Thursday, January 10, 2013 8:53:17 AM
More Guns = More Killing
A soldier stood guard in Mixco, Guatemala, a municipality next to the capital, Guatemala City.
Johan Ordonez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: January 5, 2013
IN the wake of the tragic shooting deaths at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last month, the National Rifle Association [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_rifle_association/index.html ] proposed that the best way to protect schoolchildren was to place a guard — a “good guy with a gun” — in every school, part of a so-called National School Shield Emergency Response Program.
Indeed, the N.R.A.’s solution to the expansion of gun violence in America has been generally to advocate for the more widespread deployment and carrying of guns.
I recently visited some Latin American countries that mesh with the N.R.A.’s vision of the promised land, where guards with guns grace every office lobby, storefront, A.T.M., restaurant and gas station. It has not made those countries safer or saner.
Despite the ubiquitous presence of “good guys” with guns, countries like Guatemala [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/guatemala/index.html ], Honduras [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/honduras/index.html ], El Salvador, Colombia and Venezuela have some of the highest homicide rates in the world.
“A society that is relying on guys with guns to stop violence is a sign of a society where institutions have broken down,” said Rebecca Peters, former director of the International Action Network on Small Arms. “It’s shocking to hear anyone in the United States considering a solution that would make it seem more like Colombia [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/colombia/index.html ].”
As guns proliferate, legally and illegally, innocent people often seem more terrorized than protected.
In Guatemala, riding a public bus is a risky business. More than 500 bus drivers have been killed in robberies since 2007, leading InSight Crime, which tracks organized crime in the Americas, to call it “the most dangerous profession on the planet.” And when bullets start flying, everyone is vulnerable: in 2010 the onboard tally included 155 drivers, 54 bus assistants, 71 passengers and 14 presumed criminals. Some were killed by the robbers’ bullets and some by gun-carrying passengers.
Scientific studies have consistently found that places with more guns have more violent deaths, both homicides and suicides. Women and children are more likely to die if there’s a gun in the house. The more guns in an area, the higher the local suicide rates. “Generally, if you live in a civilized society, more guns mean more death,” said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. “There is no evidence that having more guns reduces crime. None at all.”
After a gruesome mass murder in 1996 provoked public outrage, Australia enacted stricter gun laws, including a 28-day waiting period before purchase and a ban on semiautomatic weapons. Before then, Australia had averaged one mass shooting a year. Since, rates of both homicide and suicide have dropped 50 percent, and there have been no mass killings, said Ms. Peters, who lobbied for the legislation.
Distinctive factors contribute to the high rates of violent crime in Latin America. Many countries in the region had recent civil wars, resulting in a large number of weapons in circulation. Drug- and gang-related violence is widespread. “It’s dangerous to make too tight a link between the availability of weapons and homicide rates,” said Jeremy McDermott, a co-director of InSight Crime who is based in Medellín, Colombia. “There are lots of other variables.”
Still, he said that the recent sharp increase in homicides in Venezuela could be in part explained by the abundance of arms there. Although the government last spring imposed a one-year ban on importing weapons, there had previously been a plentiful influx from Russia. There is a Kalashnikov plant in the country.
In 2011, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime [ http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html ], Honduras led the world in homicides, with 91.6 per 100,000 people. But rates were also alarmingly high in El Salvador (69.1), Jamaica (40.9), Colombia (31.4) and Guatemala (38.5). Venezuela’s was 45.1 in 2010 but is expected to be close to to 80 this year. The United States’ rate is about 5.
THOUGH many of these countries have restrictions on gun ownership, enforcement is lax. According to research by Flacso, the Guatemalan Social Science Academy, illegal guns far outnumber legal weapons in Central America.
All that has spawned a thriving security industry — the good guys with guns that grace every street corner — though experts say it is often unclear if their presence is making crime better or worse. In many countries, the armed guards have only six weeks of training.
Guatemala, with approximately 20,000 police officers, has 41,000 registered private security guards and an estimated 80,000 who are working without authorization. “To put people with guns who are not accountable or trained in places where there are lots of innocent people is just dangerous,” Ms. Peters said, noting that lethal force is used to deter minor crimes like shoplifting.
Indeed, even as some Americans propose expanding our gun culture into elementary schools, some Latin American cities are trying to rein in theirs. Bogotá’s new mayor, Gustavo Petro, has forbidden residents to carry weapons on streets, in cars or in any public space since last February, and the murder rate has dropped 50 percent to a 27-year low. He said, “Guns are not a defense, they are a risk.”
William Godnick, coordinator of the Public Security Program at the United Nations Regional Center for Peace, Disarmament and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, said that United Nations studies in Central America showed that people who used a gun to defend against an armed assault were far more likely to be injured or killed than if they had no weapon.
Post-Sandy Hook, gun groups in the United States are now offering teachers firearms training. But do I really want my kid’s teachers packing a weapon?
“If you’re living in a ‘Mad Max’ world, where criminals have free rein and there’s no government to stop them, then I’d want to be armed,” said Dr. Hemenway of Harvard. “But we’re not in that circumstance. We’re a developed, stable country.”
Elisabeth Rosenthal is a physician and a science reporter for The New York Times.
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/sunday-review/more-guns-more-killing.html [with comments]
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For Americans Under 50, Stark Findings on Health
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: January 9, 2013
Younger Americans die earlier and live in poorer health than their counterparts in other developed countries, with far higher rates of death from guns, car accidents and drug addiction [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/drug-abuse-and-dependence/overview.html ], according to a new analysis of health and longevity in the United States.
Researchers have known for some time that the United States fares poorly in comparison with other rich countries, a trend established in the 1980s. But most studies have focused on older ages, when the majority of people die.
The findings were stark. Deaths before age 50 accounted for about two-thirds of the difference in life expectancy between males in the United States and their counterparts in 16 other developed countries, and about one-third of the difference for females. The countries in the analysis included Canada, Japan, Australia, France, Germany and Spain.
The 378-page study by a panel of experts [ http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13497 ] convened by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council [ http://www.iom.edu/ ] is the first to systematically compare death rates and health measures for people of all ages, including American youths. It went further than other studies in documenting the full range of causes of death, from diseases to accidents to violence. It was based on a broad review of mortality and health studies and statistics.
The panel called the pattern of higher rates of disease and shorter lives “the U.S. health disadvantage,” and said it was responsible for dragging the country to the bottom in terms of life expectancy over the past 30 years. American men ranked last in life expectancy among the 17 countries in the study, and American women ranked second to last.
“Something fundamental is going wrong,” said Dr. Steven Woolf [ http://www.familymedicine.vcu.edu/directory/woolf.html ], chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, who led the panel. “This is not the product of a particular administration or political party. Something at the core is causing the U.S. to slip behind these other high-income countries. And it’s getting worse.”
Car accidents, gun violence and drug overdoses were major contributors to years of life lost by Americans before age 50.
The rate of firearm homicides was 20 times higher in the United States than in the other countries, according to the report, which cited a 2011 study of 23 countries. And though suicide rates were lower in the United States, firearm suicide rates were six times higher.
Sixty-nine percent of all American homicide deaths in 2007 involved firearms, compared with an average of 26 percent in other countries, the study said. “The bottom line is that we are not preventing damaging health behaviors,” said Samuel Preston [ http://sociology.sas.upenn.edu/samuel_preston ], a demographer and sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was on the panel. “You can blame that on public health officials, or on the health care system. No one understands where responsibility lies.”
Panelists were surprised at just how consistently Americans ended up at the bottom of the rankings. The United States had the second-highest death rate from the most common form of heart disease, the kind that causes heart attacks, and the second-highest death rate from lung disease, a legacy of high smoking rates in past decades. American adults also have the highest diabetes [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/diabetes/overview.html ] rates.
Youths fared no better. The United States has the highest infant mortality [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/infant_mortality/index.html ] rate among these countries, and its young people have the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/venerealdiseases/index.html ], teen pregnancy [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/adolescent-pregnancy/overview.html ] and deaths from car crashes. Americans lose more years of life before age 50 to alcohol and drug abuse [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/drug-abuse/overview.html ] than people in any of the other countries.
Americans also had the lowest probability over all of surviving to the age of 50. The report’s second chapter details health indicators for youths where the United States ranks near or at the bottom. There are so many that the list takes up four pages. Chronic diseases, including heart disease, also played a role for people under 50.
“We expected to see some bad news and some good news,” Dr. Woolf said. “But the U.S. ranked near and at the bottom in almost every heath indicator. That stunned us.”
There were bright spots. Death rates from cancers that can be detected with tests, like breast cancer [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/breast-cancer/overview.html ], were lower in the United States. Adults had better control over their cholesterol [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/nutrition/cholesterol/overview.html ] and high blood pressure [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/hypertension/overview.html ]. And the very oldest Americans — above 75 — tended to outlive their counterparts.
The panel sought to explain the poor performance. It noted the United States has a highly fragmented health care system, with limited primary care resources and a large uninsured population. It has the highest rates of poverty among the countries studied.
Education also played a role. Americans who have not graduated from high school die from diabetes at three times the rate of those with some college, Dr. Woolf said. In the other countries, more generous social safety nets buffer families from the health consequences of poverty, the report said.
Still, even the people most likely to be healthy, like college-educated Americans and those with high incomes, fare worse on many health indicators.
The report also explored less conventional explanations. Could cultural factors like individualism and dislike of government interference play a role? Americans are less likely to wear seat belts and more likely to ride motorcycles without helmets.
The United States is a bigger, more heterogeneous society with greater levels of economic inequality, and comparing its health outcomes to those in countries like Sweden or France may seem lopsided. But the panelists point out that this country spends more on health care than any other in the survey. And as recently as the 1950s, Americans scored better in life expectancy and disease than many of the other countries in the current study.
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/health/americans-under-50-fare-poorly-on-health-measures-new-report-says.html
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Keith Ratliff Dead: FPSRussia YouTube Channel Producer Shot In Apparent Homicide, Georgia Police Say
Posted: 01/09/2013 11:56 am EST | Updated: 01/09/2013 11:22 pm EST
A producer behind a popular gun enthusiast YouTube channel was found dead with a single gunshot wound to the head at his business last week.
Police in Georgia are investigating the apparent homicide of Keith Ratliff, a 32-year-old Franklin County resident.
"It's really heartbreaking [ http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/story/20538156/fpsrussia ], and everything I see, or any kind of memorable thing -- I mean, I just break down," Amanda Ratliff, the victim's wife, told MyFoxAtlanta. "He had such a life to live, and such a good life to live, and things to look forward to."
Authorities found multiple weapons at the scene of the crime [ http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/police-investigate-death-popular-youtube-channel-o/nTqpg/ ], some manufactured by Ratliff himself, WSBTV reports. Investigators have not identified a motive.
Ratliff worked mostly behind the scenes to produce videos for the YouTube channel FPSRussia [ http://www.youtube.com/user/FPSRussia ], a site dedicated to showcasing high-power firearms. FPSRussia -- which commands nearly 3.5 million subscribers and has generated over 500,000 page views is one of the top 10 channels ranked on YouTube [ http://www.youtube.com/charts/videos_views?t=a&gl=US ].
In addition to his contributions to FPSRussia, Ratliff also worked for FPS Industries [ http://fpsindustries.com/ ], a company focussing on "product development and testing for hard use firearms shooters," according to its website. FPS Industries is located in Carnesville, Ga.
Ratliff was known as an outspoken gun advocate. In a message posted to Twitter on Aug 11, 2012, he wrote: "I went to the movies with my pistol in my pocket the whole time I was praying that somebody would try to pull a Batman!"
Kitty Wandel [ https://twitter.com/Paintball_Kitty ], a manager and producer for FPSRussia, released a brief statement [ http://www.twitlonger.com/show/kkue1m ] regarding Ratliff's passing:
As it seems to be leaking out I will confirm to save more messages and questions coming to me. As I am sure most of you know Keith Ratliff has been with the FPS Russia channel for quite some time now, helping us out with everything from pulling pranks to finding almost impossible weapons to use in videos. It saddens me to confirm that he was indeed found having passed away here in Georgia on Thursday. I do ask for some privacy right now as you can imagine it has shocked us all and our main thoughts and concerns lay with his family right now. Thank you for understanding.
Ratliff had recently moved to northern Georgia for work. His wife and 2-year-old son remain in Kentucky.
Scroll through the slideshow for relevant images, video and tweets:
[slideshow embedded]
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/09/keith-ratliff-fpsrussia-dead_n_2439284.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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FPS Russia Tazer Fun
What you're seeing here are friends and family coping with the loss of a loved one. The man on the right, who is new to most of you, is the victim's cousin. Not all of our time has been so lighthearted but it's good to get your mind off of the tragedy from time to time.
FPS Russia's Channel: http://youtube.com/fpsrussia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwGDiNoO8_g
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After Pinpointing Gun Owners, Paper Is a Target
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
Published: January 6, 2013
WHITE PLAINS — Local newspapers across the country look for stories that will bring them national attention, but The Journal News [ http://www.lohud.com/ ], a daily nestled in a wooded office park in a suburb north of New York, may have gotten more than it bargained for.
