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OSLO — An early morning shooting near a popular gay club in downtown Oslo that killed two people and seriously wounded at least 10 was being investigated as an act of terrorism, the police said on Saturday, as Norwegians grappled with a rare gun attack that shattered an expected Pride weekend celebration.

The shooting, on a warm summer night, came hours before the city was scheduled to host big crowds for its first Pride parade since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The event’s organizers canceled the parade and other events connected to a 10-day Pride festival at the suggestion of the police.

“We encourage all of Norway to show solidarity and celebrate Pride at home, in their neighborhoods and towns,” Inger Kristin Haugsevje, the leader of Oslo Pride, said in a statement.

The gunman, who opened fire outside two nightclubs, was detained shortly after the shooting, the police said. Christian Hatlo, a lawyer for the police, told reporters that the man in custody was a 42-year-old Norwegian citizen who was originally from Iran and had a record of minor crimes. The man’s defense lawyer could not immediately be reached.

Mr. Hatlo said that the authorities had charged him with murder, attempted murder and terrorism. He said they were investigating the shooting as a terrorist attack because of the number of crime scenes and the size of the death and injury tolls.

“He seems to have had the intention to create fear in the population,” Mr. Hatlo said.

In addition to the 10 people who were seriously wounded, 11 others were lightly injured, some during a panicked rush to flee the scene, Mr. Hatlo said. He added that the police had seized two weapons, including a fully automatic one that he described as “not a modern gun.”

Shootings are rare in Norway. Gun owners must be licensed and take safety classes, and a ban on semiautomatic weapons enacted by Parliament — a belated response to a 2011 attack by a far-right gunman that killed 77 people — took effect last year.

The police have reason to assume that the attack was a hate crime because one of the three venues was London Pub, a center of gay nightlife in Oslo, Mr. Hatlo said. The pub, which lies a few blocks from Norway’s Parliament building, opened in the 1970s.

Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Store, described the shooting as a “cruel and deeply shocking attack on innocent people.” The mayor of Oslo, Raymond Johansen, called it “gruesome.”

Some L.G.B.T. people reacted with shock in a country where gay people are widely accepted, safety is not seen as a major issue and rainbow flags are common in shops and restaurants. Same-sex marriage has been legal since 2009, and the Norwegian government in April 2022 apologized on the 50th anniversary of the repeal of laws criminalizing sex between men.

On Saturday afternoon, Isack Tronaas, 17, delivered flowers to a memorial about a block away from the bar, where the police had cordoned off the area. He said he had planned to attend the Pride parade, as he does every year, but he wasn’t sure what he and other L.G.B.T.Q. people in the city would do instead this weekend.

“This is a really hard situation, because things like this don’t happen often in Norway,” he said, in tears. “It’s a peaceful country, but people still hate each other. Why can’t people just love each other?”

Herman Ellegard, who said he had been celebrating Pride at a nearby bar when the shooting happened, said the attack had made him feel suddenly unsafe. “We only wish to celebrate love and diversity,” he said, adding that it was “gruesome that some want to ruin the celebration of freedom.”

Masud Gharahkhani, the speaker of Norway’s Parliament, condemned the shooting on his Facebook page. Mr. Gharahkhani, a Norwegian citizen of Iranian origin, said that the Parliament building had hoisted the Pride flag for the first time last Saturday to “celebrate diversity and love.”

“I am proud of that,” he said. “I have seen time after time how hate flourishes in social media when we celebrate queer diversity. That is sad and unacceptable.”

Henrik Pryser Libell reported from Oslo, and Mike Ives from Seoul. Julia Jacobs contributed reporting from Oslo.

The Supreme Court has spoken: Roe is gone. But the Supreme Court doesn’t get the final say on abortion. The American people will have the last word through their representatives in Congress and the White House.

With its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, an extremist Supreme Court has overturned nearly 50 years of precedent, stripping away the constitutional right to an abortion and ruling that the government — not the person who is pregnant — will make the critical decision about whether to continue a pregnancy. At least nine states have already banned abortion; over a dozen more could soon follow suit by severely restricting or outright outlawing abortion, putting the lives, health and futures of girls and women at risk.

If we sound angry and alarmed, that’s because we are. This decision is devastating — and we have seen what happens next. We both lived in an America where abortion was illegal. A nation in which infections and other complications destroyed lives. A nation in which unplanned pregnancies derailed careers and livelihoods. A nation in which some women took their own lives rather than continue pregnancies they could not bear.

But we must hold on to hope. Each of us can and should act — both elected officials and everyday Americans. We can start by helping those who need access to an abortion. Support Planned Parenthood and other organizations that are expanding their services in states where abortion is available. Contribute to abortion funds. Encourage state legislators to protect reproductive rights in states like New Mexico and Minnesota that border places where abortion services will most likely be severely restricted and even criminalized. Encourage employers in states with abortion bans to give their employees adequate time off and money for travel to find the abortion care they need. Do all you can — and demand the same all-you-can approach from all of our elected leaders.

