Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged shooting

Rss Feed Group items tagged

peterconnelly

Craig Nason : I survived the Columbine school shooting - then watched Uvalde ... - 0 views

  • In April 1999, I survived the Columbine shooting. At just 17 years old, I was forced to process the murder of my friends, the trauma of my community, and the unique attention the world paid to my experience. At the time, Columbine was considered a once-in-a-generation type of tragedy — one that few other people in our country would ever have to contend with. 
  • According to the organization Everytown for Gun Safety, the U.S. has experienced 274 mass shootings since 2009 alone. Thousands of survivors are now part of a club that nobody wants to join.
  • I think about how we vowed to “never forget” Columbine. How we would make sure the next generation would be safer. The opposite has happened.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • You likely have memories associated with some of these shootings. What you were doing when you heard. Who you were with. How it affected you. When the headlines break, I often hear from friends, family, and colleagues: “I’m so sorry you have to relive this again.” The truth is, we are all reliving it again on some level. The steady cadence of shock, grief and pain is our collective story.
  • So now that the “thoughts and prayers” have been shared, what can we do together? 
  • Politicians love to tell us not to “politicize these tragedies” following mass shootings.
  • Would you care if an earlier tragedy was politicized if it meant getting your son or daughter back? Of course not. Grief doesn’t have a political affiliation. 
  • Then, change the culture. It’s impossible to ignore the role white supremacy, misogyny and extremism plays in so many mass gun violence events. In many mass shootings, the shooter has exhibited dangerous warning signs before the shooting.
  • Because it’s about the guns. The United States has roughly 5 percent of the world’s population and over 30 percent of the world’s mass shootings.
  • And while politicians love to act like this is an impossibly polarizing issue, perhaps we’re not as divided as we think. The majority of Americans actually believe Congress should pass more extensive gun legislation. According to a 2015 Public Policy Polling survey, 83 percent of gun owners support expanded background checks.
  • A new generation has grown up since Columbine; 310,000 more students in the U.S. have experienced gun violence since that day in 1999 when I escaped with my life.
ilanaprincilus06

I survived a school shooting. My kids shouldn't have to face the same danger | Ashley J... - 1 views

  • Surviving a school shooting was an initiation of evil. The world didn’t look or feel the same afterward
  • Despite 12 years and countless other mass shooting incidents across the country, not much has been done by our federal legislators to make anyone safer from gun violence anywhere – let alone at school.
  • I clutched my eight-month-old son to my chest as the precious faces of young children murdered at school cycled across my television screen on the evening news.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Little kids were new casualties in our country’s ongoing struggle to define itself. Its endless argument over guns appeared to be a symptom of a national identity crisis between political polar opposites – two parties so ideologically opposed that even the needless deaths of tiny innocents couldn’t bridge the divide between them.
  • What sickened me most, though, wasn’t our government’s failure to prioritize people over partisanship. It was knowing that there were parents who took their kids to school and returned home eternally empty-handed.
  • Survivors of school shootings like me are now raising kids of their own, worrying they will suffer similar fates. Although the psychological effects of school shootings on parents may not yet be fully known or understood, research suggests that those with loved ones who have been exposed to “assaultive violence” have a higher risk of mental health disorders.
  • School shootings don’t just deprive children of their lives and innocence; they deprive parents of a sense of safety and security their parents and grandparents took for granted.
  • This reality is a painful part of our collective consciousness. We send our kids to school, hoping the horror of gun violence won’t happen there, but knowing no child or school is immune.
  • Both sides seem content to debate the second amendment and the founders’ intent until they run out of breath. But in the meantime, Congress must come together, in earnest, to find common ground and common-sense solutions to stop this bleeding. The consequences of inaction have become too high – and our kids are counting on them.
aprossi

Robert Aaron Long: What we know about the suspect in Atlanta spa shootings - CNN - 0 views

