 1, and only about $38 million in revenue has been raised so far. The measure also faces legal challenges that could put funding in jeopardy.

City lawmakers are restricted under state law from pushing back the Tuesday repayment deadline. But tenant advocates say city leaders could have done more to deliver rent relief ahead of time in order to stop evictions over pandemic debt.

“They had years of time to do something like set up a local rental assistance program to help tenants pay off these debts that were not covered by the state rental assistance program, or to look at other potential ways of mitigating the harm of having all of this due on the same day,” said Jager with the Legal Aid Foundation.

Tenants rally to call for relief

Tenants like Julia Orozco fear they could soon slip into homelessness. As a street vendor, Orozco saw her income evaporate during the pandemic. She isn’t earning enough to cover the approximately $5,000 in debt coming due on Tuesday.

Orozco attended a rally this week outside the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown L.A. She and other tenants called on L.A. leaders to stop the rising number of eviction filings across the city.

Speaking in Spanish, Orozco said, “It affects me a lot because my daughter asks me every day if we are going to sleep at home or if we are going to sleep on the street.”

Julia Orozco brought her daughter to a rally where tenants called on city leaders to address evictions over COVID-19 rent debt.

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Councilmember Nithya Raman, chair of the L.A. city council’s housing committee, said she has been working with the mayor’s office and the city’s housing department to coordinate efforts around the looming deadline. She said new renter protections passed by the council earlier this year, as well as the city’s existing Eviction Defense Program, could help many tenants.

"My hope is that the impending Aug. 1 rent debt repayment deadline actually pushes us to reshape and transform our current system into one that proactively supports vulnerable tenants to stay housed, not just at this moment but over the long term,” Raman said in a written statement.

But local landlords say their patience is wearing thin.

“Renters should have known this day was coming,” said Daniel Yukelson, executive director of The Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles. “If a renter has not made at least some attempts to pay down some of this rental debt these past three years, there’s a strong likelihood that they're not going to be able to make a lump sum payment when the due date comes.”

Yukelson said most landlords in the city are not hopeful about recovering unpaid debts. As for eviction, he said going to court for many landlords is a last resort. He said in some cases, tenants who followed all of the city’s requirements for notifying landlords about COVID-19 hardships each month may not be subject to eviction, only debt collection.

What to do if you're at risk of eviction

The mayor’s office, in conjunction with Raman’s office, released a list of resources available to tenants on Thursday. They recommended tenants at risk of eviction reach out to the city’s housing department through appointment-only public counters or by calling 866-557-7368. They also encouraged tenants to contact their local councilmembers and sign up for tenant rights workshops put on by StayHousedLA.org.

L.A. city leaders will discuss on Wednesday whether to pull hundreds of millions of dollars out of the regional homelessness agency and assign different oversight.

L.A. County supervisors voted to withdraw funding for the L.A. Homeless Services Authority last April, citing ongoing problems with the agency's oversight of homelessness funds.

Now 10 months later, City Council members are planning to talk about whether to pull the city’s funds from LAHSA — which amount to just under $300 million this fiscal year.

It’s one of the most consequential decisions on homelessness city officials have faced in years. In deciding the future of LAHSA, the City Council will be deciding who will be entrusted with taxpayer funds meant to address the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population.

What the council will discuss

On Wednesday, the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee is scheduled to discuss a range of options that include:

• not changing anything major
• keeping the city money at LAHSA, but beefing up city oversight
• shifting the funding from LAHSA to direct city control
• shifting the city’s funding from LAHSA to the county homelessness department to administer it

The committee also is scheduled to discuss whether to pursue shifting the city’s federal homelessness funding from LAHSA to more direct city control.

The options were first laid out in a staff report to delivered last April, two years after it was requested by Councilmember Monica Rodriguez.

At a City Council meeting in January, Rodriguez criticized housing and homelessness committee chair Nithya Raman for not scheduling a committee discussion on the options.

“It's been sitting [for] 280 days, a report in your committee that you won't hear,” Rodriguez said at the January meeting. “So let's stop playing this false notion of the arsonists showing up as the firefighters.”