Earlier this month, along with Senator Patty Murray and half the Senate Democratic Caucus, we sent a letter to President Biden outlining executive actions he could take to defend reproductive freedom. These actions include increasing access to abortion medication, providing federal resources for individuals seeking abortion care in other states and using federal property and resources to protect people seeking abortion services locally. We need action, and we need it now.

On Friday, with the release of the Dobbs decision, we entered a perilous time that threatens millions of women across this nation. We urge the president to declare a public health emergency to protect abortion access for all Americans, unlocking critical resources and authority that states and the federal government can use to meet the surge in demand for reproductive health services. The danger is real, and Democrats must meet it with the urgency it deserves.

We’re in this dark moment because right-wing politicians and their allies have spent decades scheming to overrule a right many Americans considered sacrosanct. Passing state laws to restrict access to abortion care. Giving personhood rights to fertilized eggs. Threatening to criminalize in vitro fertilization. Offering bounties for reporting doctors who provide abortion services. Abusing the filibuster and turning Congress into a broken institution. Advancing judicial nominees who claimed to be committed to protecting “settled law” while they winked at their Republican sponsors in the Senate. Stealing two seats on the Supreme Court.

For nearly 50 years, right-wing extremists rejected the beliefs held by an overwhelming majority of Americans. They doubled and redoubled their efforts to create a future in which women and their doctors could face a prison sentence for seeking or providing basic health care. When these extremists couldn’t impose their radical views through the legislative process, they stacked the courts. And now that the Supreme Court has opened the door by overturning Roe, Republicans will continue their assault on our civil rights and liberties.

Former Vice President Mike Pence called for a national ban on abortion in all 50 states; Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, flat out stated that it’s a possibility. And the logic laid out by the majority in Dobbs seems to undercut other precedents, raising the alarming possibility that we could soon see an assault on privacy and marriage equality.

In order to fix the damage Republicans have done to our system in their efforts to control women’s lives, we need broad democracy reform: changing the composition of the courts, reforming Senate rules like the filibuster, and even fixing the outdated Electoral College that allowed presidential candidates who lost the popular vote to take office and nominate five of the justices who agreed to end the right to an abortion.

We can’t undo in five months the damage it took Republicans five decades to accomplish, but we can immediately start repairing our democracy. The public is overwhelmingly on our side. A vast majority of Americans oppose the decision the Supreme Court just made. Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And more Americans describe themselves as pro-choice today than at any other point in the last 25 years.

Let’s be clear: Roe may be gone, but the protections it once guaranteed are on the ballot. States like Kansas and Kentucky have initiatives to strip away state constitutional protections for abortion, while Michigan and Vermont are working toward statewide votes to create constitutional protections for reproductive freedom. But make no mistake, this radical decision affects all Americans, not just those in states where the right to a safe, legal abortion will soon fall.

Now is the time to demand that every single candidate for every single office voice a firm position on reproductive rights. Ask every Senate candidate to commit to reforming the filibuster rules, so that the chamber can pass federal legislation protecting the right to reproductive freedom. If voters help us maintain our control of the House and expand our majority in the Senate by at least two votes this November, we can make Roe the law all across the country as soon as January.

Simply put: We must restore our democracy so that a radical minority can no longer drown out the will of the people. This will be a long, hard fight, and the path to victory is not yet certain. But it’s a righteous fight that we must win — no matter how long it takes. The two of us lived in an America without Roe, and we are not going back. Not now. Not ever.

OSLO, Norway — Two people were killed and at least 19 injured early Saturday morning in downtown Oslo when a gunman opened fire outside two nightclubs and a diner, the police and Norway’s state broadcaster said.

A male suspect was apprehended five minutes after the shooting was reported, the Oslo police said on Twitter. Tore Barstad, a police operations chief who spoke to reporters about the incident, did not identify the suspect or speculate about a motive. He said three of the wounded were seriously injured.

One of the two nightclubs, the London Pub, is a center of gay nightlife in Oslo. The city’s annual Pride parade, a highlight of a ten-day festival that began last week, was scheduled to take place Saturday.

Olav Rønneberg, a crime reporter for the Norwegian public broadcaster, NRK, happened to be in the area when the violence began. “I saw a man arrive at the scene with a bag, he took up a gun and started shooting,” he told the outlet.

The London Pub, which lies a few blocks from Norway’s Parliament building, opened in the 1970s. A picture of the bar in a listing on Oslo’s official tourism website shows a rainbow flag hoisted above its entrance.

The timing and the location of the attack raised concern that it may have been intended to target the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Norway, where gay couples have had the right to marry and have children since 2009.