  • What we know about Robert Aaron Long, the suspect in Atlanta spa shootings
  • State and federal investigators are scrambling to learn more about Robert Aaron Long, the suspect in a string of deadly shootings at three Atlanta-area Asian spas, and his alleged motive.
  • He is being held without bond in Cherokee County, where he faces four counts of murder and a charge of aggravated assault, according to the county sheriff's office. He also has been charged with more four counts of murder, Atlanta Police Department said.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Tuesday's shootings took place at two spas in Atlanta and another in Acworth, about 10 miles west of Woodstock -- which left eight people, at least four of them Asian women, dead.
  • Authorities located Long about 150 miles south of Atlanta in Crisp County. State troopers took him into custody after using a special pursuit maneuver to spin his car out of control.
  • Sheriff Frank Reynolds of Cherokee County, where the Acworth shootings took place, told reporters Long "made indicators that he has some issues -- potentially sexual addiction -- and may have frequented some of these places in the past."Reynolds said those issues could be the motivation behind the shooting.
  • A law enforcement source said the suspect was recently kicked out of the house by his family due to his sexual addiction, which, the source said, included frequently spending hours on end watching pornography online.
  • Gun was purchased legally
  • Long purchased his gun legally at a local gun store, Big Woods Goods in Holly Springs, Georgia, an attorney for the company confirmed to CNN.
anonymous

Opinion | The Kind Workers at King Soopers Who Helped a Confused College Kid - The New ... - 0 views

  • The Kind Workers at King Soopers Who Helped a Confused College Kid
  • A University of Colorado Boulder graduate recalls two victims of the shooting who helped a grocery shopping novice.
  • To the Editor:In the fall of 2016 I had just moved into my first apartment and was about to start my sophomore year at the University of Colorado Boulder.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Eager to finally cook food of my own, I decided to pick up groceries at the King Soopers on Table Mesa Drive.
  • I spent most of my first solo supermarket store trip asking the store attendants where various items were.
  • Right away I was struck by how welcoming and friendly everyone working there was.
  • Teri Leiker, killed in Monday’s massacre, was the employee who packed groceries into my large duffle bag. “Find everything all right?” she asked with a grin. “You could pack this thing three times over,” she added, when zipping up my bag.
  • My interaction with Teri was representative of the warm vibe and casual relationship I developed with many of the store employees.
  • Rikki Olds, also murdered in the shooting, came to the rescue several times when my self-checkout machine froze
  • , and assured me it was fine when I realized I forgot things on my shopping list halfway through scanning items.
  • Shootings have become an all-too-common occurrence in America.
  • serving as a stark reminder that at any moment Boulder could be the next target of domestic terrorism.
  • As much as a mass shooting remained a lingering possibility, never did anyone expect something of Monday’s magnitude to occur in a peaceful, quirky, happy-go-lucky college town that’s proudly advertised itself as one of the best places to live in the country.
  • I was hit with a sense of guilt knowing I had never fully expressed my gratitude for Teri or Rikki’s hard work and compassion.
  • Never did I take a second to stop and think about the role they and their co-workers played in making me comfortable in a new place and transitioning to adulthood.
  • Going forward, we owe it to ourselves to have an enhanced appreciation of life and treat one another more kindly
  • In honor of the 10 people caught in the middle of another senseless shooting, let’s all strive to be more appreciative.
  • Jack Stern
peterconnelly

Debunking 3 Viral Rumors About the Texas Shooting - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Here are three of the most prominent rumors that have spread on online platforms such as Twitter, Gab, 4chan and Reddit.
  • Among their unfounded claims were that the shooting had been orchestrated to draw local law enforcement away from the border, allowing criminals and drugs to cross into the United States, and that gun-control advocates had organized the tragedy to stoke public outrage.
  • he conspiracy theorist and broadcaster Alex Jones of Infowars has lied for years that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was staged by the federal government, with people pretending to be survivors and victims’ parents. Last year, Mr. Jones lost four defamation lawsuits filed by victims’ families, many of whom have been harassed by his believers.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Hours after the attack, a post on the fringe online message board 4chan circulated claiming that the gunman was transgender.
  • where people falsely claimed that the shooting was a result of hormone therapy undertaken by the gunman.
  • “There is an overwhelming number of individuals who are posting images of this person, who was the shooter, and information about the nature of them being transgender,”
  • On Tuesday, a transgender artist said on Reddit that people online “just took my photos and used it to spread misinformation.”
  • False claims that the gunman was born outside the United States began to circulate within hours of the shooting. Spread largely on white nationalist Telegram channels and Gab accounts, the claims alleged that he was an undocumented immigrant in the United States, even after authorities including Roland Gutierrez, a Texas state senator, confirmed that the gunman was born in North Dakota.
  • “Did he cross the border illegally?” Code of Vets, a veterans organization, posted on Twitter. “Our nation has a serious national security crisis evolving.”
anonymous