Asked for a response Monday, Raman’s spokesperson Stella Stahl told LAist the item is on Wednesday's agenda.

In a statement, Raman said she expects to hold two meetings to discuss all the city’s options before the council makes a decision.

Raman and Mayor Karen Bass urged the county not to pull funding from LAHSA last spring, saying the agency was making progress on homelessness.

The supervisors went ahead last April with their decision to withdraw the more than $300 million in annual county funding from the agency.

The vast majority of county funds will be shifted from LAHSA starting July 1.

Raman recently announced she’s running in the June primary against Bass, whom she previously endorsed for re-election.

LAHSA is in ‘crisis,’ its CEO says

LAHSA was created by the city and county in 1993 to oversee homeless services. It’s governed by a CEO who reports to a commission of 10 members. Half of the members are appointed by the L.A. mayor, and the other half by each of the five county supervisors. Bass also serves on the commission, having appointed herself in fall 2023.

While it’s long faced criticism, it’s been under particularly close scrutiny for more than a year.

An audit and court-ordered review found it failed to properly track its spending and whether services were being provided.

LAHSA also has been facing criticism more recently for months-long delays in paying tens of millions of dollars to reimburse service providers — a problem officials vowed to fix nearly two years ago. Several providers recently told LAist they've had had to dip into reserves or take on debt.

While addressing the commission that oversees the organization on Friday, CEO O’Neill said LAHSA was “in crisis. And I say this not as a criticism to any of our really hardworking staff. They've built what they were asked to build.”

LAHSA’s staff report to “essentially 21 elected bosses, all of whom have different, sometimes conflicting agendas,” O’Neill said. “This creates a structure that is unstable.”

“LAHSA has been structured for decades as the entity that takes the blame,” she added. “Political incentive…has been to point at LAHSA rather than to address structural issues.”

“Morale is very low,” O’Neill said of LAHSA staff.

Fifteen years ago, when modern electric vehicles were just hitting the road, no one knew exactly what to expect from their giant, expensive lithium-ion batteries.

As batteries age, they hold less and less energy. Anyone who's ever had a dying smartphone, or had to replace a vehicle's 12-volt starter battery, knows this painfully well.

EV batteries were intended to last longer than those smaller, cheaper batteries. But how much longer?

The predictions were not soothing. In 2010, the New York Times wrote that "estimates of [EV] battery packs' lifespan — no one knows for sure — range upward from seven years." The average car on the road is more than 12 years old. And that discrepancy made some would-be EV buyers nervous.

Batteries come with warranties, but they don't last as long as the car. If a high-voltage battery chokes out midway through a car's life, it needs replacing — at a price tag that can run in the ballpark of $5,000 to $20,000.

But there's good news.

As the fleet of EVs on the road ages, new data pooled from tens of thousands of vehicles is showing those batteries are lasting longer than expected.

How a battery ages 

Lithium-ion batteries undergo two kinds of aging. First, there's calendar aging: They degrade as time goes on, holding less juice, even if they just sit in storage.

Then there's cyclical aging, which is how much a battery degrades based on its use — being charged and discharged, over and over again.

That means there's no way to dodge degradation. Whether you use a vehicle a lot or a little, eventually, the battery will hold less energy.

But the trajectory of aging isn't a straight line. Recurrent, a research firm that pulls in data from over 30,000 EV drivers, describes it as an "S curve." There's a rapid decline at the beginning, a long leveling off, and then a more rapid decline at the end.

"It's very much like breaking in a pair of shoes," says Liz Najman, the director of market insights at Recurrent. The shoes start out stiff, but quickly get a little more give. "And then your shoes just last you," she says, until at some point, "It's all over, it's a rapid decline."

And when it comes to EV batteries, two things are becoming clear. The initial drop-off is not as severe as some people had worried. And the sharp end-of-life decline is taking a long, long time to materialize.

At auto auctions, a lot of healthy batteries

Adam George is a vehicle services director at Cox Automotive, which runs used car auctions around the country. In recent years, the number of used EVs for sale has increased enormously — reflecting the sharp rise in production a few years ago.