Two weeks ago, the paper published the names and addresses of handgun permit holders — a total of 33,614 — in two suburban counties, Westchester and Rockland, and put maps [ http://www.lohud.com/interactive/article/20121223/NEWS01/121221011/Map-Where-gun-permits-your-neighborhood- ] of their locations online. The maps, which appeared with the article [ http://www.lohud.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012312230056 ] “The Gun Owner Next Door: What You Don’t Know About the Weapons in Your Neighborhood,” received more than one million views on the Web site of The Journal News — more than twice as many as the paper’s previous record, about a councilman who had two boys arrested for running a cupcake stand.
But the article, which left gun owners feeling vulnerable to harassment or break-ins, also drew outrage from across the country. Calls and e-mails grew so threatening that the paper’s president and publisher, Janet Hasson, hired armed guards [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/nyregion/putnam-officials-keep-gun-permit-records-from-journal-news.html ] to monitor the newspaper’s headquarters in White Plains and its bureau in West Nyack, N.Y.
Personal information about editors and writers at the paper has been posted online, including their home addresses and information about where their children attended school; some reporters have received notes saying they would be shot on the way to their cars; bloggers have encouraged people to steal credit card information of Journal News employees; and two packages containing white powder have been sent to the newsroom and a third to a reporter’s home (all were tested by the police and proved to be harmless).
“As journalists, we are prepared for criticism,” Ms. Hasson said, as she sat in her meticulously tended office and described the ways her 225 employees have been harassed since the article was published. “But in the U.S., journalists should not be threatened.” She has paid for staff members who do not feel safe in their homes to stay at hotels, offered guards to walk employees to their cars, encouraged employees to change their home telephone numbers and has been coordinating with the local police.
The decision to report and publish the data, taken from publicly available records, happened within a week of the school massacre in nearby Newtown, Conn. On Dec. 17, Dwight R. Worley, a tax reporter, returned from trying to interview the families of victims in Newtown with an idea to obtain and publish local gun permit data. He discussed his idea with his immediate editor, Kathy Moore, who in turn talked to her bosses, according to CynDee Royle, the paper’s editor.
Mr. Worley started putting out requests for public information that Monday, receiving the data from Westchester County that day and from Rockland County three days later. All the editors involved said there were not any formal meetings about the article, although it came up at several regular news meetings. Ms. Royle, who had been at The Journal News in 2006 when the newspaper published similar data, without mapping it or providing street numbers, said that editors discussed publishing the data in at least three meetings.
Ms. Hasson said Ms. Royle told her that an article with gun permit data would be published on Sunday, Dec. 23. While Ms. Hasson had not been at the paper in 2006, she knew there had been some controversy then. She made sure to be available on Dec. 23 by e-mail, and accessible to the staff if any problems came up. A spokesman for Gannett, which owns The Journal News, said it was never informed about the coming article.
“We’ve run this content before,” Ms. Hasson said. “I supported it, and I supported the publishing of the info.”
By Dec. 26, employees had begun receiving threatening calls and e-mails, and by the next day, reporters not involved in the article were being threatened. The reaction did not stop at the local paper: Gracia C. Martore, the chief executive of Gannett, also received threatening messages.
Many of the threats, Ms. Hasson said, were coming from across the country, and not from the paper’s own community. But local gun owners and supporters are encouraging an advertiser boycott of The Journal News. Scott Sommavilla, president of the 35,000-member Westchester County Firearm Owners Association [ http://www.wcfoany.org/ ], said 44,000 people had downloaded a list of advertisers from his group’s Web site. But he emphasized that his association would never encourage any personal threats. Appealing to advertisers, he said, is the best way for gun owners to express their disapproval of the article.
“They’re really upset about it,” Mr. Sommavilla said. “They’re afraid for their families.”
The paper’s decision has drawn criticism from journalists who question whether The Journal News should have provided more context and whether it was useful to publish individual names and addresses. Journalists with specialties in computer-assisted reporting have argued that just because public data has become more readily available in recent years does not mean that it should be published raw. In ways, they argued, it would have been more productive to publish data by ZIP code or block.
“The Journal News, I personally think, should have rethought the idea as actually going so far to identify actual addresses,” said Steve Doig, a professor with an expertise in data journalism at Arizona State. “This particular database ought to remain a public record. Just because it’s available and public record doesn’t mean we have to make it so readily available.”
Mr. Worley disagrees. “The people have as much of a right to know who owns guns in their communities as gun owners have to own weapons,” he said.
Mr. Doig pointed out that the recent publication of gun information by other papers has made access to this public information more difficult because legislators started blocking the data immediately. “The backlash, very typically from this, is for legislators to try to close up the access to this type of data.”
Mr. Worley said he had received mainly taunting phone calls sprinkled in with callers who said “you should die.” He found broken glass outside of his home and would not say how much time he was spending there right now. But he said he had largely been supported by the newsroom.
The Journal News’s features editor, Mary Dolan, said that while she was not involved with the publication of the article, her home address and phone numbers were published online in retaliation. She has had to disconnect her phone and has “taken my social media presence and just put it on the shelf for a while.” She has also received angry phone calls from former neighbors in Westchester whose gun information was published.
She said she was especially concerned about the part-time staff members who write up wedding anniversary and church potluck announcements who have been harassed. But she supports the paper for its decision.
“It sparked a conversation that needed to occur in this country, and it revealed tactics that will be employed when gun owners feel their rights are threatened,” she said.
Putnam County has refused to release similar data, but Ms. Hasson said she would continue to press for it. She would not say whether the paper had lost any of its advertisers. According to the Alliance for Audited Media [ http://www.auditedmedia.com/ ], The Journal News, like many newspapers nationwide, has had sharp declines in circulation. Its total circulation from Monday through Friday fell from 111,536 in September 2007 to 68,850 in September 2012.
At the same time, Ms. Hasson has been trying to calm the nerves of her family after photographs of the home she is renting and references to her adult children were put online.
“They are concerned about my safety,” she said about her children. “But they are very supportive.”
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/nyregion/after-pinpointing-gun-owners-journal-news-is-a-target.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/nyregion/after-pinpointing-gun-owners-journal-news-is-a-target.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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Gun Owners Are Coming To Take Away Our Free Speech Rights
By Judge H. Lee Sarokin
Posted: 01/07/2013 12:53 pm
Is there anything more delicious than gun owners urging that a right guaranteed under the Constitution should be subject to reasonable regulation if the failure to do so causes harm? They want limitations -- but not on the Second Amendment right to bear arms but rather the First Amendment right of free speech. A Westchester County, N.Y. newspaper, the Journal News, published a map showing the names and addresses of pistol permit holders. The information was public and there is no real dispute over the right to publish it. Nonetheless, the outcry from gun advocates was deafening.
The primary complaint seemed slightly illogical: the publication of the information placed gun owners in greater danger from criminals. Wait a minute. Isn't this what it's all about -- that having a gun in your house protects you from criminals and deters them? Why would criminals knowing that you have a weapon in the house increase rather than reduce the risk of home invasion? Publicizing those that don't have guns might do that, but that complaint doesn't come from gun owners.
On the other hand, neighbors, particularly parents, would like to know if their children are playing at houses that have guns. They fear that one of those four-year-old "bad guys" will find and play with their father's gun and accidentally shoot their child. Others might be concerned that the crazy guy next door has a weapon. Opponents of the publication validly claim that it might target weapons for theft. It also identifies the location of law enforcement personnel, police and prison guards; although one suspects that such information regarding addresses is available through other sources.
Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter ranted on this issue like two inmates in an insane asylum. In the most ludicrous analogy every posited, Coulter said [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/04/ann-coulter-guns-women-abortions-mothers-murder-child_n_2408584.html ] if these facts about gun owners can be posted, why not publicize "which women (who had an abortion) on the street are likely to murder a child" -- suggesting that somehow a woman who had an abortion is likely to murder someone else's child! She also declared that "liberals won't let us go after criminals," and, of course, "They are coming after our guns!" In like vein, the newspaper received death threats and had to hire security guards. I don't think even the NRA can claim that these threats came from criminals rather than "law-abiding" gun owners.
The point of all of this is that there well may be some merit to the concerns from the publication of this information, despite the absolute right to do so. Maybe reconsideration should be given to designating this as public information or thought be given to restricting its publication in a reasonable and sensible way. Maybe those who oppose publication are not intent on destroying all rights of free speech, just in the same way persons who want to restrict and regulate semi-automatic weapons, huge ammunition magazines and gun shows are not necessarily intent on confiscating all guns. Free speech certainly does less harm than guns. Shouldn't both be susceptible to some sensible and reasonable regulation in the public interest? Encroachment, limitations or regulations of any constitutional right should be done with great caution and only for compelling reasons, but if the First Amendment should yield a little to reason -- should not the Second as well?
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judge-h-lee-sarokin/gun-owners-are-coming-to-_b_2425320.html [with comments]
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DebraLee Hovey, Connecticut Republican, Apologizes For Telling Gabrielle Giffords To 'Get Out'
By Nick Wing
Posted: 01/07/2013 6:22 pm EST | Updated: 01/08/2013 8:14 am EST
Connecticut state Rep. DebraLee Hovey (R) has apologized after directing a Facebook post at former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) last week, telling the lawmaker who was wounded in a mass shooting to "stay out of [her] towns." Giffords on Friday visited Newtown, Conn., where a mass shooting last month killed 26, including 20 first graders, as well as the gunman and his mother.
“The remarks I made regarding Congresswoman Gifford’s visit were insensitive and if I offended anyone I truly apologize,” Hovey said, according to the New Haven Register [ http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2013/01/07/news/doc50eb20ed3b8d0204090529.txt ]. "My comments were meant to be protective of the privacy of the families and our community as we work to move on, and were in no way intended as an insult to Congresswoman Giffords personally. Our community has struggled greatly through this tragedy, and we are all very sensitive to the potential for this event to be exploited for political purposes. This is what I wish to avoid."
Hovey's posts [ http://courantblogs.com/capitol-watch/state-rep-debralee-hovey-to-gabby-giffords-stay-out/ ], removed since their original posting on Friday, read "Gabby Giffords stay out of my towns!!!"
and went on to allege that the meeting between Giffords, state leaders and families of those killed during last month's massacre was driven by "pure political motives."
Giffords' trip to Newtown was days before the two-year anniversary of the shooting in Tucson, Ariz., which killed six and injured 13, including the congresswoman. Giffords was left partially blind, with a paralyzed right arm and brain injury, according to the Associated Press [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/05/gabrielle-giffords-newtown-visit_n_2415720.html ].
Giffords's husband, Mark Kelly, has become a vocal proponent for gun control since her shooting. Upon hearing the news of the Newtown shooting, Kelly challenged leaders [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/mark-kelly-newtown-school-shooting_n_2303008.html ] to exhibit "the courage to participate in a meaningful discussion about our gun laws -- and how they can be reformed and better enforced to prevent gun violence and death in America."
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/07/debralee-hovey-connecticut_n_2427485.html [with comments]
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Melinda Herman, Mom Who Shot Intruder, Inspires Gun Control Foes
By KATE BRUMBACK
01/09/13 07:47 PM ET EST
LOGANVILLE, Ga. -- A Georgia mother who shot an intruder at her home has become a small part of the roaring gun control debate, with some firearms enthusiasts touting her as a textbook example of responsible gun ownership.
Melinda Herman grabbed a handgun and hid in a crawl space with her two children when a man broke in last week and approached the family at their home northeast of Atlanta, police said. Herman called her husband on the phone, and with him reminding her of the lessons she recently learned at a shooting range, Herman opened fire, seriously wounding the burglary suspect.
The National Rifle Association tweeted a link to a news story about the shooting, and support poured in from others online, hailing Herman as a hero. The local sheriff said he was proud of the way she handled the situation.
"This lady decided that she wasn't going to be a victim, and I think everyone else looks at this and hopes they have the courage to do what she done," Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman said Wednesday.
Herman was working from home Friday when she saw a man walk up to the front door. She told police he rang the doorbell twice and then over and over again. He went back to his SUV, got something out and walked back toward the house, a police report said.
Herman took her 9-year-old son and daughter into an upstairs bedroom and locked the door. They went into bathroom and she locked that door, too. She got her handgun from a safe, the report said, and hid with her children. At some point, she called her husband, who kept her on the line and called 911 on another line.
In a 10-minute 911 recording released by the Walton County Sheriff's Office, Donnie Herman calmly explained what was happening to a dispatcher. His part of the conversation with his wife was also recorded.
"Is he in the house, Melinda? Are you sure? How do you know? You can hear him in the house?" Donnie Herman said.
His wife told him the intruder was coming closer.
"He's in the bedroom? Shh, shh, relax. Just remember everything that I showed you, everything that I taught you, all right?" Donnie Herman told his wife, explaining later to the dispatcher that he had recently taken her to a gun range.
It wasn't clear from the recording exactly when they went to range and Donnie Herman told The Associated Press on Wednesday the family didn't want to talk about the shooting.
After Donnie Herman told his wife police were on the way, he started shouting: "She shot him. She's shootin' him. She's shootin' him. She's shootin' him. She's shootin' him."
"OK," the dispatcher responded.
"Shoot him again! Shoot him!" Donnie Herman yelled. He told the dispatcher he heard a lot of screaming, but he seems to get increasingly worried when he doesn't hear anything from his wife.
Melinda Herman told police she started shooting the man when he opened the door to the crawl space. The man pleaded with her to stop, but she kept firing until she had emptied her rounds, she told police. She then fled to a neighbor's house with her children.
