Robert Mercer’s Secret Adventure as a New Mexico Cop. Robert Mercer probably would have flown into Roswell. From there—1,800 miles from home—he would’ve traveled south through the high desert plains of southeast New Mexico, flat as a tortilla, past abandoned homesteads and irrigation machines moving in slow circles. His phone reception would’ve gotten spotty when he turned left off Highway 285.
He would’ve seen the bare limbs of a pecan orchard and a graveyard decked in plastic flowers. At the town hall in Lake Arthur, population 433, he would’ve met Police Chief William Norwood, the department’s sole full-time employee, a barrel-chested man with two spare rifle magazines on his belt. If Mercer’s trips to Lake Arthur resembled my recent visit, he might’ve climbed into the passenger seat of Norwood’s police truck, whose black-and-white paint job is fading in the wind-whipped sand.
Until a few months ago, Mercer, 71, ran what is arguably the world’s most successful hedge fund. But Centre’s partnership with Shea quickly collapsed. A Look At The Narrow Point Of Intersection Between Mental Health And Gun Violence. NPR's Ailsa Chang speaks with psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl about the narrow point of intersection between the worlds of mental illness and gun violence. He says there's not much more the mental health field can do to prevent potential mass shooters, since the best predictive factors fall out of the scope of the medical field.
Lawmakers are trying to decide what they can do now to prevent future mass shootings from happening. And one phrase that keeps coming up again and again is mental health. LINDSEY GRAHAM: What I want to look at is the mental health science. PAUL RYAN: Do we have the kind of mental health laws that we need on the books? JOHN CORNYN: ...Whether mental health officials could have done more. CHANG: That's all from this week, all from Republican lawmakers - Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senator John Cornyn of Texas. JONATHAN METZL: Thanks so much for having me. METZL: It's a very mushy assessment. METZL: Thanks so much. Nevada Republican Leaders Are in the Hot Seat for Refusing to Implement New Background-Check Law – Mother Jones. Las Vegas Police and medical workers respond to the shooting. Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun/ZUMA Wire The mass shooting that killed at least 58 people and wounded 500 in Las Vegas has placed Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt* in the hot seat for refusing to enforce a universal background check law state voters passed last year.
It is not yet clear whether the inaction of Laxalt, a Republican, played any role in the attack by Stephen Craig Paddock, who law enforcement officials say fired from his room in the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino onto a crowd at an outdoor concert before fatally shooting himself. Police said they found at least 10 weapons in Paddock’s room, but there was no immediate indication that Paddock met any criteria that would have caused him to fail a background check.
Nor was it evident whether he bought any of the guns through private sales that would have been covered by the new law. Laxalt and Gov. The Documentary 'The Armor of Light' Explores the Racial Divide Among Evangelicals on Gun Control - The Atlantic - The Atlantic. The documentary The Armor of Light follows the journey of the Evangelical minister Rob Schenck as he attempts to preach to a reluctant audience on the issue of gun violence in America. “You can’t ignore the racial dimensions to this whole subject. It’s the giant elephant in the room that must be addressed,” he says in this short clip from the film. The reality is that different conversations exist within white and black families regarding guns and gun safety, and young black men are at an elevated risk of being shot. One of Schenck’s main allies in this fight to unify Christian believers has been Lucy McBath, the mother of Jordan Davis, an unarmed teenager who was killed in Florida and whose story cast a spotlight on the state’s Stand Your Ground laws.
“Instead of looking to God righteously as the protector, we have replaced God with our guns,” McBath tells Schenck. Line In The Sand. America's Deadly Gun Addiction, By the Numbers. Aurora. Newtown. San Bernardino. And now Kalamazoo. Mass shootings have become sickeningly routine in the US, each resulting in outpourings of grief and calls for more robust gun control—countered by arguments that the problem is everything but the guns. However, the data is irrefutable: The US is home to more firearms than adults; more people own guns here than in any other nation; and the US is also host to more gun deaths per capita than any other advanced country. 1.
Civilians own three-quarters of the world’s firearms, and Americans have more than anybody else. 2. The number of new firearms available in the US has more than tripled in the past 15 years. 3. While the US doesn’t have the most gun deaths per capita, it’s up there with some of the planet’s deadliest places. 4. Gun massacres are nothing new in the US, but the frequency and deadliness have skyrocketed over the past five years. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Go Back to Top. When Gun Violence Felt Like a Disease, a City in Delaware Turned to the C.D.C. The NRA Gave These Senators Millions To Block Gun Laws. The NRA and their bought-and-paid-for Senators have blood on their hands. How can not one, but three gun bills fail to pass after two horrific mass shootings in just one week? How can our GOP-run congress remain so cruelly indifferent to our grief and outrage? Since Adam Lanza gunned down 20 first graders, six teachers, and his own mother back in 2012, we’ve clamored for tougher gun laws. Alas, as my Reverb Press colleague Tina Praino aptly puts it, the GOP’s more afraid of the NRA than they are of angry voters or terrorists buying guns. Money’s a powerful thing, and the gun trade makes lots of it from gun-crazy Americans… Especially when gun sales spike after a mass shooting.
No wonder the NRA spends so much on local, state, and national elections to keep their buddies in business. Scott Bixby from Mic.Com took a long, hard look at the 50 U.S. To add insult to injury, the NRA spent $14,240,194 — over $14 million — on taking down candidates who oppose background checks. ALL NRA RECIPIENTS - NRACONGRESS.COM. National Rifle Assn Outside Spending. Discloses Donors? PARTIALViewpoint: ConservativeType of group: PAC or Party Committee 501c Grand Total Spent on 2014 Federal Elections: $27,024,618 88.2% spent in general election General Election Spending - How Successful Were They?
