In the aftermath of the horrific Nashville school shooting that took the lives of three adults and three little children, Tony Perkins president of the Family Research Council, refused to find fault in America’s obsession with guns. Instead, he posited prayer being the only solution to the crisis of mass shootings “We must return to the only lasting source of[Read More…]
For seven years now former Marine and anti-gun violence activist Jamal Johnson has undertaken a three week 140-mile walk from Philadelphia to Washington, DC to participate in the annual Stop Killing Us (SKU) campaign and intergenerational rally. “Every step I take is a step in the right directions” is how Johnson affirmatively surmises his long between the two cities. In[Read More…]
March 27, 2023 – The Fellowship of Reconciliation, the oldest interfaith peace organization in the United States, established in 1915, is horrified at the senseless loss of seven lives – three children and four adults, including the 28-year-old shooter – today in Nashville, Tennessee. It is sinful that guns receive more protection in our country and are considered more sacred[Read More…]
WASHINGTON (03-04) – Today marked the closing ceremony at the National Building Museum where the shocking and profoundly sad Gun Violence National Memorial Project has been on display since April 2021. With its closing, future exhibitions are now being planned to take place around the country while those involved in its creation are lobbying for a permanent National Gun Violence[Read More…]
NOVATO, CA (12-14) – On the 10th anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, activist groups around the country honored the memory of the 20 first graders ages six and seven and six adult staff members who were murdered. Since then, 89 other students across the country have been killed in twenty-two school shootings. Those who were hopeful that[Read More…]
A profoundly inspiring and positive news conference was held today at the National Press Club addressing the ever-increasing street gang gun violence problem in America. No community in the country has suffered more than that of the African-American community that has seen during the COVID pandemic an ever-escalating increase in senseless shootings and killings. In addressing the pandemic of gun[Read More…]
No school year in the U.S. in nearly a decade saw as much gunfire as the 2021-2022 academic calendar, a report released Friday shows. The report (https://everytownsupportfund.org/press/new-everytown-report-finds-average-number-of-gunfire-on-school-grounds-incidents-nearly-quadrupled-during-last-school-year/?_gl=1*ifxwvo*_ga*ODUyMTMyNDc4LjE2NjA3NjgzMTU.*_ga_LT0FWV3EK3*MTY2MDkyMjczMC40LjEuMTY2MDkyMjc5My4wLjAuMA) was published by Everytown For Gun Safety, a nonpartisan group advocating against gun violence. The gun violence report shows the last school year, between Aug. 1 and May 31, saw 193 incidents of gunfire,[Read More…]
Today being 7-11, one would have thought it would be a lucky day. But America being America, ever fascinated with guns and gun culture, it’s just another day of violence in which, on average, sees 96 people killed by guns. Oddly, too, it was one week ago on July 4th that a deranged gunman killed seven people at an Independence[Read More…]
American schools are soft, you say? I know what you mean. I taught college for 15 years, so I’ve dealt with my share of still-teenagers fresh out of high school. Many of them inspired me, but some had clearly earned high marks too easily and needed remedial help in math, English, or other subjects. School discipline had been too lax[Read More…]
An epidemic is hitting the US and ordinary citizens are unable to stop it. The reason is simple: the laws protect the killers. And those responsible for making the laws have abdicated their responsibility. The Gun Violence Archive reports that mass shootings have increased from 269 in 2014 to 693 in 2021. They do so even when the victims could[Read More…]
Irrespective of whatever is ethnic identity of any shooter leading to violence and/or murders, how can approach towards him be decided by his religion, race, colour or any ethnic as well as national factor? A crime remains a crime. Sadly, double-standards of this nature still prevail. If Salvador Rolando Ramos was an Arab, a Muslim and/or a Black, the rage[Read More…]
The United States remains a country of tenacious faith. The nature of that faith stretches from the digital pulpits of Silicon Valley, where cool technology occupies the seat of majesty, to the hot Bible Belt of spiritual endurance and suffering, where the good Lord holds sway in stern disapproval. In between, market fundamentalists take time to worship the invisible hand[Read More…]
The gun I carried on the streets of New York City in the late 1960s was a Beretta, similar to the pistol James Bond packed in the early Ian Fleming novels. It was a small, dark beauty that filled me with bravado. I was never afraid when I had it in my pocket, which is why I’m so very afraid[Read More…]
