Showing posts with label gun control. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gun control. Show all posts
Thursday, May 26, 2022
G.O.P. Says One Nation Under The Gun!
This retro-looking art from Todd Alcott would be biting sarcasm if it weren't true.
https://www.instagram.com/toddalcott/
Wednesday, May 25, 2022
IN NO OTHER COUNTRY
In no other country do we see the level of gun use that we have here in the United States, where this culture has fetishized, venerated, and worshiped fire arms to a grotesque degree, and where the conservative politicians who could do something about this rampant--AND DECADES OLD--scourge have decided to literally sacrifice the lives of children in favor of unrestricted gun ownership. So much for the right-to-life.
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| From The New York Times The Morning newsletter, May 25, 2022 |
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| From AMERICA'S GUN CULTURE on BBC News, May 25, 2022 |
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| From AMERICA'S GUN CULTURE on BBC News, May 25, 2022 |
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| From AMERICA'S GUN CULTURE on BBC News, May 25, 2022 |
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| From AMERICA'S GUN CULTURE on BBC News, May 25, 2022 |
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| From The New York Times The Morning newsletter, May 26, 2022 |
Sunday, November 10, 2019
The Powerful Art of Ben Turnbull
Artist Ben Turnbull's work powerfully and pointedly addresses the epidemic of gun violence in the United States. Speaking to the penchant Americans have for fetishizing and worshiping fire arms, he uses the lids of old lift-up school desks to carve hidden reliefs of hand guns and semi-automatic weapons...the kind that are used repeatedly in the regular mass shootings that plague our our schools and country, the kind that conservatives and Republicans refuse to do anything to try to curtail or stop.
https://www.benturnbull.com/
https://www.benturnbull.com/
Monday, October 14, 2019
BEAUTY: Art--Jenny Holzer
This past Thursday, Friday, and Saturday October 10-12, 2019, famed multi-media artist Jenny Holzer in collaboration with Creativetime mounted a scrolling, projected-word installation at Rockefeller Center In New York City addressing rampant gun violence in the United States. Vigil gathered together first hand accounts from victims of gun violence, whether personally shot or having lost loved ones to guns, along with poems and statements about this most grotesque, seemingly endless epidemic plaguing life in this country.
https://projects.jennyholzer.com/
http://creativetime.org/vigil-jenny-holzer/
Photo: Lauren Camarata
Photo: Lauren Camarata
Photo: Lauren Camarata
Photo: Lauren Camarata
Photo: Lauren Camarata
https://projects.jennyholzer.com/
http://creativetime.org/vigil-jenny-holzer/
Wednesday, August 7, 2019
America’s Mass Shooting Epidemic Is the Result of Republican Minority Rule by Mari Uyehara
America’s Mass Shooting Epidemic Is the Result of Republican Minority Rule
A clear majority of Americans and Democrats support stricter gun control—the GOP has been blocking it for decades, and the results have been murderous.
by Mari Uyehara | August 5, 2019
Over this past weekend, America experienced yet another double-header mass shooting, with a total of 29 dead and 53 injured.
On Saturday in El Paso, Texas, a 21-year-old white man, who authorities say published an anti-Hispanic screed on the online forum 8chan, reportedly opened fire in a Walmart store. Police arrived within six minutes, but he had already killed 20 and injured 26 people. Thirteen hours later, another 24-year-old white man reportedly opened fire in the entertainment district of Dayton, Ohio, and he managed to kill nine and wounded 27 others, despite police in the area responding within a minute of the first shots. They were, according to the research group Gun Violence Archive, the 250th and 251st mass shootings in the U.S. of 2019, following two from the previous weekend.
No other developed country has anywhere near this level of both gun violence and mass shootings. A 2016 study, “Mass Shootings: Media, Myths, and Realities,” found that between 2000 and 2014, the United States had 133 mass shootings, while Finland had just two (killing 18 people in total) and Switzerland had one mass shooting (killing 14 in total). In 2019, America has had more mass shootings than days. In The Atlantic, David Frum, like so many other commentators, called it “a uniquely American determination to ignore the obvious,” pointing out that nations like Italy are home to white supremacists and even fascistic leaders, but not mass shootings. “More guns, more killing. Fewer guns, less killing,” he wrote in conclusion. “Everybody else has figured that out. Americans—and only Americans—refuse to do so.”
