What’s the most forbidden topic in America? asked Timothy Egan. It’s not sex or religion. It’s gun violence. We are “the most armed society in the world,” with more than 300 million guns in private hands, and 9,146 gun homicides in 2009—a rate nearly 20 times higher than that of other supposedly civilized countries. “But don’t bring that up.” Sports […]
Read more
Why are most mass shootings perpetrated by white males? asked Charlotte Childress and Harriet Childress. In the debate over why America suffers so many killing sprees, race and gender are “the elephant in the room.” At Newtown, Aurora, Tucson, Columbine— “month after month, year after year”—it is seething white men and teenagers who use guns to massacre scores of strangers. […]
Read more
Newtown, Conn. ̿ ̿ ̿̿̿̿̿’̿’\̵͇̿̿\=(•̪●)=/̵͇̿̿/’̿̿ ̿ ̿ ̿ ̿ Grim contest? Newtown shooter Adam Lanza may have been trying to compete with Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik when he carried out the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December. Citing law enforcement sources, CBS reported this week that Lanza wanted to beat Breivik’s “score” of 77—the number of deaths […]
Read more
“When we are violent to our enemies, we do violence to ourselves. When we brutalize others, we brutalize ourselves. And eventually we run the risk of becoming our oppressors.” – Arundhati Roy
Read more
Gun violence now costs Americans an estimated $229 billion a year, including the expense of imprisoning gun offenders, medical treatment for the roughly 31,000 people killed and 75,000 wounded each year, lost wages, and loss of quality of life among victims and their families, according to an analysis by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. By the same measures, […]
Read more
“Nonviolence doesn’t always work — but violence never does.” – Madge Micheels-Cyrus
Read more
Guatemalans are suffering from “an epidemic of chronic pessimism,” said Jose J. Camacho. We all seem to agree that “everything is bad, nothing is certain, everyone has a price, and something evil lurks behind every good deed.” The media fuel these perceptions by covering every new incidence of violence exhaustively, lavishing special attention on the most frightening and lurid details […]
Read more
A New Mexico teenager is expected to face murder charges after allegedly gunning down five family members with his parents’ rifles. Nehemiah Griego, 15, is accused of using a .22 caliber rifle to shoot his mother while she slept and then kill his siblings—ages 9, 5, and 2—when they awoke. He then allegedly grabbed an assault rifle and waited downstairs […]
Read more
One violent movie does not a mass killer make, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. But the pornographic violence that now fills popular films has “the cumulative power to desensitize and destabilize” impressionable minds. Disturbed young men like James Holmes, the accused Aurora, Colo., killer, may be unable to process the nihilistic, sadistically violent world of movies like […]
Read more
“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Read more