What more can be said with so much grief, after the spate of recent gun violence around the country? Can anything be added that has not already been said. The same questions have been haunting the country over the past two decades. Why do mass shootings appear to be accelerating? Why are children often being targeted? Why are teens, who[Read More…]
The horrifying mass murder of 18 school children and two teachers in Uvalde, TX occurred at the same time as the funeral of Celestine Chaney, grandmother of six and Buffalo, NY mass shooting victim, was taking place. Only two of the ten Black Americans killed in Buffalo by avowed white supremacists had been yet laid to rest when that tragedy[Read More…]
The burden of absence savages the heart. How to give voice to the horrors of grief? In the valley of tears rivers from Eden run red with the salt of blood. In this Promise Land parents and prayers are exiled by violence. Each day an angel is fallen. The naming of victims! In gardens of hatred the flowering of graves.[Read More…]
This Memorial Day, as the nation reflects on, mourns and honors the sacrifices of U.S. military personnel who have died in the line of duty, another senseless killing of innocent elementary school children by a deranged gunman has marred the Federal holiday. First observed on May 30, 1868, the holiday allows us for one day to reflect on those sacrifices[Read More…]
I have been numb and silent. Not like me. But I guess I am also human and sometimes the pain is too much. 19 children dead? Should I be thankful that none of those who died in Buffalo, Uvalde or in the many instances of mass shootings that happen as regularly as rainfall in America, didn’t have the name of[Read More…]
The Washington Post (WashPost) made a front-page headline after the Buffalo’s East Side mass shooting. The headline – “‘That’s not the devil. – That’s America.’” tells state of the one of the most advanced bourgeois states – the United States of America. The report (May 17, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/17/buffalo-tops-shooting-neighborhood/) by Silvia Foster-Frau formulated its heading by citing James Baldwin, 60, a citizen[Read More…]
Societies generate their own economies of tolerable cruelties and injustices. Poverty, for instance, will be allowed, as long a sufficient number of individuals are profiting. To an extent, crime and violence can be allowed to thrive. In the United States, the economy of tolerable massacres, executed by military grade weapons, is considerable and seemingly resilient. Its participants all partake in[Read More…]
America continues to unleash unparalleled madness in the world. It’s the madness spawned by an all-consuming hatred against: Children, Women, Men, Black-Brown-White folks, Russians and Communists, Palestinians and Houthi, Nature, the Environment, Beauty and Life itself. It remains mindless, formless and knows only violence. The manufacturers of all this violence can be found permanently-embedded in every state of the American[Read More…]
Fanon had written that the colonized belonged to a higher cognitive category than the colonizer for a simple reason: The colonized have to be able to think of themselves and their masters as human whereas the colonizer thinks of his subjects as merely “things” or chattel. I have thought about this with regard to two peoples with whom I have[Read More…]
The weekend of 4 July was supposed to be a celebratory time in the USA as celebrations of freedom day were being held all over the country and fireworks celebrations were being organized. But this turned out to be actually a nightmarish time for a very large number of people as random shooting incidents and brawls in many parts of[Read More…]
A new poll has found a majority of Americans is blaming mass shootings in the U.S. on easy access to guns and racism, but a significant portion also put networks like Fox News and CNN at fault. Asked “how much do you blame each of the following for mass shootings?” in the wide-ranging Politico/Morning Consult poll, 69% and 67% pointed[Read More…]
By the time you read this piece, it will already be out of date. The reason’s simple enough. No matter what mayhem I describe, with so much all-American weaponry in this world of ours, there’s no way to keep up. Often, despite the headlines that go with mass killings here, there’s almost no way even to know. On this planet[Read More…]
Cold blooded murder, as they call it, sucks! When it is pre-meditated it is even worse. In Nazi Germany, once Hitler and his gang were in power, ‘ No holds were barred!’ Jewish citizens were ‘ Fair game’. Imagine Goebbels stating on their state controlled radio and television after another Brown shirt killing of a defenseless Jewish person:’ How much[Read More…]
Over the last three months in Portland, mass protests against police violence and racism gradually gave way to nightly often violent standoffs between a core of pro-Black Lives Matter (BLM) and anti-fascist protesters and law enforcement. The incidents are now part of a fact of life in the United States. In the past week the city has fallen back into[Read More…]
I write these words in an agony of urgency. Already this year, 2019, there have been 31 mass shootings in the USA; more than in any other nation. Over half of these have been in the state of Texas. At what is only temporarily the most recent crime scene, in Odessa, one of the victims was 17 months old. The[Read More…]
