Stephan: If I were a Black, Brown, or Asian teenager, particularly if I lived in a lower-income neighborhood, this is exactly how I would feel and think. American police and sheriffs all too frequently are neither serving nor protecting, as the Uvalde, Texas made glaringly clear.
Naiara Tamminga, 13, accuses the city commission in Grand Rapids, Michigan, of being “accomplices to a murder” after police killed 26-year-old Patrick Lyoya during a traffic stop on April 4.
A 13-year-old girl gave a speech during a local city commission meeting in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that just had to have made her parents’ hearts swell with pride. Long tired of city leaders sitting on their hands following the deadly police shooting of Patrick Lyoya during a traffic stop in April, Naiara Tamminga called city commissioners “accomplices” to murder during a meeting on May 17. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Lyoya’s family and has been a fierce advocate for the public release of video in the shooting, tweeted video of Naiara’s speech on Wednesday.
Read the Full Transcript of Naiara’s speech:
“My name is Naiara Taminga. I am 13 years old. I’ve lived in Grand Rapids almost my whole life. I’m gonna say it again. I’m 13 years old. All of you are adults. Adults, right. You can drive, you can drink, you can vote. I don’t […]
DAVID STUDDERT, Professor of Law and of Health Policy at Stanford University - Time Magazine
Stephan: It is an article of faith amongst gun obsessives that having a gun in their home makes them safer. Unfortunately, that is a lie, actually it puts a family at greater risk of homicide or suicide occurring in that family. Here are the facts, and to read the entire peer-reviewed research paper, Homicide Deaths Among Adult Cohabitants of Handgun Owners in California, 2004 to 2016, published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine go to: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M21-3762.
Not that I expect the facts to make any difference to gun obsessives. The truth, that no one wants to publicly talk about is that for many, particularly White men, owning a gun is proof of their manhood, and that is what matters to them.
I live with my partner. Neither of us owns a gun. Concerned about reports of rising crime rates in our neighbourhood, my partner decides to buy a handgun to help keep us safe. Is our home safer now? Am I?
Millions of Americans may have asked themselves these questions, or versions of them—especially in the wake of horrific mass shootings like those in Buffalo and Uvalde. Record-breaking spikes in gun sales over the last two years, alongside surveys indicating that self-protection continues to be the dominant reason for buying guns, underscore a widely-held belief that a gun in the home has security benefits.
A new study from my research team, recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, shows no such benefits. We found the opposite: people living in homes with guns face substantially higher risks of being fatally assaulted.
Mass shootings are the most visible form of gun violence in America. But they account for a small fraction of all fatal shootings. Most of these deaths are lesser-known, private tragedies that occur in homes and on the streets.
Stephan: I wanted to use a picture of a child shot by an AR-15 to visually make the point this article addresses because I think it is very important. I spent half an hour trying to find such an image, searching every way I could think of on Google. It is impossible, I discovered, to actually find such an image, and that I found very revealing in itself.
After one of these school shootings we are shown cute pictures of the children, but not what they looked like lying dead of their wounds. I can tell you from my service as a medic in the Army during the early Viet Nam period that when I saw what someone looked like when they had been shot with an AK-47, when I got out of the service I went home to my family's farm, took my 37 guns, put them in my family's boat, took them out into Mobjack Bay, and threw them into the sea, and I have not fired a weapon since and that was 58 years ago.
We tolerate all kinds of violence in movies, in fact, there are movies that seem to specialize in having the hero(s) shoot as many people as possible. Lots of visual gore. But it is verboten for media to show it in real life and I find that a notable characteristic of American culture. We fantasize, even fetishize, violence but cannot stand to see it in reality.
People mourn at a makeshift memorial outside Uvalde County Courthouse in Uvalde, Texas Credit: Chandan Khanna / AFP / Getty
It is one of the rituals of school shootings in America — another round of debate, usually among journalists, on whether graphic photos should be published. If people could just see what assault weapons do to young bodies, the argument goes, they would no longer tolerate the policies that enable these killings. No, the other side warns, these photos would only cause further pain to the survivors and have no impact on a divided society that moves from one gruesome entertainment to another with the flick of a switch.
This debate skips along the surface of an American aberration: We passively tolerate high levels of violence while actively suppressing evidence of the slaughter. It is not just school shootings that we forbid ourselves from seeing — and I mean really seeing, not the thoughts-and-prayers equivalent of gazing in sadness at memorial wreaths. It is also the visual evidence of more than 1 million people who died from Covid-19 in the U.S that we […]
Stephan: I keep focusing on guns and what they are doing to American society because it never seems to end. This weekend alone, for instance, after Buffalo and Uvalde, a string of shootings in eight states left at least 15 people dead and more than 60 others wounded. Did you know that? Guns murders are so commonplace in the United States many get only superficial coverage, and that only in local media.
A customer shops for a handgun at a gun store in Florida. Credit: Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Guns are deeply ingrained in American society and the nation’s political debates.
The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gives Americans the right to bear arms, and about a third of U.S. adults say they personally own a gun. At the same time, President Joe Biden and other policymakers earlier this year proposed new restrictions on firearm access in an effort to address gun violence ranging from rising murder rates in some major cities to mass shootings.
Here are some key findings about Americans’ attitudes about gun violence, gun policy and other subjects, drawn from recent surveys by Pew Research Center and Gallup.
How we did this Four-in-ten U.S. adults say they live in a household with a gun, including 30% who say they personally own one, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in June 2021.
There are differences in gun ownership rates by political party affiliation, gender, geography and other factors. For instance, 44% of Republicans […]
Stephan: Here is some good news, for Blue states, at least, although a further indication of The Great Schism Trend. I have been following the state responses to the mass killings and it is very marked. Blue states tighten gun laws at the state level. Red states further loosen them, still operating, against all evidence, that good guys with guns is the way to stop bad guys with guns. The social outcome data makes it clearer with each passing year, that Red states are sinking further and further into dysfunction, while it is just the reverse for Blue states, which are fostering wellbeing.
Students participate in a school walk-out and protest in front of City Hall to condemn gun violence, in Los Angeles, California, on May 31, 2022. Ringo Chiu / AFP / Getty
While Senate Democrats attempt to reach a long-shot compromise on gun legislation, blue states are taking their own steps to respond to the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, Uvalde, Texas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
New York became the first to pass a slate of new gun control bills before the end of its legislative session on Thursday. California, New Jersey, and Delaware also have legislation in the pipeline.
These states, where Democrats have trifecta control of government, already have some of the strictest gun control laws in the country. Soon, they’ll likely have even stronger laws, which should mean less gun violence: States with tougher gun laws have lower rates of gun-related homicides and suicides, according to a January study by the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.
While blue states typically see limiting access to guns as the key to reducing gun […]