$8,224,285 spent supporting 27 candidates who won$11,779,860 spent opposing 20 candidates who lost$23,835,384 total spent in general election on 70 candidates Total Independent Expenditures: $25,860,481 For Democrats: $24,262 Against Democrats: $15,200,018 For Republicans: $10,823,998 Against Republicans: $92,034Total Electioneering Communications: $0 By definition, electioneering communications do not explicitly advocate for or against the election of a candidate, but simply refer to a clearly identified federal candidate in a broadcast ad. Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics.
Map: The gun lobby’s campaign contributions, by congressional district. The political clout of the famously effective gun rights lobby is again under scrutiny. As Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif) said Thursday, everyone in D.C. “lives in terror of the gun lobby.” The gun organizations, through their PACs, employees, and other connected individuals, gave a record $3 million in campaign contributions in the last election cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org. Half of that sum went to House races, and almost all of it went to Republican candidates. The top contributors to federal candidates were the National Rifle Association, Safari Club International, and the National Association for Gun Rights, which together contributed $1.2 million. So, which members of Congress did gun rights advocates help elect? National Rifle Assn: Summary. The National Rifle Association goes to great lengths (and spends a huge sum of money) to defend the right to bear arms. It is opposed to virtually every form of gun regulation, including restrictions on owning assault weapons, retention of databases of gun purchases, background checks on purchasers at gun shows and changes in the registration of firearms.
The NRA's influence is felt not only through campaign contributions, but through millions of dollars in off-the-books spending on issue ads. Lobbying expenditures for the National Rifle Association regularly exceed $1.5 million, as the organization's lobbyists frequently try to exert their influence over government agencies including members of Congress, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Agriculture, and the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.
Profile for 2014 Election Cycle $984,152ranks 0 of 16,889 $3,360,000(2014)$3,410,000(2013)ranks 149 of 3,514 in 2014 $28,212,718ranks 10 of 144 Top Recipients Discloses Donors? Gun killings fell by 40 percent after Connecticut passed this law. (Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images) In the early ’90s, gang shootings gripped Connecticut. Bystanders, including a 7-year-old girl, were getting gunned down in drive-bys. “The state is becoming a shooting gallery, and the public wants action,” an editorial in the Hartford Courant said at the time. So in the summer of 1994, lawmakers hustled through a gun control bill in a special session. They hoped to curb shootings by requiring people to get a purchasing license before buying a handgun. The state would issue these permits to people who passed a background check and a gun safety training course. At the time, private citizens could freely buy and sell guns secondhand, even to those with criminal records.
Critics scoffed at the plan. “This will not take one gun out of the hands of a single criminal,” State Rep. Even some supporters of the law, which took effect in 1995, called it a “small step” — a gesture to placate residents alarmed at the gun violence. How they analyzed the data. What liberals don’t want to admit about gun control. Play Video12:55 Obama speaks about Ore. community college shooting Speaking at the White House on Thursday evening, a visibly frustrated and emotional President Obama remarked on the deadly shooting at a community college in Oregon. (AP) Following the fatal shooting of nine people at a community college in southern Oregon last week, President Obama renewed his call for "sufficient, common-sense gun-safety laws.
" Take a prohibition on assault weapons, one of the most common proposals. Civilians in the United States already own more than enough guns to arm every American man, woman and child. "The big problem is the guns," said David Hemenway, a professor of public health at Harvard University. "Guns are incredibly lethal," he said. A mandatory buy-back program, along the lines of Australia's highly successful ban on shotguns and semiautomatic and automatic rifles, could be effective in reducing the number of firearms.
[Read more: Did gun control work in Australia?] San Bernardino shooting: 11 essential facts about guns and mass shootings in America. Play Video1:11 What we know about the shooting in San Bernardino Police in San Bernardino, Calif., said heavily armed gunmen killed 14 people and injured 17 others during a holiday party for county employees. Here's what we know about the mass shooting. (The Washington Post) At least 14 people were killed and 14 more injured in a shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. on Wednesday. The incident, which police say involves as many as three suspects, is the latest in the string of major gun violence incidents in the United States this year. It's at least the second mass shooting in a week: On Friday, a man shot several people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, killing three, including a police officer.
[Active shooter reported in San Bernardino, Calif.] As America grapples with another apparent mass shooting, we're again facing questions about the country's unique gun culture and the prevalence of gun violence. How common are mass shootings in the United States? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Homicide | Harvard Injury Control Research Center. 1. Where there are more guns there is more homicide (literature review). Our review of the academic literature found that a broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries. Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide.
Hepburn, Lisa; Hemenway, David. Firearm availability and homicide: A review of the literature. 2. We analyzed the relationship between homicide and gun availability using data from 26 developed countries from the early 1990s. Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew. 3. Using a validated proxy for firearm ownership, we analyzed the relationship between firearm availability and homicide across 50 states over a ten year period (1988-1997). Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David.
San Bernardino shooting: 11 essential facts about guns and mass shootings in America. One map shows why America’s gun violence is so much worse than anywhere else. There are many ways in which America is exceptional. Unfortunately, one is the country's stunning rate of gun violence, which was demonstrated by two major mass shootings in the last week. Whatever your opinion about gun rights, it's hard to deny that the frequency of mass shootings is closely tied with America's very high rate of gun ownership.
The U.S. has an average of 88 guns per 100 people, according to a 2007 Small Arms Survey. That puts gun ownership rates in the U.S. far above the rest of the world, as the map below, created with data from the Small Arms Survey shows. The U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world's population, yet it's home to between a third and a half of the world's civilian-owned guns, according to that data. The Guardian previously produced a similar analysis. How exceptional is the U.S. in terms of its gun violence? Tewksbury Lab See also: -What the rest of the world wonders about America, according to Google.