Parkland shooting

[3/24/18] Hundreds of thousands of Americans galvanized by last month’s Florida school massacre rallied in cities across the country on Saturday to demand tighter gun laws.

Carrying signs with slogans such as “If they choose guns over our kids, vote them out,” protesters in Washington jammed Pennsylvania Avenue as students from the Parkland, Florida, high school where 17 people were shot to death called on lawmakers and President Donald Trump to confront the issue.

The massive March For Our Lives rallies, some led by student survivors from Parkland, aim to break legislative gridlock that has long stymied efforts to increase restrictions on firearms sales in a nation where mass shootings like the one on Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have become frighteningly common. 

[3/21/18] Obamas' letter to Parkland students
[3/14/18] Thousands of students walk out to protest gun violence
[3/10/18] NRA files lawsuit to block school safety bill
[3/9/18] Florida Governor Rick Scott signs compromise school safety bill
[3/7/18] Two great moral crusades (Dan Boylan, Midweek, page 10)

[2/28/18] Trump spars with GOP on gun control and school safety

[2/28/18] Dick's Sporting Goods to stop selling assault-style rifles

[2/26/18] Trump believes he would have run in there even he didn't have a weapon / yes this guy

[2/24/18] Florida’s governor announced plans Friday to put more armed guards in schools and to make it harder for young adults and some with mental illness to buy guns, responding to days of intense lobbying from survivors of last week’s shooting at a Florida high school.

Scott, a Republican widely expected to run for the Senate, outlined his plan at a Tallahassee news conference. In addition to banning firearm sales to anyone under 21, the governor called for a trained law-enforcement officer for every school – and one for every 1,000 students at larger schools – by the time the fall 2018 school year begins.

[2/24/18] PARKLAND, Fla. >> The progression has become numbingly repetitive — mass bloodshed unleashed by a gunman, followed by the stories of the fallen, the funerals, the mourning, the talking heads and the calls for change that dwindle into nothingness.

The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, though, has some pondering the improbable: Could this latest carnage actually lead to gun reforms?

Alongside the familiar refrains stemming from earlier shootings, the Feb. 14 attack in Parkland, Florida, came with something else: young survivors immediately pleading for nationwide action. They have led walk-outs, confronted politicians and garnered the support of celebrities, linking their sorrowful, eloquent, outraged voices to the gun debate.

“Our kids have started a revolution,” Stoneman Douglas teacher Diane Wolk Rogers said during a CNN-sponsored forum Wednesday.

[2/22/18] Trump says minimum age for owning guns should be 21

[2/21/18] Trump argues for arming teachers (concealed carry)

[2/20/18] Gun enthusiast destroys his AR-15

[2/20/18]  WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he has signed a memo directing the Justice Department to propose regulations to "ban all devices" like the rapid-fire bump stocks involved in last year's Las Vegas massacre.

Seeking to show action days after a deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Trump spoke during a White House ceremony recognizing bravery by the nation's public safety officers.

The announcement came days after the shooting deaths of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The device Trump referred to was used in the October shooting deaths of 58 people in Las Vegas, and attached to a half-dozen of the long guns found in the shooter's hotel room. A legislative effort to ban the device fizzled out last year.

White House officials say the president will be meeting with students, teachers and state and local officials to discuss ways of providing more school safety and address gun violence. Pressure has been mounting for action after the Parkland shooting.

[2/18/18] A prominent Republican political donor demanded on Saturday that the party pass legislation to restrict access to guns, and vowed not to contribute to any candidates or electioneering groups that did not support a ban on the sale of military-style firearms to civilians.

Al Hoffman Jr., a Florida-based real estate developer who was a leading fund-raiser for George W. Bush’s campaigns, said he would seek to marshal support among other Republican political donors for a renewed assault weapons ban.

“For how many years now have we been doing this — having these experiences of terrorism, mass killings — and how many years has it been that nothing’s been done?” Mr. Hoffman said in an interview. “It’s the end of the road for me.”

Mr. Hoffman announced his ultimatum in an email to half a dozen Republican leaders, including Jeb Bush and Gov. Rick Scott of Florida. He wrote in the email that he would not give money to Mr. Scott, who is considering a campaign for the Senate in 2018, or other Florida Republicans he has backed in the past, including Representative Brian Mast, if they did not support new gun legislation.

“I will not write another check unless they all support a ban on assault weapons,” he wrote. “Enough is enough!”

[2/14/18] On the afternoon of February 14, 2018, a mass shooting occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in the Miami metropolitan area. Seventeen people were killed and fifteen more were taken to hospitals, making it one of the world's deadliest school massacres.^[1][2] The suspected perpetrator, Nikolas Cruz, was arrested shortly afterward and confessed to the shooting, according to the Broward County Sheriff's Office.^[3] He was charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder.