That’s not quite right, however. For all the talk of America’s obsession with guns and propensity for violence, only 30 percent of Americans actually own them, according to Pew Research. A solid majority—57 percent of Americans—support stricter gun laws, with 80 percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents versus 28 percent of Republicans. Blue states, like California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Hawaii, and New York, have passed stricter gun-control laws—and even though it’s relatively easy to purchase firearms and bring them across state lines, those states have lower rates of gun violence than those with lax standards, according to the Giffords Law Center. On the federal level, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed two bipartisan gun-control bills earlier this year: H.R. 8 (a bill prohibiting person-to-person firearms transfer unless a background check can be performed) and H.R. 1112 (a bill extending the time firearms dealers have to wait for a response on background checks to 10 days).
That legislation has been held up in the Republican-controlled Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has not brought them to the floor for a vote. It is not merely a problem of obstructionism at the federal level either. Nine of the ten states with the highest gun-death rates—Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and West Virginia—have both Republican-controlled state legislatures and weak gun laws. So it is not, as Frum asserts, that “Americans express befuddlement, and compete to devise ever more far-fetched answers.” It is largely a Republican determination to do so.
In the wake of the latest mass shootings, Republicans rallied around anything-but-gun-control talking points. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California blamed video games in a Sunday morning appearance on Fox News. "The idea that these video games that dehumanize individuals to have a game of shooting individuals," McCarthy said. "I've always felt that it's a problem for future generations and others.” Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick also pointed at video games, as well as a lack of prayer in schools and saluting the flag, in an appearance on Fox & Friends.
Republican Texas senator John Cornyn—who supported the 1996 Dickey amendment on a spending bill which banned federal funding for the Centers for Disease Control to study gun violence—tweeted that “for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong,” gesturing toward a “broken background check system, improving access to mental health treatment, by hardening soft targets like our schools, by enhanced training for law enforcement and mental health professionals.” Texas governor Greg Abbott—who once tweeted that he was “embarrassed” that Texas was second to California in gun purchases, urging Texans to “pick up the pace”—also deflected to mental illness: “the need for the state and for society to do a better job of dealing with challenging mental health based issues." As did President Donald Trump, who claimed to reporters that this was “a mental illness problem.”
None of these theories are backed by evidence or even some kind of good-faith reasoning. Every other industrialized country has mental illness, video games, and “soft target” schools, as well as minimal school prayers and flag saluting, without our mass-shooting epidemic. In Japan, where video gaming is widely popular and gun laws are strict, there have been no mass shootings in the past year—never mind hundreds of them in eight months. Researchers have found no link between mass shootings and violent video games. Ditto mental illness. In a study for the National Institutes of Health, professors of psychiatry Paul Applebaum, of Columbia, and Jeffrey Swanson, of Duke, found that only “3 percent—5 percent of violent acts are attributable to serious mental illness, and most do not involve guns.” And another psychiatrist at Columbia, Michael Stone, found that about 65 percent of mass murderers exhibited no mental disorder, and a 2016 analysis by the Department of Justice found a similar rate, about 20 percent, of psychotic disorders among mass killers.
“In my large file of mass murders, if you look decade by decade, the numbers of victims are fairly small up until the 1960s,” Dr. Stone told The New York Times. “That’s when the deaths start going way up. When the AK-47s and the Kalashnikovs and the Uzis—all these semiautomatic weapons, when they became so easily accessible.”
Americans aren’t willfully blind to the fact that the availability of guns is a component of the country’s gun-violence problem. According to a 2017 Gallup poll, while only 48 percent backed a full ban on assault weapons, 96 percent of Americans support background checks for all gun purchases, 75 percent back a 30-day waiting period for all gun purchases, and 70 percent favor requiring all guns to be registered with the police—measures that go beyond today’s federal gun regulations. The Rupert Murdoch–owned New York Post, hardly a liberal rag, published a cover editorial on Monday morning, calling for a “Ban on Weapons of War.”