Shootings are exceedingly rare in Norway, a country of five million people whose capital lies beside a picturesque fjord.

Gun owners must be licensed and take safety classes, and a ban on semiautomatic weapons enacted by the Norwegian Parliament — a response to a 2011 attack by a far-right gunman that killed 77 people — took effect last year.

The 2011 attack started when the gunman, Anders Behring Breivik, detonated a fertilizer bomb in downtown Oslo, killing eight people. He then killed 69 people, mostly teenagers, in a shooting rampage at a political summer camp.

Mr. Breivik received a 21-year sentence for the attacks, the maximum under Norwegian law. He was denied parole in February by a Norwegian court that said he “appeared devoid of empathy and compassion for the victims of the terror.”

Henrik Pryser Libell reported from Oslo and Mike Ives from Seoul.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade on Friday catapulted the explosive battle over abortion rights into the center of several marquee midterm races, turning the fight over key governor’s contests and coveted Senate seats into heated debates about personal freedom and public health.

Devastated Democrats, facing staggering political challenges amid high inflation and President Biden’s low approval ratings, hoped the decision might reinvigorate disaffected base voters. They also saw the moment as a fresh chance to hold on to the moderate, suburban swing voters who have helped them win recent elections.

Republicans, for their part, publicly celebrated the ruling as the realization of a decades-long effort, even as some strategists — and former President Donald J. Trump — privately acknowledged that the issue created at least some risk for a party that has enjoyed months of political momentum. Many argued that competitive races would ultimately be decided by other issues.

“From the grass-roots perspective, there’s a lot of joy,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican who is a former top campaign aide to Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader. “This is why we fight. And at the same time, this election is going to be decided on a couple of issues: Joe Biden’s approval rating, inflation, the economy, crime, quality of life.”

For years, the prospect of overturning Roe v. Wade was an abstract concept for many Americans — a distressing but distant worry for some and a long-term goal rather than an imminent possibility to others. The Supreme Court’s opinion eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion ended that era of disbelief, opening a new chapter of concrete consequences, in which races for governor, state legislature and attorney general, and even state courts might determine whether millions of Americans have access to the procedure.

“This fall, Roe is on the ballot,” Mr. Biden said on Friday. “Personal freedoms are on the ballot.”

Both parties agree that the high stakes will be galvanizing, to some degree, to their respective bases. But the critical question remains whether swing voters — in particular, independent women from the diverse suburbs, who are currently focused on economic uncertainty — will turn their attention to the fight over access to abortion.

“There are a lot of independent women, I think there are a lot of women who haven’t been participating in elections, and are going to engage,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan said in an interview earlier this week, after hosting an emotional round table focused on abortion rights at a brewery in Grand Rapids. “But I’m not going to assume it. We’re going to have to make sure that we’re doing the work of education and persuasion and activation.”

Already this year, Democratic campaigns and supportive outside groups have spent nearly $18 million in advertising on abortion issues, while Republicans and affiliated outside groups have spent nearly $21 million, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. Both figures may balloon.

Activists and party strategists, who have been preparing for months to mobilize around this issue, are focusing in particular on governor’s races in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, three states currently led by Democratic governors, and places where the outcomes this fall could directly impact the future of abortion rights after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision handed control over abortion protections back to the states.

Democrats also are planning to use the issue to play offense in other governor’s races, while making the case that Senate and House candidates across the country, too, have embraced positions on abortion that are far outside the mainstream.

An early test of energy around this issue will come in August, as Kansans vote on whether to remove the right to an abortion from the state constitution.

In a fund-raising email on Friday, Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas, a Democrat, declared that “I could be the only Kansas leader standing in the way” of new abortion restrictions. Her likely opponent, the state attorney general, Derek Schmidt, said that he would support the ballot initiative.

Democrats had been preparing to try to direct the expected outpouring of shock and anger into electoral action once the opinion was handed down, with party committees and state parties conferring on national messaging and mobilization plans, as well as launching a website on Friday to direct organizing efforts.

Candidates and organizations have employed focus groups and polling to assess the issue; there are sprawling fund-raising efforts; and the abortion rights groups Planned Parenthood Action Fund, NARAL Pro-Choice America and Emily’s List have said they intend to spend $150 million on the midterm elections. American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic-aligned super PAC, says it has tapped social media influencers to communicate about abortion rights and Republican records on that issue to Americans who may be only casually political.

“We will see, state by state by state, pre-existing bans go into effect, state legislatures rush to pass abortion bans,” said Cecile Richards, the former president of Planned Parenthood who is now a chair of American Bridge. “It’s a different conversation now because it’s become real.”

