Stephan: Thousands die each year because of opioid overdoses, and it has been going on for over a decade. It is yet another demonstration of the corruption and lack of interest in fostering wellbeing by the American illness profit system and the corporate pharmaceutical industries.
Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source Images: Strauss/Curtis and Esben_HGetty Images.
Twelve years ago, ProPublica set out to build a first-of-its-kind tool that would allow users, with a single search, to see whether their doctors were receiving money from an array of pharmaceutical companies.
Dollars for Docs generated a huge rush of interest. Readers searched the database tens of millions of times to see if their doctors had financial ties to the companies that made the drugs they prescribed. Law enforcement officials used it to investigate drug company marketing, drug companies looked up their competitors and doctors searched for themselves.
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A trove of recently released documents offers the public an unvarnished look inside those relationships from the perspective of drug companies themselves. The material shows company officials worked to deflect the media scrutiny even as they sought to take advantage of relationships that they had built with doctors they were paying significant sums of money.
The documents were published online by the University of California San Francisco and Johns Hopkins University and became available as a […]
Patrick Sharkeya and Yinzhi Shen - Edited by John Hagan, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL,, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University | Office of Population Research, Princeton University - PHAS https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/ doi:10.1073/pnas.2100846118/-/DCSupplemental.
Stephan: I am increasingly concerned that murderous gun violence is becoming normalized in the United States, and here is the actual research that leads me to that concern.
Credit: Patrick Sharkey and Yinshi Shen
Media coverage in the aftermath of mass shootings frequently documents expressions of sadness and outrage shared by millions of Americans. This type of collective emotion can be a powerful force in establishing shared objectives and motivating political actions.
Yet, the rise in mass shootings has not translated into widespread legislative progress toward gun control across the nation. This study is designed to shed light on this puzzle by generating causal evidence on the temporal and geographic scale of collective emotional responses to mass shootings.
Using a unique continuous survey on Americans’ daily emotions without reference to specific events, our empirical strategy compares the daily emotions of residents interviewed after to those interviewed before 31 mass shootings within the same city or state where the event occurred. We found that the emotional impact of mass shootings is substantial, but it is local, short-lived, and politicized. These results suggest that if policy reform efforts are to draw on collective emotional responses to these events, they will likely have to start at […]
Stephan: The reason an 18-year-old sad loser Texan boy could walk into a gun shop on his 18th birthday and legal buy a weapon specifically designed for combat and killing as many humans as possible as quickly as possible is because the Republican whores in Congress will not permit any legislation that in any way restricts access to guns. It's not complicated, so thousands of Americans, including little children as we just saw, are murdered each year.
Tuesday’s massacre at a Texas elementary school, in which a gunman killed 19 children and two adults, reignited calls to pass gun control legislation that has been stalled in Congress, in some cases for decades.
Numerous Democrats urged the Senate to act on stalled House-passed legislation, or for Congress to bring up other gun control measures. No major gun legislation has been approved by Congress in more than a decade, despite widespread calls to do so after mass shootings.
Two major control measures were passed by the House last year: The Enhanced Background Checks Act of 2021 and the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2021. Both measures stalled in the Senate.
After the massacre on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) initiated a process to fast-track both bills onto the Senate’s legislative calendar. But that does not guarantee that either bill will receive a vote in the Senate, and Schumer on the floor Wednesday indicated that he would not immediately bring gun control bills to the floor.
Enacting any bill will be tough. The evenly split, 50-50 Senate requires support from […]
Oriana Gonzalez and Will Chase, Breaking News Reporters - Axios
Stephan:
Driving the news: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) received the most money from gun rights supporters. On Tuesday, he received major backlash for responding to the shooting by saying that gun control will not help and that “we need to devote far more law enforcement resources to stopping violent criminals.”
In the wake of the Texas elementary school shooting, where 19 kids and 2 adults were killed, there is renewed scrutiny on the hundreds of thousands of dollars Republican lawmakers have received in campaign contributions from groups supporting gun rights.
The shooter was even engaged with law enforcement prior to entering the building, but he still managed to get inside and gun down people in the school.
The big picture: There’s a pattern that follows congressional action in the wake of a mass shooting: Lawmakers will zero in on legislation focused on gun control that requires bipartisan support to pass, but […]
DAVID SIDERS and OLIVIA BEAVERS, Staff Writers - Politico
Stephan: The appearance of Trump, at the NRA convention on 27-29 May and described by the NRA as "a showcase of more than 14 acres of “the latest guns and gear,” with a 'powerhouse lineup of political speakers.'" All this just days after the massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde is a very deliberate considered political statement, and not just by Trump. Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw, are scheduled to present at Friday's convention. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, will also speak. It is because of this organization, these politicians, plus the weapon maker corporations, that are responsible, in my view, for the deaths in both cities. No one who has the least interest in wellbeing would make or sell something like the weapon used in both massacres, and continuing a conference only a few miles from where the Uvalde murders occurred is giving the middle finger to the rest of us. This is all about political power.
Will Americans recognize what is actually going on? I don't know. We will see in November.
Nothing laid bare the disjointed state of gun politics in America as starkly as the call and response in Texas this week. On Tuesday, it was a school shooting. Days later, Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans will appear at a gathering of the NRA.
The Memorial Day weekend event is being billed by the National Rifle Association as a showcase of more than 14 acres of “the latest guns and gear,” with a “powerhouse lineup of political speakers.” On his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump confirmed on Wednesday he will appear.
That should never have been in doubt. Despite being weakened by financial difficulties and infighting, the National Rifle Association’s membership is a critical constituency to conservative politicians, and the event in Houston — less than 300 miles from the site of the mass shooting in Uvalde — a measure of its longstanding ties to the GOP.
The timing was inconsequential.
“Fuck them,” said Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was killed in the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., in 2018. “Fuck all of […]
