A Facebook post by a comic book store owner reminds us that these parkland kids may be brave on the outside, but on the inside they are shattered and barely holding it together.

Facebook post by a comic shop owner who met some of the Parkland students recently. Very hard to read but I’m glad I did. pic.twitter.com/Cuq8rvs6Ea

— Tres @ C2E2 AA #T14 (@tresdcomics) March 24, 2018

We keep expecting these kids to save the country, but who is making sure that they will be saved as well?

They have gone from one terrifying reality involving gun violence, to another terrifying reality involving being thrust onto the national stage.

At some point they need the time to heal.

Hopefully that time will come before the wounds become too deep, and the wounds become too forever.

80 percent of mass shooters showed no interest in video games.

Courtesy of CBS News: 

President Trump met with video game industry representatives Thursday, after saying last month violent video games may play a role in mass shootings. 

The president met with parents like Melissa Henson. "The kind of messages and images that they are putting in their minds, I think they're nightly dress rehearsals for huge acts of violence," she said. 

But psychologist Patrick Markey's research shows 80 percent of mass shooters did not show an interest in violent video games.

"It seems like something that should make us safer so it's a totally understandable reaction," Markey said. "The problem is just the science, the data, does not back up that they actually have an effect."

Keep in mind that video games are popular all over the world, including first person shooters.

And yet the ONLY industrialized country that has to subject their children to school shooter drills, or seriously talks about arming teachers in the classroom, is America.

This is not a video game problem, this is a gun problem.

And until that is recognized and addressed with stringent gun control laws, this violence simply will not stop.

Parkland school shooting survivors confront the "What about Chicago" anti-gun control argument directly.

(1/4)Yesterday, the members of @AMarch4OurLives got to meet up with some of the most wonderful and most strong spoken students of Chicago. "Florida's safest city" and one of the cities in America most affected by gun violence came together to share stories, ideologies, and pizza. pic.twitter.com/3SIDgvAnDM

— Emma González (@Emma4Change) March 4, 2018

(2/4) Those who face gun violence on a level that we have only just glimpsed from our gated communities have never had their voices heard in their entire lives the way that we have in these few weeks alone. Since we all share in feeling this pain and know all too well how it

— Emma González (@Emma4Change) March 4, 2018

(3/4) feels to have to grow up at the snap of a finger, we were able to cover a lot of ground in communicating our experiences. People of color in inner-cities and everywhere have been dealing with this for a despicably long time, and the media cycles just don't cover the

— Emma González (@Emma4Change) March 4, 2018

(4/4) violence the way they did here. The platform us Parkland Students have established is to be shared with every person, black or white, gay or straight, religious or not, who has experienced gun violence, and hand in hand, side by side, We Will Make This Change Together.

— Emma González (@Emma4Change) March 4, 2018

This is in an extraordinary move on the part of these young people.

They are not selfishly hogging the attention for themselves, but rather using the attention directed at them to shine a light on those communities that also suffer from gun violence but have been neglected by the media.

They are demonstrating not only incredible compassion but advertising their unwavering commitment to see this movement through until it achieves the change that they are demanding.

If I worked for the NRA this is around the time that I would start breathing into a paper bag to keep from hyperventilating. 

By the way if you want to know why Chicago really has the problems with guns that it has, there is a great NPR article from 2017 that will do much to explain that to you.

Former Trump adviser appearing on Sinclair owned news outlet claims the real problem with violence in America is all this "black African gun crime against black Africans."

On a Sinclair station, Gorka refers to "black African crime on black African crime" & says black men are killing each other "by the bushel" pic.twitter.com/Cbtqm39tTd

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) October 24, 2017

Courtesy of TPM: 

In a round-table discussion on gun violence aired by WJLA — the Washington, D.C. ABC affiliate that was purchased in 2014 by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group — Gorka attempted to make a point about the legislative effort to ban so-called bump stocks. The gunman behind the shooting massacre in Las Vegas on Oct. 1 had several bump stocks, which mimic the firing speed of automatic weapons, in his hotel room. 

“The biggest problem we have is not mass shootings, they are the anomaly,” he began. “You do not make legislation out of outliers.”

