guns

27 school shootings so far this year in America…

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A North Texas teacher attending the March for Our Lives sister rally in Denton, Texas on March 24th, 2018.

The shooting in Texas of 19 school kids and 2 adults is pretty depressing, even more so when you find out it is actually the 27th school shooting this year alone, and the 200th mass shooting. And the solution? How about arming the teachers? Actual politicians are proposing this. Other suggestions include hiring ex-military to protect schools. Because we all know the solution to gun crime is more guns… Asked on Newsmax about his solution for school shootings, Texas AG …

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Back to school American style…

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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 …

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Gun Control: If Even NI Can Get It Right…

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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 …

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“Honey, it’s not a Glock. It’s just a shotgun.”

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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, …

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Sheriff Poots “opened up from an upstairs bedroom” to scare away intruders – can you ever take the guns out of politics?

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While the dissident non-conformist republican groups are amid a rebranding exercise, there was a reminder this morning that paramilitary groups aren’t the only ones with guns that are willing to use. DUP Health Minister and Lagan Valley MLA Edwin Poots has admitted to firing warning shots out of a bedroom window to ward off potential intruders one night in early June. The Belfast Telegraph reports: Police said they were investigating the incident which happened in the early hours of June …

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Irish gun killings five times that of England and Wales…

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And that’s just in the south. Conor Lally with a front page piece in the Irish Times today: In 2008, for example, some 38.2 per cent of murders and manslaughters committed in the Republic involved firearms. During the same year, just 6.8 per cent of murders and manslaughters committed in England and Wales involved a firearm. However the homicide rates themselves are comparable, so it’s not that Ireland is more dangerous than England, but it would seem that it has …

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