Opinion | The Atlanta Shootings and a Religious Toxicity - The New York Times - 0 views

  • I’m a Scholar of Religion. Here’s What I See in the Atlanta Shootings.
  • Did racism or theology or gender motivate the shootings in Georgia? All of the above.
  • I saw in Korean sources first that six of the dead were Asian women, four of Korean descent
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • I didn’t yet know their names; I mourned them as Daughter, Big Sister, Mother, Aunt.
  • As a child I asked my parents why we did this. They explained that who we are is inseparable from who loves us and whom we love.
  • Who are you? Where are you from? What do you believe? To move through this world as an Asian who is American is to exist under the gaze of white supremacy.
  • In other words, we have to constantly give an accounting of ourselves to justify and explain why we are here.
  • I walked through the world in a kind of haze of anger and despair.
  • So we learned early on the name of the alleged murderer.
  • Was it racism? Was it deep-rooted misogyny? Was it a fetishization of Asian women in particular? Was it toxic theology — an extreme fear of God and an equally extreme self-loathing?
  • Race, gender, religion and culture are all implicated
  • The Asian who is American is an accessory — the one you want for your group projects, or the one who makes your farms yield more.
  • And the Asian woman who is American is simultaneously translucent, a mirror and a looking glass; she is a ghost, invisible, unknowable, stripped of her identity, making her both desirable and expendable. How else to explain how easily she is attacked?
  • We learned that he is white. We learned that he is a Southern Baptist, but not his motivation.
  • All the moments I’d kept hidden for years suddenly rushed to the surface: the attacks, the looks, the vandalism, the endless stream of questions
  • The long history of anti-Asian racism is rooted in the history of American expansionism amid wide-ranging legal, cultural and military projects across the Pacific.
  • These colonial projects hypersexualized Asian women, through forced sex and sex work, casting them as docile creatures that brought comfort
  • They also shaped Asian men as submissive and feminine, objects to be conquered, dominated and consumed.
  • Even the humanitarian interventions and the religious outreach that helped to shape much of white imagination about Asian women’s bodies overseas were then continuously reproduced here in America.
  • But churches are imperfect, man-made institutions, burdened by ego and fear
  • I grew up never seeing a woman preach from the pulpit.
  • Later I discovered stories that centered on people on the margins — Black, queer, women and others.
  • These theologies radicalized my faith; I saw myriad possibilities of God in the world.
  • When I looked in the mirror, I saw the divine in myself and in the faces of those around me. This changed everything. The God of grace I proclaim from the pulpit lives in us, loves every single one of us, and this was liberation.
  • But fear is not so easily uprooted, and shame is not limited to one culture or religion.
  • Absolute moral ideals of virginity or marital sex have long been linked to conservative white Christian attempts at what is sometimes called “sexual containment” or more popularly known as purity culture.
  • Though more and more people of faith have questioned the psychological impact of purity culture, shame around sex persists.
  • The Asian women murdered in Atlanta were an explicit threat to the purported ideal; their perceived entanglement with sex work justified this violence.
  • “I just don’t see you as Asian.” Proximity to whiteness is seen as our saving grace, but we are still dying.
  • Xiaojie Tan, Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, Daoyou Feng, Paul Andre Michels, Soon Chung Park, Hyun-Jung Grant, Yong Ae Yue, Suncha Kim
  • Sister, daughter, mother, cousin, aunt, grandmother, child of God.
mcginnisca

Visiting an Anti-Muslim Hate Group at the Peak of America's Islamophobia | VICE | Unite... - 0 views