The man drove away in his SUV. Police found the SUV on another subdivision street and discovered a man bleeding from his face and body in a nearby wooded area. Police identified the suspect as 32-year-old Paul Slater of Atlanta.
Chapman said the hospital asked him not to comment on Slater's condition, but he said he is not certain Slater will survive. Authorities have a warrant but haven't formally arrested Slater yet. They plan to charge him with burglary, possession of tools for the commission of a crime and aggravated assault, Walton County sheriff's Capt. Greg Hall said.
A phone number for Slater was not listed and it was not clear whether he has an attorney.
Authorities believe Slater targeted a home in another local subdivision but left when confronted by the homeowner, Chapman said.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/09/melinda-herman-mom-who-shot-intruder_n_2443920.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Misty Nunley, Woman Killed In Tulsa Shooting, Was 'Getting Her Life Back Together'
Misty Nunley, 33, was killed during a shooting at an apartment complex in Tulsa, Okla.
By JUSTIN JUOZAPAVICIUS
01/08/13 08:27 PM ET EST
TULSA, Okla. -- One of four women found fatally shot inside a Tulsa apartment was staying at the crime-plagued building with a friend as she tried to get her life back together, her mother said Tuesday as police asked for the public's help in solving the murders.
Misty Nunley, along with 23-year-old twin sisters Rebeika Powell and Kayetie Melchor, and Julie Jackson, 55, were found dead Monday by police. No arrests have been made, and investigators have released no other details – including possible suspects, how the women knew each other or why they may have been targeted.
But Nunley's mother, Cheryl Nunley, said her 33-year-old daughter had befriended Powell and had been staying with her on and off for the past week. She said she called her daughter nearly every morning to check in, and spoke to her Monday just hours before the women were found dead.
"She had positive people back in her life," Cheryl Nunley told The Associated Press, holding back tears while sitting with family and friends in a tiny apartment a few blocks away from the crime scene.
"She's not perfect. She ran around with some people she shouldn't have been running around with, but she was getting her life back together."
Tulsa police spokesman Leland Ashley said Tuesday that detectives and officers were "beating the bushes" to figure out what happened at the apartment, where police also found an unharmed 3-year-old boy. Police said he was taken into protective custody but released no other information.
"Right now, we have no clear-cut suspect," Ashley said, urging anyone with information to come forward.
"I don't want to strike fear in the community tonight, but we do have an individual or individuals who murdered four people," he added. "Do we know if there was a motive, like a jealous lover? We don't know that. We can't say if it was random or if someone knew (the victims)."
Relatives and neighbors have told Nunley's family there may have been a romantic spat between one of the women who lived at the apartment and a boyfriend or ex-boyfriend. Police wouldn't comment on those rumors.
Hillary McGuire, the former stepsister of Powell and Melchor, told the AP she had lost touch with the sisters over the past couple years but remembered both as "the nicest girls."
"I hope to God they find whoever did it and lock them away forever," she said.
Messages left by the AP at phone numbers believed to belong to other relatives of the victims weren't returned Tuesday.
The four women were found dead in a unit at the Fairmont Terrace Apartments, a gated but rundown complex in south Tulsa's Riverwood neighborhood where residents say crime is common. The complex has a nighttime security patrol and curfew, but police believe the killings occurred during the day Monday. Police said they received a 911 call reporting the shooting around 12:30 p.m.
Cheryl Nunley said she didn't know the other three women or how they knew each other. She said Misty had been estranged from her family but was working to repair the relationships and get reacquainted with her own 19-year-old daughter, Shondelle.
"She last called me Sunday night," recalled Shondelle. "She told me she was proud of me."
Cheryl Nunley is convinced that more than one assailant was responsible for the killings, saying her daughter would have fought any one attacker "to the death."
"I don't know anybody who was mad enough at my daughter to do that to her," she said.
Crime-scene tape had been removed by Tuesday afternoon at the apartment complex, where bed sheets or cardboard hang as improvised draperies in many windows behind a black wrought-iron gate. The guard shack is empty and signs read "Curfew 10 p.m. for everyone, everyday" and "Photo ID required to be on property." Three of the units are burned out and boarded up with plywood.
Tulsa police said there were two murders at the complex last year, and residents of the neighborhood say gunfire and break-ins are fairly common.
"We're in the eye of the storm," said Charles Burke, a 48-year-old construction worker who lives across the street but didn't hear the shootings. "You're on your toes. You can't be too careful."
Jamie Kramer, a 28-year-old mother of two young children, has lived in the neighborhood for 10 years. She said crime seems to come in cycles and that things had been pretty quiet for several months until Monday.
"It escalates and goes back down, it escalates and it goes back down," she said.
Alexis Draite, a 20-year-old who recently moved to the area from Oklahoma City, also said she didn't hear gunshot Monday. She said she has a routine: "Lock the doors, lock the cars and don't stay outside longer than you need to."
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/09/misty-nunley-tulsa-shooting_n_2438876.html [with comments]
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We're now one step closer to America's coming civil war
In this Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2013, file photo, the dome of the Capitol is reflected in a skylight of the Capitol Visitor's Center in Washington.
(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
By Arthur Herman
Published January 03, 2013
FoxNews.com
The New Year has started with a monstrosity of a budget deal, one that proves that neither political party, Democrats or Republicans, is really serious about controlling the growth of big government.
But soap opera dramatics about fiscal "cliffs" and sequestration shouldn’t deflect from where President Obama is really taking this country. Consider this story from the Wall Street Journal a few days before Christmas:
“Thousands of people in several Argentine cities ransacked supermarkets for a second day in the latest challenge to President Chistina Kirchner, who is struggling to revive a weak economy...In the central city Rosario, two people were killed during the incidents and 137 people arrested.
“The violence puts Mrs. Kirchner in a difficult position as the poor are [her] core constituents...Her government spends billions of dollars a year to help low income families, including free health care...[Yet] Argentine activists who claim to represent the poor traditionally block access to supermarkets in the month of December to demand free food and other items...The latest events were some of the worst acts of looting and vandalism in years.... Local media showed dozens of men, women, and children hauling away televisions, refrigerators, and food.”
Some have said my warnings about a coming civil war between makers and takers are exaggerated. It’s true that Argentina’s politicians have been waging class warfare since Juan and Eva Peron–and they aren’t fazed when it turns bloody. Obama and the Democrats are relative newcomers to the game. But Argentina reveals who really suffers when those who create a nation’s wealth get mugged by those who spend it–as just happened this week in Washington.
It’s the poor and the middle class, the very ones big government says it’s trying to protect.
And sadly that’s where Mitt Romney had it wrong.
That 47 percent of Americans who get unemployment benefits, Social Security disability checks, Medicare and Medicaid, and government student loans, aren’t the real takers. Like the rioters in Rosario, they’re just pawns in a perennial battle between those who see wealth and prosperity as something created by hard work, ingenuity, and innovation in a free market system–or something to be doled out by government.
Experience teaches that those who believe in free markets are right. The November election and the budget deal, however, show that the other side is winning, and winning big.
Since 1970, America’s public sector has exploded as a percentage of GDP, rising to almost 25% last year. While the national unemployment rate hovers at the 8% mark, government worker unemployment rate is a cozy 3.8%. Sixteen percent of America’s workforce now work for government. By the time the Obama administration ends, we won’t be that far away from Argentina’s 21 percent.
Yet as an economic and social enterprise, government creates nothing.
Far from adding to people’s standard of living, government is the number one cause of poverty in this country. It forces those who depend on its largesse to live hand to mouth, with no time or money to plan for the future. They become unable to fend for themselves---and increasingly resentful of those who can.
When the economy tanks and the government checks have to shrink, their only alternative is to take to the streets. That’s what happening in Argentina, and in Greece; and that’s where the growth of government is taking us here, as this current budget deal increases handouts–and more and more Americans are finding that an unemployment or Social Security disability check is their only life line.
Washington’s Republicans and Democrats alike have become the toll collectors on the road to serfdom–and the road to Rosario.
How far down that road depends on how our private sector rallies in 2013 after two numbing defeats, first on November 7 and then on Capitol Hill this week.
It needs to explain to that 47 percent that when big government wins, we all lose–and that this nation won’t survive if it does.
Historian Arthur Herman is the author of the just released "Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II [ http://www.amazon.com/Freedoms-Forge-American-Business-Produced/dp/1400069645 (and see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=56405700 and preceding {and any future following})]" (Random House May 2012) and the Pulitzer Prize finalist book "Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age [ http://www.amazon.com/Gandhi-Churchill-Rivalry-Destroyed-Empire/dp/0553383760 ]" (Bantam, 2008).
©2013 FOX News Network, LLC
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/03/were-now-one-step-closer-to-america-coming-civil-war/
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Schaeffer Cox, Alaska Militia Leader, Sentenced To Nearly 26 Years
Schaeffer Cox, a boyish-looking young man with a soft voice who spewed anti-government rhetoric and amassed weapons in a plot to kill federal law enforcement officials, will spend nearly 26 years in a federal prison.
By MARK THIESSEN
01/08/13 07:12 PM ET EST
ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- A boyish-looking young man with a soft voice who spewed anti-government rhetoric and amassed weapons in a plot to kill federal law enforcement officials will spend nearly 26 years in a federal prison.
Schaeffer Cox was sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court on nine felony counts, including conspiracy and possessing illegal weapons. The 28-year-old is the third and last member of the Alaska Peacemakers Militia to be sentenced after authorities used an informant to infiltrate the group.
Cox came off at times as arrogant during his trial last spring, but he spoke with a very different demeanor during the two-hour sentencing hearing.
"I put myself here, with my own words," he said, choking back tears. "And I feel horrible about that. And I hurt my family, and that's who is really paying."
Federal prosecutors portrayed Cox as a dangerous militia leader who helped stockpile a huge cache of illegal weapons while plotting a strategy to one day kill judges, state troopers and other government officials.
According to prosecutors, Cox believed his group would eventually need to take up arms against the government, and be sufficiently armed and equipped to sustain a takeover of the government or become a new government in the event of a collapse.
Cox came to the attention of the FBI in late 2009 after speeches in Montana that claimed the Fairbanks militia had 3,500 members and was armed with mines and other military weapons. But the group only had about a dozen members and, as Judge Robert Bryan noted, never trained for military duty.
As the investigation unfolded over more than a year, the FBI eventually used an informant to infiltrate the group. He recorded more than 100 hours of conversations.
Cox's attorney Nelson Traverso claimed during the trial that the case was an overreach by prosecutors and an attempt to silence Cox and his offensive but protected speech.
Cox once told a state judge some militia members would sooner murder her than appear before her, and told an Alaska State Trooper the militia had officers outgunned.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Skrocki said that Cox eventually crossed the line separating offhand comments about killing someone to formulation of plans to do so.
He and others hatched a plan intended to kill two government officials for every one militia member who was killed – a strategy known within the group as "241" or "two for one."
Cox, along with militia foot soldiers Coleman Barney and Lonnie Vernon, have been sentenced in the plot.
Cox's new lawyer, Peter Camiel of Seattle, had him undergo a psychological examination, which indicated Cox suffered from paranoia disorders, which he said could be treated with drugs and counseling.
"I put a lot of people in fear by the things that I said," Cox told the court Tuesday. "Some of the crazy stuff that was coming out of my mouth, I see that, and I sounded horrible.
"I couldn't have sounded any worse if I tried. The more scared I got, the crazier the stuff," he said. "I wasn't thinking, I was panicking."
He took sole credit for any blame, and apologized for putting his wife and two small children, ages 2 and 4, into a position of pain and uncertainty.
He said it was important to him to provide his children both their parents and home where they could grow up.
"I was so scared that something would jeopardize that, that I wound up running right into the very thing I was running away from," he said.
His new tone didn't sway the lead prosecutor in the case.
"Our view of what Mr. Cox said to the court is really contradicted by his actions," said Skrocki, who sought a 35-year term for Cox.
At the end of the trial in June, Bryan said he wrote down observations about Cox, which included: paranoia, grandiosity, narcissism, egocentricity and pathological lying.
He said the paranoia diagnosis from the defense's psychological exam may supply some reasons for some of Cox's actions, "but it does not provide excuses."
And if it is a true diagnosis, Bryan said Cox will need long-term care to treat it, something the judge said he wasn't sure he would get outside jail.
Bryan also noted Cox was never so ill he didn't have followers.
Under previous federal sentencing guidelines no longer in place, Cox would have faced life in prison with no opportunity for the judge to consider a shorter sentence
Murder conspiracy and other charges against the men were thrown out of a state court in October 2011 after a judge ruled audio and video recordings made during the six-month FBI investigation into Cox and the militia were not admissible because they were made without a search warrant, and therefore violated the Alaska Constitution. The FBI has wider authority to obtain warrants, and charges remained in federal court.
Lonnie Vernon was charged with conspiring to kill public officials, amassing weapons and, along with his wife, of planning to kill a federal judge and an Internal Revenue Service official over a tax dispute. On Monday, he received the same sentence as Cox.
Karen Vernon was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Monday.
Barney was sentenced last year to five years in prison on weapons charges.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/schaeffer-cox-sentenced-26-years_n_2435659.html [with embedded video interview of Cox, and comments]
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Welcome to the new Civil War
Daniel Day Lewis stars as President Abraham Lincoln in this scene from director Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" from DreamWorks Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox.
