The Glock handgun that was used in Friday’s shooting at Naval Air Station Pensacola was purchased legally in the U.S., the FBI says. Mohammed Alshamrani, a Saudi national, used the weapon to kill three sailors and wound eight more people.

Alshamrani was “a 21-year-old second lieutenant in the Royal Saudi Air Force who was a student naval flight officer at Naval Aviation Schools Command” in Pensacola, according to Rachel Rojas, special agent in charge of the Jacksonville Field Office.

The FBI is investigating the case as an act of terrorism. The agency says Alshamrani bought the 9mm Glock model 45 pistol in Florida.

“He did purchase it legally and lawfully,” Rojas said at a news conference on Sunday. Of the legal process Alshamrani used to acquire the weapon, she added, “It’s not just him, but any foreign national.”

The FBI has been tight-lipped about the high-profile case, even as Florida politicians have spoken out publicly about it.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has repeatedly called for better vetting of military personnel who come to the U.S. for training, saying on Sunday, “they should not be doing that if they hate our country.”

Of Alshamrani’s gun purchase, DeSantis said, “That’s a federal loophole he took advantage of. I’m a big supporter of the Second Amendment – but the Second Amendment is so that we the American people can keep and bear arms. It does not apply to Saudi Arabians. He had no constitutional right to do that, for sure.”

DeSantis said he was surprised to learn foreign nationals can buy guns in the U.S., adding, “I think that they should definitely look at that.”

When Rojas was pressed for details about the pistol, including when the Saudi student bought it, she declined to divulge that information.

“We’re not going to go into the specifics of the investigation at this time,” she said, adding, “It was purchased lawfully, and that’s the information we’re sharing.”

Joseph Vince, a former special agent with the ATF who now works as a gun crime consultant, says it doesn’t surprise him that Alshamrani was able to buy a gun as a foreigner visiting the U.S.

“Aliens legally in the country can buy a gun,” he said. “A lot of times if they’re going to take it back, they have to have something written from their embassies to do it — but they can purchase it legally.”

Vince added, “I would venture to say that for a lot of these military people that come over here to train, that taking back a weapon [to their home country] would be something that would be a common thing that would occur.”

According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, foreign nationals who are in the U.S. on a nonimmigrant visa are forbidden from possessing a gun or ammunition unless they meet one of several exceptions. Those exceptions allow for someone with “a valid hunting license or permit, admitted for lawful hunting or sporting purposes, certain official representatives of a foreign government, or a foreign law enforcement officer of a friendly foreign government entering the United States on official law enforcement business.”

In response to a request for information about the Alshamrani case, the ATF cited the relevant federal law, which is posted on its website. The agency’s statement to NPR also adds some details about how gun sales between foreign nationals and U.S. sellers can take place:

“A nonimmigrant alien who falls within an exception and has established residency in a State may purchase and take possession of a firearm from an unlicensed person, provided the buyer and seller are residents of the same State, and no other State or local law prohibits the transaction. A nonimmigrant alien with residency in a State may purchase a firearm from a licensee, provided the sale complies with all applicable laws and regulations.”

The Glock 45 pistol’s magazine normally holds 17 rounds; a 10-round magazine is also available, for customers who live in the small number of states with that restriction. On Glock’s online store, the weapon is currently listed for sale at from $539 to $649.

There have been media reports that the Saudi gunman may have bought the pistol after obtaining a hunting license. When asked about that on Monday, the ATF declined to comment.

As for why Alshamrani’s purchase of a Glock pistol on the strength of a hunting license might not have raised any alarms, the former ATF agent Vince said, “People do take handguns when they do hunt — especially if you’re hunting wild boar or something. That’s not uncommon.”

NPR has been in touch with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission about what type of hunting license the Saudi military service member might have obtained. We’ll update our reporting when the agency responds to that inquiry.

It used to be that the battle to overcome inequality was about money. It was about helping the poor get better jobs so they could access a larger slice of the economic pie.

