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In fact, campus-carry supporters maintain that the law will keep the peace, enabling students and faculty to defend themselves effectively, and deter would-be shooters.

It turns out, for example, there were armed students at Umpqua Community College in Oregon on the day of its shooting last fall. Their presence did not deter the attack, nor did they halt it; the students wisely decided not to jump into the fray for fear it would compound the mayhem.

Stand Your Ground laws protect citizens from prosecution in cases where they feel threatened in public, and fire their weapons.

It’s unclear whether campus carry does and will in fact undermine the freedom of expression, but if there’s one place in society where the citizenry must not tolerate such threats, it’s the college classroom.

Few young adults have put significant thought into these kinds of issues; they must experiment with them to understand them properly and deeply, and to develop mature and critical views.

In short, they argued that guns in the classroom pose an intolerable threat to free speech.

Will guns encourage speech and invite people to discussion and debate in the classroom?

Gun owners have shot and killed unarmed citizens—and sought Stand Your Ground protections—in cases in which they misjudged or overestimated the threats before them.

In 2014, a Montana man invoked Stand Your Ground after he shot and killed an unarmed German exchange student trespassing in his garage.

One University of Houston professor, Maria Gonzalez, expressed her concerns over campus carry in the context of her own classes, which cover Marxist and Queer Theory.

Expansions of civil rights are almost always deeply unpopular at first; this was the case in the fight for women’s rights, suffrage for African Americans, and marriage equality for gays and lesbians.

I fear that campus carry will make students and faculty less inclined to engage in the critical intellectual work that must take place in the classroom, the courageous inquiry and experimentation American democracy requires.

It’s impossible to measure the cost of campus carry. But I wager that the cost will be evidenced in the mounting silence on college campuses, and the trepidation, timidity, and lack of creativity among new generations of voters. American democracy will be the poorer for it.

More guns, more killing. Fewer guns, less killing. Everybody else has figured that out. Americans—and only Americans—refuse to do so.

On gun control, health care, financial regulation, her "many hours in the Situation Room advising President Obama" and more, Clinton cast herself as the defender of Obama's legacy and Sanders as someone who'd toss out his accomplishments.

Obama remains popular with Democrats. She has a strong claim to the President's legacy having served in his Cabinet as his top foreign policy officer. And minority voters favor Obama and Clinton over Sanders.

She accused Sanders of calling Obama "weak" and "ineffective" when it came to perhaps Clinton's most vulnerable subject, Wall Street reform, and said he'd tried to recruit a primary challenger against Obama in 2011.

while one hand draws up plans for border walls, the other doles out AR-15s to white, male, homegrown terrorists: Between 54 and 63 percent of the mass shootings since 1982 were committed by white men. A hypothetical outside threat is seen as far more deadly than a very real internal one. How do we account for these seemingly contradictory impulses?

In recent years, for instance, politicians and pundits have gone to great lengths to distinguish “our” violence from “theirs,” referring to Muslims.

Where does a political motive diverge from a delusion? Only in the case of Muslim killers are we confident that we can draw a bright line.

We’ve embraced the false dichotomy: If browser history and social media accounts link a shooter to some form of radical Islam, then he is a terrorist (as in the case of Syed Rizwan Farouk, one of the San Bernardino, Calif., attackers), even though the animating factor may have been mental illness.

If we look beyond America, we might notice features common among perpetrators across religious and ethnic lines. As Olivier Roy argues in his recent book, “Jihad and Death,” they tend to be young men from middle- or upper-middle-class backgrounds, often with a history of petty crime

white American perpetrators are deemed “troubled” or “disturbed” (as Trump described Cruz on Thursday), while their Muslim counterparts are purportedly motivated by nothing but religious fanaticism.

“People suffering from psychological troubles can undoubtedly find in the jihadi imaginary a way to situate their madness within a realm of meaning shared by others,” Roy writes; “in other words, to cease being considered mad when their insanity reaches its murderous height, because they will be given the prestigious label of terrorist instead of being called a psychopath.”