“Our big issue is black African gun crime against black Africans,” Gorka said. “It is a tragedy. Go to Chicago. Go to — the city’s run by Democrats for 40 years. Black young men are murdering each other by the bushel. This is a social issue. Allow the police to do their jobs and re-build those societies. Legislation will not save lives. 

“I assume what he’s talking about is African-Americans,” one panelist said after Gorka finished. 

“Yes,” the former White House official replied. 

“Well, that’s not what you said,” the panelist responded. “I couldn’t figure out who these African— “ 

“African-Americans,” Gorka said.

I believe that is what we in the business call a "Freudian slip."

This Gorka guy is such in innate racist that he cannot even bring himself to call black folks in this country "Americans."

This is just another example of that Trump TV we all heard about late last year.

Trump cannot get the real media to report on what he wants them to report, so he has helped to create his own version of reality in partnership with this Sinclair broadcasting group.

And millions of Americans are seeing this on their TV screens and believe they are watching trustworthy local news outlets.

Estranged husband in Texas murders his wife and seven of her friends with handgun. Update!

Spencer Hight

Courtesy of the New York Daily News:  

The mother of a woman who was shot dead by her estranged husband in a mass shooting in Texas said he was upset that she was moving on after she filed for divorce. 

Meredith Hight, 27, was hosting a cookout for her friends and colleagues at her home in Plano on Sunday when Spencer James Hight crashed the party and opened fire, killing a total of eight people, police said. Meredith Hight filed for divorce in July and while her husband had moved out months ago, he collected his belongings from the home just days before the shooting, her mother Debbie Lane told WFAA. 

"I think he saw our comfort, ease and happiness and her embracing new life and resented it to the maximum and responded the way he did,” Lane told the local news station.

Hight was killed by the police officer who responded to the call of a shooting.

As you can probably guess Hight had been violent toward his former ex-wife, though she did not report this to the police, and he had a problem with alcohol.

The argument can be made that this man could have killed his wife with a number of weapons that would not have included a gun, but to kill eight people, five of them grown men, that requires an instrument specifically designed to take multiple lives.

Once again these weapons are advertised as tools with which to protect yourself and your family, but in the vast majority of the cases, if used at all it is to cause harm to yourself, your family, or other innocent people.

Update: Almost missed this. There was also a school shooting in Washington yesterday with one fatality.

210 Americans were killed or injured by gun violence on the first day of 2017.

Courtesy of Vox:

In the first 24 hours of the new year, 264 separate incidents of gun violence happened across the United States, according to data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive and Vox. 

At least 64 people were killed, and another 146 were injured. 

The incidents include 24 shootings apiece in Chicago and Jacksonville, Florida; seven shootings in New York City; six shootings each in Baltimore and Buffalo, New York; and five each in Cleveland and Indianapolis. 

Generally, New Year’s Day — which is associated with drinking and partying — is a bit more violent than the typical day of the year. But looking over the incidents reveals a pattern of gun violence that is commonplace in America.

Just in case anybody thought that increased gun violence had anything to do with President Obama.

No the violence will surely continue, if not increase under a Trump administration, because despite what some Right Wing conspiracy theorists might have you believe this is not about President Obama, it is about America.

The AP and USA Today combine forces to study just how any children are dying from gun violence in this country every year.

Here is what the study found as reported by the New York Daily News:  

The findings: During the first six months of this year, minors died from accidental shootings — at their own hands, or at the hands of other children or adults — at a pace of one every other day, far more than limited federal statistics indicate.

Using information collected by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonpartisan research group, news reports and public sources, the media outlets spent six months analyzing the circumstances of every death and injury from accidental shootings involving children ages 17 and younger from Jan. 1, 2014, to June 30 of this year — more than 1,000 incidents in all. Among the findings: 

— Deaths and injuries spike for children under 5, with 3-year-olds the most common shooters and victims among young children. Nearly 90 3-year-olds were killed or injured in the shootings, the vast majority of which were self-inflicted. 

— Accidental shootings spike again for ages 15-17, when victims are most often fatally shot by other children but typically survive self-inflicted gunshots. 

