gun control
gregladen | January 16, 2013President Barack Obama has signed 23 Executive Orders intended to reduce gun violence in the United States. This alone will not be sufficient--Congress must pass new laws to address this problem as well, and the citizens of the united states have to make some cultural adjustments--but it is a start.
Republican Tea Party Congressman Steve Stockman of, where else, Texas, plans to file articles of impeachment against the president in an effort to maintain our current level of gun violence because, I suppose, he likes it when six year old children are gunned down in cold blood. The people of…
gregladen | January 4, 2013The evidence from palaeoanthropology suggests that in the past humans were about the stature they are now, with more sexual dimporphism than now, with similar or larger brains than they have now, and used technology at the same level of sophistication as many later humans. Scientists argue over the degree to which modern day language abilities, symbolic thinking, and artistic capacity was found in these earlier humans.
Where we see physical evidence suggesting morbidity or even mortality among those humans, which included "archaic Homo sapiens" and Neanderthals and their kin, we often see…
gregladen | December 21, 2012Below the fold is a description from Wikipedia of the Red Lake School Shooting. Consider the details in relation to issues of gun ownership, safety, school security, and whatever other issues it brings to mind.
Warning, this is graphic and horrid.
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The day of the massacre, Weise got a .22 caliber pistol from his bedroom, and fatally shot his grandfather as he was sleeping; he shot him two times in the head and ten times in the chest. According to Weise's friends, the teenager may have had the gun for as long as a year. He took Lussier's two police-issue weapons, a .…
gregladen | December 19, 2012The gun nuts did not waste much time after the brutal slaying of 20 six year olds, some teachers, a principal, and some others at a school in Newtown Connecticut to start suggesting that everything would have been fine if only the teachers were armed. And now, after more days have gone by, it seems that the gun nuts are making this suggestion even more frequently.
The evidence suggests that when there are more guns around, especially in the hands of untrained individuals, there is more rather than less danger. Don't let anyone tell you that an armed population is a safe population. That is…
gregladen | December 17, 2012Let me start with this. People talking about Sandy Hook need to stop saying that "20 children between the ages of 5 and 10 were killed." That is technically true but misses an enormously important point and indicates that you really haven't thought this through. All of the children who were killed were born between September 2005 and December 2006. They were all in the first grade, all in the same school year, and most of them in the same exact class. Sandy hook had about 100 students in that year. Now, the class is 20% smaller.
This means that every year for the next few years there will be…
gregladen | December 15, 2012I have been writing about this topic for years. Lately, I have been ignoring it. Last few massacres, I didn't say or do anything. I think Gabby Gifford's shooting was a last straw for me; I became too disgusted with our situation and I became too disheartened with the number of people who require that we Americans remain an utterly unique society in that we shoot each other at record rates. Somehow, it seems, that makes us good. Others claim that because there are problems in the world with higher body counts, this problem of guns in the US should not be addressed at all. That is utterly…
gregladen | October 23, 2011Years ago, I read an old newspaper account of chaos in 19th century New York City; A storm damaged many of the cages at the Central Zoo, and most of the wild animals got out. The next day or two was spent rounding up the animals, and even the mayor and the governor, who were experienced big game hunters, got involved in tracking down the rhino and the hippo and the lions and the rest of them.
A few months ago, for some reason, that story re-emerged in my memory for the first time in decades, so I went and looked it up and found out that it was a hoax. I don't remember if I knew it was a hoax…
gregladen | October 13, 2010 I dare you to tell me that this is not an argument for stricter control over access to firearms:
The identities of the two ninth-grade students found dead in a Lakeland park were released Wednesday, and authorities said they were both shot in what appears to be a case involving suicide.
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Deputies found the two Tuesday evening "on the ground with apparent gunshot wounds," the sheriff said in a news release. Deputies recovered "a long-barreled weapon" near one of the bodies, he said.
strib
Here's the facebook page related to their death.
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
palmd | April 8, 2009I'm not real interested in blogging about politics. It's just not my thing. But the recent increase in absurd and frankly scary rhetoric from the right is giving me the shpilkes. It's not just the tea-baggers (heh heh...I said "tea bagger"), but I might as well say something about their lame-ass tea parties. These tea parties differ, but many of them involve sending tea bags to a representative or to the IRS to protest taxes. These "parties" don't actually protest higher taxes, just the idea of taxes. After all, taxes have always sucked, and no one was having tea parties under Reagan,…