(Credit: David James, Smpsp)
Lincoln's unfinished war rages on, as the neo-Confederacy tries to turn back the clock on women, gays, God and guns
By Andrew O'Hehir
Saturday, Jan 5, 2013 10:30 AM CST
On a repeat viewing of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln [ http://www.salon.com/topic/lincoln/ ]” over the New Year’s holiday, a scene I had barely noticed the first time jumped out at me. Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_H._Stephens ] (played with reptilian gentility by Jackie Earle Haley), in a secret meeting [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Roads_Conference ] aboard a steamboat with Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, faces up to the reality that the era of slavery has come to an end. Ratification of the 13th Amendment, Stephens muses, will destroy the basis of the Southern economy and the South’s traditional way of life. “We won’t know ourselves anymore,” he says.
If only it had been so. What an affluent slaveowner like Stephens feared most, no doubt, was the utopian vision of “radical Reconstruction” imagined by legendary abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaddeus_Stevens ] (Tommy Lee Jones in the movie), in an earlier conversation with Lincoln in the White House kitchen. Stevens envisioned a future in which all the land and property of the Southern aristocracy would be dispossessed and divided among the emancipated slaves, building a new society of free soil and free labor amid the ruins of tyranny. To put it in contemporary social-studies terms, Stevens hoped that by uprooting and destroying the South’s slave economy, one could also replace its culture.
It didn’t quite work out that way. You can’t boil one of the most tumultuous periods of American history down to one paragraph, but here goes: Lincoln was assassinated by a domestic terrorist and replaced by Andrew Johnson [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Johnson ], who was an incompetent hothead and an unapologetic racist. Within a few years the ambitious project of Reconstruction [ http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart5.html ] fell victim to a sustained insurgency led by the Ku Klux Klan and similar white militia groups. By the late 1870s white supremacist “Redeemers” controlled most local and state governments in the South, and by the 1890s Southern blacks had been disenfranchised and thrust into subservience positions by Jim Crow laws that were only slightly preferable to slavery.
So even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true. We’re still reaping the whirlwind from that long-ago conflict, and now we face a new Civil War, one focused on divisive political issues of the 21st century – most notably the rights and liberties of women and LGBT people – but rooted in toxic rhetoric and ideas inherited from the 19th century.
We’ve just emerged from a presidential campaign that exposed how hardened our political and cultural divide has become, and how poorly the two sides understand each other. Part of the Republican problem, in an election that party thought it would win easily, was that those who felt a visceral disgust toward both the idea and the reality of President Barack Obama simply could not believe that they didn’t represent a majority. As many Republicans are now aware, the party now faces an existential crisis. It’s all very well to go on TV and talk about attracting Latinos and downplaying cultural wedge issues. But the activist core of the Republican Party is neo-Confederate, whether it thinks of itself that way or not. It isn’t interested in common cause with Mexicans or turning down the moral thermostat. Just ask Rick Santorum: What it wants is war.
In the recent “fiscal cliff” negotiations, which ended (of course) in yet another short-term stopgap measure, most congressional Republicans, having sworn a blood oath never to raise taxes on their millionaire patrons, were content to let the nation slide into chaos and catastrophe rather than reach a compromise with the president they have consistently depicted as a socialist renegade or alien interloper. It was like a third-rate farcical reprise of the great congressional struggle depicted by Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner in “Lincoln,” when the defeated and embittered Democrats of 1864 fought a rear-guard action to defend slavery, in defiance of not just history, morality and basic human decency but also tactical judgment and common sense.
Thanks to Lincoln’s great political victory in that Congress, slavery has faded into the history books — maybe too much so. As the controversy over Quentin Tarantino’s slave-revenge western “Django Unchained [ http://www.salon.com/topic/django_unchained/ ]” demonstrates, it still isn’t a history we know how to talk about. It may seem melodramatic to claim that the curse of slavery hangs over us still, but Lincoln himself clearly foresaw that possibility, as his slaveowning predecessor Thomas Jefferson had before him. In Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address [ http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html ], he described slavery as an offense against God, and the bloodshed of the Civil War “as the woe due to those [on both sides] by whom the offense came.” Perhaps a cruel cosmic justice was now being extracted, he concluded, and the war would go on “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
I’m not sure America ever paid that debt, in blood or money or any other currency. The lingering effects of our racist history – from the resegregation of our public schools to the enduring and astonishing “wealth gap [ http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/21/news/economy/wealth-gap-race/index.htm ]” between whites and blacks – are national problems, not just Southern problems. Our new Civil War is infused with the undead spirit of the old one and waged by a rebellious neo-Confederacy rooted in the states of the Old South, but its influence can be felt, as with the pro-slavery forces of the 1860s, in every part of the country. (Fernando Wood, the fiery pro-slavery Democrat played by Lee Pace in “Lincoln,” was a former mayor of New York.)
The new Civil War is not entirely or even principally about race, although there’s no mistaking its pernicious racial component. Even making allowances for Bobby Jindal and Allen West, the neo-Confederate forces are perhaps 99 percent white, in a nation whose fastest-growing demographic groups are neither white nor black. While the issues of the new Civil War are contemporary, its rhetoric is ancient and all too familiar, from states’ rights and resistance to Washington to claims of a special relationship with the Almighty and vague appeals to distinctive “cultural traditions,” employed as a justification for bigotry and oppression.
While the Civil War of the 1860s really was about slavery first and foremost – it was the foundation of the Southern economy, and had concentrated immense wealth in the hands of a small landowning caste – the true subject matter of the new Civil War is much less clear. Abortion and same-sex marriage play a crucial role, to be sure (and we may soon see guns and marijuana enter the picture as well). Those are symbolic issues that reflect larger social tensions around gender roles, sexuality and the “war on women,” but they are not just symbolic issues. Many people on the neo-Confederate side see abortion and Adam-and-Steve marriage as moral outrages or offenses against God, to borrow Lincoln’s phrasing, which must be stopped at almost any cost. Of course, pro-choice activists and marriage-equality advocates see those issues as matters of basic economic justice, guaranteeing to all people the kind of basic personal autonomy that men take for granted, or the common-law legal and medical rights that heterosexual married couples have long enjoyed.
We appear to be moving into an unstable Missouri Compromise [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Compromise ] period of American history, in which regional tiers of states adopt sharply different policies on reproductive rights and marriage rights in particular, but also seem locked into fixed political identities and differing views on fundamental questions of national identity and the national future. Within the past week, we saw Illinois and Rhode Island – core “neo-Union” states, if you will – move closer to legalizing gay marriage, while the Republican governors of Michigan and Virginia (exactly the kind of “border states” where these battles are being fought on the ground) snuck new restrictions on abortion through the legal back door.
If you correlate the states where both same-sex marriage and same-sex civil unions have been banned and the states with the harshest restrictions on abortion, you begin to measure the breadth of the neo-Confederacy: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah. Most (but not all) are onetime Southern slave states and hotbeds of evangelical Christianity, and most (but not all) coincide with the familiar red-blue split between Republicans and Democrats. The battleground states of the moment, on these issues as on many others, are strikingly familiar: Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. All four are currently in the grip of neo-Confederate forces on a state level, and all four have enacted gay-marriage bans and abortion restrictions, even though Obama won them all in both of his election campaigns.
Do I even need to mention that none of the neo-Confederate states are in the Northeast or on the West Coast, regions where abortion remains widely available and same-sex marriage is rapidly becoming routine? Or that the neo-Confederate states of the South and the Plains States have sent nearly all of the intransigent, anti-taxation Tea Party members to Congress, while the neo-Union states of the East and West, with their polyglot, immigrant-rich populations, have elected few or none?
Ultimately, the Missouri Compromise collapsed (as did the short-lived Compromise of 1850 [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1850 ] that followed it), tearing the nation apart and forcing a long overdue reckoning with the enormous evil of slavery.. We are heading toward a similar reckoning now. Secession is no longer an option (although many, on both sides, might wish it were), so the new Civil War is not likely to involve pitched battles in the meadows of Pennsylvania, or hundreds of thousands of dead. Today’s fights over abortion and gays and God and guns have a profound moral dimension, but don’t quite have the world-historical weight of the slavery question. As with slavery, however, it’s tough to imagine any viable long-term middle ground. At the moment, two women who get married in Iowa will have no legal relationship if they move to Kansas, and a teenage girl in Seattle can easily get a safe and legal abortion while her cousin in Dallas faces mandatory counseling, a 24-hour waiting period and a parental consent law. (If they have another cousin in rural Mississippi, she probably won’t find legal abortion services under any terms.)
Regardless of how you feel about those issues, that’s nuts. No nation-state can function indefinitely on that kind of patchwork-quilt basis. Then again, this is the United States of America, land of semi-permanent political paralysis, so “functional” doesn’t really apply. It’s tempting to call upon history and proclaim that the only possible outcome of this new Civil War, after many years of ugly politics and occasional outbreaks of craziness and violence, will resemble the outcome of the last one: the continued expansion of constitutional rights and freedoms and the final defeat of the Confederate strain in American political and cultural life. But other, darker outcomes are definitely possible, and I suspect that as long as we’ve got a country, the Confederacy will still be with us.
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/05/welcome_to_the_new_civil_war/ [with comments]
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Bob Casey Voices Concerns Over Militias, Gun Violence
By Mollie Reilly
Posted: 01/10/2013 12:21 am EST
During a meeting with constituents, Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) further detailed his changing gun control views in light of last month's tragic shooting in Newtown, Conn., voicing concerns over the existence of citizen militias and the proliferation of gun violence.
Casey, a longtime gun advocate who has earned high marks from the National Rifle Association [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/19/us/politics/nra.html ], made headlines last month when he told the Philadelphia Inquirer [ http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/20121219_Sen__Casey_changes_stance_on_gun_laws.html ] that he was so deeply impacted by the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that he would support legislation banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazine clips.
"The power of the weapon, the number of bullets that hit each child, that was so, to me, just so chilling, it haunts me. It should haunt every public official," Casey told the paper.
According to Naked Philadelphian blogger Laura Goldman [ http://nakedphiladelphian.blogspot.com/2013/01/senator-casey-serious-about-gun-control.html ], who attended the meeting with Casey, the senator further discussed his post-Newtown concerns -- including his apprehensions about armed citizen militias.
Goldman reports:
Casey said, "I was haunted by the reality of 20 kids dead and the possibility of an entire school dying. My daughter asked me, Dad, you have a vote. What are you going to do about it?"
For the first time, he questioned the existence of militias and the unlimited rights of gun owners.
"I do not know how many of my constituents are in the militia category, but as someone who loves his country and sees the government as a force of good for its citizens, I am clearly alarmed by this segment of our society," said Casey.
Casey's office did not immediately return a request for comment.
As NPR reported [ http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/03/08/148217754/report-explosive-growth-of-patriot-movement-and-militias-continues ], the number of "patriot movement" militia groups have greatly increased during President Obama's first term. A Southern Poverty Law Center study [ http://splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/the-year-in-hate-and-extremism ] identified as many as 1,200 of these extremist anti-government organizations in existence as of last spring.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/10/bob-casey-guns_n_2444440.html [with comments]
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Piers Morgan: Alex Jones 'Terrifying,' A Perfect 'Advertisement For Gun Control'
Posted: 01/09/2013 8:45 am EST | Updated: 01/09/2013 10:15 am EST
Piers Morgan said on Tuesday that his infamous encounter with radio host Alex Jones would only help his gun control crusade.
The radio host more than lost his temper with Morgan on Monday, going on a monumental rant about guns [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/alex-jones-piers-morgan-guns_n_2429161.html ( http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=83250756 )]. He then speculated that he might be murdered [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/alex-jones-piers-morgan-cops-crackheads_n_2432839.html ( http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=83243898 )] by undercover police officers.
"I can't think of a better advertisement for gun control than Alex Jones' interview last night," Morgan told CNN on Tuesday [ http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/08/morgan-on-fiery-alex-jones-interview-startling-deluded/ ]. "It was startling, it was terrifying in parts, it was completely deluded. It was based on a premise of making Americans so fearful that they all rush out to buy even more guns ... the kind of twisted way that he turned everything into this assault on the Second Amendment is exactly what the gun rights lobby people do."
At least one person agreed that Jones was a terrible spokesman for gun rights: Glenn Beck. Speaking on his radio show Tuesday, he said that Morgan had chosen well if his intention was to discredit the pro-gun movement.
"Piers Morgan is trying to have gun control," Beck said. "He is trying to make everybody who has guns and who believes the Second Amendment to be a deterrent to an out of control government look like a madman. So now he immediately books the madman and makes him look like a conservative."
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/09/piers-morgan-alex-jones-gun-control_n_2438963.html [with comments]
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A soldier stood guard in Mixco, Guatemala, a municipality next to the capital, Guatemala City.
Johan Ordonez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: January 5, 2013
IN the wake of the tragic shooting deaths at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last month, the National Rifle Association [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_rifle_association/index.html ] proposed that the best way to protect schoolchildren was to place a guard — a “good guy with a gun” — in every school, part of a so-called National School Shield Emergency Response Program.
Indeed, the N.R.A.’s solution to the expansion of gun violence in America has been generally to advocate for the more widespread deployment and carrying of guns.
I recently visited some Latin American countries that mesh with the N.R.A.’s vision of the promised land, where guards with guns grace every office lobby, storefront, A.T.M., restaurant and gas station. It has not made those countries safer or saner.
