The Unknown Why in the Aurora Killings. The Secret History of Guns - Adam Winkler. The Surprising History of Gun Control, School Shooting Myths, and More. Why We Won’t Stop Mass Killings: We Like Them Too Much. Forgive me if I’ve already offended you with the title of this piece, but I’m an economist.
As such, I tend to weigh up the costs and benefits of just about anything when trying to figure out what it means for society. And when it comes to mass killings, my analysis suggests we have some reason for introspection. Because of the inescapable reach of media, mass killings affect virtually everyone. While the victims and the ones who loved them suffer terribly, the rest of us may feel a combination of many emotions: grief (through empathy), fear, disbelief, curiosity, fascination, and even a thrill at seeing the commotion caused by what happened.
Each horrific event puts us on a new emotional binge. Gun-death tally: Every American gun death since Newtown Sandy Hook shooting (INTERACTIVE) The answer to the simple question in that headline is surprisingly hard to come by.
So Slate is collecting data for our crowdsourced interactive. This data is necessarily incomplete (click here to see why, and to learn more about @GunDeaths, the Twitter user who helped us create this interactive). American Gun Culture - The Christian Science Monitor. Gorilla Sales Skyrocket After Latest Gorilla Attack. SAN DIEGO—Following the events of last week, in which a crazed western lowland gorilla ruthlessly murdered 21 people in a local shopping plaza after escaping from the San Diego Zoo, sources across the country confirmed Thursday that national gorilla sales have since skyrocketed.
“After seeing yet another deranged gorilla just burst into a public place and start killing people, I decided I need to make sure something like that never happens to me,” said 34-year-old Atlanta resident Nick Keller, shortly after purchasing a 350-pound mountain gorilla from his local gorilla store. “It just gives me peace of mind knowing that if I’m ever in that situation, I won’t have to just watch helplessly as my torso is ripped in half and my face is chewed off. I’ll be able to use my gorilla to defend myself.” “Law enforcement and animal control can only get there so quickly,” Keller added.
Area Woman Decides Not To Post Facebook Status That Would Have Tipped Gun Control Debate. AURORA, IL—The contentious debate on gun control will continue unresolved after local woman Theresa Delacroix opted Friday not to post an anti-gun message on Facebook, an opinion experts agreed would have tipped the scales toward a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s firearm laws.
The line outside Miami gun show January 2013. Guns and the second amendment. Follow us omnivore Guns and the Second Amendment May 20 2013 1:00PM Edward J.
How to Think About Guns: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast. [MUSIC: The Wintermarket; “Thank You There Will Be No Encore” (from The Ballad of Artie Fufkin)] Stephen J.
Battle lines over today's debates over violence issues were drawn centuries ago. Last December, when Adam Lanza stormed into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, with a rifle and killed twenty children and six adult staff members, the United States found itself immersed in debates about gun control.
Another flash point occurred this July, when George Zimmerman, who saw himself as a guardian of his community, was exonerated in the killing of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. That time, talk turned to stand-your-ground laws and the proper use of deadly force. Political language: "Gun safety" versus "gun control" Dorner manhunt: Lawyer calls shootings of paper carriers 'unacceptable'
An attorney representing two women who were delivering newspapers when they were shot by police during a massive manhunt for an ex-LAPD officer called the incident "unacceptable," saying his clients looked nothing like the suspect.
Emma Hernandez, 71, was delivering the Los Angeles Times with her daughter, Margie Carranza, 47, in the 19500 block of Redbeam Avenue in Torrance on Thursday morning when Los Angeles police detectives apparently mistook their pickup for that of Christopher Dorner, the 33-year-old fugitive suspected of killing three people and injuring two others. The Freedom of an Armed Society. Is it True Armed Civilians Have Never Stopped a Mass Shooting? In response to last week's massacre in Connecticut, Mother Jones has put together a "study" on mass shootings that makes a pretty bold claim:
10 Pro-Gun Myths, Shot Down. By cutting off federal funding for research and stymieing data collection and sharing, the National Rifle Association has tried to do to the study of gun violence what climate deniers have done to the science of global warming.
No wonder: When it comes to hard numbers, some of the gun lobby's favorite arguments are full of holes. (This article has been updated.) Myth #1: They're coming for your guns. Fact-check: With as many as 310 million privately owned guns in America, it's clear there's no practical way to round them all up (never mind that no one in Washington is proposing this). Yet if you fantasize about rifle-toting citizens facing down the government, you'll rest easy knowing that America's roughly 70 to 80 million gun owners already have the feds and cops outgunned by a factor of around 79 to 1.
Why the 'Citizen Militia' Theory Is the Worst Pro-Gun Argument Ever - Mark Nuckols. Two out of three Americans see the Second Amendment as a safeguard against tyranny. What? A detail of the Minutemen statue in Lexington, Massachusetts (Tim Grafft/Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism/Flickr) The notion that an individual right to bear arms guarantees the American people against government tyranny is of course an old one. Given its apparent validation in the Second Amendment of the Constitution itself, it's not surprising that the notion has survived in some way through to the 21st century.
Given its defiance of history and common sense, though, what should be surprising is that it's survived to remain so widespread. Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm - Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death. For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.”