Fear of Mass Shootings Strains America’s Psyche, Survey Finds
Reading Time: 3 minutes Mass shootings do not just affect the victims and their loved ones. They are a major strain on the psyche of most Americans, a new poll finds.
Discussing Gun Control Without Killing Each Other
Reading Time: 5 minutes Contrary to what we see online, on cable news, or in Congress, there are ways Americans can have a non-hostile, even productive, conversation about gun control.
Inside the Mind of the American Mass Shooter
Reading Time: 4 minutes Latest research reveals how suicidal thoughts, personal crisis, and desperation are often the dark subtext to mass shootings.
16 Crazy Things Americans Did With Guns
Reading Time: 10 minutes True stories, from the tragic to the grotesque, of people shooting at other people, and at things — for reasons that boggle the mind.
National Gun Violence Awareness Day: Should Be Every Day
Reading Time: 7 minutes On National Gun Violence Day, we present seven stories that illustrate the US’s obsession with guns and some of the issues we must face before the epidemic of gun deaths can be addressed in a meaningful way.
The End of Guns
Reading Time: 20 minutes Can tasers and electric pulse technology replace the need for traditional guns?
Guns Versus Weed: How Background Checks Conflict with State Cannabis Laws
Reading Time: 6 minutes Legal weed blocks users from buying guns, as state cannabis laws come into conflict with the federal gun background check system.
What Gun Background Checks Can’t Detect: Stupidity
Reading Time: 6 minutes Even if background checks legislation passes, it won’t detect a gun owner’s potential for doing spectacularly reckless things.
Red Flag Laws and the Consequences of Good Intentions
Reading Time: 6 minutes Red flags laws may prevent gun violence as well as suicides, but they also introduce civil rights concerns that will likely lead to court challenges.
How America Fell Out of Love With Machine Guns
Reading Time: 5 minutes If you think the current brouhaha over gun violence is somehow unprecedented in American history, read on.
Guns Will Soon Be as Smart as Our Phones
Reading Time: 9 minutes Imagine guns that will only fire with your fingerprints or biomarkers, that can do facial recognition, and that send out a GPS signal as to their location. Will that make guns safer?
The Granddaddy of Campus Mass Shootings
Reading Time: 3 minutes This year marks the 50th anniversary of the University of Texas Tower shootings. A creative new documentary brings the larger story to life.
A Child Massacre Examined
Reading Time: 3 minutes A surprising number of people actually claim that the entire mass shooting event at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was fabricated. They’re dangerously wrong — and this documentary proves it, while bringing some of the children back to life, if only for a moment.
Bringing a Knife to a Gunfight
Reading Time: 4 minutes The NRA has millions of dollars, and millions of aggressive supporters who knock on doors, hand out fliers, make phone calls, and register voters — while most of their opponents do nothing but tweet and post clever memes on Facebook. In the meantime, an average of one mass shooting occurs in the US every day.
Surprising Facts About Who Threatens Our Safety the Most—Recommended Reading
Reading Time: 2 minutes Despite the media’s overwhelming coverage of foreign terrorism, there’s a much bigger problem here at home.
Classic WHY: Just Asking—Media Outfoxed on Spate of Bizarre Shootings?
Reading Time: 5 minutes In the wake of the Charleston shootings, it’s worth revisiting this discussion about how—and why—the media discourages deeper scrutiny of violence in the US.
RussRant: No “Insanity Defense” for US Obsession with Guns
Reading Time: 3 minutes The South Carolina church shootings are no anomaly. Americans are senselessly gunned down—at a rate of 30 per day (excluding suicides and accidents). Gun advocates who want no meaningful restrictions, ostensibly to protect themselves, put all of us at risk. Yet those advocating universal disarmament are not practical. But here’s a third way.
RadioWhoWhatWhy: The Future of Outsourced Warfare
Reading Time: 1 minute Blackwater may have become a symbol of all that can go wrong when government contractors outnumber trained military personnel, but what really happened in the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan? WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman sits down with Blackwater founder Erik Prince to discuss the history and future of “outsourced” warfare.
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Police Becoming Sixth Branch of US Military?
Reading Time: 1 minute Is President Obama’s recently announced order seeking to reverse the dramatic over-arming of police forces nationwide too little, too late? We all saw—in Baltimore, in Ferguson, in Boston—how civilian law enforcement has turned into a virtual sixth branch of the military. Where is this going? Our guest, author of a new book on the topic, shares his research.
RadioWhoWhatWhy: Lawyers, Guns and Money
Reading Time: 1 minute Lawyers, money and enforcement are an ever growing part of elections in America. A new set of rules now prevail. Issues such as campaign finance, voting rights, voter ID, electronic voting and ballot access itself are now debatable parts of voting in America.