In recent days, while 50 Republican lawmakers turned down invitations to appear on CNN to talk about the mass shootings, Democrat senators, including Connecticut’s Chris Murphy and California’s Kamala Harris, called for more gun regulation, with presidential candidates Cory Booker of New Jersey and Bernie Sanders of Vermont calling on McConnell to bring the Senate back from recess to enact emergency legislation. Former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder tweeted: “Enough-time for real action. Pass a domestic terrorism bill. Ban assault weapons, high capacity magazines, body armor, silencers. Pass universal background checks, end loopholes: gunshow and Charleston. Pass red flag laws. We can reduce the carnage if pols have the guts to act.”
Many pols have those guts, but they are outweighed by a Senate makeup tilted toward less populous states, gerrymandering and voter suppression rampant on the state level, and a judiciary reshaped with far-right appointments, thanks to McConnell’s obstructionism. In 2018, Democratic Senate candidates collectively won 18 million more votes than their Republican counterparts, yet still lost seats, with the Senate balance maintained by the Republicans 53-47. To the extent that mass shootings are a uniquely American epidemic, it is because the American electoral system is uniquely rigged for the modern GOP—the “Great Compromise” that allotted the same number of Senate seats for both large and small states has metastasized the issue to deadly effect. Without a representative body that reflects the will of the people, it is unlikely that the carnage will stop anytime soon.
Link to original article:
https://www.gq.com/story/americas-mass-shooting-republican-rule
A clear majority of Americans and Democrats support stricter gun control—the GOP has been blocking it for decades, and the results have been murderous.
by Mari Uyehara | August 5, 2019
Over this past weekend, America experienced yet another double-header mass shooting, with a total of 29 dead and 53 injured.
On Saturday in El Paso, Texas, a 21-year-old white man, who authorities say published an anti-Hispanic screed on the online forum 8chan, reportedly opened fire in a Walmart store. Police arrived within six minutes, but he had already killed 20 and injured 26 people. Thirteen hours later, another 24-year-old white man reportedly opened fire in the entertainment district of Dayton, Ohio, and he managed to kill nine and wounded 27 others, despite police in the area responding within a minute of the first shots. They were, according to the research group Gun Violence Archive, the 250th and 251st mass shootings in the U.S. of 2019, following two from the previous weekend.
No other developed country has anywhere near this level of both gun violence and mass shootings. A 2016 study, “Mass Shootings: Media, Myths, and Realities,” found that between 2000 and 2014, the United States had 133 mass shootings, while Finland had just two (killing 18 people in total) and Switzerland had one mass shooting (killing 14 in total). In 2019, America has had more mass shootings than days. In The Atlantic, David Frum, like so many other commentators, called it “a uniquely American determination to ignore the obvious,” pointing out that nations like Italy are home to white supremacists and even fascistic leaders, but not mass shootings. “More guns, more killing. Fewer guns, less killing,” he wrote in conclusion. “Everybody else has figured that out. Americans—and only Americans—refuse to do so.”
That’s not quite right, however. For all the talk of America’s obsession with guns and propensity for violence, only 30 percent of Americans actually own them, according to Pew Research. A solid majority—57 percent of Americans—support stricter gun laws, with 80 percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents versus 28 percent of Republicans. Blue states, like California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Hawaii, and New York, have passed stricter gun-control laws—and even though it’s relatively easy to purchase firearms and bring them across state lines, those states have lower rates of gun violence than those with lax standards, according to the Giffords Law Center. On the federal level, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed two bipartisan gun-control bills earlier this year: H.R. 8 (a bill prohibiting person-to-person firearms transfer unless a background check can be performed) and H.R. 1112 (a bill extending the time firearms dealers have to wait for a response on background checks to 10 days).
That legislation has been held up in the Republican-controlled Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has not brought them to the floor for a vote. It is not merely a problem of obstructionism at the federal level either. Nine of the ten states with the highest gun-death rates—Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and West Virginia—have both Republican-controlled state legislatures and weak gun laws. So it is not, as Frum asserts, that “Americans express befuddlement, and compete to devise ever more far-fetched answers.” It is largely a Republican determination to do so.