Perhaps most important — and chilling — what links mass shootings is the sense of sheer randomness they invoke

they rarely stop to target foes or spare friends. The mere act of being present makes one a legitimate target. It is this feature of contemporary terrorism — whether in Paris or Parkland — that unites disparate acts of violence and constitutes their prime psychological menace: It could be anyone, anywhere.

That truth transcends borders, but Americans continue to embrace the expensive fiction that outsiders are the real threat, with 45 percent of Americans saying immigrants worsen U.S. crime.

Even as the Islamic State entreats would-be fighters to take advantage of America’s lax gun laws (“their” domestic attacks depend on “our” policies), our leaders offer “thoughts and prayers” to shooting victims.

Scholars in a range of disciplines — from comparative literature to social theory to psychoanalysis — have long noted the tendency to project our faults on people who seem alien to us.

With regard to safety and security, demonizing refugees, Muslims, Mexicans and so on does the important work of seeming to take action while leaving the existing order (and the incredible profits of gun manufacturers) intact.

“The issue is not the loopholes,” the senator said, “it’s the problem that once you start looking at how easy it is to get around it, you would literally have to ban every semi-automatic rifle that’s sold.” But the crowd cheered loudly at the suggestion of such a ban, a response that caught Rubio off guard.

“I want you to know that we will support your two children in the way that you will not,” Gonzalez said. She also asked Loesch if the NRA supported any restrictions on the purchase of semiautomatic weapons and modifications like bump stocks.

It’s unclear if those kinds of restrictions would actually reduce the rate of gun violence or incidence of mass shootings, but the town hall did show that the power of people—especially young people—is still important even in this age of big money.

That power only seems to be growing. Students across Florida and other places in the country are marching, and there appears to be an ongoing political awakening among youth about the issue of gun violence. Students from Stoneman Douglas are finding their footing as political leaders in their own right, forced into the fire by tragedy, and have now proven effective in meeting the strongest arguments of their policy opponents, and in wielding the power of public opinion on their side. If there is significant movement on gun-control reforms in the future, it’s possible, perhaps even probable, that the country will look back on Wednesday’s town hall as a paradigm-shifting moment that might have finally moved the debate.

it’s a gateway, a sort of testing of boundaries and hunger to sow fear in others, that leads in that direction.

After all, they’ve already bought the hardware.

“Bernie’s still being given a bit of a free pass by the national media,” he says. “I do not believe that he would be a strong candidate for our party in the fall. And, except for three months out of every four years, he’s not even of our party.”

Here’s a guy who has been a kind of stalwart of the National Rifle Association, a man who said immigrants steal our jobs right up until he ran for president,

Of course, much of the energy that delivered such victories was determinedly progressive, akin to or directly supportive of Sanders and his transformative effect on the liberal cause. But O’Malley is as much a pillar of the party as Sanders is not.

e smiles. “Do you want me to speak more frankly?”

Some such stories, he says, feature in another manuscript, written with the guidance of the late Richard Ben Cramer, the author of What It Takes, “the definitive book about the 1988 presidential race” in which Hart flew so high then fell. Its title is Baltimore: A Memoir and a piece of it is out there on the web. Some want O’Malley to rewrite it, he says, to tie his own story more closely to the idea he was the model for the mayor of Charm City played by Aidan Gillen in The Wire, David Simon’s groundbreaking HBO series. He’s not keen.

Such focus seems timely: with the federal government in Trump’s sclerotic grip, cities in particular have begun to take a lead. On climate change, for example, some US mayors have reacted to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris deal by saying they will simply pursue its aims themselves.

The Gonzaga gathering, O’Malley says, is a friendly one, a chance for the old boys “to ask, ‘Hey, how are you doing? How’s your wife? How’s your kids? What are you up to?’

“We recognized each other from the Sunday shows and having served together. We shook hands … but it was not a moment for me to simply say, ‘Hey, how’s work?’ I know how work is with him.

om Perez, once the Maryland secretary of labor, ended up in the role but O’Malley supported a young mayor from the Republican heartlands: Pete Buttigieg, now a challenger in the presidential primary.

But in an echo of the frustrations of 2016, O’Malley criticises the way the DNC has run the primary, particularly the way debate qualifications based on polling data and donor numbers – changed this week – have kept the likes of the former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick (“a friend” to whom O’Malley has donated) and the Montana governor Steve Bullock firmly out of the spotlight.