That's given Cox Automotive a growing pool of used EVs to evaluate before they're re-sold.

"We were expecting battery health to be experiencing mass degradation over the first one to three years of owning a vehicle," George says. "What we have seen, though, is that these 2, 3, 4-year-old off-lease cars that are coming back have battery health scores well upwards of 95%."

Recurrent's data also shows that cars from most major brands retain 95% or more of their expected range after 3 years, thanks in part to software and battery management systems that are designed to correct for the battery's early degradation, and give drivers consistent range.

So the initial drop-off in that S curve is in the range of 5% or so, give or take. After that? Well, Cox Automotive has tested nearly 80,000 EVs, and found an average battery health of 92%.

Decade-old EVs are overwhelmingly on their original batteries 

That data set is naturally skewed toward younger vehicles, because the vast majority of EVs on the road today are fairly new. There were only a million EVs sold between 2010 and 2018, and now there are more than a million sold each year.

So what about the oldest EVs, specifically?

Recurrent's data can help answer this question. Najman, a data scientist, notes a few caveats: It's a fairly small dataset, just because there weren't many EVs built more than a decade ago. And some of the oldest EVs use technology that can't connect to Recurrent's opt-in network.

But based on their community, among EVs that are 10 years old or older, only 8.5% have ever had a battery replacement. More than 90% of them are still on their original battery.

"EV batteries are holding up phenomenally well," Najman says.  

Recurrent has also looked at EVs of any age that have more than 150,000 miles on them, which provides a closer look at the effects of that cyclical aging. There, too, the batteries outperformed expectations.

"Cars with 150,000 miles or more, and that have not had battery replacements, are getting at least 83% of their original range," Najman says.

Now, there is one common reason why EV batteries will be replaced very early on: a defect. There have been multiple large-scale battery recalls, and any individual battery might have a flaw that requires replacement. But because all new EVs come with warranties, that kind of replacement isn't a financial blow to owners.

"That would be something that would be synonymous with, like, your engine or a transmission going bad," says Adam George, of Cox Automotive. "That's what warranties are for."

EV battery warranties typically cover at least 8 years and 100,000 miles, and automakers will replace the battery in the case of catastrophic failure, or a reduction in capacity (usually to 70% of the original or less).

A robotic arm displays the dual engine chassis of a Model S electric sedan at the Hawthorne Airport in Los Angeles on October 9, 2014.

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The tale of one Model S 

What do all these stats look like in real life? Consider Norman Hajjar's Model S.

Hajjar was an early adopter of electric vehicles. He kind of had to be: In 2013 he became an executive at the electric vehicle drivers' app Plugshare.

His 2012 Model S is one of the first that Tesla ever built. When he got it, he was well aware of the question mark about battery lifespan. "There was really no way of knowing what the future held for it because there was zero track record," Hajjar says.

In his case, the future held a battery defect: a loud noise followed by his car coming to an abrupt stop. He recalls Tesla replacing the battery — free of charge and under warranty — in 2014.

Since then, he's spent 12 years on that second battery. He's put around 200,000 miles on the car overall. And it's driving great, thank you very much.

"This vehicle still is a monster," Hajjar says, affectionately. "It is extremely fast, quick off the line."

The vehicle was originally rated to have 265 miles of range. Now it has about 220. Do the math, and it's at 83% of its original capacity. "The amount of degradation is pretty minor," Hajjar says.

Hajjar has moved on to a newer vehicle for his daily driver, mostly to enjoy higher-tech features. (His newer Model Y has Tesla's advanced driver-assistance software.) His son uses the Model S these days for his commute to college. "It's just sort of a backup vehicle now," Hajjar says. But he plans to hang on to it. He's sentimental about it, he says.

Why are batteries outlasting expectations? 

The engineers who developed modern EVs knew that prolonging battery life would be crucial. They designed systems to actively manage temperatures to improve battery lifespan, and software to constantly check battery health. Years have shown those efforts paid off.