Despite the ubiquitous presence of “good guys” with guns, countries like Guatemala [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/guatemala/index.html ], Honduras [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/honduras/index.html ], El Salvador, Colombia and Venezuela have some of the highest homicide rates in the world.
“A society that is relying on guys with guns to stop violence is a sign of a society where institutions have broken down,” said Rebecca Peters, former director of the International Action Network on Small Arms. “It’s shocking to hear anyone in the United States considering a solution that would make it seem more like Colombia [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/colombia/index.html ].”
As guns proliferate, legally and illegally, innocent people often seem more terrorized than protected.
In Guatemala, riding a public bus is a risky business. More than 500 bus drivers have been killed in robberies since 2007, leading InSight Crime, which tracks organized crime in the Americas, to call it “the most dangerous profession on the planet.” And when bullets start flying, everyone is vulnerable: in 2010 the onboard tally included 155 drivers, 54 bus assistants, 71 passengers and 14 presumed criminals. Some were killed by the robbers’ bullets and some by gun-carrying passengers.
Scientific studies have consistently found that places with more guns have more violent deaths, both homicides and suicides. Women and children are more likely to die if there’s a gun in the house. The more guns in an area, the higher the local suicide rates. “Generally, if you live in a civilized society, more guns mean more death,” said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. “There is no evidence that having more guns reduces crime. None at all.”
After a gruesome mass murder in 1996 provoked public outrage, Australia enacted stricter gun laws, including a 28-day waiting period before purchase and a ban on semiautomatic weapons. Before then, Australia had averaged one mass shooting a year. Since, rates of both homicide and suicide have dropped 50 percent, and there have been no mass killings, said Ms. Peters, who lobbied for the legislation.
Distinctive factors contribute to the high rates of violent crime in Latin America. Many countries in the region had recent civil wars, resulting in a large number of weapons in circulation. Drug- and gang-related violence is widespread. “It’s dangerous to make too tight a link between the availability of weapons and homicide rates,” said Jeremy McDermott, a co-director of InSight Crime who is based in Medellín, Colombia. “There are lots of other variables.”
Still, he said that the recent sharp increase in homicides in Venezuela could be in part explained by the abundance of arms there. Although the government last spring imposed a one-year ban on importing weapons, there had previously been a plentiful influx from Russia. There is a Kalashnikov plant in the country.
In 2011, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime [ http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html ], Honduras led the world in homicides, with 91.6 per 100,000 people. But rates were also alarmingly high in El Salvador (69.1), Jamaica (40.9), Colombia (31.4) and Guatemala (38.5). Venezuela’s was 45.1 in 2010 but is expected to be close to to 80 this year. The United States’ rate is about 5.
THOUGH many of these countries have restrictions on gun ownership, enforcement is lax. According to research by Flacso, the Guatemalan Social Science Academy, illegal guns far outnumber legal weapons in Central America.
All that has spawned a thriving security industry — the good guys with guns that grace every street corner — though experts say it is often unclear if their presence is making crime better or worse. In many countries, the armed guards have only six weeks of training.
Guatemala, with approximately 20,000 police officers, has 41,000 registered private security guards and an estimated 80,000 who are working without authorization. “To put people with guns who are not accountable or trained in places where there are lots of innocent people is just dangerous,” Ms. Peters said, noting that lethal force is used to deter minor crimes like shoplifting.
Indeed, even as some Americans propose expanding our gun culture into elementary schools, some Latin American cities are trying to rein in theirs. Bogotá’s new mayor, Gustavo Petro, has forbidden residents to carry weapons on streets, in cars or in any public space since last February, and the murder rate has dropped 50 percent to a 27-year low. He said, “Guns are not a defense, they are a risk.”
William Godnick, coordinator of the Public Security Program at the United Nations Regional Center for Peace, Disarmament and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, said that United Nations studies in Central America showed that people who used a gun to defend against an armed assault were far more likely to be injured or killed than if they had no weapon.
Post-Sandy Hook, gun groups in the United States are now offering teachers firearms training. But do I really want my kid’s teachers packing a weapon?
“If you’re living in a ‘Mad Max’ world, where criminals have free rein and there’s no government to stop them, then I’d want to be armed,” said Dr. Hemenway of Harvard. “But we’re not in that circumstance. We’re a developed, stable country.”
Elisabeth Rosenthal is a physician and a science reporter for The New York Times.
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/sunday-review/more-guns-more-killing.html [with comments]
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For Americans Under 50, Stark Findings on Health
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: January 9, 2013
Younger Americans die earlier and live in poorer health than their counterparts in other developed countries, with far higher rates of death from guns, car accidents and drug addiction [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/drug-abuse-and-dependence/overview.html ], according to a new analysis of health and longevity in the United States.
Researchers have known for some time that the United States fares poorly in comparison with other rich countries, a trend established in the 1980s. But most studies have focused on older ages, when the majority of people die.
The findings were stark. Deaths before age 50 accounted for about two-thirds of the difference in life expectancy between males in the United States and their counterparts in 16 other developed countries, and about one-third of the difference for females. The countries in the analysis included Canada, Japan, Australia, France, Germany and Spain.
The 378-page study by a panel of experts [ http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13497 ] convened by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council [ http://www.iom.edu/ ] is the first to systematically compare death rates and health measures for people of all ages, including American youths. It went further than other studies in documenting the full range of causes of death, from diseases to accidents to violence. It was based on a broad review of mortality and health studies and statistics.
The panel called the pattern of higher rates of disease and shorter lives “the U.S. health disadvantage,” and said it was responsible for dragging the country to the bottom in terms of life expectancy over the past 30 years. American men ranked last in life expectancy among the 17 countries in the study, and American women ranked second to last.
“Something fundamental is going wrong,” said Dr. Steven Woolf [ http://www.familymedicine.vcu.edu/directory/woolf.html ], chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, who led the panel. “This is not the product of a particular administration or political party. Something at the core is causing the U.S. to slip behind these other high-income countries. And it’s getting worse.”
Car accidents, gun violence and drug overdoses were major contributors to years of life lost by Americans before age 50.
The rate of firearm homicides was 20 times higher in the United States than in the other countries, according to the report, which cited a 2011 study of 23 countries. And though suicide rates were lower in the United States, firearm suicide rates were six times higher.
Sixty-nine percent of all American homicide deaths in 2007 involved firearms, compared with an average of 26 percent in other countries, the study said. “The bottom line is that we are not preventing damaging health behaviors,” said Samuel Preston [ http://sociology.sas.upenn.edu/samuel_preston ], a demographer and sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was on the panel. “You can blame that on public health officials, or on the health care system. No one understands where responsibility lies.”
Panelists were surprised at just how consistently Americans ended up at the bottom of the rankings. The United States had the second-highest death rate from the most common form of heart disease, the kind that causes heart attacks, and the second-highest death rate from lung disease, a legacy of high smoking rates in past decades. American adults also have the highest diabetes [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/diabetes/overview.html ] rates.
Youths fared no better. The United States has the highest infant mortality [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/infant_mortality/index.html ] rate among these countries, and its young people have the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/venerealdiseases/index.html ], teen pregnancy [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/adolescent-pregnancy/overview.html ] and deaths from car crashes. Americans lose more years of life before age 50 to alcohol and drug abuse [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/drug-abuse/overview.html ] than people in any of the other countries.
Americans also had the lowest probability over all of surviving to the age of 50. The report’s second chapter details health indicators for youths where the United States ranks near or at the bottom. There are so many that the list takes up four pages. Chronic diseases, including heart disease, also played a role for people under 50.
“We expected to see some bad news and some good news,” Dr. Woolf said. “But the U.S. ranked near and at the bottom in almost every heath indicator. That stunned us.”
There were bright spots. Death rates from cancers that can be detected with tests, like breast cancer [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/breast-cancer/overview.html ], were lower in the United States. Adults had better control over their cholesterol [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/nutrition/cholesterol/overview.html ] and high blood pressure [ http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/hypertension/overview.html ]. And the very oldest Americans — above 75 — tended to outlive their counterparts.
The panel sought to explain the poor performance. It noted the United States has a highly fragmented health care system, with limited primary care resources and a large uninsured population. It has the highest rates of poverty among the countries studied.
Education also played a role. Americans who have not graduated from high school die from diabetes at three times the rate of those with some college, Dr. Woolf said. In the other countries, more generous social safety nets buffer families from the health consequences of poverty, the report said.
Still, even the people most likely to be healthy, like college-educated Americans and those with high incomes, fare worse on many health indicators.
The report also explored less conventional explanations. Could cultural factors like individualism and dislike of government interference play a role? Americans are less likely to wear seat belts and more likely to ride motorcycles without helmets.
The United States is a bigger, more heterogeneous society with greater levels of economic inequality, and comparing its health outcomes to those in countries like Sweden or France may seem lopsided. But the panelists point out that this country spends more on health care than any other in the survey. And as recently as the 1950s, Americans scored better in life expectancy and disease than many of the other countries in the current study.
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/health/americans-under-50-fare-poorly-on-health-measures-new-report-says.html
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Keith Ratliff Dead: FPSRussia YouTube Channel Producer Shot In Apparent Homicide, Georgia Police Say
Posted: 01/09/2013 11:56 am EST | Updated: 01/09/2013 11:22 pm EST
A producer behind a popular gun enthusiast YouTube channel was found dead with a single gunshot wound to the head at his business last week.
Police in Georgia are investigating the apparent homicide of Keith Ratliff, a 32-year-old Franklin County resident.
"It's really heartbreaking [ http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/story/20538156/fpsrussia ], and everything I see, or any kind of memorable thing -- I mean, I just break down," Amanda Ratliff, the victim's wife, told MyFoxAtlanta. "He had such a life to live, and such a good life to live, and things to look forward to."
Authorities found multiple weapons at the scene of the crime [ http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/police-investigate-death-popular-youtube-channel-o/nTqpg/ ], some manufactured by Ratliff himself, WSBTV reports. Investigators have not identified a motive.
Ratliff worked mostly behind the scenes to produce videos for the YouTube channel FPSRussia [ http://www.youtube.com/user/FPSRussia ], a site dedicated to showcasing high-power firearms. FPSRussia -- which commands nearly 3.5 million subscribers and has generated over 500,000 page views is one of the top 10 channels ranked on YouTube [ http://www.youtube.com/charts/videos_views?t=a&gl=US ].
In addition to his contributions to FPSRussia, Ratliff also worked for FPS Industries [ http://fpsindustries.com/ ], a company focussing on "product development and testing for hard use firearms shooters," according to its website. FPS Industries is located in Carnesville, Ga.
Ratliff was known as an outspoken gun advocate. In a message posted to Twitter on Aug 11, 2012, he wrote: "I went to the movies with my pistol in my pocket the whole time I was praying that somebody would try to pull a Batman!"
Kitty Wandel [ https://twitter.com/Paintball_Kitty ], a manager and producer for FPSRussia, released a brief statement [ http://www.twitlonger.com/show/kkue1m ] regarding Ratliff's passing:
As it seems to be leaking out I will confirm to save more messages and questions coming to me. As I am sure most of you know Keith Ratliff has been with the FPS Russia channel for quite some time now, helping us out with everything from pulling pranks to finding almost impossible weapons to use in videos. It saddens me to confirm that he was indeed found having passed away here in Georgia on Thursday. I do ask for some privacy right now as you can imagine it has shocked us all and our main thoughts and concerns lay with his family right now. Thank you for understanding.
Ratliff had recently moved to northern Georgia for work. His wife and 2-year-old son remain in Kentucky.
Scroll through the slideshow for relevant images, video and tweets:
[slideshow embedded]
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/09/keith-ratliff-fpsrussia-dead_n_2439284.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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900 RPM AR CIVILIAN LEGAL!
Published on Jan 25, 2012 by FPSRussia
FPSRussia Shirts: http://fpsrussia.spreadshirt.com/-C94489
Twitter: http://twitter.com/THEFPSHOW
FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/FPSRUSSIA
Weapon Here: http://primaryweapons.com/
SLIDE FIRE STOCKS: http://www.slidefire.com/
Also if you dont know the difference between a rifle and pistol, run a quick google search.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6BFarrICWs
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AA-12 Fully Automatic Shotgun!!!
Uploaded on Apr 25, 2011 by FPSRussia
Shirts Here: http://fpsrussia.spreadshirt.com/-C94489
http://www.facebook.com/FPSRUSSIA
Follow me: http://twitter.com/thefpshow
http://www.facebook.com/pages/FPS-Russia-OFFICIAL/135529993185189
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOoUVeyaY_8
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TOP 3 WEAPONS TO SURVIVE THE APOCALYPSE
Published on Nov 10, 2012 by FPSRussia
My Shirts: http://fpsrussia.spreadshirt.com/-C94489
CLICK2TWEET: http://clicktotweet.com/wajNU
Twitter: http://twitter.com/THEFPSHOW
FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/FPSRUSSIA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj3tYO9co44
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FPS Russia Tazer Fun
Published on Jan 6, 2013 by WoodysGamertag
What you're seeing here are friends and family coping with the loss of a loved one. The man on the right, who is new to most of you, is the victim's cousin. Not all of our time has been so lighthearted but it's good to get your mind off of the tragedy from time to time.