I was out there rattling the tin cup, from county square to county square.”

“All of that’s part of the process. But at the end of the day, we have to nominate someone who can defeat him and who can bring our country together and govern.”

Americans have so many guns because drug gangs roam the streets, because they have less trust in their neighbors, because they read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Because all of their personal and financial information got hacked in the latest breach, because our country’s real overlords are in Silicon Valley and appear to be moral Martians who operate on some weird new postmodern ethical wavelength.

The establishments and elites that create our political and entertainment culture have no idea how fragile it all is—how fragile it seems to people living normal, less privileged lives. That is because nothing is fragile for them

Would it help if we tried less censure and more cultural affiliation? Might it help if we started working on problems that are real? Sure. But why lower the temperature when there’s such easy pleasure to be had in ridiculing your mindless and benighted countrymen?

. The Supreme Court, though it ruled 5-4 in the 2008 Heller case that an individual has the right to own a gun unconnected to service in a militia, has left the door open to sensible regulation.“Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited,” the court wrote in that case. “It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever for whatever purpose.”

The disgraced former cable pundit Bill O’Reilly said all the recent carnage is “the price of freedom.” But it’s not the price of freedom in Canada or Japan or England. It’s the price of freedom only in the United States, where mass killings have surged. In every other free country, sanity has prevailed.

It’s a no-brainer to pass a law designed to keep people from turning their AKs into machine guns with the so-called bump stocks. But it was also a no-brainer to restrict people on terrorism watch lists from buying guns, as was proposed after the Orlando slaughter of 49 people last year. It failed.

Bush also destroyed centrist Democrats intellectually, by making it impossible for them to credibly critique liberalism from the right.

. In the late ’80s and the ’90s, centrist Democrats had also argued that Reagan’s decision to boost defense spending and aid the Afghan mujahideen had helped topple the Soviet empire. But in 2003, when Bush invaded Iraq, he sparked the greatest foreign-policy catastrophe since Vietnam.

If the lesson of the Reagan era had been that Democrats should give a Republican president his due, the lesson of the Bush era was that doing so brought disaster.

In the Senate, Bush’s 2001 tax cut passed with 12 Democratic votes; the Iraq War was authorized with 29. As the calamitous consequences of these votes became clear, the revolt against them destroyed the Democratic Party’s centrist wing

With the Dean campaign came an intellectual revolution inside the Democratic Party. His insurgency helped propel Daily Kos, a group blog dedicated to stiffening the liberal spine. It energized the progressive activist group MoveOn. It also coincided with Paul Krugman’s emergence as America’s most influential liberal columnist and Jon Stewart’s emergence as America’s most influential liberal television personality.

All of this has shaped the Clinton campaign’s response to Sanders. At the first Democratic debate, she noted that, unlike him, she favors “rein[ing] in the excesses of capitalism” rather than abandoning it altogether. But the only specific policy difference she highlighted was gun control, on which she attacked him from the left.

Whereas the party’s most respected thinkers had once urged Democrats to critique liberal orthodoxy, they now criticized Democrats for not defending that orthodoxy fiercely enough. The presidency of George W. Bush had made Democrats unapologetically liberal, and the presidency of Barack Obama was the most tangible result.

that’s only half the story. Because if George W. Bush’s failures pushed the Democratic Party to the left, Barack Obama’s have pushed it even further. If Bush was responsible for the liberal infrastructure that helped elect Obama, Obama has now inadvertently contributed to the creation of two movements—Occupy and Black Lives Matter—dedicated to the proposition that even the liberalism he espouses is not left-wing enough.

Todd Gitlin quotes Jeremy Varon, a close observer of Occupy who teaches at the New School for Social Research, as saying, “This is the Obama generation declaring their independence from his administration. We thought his voice was ours. Now we know we have to speak for ourselves.