The US is in the midst of an epidemic of mass killings. In the 215 days so far this year, the US has seen 252 mass shootings – an average of more than one a day. The reasons why this is happening are pretty obvious: too many guns, inadequate gun laws, a culture of militarism that glorifies violence, misogyny, and[Read More…]
Hundreds of mothers, students and other volunteers demanding action on gun control marched on the White House and the Capitol on the heels of the deadly shooting in El Paso, Texas on Saturday. Several other similar protest demonstrations were also held across the U.S. Members of activists group Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action organized the march. The protesters[Read More…]
In the wake of the February 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 students and staff members, a teacher said the school looked “like a war zone.” And to many young Americans, that’s exactly what it felt like. But this shooting was different. Refusing to be victims, Parkland survivors disrupted the “thoughts and[Read More…]
Another mass shooting in America! They are so frequent they are anticipated. I favor stick gun control, and the application of the Second Amendment of the Constitution should be challenged as it now stands before weapons’ technology but continues to be interpreted along antiquated guidelines. How little is commonly known about the original purpose and history of the Second Amendment,[Read More…]
Another horrible mass shooting took place in the US on Wednesday night, the 307th such episode on the 311th day of the year, according to a website that tracks gun violence. A 28-year-old Marine Corps veteran of the Afghanistan war walked into a country music dance club in Thousand Oaks, California on Wednesday night and opened fire with a handgun,[Read More…]
We just had another mass murder in the USA. A military connected person carried it out. I know two Marines. Both have shell shock permanent brain damage AND PTSD. One shot a rifle at a medical helicopter going to a hospital across the lake where he lived when back in the USA. The other raped his own daughter, realized his[Read More…]
It’s Friday. There have been 28,420 incidents of gun violence so far this year in the US. 1,135 of those have happened since last week. Yesterday saw the 154th mass shooting—of four or more human victims—so far this year, and the year is marking its 180th day. Those numbers were reported early Friday morning by CNN. So you can expect[Read More…]
A week ago on May 18, 10 students were killed and 13 wounded at Santa Fe High school just south of Houston, within its metropolitan area. The shooter was a student who, as can now be expected, had been bullied. While definitions of a mass shooting may vary, the Investigative Assistance for Violent Crimes Act of 2012 labels it as[Read More…]
The mother of one of the dozen third graders I was teaching last year in a home school setting crossed paths with me the other day. She reminded me of how the parents of my young charges had requested that I address gun violence with their children after the San Bernadino Elementary School Shooting came down. I had questioned whether or not[Read More…]
The quaint, unassuming, elevated area south of Denver known as Columbine rarely, if ever, caught the attention of the average American residing outside the State of Colorado for just over 99% of the twentieth century. When it etched its way into the hearts and minds of shocked onlookers around the world 19 years before Friday, nobody predicted that it would[Read More…]
“People like me are not good for big business, like for animal business, medicine business and for many other businesses. That’s why they are discriminating and censoring us.” Nasim Najafi Aghdam discussing YouTube She claimed to have detested it, issuing fiery calls on her social media outlets, and asserting that this creature was demonic in its effort to limit talent,[Read More…]
Co-Written by Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox The United States government views human rights not as the foundation of human dignity but as an impediment to corporate profits. — Haley Pedersen & Jodie Evans, AlterNet, January 11, 2018. In the United States of America it’s all about the quantity, not the quality, of so-called freedom. That may be because[Read More…]
March 18: Stephon Clark—gunned down by two Sacramento, California cops who shot him eight times in his grandmother’s backyard; six times in the back, once in the side and once as or after he was falling down, according to an autopsy done by the young Black man’s family. March 27: The Louisiana attorney general announced that the cops who[Read More…]
“Violence and other potentially criminal behaviors caused by prescription drugs are medicine’s best kept secret.” — David Healy, UK psychiatrist and author (and co-founder of www.RxISK.org) “The establishment media ignores the scientific evidence linking psychiatric medications and violent behavior because psychiatry is the religion of the mainstream media, and they don’t want to see the dangers of psychiatrically[Read More…]
