September is the time of year when most parents breathe a sigh of relief when the kids go back to school. That is unless you are an American parent in which case you have school shootings to worry about. This new ad from Sandy Hook Promise gives a hard-hitting perspective on the issue. The stats are a bit crazy, there have been at least 288 school shootings in the United States since January 1, 2009. They now average about one …
In response to yet another mass shooting in the US, a quick note about one of the many ironies of life in Northern Ireland: we have extremely high levels of *legal* gun ownership. But legal gun ownership in NI is very tightly controlled. And successfully too. It really isn’t rocket science. As I understand it* applicants for a firearms certificate simply have to… Prove why they want a gun: Be it for agricultural reasons, target shooting at a club, clay …
Via Audrey Carville on Twitter, this great blog essay, on guns: But more importantly, who was going to take this gun? I had to call someone, I couldn’t just keep this gun. That’s how fucked up my thinking was at the time: it was all about the gun. When the 911 operator picked up, I was downright professional. I stated my name. I stated my location. I stated the nature of what I was calling about. “You see,” I said, …
If there is one fault with the progressive view of politics it is that the people, en masse, rarely concur. And in the US beyond the Beltway, the people are rarely inclined towards even the most optimistic forms of historical determinism… Nicholas Kristoff starts his own (self described) tirade on the subject with some telling stats: Since 1959, Gallup has asked Americans if they favor banning handguns. When the polling started, 60 percent said yes; the latest poll showed support from a …