— They most often happen at the children's homes, with handguns legally owned by adults for self-protection. They are more likely to occur on weekends or around holidays such as Christmas. 

— States in the South, including Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Georgia, are among those with the highest per capita rates of accidental shootings involving minors. 

In all, more than 320 minors age 17 and under and more than 30 adults were killed in accidental shootings involving minors. Nearly 700 other children and 78 adults were injured. 

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 74 minors died from accidental discharges of firearms in 2014, the latest year for which comparable data are available. The AP and USA TODAY analysis counted 113 for that year, suggesting the federal government missed a third of the cases.

Great, so now we know that the information that we had which horrified us concerning the number of children dying due to gun violence, is actually watered down and the REAL numbers are even more horrific.

And all it does is to reinforce the knowledge that the guns people buy to protect their families actually put their families at greater risk.

Just try to imagine how many more children would be alive today without the 2nd Amendment to protect us in this country.

Arizona Republicans release bullet riddled wanted poster attacking Democrat challenging John McCain.

Courtesy of Think Progress:  

Arizona Republicans, who are scrambling to help Sen. John McCain win the “fight of his political life,” unveiled a poster this week depicting the face of McCain’s Democratic challenger surrounded by bullet holes. 

The Wild West-themed poster accuses Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-AZ) — who is polling neck and neck with McCain — of not holding enough public events during her campaign. 

The image has outraged many in the state, as it comes just five years after another Arizona Democratic congresswoman was shot in the head at a public event.

Yes and we all remember the image that preceded THAT shooting.

In fact Gabby Giffords released this statement to Think Progress to express her disgust: 

“In a state and country that know the toll of gun violence too well, there is no room for invoking the use of firearms in our politics,” she said, in a statement emailed to ThinkProgress. “Our political leaders have the responsibility to avoid a descent into messages that might suggest that elections are settled anywhere else than at the ballot box.”

Damn Republicans are either the slowest learners on the planet, or they simply to not care if they foment gun violence as part of our political process.

The daughter of Ronald Reagan speaks out about Donald Trump's careless language.

Courtesy of ABC News: 

In a Facebook post directed at the Republican presidential candidate, President Ronald Reagan's daughter blasted Donald's Trump's "glib and horrifying comment" on the Second Amendment. 

"I am the daughter of a man who was shot by someone who got his inspiration from a movie," the post by Patti Davis begins, referring to the 1981 assassination attempt on Reagan by John Hinckley Jr.

Remember this is the daughter of Saint Ronnie.

And even though she is seen by many as a liberal I am sure that her words hit home for a lot of the older more establishment Republicans still struggling with the decision of whether to support Donald Trump or not in the general.

And if that were not enough to sway them, there is also this piece in the Dallas Observer comparing the mood of the country to the one that existed in Texas when JFK was shot.

Donald Trump thinks he can incite violence and then deflect criticism by saying that he was just kidding or being sarcastic, but once a bullet fires from a gun to take a life there are is simply no taking that back.

A reminder of why gun violence statistics are so damn hard to come by.

Courtesy of The New York Times:

For nearly two decades, Congress has banned needed research on gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last week, Congress, doing the bidding of the gun industry, quietly killed a provision in the omnibus spending bill that would have reversed that ban. 

In so doing, it left intact an anti-science smoke screen that has helped the industry and its lobbyists deny and dispute the facts of the gun violence that takes more than 30,000 lives a year. Imagine if the tobacco industry had been similarly favored by Congress with a ban on federal research about cigarette deaths. 

Imagine, too, if the auto industry had such a shield during the years when the government successfully fought unsafe cars in the cause of public health. 

Perversely, the gun industry claims that research by private and academic interests — which it can’t block — is untrustworthy. Expect that argument to be invoked in reaction to alarming research about the Missouri General Assembly’s repeal eight years ago of background checks for gun buyers that required people to appear in person at the local sheriff’s office. 

A study by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research found that in the first six years after the repeal, gun homicides rose within the state by 16 percent, while the national rate declined 11 percent. By contrast, it also found that Connecticut, which has maintained its 1995 background check law, registered a 40 percent drop in gun homicides across a decade.