FPS Russia's Channel: http://youtube.com/fpsrussia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwGDiNoO8_g
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After Pinpointing Gun Owners, Paper Is a Target
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
Published: January 6, 2013
WHITE PLAINS — Local newspapers across the country look for stories that will bring them national attention, but The Journal News [ http://www.lohud.com/ ], a daily nestled in a wooded office park in a suburb north of New York, may have gotten more than it bargained for.
Two weeks ago, the paper published the names and addresses of handgun permit holders — a total of 33,614 — in two suburban counties, Westchester and Rockland, and put maps [ http://www.lohud.com/interactive/article/20121223/NEWS01/121221011/Map-Where-gun-permits-your-neighborhood- ] of their locations online. The maps, which appeared with the article [ http://www.lohud.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012312230056 ] “The Gun Owner Next Door: What You Don’t Know About the Weapons in Your Neighborhood,” received more than one million views on the Web site of The Journal News — more than twice as many as the paper’s previous record, about a councilman who had two boys arrested for running a cupcake stand.
But the article, which left gun owners feeling vulnerable to harassment or break-ins, also drew outrage from across the country. Calls and e-mails grew so threatening that the paper’s president and publisher, Janet Hasson, hired armed guards [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/nyregion/putnam-officials-keep-gun-permit-records-from-journal-news.html ] to monitor the newspaper’s headquarters in White Plains and its bureau in West Nyack, N.Y.
Personal information about editors and writers at the paper has been posted online, including their home addresses and information about where their children attended school; some reporters have received notes saying they would be shot on the way to their cars; bloggers have encouraged people to steal credit card information of Journal News employees; and two packages containing white powder have been sent to the newsroom and a third to a reporter’s home (all were tested by the police and proved to be harmless).
“As journalists, we are prepared for criticism,” Ms. Hasson said, as she sat in her meticulously tended office and described the ways her 225 employees have been harassed since the article was published. “But in the U.S., journalists should not be threatened.” She has paid for staff members who do not feel safe in their homes to stay at hotels, offered guards to walk employees to their cars, encouraged employees to change their home telephone numbers and has been coordinating with the local police.
The decision to report and publish the data, taken from publicly available records, happened within a week of the school massacre in nearby Newtown, Conn. On Dec. 17, Dwight R. Worley, a tax reporter, returned from trying to interview the families of victims in Newtown with an idea to obtain and publish local gun permit data. He discussed his idea with his immediate editor, Kathy Moore, who in turn talked to her bosses, according to CynDee Royle, the paper’s editor.
Mr. Worley started putting out requests for public information that Monday, receiving the data from Westchester County that day and from Rockland County three days later. All the editors involved said there were not any formal meetings about the article, although it came up at several regular news meetings. Ms. Royle, who had been at The Journal News in 2006 when the newspaper published similar data, without mapping it or providing street numbers, said that editors discussed publishing the data in at least three meetings.
Ms. Hasson said Ms. Royle told her that an article with gun permit data would be published on Sunday, Dec. 23. While Ms. Hasson had not been at the paper in 2006, she knew there had been some controversy then. She made sure to be available on Dec. 23 by e-mail, and accessible to the staff if any problems came up. A spokesman for Gannett, which owns The Journal News, said it was never informed about the coming article.
“We’ve run this content before,” Ms. Hasson said. “I supported it, and I supported the publishing of the info.”
By Dec. 26, employees had begun receiving threatening calls and e-mails, and by the next day, reporters not involved in the article were being threatened. The reaction did not stop at the local paper: Gracia C. Martore, the chief executive of Gannett, also received threatening messages.
Many of the threats, Ms. Hasson said, were coming from across the country, and not from the paper’s own community. But local gun owners and supporters are encouraging an advertiser boycott of The Journal News. Scott Sommavilla, president of the 35,000-member Westchester County Firearm Owners Association [ http://www.wcfoany.org/ ], said 44,000 people had downloaded a list of advertisers from his group’s Web site. But he emphasized that his association would never encourage any personal threats. Appealing to advertisers, he said, is the best way for gun owners to express their disapproval of the article.
“They’re really upset about it,” Mr. Sommavilla said. “They’re afraid for their families.”
The paper’s decision has drawn criticism from journalists who question whether The Journal News should have provided more context and whether it was useful to publish individual names and addresses. Journalists with specialties in computer-assisted reporting have argued that just because public data has become more readily available in recent years does not mean that it should be published raw. In ways, they argued, it would have been more productive to publish data by ZIP code or block.
“The Journal News, I personally think, should have rethought the idea as actually going so far to identify actual addresses,” said Steve Doig, a professor with an expertise in data journalism at Arizona State. “This particular database ought to remain a public record. Just because it’s available and public record doesn’t mean we have to make it so readily available.”
Mr. Worley disagrees. “The people have as much of a right to know who owns guns in their communities as gun owners have to own weapons,” he said.
Mr. Doig pointed out that the recent publication of gun information by other papers has made access to this public information more difficult because legislators started blocking the data immediately. “The backlash, very typically from this, is for legislators to try to close up the access to this type of data.”
Mr. Worley said he had received mainly taunting phone calls sprinkled in with callers who said “you should die.” He found broken glass outside of his home and would not say how much time he was spending there right now. But he said he had largely been supported by the newsroom.
The Journal News’s features editor, Mary Dolan, said that while she was not involved with the publication of the article, her home address and phone numbers were published online in retaliation. She has had to disconnect her phone and has “taken my social media presence and just put it on the shelf for a while.” She has also received angry phone calls from former neighbors in Westchester whose gun information was published.
She said she was especially concerned about the part-time staff members who write up wedding anniversary and church potluck announcements who have been harassed. But she supports the paper for its decision.
“It sparked a conversation that needed to occur in this country, and it revealed tactics that will be employed when gun owners feel their rights are threatened,” she said.
Putnam County has refused to release similar data, but Ms. Hasson said she would continue to press for it. She would not say whether the paper had lost any of its advertisers. According to the Alliance for Audited Media [ http://www.auditedmedia.com/ ], The Journal News, like many newspapers nationwide, has had sharp declines in circulation. Its total circulation from Monday through Friday fell from 111,536 in September 2007 to 68,850 in September 2012.
At the same time, Ms. Hasson has been trying to calm the nerves of her family after photographs of the home she is renting and references to her adult children were put online.
“They are concerned about my safety,” she said about her children. “But they are very supportive.”
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/nyregion/after-pinpointing-gun-owners-journal-news-is-a-target.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/nyregion/after-pinpointing-gun-owners-journal-news-is-a-target.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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Gun Owners Are Coming To Take Away Our Free Speech Rights
By Judge H. Lee Sarokin
Posted: 01/07/2013 12:53 pm
Is there anything more delicious than gun owners urging that a right guaranteed under the Constitution should be subject to reasonable regulation if the failure to do so causes harm? They want limitations -- but not on the Second Amendment right to bear arms but rather the First Amendment right of free speech. A Westchester County, N.Y. newspaper, the Journal News, published a map showing the names and addresses of pistol permit holders. The information was public and there is no real dispute over the right to publish it. Nonetheless, the outcry from gun advocates was deafening.
The primary complaint seemed slightly illogical: the publication of the information placed gun owners in greater danger from criminals. Wait a minute. Isn't this what it's all about -- that having a gun in your house protects you from criminals and deters them? Why would criminals knowing that you have a weapon in the house increase rather than reduce the risk of home invasion? Publicizing those that don't have guns might do that, but that complaint doesn't come from gun owners.
On the other hand, neighbors, particularly parents, would like to know if their children are playing at houses that have guns. They fear that one of those four-year-old "bad guys" will find and play with their father's gun and accidentally shoot their child. Others might be concerned that the crazy guy next door has a weapon. Opponents of the publication validly claim that it might target weapons for theft. It also identifies the location of law enforcement personnel, police and prison guards; although one suspects that such information regarding addresses is available through other sources.
Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter ranted on this issue like two inmates in an insane asylum. In the most ludicrous analogy every posited, Coulter said [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/04/ann-coulter-guns-women-abortions-mothers-murder-child_n_2408584.html ] if these facts about gun owners can be posted, why not publicize "which women (who had an abortion) on the street are likely to murder a child" -- suggesting that somehow a woman who had an abortion is likely to murder someone else's child! She also declared that "liberals won't let us go after criminals," and, of course, "They are coming after our guns!" In like vein, the newspaper received death threats and had to hire security guards. I don't think even the NRA can claim that these threats came from criminals rather than "law-abiding" gun owners.
The point of all of this is that there well may be some merit to the concerns from the publication of this information, despite the absolute right to do so. Maybe reconsideration should be given to designating this as public information or thought be given to restricting its publication in a reasonable and sensible way. Maybe those who oppose publication are not intent on destroying all rights of free speech, just in the same way persons who want to restrict and regulate semi-automatic weapons, huge ammunition magazines and gun shows are not necessarily intent on confiscating all guns. Free speech certainly does less harm than guns. Shouldn't both be susceptible to some sensible and reasonable regulation in the public interest? Encroachment, limitations or regulations of any constitutional right should be done with great caution and only for compelling reasons, but if the First Amendment should yield a little to reason -- should not the Second as well?
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judge-h-lee-sarokin/gun-owners-are-coming-to-_b_2425320.html [with comments]
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DebraLee Hovey, Connecticut Republican, Apologizes For Telling Gabrielle Giffords To 'Get Out'
By Nick Wing
Posted: 01/07/2013 6:22 pm EST | Updated: 01/08/2013 8:14 am EST
Connecticut state Rep. DebraLee Hovey (R) has apologized after directing a Facebook post at former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) last week, telling the lawmaker who was wounded in a mass shooting to "stay out of [her] towns." Giffords on Friday visited Newtown, Conn., where a mass shooting last month killed 26, including 20 first graders, as well as the gunman and his mother.
“The remarks I made regarding Congresswoman Gifford’s visit were insensitive and if I offended anyone I truly apologize,” Hovey said, according to the New Haven Register [ http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2013/01/07/news/doc50eb20ed3b8d0204090529.txt ]. "My comments were meant to be protective of the privacy of the families and our community as we work to move on, and were in no way intended as an insult to Congresswoman Giffords personally. Our community has struggled greatly through this tragedy, and we are all very sensitive to the potential for this event to be exploited for political purposes. This is what I wish to avoid."
Hovey's posts [ http://courantblogs.com/capitol-watch/state-rep-debralee-hovey-to-gabby-giffords-stay-out/ ], removed since their original posting on Friday, read "Gabby Giffords stay out of my towns!!!"
and went on to allege that the meeting between Giffords, state leaders and families of those killed during last month's massacre was driven by "pure political motives."
Giffords' trip to Newtown was days before the two-year anniversary of the shooting in Tucson, Ariz., which killed six and injured 13, including the congresswoman. Giffords was left partially blind, with a paralyzed right arm and brain injury, according to the Associated Press [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/05/gabrielle-giffords-newtown-visit_n_2415720.html ].
Giffords's husband, Mark Kelly, has become a vocal proponent for gun control since her shooting. Upon hearing the news of the Newtown shooting, Kelly challenged leaders [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/mark-kelly-newtown-school-shooting_n_2303008.html ] to exhibit "the courage to participate in a meaningful discussion about our gun laws -- and how they can be reformed and better enforced to prevent gun violence and death in America."
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/07/debralee-hovey-connecticut_n_2427485.html [with comments]
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Melinda Herman, Mom Who Shot Intruder, Inspires Gun Control Foes
By KATE BRUMBACK
01/09/13 07:47 PM ET EST
LOGANVILLE, Ga. -- A Georgia mother who shot an intruder at her home has become a small part of the roaring gun control debate, with some firearms enthusiasts touting her as a textbook example of responsible gun ownership.
Melinda Herman grabbed a handgun and hid in a crawl space with her two children when a man broke in last week and approached the family at their home northeast of Atlanta, police said. Herman called her husband on the phone, and with him reminding her of the lessons she recently learned at a shooting range, Herman opened fire, seriously wounding the burglary suspect.
The National Rifle Association tweeted a link to a news story about the shooting, and support poured in from others online, hailing Herman as a hero. The local sheriff said he was proud of the way she handled the situation.
"This lady decided that she wasn't going to be a victim, and I think everyone else looks at this and hopes they have the courage to do what she done," Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman said Wednesday.
Herman was working from home Friday when she saw a man walk up to the front door. She told police he rang the doorbell twice and then over and over again. He went back to his SUV, got something out and walked back toward the house, a police report said.
Herman took her 9-year-old son and daughter into an upstairs bedroom and locked the door. They went into bathroom and she locked that door, too. She got her handgun from a safe, the report said, and hid with her children. At some point, she called her husband, who kept her on the line and called 911 on another line.
In a 10-minute 911 recording released by the Walton County Sheriff's Office, Donnie Herman calmly explained what was happening to a dispatcher. His part of the conversation with his wife was also recorded.
"Is he in the house, Melinda? Are you sure? How do you know? You can hear him in the house?" Donnie Herman said.
His wife told him the intruder was coming closer.
"He's in the bedroom? Shh, shh, relax. Just remember everything that I showed you, everything that I taught you, all right?" Donnie Herman told his wife, explaining later to the dispatcher that he had recently taken her to a gun range.
It wasn't clear from the recording exactly when they went to range and Donnie Herman told The Associated Press on Wednesday the family didn't want to talk about the shooting.
