firearms
gregladen | October 2, 2017And lax legislation and elected representatives who run their elections using money from the gun industry make sure there are PLENTY of guns to go around. People who are running for office who have pro NRA positions and/or take gun money should be drummed out of politics.
The rate of gun ownership in a state predicts the rate of gun deaths in that state.
This works across countries as well.
Once again. Politicians who have voted in favor of NRA policies need to go.
Photo above from TIME
kkrisberg | November 18, 2016In 2005, Florida legislators passed the nation’s first “Stand Your Ground” law, expanding legal immunity for residents to use lethal force when they believe they’re being threatened. A decade later, a new study finds that Florida has experienced a significant increase in homicides, while states without such laws have not.
“From a public health perspective, we were shocked that in a given area, rates of people dying changed so abruptly and in such a sustained way,” study co-author Douglas Wiebe, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of…
cmonforton | July 8, 2016Citizens shot by police. Police shot by citizens. Citizens shot by citizens.
Too many victims. Terror. Tears.
Somebody else's neighborhood. Never in mine.
Racism, disrespect, mental illness, hatred, anger, economic inequality, hopelessness.
Rationalizing? History. Reality.
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The Gun Violence Archive lists more than 27,390 gun-related incidents in the U.S. which have occurred since January 1, 2016. The result includes nearly 7,100 deaths. Some of the latest additions are those who sadly made this week's headlines: Officer Lorne Ahrens, 48, Philando Castile, 32, Officer Michael Krol, 40, Alton…
gregladen | February 24, 2016Texas has adopted a law that allows students to bring a handgun to class, or to meetings with professors.
As a response to this policy, the president of the Faculty Senate, Jonathan Snow, gathered a group of faculty and gave a powerpoint presentation that included the slide at the top of the post.
Snow's presentation was not any sort of official university statement, but the slide does a good job of demonstrating the likely effect on faculty student relationships under the conditions where students are more likely to pull out a handgun and plug the professor.
The situation, and the context…
gregladen | July 14, 2013First, I want to say this to George Zimmerman and his lawyer. Stop whining. You are the one who chose to kill someone, and did so, then got away with it. It is not you who lost or who has had your life torn apart or taken away or anything like that. So stop being the damn victim. No one is going to hunt you down and kill you. That's you, George. That's you who hunts down and kills people. Other people, generally, don't do that. No one is going to hunt you down and kill you or in any other way bother you. Having said that, it is true that much of the part of humanity that is aware of your…
lborkowski | June 11, 2013by Kim Krisberg
It seems we barely go a week now without news of another violent gun incident. Last week's shooting rampage in Santa Monica, Calif., has resulted in the deaths of five people. And since the Newtown school shooting last December — in the span of less than six months — thousands of Americans have been killed by guns.
Just a couple days before the Santa Monica shooting, the Institute of Medicine (IoM) and National Research Council released a new report proposing priority research areas for better understanding gun-related violence, its causes, health effects and possible…
gregladen | January 19, 2013As you know, I often mention reports from the Ohh Shoot blog, which chronicles the virtually daily instances of someone doing something accidental with a gun and the associated serious wounding or killing of one or more other individuals. These events are not part of the large number of suicides using guns that happen every year, and they are not part of the large number of shootings related to felonies carried out with the aid of a gun and they are not part of the number of times a person shoots a truly armed and dangerous intruder truly intruding the home (as opposed to a grandchild hanging…
gregladen | January 19, 2013Happy Gun Appreciation Day!
Let's spend a little time to appreciate guns. Because this is the very first Gun Appreciation Day! I'm not sure why we've never had a Gun Appreciation Day before, but now that we have one let's celebrate with a review of the last month's interesting stories about guns! Yay!
For completeness, because I'm sure Gun Appreciation Day was generated in response to the massacre of 20 six year olds and their teachers and other school personnel in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, we'll go back to the day before that event, to something sort of local to me, and review events over…
gregladen | January 17, 2013Sometimes, a person shows up at a gun range, checks out a gun ostensibly to use in target practice on the range, but instead uses the gun to commit suicide. In one case not long ago, a woman brought her teenage son to the range, and checked out two pistols. They took turn shooting for a while, then, while he was aiming his firearm at the target, she shot him in the back of the head and then shot herself. So that was murder-suicide. Now and then a person goes to the shooting range, and while shooting end up shooting themselves dead but it is not clear if it was an accident or suicide.
A quick…
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…
cmonforton | July 23, 2012A night out for the midnight premiere of the summer blockbuster "Batman: The Dark Knight Rises" turned deadly. Twelve people are dead and at least 59 were wounded. The victims will be mourned, the suspect studied, and the incident relegated to our criminal justice system. In my circle, however, we see gun violence a public health problem. It affects people, it causes death, injury and disability, and it can be addressed with environmental, legal, and behavioral interventions. A classic paper examining violence in a public health frame was published in a 1993 issue of the journal Health…