This is what we are going to have to keep in mind, and fight against if we ever want to REALLY pass any meaningful legislation against gun violence in this country. 

And if Hillary continues putting the need to do something about all of these gun deaths front and center in her campaign I imagine the amount of misinformation put out by the NRA will increase a hundred fold.

Here my question. If the NRA is right and the statistics often used by media outlets are often exaggerated then why would they NOT want the CDC to set the record straight?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Leave it to John Oliver to drop the truth bomb concerning mental illness and mass shootings.

Damn! This is why Oliver is my go to guy on just about everything involving current events and politics these days.

I like Trevor Noah and he was great last week, and Stephen Colbert has some moments of real brilliance on his new show, but for my money the REAL successor to John Stewart's legacy is my man John Oliver.

And this bit right here sounds like everything that has been bouncing around inside my head for the last several years about mental health and guns. You know, only much funnier.

And that ability to use humor to tell difficult truths to the public at large, is  why THIS is our new reality in this country.

I am all for this plan.

Maybe we should start with those photos of the children murdered in Sandy Hook, whose bodies were so badly damaged that they were considered too gruesome to share with the public.

Maybe, just maybe, THAT will be enough to get them of their fat asses and convince them to write some laws to protect us.

Yet another horrific mass shooting in "The greatest nation on earth."

Eight bodies found in Houston home after standoff with suspect http://t.co/11TAWC0wxQ #KSATnews pic.twitter.com/fi7pr1NPSd

— KSAT 12 (@ksatnews) August 9, 2015

Courtesy of The Washington Post: 

Houston authorities have charged a 48-year-old man with multiple counts of capital murder after deputies discovered the bodies of six children and two adults in a home where the man was arrested. 

The man, David R. Conley, allegedly was involved in a standoff with deputies that ended when he was coaxed out of the home by hostage negotiators without incident, according to the Houston Chronicle. 

Once deputies entered the residence, they discovered the gruesome scene. 

“He restrained, shot and killed eight people,” Celeste Byrom, an assistant district attorney, said during a court hearing Sunday in which Conley was ordered held without bail, according to the Chronicle. 

Byrom said Conley gained access to the home through an unlocked window and restrained his victims using handcuffs before shooting them in the back of the head, according to CBS affiliate KHOU.

Apparently Conley, who has a history of violence, had previously been in a relationship with one of the victims, Valerie Jackson.

On fact one of the victims, a thirteen year old boy, is believed to be the son Conley had with Jackson.

Can we not go at least one week in this country without yet another report of a horrendous massacre involving a gun?

And let us remind ourselves once again that after Australia's 1996 Port Arthur massacre their politicians bravely said "No more fucking guns!" And there has not been a mass killing since. 

It can be done, we just lack the will, and perhaps the intelligence, to do it.

The average gun owner is white, 55 years of age, and apparently from Alaska. Wait, what?

Courtesy of HuffPo:  

After a shooting in Charleston, South Carolina claimed nine lives, President Barack Obama called for the nation to come to terms with the fact that no other advanced country in the world suffers mass shootings as frequently as the U.S. It won’t be until we acknowledge this basic truth, he said, that we’ll realize we have the power to put an end to gun violence. 

But that won’t happen until we learn more about the culture that drives gun ownership in the first place, according to Dr. Bindu Kalesan, a gun violence researcher at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. In a first step toward understanding who the typical American gun owner is, as well as the role guns play in their lives, she conducted a nationally representative online survey of 4,000 U.S. adults in 2013. The findings, published Monday in the journal Injury Prevention, reveal a wide range of gun ownership rates across the country as well as the profile of an average gun owner in America. 

He’s white, married or divorced, high income, and over 55 years old. Unsurprisingly, he’s also more than twice as likely to be a member of “social gun culture” than those who don't own firearms. In all, almost one in three Americans owns at least one gun, but gun ownership rates vary widely across states. At 61.7 percent, Alaska has the highest rate of gun ownership, while Delaware has the lowest, at 5.2 percent.

HuffPo goes on to define “social gun culture” as a phenomenon in which friends or family would think less of you if you didn’t own a gun, and if your social life with friends and family involved guns.

