The National Rifle Association
will be rolling out the conclusions of its National School Shield Program Tuesday. The short version. More armed guards in schools. Training for the guards and training for teachers in the use of firearms. Back in December, when NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre first responded to the slayings of 20 first-graders and six educators at their school in Newtown, Connecticut, columnist Eugene Robinson
called the idea "so insane that as far as I’m concerned—and, I hope, as far as a still-grieving nation is concerned—the NRA has forfeited the right to be taken seriously on matters of public policy." But since then, as we have seen, some of the people taking the gun manufacturers' mouthpiece the most seriously are members of Congress.
Mother Jones senior editor Mark Follman has vivisected a key claim the organization keeps making in favor of more guns in schools (and elsewhere). An excerpt:
Ever since the massacres in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut, it's been repeated like some surreal requiem: The reason mass gun violence keeps happening is because the United States is full of places that ban guns.
Second Amendment activists have long floated this theme, and now lawmakers across the nation are using it too. During a recent floor debate in the Colorado Legislature, Republican state Rep. Carole Murray put it this way: "Most of the mass killings that we talk about have been effected in gun-free zones. So when you have a gun-free zone, it's like saying, 'Come and get me.'"
The argument claims to explain both the motive behind mass shootings and how they play out. The killers deliberately choose sites where firearms are forbidden, gun-rights advocates say, and because there are no weapons, no "good guy with a gun" will be on hand to stop the crime.
With its overtones of fear and heroism, the argument makes for slick sound bites. But here's the problem: Both its underlying assumptions are contradicted by data. Not only is there zero evidence to support them, our in-depth investigation of America's mass shootings indicates they are just plain wrong.
Among the 62 mass shootings over the last 30 years that we studied, not a single case includes evidence that the killer chose to target a place because it banned guns.
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—Jessica Lynch rescued:
This is cool:
U.S. special forces rescued a female U.S. Army soldier held captive for 10 days and recovered the bodies of two other soldiers in a midnight raid on an Iraqi hospital, officials said on Wednesday.
The rescued soldier was identified as Private First Class Jessica Lynch, 19, from Palestine, West Virginia. She was with a maintenance convoy ambushed by Iraqi forces on March 23.
Captain Jay La Rossa, spokesman for the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, said Lynch had two broken legs and one broken arm, but was stable and in good condition.
We can all breath a sigh of relief for Jessica, even as we continue to mourn for the hundreds of other victims of this senseless war. |
Tweet of the Day:
On today's
Kagro in the Morning show, we went on without
Greg Dworkin this morning, but... Ha! April Fool! He was
totally on the show. Ha! April Fool again! No, he wasn't! We hit yesterday's Google doodle freak-out, then turned to Hill budgeting & spending processes.
Armando rounded-up a Jeff Sachs op-ed complaining Obama isn't doing stuff he's doing, bankrupt companies paying big bonuses, and immigration polling from Pew. Then,
GideonAB on Senate voting procedure, the filibuster threat on guns, 2014 prospects & more. Lastly,
Meteor Blades's post on controversy over nominations to the Mississippi Board of Public Health.
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