After Donnie Herman told his wife police were on the way, he started shouting: "She shot him. She's shootin' him. She's shootin' him. She's shootin' him. She's shootin' him."
"OK," the dispatcher responded.
"Shoot him again! Shoot him!" Donnie Herman yelled. He told the dispatcher he heard a lot of screaming, but he seems to get increasingly worried when he doesn't hear anything from his wife.
Melinda Herman told police she started shooting the man when he opened the door to the crawl space. The man pleaded with her to stop, but she kept firing until she had emptied her rounds, she told police. She then fled to a neighbor's house with her children.
The man drove away in his SUV. Police found the SUV on another subdivision street and discovered a man bleeding from his face and body in a nearby wooded area. Police identified the suspect as 32-year-old Paul Slater of Atlanta.
Chapman said the hospital asked him not to comment on Slater's condition, but he said he is not certain Slater will survive. Authorities have a warrant but haven't formally arrested Slater yet. They plan to charge him with burglary, possession of tools for the commission of a crime and aggravated assault, Walton County sheriff's Capt. Greg Hall said.
A phone number for Slater was not listed and it was not clear whether he has an attorney.
Authorities believe Slater targeted a home in another local subdivision but left when confronted by the homeowner, Chapman said.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/09/melinda-herman-mom-who-shot-intruder_n_2443920.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Misty Nunley, Woman Killed In Tulsa Shooting, Was 'Getting Her Life Back Together'
Misty Nunley, 33, was killed during a shooting at an apartment complex in Tulsa, Okla.
By JUSTIN JUOZAPAVICIUS
01/08/13 08:27 PM ET EST
TULSA, Okla. -- One of four women found fatally shot inside a Tulsa apartment was staying at the crime-plagued building with a friend as she tried to get her life back together, her mother said Tuesday as police asked for the public's help in solving the murders.
Misty Nunley, along with 23-year-old twin sisters Rebeika Powell and Kayetie Melchor, and Julie Jackson, 55, were found dead Monday by police. No arrests have been made, and investigators have released no other details – including possible suspects, how the women knew each other or why they may have been targeted.
But Nunley's mother, Cheryl Nunley, said her 33-year-old daughter had befriended Powell and had been staying with her on and off for the past week. She said she called her daughter nearly every morning to check in, and spoke to her Monday just hours before the women were found dead.
"She had positive people back in her life," Cheryl Nunley told The Associated Press, holding back tears while sitting with family and friends in a tiny apartment a few blocks away from the crime scene.
"She's not perfect. She ran around with some people she shouldn't have been running around with, but she was getting her life back together."
Tulsa police spokesman Leland Ashley said Tuesday that detectives and officers were "beating the bushes" to figure out what happened at the apartment, where police also found an unharmed 3-year-old boy. Police said he was taken into protective custody but released no other information.
"Right now, we have no clear-cut suspect," Ashley said, urging anyone with information to come forward.
"I don't want to strike fear in the community tonight, but we do have an individual or individuals who murdered four people," he added. "Do we know if there was a motive, like a jealous lover? We don't know that. We can't say if it was random or if someone knew (the victims)."
Relatives and neighbors have told Nunley's family there may have been a romantic spat between one of the women who lived at the apartment and a boyfriend or ex-boyfriend. Police wouldn't comment on those rumors.
Hillary McGuire, the former stepsister of Powell and Melchor, told the AP she had lost touch with the sisters over the past couple years but remembered both as "the nicest girls."
"I hope to God they find whoever did it and lock them away forever," she said.
Messages left by the AP at phone numbers believed to belong to other relatives of the victims weren't returned Tuesday.
The four women were found dead in a unit at the Fairmont Terrace Apartments, a gated but rundown complex in south Tulsa's Riverwood neighborhood where residents say crime is common. The complex has a nighttime security patrol and curfew, but police believe the killings occurred during the day Monday. Police said they received a 911 call reporting the shooting around 12:30 p.m.
Cheryl Nunley said she didn't know the other three women or how they knew each other. She said Misty had been estranged from her family but was working to repair the relationships and get reacquainted with her own 19-year-old daughter, Shondelle.
"She last called me Sunday night," recalled Shondelle. "She told me she was proud of me."
Cheryl Nunley is convinced that more than one assailant was responsible for the killings, saying her daughter would have fought any one attacker "to the death."
"I don't know anybody who was mad enough at my daughter to do that to her," she said.
Crime-scene tape had been removed by Tuesday afternoon at the apartment complex, where bed sheets or cardboard hang as improvised draperies in many windows behind a black wrought-iron gate. The guard shack is empty and signs read "Curfew 10 p.m. for everyone, everyday" and "Photo ID required to be on property." Three of the units are burned out and boarded up with plywood.
Tulsa police said there were two murders at the complex last year, and residents of the neighborhood say gunfire and break-ins are fairly common.
"We're in the eye of the storm," said Charles Burke, a 48-year-old construction worker who lives across the street but didn't hear the shootings. "You're on your toes. You can't be too careful."
Jamie Kramer, a 28-year-old mother of two young children, has lived in the neighborhood for 10 years. She said crime seems to come in cycles and that things had been pretty quiet for several months until Monday.
"It escalates and goes back down, it escalates and it goes back down," she said.
Alexis Draite, a 20-year-old who recently moved to the area from Oklahoma City, also said she didn't hear gunshot Monday. She said she has a routine: "Lock the doors, lock the cars and don't stay outside longer than you need to."
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/09/misty-nunley-tulsa-shooting_n_2438876.html [with comments]
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We're now one step closer to America's coming civil war
In this Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2013, file photo, the dome of the Capitol is reflected in a skylight of the Capitol Visitor's Center in Washington.
(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
By Arthur Herman
Published January 03, 2013
FoxNews.com
The New Year has started with a monstrosity of a budget deal, one that proves that neither political party, Democrats or Republicans, is really serious about controlling the growth of big government.
But soap opera dramatics about fiscal "cliffs" and sequestration shouldn’t deflect from where President Obama is really taking this country. Consider this story from the Wall Street Journal a few days before Christmas:
“Thousands of people in several Argentine cities ransacked supermarkets for a second day in the latest challenge to President Chistina Kirchner, who is struggling to revive a weak economy...In the central city Rosario, two people were killed during the incidents and 137 people arrested.
“The violence puts Mrs. Kirchner in a difficult position as the poor are [her] core constituents...Her government spends billions of dollars a year to help low income families, including free health care...[Yet] Argentine activists who claim to represent the poor traditionally block access to supermarkets in the month of December to demand free food and other items...The latest events were some of the worst acts of looting and vandalism in years.... Local media showed dozens of men, women, and children hauling away televisions, refrigerators, and food.”
Some have said my warnings about a coming civil war between makers and takers are exaggerated. It’s true that Argentina’s politicians have been waging class warfare since Juan and Eva Peron–and they aren’t fazed when it turns bloody. Obama and the Democrats are relative newcomers to the game. But Argentina reveals who really suffers when those who create a nation’s wealth get mugged by those who spend it–as just happened this week in Washington.
It’s the poor and the middle class, the very ones big government says it’s trying to protect.
And sadly that’s where Mitt Romney had it wrong.
That 47 percent of Americans who get unemployment benefits, Social Security disability checks, Medicare and Medicaid, and government student loans, aren’t the real takers. Like the rioters in Rosario, they’re just pawns in a perennial battle between those who see wealth and prosperity as something created by hard work, ingenuity, and innovation in a free market system–or something to be doled out by government.
Experience teaches that those who believe in free markets are right. The November election and the budget deal, however, show that the other side is winning, and winning big.
Since 1970, America’s public sector has exploded as a percentage of GDP, rising to almost 25% last year. While the national unemployment rate hovers at the 8% mark, government worker unemployment rate is a cozy 3.8%. Sixteen percent of America’s workforce now work for government. By the time the Obama administration ends, we won’t be that far away from Argentina’s 21 percent.
Yet as an economic and social enterprise, government creates nothing.
Far from adding to people’s standard of living, government is the number one cause of poverty in this country. It forces those who depend on its largesse to live hand to mouth, with no time or money to plan for the future. They become unable to fend for themselves---and increasingly resentful of those who can.
When the economy tanks and the government checks have to shrink, their only alternative is to take to the streets. That’s what happening in Argentina, and in Greece; and that’s where the growth of government is taking us here, as this current budget deal increases handouts–and more and more Americans are finding that an unemployment or Social Security disability check is their only life line.
Washington’s Republicans and Democrats alike have become the toll collectors on the road to serfdom–and the road to Rosario.
How far down that road depends on how our private sector rallies in 2013 after two numbing defeats, first on November 7 and then on Capitol Hill this week.
It needs to explain to that 47 percent that when big government wins, we all lose–and that this nation won’t survive if it does.
Historian Arthur Herman is the author of the just released "Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II [ http://www.amazon.com/Freedoms-Forge-American-Business-Produced/dp/1400069645 (and see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=56405700 and preceding {and any future following})]" (Random House May 2012) and the Pulitzer Prize finalist book "Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age [ http://www.amazon.com/Gandhi-Churchill-Rivalry-Destroyed-Empire/dp/0553383760 ]" (Bantam, 2008).
©2013 FOX News Network, LLC
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/03/were-now-one-step-closer-to-america-coming-civil-war/
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Schaeffer Cox, Alaska Militia Leader, Sentenced To Nearly 26 Years
Schaeffer Cox, a boyish-looking young man with a soft voice who spewed anti-government rhetoric and amassed weapons in a plot to kill federal law enforcement officials, will spend nearly 26 years in a federal prison.
By MARK THIESSEN
01/08/13 07:12 PM ET EST
ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- A boyish-looking young man with a soft voice who spewed anti-government rhetoric and amassed weapons in a plot to kill federal law enforcement officials will spend nearly 26 years in a federal prison.
Schaeffer Cox was sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court on nine felony counts, including conspiracy and possessing illegal weapons. The 28-year-old is the third and last member of the Alaska Peacemakers Militia to be sentenced after authorities used an informant to infiltrate the group.
Cox came off at times as arrogant during his trial last spring, but he spoke with a very different demeanor during the two-hour sentencing hearing.
"I put myself here, with my own words," he said, choking back tears. "And I feel horrible about that. And I hurt my family, and that's who is really paying."
Federal prosecutors portrayed Cox as a dangerous militia leader who helped stockpile a huge cache of illegal weapons while plotting a strategy to one day kill judges, state troopers and other government officials.
According to prosecutors, Cox believed his group would eventually need to take up arms against the government, and be sufficiently armed and equipped to sustain a takeover of the government or become a new government in the event of a collapse.
Cox came to the attention of the FBI in late 2009 after speeches in Montana that claimed the Fairbanks militia had 3,500 members and was armed with mines and other military weapons. But the group only had about a dozen members and, as Judge Robert Bryan noted, never trained for military duty.
As the investigation unfolded over more than a year, the FBI eventually used an informant to infiltrate the group. He recorded more than 100 hours of conversations.
Cox's attorney Nelson Traverso claimed during the trial that the case was an overreach by prosecutors and an attempt to silence Cox and his offensive but protected speech.
Cox once told a state judge some militia members would sooner murder her than appear before her, and told an Alaska State Trooper the militia had officers outgunned.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Skrocki said that Cox eventually crossed the line separating offhand comments about killing someone to formulation of plans to do so.
He and others hatched a plan intended to kill two government officials for every one militia member who was killed – a strategy known within the group as "241" or "two for one."
Cox, along with militia foot soldiers Coleman Barney and Lonnie Vernon, have been sentenced in the plot.
Cox's new lawyer, Peter Camiel of Seattle, had him undergo a psychological examination, which indicated Cox suffered from paranoia disorders, which he said could be treated with drugs and counseling.
"I put a lot of people in fear by the things that I said," Cox told the court Tuesday. "Some of the crazy stuff that was coming out of my mouth, I see that, and I sounded horrible.
"I couldn't have sounded any worse if I tried. The more scared I got, the crazier the stuff," he said. "I wasn't thinking, I was panicking."
He took sole credit for any blame, and apologized for putting his wife and two small children, ages 2 and 4, into a position of pain and uncertainty.
He said it was important to him to provide his children both their parents and home where they could grow up.
"I was so scared that something would jeopardize that, that I wound up running right into the very thing I was running away from," he said.
His new tone didn't sway the lead prosecutor in the case.
"Our view of what Mr. Cox said to the court is really contradicted by his actions," said Skrocki, who sought a 35-year term for Cox.
At the end of the trial in June, Bryan said he wrote down observations about Cox, which included: paranoia, grandiosity, narcissism, egocentricity and pathological lying.
He said the paranoia diagnosis from the defense's psychological exam may supply some reasons for some of Cox's actions, "but it does not provide excuses."
And if it is a true diagnosis, Bryan said Cox will need long-term care to treat it, something the judge said he wasn't sure he would get outside jail.
Bryan also noted Cox was never so ill he didn't have followers.
Under previous federal sentencing guidelines no longer in place, Cox would have faced life in prison with no opportunity for the judge to consider a shorter sentence
Murder conspiracy and other charges against the men were thrown out of a state court in October 2011 after a judge ruled audio and video recordings made during the six-month FBI investigation into Cox and the militia were not admissible because they were made without a search warrant, and therefore violated the Alaska Constitution. The FBI has wider authority to obtain warrants, and charges remained in federal court.