Despite all the mobilization, many party strategists do not anticipate that even Friday’s seismic decision will fundamentally change voters’ focus on cost-of-living worries. But some see it as reinforcing their core argument against Republicans: that the party is in control, wildly out of step with public opinion, and focused above all else on cultural battles. Senate Democrats and strategists are particularly focused on highlighting the Republican candidates who support near-total bans on abortion.

“Economic issues are always going to outweigh abortion for a lot of voters,” said Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic strategist. “But it’s very, very important for Democrats — to win these swing voters — to make this a choice, not a referendum.”

Polling shows that Americans strongly oppose completely overturning Roe v. Wade — in a Washington Post-ABC poll conducted in late April, 54 percent of Americans thought the Roe decision should be upheld, while 28 percent believed it should be overturned. But views on abortion vary depending on a state’s political tilt.

That is one reason Republicans’ messaging on the issue has been less unified. On Friday, as some candidates, lawmakers and the Republican National Committee rushed to celebrate the ruling, others sought to quickly return their focus to pocketbook issues.

Adam Laxalt, the Republican Senate candidate in Nevada — a state with a history of supporting abortion rights — on Friday cheered the “historic victory for the sanctity of life,” but stressed that access to abortion was already “settled law” in Nevada.

“It won’t distract voters from unaffordable prices, rising crime or the border crisis,” he said.

When asked for comment, Jesse Hunt, a spokesman for the Republican Governors Association, responded in a statement that “the persuadable voters that will determine the outcome in competitive races are deeply concerned with the damage being done to their financial security” by Democrats.

Even Mr. Trump, the former president who put conservatives on the court, has privately told people that he believes the court’s decision will be “bad for Republicans.” In a public statement on Friday, Mr. Trump called the decision “the biggest WIN for LIFE in a generation.”

Abortion rights opponents are working to capitalize on conservatives’ enthusiasm.

The anti-abortion rights group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America launched a field program last year, with plans to engage eight million voters in critical battleground states. The group is focusing on “those people that are in play, that could go either way based on this particular issue,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the organization.

“It’s not just some theoretical vote about somebody who says they’re pro-life,” she said. “It’s now an opportunity to actually do something about it.”

Penny Nance, the president of Concerned Women for America, an organization that opposes abortion rights, said the group was planning a summit that would focus on the role of state activism in a post-Roe nation.

Some state officials have “basically said, ‘We don’t really have the ability to change the law because of the Supreme Court decision,’” she said.

“Now,” she continued, “it changes everything.”

That new focus on state laws has already intensified the debate in statehouses and governor’s races in politically divided states. In Pennsylvania, the next governor and a Republican-led statehouse will likely determine access.

“Roe v. Wade is rightly relegated to the ash heap of history,” said Doug Mastriano, the far-right Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro, the state attorney general and the Democratic nominee for governor, wrote on Twitter on Friday that “without Roe, the only thing stopping them is the veto pen of our next Governor.”

In Michigan and Wisconsin, old laws on the books call for near-total bans on abortion and Democratic governors up for re-election have vowed to fight to protect access.

In Michigan, abortion rights supporters are working to secure a constitutional amendment protecting the right to an abortion. Ms. Whitmer has also filed a lawsuit asking “the Michigan Supreme Court to immediately resolve” whether the State Constitution protects the right to an abortion.

At her roundtable discussion this week, Ms. Whitmer spoke with women about whether they thought voters had yet grasped the significance of what overturning Roe v. Wade would mean.

“So many people,” one attendee told her, “didn’t realize it was this serious.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the Orlando Museum of Art on Friday, taking all 25 works that had been part of an exhibition on the life and work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the museum said.

The New York Times had previously reported that the F.B.I.’s Art Crime Team had been investigating the authenticity of 25 paintings that the museum had said were created by Basquiat and were on exhibit there for months.

A spokeswoman for the museum said Friday that it had complied with a request from the F.B.I. for access to its “Heroes and Monsters” exhibit, and that the exhibit was now in the F.B.I.’s possession.

“It is important to note that we still have not been led to believe the museum has been or is the subject of any investigation,” the spokeswoman, Emilia Bourmas-Fry, said in an emailed statement. “We continue to see our involvement purely as a fact witness.”

The Basquiat exhibit had been set to close on June 30, and the works were scheduled to be exhibited next in Italy. Museum officials said they would continue to cooperate with the authorities.

According to museum employees, over a dozen F.B.I. agents arrived at the museum Friday morning. They walked through its front doors, presented a warrant, and then promptly began removing the 25 paintings from the museum’s walls. The museum was quickly closed to the public, as curious visitors peered through the now-locked entrance and gathered outside and F.B.I. agents boxed up the paintings and moved them into waiting vehicles at the museum’s loading dock.

A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. confirmed that a federal search warrant had been executed on Friday at the museum and said the investigation by the Art Crime Team was ongoing.

