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. […]
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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 […]
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“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
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“Nonviolence doesn’t always work — but violence never does.” – Madge Micheels-Cyrus
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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 […]
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“NONVIOLENCE IS NOT A WEAPON OF THE WEAK. IT IS A WEAPON OF THE STRONGEST AND THE BRAVEST.” – Gandhi
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Tbilisi, Georgia Orthodox priests led a mob of some 20,000 people in an attack on a small gay-rights rally in the Georgian capital last week. On a new crusade Television images showed priests throwing rocks, punching people, and pounding the buses that were trying to evacuate the marchers. Dozens of people were injured. “I am not able to either condemn […]
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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 […]
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Drinking soda, long known to contribute to childhood obesity, may also have a negative effect on childhood behavior. Columbia University researchers interviewed the parents of about 3,000 5-year-olds in 20 cities about their children’s soda consumption and behavior. They found that 43 percent of the children drank at least one soda per day, and that 4 percent drank four servings […]
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“Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
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