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Newtown

  • 12-16-13

    White Men and Their Guns

    by Leonard Steinhorn

    When white men parade their firearms in public, it's not to deter crime, but to summon our deference.

  • SOURCE: Reuters
    5-8-13

    Alan Brinkley: Fighting the Gun World

    Now, almost five months after the killing of 20 first-graders in Newtown, Connecticut, riveted the nation, Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is talking about trying to resurrect his bill on gun background checks that was defeated in the Senate last month.

  • SOURCE: CrooksandLiars.com
    1-16-13

    David Barton: History proves armed elementary kids prevent school shootings

    Conservative host Glenn Beck and "historian" David Barton on Tuesday debuted a new show called "Foundations of Freedom" and suggested that history proved that school shootings could be prevented if all elementary school children were armed.After pointing out that some areas of the United States required every household to own a gun in the late 1800s, Beck told Barton that "everybody grew up with a gun" and it was "part of school."Barton noted that guns were only fired in schools at the time to stop criminal activity."The great example, in the 1850s you have a school teacher who's teaching," the historian explained. "A guy, he's out in the West, this guy from New England wants to kill him and find him. So, he comes into the school with his gun to shoot the teacher, he decides not to shoot the teacher because all the kids pull their guns out and point it at him and say, 'You kill the teacher, you die.' He says, 'Okay.' The teacher lives. Real simple stuff."...

  • SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer
    1-17-13

    Jonathan Zimmerman: [Video] Blame Games

    Jonathan Zimmerman is a Narberth resident and a professor of history at New York University. He is teaching a course at NYU's Abu Dhabi campus. E-mail: jlzimm@aol.com. ...In Washington, stricter regulation of video games has become a post-Sandy Hook cause du jour. Last week, Vice President Biden convened a high-profile meeting with video-game executives. Some have called for warning labels and other precautions.But we still don't know if playing video games makes users more likely to behave aggressively. Research on the subject is spotty and mixed, and millions of Americans clearly play violent games without becoming violent.For the most part, they also play them in a stationary position. So we shouldn't be surprised that video games are very strongly associated with obesity, especially among the young. In 2011, the World Health Organization named video games the single biggest cause of child obesity.Why would playing video games lead to more weight gain than, say, watching television? Nobody knows, although one recent study suggested an intriguing possibility: Video games make you hungry. Boys who played them were found to consume four times as many calories as they burned off....

  • SOURCE: WaPo
    1-16-13

    King’s daughter, others say nonviolent message relevant as ever after Connecticut shootings

    NASHVILLE, Tenn. — While the nation struggles to agree on how to curb gun violence, followers of a man gunned down nearly 45 years ago think his wisdom offers an answer.The words of Martin Luther King Jr. and the role he set for churches in leading a nonviolent response to civil injustice are as applicable today as they were in the 1960s, say his younger daughter and other followers.Bernice King, chief executive of the King Center in Atlanta, recalls a sobering statement from her father: “The choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence, but nonviolence and nonexistence.”King’s lessons take on new urgency after one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history, when a gunman opened fire at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., last month, killing 20 children and 6 adults....