In the wake of the latest mass shootings, Republicans rallied around anything-but-gun-control talking points. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California blamed video games in a Sunday morning appearance on Fox News. "The idea that these video games that dehumanize individuals to have a game of shooting individuals," McCarthy said. "I've always felt that it's a problem for future generations and others.” Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick also pointed at video games, as well as a lack of prayer in schools and saluting the flag, in an appearance on Fox & Friends.
Republican Texas senator John Cornyn—who supported the 1996 Dickey amendment on a spending bill which banned federal funding for the Centers for Disease Control to study gun violence—tweeted that “for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong,” gesturing toward a “broken background check system, improving access to mental health treatment, by hardening soft targets like our schools, by enhanced training for law enforcement and mental health professionals.” Texas governor Greg Abbott—who once tweeted that he was “embarrassed” that Texas was second to California in gun purchases, urging Texans to “pick up the pace”—also deflected to mental illness: “the need for the state and for society to do a better job of dealing with challenging mental health based issues." As did President Donald Trump, who claimed to reporters that this was “a mental illness problem.”
None of these theories are backed by evidence or even some kind of good-faith reasoning. Every other industrialized country has mental illness, video games, and “soft target” schools, as well as minimal school prayers and flag saluting, without our mass-shooting epidemic. In Japan, where video gaming is widely popular and gun laws are strict, there have been no mass shootings in the past year—never mind hundreds of them in eight months. Researchers have found no link between mass shootings and violent video games. Ditto mental illness. In a study for the National Institutes of Health, professors of psychiatry Paul Applebaum, of Columbia, and Jeffrey Swanson, of Duke, found that only “3 percent—5 percent of violent acts are attributable to serious mental illness, and most do not involve guns.” And another psychiatrist at Columbia, Michael Stone, found that about 65 percent of mass murderers exhibited no mental disorder, and a 2016 analysis by the Department of Justice found a similar rate, about 20 percent, of psychotic disorders among mass killers.
“In my large file of mass murders, if you look decade by decade, the numbers of victims are fairly small up until the 1960s,” Dr. Stone told The New York Times. “That’s when the deaths start going way up. When the AK-47s and the Kalashnikovs and the Uzis—all these semiautomatic weapons, when they became so easily accessible.”
Americans aren’t willfully blind to the fact that the availability of guns is a component of the country’s gun-violence problem. According to a 2017 Gallup poll, while only 48 percent backed a full ban on assault weapons, 96 percent of Americans support background checks for all gun purchases, 75 percent back a 30-day waiting period for all gun purchases, and 70 percent favor requiring all guns to be registered with the police—measures that go beyond today’s federal gun regulations. The Rupert Murdoch–owned New York Post, hardly a liberal rag, published a cover editorial on Monday morning, calling for a “Ban on Weapons of War.”
In recent days, while 50 Republican lawmakers turned down invitations to appear on CNN to talk about the mass shootings, Democrat senators, including Connecticut’s Chris Murphy and California’s Kamala Harris, called for more gun regulation, with presidential candidates Cory Booker of New Jersey and Bernie Sanders of Vermont calling on McConnell to bring the Senate back from recess to enact emergency legislation. Former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder tweeted: “Enough-time for real action. Pass a domestic terrorism bill. Ban assault weapons, high capacity magazines, body armor, silencers. Pass universal background checks, end loopholes: gunshow and Charleston. Pass red flag laws. We can reduce the carnage if pols have the guts to act.”
Many pols have those guts, but they are outweighed by a Senate makeup tilted toward less populous states, gerrymandering and voter suppression rampant on the state level, and a judiciary reshaped with far-right appointments, thanks to McConnell’s obstructionism. In 2018, Democratic Senate candidates collectively won 18 million more votes than their Republican counterparts, yet still lost seats, with the Senate balance maintained by the Republicans 53-47. To the extent that mass shootings are a uniquely American epidemic, it is because the American electoral system is uniquely rigged for the modern GOP—the “Great Compromise” that allotted the same number of Senate seats for both large and small states has metastasized the issue to deadly effect. Without a representative body that reflects the will of the people, it is unlikely that the carnage will stop anytime soon.