Occupy. The movement may have burned out, but it injected economic inequality into the American political debate

The same anger that sparked Occupy—directed not merely at Wall Street but at the Democratic Party elites who coddled it—fueled Bill de Blasio’s election and Elizabeth Warren’s rise to national prominence. And without Occupy, it’s impossible to understand why a curmudgeonly Democratic Socialist from Vermont is seriously challenging Hillary Clinton

the Democracy Alliance, the party’s most influential donor club, which includes mega-funders such as George Soros and Tom Steyer, has itself shifted leftward during the Obama years. In 2014, it gave Warren a rapturous welcome when she spoke at the group’s annual winter meeting. Last spring it announced that it was making economic inequality its top priority.

By the time Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, in part because of her support for the Iraq War, the mood inside the party had fundamentally changed.

Moreover, the Occupy-Warren-Sanders axis has influenced Clinton’s own economic agenda, which is significantly further left than the one she ran on in 2008. She has called for tougher regulation of the financial industry, mused about raising Social Security taxes on the wealthy (something she opposed in 2008), and criticized the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a trade agreement she once gushed about).

“Black Lives Matter developed in the wake of the failure of the Obama administration,” argues the Cornell sociologist Travis Gosa, a co-editor of The Hip Hop & Obama Reader. “Black Lives Matter is the voice of a Millennial generation that’s been sold a ba

Had Black Lives Matter existed when Bill Clinton was seeking the presidency, he probably would have run against the group

Today, by contrast, the Democratic Establishment has responded to Black Lives Matter much as it responded to Occupy: with applause

what’s most remarkable isn’t Hillary Clinton’s move to the left, or the Democratic Party’s. It’s the American public’s willingness to go along.

Much of this shift is being driven by a changing mood among whites. Between January and April alone, according to a YouGov poll, the percentage of whites who called deaths like those of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray “isolated incident[s]” dropped 20 points. There’s even been movement within the GOP. From 2014 to 2015, the percentage of Republicans saying America needs to make changes to give blacks an equal chance rose 15 points—more than the percentage increase among Democrats or Independents.

Most interesting—because he is the Republican candidate with the keenest sense of how to appeal to the general electorate—has been the approach of Senator Marco Rubio. In August, a Fox News anchor asked him about Black Lives Matter. Instead of condemning the movement, Rubio told the story of an African American friend of his whom police had stopped eight or nine times over the previous 18 months even though he had never broken the law. “This is a problem our nation has to confront,” Rubio declared. Then he talked about young African Americans who get arrested for nonviolent offenses and pushed into plea deals by overworked public defenders. The government, he said, must “look for ways to divert people” from going to jail “so that you don’t get people stigmatized early in life.”

Conservative Republicans didn’t talk this way in the ’90s. They didn’t talk this way even in the early Obama years. The fact that Rubio does so now is more evidence that today, unlike in the mid-’60s, the debate about race and justice isn’t moving to the right. It’s moving further left

What’s different this time? One difference is that in the 1960s and ’70s, crime exploded, fueling a politics of fear and vengeance. Over the past two decades, by contrast, crime has plummeted. And despite some hyperbolic headlines, there’s no clear evidence that it’s rising significantly again.

When the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law examined polls, it found that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans now support barring discrimination against transgender people.

Most Americans, in other words, having decided that discriminating against lesbians and gay men was wrong, have simply extended that view to transgender people via what Flores describes as a “mechanism of attitude generalization.”

In polling, Americans typically say they favor smaller government in general while supporting many specific government programs. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Americans said they favored “a smaller government providing fewer services” over “a bigger government providing more services” by 37 percentage points. When Obama took power in 2009, the margin was a mere eight points. And despite the president’s many economic interventions, the most recent time Pew asked that question, in September 2014, the margin was exactly the same.

This intervention has sparked an angry response on the Republican right, but not among Americans as a whole.

On health care, the story is similar: no public backlash. When Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, most polls showed Americans opposing it by about eight to 10 points. Today, the margin is almost identical

Little has changed on taxes, either, even though Obama allowed some of the tax cuts passed under George W. Bush to expire. The percentage of Americans who say they pay more than their fair share in taxes is about the same as it was in the spring of 2010 (

in an era when government has grown more intrusive, African American activists have grown more confrontational, and long-standing assumptions about sexual orientation and gender identity have been toppled, most Americans are not yelling “stop,” as they began doing in the mid-1960s. The biggest reason: We’re not dealing with the same group of Americans.