Which to me sounds pretty accurate. And I certainly know people like that up here.

I have to admit that I am a little wigged out by a study about gun ownership that describes me so accurately.

Yes, I am white, 55 years old, and living in the state with the highest gun ownership in the country.

However I would not characterize myself as having a high income, and more importantly I DO NOT OWN ANY GUNS!

The article goes on to offer this chart which demonstrates that more gun ownership equals more gun deaths.

Which is a fact I know, which is why I DON'T OWN ANY GUNS!

Look I don't have any idea what it is about holding onto a piece of metal that we are conditioned to equate with male dominance and power that men find so appealing.

But I guess that might be due to the fact that the source of my own self confidence is more internal and not something that I can buy at the local Wal-Mart while I am out shopping for a new toilet plunger.

And now for the really big news of the day, President Obama used the "N" word on the radio.

Courtesy of CNN: 

President Barack Obama used the n-word during an interview released Monday to make a point that there's still plenty of room for America to combat racism. 

"Racism, we are not cured of it. And it's not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public," Obama said in an interview for the podcast "WTF with Marc Maron." 

"That's not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It's not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don't, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior."

Oh my stars and garters! A black man used the "N" word while talking about racism. Let the conservative faux outrage commence.

Well there was the Fox News guest who called Obama the "Rapper-in-Chief."

There was this tweet from Sarah Palin's favorite Christian outrage machine Todd Starnes:

President Obama drops the N-word during an interview. You, sir, have disgraced the office of the presidency.

— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) June 22, 2015

And then there was this conservative website being outraged while demanding to know why there wasn't more outrage.

Personally I think it's obvious that conservatives are just looking for a reason to be angry and outraged at the President, and they think this is one that has teeth.

But it doesn't.

The President was appearing on a cutting edge radio program, hosted by a comedian in his garage. The topic was race, and the President got real.

In fact he got REAL real.

And let's face it, the conservatives really cannot handle it when the President gets REAL real. Especially about race.

The podcast actually covered quite a few controversial topics, including gun violence, the Charleston shooting in particular, his family, and growing old.

You can hear the whole thing for yourself by clicking here.

The cost of gun violence in America.

Courtesy of Mother Jones: 

Nobody, save perhaps for the hardcore gun lobby, doubts that gun violence is a serious problem. In an editorial in the April 7 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, a team of doctors wrote: "It does not matter whether we believe that guns kill people or that people kill people with guns—the result is the same: a public health crisis." 

And solving a crisis, as any expert will tell you, begins with data. That's why the US government over the years has assessed the broad economic toll of a variety of major problems. Take motor vehicle crashes: Using statistical models to estimate a range of costs both tangible and more abstract—from property damage and traffic congestion to physical pain and lost quality of life—the Department of Transportation (DOT) published a 300-page study estimating the "total value of societal harm" from this problem in 2010 at $871 billion. Similar research has been produced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the impact of air pollution, by the Department of Health and Human Services on the costs of domestic violence, and so on. But the government has mostly been mute on the economic toll of gun violence. HHS has assessed firearm-related hospitalizations, but its data is incomplete because some states don't require hospitals to track gunshot injuries among the larger pool of patients treated for open wounds. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has also periodically made estimates using hospital data, but based on narrow sample sizes and covering only the medical and lost-work costs of gun victims. 

Why the lack of solid data? A prime reason is that the National Rifle Association and other influential gun rights advocates have long pressured political leaders to shut down research related to firearms. 

In response to the fact that data was hard to come by Mother Jones found their own researcher, Ted Miller at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. And this is what he found:

Miller's approach looks at two categories of costs. The first is direct: Every time a bullet hits somebody, expenses can include emergency services, police investigations, and long-term medical and mental-health care, as well as court and prison costs. About 87 percent of these costs fall on taxpayers. The second category consists of indirect costs: Factors here include lost income, losses to employers, and impact on quality of life, which Miller bases on amounts that juries award for pain and suffering to victims of wrongful injury and death. 

