Skip to main content

Remembering Sandy Hook

By

The nation took pause yesterday in memory of perhaps the worst civilian gun-related tragedy in American history.  There have been 31 school shootings since Columbine in 1999.  Yet, local and state governments find it ever more difficult to pass gun laws in the wake of the Supreme Court decision that shot down a DC gun ban in 2009.  We hear over and over again that "guns don't kill people, people kill people."  Well, having easy access to assault weapons sure makes killing people a lot easier, especially six and seven year olds.  One can only hope that a horrible incident like this will call attention to the runaway "gun culture" that has developed in America, and has affected middle-class kids like Adam Lanza.

Comments

  1. James FergusonDecember 17, 2012 at 3:30 PM

    Will be interesting how Obama reacts to this,

    http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/sen-feinstein-vows-revive-assault-weapons-ban-article-1.1221793

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rick DiguetteDecember 17, 2012 at 3:58 PM

    I would hope that it won't take too many more massacres like this one before Congress finally takes action. But there is no reason to believe that the Newtown massacre has changed anything in Washington.

    ReplyDelete
  3. James FergusonDecember 18, 2012 at 12:39 PM

    Scarborough appears to have taken an about face on assault weapons,

    http://mediamatters.org/video/2012/12/17/joe-scarborough-breaks-with-the-nra-and-calls-f/191872

    as has Joe Manchin,

    http://www.upi.com/blog/2012/12/17/NRA-member-Sen-Joe-Manchin-No-hunter-needs-an-assault-weapon/3381355760999/

    There's hope yet for an assault weapons ban.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more