Sonoma County, Northern California: Over a million students and allies walked out of classes in the U.S., from Maine to Hawaii, and elsewhere in the world on March 14. Ten days later, March 24, hundreds of thousands of defiant marchers flooded the streets in Washington, D.C., and at more than 800 places on every continent except Antarctica. What might they[Read More…]
In the first 11 weeks of 2018, there have been 12 school shootings. Although shootings on school campuses only make up a tiny fraction of gun injuries and deaths annually, a March report from the Giffords Law Center focuses on the deep impact of gun violence on children in the USA, elaborating on how it extends far beyond the classroom.[Read More…]
Yesterday, in solidarity with the 17 students killed in Parkland, FL., students all across the country left their classes for 17 minutes. These students echoed the moral determination of their grandparents, almost fifty years ago, in nationwide student strikes following the murder of four student antiwar protesters at Kent State. Check the Congressional Record, and you’ll find one speech commemorating[Read More…]
Sonoma County, California: Driving through small-town Sebastopol on March 14 toward the Senior Center, this 73-year-old noticed groups of young students with signs gathering on downtown street corners and waving to motorists. These active participants in direct democracy joined thousands who walked out of schools across the U.S. and the world, organized by the Women’s March Youth branch. As[Read More…]
A superintendent threatens to suspend students protesting gun laws. But that’s not legal. Curtis Rhodes, the superintendent of the school district in Needville, a small town southwest of Houston, wrote a letter to students and parents that was distributed Tuesday on the social media page for the town’s high school. It began with a reference to the protests around the country[Read More…]
It doesn’t do much good to point out that mothers are going to keep crying their souls out — losing their lovely children — unless those mothers themselves are willing to die to keep a horror of horrors like the U,.S. Military from twisting the minds of their youngsters… and propagandizing parents to the point of their, then, willingly handing[Read More…]
That there is a change in the air is evident this time. Since the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida on February 14, there have been demonstrations by school kids, their parents and others, confrontations of politicians including the president, and a general feeling that enough is enough. The most prominent opposition to gun control, the National Rifle Association (NRA)[Read More…]
It had been in the works. Instead of engaging in the traditional revulsion associated with a mass shooting, or even digesting the grief of outraged students and grieving parents, US President Donald Trump’s solution to guns violence was elementary. To target the perpetrator, it was necessary to arm instructors, mount the barricades, and raise the stakes. His address of February[Read More…]
American college kids only asking for stricter gun laws, should instead ask Iraqis, Libyans, Afghanistani, Somali, and Yemeni what to do about Americans killing Americans, and they will answer, stop invading and killing our people; ask Vietnamese, Koreans, Laotians, Cambodians, Panamanians, Dominicans, Cubans & Grenadines, and they will advise to stop praising GIs sent to kill us as heroes even when they[Read More…]
On February 14, 2018, it happened again. Young people, full of potential, their futures before them, shot down… at school, supposedly a place for learning, growing, having fun, making friends, even falling in love. This time the murderous violence struck Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. A former student wielding a semiautomatic rifle massacred 17 people—14 students,[Read More…]
The scene is the House of Commons; the date May 7, 1940. A simple motion to adjourn for the ten-day Whitsun recess is of little concern to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who has a comfortable 213 seat majority. Then things take a turn. A plan approved by the first First Lord pf the Admiralty Winston Churchill to land troops in[Read More…]
My daughter is a guidance counselor, a position like being a school psychologist. She, all by herself, handles a school with 350 children in her role. It is a lot of heavy work with such a huge load of children to which to attend. So you streamline and teach classes to groups and only attend to the individuals worst in[Read More…]
“Sixty-eight percent of U.S. citizens believe that ‘better mental health screening’ would help to reduce the number of school shootings, but one has to ask what’s considered mentally healthy in our spiritually-anemic, sick society.” — Richard Martin Oxman Relationships and loyalties within a family are the strongest and most important ones, say most people. [Pause.] Yes, blood is thicker than[Read More…]
