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

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, not...
230 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

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more