Link to original article:
https://www.gq.com/story/americas-mass-shooting-republican-rule
Monday, November 6, 2017
Saturday, December 15, 2012
ENOUGH
Roland Martin writing for CNN:
Enough!
Enough with putting off tomorrow what we should be talking about today. Enough with being afraid to step on someone's delicate sensibilities when it comes to the Second Amendment. Enough with elected leaders who are too cowardly to confront the National Rifle Association and their ardent supporters. Enough with moms and dads and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and pastors and deacons who are afraid to make public the private anguish of mental illness.
Enough! Enough! Enough!
Enough with just asking for thoughts and prayers. Enough with just hugging our children. Enough with leaving flowers and teddy bears at a makeshift memorial.
It's time for action. It's time for people of conscience to, in the words of the late civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, be "sick and tired of being sick and tired."
America, 20 of our children are dead, and we are all paralyzed, not knowing what to do or say. I've shed tears for the lives of the innocent children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Many of you have likely done the same.
We witnessed the president of the United States, Barack Obama, stand before the country fighting back tears talking about the lives lost, reminding us of other tragedies involving guns and sick individuals behind the trigger.
And every time this happened, those who refuse to discuss gun control are quick to say, "Now is not the time."
One day after Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher shot and killed his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, NBC Sports anchor Bob Costas said it was time to talk about this nation's fascination with guns. Instead of being hailed as an honest communicator, he was vilified for having the audacity to raise the subject at the halftime of a football game.
Have we become such a nation of cowards that we are desperate to not discuss a real issue, instead saying, "Please, shut up so I can watch the game?"
Yet today, we are glued to the television, unable to turn from the scene in Newtown, Connecticut, eager to find every new detail as to what led to the horrific mass murder of a classroom full of kindergartners.
It wasn't time to talk about this when Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot in the head, and six others were killed in January 2011. It wasn't time in July 2012 when 12 people were blown away in a movie theater in Colorado. Seven were killed at a Sikh temple near Milwaukee near August, and we were told then, "Now is not the time."
So, please, exactly when is the time?
This nation, whether we want to admit it not, is one that is fascinated and enraptured with guns. It courses through our veins like heroin shooting through the arms of an addict. We love to see it in our movies, video games, on television, and then we'll fiercely defend the right to bear arms, all while flagrantly waving the U.S. Constitution in the face of anyone who objects.
There is absolutely no reason why we need as many guns in America. None. It simply shouldn't be the way of life others are so quick to defend. There is absolutely no doubt that we need tough and stringent gun control. Not solely to prevent murders like those in Connecticut, but to remove the option when someone is angered, depressed or in the case of too many, mentally ill.
And that's the second issue that it's time that we come to grips with in this country: We are a nation that has chosen to either medicate or ignore altogether.
"They have a few screws loose." "You know he's off his rocker." We've heard all of the terms. We often laugh and dismiss the mentally ill in America, choosing to cross the street when we see the homeless veteran screaming and cussing at anyone who walks by. When it's time for budget cuts, those most vulnerable often get thrown out first.
For years American cities, counties and states have shirked their responsibility when it comes to the mentally ill, choosing to abandon helping them, but quick to build a new prison to incarcerate them when a law is broken.
Now we wait to see if the Newtown, Connecticut, killer will be the latest Jared Lee Loughner (Gabby Giffords), Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech), or James Holmes (Colorado movie theater all individuals who were described as mentally unstable.
Too often the warning signs were there, but ignored for one reason or another.
Could any of these tragedies have been prevented? No one knows for sure. But I sure as hell would rather try than have to be a first responder and look a parent in the eye and say, "Sir or ma'am, I'm sorry. But your baby is dead, killed in the classroom along with 19 other classmates."
See, now is the time that they are having that conversation. Now is the time those parents are grieving the loss of their babies. Now is the time parents in Newtown, Connecticut are eschewing Christmas plans to prepare for a funeral.
America, now is the time for us to stop living in denial. We must address guns. We must address mental illness. We must have the courage and conviction to put aside our political views and deal with the task at hand.