In collaboration with Miller, Mother Jones crunched data from 2012 and found that the annual cost of gun violence in America exceeds $229 billion. Direct costs account for $8.6 billion—including long-term prison costs for people who commit assault and homicide using guns, which at $5.2 billion a year is the largest direct expense. Even before accounting for the more intangible costs of the violence, in other words, the average cost to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is nearly $400,000. And we pay for 32 of them every single day.

Of course 2nd Amendment advocates will argue with the numbers, even though traditionally conservatives are not very good at math, however even if this data is off a little the numbers are staggering.

So $229 billion is the annual cost for the freedom that the 2nd Amendment provides for us?

That seems a price that is simply too high to pay. And that does not even include the simple cost of human life.

Ever wonder why two years after the Sandy Hook shootings, and after President Obama ordered them to study gun violence, the CDC still refuses to do so? Here's a hint. The Republicans don't want them to.

Courtesy of The Washington Post:

The CDC had not touched firearm research since 1996 — when the NRA accused the agency of promoting gun control and Congress threatened to strip the agency’s funding. The CDC’s self-imposed ban dried up a powerful funding source and had a chilling effect felt far beyond the agency: Almost no one wanted to pay for gun violence studies, researchers say. Young academics were warned that joining the field was a good way to kill their careers. And the odd gun study that got published went through linguistic gymnastics to hide any connection to firearms. 

The long stalemate continued until shortly after the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., when Obama announced several gun-control proposals, including reversing the CDC research ban. His higher-profile proposals – tightening firearm background checks, reinstating the assault weapons ban – were viewed as impossible to pass into law. Congress wouldn’t bite. But ending the CDC research ban? Done by executive order, it appeared to have the best shot, along with broad support from a scientific community upset that gun violence as a public health problem was being ignored. 

......
 
But today the CDC still avoids gun-violence research, demonstrating what many see as the depth of its fear about returning to one of the country’s most divisive debates. The agency recently was asked by The Washington Post why it was still sitting on the sidelines of firearms studies. It declined to make an official available for an interview but responded with a statement noting it had commissioned an agenda of possible research goals but still lacked the dedicated funding to pursue it. 

“It is possible for us to conduct firearm-related research within the context of our efforts to address youth violence, domestic violence, sexual violence, and suicide,” CDC spokeswoman Courtney Lenard wrote, “but our resources are very limited.”

And WHY are their resources limited? 

Well because the Republican led Congress continues to block funding even though the President requested 10 million for the research and Democrats have introduced  bills supporting the funding.

So here's a question, if guns really do keep us safe in America, as is often claimed by gun enthusiasts, then why is the NRA and their Republican flunkies working so hard to keep that data out of the hands of our citizens?

And why have they been doing so for almost twenty years?

Liam Neeson on terrorist attack in France: "There's too many f**king guns out there. Especially in America."

Courtesy of Gulf News:  

Liam Neeson might be brandishing a gun on posters for Taken 3 all around town, but in light of the recent Charlie Hebdo attacks in France, and ongoing protests against police brutality in America, the actor told tabloid! he’s still firmly in favour of gun control. 

“First off, my thoughts and prayers and my heart are with the deceased, and certainly with all of France, yesterday. I’ve got a lot of dear friends in Paris,” the 62-year-old said. 

“There’s too many [expletive] guns out there,” he continued. “Especially in America. I think the population is like, 320 million? There’s over 300 million guns. Privately owned, in America. I think it’s a [expletive] disgrace. Every week now we’re picking up a newspaper and seeing, ‘Yet another few kids have been killed in schools.’” 

Asked whether or not he thinks this issue extends to police responsibility, he said: “Let’s not get into it. Let’s put it this way: I think a light has been shone on the justice system in America, and it’s a justifiable light.”

It may seem a tad hypocritical for an actor who is most famous for killing people who take his kidnap his family members, however Neeson does not think that cinema is the problem:  

“A character like Bryan Mills going out with guns and taking revenge: it’s fantasy. It’s in the movies, you know? I think it can give people a great release from stresses in life and all the rest of it, you know what I mean? It doesn’t mean they’re all going to go out and go, ‘Yeah, let’s get a gun!’,” he added.

