This research is a bit out of date, but it is the latest authoritative data I can find. Although more Black men are arming themselves than in previous years, it is still the case that White men are the largest gun-owning demographic. And, most relevantly, most of the mass murders being committed are being done by White male MAGAts 18-34. What the data also shows is that the main reason Americans now own guns is not for sport (if you can call killing animals and birds sport) but for protection. Particularly significant, I think, Republicans are more fearful, and more of them own guns to protect themselves. And as a result here’s what The Gun Violence Archive reported as of 1 May 2023, before the latest shootings:
•5,971 gun deaths
•11,035 gun injuries
•184 mass shootings
•290 children shot
•1,702 teenagers shot
•359 incidents of defensive gun use
•454 unintentional shootings
~7,986 suicides [CDC estimate]
Understanding gun ownership in America is not as simple as knowing who does and does not own a gun. Some Americans who don’t personally own guns live with someone who does or may have owned a gun in the past. And many who don’t currently own a gun, including those who have never owned one, may be open to doing so in the future.
Three-in-ten American adults say they currently own a gun, and another 11% say they don’t personally own a gun but live with someone who does. Among those who don’t currently own a gun, about half say they could see themselves owning one in the future.
Gun ownership is more common among men than women, and white men are particularly likely to be gun owners. Among those who live in rural areas, 46% say they are gun owners, compared with 28% of those who live in the suburbs and 19% in urban areas. There are also significant differences across parties, with Republican and Republican-leaning independents more than twice as likely as Democrats and those who […]
I have direct personal experience with this. When I was in government as Special Assistant for Research and Analysis to the Chief of Naval Operations, I was approached several times by Defense Contractors, and I watched this happen with several others. I was a GS-15, roughly equivalent to a colonel in the army or a captain in the Navy. I was 29 years old, making what I thought was a pretty good living, enough to buy a house in Chevy Chase, and the offer was for three times what I was making. As it was happening I understood what corruption looked like, and they were surprised when I turned it down all three times and left government. The defense industries are so grotesquely overfunded because of this corruption.
Coyote, StormBreaker Smart Weapon, Stinger and Javelin Missiles by Raytheon Missiles and Defense are displayed during the Farnborough International Airshow 2022 on July 18, 2022 in Farnborough, England. Credit: John Keeble / Getty
The defense sector hired dozens of former armed services committee and Department of Defense personnel last year, with more swinging through the so-called “revolving door” to lobby on behalf of defense sector clients for the first time in the first quarter of 2023, a new OpenSecrets analysis of federal lobbying disclosures found.
At least 672 former government officials, military officers and members of Congress worked as lobbyists, board members or executives for the top 20 defense companies in 2022, according to a new report released by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) last Wednesday. Warren’s staff utilized OpenSecrets’ revolving door database as well as corporate websites, lobbying disclosures and U.S. Senate confirmation lists to identify these individuals.
“This practice is widespread in the defense industry, giving, at minimum, the appearance of corruption and favoritism, and potentially increasing the chance that DoD spending results in ineffective weapons and programs, bad deals, and waste of […]
Yet another story about a Republican-controlled state, and the direction the party is choosing to take the state. This report, as the title gives it, is about “Utah’s Suicide Pact with the Fossil Fuel Industry.” I’ll leave it at that.
The White River in Northeastern Utah emerges from the Colorado mountains into the Uinta Basin. Russel Albert Daniels
The GPS coordinates weren’t especially helpful last May as we drove across the remote Tavaputs Plateau in Utah’s Uinta Basin. Cell service was spotty in the vast expanse of land crosshatched with unpaved roads identified on the map only as “Well Road 4304735551” or “Chevron Pipeline Road.” Photographer Russel Albert Daniels and I had set off that morning from Vernal (population 10,241), in search of a 15-square-mile plot of undeveloped land purchased in 2011 by the Estonian-government-owned energy company Enefit.
On that land, the Estonians had hoped to create the first commercial-scale oil shale mining and processing facility in the United States, with a 320-acre industrial plant that would process 28 million tons of strip-mined shale and turn it into 50,000 barrels of oil every day for 30 years. Rich with traditional oil and gas reserves, the Uinta Basin also sits atop the largest oil shale reserve in the world, a 6 million-year-old geologic formation where […]
Christine Nguyen, California Health Equity Fellow, University of Southern California - The Conversation
Stephan:
This report begins, “In the past two decades, children have become more obese and have developed obesity at a younger age. A 2020 report found that 14.7 million children and adolescents in the U.S. live with obesity.” I had a hard time getting past that because I had gone to the Costco where we shop and while there had seen nine prepubescent children six of whom were obese and wondered, what is happening in America? Bad diet made up mostly of processed foods, obviously. Also, lack of exercise because they spend much of their time staring at electronic screens. And, as this report describes, the health issues created by childhood obesity will haunt these children throughout their adulthood. Yet another example of an American culture defined by ignorance and a society that places profit above wellbeing.
Credit: Business Insider
In the past two decades, children have become more obese and have developed obesity at a younger age. A 2020 report found that 14.7 million children and adolescents in the U.S. live with obesity.
Without intervention, many obese adolescents will remain obese as adults. Even before adulthood, some children will have serious health problems beginning in their preteen years.
I am a pediatric gastroenterologist who sees children in the largest public hospital in California, and I have witnessed a clear trend over the last two decades. Early in my practice, I only occasionally saw a child with a complication of obesity; now I see multiple referrals each month. Some of these children have severe obesity and several health complications that require multiple specialists.
NED BLACKHAWK, Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University - Time Magazine
Stephan:
The Republican Party, led by people like Gregg Abbott and Ron DeSantis and funded by uber-rich christofascist oligarchs is trying to gut the integrity of public education, and public colleges so that they don’t teach instead they indoctrinate. In terms of history this means no teaching about what was done to the indigenous peoples of North America, no serious discussion about slavery, no coverage of racism in the United States. Only talk, and positively, about White Christian history.
Pueblo Indigenous people at the Ceremonial Cave of the Frijoles Canyon in New Mexico. Credit: George Rinhart / Corbis / Getty
It is time to build a new foundation for American history. Its old paradigms have grown thin and worn. For so long, the field’s exclusive focus on Europeans and their descendants has left us with more problems than answers. Generations of other imperialists, for example, preceded the Puritans, who we have been told governed a commonwealth in the “wilderness.” Similarly, histories that celebrated pioneers upon western “frontiers” have remained incomplete without attention to broader tales of expansion and empire. If history provides the common soil for a nation’s growth and a window into its future, it is time to reimagine U.S. history and to do so outside the tropes of discovery that have often bred exclusion and misunderstanding. To find answers to the challenges of our time—racial strife, climate crisis, and domestic and global inequities, among others—will require new concepts, approaches, and commitments. It is time to put down the interpretive tools of the previous […]
