By Michael Siegel, Tufts University | – Americans have blamed many culprits, from mental illness to inadequate security, for the tragic mass shootings that are occurring with increasing frequency in schools, offices and theaters across the U.S. The latest, which occurred on May 24, 2022, at a Texas elementary school and left at least 19 […]
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Guns
People Die as Weapons Industry Profits
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 […]
How the NRA evolved from backing a 1934 Ban on Machine Guns to blocking nearly all firearm Restrictions Today
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, […]
When it comes to Guns, the US is a Third World Country run by Corporate Lobbyists for a Profit
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 […]
We do it to Ourselves: 30 Gun Homicides in England in 2020 (167 US Equiv.), vs. 13,620 in US
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 […]
Why the Rittenhouse verdict flies in the face of legal standards for self-defense
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 […]
Oath Keepers in the State House: How a Militia Movement Took Root in the Republican Mainstream
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 […]
More guns, pandemic stress and a police legitimacy crisis created perfect conditions for homicide spike in 2020
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 […]
America’s Lost Causes: Misty-eyed Nostalgia for Bounty Hunters, Slave-Holding and Wife-beating
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 […]