  • Who is the enemy and what is the enemy's 'Threat Doctrine?'"
  • "national security expert," where her advice tends to be "get rid of the Muslims."
  • They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It, and Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • The purpose of the group is to "[promote] national security and [defeat] terrorism"—two goals which are, in the group's view, intrinsically threatened by the Islamic faith. The rhetoric of their meetings doesn't suggest that the problem is radical Islam, but Islam itself.
  • Just hours after the attacks in Paris, a mosque in St. Petersburg, Florida received a voicemail from a man who said he planned to shoot all Muslims, including children, in the head.
  • Act for America has flourished
  • the basic doctrine of the Quran, which is a personal, moral code for Muslims—as a threat to American security. It doesn't matter that the majority of American mass shootings are committed by young, white males (and often fanatical Christians), or that gun regulations play a role in terrorism-related events. Here, the group's mission is to "educate and effect change"—meaning, the Muslims have to go.
  • Yerushalmi claimed that 80 percent of mosques in the United States are "strictly Sharia," which he equated to Muslims following the same dogma as Al-Qaeda terrorists.
  • "the mythical 'moderate' Muslims who embrace traditional Islam but want a peaceful coexistence with the West is effectively non-existent."
  • By his logic, when a Muslim attends an American mosque, he is not only learning a violent doctrine but is also susceptible to be recruited by ISIS
  • Yerushalmi was suggesting further alienation. "Syrian immigrants, when they come here, where are they going to go to those mosques; the reservoir of support is there."
  • "The threat is real!" Yerushalmi concluded. "Sharia is not a peaceful, feel-good Islam."
  • "If my Roman Catholic church was preaching death to Muslims, Jews, everyone else, I'm sure it would be closed down with a blink of an eye," she continued. "So this is where we have to stop the growth of mosques!"
  • some members believe that the White House "is controlled by Muslims."
  • "They don't want peace and prosperity. They want to live by Sharia," said an angry old man.
  • President Obama delivered a speech responding to the San Bernardino shootings, calling for religious tolerance. He harshly condemned those who wish to discriminate against others based on their religion and addressed the plight of Muslim Americans who are currently enduring the ongoing Islamophobic backlash
Roth johnson

Are Today's Cops Too Quick to Shoot? - Uzma Kolsy - The Atlantic - 0 views

  •  
    Interesting article on the mindset of police today. Do officers think before they shoot? Or is it just instant reflexes?
Javier E

Is Everyone a Little Bit Racist? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Research in the last couple of decades suggests that the problem is not so much overt racists. Rather, the larger problem is a broad swath of people who consider themselves enlightened, who intellectually believe in racial equality, who deplore discrimination, yet who harbor unconscious attitudes that result in discriminatory policies and behavior.
  • The player takes on the role of a police officer who is confronted with a series of images of white or black men variously holding guns or innocent objects such as wallets or cellphones. The aim is to shoot anyone with a gun while holstering your weapon in other cases.Ordinary players (often university undergraduates) routinely shoot more quickly at black men than at white men, and are more likely to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black man than an unarmed white man.
  • Correll has found no statistically significant difference between the play of blacks and that of whites in the shooting game.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • an uncomfortable starting point is to understand that racial stereotyping remains ubiquitous, and that the challenge is not a small number of twisted white supremacists but something infinitely more subtle and complex: People who believe in equality but who act in ways that perpetuate bias and inequality.
  • One finding is that we unconsciously associate “American” with “white.” Thus, in 2008, some California college students — many who were supporting Barack Obama for president — unconsciously treated Obama as more foreign than Tony Blair, the former British prime minister.
  • “There’s a whole culture that promotes this idea of aggressive young black men,” Correll notes. “In our minds, young black men are associated with danger.”
  • Joshua Correll of the University of Colorado at Boulder has used an online shooter video game to try to measure these unconscious attitudes (you can play the game yourself).
Javier E

When bias beats logic: why the US can't have a reasoned gun debate | US news | The Guar... - 1 views