America, NOW IS THE TIME.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/opinion/martin-gun-control/index.html?hpt=hp_c4
Enough!
Enough with putting off tomorrow what we should be talking about today. Enough with being afraid to step on someone's delicate sensibilities when it comes to the Second Amendment. Enough with elected leaders who are too cowardly to confront the National Rifle Association and their ardent supporters. Enough with moms and dads and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and pastors and deacons who are afraid to make public the private anguish of mental illness.
Enough! Enough! Enough!
Enough with just asking for thoughts and prayers. Enough with just hugging our children. Enough with leaving flowers and teddy bears at a makeshift memorial.
It's time for action. It's time for people of conscience to, in the words of the late civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, be "sick and tired of being sick and tired."
America, 20 of our children are dead, and we are all paralyzed, not knowing what to do or say. I've shed tears for the lives of the innocent children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Many of you have likely done the same.
We witnessed the president of the United States, Barack Obama, stand before the country fighting back tears talking about the lives lost, reminding us of other tragedies involving guns and sick individuals behind the trigger.
And every time this happened, those who refuse to discuss gun control are quick to say, "Now is not the time."
One day after Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher shot and killed his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, NBC Sports anchor Bob Costas said it was time to talk about this nation's fascination with guns. Instead of being hailed as an honest communicator, he was vilified for having the audacity to raise the subject at the halftime of a football game.
Have we become such a nation of cowards that we are desperate to not discuss a real issue, instead saying, "Please, shut up so I can watch the game?"
Yet today, we are glued to the television, unable to turn from the scene in Newtown, Connecticut, eager to find every new detail as to what led to the horrific mass murder of a classroom full of kindergartners.
It wasn't time to talk about this when Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot in the head, and six others were killed in January 2011. It wasn't time in July 2012 when 12 people were blown away in a movie theater in Colorado. Seven were killed at a Sikh temple near Milwaukee near August, and we were told then, "Now is not the time."
So, please, exactly when is the time?
This nation, whether we want to admit it not, is one that is fascinated and enraptured with guns. It courses through our veins like heroin shooting through the arms of an addict. We love to see it in our movies, video games, on television, and then we'll fiercely defend the right to bear arms, all while flagrantly waving the U.S. Constitution in the face of anyone who objects.
There is absolutely no reason why we need as many guns in America. None. It simply shouldn't be the way of life others are so quick to defend. There is absolutely no doubt that we need tough and stringent gun control. Not solely to prevent murders like those in Connecticut, but to remove the option when someone is angered, depressed or in the case of too many, mentally ill.
And that's the second issue that it's time that we come to grips with in this country: We are a nation that has chosen to either medicate or ignore altogether.
"They have a few screws loose." "You know he's off his rocker." We've heard all of the terms. We often laugh and dismiss the mentally ill in America, choosing to cross the street when we see the homeless veteran screaming and cussing at anyone who walks by. When it's time for budget cuts, those most vulnerable often get thrown out first.
For years American cities, counties and states have shirked their responsibility when it comes to the mentally ill, choosing to abandon helping them, but quick to build a new prison to incarcerate them when a law is broken.
Now we wait to see if the Newtown, Connecticut, killer will be the latest Jared Lee Loughner (Gabby Giffords), Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech), or James Holmes (Colorado movie theater all individuals who were described as mentally unstable.
Too often the warning signs were there, but ignored for one reason or another.
Could any of these tragedies have been prevented? No one knows for sure. But I sure as hell would rather try than have to be a first responder and look a parent in the eye and say, "Sir or ma'am, I'm sorry. But your baby is dead, killed in the classroom along with 19 other classmates."
See, now is the time that they are having that conversation. Now is the time those parents are grieving the loss of their babies. Now is the time parents in Newtown, Connecticut are eschewing Christmas plans to prepare for a funeral.
America, now is the time for us to stop living in denial. We must address guns. We must address mental illness. We must have the courage and conviction to put aside our political views and deal with the task at hand.
America, NOW IS THE TIME.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/opinion/martin-gun-control/index.html?hpt=hp_c4
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