On issue after issue, it is the young who are most pleased with the liberal policy shifts of the Obama era, and most eager for more

It is largely because of them that the percentage of Americans who want government to “promote traditional values” is now lower than at any other time since Gallup began asking the question in 1993, and that the percentage calling themselves “socially liberal” now equals the percentage calling themselves “socially conservative” for the first time since Gallup began asking that question in 1999.

Millennials are also sustaining support for bigger government. The young may not have a high opinion of the institutions that represent them, but they nonetheless want those institutions to do more

They were also 25 points more likely than those 65 and older to approve of Occupy Wall Street and 36 points more favorable toward socialism, which they actually preferred to capitalism, 49 percent to 46 percent. As the Pew report put it, “Millennials, at least so far, hold ‘baked in’ support for a more activist government.

The press often depicts American politics as a battle pitting ever more liberal Democrats against ever more conservative Republicans. Among the young, however, that’s inaccurate. Young Democrats may be more liberal than their elders, but so are young Republicans. According to Pew, a clear majority of young Republicans say immigrants strengthen America, half say corporate profits are too high, and almost half say stricter environmental laws are worth the cost—answers that sharply distinguish them from older members of the GOP.

Asked how they categorize themselves ideologically, more than two-thirds of Republican Millennials call themselves either “liberal” or “mixed,” while fewer than one-third call themselves “conservative.” Among the oldest Republicans, that breakdown is almost exactly reversed.

Millennials are not liberal primarily because they are young. They are liberal because their formative political experiences were the Iraq War and the Great Recession, and because they make up the most secular, most racially diverse, least nationalistic generation in American history. And none of that is likely to change.

America is not governed by public-opinion polls, after all. Congressional redistricting, felon disenfranchisement, and the obliteration of campaign-finance laws all help insulate politicians from the views of ordinary people, and generally empower the right. But despite these structural disadvantages, Obama has enacted a more consequential progressive agenda than either of his two Democratic predecessors did

If Clinton does win, it’s likely that on domestic policy, she will govern to Obama’s left. (On foreign policy, where there is no powerful left-wing activist movement like Occupy or Black Lives Matter, the political dynamics are very different.) Clinton’s campaign proposals already signal a leftward shift. And people close to her campaign suggest that among her top agenda items would be paid family leave, debt-free college tuition, and universal preschool

Clinton will face this reality from her first day in office. And she will face it knowing that because she cannot inspire liberals rhetorically as Obama can, they will be less likely to forgive her heresies on policy. Like Lyndon B. Johnson after John F. Kennedy, she will have to deliver in substance what she cannot deliver in style.

it’s likely that any Republican capable of winning the presidency in 2016 would govern to the left of George W. Bush. In the first place, winning at all would require a different coalition. When Bush won the presidency in 2000, very few Millennials could vote. In 2016, by contrast, they will constitute roughly one-third of those who turn out

In 2000, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians constituted 20 percent of voters. In 2016, they will constitute more than 30 percent.

even if the 2016 Republican nominee wins 60 percent of the white vote (more than any GOP nominee in the past four decades except Reagan, in 1984, has won), he or she will still need almost 30 percent of the minority vote. Mitt Romney got 17 percent.

This need to win the votes of Millennials and minorities, who lean left not just on cultural issues but on economic ones, will shape how any conceivable Republican president campaigns in the general election, and governs once in office.

If America’s demographics have changed since the Bush presidency, so has the climate among conservative intellectuals. There is now an influential community of “reformocons”—in some ways comparable to the New Democratic thinkers of the 1980s—who believe Republicans have focused too much on cutting taxes for the wealthy and not enough on addressing the economic anxieties of the middle and working classes.