  • Jon Stokes, a writer and software developer, said he is frustrated after each mass shooting by “the sentiment among very smart people, who are used to detail and nuance and doing a lot of research, that this is cut and dried, this is black and white”.
  • Stokes has lived on both sides of America’s gun culture war, growing up in rural Louisiana, where he got his first gun at age nine, and later studying at Harvard and the University of Chicago, where he adopted some of a big-city resident’s skepticism about guns. He’s written articles about the gun geek culture behind the popularity of the AR-15, why he owns a military-style rifle, and why gun owners are so skeptical of tech-enhanced “smart guns”.
  • Even to suggest that the debate is more complicated – that learning something about guns, by taking a course on how to safely carry a concealed weapon, or learning how to fire a gun, might shift their perspective on whichever solution they have just heard about on TV – “just upsets them, and they basically say you’re trying to obscure the issue”.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • In early 2013, a few months after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, a Yale psychologist created an experiment to test how political bias affects our reasoning skills. Dan Kahan was attempting to understand why public debates over social problems remain deadlocked, even when good scientific evidence is available. He decided to test a question about gun control.
  • Then Kahan ran the same test again. This time, instead of evaluating skin cream trials, participants were asked to evaluate whether a law banning citizens from carrying concealed firearms in public made crime go up or down. The result: when liberals and conservatives were confronted with a set of results that contradicted their political assumptions, the smartest people were barely more likely to arrive at the correct answer than the people with no math skills at all. Political bias had erased the advantages of stronger reasoning skills.
  • The reason that measurable facts were sidelined in political debates was not that people have poor reasoning skills, Kahan concluded. Presented with a conflict between holding to their beliefs or finding the correct answer to a problem, people simply went with their tribe.
  • It wasa reasonable strategy on the individual level – and a “disastrous” one for tackling social change, he concluded.
  • But the biggest distortion in the gun control debate is the dramatic empathy gap between different kinds of victims. It’s striking how puritanical the American imagination is, how narrow its range of sympathy. Mass shootings, in which the perpetrator kills complete strangers at random in a public place, prompt an outpouring of grief for the innocent lives lost. These shootings are undoubtedly horrifying, but they account for a tiny percentage of America’s overall gun deaths each year.
  • The roughly 60 gun suicides each day, the 19 black men and boys lost each day to homicide, do not inspire the same reaction, even though they represent the majority of gun violence victims. Yet there are meaningful measures which could save lives here – targeted inventions by frontline workers in neighborhoods where the gun homicide rate is 400 times higher than other developed countries, awareness campaigns to help gun owners in rural states learn about how to identify suicide risk and intervene with friends in trouble.
  • When it comes to suicide, “there is so much shame about that conversation … and where there is shame there is also denial,”
  • When young men of color are killed, “you have disdain and aggression,” fueled by the type of white supremacist argument which equates blackness with criminality.
clairemann

Why the Atlanta Shooter May Have Called Himself a Sex Addict | Time - 0 views

  • The Atlanta Police Department said the shooter told them that he was a sex addict and was seeking to eliminate the temptation that he perceived these outlets represented.
  • According to the shooter’s roommate, the shooter had sought treatment for his sex addiction at HopeQuest, a facility operated by an evangelical group and located just down the road from the first spa that he attacked in Acworth, Ga. The gunman was also a member of the evangelical Crabapple First Baptist church, in Milton, Ga., which has begun the process to expel him and called the shootings “the result of a sinful heart and depraved mind.”
  • the confusing rhetoric of the evangelical church about sex can lead to despair over a perceived sex addiction and a feeling that one must go to extremes to avoid it. He spoke to TIME about his research.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • That usually is not going on when Christian men like [the shooter] describe their behavior as an addiction. Oftentimes what they really mean is “I’m regularly engaging in this thing that I’d rather not, but I’m doing it consistently, so I feel like I’m out of control.”
  • That suggests that evangelicals are working with a very expansive definition of addiction that is basically shaped by this idea that if I’m doing something regularly that I’d rather not do, I can call myself an addict. And that’s a core aspect of their identity: I’m a porn addict or I’m a sex addict.
  • One of these interesting paradoxes among conservative Christian men is that sexual sin is a really bad sin and that you can reduce your entire spiritual life to how you’re doing sexually. It’s something I call sexual exceptionalism
cvanderloo

Two stereotypes that diminish the humanity of the Atlanta shooting victims - and all As... - 0 views