But there's another reason EV batteries have out-performed expectations. It turns out that testing batteries is harder on them than the real world. Their lifespan was underestimated.

Simona Onori's lab at Stanford University has done research into the longevity of lithium-ion batteries, including a 2024 paper in Nature Energy showing that traditional methods for testing battery life are very stressful, and don't match the way batteries are actually used.

In most lab tests, researchers repeatedly cycle them from a very high state of charge to a very low one.

Real-world driving is gentler, with stops and starts — each start draws a bit of the battery's energy down, while each stop gives it a little time to recharge. A driver would never slam the accelerator to the floor and keep it there until the battery is dead.

"We accelerate, we decelerate," Onori says. "The battery will be charged, and discharged, some rest if you're at a traffic light."

Her lab's findings suggest that the traditional tests for battery life were unrealistically challenging, and Onori says ongoing work with real-world data is now confirming that. When they're actually driven, she says, EV batteries "age gracefully. Very gracefully."

Just like humans, she notes: "When we live a life with less stress, we live longer."

A decade plus … and counting 

So how long do EV batteries last? It's still too soon to put a precise number on it, because — as a group — the cars already on the road haven't yet reached the end of the S-curve, the point when they will start to show massive performance declines. In other words, they're not dead yet.

Meanwhile, battery technology keeps improving. The oldest EVs, like Hajjar's Model S, may not be the best indicator of how long newer EVs will last. Software systems to manage batteries have gotten more sophisticated. A lot of new EVs use a different battery chemistry — lithium iron phosphate or LFP — which lasts even longer than other lithium-ion batteries.

As Stephanie Valdez-Streaty, who follows EV trends for Cox Automotive, puts it: "These batteries are built to outlast the cars."

And there's one more wrinkle when it comes to figuring out the end of life for a normally-aging EV battery. They don't die abruptly, like an old engine cutting out. It's more that their range shrinks; they can only hold enough energy for shorter and shorter trips. Instead of shelling out for an expensive battery replacement, some EV owners might just put up with that limitation.

Thomas McVeigh, of Ontario, Canada, drives a 2014 BMW i3. That vehicle didn't have an impressive range even when it was new, and now it can only manage about 55 miles on a single charge in the winter. But it still looks great. It's pleasant to drive. It saves him on gas. Maintenance is wildly cheap for a 12-year-old vehicle, and especially for a BMW; his only real cost is new tires.

He's fine with its diminished range. And he's not inclined to put what he estimates would be a $6,000 battery into an aging car. Instead, maybe he'll pass it on to his kid. "Teenagers generally aren't going for long drives," he says.

Or maybe he'll keep it for himself, after all. "I mean," he says, "I love that car."

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This week the Getty Villa Museum will begin offering a rare look at scrolls from its ancient Egyptian “Book of the Dead” collection.

The collection of 19 manuscripts written on scrolls of papyrus and linen fragments are fragile, with one of them dating back nearly 3,500 years. Because of that, the materials are not usually on display to the public and the gallery will be carefully lit, temperature and humidity-controlled.

Sara Cole, associate curator of antiquities, told LAist that a lot of the language in the spells is written in first person speech for the deceased spirit to say while navigating the afterlife.

“One of my favorite phrases that I have on a wall of the gallery is ‘May I join with the stars that call out to me in the night boat,’” Cole said.

Cole explained that the manuscripts have been in the Getty’s collection since 1983, when they were donated by a bookseller in New York, who got them from the private collection of a British rare manuscript collector.

Egyptian mummy wrapping of Petosiris, Son of Tetosiris, from around 332–100 BCE.

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A years-long project is underway to translate the spells and rituals immortalized in the Getty's “Book of the Dead” scrolls and fragments, with a “large publication” in the works, Cole said.

The exhibition will feature four papyri belonging to women named Webennesre, Ankhesenaset, and Aset. Cole said “Book of the Dead” materials belonging to women are rare, because most were reserved for men.

