Guns

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A 22-year-old gunman walked into Club Q in Colorado Springs Sunday and shot five people to death with a long gun, injuring 25, before two people inside the club bravely took him on and stopped further murders. Club Q bills itself as a safe space for LGBTQ patrons. So report […]

Dissent

‘Waste no more time’ — a teacher’s call to act on gun violence

Waging Nonviolence

By Michael Nagler and Francesca Po | – ( Waging Nonviolence) – Given the almost inconceivable tragedy that has been visited on our schools — and believing that no democracy can survive without a viable education and a safe space for children — Michael Nagler spoke with career teacher, peace activist and Metta Center board […]

Far Right

Militant white identity politics on full display in GOP political ads featuring high-powered weapons

The Conversation

By Ryan Neville-Shepard, University of Arkansas and Casey Ryan Kelly, University of Nebraska-Lincoln | – (The Conversation) – Republican Eric Greitens, a candidate for Missouri’s open U.S. Senate seat, shocked viewers with a new online political ad in June 2022 that encouraged his supporters to go “RINO hunting.” Appearing with a shotgun and a smirk, […]

Featured

With Highland Park 4th of July Mass Shooting, Supreme Court and Congress have Blood on their Hands

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – It is a hell of a note when you can’t have a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, without some gun nut with a military weapon turning the place into Falluja, killing 6 people and wounding 31. The Republicans in Congress, beholden to campaign money from gun companies, […]

Arms Sales

Unlike SCOTUS, Iraqi Kurds are Rethinking Lax Gun Laws after Shootings; Will even Iraq be Safer than the US?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Other countries can just adopt rational policies to deal with severe social problems. The United States is locked into various weird metaphysical dogmas that make reasoning about such issues difficult. The second amendment, for instance, has nothing to do with universal gun ownership, whatever ideologues on the Right assert. The […]

Far Right

The Right-Wing’s Attempt to Militarize American Politics

Tomdispatch

( Tomdispatch.com) – Increasingly, it seems, Americans have an anger problem. All too many of us now have the urge to use name-calling, violent social-media posts, threats, baseball bats, and guns to do what we once did with persuasion and voting. For example, during the year after Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, threats of […]

Guns

American gun culture is based on frontier mythology – but ignores how common gun restrictions were in the Old West

The Conversation

By Pierre M. Atlas, Indiana University | – In the wake of the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings, 70% of Republicans said it is more important to protect gun rights than to control gun violence, while 92% of Democrats and 54% of independents expressed the opposite view. Just weeks after those mass shootings, Republicans and […]

Education

Why Going “Hard” Is Taking the Easy Way Out: Hardening Schools and Arming Teachers Is the Wrong Approach

William J. Astore

( Tomdispatch.com ) – American schools are soft, you say? I know what you mean. I taught college for 15 years, so I’ve dealt with my share of still-teenagers fresh out of high school. Many of them inspired me, but some had clearly earned high marks too easily and needed remedial help in math, English, […]

Featured

How Clarence Thomas gets the History of Gun Regulation Wrong: And a Modest Proposal to Make Gunmen put up Surety Bonds

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Originalists on the Supreme Court such as the late Antonin Scalia and current Justice Clarence Thomas claim to seek guidance to the meaning of the constitution in history, but most historians believe that their arguments are singularly ahistorical. These two thinkers find an English common law and American eighteenth- and […]