The unsealed search warrant, which The Times reviewed, was signed by a judge on Thursday. The a 41-page affidavit was issued on the basis that two possible crimes may have occurred: Conspiracy and wire fraud. In the documents, the F.B.I. said it was investigating the exhibition and attempted sale of 25 paintings, and said its investigation had revealed, among other things, “false information related to the alleged prior ownership of the paintings.”

The paintings in the “Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat” exhibition were said by the museum and their owners to have been recovered from a Los Angeles storage unit in 2012. The works were largely unseen before the show’s February opening.

A Times report published that month raised questions about their authenticity. It noted that one of the art works was painted on the back of a cardboard shipping box bearing an instruction to “Align top of FedEx Shipping Label here,” in a typeface that a designer who worked for Federal Express said was not used until 1994 — six years after Basquiat’s death.

The owners of the paintings, and the Orlando museum’s director and chief executive, Aaron De Groft, have all maintained that the works are genuine. None immediately returned a request for comment about the seizure of the paintings.

Both De Groft and the owners have said that the works, done on pieces of scavenged cardboard, were done by Basquiat in late 1982 when he was living and working out of a studio beneath the Los Angeles home of the art dealer Larry Gagosian and preparing for a show at Gagosian’s gallery. They said Basquiat sold the works for $5,000 to a now-deceased television screenwriter, Thad Mumford, who put them into a storage unit and apparently forgot about them for 30 years — until the unit’s contents were seized for nonpayment of rent and auctioned off in 2012. (Gagosian has said he “finds the scenario of the story highly unlikely.”)In the affidavit for the search warrant, Elizabeth Rivas, a special agent for the F.B.I., writes that she interviewed Mumford in 2014 and learned that “Mumford never purchased Basquiat artwork and was unaware of any Basquiat artwork being in his storage locker.”

The paintings were bought for about $15,000 by William Force, an art and antiques dealer, and Leo Mangan, a retired salesman. Pierce O’Donnell, a lawyer, later bought an interest in six of the 25 works and hired several experts who said that the works appeared genuine. The owners did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment.

The Basquiat estate’s authentication committee disbanded in 2012, when many artists’ estates stopped trying to authenticate works because of costly litigation.

If authentic, the Basquiat paintings would be worth about $100 million, according to Putnam Fine Art and Antique Appraisals, which assessed them for the owners. The owners have said in previous interviews that they were trying to sell the works.

The intentional sale of art known to be fake is a federal crime.

A few years ago, as American consumers were being wooed with “Buy Now, Pay Later” loans that let them pay for online purchases — from makeup to Peloton bikes — in small increments, one start-up had an idea: Why not adapt the model to sell outdoor recreation gear, including guns?

Thus, Credova was born.

Founded in 2018, the Bozeman, Mont., company positioned itself as a provider of easy online payment plans to customers of hunting, fishing and camping supplies. But Credova also saw an opportunity to focus on the gun industry, because most of the big “Buy Now, Pay Later” companies don’t finance purchases of weapons. Credova has since partnered with dozens of online gun merchants to offer customers financing options that make buying a gun — which generally cost anywhere from $200 to $900 — more affordable.

Credova’s profile in the gun industry is rising. It has partnered with the National Rifle Association on at least two occasions, including sponsoring a luncheon at the association’s annual meeting in 2019.

More recently, Credova drew attention because it offers financing plans to customers of Daniel Defense, the manufacturer of the gun used by the Uvalde, Texas, school shooter. Credova told Bloomberg it did not finance the shooter’s purchase of firearms. Investigators said the shooter bought the guns with a bank debit card.

Credova “plays a very small role in the legal firearm purchase ecosystem by representing less than one-tenth of 1 percent of financing firearm purchases,” Elizabeth Locke, a lawyer retained by Credova, said in an emailed statement. Most gun purchases are made with credit cards, Ms. Locke said. She added that it would be misleading to describe Credova as focused on gun buyers. (Ms. Locke represented Sarah Palin in her libel lawsuit against The New York Times.)

The company declined to make its chief executive, Dusty Wunderlich, available for an interview.

The gun market, especially the ways in which people buy and sell weapons, has come under fresh scrutiny as the nation grapples with a spate of mass shootings. Congress on Friday passed a bipartisan deal on a modest set of gun safety measures, including enhanced background checks for some prospective gun buyers under the age of 21.

Online gun sales fueled by extreme advertising and social media have been growing, and Credova and other gun-financing companies are part of that broader ecosystem, said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel and policy director for Giffords Law Center, an advocacy group for the prevention of gun violence that is backed by former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a victim of gun violence herself.

“Buy Now, Pay Later” financing can make guns more accessible for people without credit cards, Mr. Skaggs said. “Maybe some prefer this because they don’t have to go to the trouble of getting a credit card.”