I actually agree with that.  After all one of the most popular movies of all time is the Lord of the Rings trilogy and yet you don't hear of too many cases of people killing each other with bows and  arrows.

I personally am a huge fan of action movies, and have watched literally hundred, yet I own no firearms and have never brandished one in anger.

People kill people with guns because guns are plentiful and because we are taught from infancy that they are a source of prestige and power in this country.

I have always seen that as a sign of weakness, not strength.

Gunman opens fire at Florida State University, shooting three before he is killed by police. Update!

Courtesy of NBC:  

A gunman was fatally shot after opening fire in a library on Florida State University's campus early Thursday, sending hundreds of students who'd been studying for final exams running for their lives and cowering behind bookshelves. Three students were found suffering gunshot wounds at the scene. 

Police received a call about an "armed subject" at the Strozier Library on the school's main campus in Tallahassee at 12.30 a.m. ET. Officers confronted the gunman and ordered him to drop his weapon, according to Tallahassee Police spokesman Dave Northway. "The suspect did not comply with the commands and shot at the officers," he added. "They returned fire and the suspect was killed.” 

During a press conference at 6 a.m. ET, Police Chief Michael DeLeo described the shooting as an “isolated incident with one person acting alone.” It was unclear whether the gunman was a student. 

One of the shooting victims was listed in critical condition early Thursday, Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare spokeswoman Stephanie Derzypolski said. Another was in stable condition. Police said a third victim had received a "grazing injury" and was treated at the scene.

Several tweets were sent out during both the shooting and the police response.

This is one of them.

Students say a man started shooting at FSU, police told him to put the gun down. He didn't. "They lit him up, man." pic.twitter.com/ZK8vKJfe22
— Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) November 20, 2014

Here is video of the students in the library receiving instruction about the shooting courtesy of Gawker.

I can only imagine how frightened these students and their parents must have been  as this tragedy unfolded.

Currently there is no known motive, nor is it clear that the gunman was a student.

Update: Now we know that the gunman WAS a former student, and lawyer, named Myron May.

Ted Cruz claims that President Obama's pick for Surgeon General is not a "health care professional" because he is for stricter gun laws.

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

Sen.Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Sunday accused President Barack Obama’s pick for surgeon general of not being a “health care professional” because the doctor had backed a ban on military-style assault rifles. 

During an interview on CNN, host Candy Crowley pointed out that the surgeon general should “voice” of public health during the Ebola crisis, but Republicans in the Senate had blocked the appointment of Dr. Vivek Murthy. 

“Of course we should have a surgeon general in place,” Cruz told Crowley. “And we don’t have one because President Obama, instead of nominating a health professional, he nominated someone who is an anti-gun activist.” 

“And a doctor,” Crowley pointed out. “That’s a health professional.” 

“He’s a doctor,” Cruz admitted. “Where he’s made his name is as a crusader against Second Amendment rights, and as a consequence, he didn’t have the votes among Republicans or Democrats.”

Yes that's right, because you recognize that one of the  biggest hazards facing the American people is the proliferation of firearms you cannot possibly be a health care professional. Even if you are a licensed physician.

And that is why the NRA is blocking this guy's confirmation.

This article from The Nation might help to explain it: 

The post of the surgeon general has been vacant since July, and it looks likely to remain that way for some time thanks to a strident campaign led by the National Rifle Association and libertarian Senator Rand Paul against President Obama’s nominee, Dr. Vivek Murthy. 

Murthy has medical and business degrees from Yale, works as an attending physician and instructor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School and has founded several health businesses and nonprofits. He has also expressed support for limited gun safety measures like a ban on assault weapons, mandatory safety training and limits on ammunition, and so the NRA has declared it will “score” his confirmation vote, putting pressure on Senate Democrats running tight re-election races in red states to block Murthy’s confirmation. As The New York Times reported on Saturday, the White House is “recalibrating” its strategy towards Murthy’s nomination, meaning the Senate vote will either be delayed or never happen.

And that is why today, in the middle of media driven hysteria concerning Ebola, we do not have a trusted voice to put the minds of the American people at ease.

Thanks NRA.