People are asking why the shooter in Virginia Beach used a gun to settle his workplace score. The answer is probably pretty simple.

When a man has a gun, he literally holds the power of life and death in his hand. That kind of power is extraordinarily seductive.

With a gun in his hand, a man can look around a room, a building, or a public area and specifically identify who will instantaneously die and whom he will allow to live. It’s a power that traditionally has only been held by doctors, priests, police and soldiers.

The power over life and death is greater and more intoxicating than any other power; it’s one of the reasons why some men are specifically drawn to these professions and historically have tried to regulate them to be male-only.

If you are not male and have never carried a gun in public, it’s only an imaginary experiment, but science shows that simply handling a gun alters men’s levels of testosterone and measurably increases their aggressive behavior.

This is largely a male problem because men commit 85.3 percent of all homicides and 

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The Republican Party has earned a reputation as the anti-science, anti-fact party — understandably, perhaps, given the GOP’s policy of ignoring the evidence for global climate change and insisting on  the efficacy of supply-side economics, despite all the research to the contrary. Yet ironically, it is now the Democratic Party that is wantonly ignoring mounds of social science data that suggests that promoting centrist candidates is a bad, losing strategy when it comes to winning elections. As the Democratic establishment and its pundit class starts to line up behind the centrist nominees for president — mainly, Joe Biden, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris — the party’s head-in-the-sand attitude is especially troubling.

The mounds of data to which I refer comes from Thomas Piketty, the French political economist who made waves with his 2013 book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” This paper, entitled “Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict,” analyzes around 70 years of post-election surveys from three countries — Britain, the United States and France — to comprehend how Western politics have changed in […]

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Conservative Republicans in Louisiana this week shot down legislation aimed at setting a minimum age requirement marriage in their state, as they argued that some 15 and 16 year olds should have the right to get married.

NOLA.com reports that conservatives in Louisiana’s state legislature have rejected setting hard minimum age requirements for marriage, and instead voted to continue the current policy of allowing people under 18 to get married with parental consent. Additionally, the law would require some sort of judicial process for anyone under the age of 16 to get married.

Rep. Nancy Landry, a Lafayette Republican, said she wanted to have minimum age for getting married because she thinks marriage is the right choice for young people who are already sexually active.

“If they’re both 16 years old, and they both consent to sexual relations, and they’re about to have a baby, why wouldn’t we want them to be married?” she asked. “It’s really disturbing to me, because a lot of 16-year-olds are very mature.”

Not every Republican shared Landry’s view, however. The Baton Rouge Advocate reports that GOP […]

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