Buying firearms on installment plans isn’t new for the gun industry, just as layaway plans have long existed for all kinds of customers. But as gun sales have moved online, the “Buy Now, Pay Later” model — which is generally targeted to young shoppers who typically don’t have much disposable income or credit cards — has become a way to attract a new generation of customers.

Although online sales are a small fraction of the $15 billion gun market, according to IBISWorld, an market research firm, they have been growing. IBISWorld expects online gun sales to reach $2.6 billion by 2026, up from $532 million in 2012.

“Credova got into the gun financing business not just because of the layaway culture in gun retail, but because so many guns are being purchased online,” said Mike Weisser, a longtime gun seller in Massachusetts who became a consultant to gun control organizations and writes a blog on ways to reduce gun violence.

Of course, buying firearms and ammunition online is more complicated than a typical Amazon purchase, since they cannot be shipped to a person’s home but must be picked up from a licensed gun retailer after the buyer has passed a standard background check. Credova and other gun financiers are not involved with those background checks; they perform only standard credit checks before extending financing to buyers. Credova says on its website that approval takes “seconds” for most customers.

Retailers like the “buy now, pay later” option because it draws more customers. Customers like it because it’s relatively easy to apply, requiring only a simple credit check. The loans are interest free and can be paid back in three or four monthly installments. The financing companies make their money by charging retailers a fee for the service. Some companies also charge customers fees and interest if they miss payments.

Even though “buy now, pay later’’ financing has blossomed in the United States, many of the biggest companies, including Affirm, Klarna, Afterpay, PayPal and Zip, explicitly bar gun and ammunition purchases, creating the business opportunity for Credova and other niche firms.

Gearfire Capital, an online financing company, started in January with the motto “Gear up, Pay Later.” Global Check Services, offers online gun financing through its ARC90 program. Sezzle, another company that is about to be acquired by Zip, permits gun purchases, but gun sales are a small part of its business, a Sezzle spokeswoman said.

Ms. Locke, Credova’s lawyer, said the company helps people who are not wealthy buy guns for self-defense. “We believe Credova should not set restrictions on the commerce of lawful goods nor judge what legal goods should be transacted, and doing so creates a dangerous precedent,” she said in an emailed statement.

Credova markets itself as a financing company for hunting, camping and fishing supplies and equipment for outdoors sports enthusiasts, using the motto “Adventure Now, Pay Later.” It also finances puppy purchases from pet stores. Last year, Credova was one of two companies that settled with regulators in Massachusetts over allegations that they illegally leased dogs in the state.

But Credova’s website suggests that guns are a big part of its business. Of the roughly 100 retail partners listed on its website, 60 are online gun and hunting supply retailers, according to a New York Times tally conducted on June 22. Gun merchants feature prominently on its site. And it is currently running a sweepstakes in partnership with the U.S. Concealed Carry Association, a gun rights organization, in which the winner can get $15,000 toward the purchase of ammunition or guns.

Two years ago, Credova was one of six companies that partnered with the lobbying arm of the N.R.A. to raise $1 million to defend the Second Amendment. In 2019, it sponsored a corporate executives’ luncheon at the N.R.A.’s annual meeting, according to a news release, which also said that Credova is owned by steadfast supporters of gun rights who are “determined to provide financing options for firearm and sporting goods consumers.”

Credova’s app, which debuted in August 2020, has been downloaded just 19,000 times, according to Sensor Tower, a mobile app tracking firm. By comparison, the biggest “Buy Now, Pay Later” firms have had their apps downloaded millions of times.

The availability of easy financing options for weapons raises the possibility of abuse, said Mr. Skaggs of the Giffords center. One potential concern is whether no-interest installment financing can be used by people looking to quickly resell a gun for a profit without first putting a lot of money down, he said.

Not all Credova’s customers are happy with the company’s business practices, according to court filings and reviews and complaints submitted to the Better Business Bureau. In particular, some customers complained about its one-year installment plan, under which customers can end up paying much more than the list price for a gun if the borrowed amount is not repaid within a 90-day, interest-free period.

Jerry Carver, the general manager of the Bullet Ranch in Pataskala, Ohio, was intrigued by Credova because most financing firms eschew dealings with merchants “in the Second Amendment business.” But Mr. Carver said some installment contracts were too costly for some customers. The Bullet Ranch no longer does business with Credova.

Matthew Sheffield of Selma, Ala., used Credova two years ago to pay for a $400 box of ammunition he had ordered online. Mr. Sheffield said he planned to pay for the purchase within the 90-day no interest period, but was unable to do so. As a result, he said, Credova told him he would have to comply with the more costly installment contract.

Mr. Sheffield, who works as a welding inspector, said he doesn’t plan to use the service again.

In an email, Ms. Locke said that had Mr. Sheffield paid the purchase balance “within the 90-day window, he would have not needed to incur any additional charges or fees.”

