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.
Reading Time: 20 minutes Can tasers and electric pulse technology replace the need for traditional guns?
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.
Reading Time: 6 minutes Even if background checks legislation passes, it won’t detect a gun owner’s potential for doing spectacularly reckless things.
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.
Reading Time: 5 minutes If you think the current brouhaha over gun violence is somehow unprecedented in American history, read on.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Despite the media’s overwhelming coverage of foreign terrorism, there’s a much bigger problem here at home.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reading Time: 4 minutes The finger-pointing about who is to blame for gun violence
has turned to prescription pharmaceuticals. We’re told that they
transform people into killing machines. But is the problem the
drugs themselves—or the ease with which the mentally ill can obtain
guns?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Putting armed guards into every school seems an odd thing for certain people to be advocating. It runs counter to their general philosophy, and many other complications emerge.
Reading Time: 1 minute In this interview with host Pat Thurston on the popular San Francisco-based KGO, Russ discusses less publicized aspects of George HW Bush’s life, makes new enemies over guns, explains why timing is everything in the news business, and laments the media’s failure to level with the public over Syria. Plus more.
Reading Time: 4 minutes What a difference it makes…when news breaks. A look at the consequences of poor timing, in stories about Israel/Gaza and gun violence.