  • Since the Atlanta spa shootings, the U.S. media has been working harder than usual to describe and understand Asian Americans.
  • One is that of Asian Americans as the “perpetual foreigner” – immigrants who constantly struggle, never assimilate.
  • Both stereotypes have been levied in tandem against Asian immigrants to the U.S. for centuries.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • In the mid-1800s, Chinese laborers made up the first significant wave of Asian immigration to the United States. Recruited during the Gold Rush and to build the Transcontinental Railroad, the men were described by employers like industrialist Leland Stanford as “quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious and economical.”
  • The model-minority myth emerged later. In 1965 the Hart-Celler Act opened immigration quotas that had previously favored Western Europeans.
  • Out-earning all other racial groups, Asian Americans became the “model minority,” a term first coined by sociologist William Petersen in a 1966 New York Times article, “Success Story: Japanese American style.”
  • Without the same educational and professional sponsorships as my father had, many in these later waves founded mom-and-pop businesses and peer lending networks. They gravitated toward blue-collar industries and “pink-collar” jobs in salons, food service or child care.
  • The women who worked and died at Young’s Asian Massage, Gold Spa and Aromatherapy Spa lived in this Asian America – not my father’s or mine.
  • Such workers make up the other side of the high-earning “model minority” statistic. That data masks the fact that Asian Americans have the highest income inequality of any racial group, with the top 10% of this population earning more than 10 times what the bottom 10% earns.
  • When Asian Americans are so easily, and so often, stereotyped, they become categories, not people – not individuals who make lives, raise families and do the best they can in their adopted homeland.
  • “My mother didn’t do anything wrong,” the son of 63-year-old Yong Ae Yue, the fan of Korean soap operas and cooking, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And she deserves the recognition that she is a human.”
cvanderloo

Why Nearly All Mass Shooters Are Men : NPR - 1 views

  • As with almost every mass shooter in recorded U.S. history, both of the suspects in the recent attacks are men.
  • "Men just are generally more violent," said the group's president, Jillian Peterson, a forensic psychologist and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University. "There are many theories as to why that is."
  • And when women do choose violence, guns are not typically their weapon of choice.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • If men vastly outnumber women as mass shooters, those perpetrators are often a model for the next male shooters who "see themselves in them," Peterson said, a phenomenon she noted is particularly true in young, white men.
  • "Many school shooters study Columbine, for example; other university shooters study the Virginia Tech shooting. And they really are kind of using those previous shootings as a blueprint for their own."
  • But at the same time, as a psychologist, I've been worried about all the risk factors that we know of for mass shootings that have been exacerbated in the pandemic. So, trauma, experiencing a mental health crisis, suicidality, time online and access to firearms have all increased.
  • . We can kind of work our way backwards and say, these are individuals who are in crisis, who have very easy access to firearms. And are there simple things we can do like universal background checks or safe storage that prevent that ease of access?
  • But we can also go further back and talk about things like, how do we make sure everybody's trained in crisis intervention and suicide prevention? How do we build trauma-informed schools, and go even further back?
  • I would say, in particular, the media coverage seems to have shifted. I'm not seeing as much of the perpetrator in the news cycle. I'm not seeing the perpetrator's name and face everywhere, which we know is what contributes to the social contagion.
adonahue011

Vienna 'terror attack': One person dead, several injured in shooting - CNN - 0 views

    • adonahue011
       
      This feels like something that should be given more global attention. I think it is very interesting how our whole country is so hyper focused on the election, as it is very important. I think it proves how we have such strong biases, inherently.
  • "We are still in battle against the would-be terrorists,
  • "We assume there are several heavily armed perpetrators."
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • the attackers started randomly shooting at people in a busy district packed with cafes and restaurants near Vienna's main synagogue, Seitenstettengasse Temple.
    • adonahue011
       
      It is important to understand how global issues can also effect us as Americans, I believe often time we do not think about the world as a whole enough.
  • keep the population safe
  • said in a tweet that it was unclear whether the synagogue was a target, but that it was closed at the time of the shooting.
    • adonahue011
       
      So similar to attacks we have seen in America.
  • Kurz said the Austrian army has been deployed to help protect buildings and properties. "We are currently going through difficult times in our republic.
  • ther leaders have shared statements expressing their shock and sorrow, including British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.
  • entral Vienna on Monday evening, killing at least one person and injuring 15, including a police officer, according to Austrian authorities.
  • Authorities are urging the public to stay inside while the other gunmen -- it is unclear how many there are in total -- remain at large.
peterconnelly