On June 15, Credova announced that it would phase out the 90-day interest-free payment window and replace it with a new plan that permits shoppers to pay for their purchases “in four payments, every two weeks, with no interest, at select merchants.”

Ms. Locke said less than 1 percent of Credova’s customers have complained about its services.

Susan C. Beachy contributed research and J. David Goodman contributed reporting.

By a 7-to-2 vote, the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973 established a constitutional right to abortion, striking down laws in many states that had banned the procedure. The court said states could not ban abortions before fetal viability, the point at which the fetus can survive outside the womb. That was around 28 weeks at the time; because of improvements in medical technology, it is around 23 weeks now.

The decision was widely criticized, including by people who supported access to abortion as a policy matter.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a strong supporter of abortion rights who died in 2020, expressed qualms about Roe over the years.

“The court bit off more than it could chew,” she said in 2009, for instance, in remarks after a speech at Princeton University. It would have been enough, she said, to strike down the extremely restrictive Texas law at issue in Roe and leave further questions for later cases.

“The legislatures all over the United States were moving on this question,” she added. “The law was in a state of flux.”

Roe shut those developments down, she said, creating a backlash.

“The Supreme Court’s decision was a perfect rallying point for people who disagreed with the notion that it should be a woman’s choice,” Justice Ginsburg said. “They could, instead of fighting in the trenches legislature by legislature, go after this decision by unelected judges.”

The decision also came under withering criticism from some liberal law professors.

“What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure,” John Hart Ely, a prominent constitutional scholar, wrote in 1973 in The Yale Law Journal.

Professor Ely, who died in 2003, wrote that the Roe decision was untenable as a matter of intellectually honest jurisprudence.

“It is not constitutional law,” he said of the decision, “and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”

Roe established a framework for governing abortion regulation based on the trimesters of pregnancy. In the first trimester, it allowed almost no regulations. In the second, it allowed regulations to protect women’s health. In the third, it allowed states to ban abortions so long as exceptions were made to protect the life and health of the mother.

The court discarded the trimester framework in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. But Casey retained what it called Roe’s “essential holding” — that women have a constitutional right to terminate their pregnancies until fetal viability.

The party in the financial markets is long over. Chatter about hot stocks and fabulous opportunities in cryptocurrencies and NFTs has died down to a whisper. Recession and bear market are the big buzz words these days.

Clearly, this is not the happiest of times for investors. If you have never put money into the market before, this may not seem the most obvious time to start.

Yet there are advantages to investing in a bear market. With stocks falling in value and day traders giving up, you are less likely to be swept away by fads because almost none of them are profitable. Instead, you can focus on the essential goal of increasing your wealth over the long run.

Most of my columns are aimed at people who already have some involvement with stock and bond investing, often using mutual funds or exchange-traded funds. But this column is a little different. It’s written mainly for people who are still in school, or just starting in the work force, or just getting around to salting away money for the future.

It’s for people like Lucy Neal, who graduated this month from North Central High School in Indianapolis, and said in a note, “I feel like I have no idea what to do to ensure my own financial safety (even though I’ve just completed my AP Macroeconomics class!).”

In a phone conversation, Ms. Neal said it would be helpful to have basic, trustworthy information about how to start investing and stick with it. So here’s a quick rundown. It may be useful even if you are an old hand at this, but it is intended mainly for beginners. If you have other, specific questions, please write in and I’ll try to answer them.

The basics

The market decline this year shows how easy it is to lose money, even if you are careful.

Yet investing can be rewarding, if you start early, focus on the long run and follow some simple steps, which I’ll explain.

• Pay your bills first, and save for emergencies, before putting any money at risk.

• Buy stocks — and, when it’s right for you, bonds — using cheap, diversified index funds that track the entire market.

• Think of investing as a marathon, not a sprint, with a 10-year horizon at a minimum and, preferably, with a much, much longer goal in mind.

First, pay your bills, and set aside some savings

Investing involves risk-taking. You can minimize those risks, but there is no getting around them entirely, especially when you put money into the stock market.

So before taking any additional risks, please make sure you can pay your bills. After that, try to salt away enough cash for an emergency.

Spend a little less, save a little more and do it regularly. Soon, you will have a nice nest egg. Keep it in a safe place.

For short-term savings, a bank account or money market fund makes sense because your money will be secure and you can get hold of it quickly. You can find money market funds at major companies like Vanguard, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price or Schwab. The interest rate is low, but it is rising.

For longer-term secure savings, try I bonds, which are issued by the Treasury Department and are paying 9.62 percent interest (the rate is reset every six months), bank certificates of deposit and high-yield savings accounts.

Buy stock, not crypto

Now you’re ready to invest.