What if that approach to inequality is no longer relevant?

In the latest edition of its Human Development Report, the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) argues that 20th-century thinking on global inequality no longer works in the 21st century.

The report warns that a new generation of inequities are driving street protests and damaging societies — and they’re on track to get worse.

Each year the UNDP looks at human progress around the globe. This year the authors say that major societal shifts around technology, education and climate change are creating a “new great divergence.” Achim Steiner, the UNDP administrator, sums up the problem this way: “an increasing number of young people are educated, connected and stuck with no ladder of choices to move up.”

Global inequality is now more about disparities in opportunity than disparities in income.

“What we are seeing is an opening up of a new generation of inequalities, particularly centered around the emerging middle classes of societies,” Steiner says.

“What people perhaps 30, 40 years ago were led to believe and often saw around them,” Steiner says, “was that if you worked hard, you could escape poverty.” Yet in many countries today, he says upward social mobility is “simply not occurring” anymore.

The Human Development Report 2019 makes the case that many of the street protests popping up around the globe are driven by a growing sense that societies are rigged to favor the powerful and trap the masses in low-wage, dead-end lives.

And those inequities can start even before birth.

“This new generation of inequality is interesting,” Steiner says. “It has to do with what you could call the micro-inequalities — the things that I perceive as unfair in my country and my community in my society.” Some of those inequities start before birth and burden individuals deep into adulthood.

“It may and sometimes does have to do with income,” Steiner adds. “But it may have also a lot to do with the fact that I know today that my child born into my family, into my neighborhood, already starts life at a significant disadvantage.”

Technology and the Internet has made people far more aware of what they might be missing out on. Universal public education systems particularly in middle-income countries have raised student expectations about the responsibilities of their political leaders. While subsistence farmers concerned about their crops, for example, might not have time to pay attention to national politics, highly-educated, unemployed, 20-somethings with mobile Internet access do.

So in the 21st century not only are there still huge global inequities, but people are far more aware of them.

“A lot of the of pressures from rising inequality and a decimated middle class led to the Arab Spring uprisings,” says Dana El Kurd, author of Polarized and Demobilized, about authoritarianism in Palestine, and an assistant professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. “I wouldn’t say [inequality] was the only cause, but it was certainly a major factor.”

She says recent protests in Lebanon and Iraq mark a shift in how people in the region view some of the problems in their countries. In the past many social conflicts in the Middle East were viewed as ethnic or sectarian clashes. But El Kurd says these new protests illustrate that people are growing frustrated with their political elites not solely because the elites are Sunni or Shia, for instance, but because the economic and political systems are failing so many citizens.

“What we’re seeing in the protests that emerged in Iraq is people recognizing that these political elites don’t represent anybody but themselves,” El Kurd says. “And what we thought was a sectarian issue is actually an issue of corruption. It’s inequality of access, the same with Lebanon. So in a lot of these places, it was kind of masked as sectarian conflict when it’s really this conflict about inequality.”

And that frustration isn’t just boiling over in the Middle East. There have been protests up and down Latin America from Chile to Colombia. The student-led demonstrations in Hong Kong show no sign of letting up. In socially-conservative parts of Africa, young women have taken to the streets as part of the global #MeToo movement.

UNDP’s Pedro Conceição, who oversees the Human Development Report, says their research shows that these global inequities are having huge impacts on individual lives.

“If we look at what happened to a child born in the year 2000 in a low human development country compared to a child born in a very high human development country, there’s a 17% probability that the child [from the low development country] is not alive today, 20 years after she was born,” Conceição says. “While in a very high human development country, there’s only a 1% chance that the child is not alive today.”

“Inequalities in human development remain high and widespread,” he notes.

And it’s not just in the health arena. More than half of the children born in wealthy countries in the year 2000 are enrolled in university today, Conceição says. Yet only 3% of the year-2000 babies from the poorest countries are in higher education.

