Anti-Trump protests for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day have elicited many an existential question about the events of November 2016. How do you compare mass shootings in 2017 to the ones in 2016? The answer seems obvious. Since Barack Obama was president, 317 Americans have been killed by gunfire. In 2016, there were 355. Since Donald Trump was elected, 321 have been killed.
That’s a 19 percent increase.
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Eight Americans have died by gun violence during Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations alone. They include a mother, a father, and their five children – all killed by officers in Oakland, California, in a shooting that injured another innocent family member.
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A video game inspired by The Gambler never intended to elicit American gun violence. In fact, it was focused on internal conflict. It did not intend to cause more death in our country than any other violent culture on earth. The only conclusion can be that it has already succeeded. If that’s true, then The Gambler, of all films, is the real king of American carnage.
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Given its huge societal and cultural effect on our culture, what is everyone doing about the toll of our use of firearms?
Given its huge societal and cultural effect on our culture, what is everyone doing about the toll of our use of firearms? That’s the question that follows closely from Dr. William Heyman’s analysis of the “Post-Gun Violence Recession” in the Washington Post. In his opinion piece, Heyman, a psychologist at the University of California San Diego, makes it clear that Americans are no longer able to understand the full magnitude of the impact of the various “trends and influences” of our new gun culture on the American psyche. Yet, heyman suggests that we can find a path to recovery – as long as we focus on the factors we did more than a decade ago to stem the tide of gun violence.
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The US will soon release a review of its mental health policy that will throw cold water on numerous recent proposals to make mental health screenings a condition of firearm ownership. But for all that it may wash away some of the ensuing chaos in the media, it will not stop the way violence continues to change all American society. We are a majority-minority nation, and we must come to terms with that reality. Until we do, we will always face an uphill battle against the vitriol of our gun culture.
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With less than six hours before Mitt Romney was to be nominated at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night, Senator Elizabeth Warren accused him of supporting policies that “have hurt middle-class families”.
Warren, an oft-mentioned candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2020, was referring to Romney’s decision in 2011, as governor of Massachusetts, to sign into law the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Romney in Massachusetts had used the federal stimulus package to implement a state-level health insurance program. Then-Obama campaign communications director David Axelrod called Romney’s move “the most cynical, most political act in the history of presidential politics”, and a line that was repeated over and over again during the campaign.
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