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, […]
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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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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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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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“Nonviolence doesn’t always work — but violence never does.” – Madge Micheels-Cyrus
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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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“Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
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“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.
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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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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 […]
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