The Justice Department’s internal watchdog is set to release a highly anticipated report Monday about the Russia investigation — including allegations of surveillance abuses against President Trump’s campaign.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report is expected to address a simmering dispute that lies at the heart of the partisan fight that has animated Washington for the past two years.

The question is, Did the Justice Department and FBI do anything improper when investigating possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia?

While political battles over the Russia probe have recently given way to the impeachment fight over Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, Republicans and Democrats have been eagerly awaiting the inspector general’s report in the hopes that it will support their respective claims.

The report, which will run hundreds of pages, is expected to contain elements that both sides can seize to buttress their respective arguments about the FBI, the Justice Department and the propriety of investigating the actions of the candidate who became president and those around him.

Republicans are expected to cite any whiff of political bias among senior FBI officials or irregularities associated with the bureau’s use of its surveillance powers.

Democrats are likely to embrace any conclusion that the FBI’s investigation was justified and not spurred by the infamous Trump-Russia dossier compiled by the British former spy Christopher Steele.

Investigating the investigators

The inspector general announced his review of the Russia probe in March 2018 in response to a request from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and members of Congress.

The president’s Republican allies allege that the FBI misused its surveillance authorities in targeting Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign who had been on the bureau’s radar for years.

Critics also argue that the FBI improperly relied on Steele’s dossier to get court approval for surveillance on Page.

Those allegations echo, at least in part, the president’s frequent claims that his campaign was “spied” on by the Obama administration and that the Russia investigation was a “witch hunt” to kneecap his presidency.

Democrats, in contrast, argue that the bureau acted properly in opening the investigation and in its surveillance of Page.

Page traveled to Russia twice in 2016. And in an earlier chapter, he had dealings with Russian intelligence operatives in New York City. The FBI’s supporters say that surveilling Page was appropriate and that the bureau provided adequate context about Steele’s political ties.

Steele had been hired by a private intelligence firm that was being paid by Democrats to research Trump in the election context.

Former FBI officials have defended the investigation into Russia’s election interference. They have said it would have been negligent of the bureau not to have acted on information it received about contacts between Trump aides and Russia at the time it was getting other leads about the election interference.

The watchdog

Those have been the competing narratives about the Russia investigation since before it was completed by then-special counsel Robert Mueller earlier this year.

Now the public will get the chance to hear from Horowitz, an independent inspector general with a long history of nonpartisan work.

When Horowitz’s office announced its Russia review, it said it would examine whether the department and the FBI followed the proper procedures when applying for surveillance on a “certain U.S. person” — a reference to Page.

Horowitz’s office also said it would look into what the FBI knew about an “alleged FBI confidential source” and the bureau’s interactions with that source, who was not identified — but is the British former spy, Steele.

Almost two months later, then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein asked Horowitz to expand the review to also look at whether there was any political motivation in how the FBI approached Trump campaign aides in 2016.

Rosenstein made that request after the president, in response to media reports, claimed that the FBI had placed a “spy” in his campaign.

There’s no evidence of that, although the bureau did use a confidential source — a former professor — to make contact with Page and other Trump aides in 2016 to try to find out what they knew about possible coordination with Russia.

Russian interlocutors were offering Trump campaign aides “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, “off the record” meetings and trips to Russia in 2016, investigators have found.

The FBI probe that uncovered those activities eventually was taken over by Mueller after he was appointed special counsel in May 2017.

More investigating of the investigation

Horowitz’s report will not be the final word on the Russia investigation and the 2016 election.

That will likely fall, instead, to John Durham, the veteran federal prosecutor who serves as U.S. attorney for Connecticut and was appointed by Attorney General William Barr this year to look into the genesis of the Russia probe.

There is overlap between Horowitz’s work and Durham’s investigation, although Durham is believed to be focusing more on U.S. spy agencies and foreign intelligence services and whether any rules were violated in the surveillance of the Trump campaign.

Durham’s work began as an administrative review and was upgraded to a criminal investigation in October. It is unclear when Durham’s inquiry might wrap up.