The candidate closest to the reformocons is Rubio, who cites several of them by name in his recent book. He says that partially privatizing Social Security, which Bush ran on in 2000 and 2004, is an idea whose “time has passed.” And unlike Bush, and both subsequent Republican presidential nominees, Rubio is not proposing a major cut in the top income-tax rate. Instead, the centerpiece of his economic plan is an expanded child tax credit, which would be available even to Americans who are so poor that they don’t pay income taxes

it’s likely that were he elected, Rubio wouldn’t push through as large, or as regressive, a tax cut as Bush did in 2001 and 2003. Partly, that’s because a younger and more ethnically diverse electorate is less tolerant of such policies. Partly, it’s because Rubio’s administration would likely contain a reformocon faction more interested in cutting taxes for the middle class than for the rich. And partly, it’s because the legacy of the Bush tax cuts themselves would make them harder to replicate

A key figure in passing the Bush tax cuts was Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2001 warned that unless Washington lowered tax rates, surpluses might grow too large, thus producing a dangerous “accumulation of private assets by the federal government.” Greenspan’s argument gave the Bush administration crucial intellectual cover. But the idea now looks laughable. And it’s hard to imagine the current Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen, endorsing large upper-income tax cuts in 2017.

the kind of centrist, Chamber of Commerce–friendly Democrats who helped Bush pass his tax plan in 2001—including Max Baucus, John Breaux, Mary Landrieu, Zell Miller, Max Cleland, Tim Johnson, Blanche Lambert Lincoln—barely exist anymore. The Democrats’ shift left over the past decade and a half means that a President Rubio would encounter more militant opposition than Bush did in 2001

the next Republican president won’t be able to return the nation to the pre-Obama era.

That’s what happened when Dwight Eisenhower followed Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Ike moderated the growth in government expansion that had begun in the 1930s, but he didn’t return American politics to the 1920s, when the GOP opposed any federal welfare state at all. He in essence ratified the New Deal

It’s also what happened when Bill Clinton followed Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. By passing punitive anticrime laws, repealing restrictions on banks, signing NAFTA, cutting government spending to balance the budget, reforming welfare, and declaring that the “era of big government is over,” Clinton acknowledged that even a Democratic president could not revive the full-throated liberalism of the 1960s and ’70s. He ratified Reaganism.

Barack Obama sought the presidency hoping to be the Democrats’ Reagan: a president who changed America’s ideological trajectory. And he has changed it. He has pushed the political agenda as dramatically to the left as Reagan pushed it to the right, and, as under Reagan, the public has acquiesced more than it has rebelled.

But Mrs. Clinton’s problems are broader than just her message: Opinion polls show that some Democrats and other voters continue to question her trustworthiness and whether she cares about their problems. Recent polls show that her once-formidable lead over Mr. Sanders in Iowa has all but vanished, while he is holding on to a slight lead over her in New Hampshire.

Mrs. Clinton and her team say they always anticipated the race would tighten, yet they were not prepared for Mr. Sanders to become so popular with young people and independents, especially women, whom Mrs. Clinton views as a key part of her base.

Several Clinton advisers are also regretting that they did not push for more debates, where Mrs. Clinton excels, to more skillfully marginalize Mr. Sanders over his Senate votes in support of the gun industry and the enormous costs and likely tax increases tied to his big-government agenda.

Instead, Mrs. Clinton, who entered the race as the prohibitive favorite, played it safe, opting for as few debates as possible, scheduled at times when viewership was likely to be low

Both Mrs. Clinton and her husband believe she can still win the Feb. 1 caucuses in Iowa and the Feb. 9 primary in New Hampshire despite Mr. Sanders’s gaining ground recently and now being virtually tied with her in many polls in those states. But the Clintons also believe she can survive losses in both places because of the strength of her political organization and support in the Feb. 27 primary in South Carolina and in many March 1 Super Tuesday states and other big states to follow.

Yet some Democratic Party officials who remain uncommitted said that after nine months of running, Mrs. Clinton still had not found her voice when it came to inspiring people and making herself broadly likable.

While Mrs. Clinton is known for connecting well with people in small settings, she has not shown the same winning touch as consistently at rallies or in television interviews, they said.

“Her voter base does not seem as gung-ho energetic as Sanders’s base,” Mr. McDonald said. “It may be that they feel like they are waiting for the real race to begin. But an enthusiastic base can make a big difference in the early stages of a presidential nomination campaign, and if Hillary can’t pull away from Sanders fairly early in the season, I suspect he will gain strength rapidly.”