Lonnie Vernon was charged with conspiring to kill public officials, amassing weapons and, along with his wife, of planning to kill a federal judge and an Internal Revenue Service official over a tax dispute. On Monday, he received the same sentence as Cox.
Karen Vernon was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Monday.
Barney was sentenced last year to five years in prison on weapons charges.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/schaeffer-cox-sentenced-26-years_n_2435659.html [with embedded video interview of Cox, and comments]
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Welcome to the new Civil War
Daniel Day Lewis stars as President Abraham Lincoln in this scene from director Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" from DreamWorks Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox.
(Credit: David James, Smpsp)
Lincoln's unfinished war rages on, as the neo-Confederacy tries to turn back the clock on women, gays, God and guns
By Andrew O'Hehir
Saturday, Jan 5, 2013 10:30 AM CST
On a repeat viewing of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln [ http://www.salon.com/topic/lincoln/ ]” over the New Year’s holiday, a scene I had barely noticed the first time jumped out at me. Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_H._Stephens ] (played with reptilian gentility by Jackie Earle Haley), in a secret meeting [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Roads_Conference ] aboard a steamboat with Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, faces up to the reality that the era of slavery has come to an end. Ratification of the 13th Amendment, Stephens muses, will destroy the basis of the Southern economy and the South’s traditional way of life. “We won’t know ourselves anymore,” he says.
If only it had been so. What an affluent slaveowner like Stephens feared most, no doubt, was the utopian vision of “radical Reconstruction” imagined by legendary abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaddeus_Stevens ] (Tommy Lee Jones in the movie), in an earlier conversation with Lincoln in the White House kitchen. Stevens envisioned a future in which all the land and property of the Southern aristocracy would be dispossessed and divided among the emancipated slaves, building a new society of free soil and free labor amid the ruins of tyranny. To put it in contemporary social-studies terms, Stevens hoped that by uprooting and destroying the South’s slave economy, one could also replace its culture.
It didn’t quite work out that way. You can’t boil one of the most tumultuous periods of American history down to one paragraph, but here goes: Lincoln was assassinated by a domestic terrorist and replaced by Andrew Johnson [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Johnson ], who was an incompetent hothead and an unapologetic racist. Within a few years the ambitious project of Reconstruction [ http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart5.html ] fell victim to a sustained insurgency led by the Ku Klux Klan and similar white militia groups. By the late 1870s white supremacist “Redeemers” controlled most local and state governments in the South, and by the 1890s Southern blacks had been disenfranchised and thrust into subservience positions by Jim Crow laws that were only slightly preferable to slavery.
So even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true. We’re still reaping the whirlwind from that long-ago conflict, and now we face a new Civil War, one focused on divisive political issues of the 21st century – most notably the rights and liberties of women and LGBT people – but rooted in toxic rhetoric and ideas inherited from the 19th century.
We’ve just emerged from a presidential campaign that exposed how hardened our political and cultural divide has become, and how poorly the two sides understand each other. Part of the Republican problem, in an election that party thought it would win easily, was that those who felt a visceral disgust toward both the idea and the reality of President Barack Obama simply could not believe that they didn’t represent a majority. As many Republicans are now aware, the party now faces an existential crisis. It’s all very well to go on TV and talk about attracting Latinos and downplaying cultural wedge issues. But the activist core of the Republican Party is neo-Confederate, whether it thinks of itself that way or not. It isn’t interested in common cause with Mexicans or turning down the moral thermostat. Just ask Rick Santorum: What it wants is war.
In the recent “fiscal cliff” negotiations, which ended (of course) in yet another short-term stopgap measure, most congressional Republicans, having sworn a blood oath never to raise taxes on their millionaire patrons, were content to let the nation slide into chaos and catastrophe rather than reach a compromise with the president they have consistently depicted as a socialist renegade or alien interloper. It was like a third-rate farcical reprise of the great congressional struggle depicted by Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner in “Lincoln,” when the defeated and embittered Democrats of 1864 fought a rear-guard action to defend slavery, in defiance of not just history, morality and basic human decency but also tactical judgment and common sense.
Thanks to Lincoln’s great political victory in that Congress, slavery has faded into the history books — maybe too much so. As the controversy over Quentin Tarantino’s slave-revenge western “Django Unchained [ http://www.salon.com/topic/django_unchained/ ]” demonstrates, it still isn’t a history we know how to talk about. It may seem melodramatic to claim that the curse of slavery hangs over us still, but Lincoln himself clearly foresaw that possibility, as his slaveowning predecessor Thomas Jefferson had before him. In Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address [ http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html ], he described slavery as an offense against God, and the bloodshed of the Civil War “as the woe due to those [on both sides] by whom the offense came.” Perhaps a cruel cosmic justice was now being extracted, he concluded, and the war would go on “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
I’m not sure America ever paid that debt, in blood or money or any other currency. The lingering effects of our racist history – from the resegregation of our public schools to the enduring and astonishing “wealth gap [ http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/21/news/economy/wealth-gap-race/index.htm ]” between whites and blacks – are national problems, not just Southern problems. Our new Civil War is infused with the undead spirit of the old one and waged by a rebellious neo-Confederacy rooted in the states of the Old South, but its influence can be felt, as with the pro-slavery forces of the 1860s, in every part of the country. (Fernando Wood, the fiery pro-slavery Democrat played by Lee Pace in “Lincoln,” was a former mayor of New York.)
The new Civil War is not entirely or even principally about race, although there’s no mistaking its pernicious racial component. Even making allowances for Bobby Jindal and Allen West, the neo-Confederate forces are perhaps 99 percent white, in a nation whose fastest-growing demographic groups are neither white nor black. While the issues of the new Civil War are contemporary, its rhetoric is ancient and all too familiar, from states’ rights and resistance to Washington to claims of a special relationship with the Almighty and vague appeals to distinctive “cultural traditions,” employed as a justification for bigotry and oppression.
While the Civil War of the 1860s really was about slavery first and foremost – it was the foundation of the Southern economy, and had concentrated immense wealth in the hands of a small landowning caste – the true subject matter of the new Civil War is much less clear. Abortion and same-sex marriage play a crucial role, to be sure (and we may soon see guns and marijuana enter the picture as well). Those are symbolic issues that reflect larger social tensions around gender roles, sexuality and the “war on women,” but they are not just symbolic issues. Many people on the neo-Confederate side see abortion and Adam-and-Steve marriage as moral outrages or offenses against God, to borrow Lincoln’s phrasing, which must be stopped at almost any cost. Of course, pro-choice activists and marriage-equality advocates see those issues as matters of basic economic justice, guaranteeing to all people the kind of basic personal autonomy that men take for granted, or the common-law legal and medical rights that heterosexual married couples have long enjoyed.
We appear to be moving into an unstable Missouri Compromise [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Compromise ] period of American history, in which regional tiers of states adopt sharply different policies on reproductive rights and marriage rights in particular, but also seem locked into fixed political identities and differing views on fundamental questions of national identity and the national future. Within the past week, we saw Illinois and Rhode Island – core “neo-Union” states, if you will – move closer to legalizing gay marriage, while the Republican governors of Michigan and Virginia (exactly the kind of “border states” where these battles are being fought on the ground) snuck new restrictions on abortion through the legal back door.
If you correlate the states where both same-sex marriage and same-sex civil unions have been banned and the states with the harshest restrictions on abortion, you begin to measure the breadth of the neo-Confederacy: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah. Most (but not all) are onetime Southern slave states and hotbeds of evangelical Christianity, and most (but not all) coincide with the familiar red-blue split between Republicans and Democrats. The battleground states of the moment, on these issues as on many others, are strikingly familiar: Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. All four are currently in the grip of neo-Confederate forces on a state level, and all four have enacted gay-marriage bans and abortion restrictions, even though Obama won them all in both of his election campaigns.
Do I even need to mention that none of the neo-Confederate states are in the Northeast or on the West Coast, regions where abortion remains widely available and same-sex marriage is rapidly becoming routine? Or that the neo-Confederate states of the South and the Plains States have sent nearly all of the intransigent, anti-taxation Tea Party members to Congress, while the neo-Union states of the East and West, with their polyglot, immigrant-rich populations, have elected few or none?
Ultimately, the Missouri Compromise collapsed (as did the short-lived Compromise of 1850 [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1850 ] that followed it), tearing the nation apart and forcing a long overdue reckoning with the enormous evil of slavery.. We are heading toward a similar reckoning now. Secession is no longer an option (although many, on both sides, might wish it were), so the new Civil War is not likely to involve pitched battles in the meadows of Pennsylvania, or hundreds of thousands of dead. Today’s fights over abortion and gays and God and guns have a profound moral dimension, but don’t quite have the world-historical weight of the slavery question. As with slavery, however, it’s tough to imagine any viable long-term middle ground. At the moment, two women who get married in Iowa will have no legal relationship if they move to Kansas, and a teenage girl in Seattle can easily get a safe and legal abortion while her cousin in Dallas faces mandatory counseling, a 24-hour waiting period and a parental consent law. (If they have another cousin in rural Mississippi, she probably won’t find legal abortion services under any terms.)
Regardless of how you feel about those issues, that’s nuts. No nation-state can function indefinitely on that kind of patchwork-quilt basis. Then again, this is the United States of America, land of semi-permanent political paralysis, so “functional” doesn’t really apply. It’s tempting to call upon history and proclaim that the only possible outcome of this new Civil War, after many years of ugly politics and occasional outbreaks of craziness and violence, will resemble the outcome of the last one: the continued expansion of constitutional rights and freedoms and the final defeat of the Confederate strain in American political and cultural life. But other, darker outcomes are definitely possible, and I suspect that as long as we’ve got a country, the Confederacy will still be with us.
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/05/welcome_to_the_new_civil_war/ [with comments]
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Bob Casey Voices Concerns Over Militias, Gun Violence
By Mollie Reilly
Posted: 01/10/2013 12:21 am EST
During a meeting with constituents, Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) further detailed his changing gun control views in light of last month's tragic shooting in Newtown, Conn., voicing concerns over the existence of citizen militias and the proliferation of gun violence.
Casey, a longtime gun advocate who has earned high marks from the National Rifle Association [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/19/us/politics/nra.html ], made headlines last month when he told the Philadelphia Inquirer [ http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/20121219_Sen__Casey_changes_stance_on_gun_laws.html ] that he was so deeply impacted by the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that he would support legislation banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazine clips.
"The power of the weapon, the number of bullets that hit each child, that was so, to me, just so chilling, it haunts me. It should haunt every public official," Casey told the paper.
According to Naked Philadelphian blogger Laura Goldman [ http://nakedphiladelphian.blogspot.com/2013/01/senator-casey-serious-about-gun-control.html ], who attended the meeting with Casey, the senator further discussed his post-Newtown concerns -- including his apprehensions about armed citizen militias.
Goldman reports:
Casey said, "I was haunted by the reality of 20 kids dead and the possibility of an entire school dying. My daughter asked me, Dad, you have a vote. What are you going to do about it?"
For the first time, he questioned the existence of militias and the unlimited rights of gun owners.
"I do not know how many of my constituents are in the militia category, but as someone who loves his country and sees the government as a force of good for its citizens, I am clearly alarmed by this segment of our society," said Casey.
Casey's office did not immediately return a request for comment.
As NPR reported [ http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/03/08/148217754/report-explosive-growth-of-patriot-movement-and-militias-continues ], the number of "patriot movement" militia groups have greatly increased during President Obama's first term. A Southern Poverty Law Center study [ http://splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/the-year-in-hate-and-extremism ] identified as many as 1,200 of these extremist anti-government organizations in existence as of last spring.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/10/bob-casey-guns_n_2444440.html [with comments]
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Piers Morgan: Alex Jones 'Terrifying,' A Perfect 'Advertisement For Gun Control'
Posted: 01/09/2013 8:45 am EST | Updated: 01/09/2013 10:15 am EST
Piers Morgan said on Tuesday that his infamous encounter with radio host Alex Jones would only help his gun control crusade.
The radio host more than lost his temper with Morgan on Monday, going on a monumental rant about guns [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/alex-jones-piers-morgan-guns_n_2429161.html ( http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=83250756 )]. He then speculated that he might be murdered [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/alex-jones-piers-morgan-cops-crackheads_n_2432839.html ( http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=83243898 )] by undercover police officers.
"I can't think of a better advertisement for gun control than Alex Jones' interview last night," Morgan told CNN on Tuesday [ http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/08/morgan-on-fiery-alex-jones-interview-startling-deluded/ ]. "It was startling, it was terrifying in parts, it was completely deluded. It was based on a premise of making Americans so fearful that they all rush out to buy even more guns ... the kind of twisted way that he turned everything into this assault on the Second Amendment is exactly what the gun rights lobby people do."
At least one person agreed that Jones was a terrible spokesman for gun rights: Glenn Beck. Speaking on his radio show Tuesday, he said that Morgan had chosen well if his intention was to discredit the pro-gun movement.
"Piers Morgan is trying to have gun control," Beck said. "He is trying to make everybody who has guns and who believes the Second Amendment to be a deterrent to an out of control government look like a madman. So now he immediately books the madman and makes him look like a conservative."
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/09/piers-morgan-alex-jones-gun-control_n_2438963.html [with comments]
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"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
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upon the Right of Election, 1790
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