Parkland shooting survivor-turned-activist Emma Gonzalez (left) grills NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch on gun control.
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is one of the most hotly debated pieces of text in history. For devotees, it guarantees the most important freedom ever enshrined in a government document. For critics, it is a dangerous relic of colonial history with little relevance to modern life. Continue reading
The New York Daily News cover shows still frames from the Roanoke shooter’s point-of-view film.
On Wednesday, two journalists at a CBS affiliate in Roanoke, Virginia were murdered during a live interview with a city official for the station’s morning broadcast. The gunman, a disgruntled former employee, killed himself after posting point-of-view footage of the killing online. So far, the gun lobby hasn’t commented, but it’s not hard to imagine their response: “If only those journalists had been armed.”
It’s the same tired refrain whenever there is a high-profile shooting. Dozens of schoolchildren murdered by a madman? Arm the teachers. Americans picked off like fish in a barrel by a lunatic in a movie theater? Arm the ushers.
The televised Virginia shooting comes just days after a damning report out of the University of Alabama by professor Adam Lankford listing the United States number one in the world, by a wide margin, for public mass shootings. Continue reading
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