Guns

Gainesville, Florida (Special to Informed Comment) – Citizens are waking up to the fact that so many politicians can be so easily bought by the weapons industry, an industry that doesn’t care how many people must die to protect their huge profits. SafeHome.org reports that after a record year in 2020, gun sales in the […]

Guns

How the NRA evolved from backing a 1934 Ban on Machine Guns to blocking nearly all firearm Restrictions Today

The Conversation

By Robert Spitzer, State University of New York College at Cortland | – The mass shootings at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, just 10 days apart, are stirring the now-familiar national debate over guns seen after the tragic 2012 and 2018 school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, and Parkland, […]

Far Right

When it comes to Guns, the US is a Third World Country run by Corporate Lobbyists for a Profit

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – 21 are dead in another mass shooting, including 19 schoolchildren. The white slavers of the Old Souoth used to call US slavery our “peculiar institution.” Nowadays we have another peculiar institution, the gun culture. And we are peculiar. When it comes to gun violence, the United States is less like […]

Featured

We do it to Ourselves: 30 Gun Homicides in England in 2020 (167 US Equiv.), vs. 13,620 in US

Juan Cole

Revised The murders by a high school student in Oxford, Michigan, who was given a gun by his parents even though he was making death threats and the school called them to conferences out of concern, have shaken the state and become national news. That is because the parents are being charged with criminal negligence […]

Far Right

Why the Rittenhouse verdict flies in the face of legal standards for self-defense

The Conversation

By Ronald Sullivan | – In a two-week trial that reignited debate over self-defense laws across the nation, a Wisconsin jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse for shooting three people, two fatally, during a racial justice protest in Kenosha. The Wisconsin jury believed Rittenhouse’s claims that he feared for his life and acted in self-defense after he […]

Far Right

Oath Keepers in the State House: How a Militia Movement Took Root in the Republican Mainstream

ProPublica

By Isaac Arnsdorf | – A membership roster for the Oath Keepers, a violent extremist group whose followers have been charged in the Jan. 6 insurrection, includes state lawmakers, congressional candidates, and local government and GOP officials. ( ProPublica) – North Carolina state representative Mike Clampitt swore an oath to uphold the Constitution after his […]

Crime

More guns, pandemic stress and a police legitimacy crisis created perfect conditions for homicide spike in 2020

The Conversation

By Justin Nix | – Homicides in the U.S. spiked by almost 30% in 2020. That was the main takeaway from figures released on Sept. 27, 2021, by the FBI that showed almost uniform increases across America in the murder rate. The fact that big cities, small cities, suburbs and rural areas – in both […]

Epidemics

America’s Lost Causes: Misty-eyed Nostalgia for Bounty Hunters, Slave-Holding and Wife-beating

H. Scott Prosterman

We have a conflagration of “Lost Causes” in America. Some people in the South still revere the Confederate leaders who betrayed the United States during the Civil War. Now much of the South is wrapped up in another “Lost Cause” a series of destructive myths – the fiction that the election was stolen from Donald […]

Guns

Are mass shootings an American epidemic?

The Conversation

By Lacey Wallace | – The U.S. has suffered yet another mass shooting, with a deadly attack in a FedEx facility in Indianapolis. This was the fifth mass shooting in five weeks, including a shooting at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado that took the lives of 10 people on March 22 and just days earlier, […]