CNN chief attacks Fox News

[3/22/18] NEW YORK >> CNN chief Jeff Zucker sharply attacked the network’s rivals at Fox News Channel today, saying that it has become a propaganda machine that is “doing an incredible disservice to the country.”

Zucker spoke at the Financial Times Future of News conference two days after a former Fox military analyst quit, claiming he was ashamed at the way the network’s opinion hosts were backing President Donald Trump. Zucker said that analyst, Ralph Peters, voiced what a lot of people have been thinking about Fox in the post-Roger Ailes era.

“What has happened to that network in the last 18 months, especially the last year, is that it has just turned itself into state-run TV,” Zucker said. “TASS has nothing on them,” he said in reference to the Russian news agency.

There was no immediate comment from a Fox representative.

However, Trump’s former White House strategist, Steve Bannon, said later at the same conference that Zucker’s comments were absurd. He said “you can’t name a more propaganda outfit than CNN.”
“Every night it’s ‘hate Trump,’” Bannon said. He questioned why anyone wasn’t fired at CNN after the 2016 election results took many people by surprise.

Fox has maintained its ratings lead with a prime-time opinion lineup led by Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. Together with MSNBC’s left-leaning lineup, the two political talk networks are frequently the most popular destinations for viewers on cable television. Fox and MSNBC have been widening their lead in prime time over CNN, which recently announced that Chris Cuomo would join its prime-time lineup.

Zucker said that Fox has “a handful of good journalists but they get lost in the propaganda machine.”
“The idea that they are a news channel is really not accurate at all,” he said.

Zucker’s network has been on the receiving end of withering criticism from Trump during his presidency. He’s repeatedly referred to CNN as “fake news” when he doesn’t like its coverage. Zucker said Trump’s criticisms are not going to stop CNN from doing its job of holding leaders accountable.

But he said the Trump has created an atmosphere of hostility toward reporters that has spread from the U.S. across the world.

“He doesn’t even understand the danger he is creating for journalists and the danger he is creating for news organizations,” Zucker said.

However, he said the Trump administration has helped news organizations raise their games to cover what is going on.

“He has made American journalism great again,” Zucker said.

Djou leaves Republican Party

Former U.S. Rep. Charles Djou says he is leaving the Republican Party.

Djou, in a column written for the online news site Civil Beat today, cited the party’s leadership under President Donald Trump as the main reason that led to his decision.

Djou wrote,“Today after much consideration, I abandon my party because I am unwilling to abandon my principles. I can no longer stand with a Republican Party that is led by a man I firmly believe is taking the party of Lincoln in a direction I fundamentally disagree with, and a party that is unwilling to stand up to him.”

He added he is “most disappointed by the failure of the GOP to clearly and consistently condemn Trump’s childish behavior.”

“Sadly today, too many Republicans either applaud Trump’s tirades or greet them with silent acceptance. This leads to an implicit ratification by the GOP of Trump’s undisciplined, uninformed, and unfocused leadership as a core part of the Republican Party. This is something I cannot accept and will not be a part of,” Djou wrote.

guns in the home protect families (?)

Guns in the home protect families.

For decades, that has been an essential part of the National Rifle Association’s mantra in defending firearms ownership, repeated at congressional hearings, in advertisements and on T-shirts.

Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who once headed research on firearm violence at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wondered if there was any evidence backing the N.R.A.’s assertion.

“So we looked at the question, does having a gun at home protect your family or not?” Dr. Rosenberg recalled.

He was amazed by the answer. The landmark study in 1993 showed that bringing a gun into the home puts everyone at much greater risk.

“They were saying if you want to keep your family safe, if you are a real man, you will have a gun at home,” Dr. Rosenberg said. “Bringing the gun not only didn’t protect you, it put you at much, much greater risk.”

To this day, gun rights advocates dispute the study’s findings. The N.R.A. pushed Congress in 1995 to stop the C.D.C. from spending taxpayer money on research that advocated gun control. Congress then passed the Dickey Amendment in 1996, and cut funding that effectively ended the C.D.C.’s study of gun violence as a public health issue.

The result is that 22 years and more than 600,000 gunshot victims later, much of the federal government has largely abandoned efforts to learn why people shoot one another, or themselves, and what can be done to prevent gun violence.

After the Parkland school massacre in Florida last month, lawmakers and gun control experts have demanded that the agency take up the issue of studying gun violence again, arguing that the federal law doesn’t ban such research altogether but prohibits advocacy of gun control.