Twelve of the manuscripts in the exhibition are written on fragments of linen that were used to wrap the mummified remains of the people they belonged to. Cole said she hopes visitors will understand that the material was very intimately associated with peoples’ burials.

Cole said her goal is to foreground the identities of the people who owned the scrolls, including two women who were ritual singers for the god Amun in the ancient city of Thebes.

“We see in these manuscripts the ancient Egyptians really grappling with this question and thinking about what might happen when we die... And I think that’s something we can all connect with and understand,” she said.

Cole recommends visiting the Getty’s website for a calendar of curator tours and special events related to the exhibition, including an upcoming talk by an Egyptologist.

The “The Egyptian Book of the Dead” at the Getty Villa runs from March 4 to Nov. 30.

The Supreme Court hears arguments Monday in an important gun case that has united an array of strange bedfellows, from conservative gun rights groups to liberal civil liberties groups. At issue is a federal law making it a crime for drug users to possess a firearm. It's the same law that was used to prosecute then-President Joe Biden's son for illegal gun possession — only this case involves marijuana use and gun ownership.

The briefs in the case present diametrically different versions of the facts. On one side, the Trump administration portrays Ali Danial Hemani as a drug dealer and someone with terrorist ties and a marijuana habit. Importantly, he is not being prosecuted for any of those offenses, however. Rather, the government has charged Hemani with violating a federal gun law that bars people with drug addiction from possession of firearms, a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the indictment, declaring that the federal law violates Hemani's Second Amendment right to own a gun.

The Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that because Hemani admitted to FBI agents that he used marijuana several times a week, he is a "persistent" drug user, thus rendering illegal the possession of the gun he bought legally and keeps securely in his home.

Hemani's lawyer, law professor Naz Ahmad of the City University of New York, paints a very different picture of her client. Hemani, she notes, was born and raised in Texas, "attended high school there, played on the high school football team, attended the University of Texas at Arlington, was an honor student there" and is "a really valued member of his local religious community."

"The Second Amendment doesn't support disarming and prosecuting somebody for mere possession of a firearm if they happen to have used marijuana occasionally," she says.

"That's a mismatch," she adds, especially at a time when 40 states, to one degree or another, have legalized marijuana use.
 
If the court rules against Hemani, she says, "the statute could apply to anybody. It could apply to somebody who uses like a marijuana sleep gummy."

The Trump administration's advocate, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, acknowledges that under the Supreme Court's landmark gun decision four years ago, the government has a heavy burden to show that modern-day gun laws are analogous to laws in place at the nation's founding. But he contends that the statute used to prosecute Hemani is both justified and analogous to founding-era laws and practices.

Specifically, in his Supreme Court brief, Sauer points to the harsh punishments imposed during the founding era on "habitual drunkards." And he contends that both Congress and the states have restricted firearm possession by illegal drug users "for as long as that social evil has plagued America."

That said, for the most part, the case seems to have united groups from left to right, from civil liberties groups to gun rights advocates.

"It's outrageous that they tried to get him on a marijuana gun charge," says Aidan Johnston, director of federal affairs for Gun Owners of America. He contends that the government is seeking to criminalize conduct that was widely tolerated at the founding.

"It was the universal custom of founding-era militias to imbibe," he notes, adding that Thomas Jefferson and other famous Americans "possessed firearms while being users of drugs ranging from opium to cocaine."

At the opposite end of the ideological spectrum are a variety of gun-safety groups that fear that if Hemani wins his case, it could gouge a hole in the existing system of national background checks.

Under the current system, dealers are required to first clear the sale by submitting the buyer's name to the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System. The hitch is that there is a very small window in which to complete the check — just three days. And gun-safety groups say that anything that makes the rules more complicated and unclear could really screw up the system.

"We're saying" to the court, "whatever you do, it's essential that you keep the rules clear so that in that short window, federal agencies can give a quick answer to the dealers," says Douglas Letter of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. 

An adverse ruling, he says, would mess up the criminal background check process. That, in turn, would result in "so many, particularly women and children, who will die if that kind of a system is not in place."

A decision in the case is expected by summer.
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