President Biden made sure of that by delivering a rare prime-time address to the nation last night, urging Congress to pass laws that could help curb the gun violence that’s sweeping the country. “For God’s sake, how much more carnage are we willing to accept?” he asked.

The most recent mass shooting in the US occurred in Tulsa, OK, Wednesday night, when a gunman armed with an AR-15-style rifle and a handgun killed three employees and a patient at a hospital. Police said the shooter was targeting the surgeon who had recently performed his back surgery.

Following massacres last month in Buffalo, NY, and Uvalde, TX, there’s been “growing momentum” to pass gun legislation, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy said this week. President Biden’s prime-time address also reflects the government’s greater focus on the issue. Biden rarely interrupts your evening TV binge to make a speech, having done it only for annual addresses to Congress and remarks on the one-year anniversary of the Covid pandemic.

So what’s on the table?

The Protecting Our Kids Act is a bill that was added to the House docket following the school shooting in Texas. Among other restrictions, it would raise the age limit to purchase a semi-automatic rifle from 18 to 21 and make it a federal offense to import, make, or own large-capacity magazines. The House could vote on it next week, but even if it gets through the chamber, it’s expected to be quashed by the evenly split Senate (where it would need 10 Republican votes, or 60 total, to pass).

Speaking of the Senate, a bipartisan group of senators has been hashing out several limited gun policies that could get the necessary 60 votes. Those measures include expanding background checks, buttressing school security, and implementing red flag laws that allow law enforcement to take guns away from people deemed high-risk of harming themselves or others. 19 states already have red flag laws.

What’s not on the table: an assault weapons ban. Since a 10-year ban on assault weapons expired during the George W. Bush administration, Democrats have been unsuccessful in pushing the policy through Congress—even in 2013, shortly after the Sandy Hook school shooting.

Bottom line: Democrats say that immediate action on the guns issue is needed, given how quickly even the most horrific events fade from the public’s memory. Plus, holding a vote forces Republicans to show their constituents where they stand during an election year.—NF

“Crypto winter” comes for the Winklevii. The Social Network-famous twins are laying off about 10% of the workforce at Gemini, the crypto exchange they own. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss said that the industry has entered a “contraction phase that is settling into a period of stasis”—which is another way of saying that the total value of digital assets has plunged by about $2 trillion from its peak last November. Facing the same challenges, Coinbase also extended its hiring freeze and rescinded a number of accepted job offers.

Vaccines for tots could arrive this month. Biden’s Covid-19 czar Ashish Jha said that vaccines for kids under five, the only age group for whom they’re currently not authorized, could begin “in earnest” as soon as June 21. The FDA is currently reviewing applications from Moderna and Pfizer–BioNTech.

The women’s French Open final is a doozy. American teenager Coco Gauff will be competing in her first-ever Grand Slam singles final on Saturday, but she’ll face a daunting opponent in World No. 1 Iga Swiatek. Swiatek, a Polish 21 year old who may be the most dominant athlete on the planet right now, has won 34 straight matches. If Swiatek wins tomorrow, she’ll tie Venus Williams for the longest winning streak by any WTA player ever.

In a move a bit like asking Batman to cut back on using the Batman voice, new CNN boss Chris Licht sent a memo to staffers indicating that the network needs to tamp down its use of “breaking news” graphics.

“It has become such a fixture on every channel and network that its impact has become lost on the audience,” Licht’s memo said of the label, which is also used heavily on other cable news channels and, as any Twitter user knows, on 99% of journalism tweets.

Licht’s predecessor, Jeff Zucker, voiced similar criticism about the breaking news banner in 2019 when he said the network “way overuse[d]” the label. According to Licht’s note, guidelines for using the banner have been created and added to CNN’s stylebook.

Zoom out: This move comes about two months after CNN and the rest of WarnerMedia’s properties were acquired by Discovery and combined under the newly formed Warner Bros. Discovery umbrella. In the acquisition, Licht became Chairman & CEO of CNN Global. He and David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, have expressed a desire to avoid the image of becoming an “advocacy network” and are seeking to return to a more traditional flavor of journalism.—MK

The White House said yesterday it would start paying its interns for the first time in history. Yep, until now you would have had the privilege of picking up Joe Biden’s daily bearclaw without seeing a dime.

For the upcoming fall session, White House interns will make $750 a week. The move is an effort to diversify the “leadership pipeline across the entire federal government,” according to the White House’s statement.

This was set in motion in March, when President Biden signed a spending bill that set aside $4.5 million to pay White House interns, and bumped funding for Senate intern pay from $6 million in FY 2021 to $7 million.

Pay raises in DC have been as prevalent as complaints about the humidity: Last month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi set the first minimum pay for House staffers at $45,000 (the median House staffer’s pay in 2020 was $38,730, about $4k less than a living wage in DC), and raised the salary cap to $203,700.

Zoom out: Five years ago, Congress also started paying its interns to increase diversity, but the racial and ethnic makeup of its internship program hasn’t changed much, according to a report from the nonprofit Pay Our Interns. While white students made up about 52% of the undergrad population in the US in 2019, they accounted for 76% of paid Congressional interns.—MM

Stat: The housing market is so intense that over 65% of Gen Z homebuyers and 61% of millennials have cried at least once while trying to buy a house, according to a Zillow survey. The survey did not ask how much crying was due to an abundance of subway-tiled kitchen walls.

Quote: “Türkiye”

Turkey pulled a Meta and has rebranded itself to Türkiye at the United Nations from now on. The new name is intended to better represent the country’s “culture, civilization, and values,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in December, and at least some reasoning behind the rebrand is the confusion with the bird.

Read: The bleak spectacle of the Amber Heard–Johnny Depp trial. (The Present Age)

The feeling of getting a 5/5 on the Brew’s Weekly News Quiz has been compared to finally giving up on a boring book halfway through.

It’s that satisfying. Ace the quiz.

History of the web: Check out this timeline of the most important events in internet history (Morning Brew’s founding didn’t make the list for some reason).

Video of the week: Watch one mountain biker conquer the “Mountain of Hell.”

Is the housing market on the verge of crashing? BiggerPockets breaks down the latest data in this article. Find out what investors need to know.

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