A scholar of gun culture looks at the roots of Americans’ love affair with firearms – and their willingness to accept gun violence as a price of freedom. By Pierre…
Southern aristocrats wanted armed militias mainly to control their slaves. So they wanted language in the new nation’s constitution protecting that right. By Nicolaus Mills, Daily Beast — Mass shootings…
By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout — In the immediate aftermath of the massacres in Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton, Donald Trump actually began to contemplate doing a tiny sliver of the right thing. In doing so, he ran straight into the teeth of the Second Amendment, without doubt, the most lethally misunderstood corner of the U.S. Constitution. On the Sunday after the attacks, Trump reached out to Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Republican Sen.…
Vantage Point Vignettes Comments and Commentary by Dr. Ron Daniels — How many Black men and women must be murdered under Florida’s infamous “stand your ground law” before Black people…
Exclusive: Rakem Balogun spoke out against police brutality. Now he is believed to be the first prosecuted under a secretive US effort to track so-called ‘black identity extremists’ By Sam Levin, The Guardian — Rakem Balogun thought he was dreaming when armed agents in tactical gear stormed his apartment. Startled awake by a large crash and officers screaming commands, he soon realized his nightmare was real, and he and his…
An interview with scholar-activist Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term ‘insersectionality,’ on gender, race and armed militancy. By Nimmi Gowrinathan — For most American audiences, the female fighter exists in a land far, far away. To consider female militancy in this country, in our movements, requires a reckoning: the need to see police brutality against black women as state violence, checkpoints in school cafeterias as militarization, and the death rates…
By Sonali Kolhatkar — Any discussions of gun violence and the regulations needed to curb it are incomplete unless they include an analysis of how racism plays a role. Government data show that “black Americans are, on average, eight times more likely to be killed by firearms than those who are white.” Gun violence by police against ordinary Americans also disproportionately affects people of color—a fact that the Black Lives Matter movement has…
Gun control becomes only one part of the larger solution to violence in our communities. By Lori Bezahler — The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have catalyzed a social movement demanding an end to gun violence. While their leadership and moral authority have undoubtedly taken the movement to another level, youth-led activism against gun violence is not, in fact, new. In Florida in 2013, for example…
Naomi Wadler, 11: I Speak for Black Girls Victimized by Guns Whose Stories Don’t Make the Front Page
She was the voice of the voiceless at the March for Our Lives. Hundreds of thousands rallied for gun control in Washington, D.C., today for the March for Our Lives….
It was young people who made possible the largest gun-control rally in a generation. By George Zornick — Sydney Neal was already planning to attend the March for Our Lives in Washington when tragedy struck her community on Tuesday. A student opened fire at the nearby Great Mills High School, killing 16-year-old Jaelynn Willey and wounding another student. On Saturday morning, Neal, the president of the association of student councils…
The gun reform debate has largely ignored race. Black students made sure the school walkouts didn’t.
Students of color highlighted police violence, poverty, and more during the National School Walkout. By P.R. Lockhart — In Atlanta, high school students took a knee in protest. In Baltimore and Chicago, teenagers called for programs to address poverty and mental health services. And in Brooklyn, students demanded that the police system be reformed. Across the country, many students of color who participated in the National School Walkout on Wednesday…
By Zenobia Jeffries — Siwatu-Salama Ra, 26, will likely spend the next two years in a Michigan prison. In early February, a Wayne County jury found the six-months pregnant Black mother of a toddler guilty of felonious assault and felony firearm possession. She was sentenced last week. Outside her mother’s Detroit home last summer, she pulled a gun on a neighbor, who Ra says used her vehicle to hit her…