I put my own investment dollars only into broadly diversified funds that hold stocks and bonds, and that is what I recommend for anyone starting out. Stocks and bonds are the two main asset classes, and you don’t need anything else. Funds — specifically, index funds that track the market — are a great, cheap way to buy stocks and bonds. (What do I mean by cheap? You will generally pay much lower fees than in what is known as an actively managed fund.)

Before going any further, consider this: As an investor, I would put no money at all directly into cryptocurrency, NFTs, gold or wheat, other commodities or anything else. You don’t need them in an investment portfolio and will be taking on extra risk if you buy them.

What’s more, if you invest in the entire stock market through index funds, you will be exposed to these things anyway because you will own pieces of the companies that engage, trade or service them. That includes Coinbase, a platform that enables trade in cryptocurrencies, and PayPal, which owns Venmo and encourages customers to buy crypto. If these or other companies manage to make money through crypto, great; you will, too. If they don’t, the losses will be offset by other stock investments.

That’s what diversification means. Buy the whole market and you minimize the effect, for better or worse, of any small part of it.

Now, for stocks and bonds: If I had the great luxury of youth, with decades ahead to recoup possible losses, I would focus on stocks. In fact, despite the pain of the bear market, understanding what I know now, I would invest 100 percent in stocks if I were in my teens or 20s.

I don’t have that luxury, though. I’m closer to retirement than to my first job, so I own a fair amount of bonds, which are generally more stable than stocks and let me sleep at night. But bonds are not what I would buy if I were 18 years old, as Ms. Neal is, because stocks return almost double what bonds do over the long run: 12.3 percent, annualized, for stocks versus 6.3 percent for bonds, according to calculations by Vanguard of market returns from 1926 to 2021.

What about losses?

The bear market is on Ms. Neal’s radar. “I keep seeing that the stock market is at record lows,” she said in a phone conversation on Tuesday. “But does that mean it’s a good time to buy stocks?”

My answer was equivocal.

Yes, it is a great time to be buying stocks if you are truly in it for the long run. Prices are much better for buyers than they were at the beginning of the year because we are in a bear market, which means simply that the stock market over all has fallen at least 20 percent from its peak. While the past doesn’t guarantee anything about the future, the fact is that the American stock market has always recovered from declines over stretches of at least 20 years. If you can plan on buying and holding stocks for 20 years or more, by all means, buy now.

But no, it may not be a good time if you are trying to make money quickly. The trend in the stock market so far this year has been negative. You could immediately lose money. Then again, the market could start rising tomorrow and keep trending upward for a long while. I don’t think that’s about to happen, but no one really knows.

In short, understand the risks you are taking. Don’t buy stocks unless you are prepared to endure “paper losses” over the short term and can keep your money in the market for a long time. And consider why you are buying stocks in the first place.

Stock index funds

Why is stock investing such an effective way to make money over the long term?

The answer may not be obvious. A bunch of “meme stocks” like GameStop and AMC rose sharply last year, not because they were solid investments but mainly because a lot of people wanted them to rise and kept buying. Over months and sometimes even years, this kind of herd behavior — what the economist Robert J. Shiller calls “irrational exuberance” — can inflate prices and give you a handsome profit.

But if you rely on the emotions of strangers to set prices for you, you can also lose a lot of money when the market falls, as it has been doing lately.

Ms. Neal, an economics student, came up with what I think is a good answer: Stocks provide long-term returns to shareholders because the economy grows over the long run, and the companies in the stock market, taken together, profit. Those growing profits accrue to shareholders. And that’s what you essentially are as a stock investor — a shareholder — even if you own only a tiny slice of a company through an index fund.

Over very long periods, that growth has been extraordinary. The 12.3 percent annualized return from the stock market means that, on average, your money would have doubled in less than six years, again and again, over many decades.

Notice that we’re not talking about picking any particular stocks. Which companies will thrive and which will fail? Which stocks will perform better this year or next? It is hard to know.

Similarly, no one knows where the stock market is going from day to day or year to year. In December, the vast majority of Wall Street forecasters said the stock market would rise in 2022. Whoops. They got it wrong.

None of that is critical if you invest in the whole market for the long haul, putting money in regardless of the market’s short-term movements. This approach is incredibly simple. You can use just one index fund to capture the entire U.S. stock market, or even the entire world’s stock market. Look for an index fund with low fees by comparing what’s called the expense ratio. Shop around, do your research.

Keep your investing as simple and as cheap as possible. As John C. Bogle, the founder of Vanguard and creator of the first commercially available index fund put it, “In investing you get what you don’t pay for.”

Don’t put yourself in a spot where short-term declines in the market or in the fortunes of individual stocks can really hurt you. Instead, set yourself up with solid, diversified, inexpensive index funds and you will be in a great position to prosper from the growth of the economy over the long run.