Meet the Wikipedia editor who published the Buffalo shooting entry minutes after it sta... - 0 views

  • After Jason Moore, from Portland, Oregon, saw headlines from national news sources on Google News about the Buffalo shooting at a local supermarket on Saturday afternoon, he did a quick search for the incident on Wikipedia. When no results appeared, he drafted a single sentence: "On May 14, 2022, 10 people were killed in a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York." He hit save and published the entry on Wikipedia in less than a minute.
  • That article, which as of Friday has been viewed more than 900,000 times, has since undergone 1,071 edits by 223 editors who've voluntarily updated the page on the internet's free and largest crowdsourced encyclopedia.
  • He's credited with creating 50,000 entries
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • In the middle of breaking news, when people are searching for information, some platforms can present more questions than answers. Although Wikipedia is not staffed with professional journalists, it is viewed as an authoritative source by much of the public, for better or for worse. Its entries are also used for fact-checking purposes by some of the biggest social platforms, adding to the stakes and reach of the work from Moore and others.
  • "Editing Wikipedia can absolutely take an emotional toll on me, especially when working on difficult topics such as the COVID-19 pandemic, mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and other disasters," he said.
  • "I like the instant gratification of making the internet better," he said.
  • "I want to direct people to something that is going to provide them with much more reliable information at a time when it's very difficult for people to understand what sources they can trust."
  • "It is considered cool if you're the first person who creates an article, especially if you do it well with high-quality contributions," said Rasberry.
  • To help patrol incoming edits and predict misconduct or errors, Wikipedia -- like Twitter -- uses artificial intelligence bots that can escalate suspicious content to human reviewers who monitor content.
  • Rasberry, who also wrote the Wikipedia page on the platform's fact checking processes, said Wikipedia does not employ paid staff to monitor anything unless it involves "strange and unusual serious crimes like terrorism or real world violence, such as using Wikipedia to make threats, plan to commit suicide, or when Wikipedia itself is part of a crime.
  • Rasberry said flaws range from a geographical bias, which is related to challenges with communicating across languages; access to internet in lower and middle income countries; and barriers to freedom of journalism around the world.
  • "I've got many other editors that I'm working with who will back me, so when we encounter vandalism or trolls or misinformation or disinformation, editors are very quick to revert inappropriate edits or remove inappropriate content or poorly sourced content," Moore said.
  • While "edit wars" can happen on pages, Rasberry said this tends to occur more often over social issues rather than news.
  • Wikipedia also publicly displays who edits each version of an article via its history page, along with a "talk" page for each post that allows editors to openly discuss edits.
  • "If no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it," the page said.
  • "If it was a paid advertising site or if it had a different mission, I wouldn't waste my time."
johnsonma23

There Has Been a Fatal School Shooting Every 5 Weeks Since Sandy Hook | Mother Jones - 0 views

  • In the two years since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, no school shooting has claimed as many lives, nor ones as young, as on that terrible day. But fatal gun attacks at schools and on college campuses remain a fixture of American life. They have occurred once every five weeks on average since Sandy Hook, including two attacks—one in Santa Monica and another near Seattle—in which four or more victims were killed.
  • dozens of other gun incidents on school grounds that caused injuries, as well as seven additional cases where someone committed suicide with a firearm, but no one else died
  • Gun violence has regularly been at the political forefront since Newtown. While Congress failed to pass a background check bill four months after the devastation, state lawmakers nationwide approved more than a hundred laws either strengthening or weakening restrictions on firearms in the first year after Sandy Hook alone
johnsonma23

Is Islam to Blame for the Shooting at Charlie Hebdo in Paris? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Outraged Christians, Jews or atheists might vent frustrations on Facebook or Twitter. Yet it looks as if Islamic extremists once again have expressed their displeasure with bullets.
  • Is there something about Islam that leads inexorably to violence, terrorism and subjugation of women?
  • fanatical Muslims so often seem to murder in the name of God, from the 2004 Madrid train bombing that killed 191 people to the murder of hostages at a cafe in Sydney, Australia, last month
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • the most systematic terrorism in the Islamic world has been the daily persecution of Christians and other religious minorities, from the Bahai to the Yazidi to the Ahmadis.
  • Terror incidents lead many Westerners to perceive Islam as inherently extremist, but I think that is too glib and simple-minded
  • they aren’t representative of a complex and diverse religion of 1.6 billion adherents.
  • The vast majority of Muslims of course have nothing to do with the insanity of such attacks — except that they are disproportionately the victims of terrorism.
runlai_jiang

