Sallyann Nicholls , Alice Tidey, Emma Beswick, - euronews
Stephan: The numbers cited are based on 2019 data but its substantive points remain the same. It illustrates the insanity of the American gun psychosis and shows the blazing contrast between all of Europe compared to the United States. The U.S. has 4.23% of the world's population, yet we own almost half the civilian-owned firearms in the world.
Gun ownership per capita in the US is more than three times that of Europe’s highest country.
There were 39.1 firearms per 100 people in Montenegro, compared with 120 in the US, according to the Small Arms Survey (SAS)
Around 46% of all 857 million guns in civilian hands around the world belonged to people living in the United States in 2017, a survey has found.
The SAS found that gun ownership among civilians (84.6%) dwarfed state militaries (13.1%) and law enforcements’ (2.2%) stockpiles, and that number had grown by more than 200 million since 2006.
In total, it is thought that there are more than 1 billion firearms in possession across 230 countries and autonomous territories around the world.
Europe
The European Union’s 513 million inhabitants owned a collective 79.8 million firearms in 2017. That figure grows to 93.2 million when including countries outside the EU, like Russia and Iceland.
The most guns were concentrated in Russia (17.6m), Germany (15.8m) and France (12.7m), while the rate of firearms owned per 100 people was highest in Montenegro (39.1), Serbia (39.1) and Cyprus (34). In comparison, there were […]
Stephan: The attack on American democracy by the Republican Party is not only affecting the United States, it is also completely destroying our international reputation as a democracy. Here is how it looks in Great Britain. Now when an American preens about the quality of American democracy it should surprise no one if the response is a horse laugh. For this and other reasons I find the Republican Party despicable.
The Republican effort comes at a moment when the US supreme court appears wholly uninterested in protecting voting rights. Illustration: Sébastien Thibault/The Guardian
Fueled by Trump’s election lies, Republicans have doubled down on a brazen effort to restrict rights – and more danger lies ahead.
Twenty twenty-one should have been a year to celebrate for LaTosha Brown.
After decades of organizing Black voters in Georgia, Brown and other organizers in Georgia broke through. Defying expectations, turnout among Black voters surged in US Senate runoff races, powering two Democrats to historic victories. It came two months after Georgia saw record turnout in its November election, helping Joe Biden become the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state in nearly three decades.
This success story was mirrored across America. Despite a lethal pandemic, a staggering 159m votes were cast, 67% of eligible voters, the highest turnout in a presidential election since 1900. Such turnout is even more remarkable considering that millions of Americans adopted an entirely new way of voting, casting their ballots not on election day but ahead of time, either in person or […]
Stephan: Do you remember Trump University, a scam built on student debt, and one of Trump's many grifts? You may recall, he ultimately had to pay $25 million in reparations. Or perhaps you recall the scummy Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her schemes to privatize public education so that schools could be run for profit not education.
In contrast to all that Trumpian crime and corruption, here is good news that promotes wellbeing from the Biden administration. Given the amount of Trumpian sewage Biden and his people have to clean up just to get the federal government back on track and functioning, I am very impressed by how much good news has nonetheless been coming out since he took office two months ago.
Department of Education
The Education Department announced this week it would fully forgive the federal loans of borrowers who enrolled in schools that “engaged in certain misconduct.”
“Borrowers deserve a simplified and fair path to relief when they have been harmed by their institution’s misconduct,” said the new Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, in a statement. “A close review of these claims and the associated evidence showed these borrowers have been harmed and we will grant them a fresh start from their debt.”
In 2019, then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos faced intense scrutiny over her handling of the issue when she appeared before the House Education and Labor committee. The Education Department says it will now ensure borrowers with approved claims “have a streamlined path to receiving full loan discharges,” including individuals who previously received “less than a full loan […]
Stephan: America's gun psychosis is intertwined but not wholly dependent on the country's White male problem. There is no other developed nation on earth, not actively having a war on its soil, that has anything like the gun death rate of the United States. We train our children what to do if a mass murderer comes to their school -- think about that for a minute -- and now, I guess, we should train ourselves as to how to escape or hide if we are in our neighborhood grocery store or drugstore and a mass murderer comes in to randomly kill 5 or 15 of us. Yet the Republicans in Congress apparently don't see this as a problem.
Police respond at a King Sooper’s grocery store where a gunman opened fire on March 22, 2021 in Boulder, Colorado. Ten people, including a police officer, were killed in the attack. Credit: Chet Strange/Getty
Rght on the heels of last week’s horrific shooting spree by a 21-year-old at three Atlanta-area Asian day spas that left eight dead comes another mass murder, this time with a death toll of 10 at a Boulder, Colorado grocery store. The suspect, 21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa was reportedly armed with an AR-15. While everyone waits for an apparent motive (officials said an investigation would not take fewer than five days to complete) one thing is absolutely certain: Little will be done to address the primary cause of mass shootings. The ease with which any random man with an inchoate grievance can pick up a gun and rapidly snuff out the lives of strangers to make himself feel powerful will remain unchecked.
Stephan: The further they dig into the insurrection of 6th January, the more evidence emerges that the White militias the law enforcement agencies at the city, state, and national level are all too intertwined. We need to radically change the way any kind of police personnel are recruited and trained once recruited. There is no democracy on earth that has as many police killings each year as the United States. But will we? Only you can make that happen.
“We need to stop fighting Antifa in the streets where the cops are and start fighting them in bars and alleys,” Donohoe wrote back in 2019. “We need to stomp them. We need to ruin their lives physically like they have ruined ours financially with doxxing. We need to rack up their hospital bills. We need to use special operations tactics and lightning strike them.”
According to The Daily Beast, his previous profile photo on the encrypted social network featured him shaking hands with a member of the D.C. Metropolitan Police, later identified as Collin Cole, a Black police officer who served in the Marines with Donohoe.
In a Facebook post around that time, Donohoe spoke of counterprotests scheduled to take place in Downtown D.C. He tagged Cole, who responded to the post by saying, “I’ll be working downtown today for the protests.”