Seventeen people were killed and at least 14 more wounded Wednesday afternoon in the latest horrific school shooting in the United States. The tragedy unfolded at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, located some 30 miles northwest of Fort Lauderdale, in Broward County. According to reports, a former student started shooting from outside and then entered the school[Read More…]
‘If a guy named Mohammad blew up that church yesterday. O my God, O my God, Washington would be on fire,” says MSNBC Moring Joe Host. Joe Scarboroug was alluding to Sunday’s shooting at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas that killed at least 26 people and injured 19. Just last week after New York president immediately talked[Read More…]
In Las Vegas on 1 October 2017, it appears that one man (although it might have been more) killed 59 people and shot and injured another 241 (with almost 300 more injured while fleeing). The incident got a lot of publicity, partly because the man managed to kill more people than most mass killers. However, because the killer was[Read More…]
If there is a mass shooting and anyone is asked where, the answer is likely to be the United States. The reason of course is the easy availability of guns, even guns that fire like machine guns. The Second Amendment allows the ‘right to bear arms’ — to prevent tyranny say the proponents. Yet, the world has moved beyond[Read More…]
The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was written into the Bill of Rights and the Constitution in 1787 as the replacement-Constitution for this country, replacing the prior Articles of Confederation, which had bound the United States together as the nation’s first Constitution. We Americans live under America’s second Constitution, but the terms-of-reference in it are the same as[Read More…]
The Las Vegas gunman wasn’t operating merely as a gunman but as a sniper, and yet the U.S. Constitution’s 2nd Amendment makes no distinctions whatsoever regarding handguns versus snipers’ weapons — automatic (or semi-automatic) rifles which spew bullets so fast the Las Vegas shooter was able in the brief time-span of only around ten minutes to murder at least[Read More…]
‘We don’t know what his belief system was at this time.’ Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo, Oct 2, 2017 Those gathered at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas were doing what revellers always do. But the script would not let them persist in their pleasures, to let them be, communing together before their figures of country music. What[Read More…]
It plays out as a horror story of law enforcement. A distress call to the Minneapolis police about activity taking place behind the house on Washburn Avenue, possibly a sound of intercourse, distress, or both, taking place after 11 during the night of July 15. “Hi, I’m, I can hear someone out back and I, I’m not sure if she’s[Read More…]
Hodgkin’s lymphoma — formerly known as Hodgkin’s disease — is a cancer of the lymphatic system, which is part of your immune system. In Hodgkin’s lymphoma, cells in the lymphatic system grow abnormally and may spread beyond the lymphatic system. As Hodgkin’s lymphoma progresses, it compromises your body’s ability to fight infection. Hodgkin’s lymphoma is one of two common[Read More…]
On 14 June 2017, Steve Scalise, House Majority Whip and Louisiana Congressman, was wounded by a gunman – small businessman James Hodgkinson, 66 – who opened fire at a baseball park in Alexandria, VA where several legislators and their aides were practicing. Gun violence in America is more prevalent than in any other country in the world. However, instead of[Read More…]
Introduction Contrary to the Hegelian assumption that civilization progresses in a linear mode, the contradictions of capitalism between the promise of prosperity for all, on the one hand, and the reality of perpetual capital concentration, on the other, undermines bourgeois democracy and leads toward a more militaristic-police state. The nexus of structural and behavioral violence has not been lost even[Read More…]
Yet another mass shooting in the U.S., this time at Ft. Lauderdale airport, Florida’s second largest. A certain Esteban Santiago flew from Alaska changing planes en route at Minneapolis. Arriving, he headed to the baggage collection area, claimed his suitcase, opened it in the privacy of a toilet, removed a gun, methodically loaded it, and began shooting in the baggage[Read More…]
January 1, 2017: This New Year’s Eve, 750 heavy wooden crosses were distributed to a gathering of Chicagoans commemorating the victims of gun violence killed in 2016. Rev. Michael Pfleger and the Faith Community of St. Sabina Parish had issued a call to carry crosses constructed by Greg Zanis. The crosses, uniform in size, presented the name and age[Read More…]
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Our beloved K.P.Sasi is no more. Filmmaker, cartoonist, writer, mentor, friend and above all tireless activist championing the cause of every underdog, Sasi breathed his last, mid-afternoon this Christmas day – after battling a medical condition for months. I remember the last time I met him, almost exactly a month before he passed away, at the ayurvedic healing center in[Read More…]