Trump suggests arming teachers as a solution to increase school safety - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • "We need more security, we need more firearms on campus, we need better background checks, and we need to study more on mental health."Read MoreFred Abt, father of Parkland shooting survivor Carson Abt, said he had discussed with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos over lunch that rather than waiting for first responders to arrive, it would be more efficient to have firearms locked on school campuses.
  • "I generally oppose gun control, but I support the ban on assault weapons and I support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun," he wrote in his 2000 book, "The America We Deserve." "With today's Internet technology, we should be able to tell within 72 hours if a potential gun owner has a record."Trump disavowed those statements during the 2016 campaign.Polls have found, however, that most Americans blame Trump and Congress for not doing more on guns. A new Washington Post/ABC News poll released Tuesday found that 62% of respondents said Trump is not doing enough to prevent mass shootings and 77% say Congress is doing an inadequate job on the issue.
  • We're fighting hard for you and we will not stop... I just grieve for you, I feel so -- to me, there could be nothing worse than what you've gone through."
peterconnelly

Should kids be allowed to use smartphones in the classroom? - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • The commonly recommended age for a first cellphone is 13 years old. Most kids that age are in the eighth grade, getting ready to learn algebra. The desperate phone calls to 911 coming from inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., where 21 people were killed last month, were placed by children younger than that.
  • In the aftermath of another school shooting, concerned parents are weighing whether phones are a distraction or a potential lifeline for their children.
  • Phone ownership already is widespread among younger children, with 43 percent of 8-to-12-year-olds owning their own smartphone
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The devices have become part of many students’ daily lives, despite various attempts over the years by state legislatures and cities to keep them out of classrooms.
  • Despite any emotional benefits for adults or educational use for children, screen-time and security experts don’t recommend taking smartphones to class, at least not without some ground rules and guidance on how to use them in a worst-case scenario.
  • A phone can make unwanted noises, and in a silent lockdown, even a vibration could be too loud. Depending on their age, kids might also be tempted to post about an ongoing incident to social media, which Trump said could both inspire other potential gunmen seeking fame or reveal details about their location. Even the ability to call 911 isn’t a good reason, because an entire school full of people calling at once could overload a switchboard.
  • She said it’s a distraction, and she worries it could replace in-person social interactions and knows she can’t have oversight over many conversations or posts that might happen via smartphone.
  • She’s also worried about misinformation that her daughter could see or read.
  • “Phones are not going to stop school shootings. Gun control might,” Twenge said.
peterconnelly

House Democrats look to pass gun control legislation by early June - 0 views

  • House Democrats will try to advance a raft of gun control bills on Thursday in the wake of two high-profile mass shootings that rocked the nation earlier this month.
  • The Democratic-led package will likely fail in the face of Republican opposition in the Senate. However, Democrats have acknowledged a hope — however slim — that bipartisan talks among senators can lead to lawmakers passing a more limited bill with support from both parties.
  • The Raise the Age Act would lift the purchasing age for semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21, while the Keep Americans Safe Act would outlaw the import, sale, manufacture, transfer or possession of a large-capacity magazine.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Senate Republicans have for years blocked progress on any gun safety legislation. They opposed efforts to tighten gun regulations both when they held the majority, and even now when they can threaten an indefinite filibuster if Democrats can’t come up with the 60 votes required to circumvent the stalling tactic.
  • “It’s much easier to scream about guns than it is to demand answer about where our culture is failing,” Cruz added in a separate social media post on Saturday.
  • Disapproval from Cruz and other Senate Republicans will likely doom any legislation Nadler and other House Democrats manage to pass.
  • Democrats dispute the claim that lawmakers need to target mental illness more so than the availability of guns to reduce shooting violence in the U.S. They say that similar rates of mental illness in other developed nations across the globe prove that mental illness alone cannot fully explain the prevalence of mass shootings in the U.S.
1 - 20 of 99 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page