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The incident occurred in Buffalo on June 4 during a Black Lives Matter demonstration.

The grand jury proceedings were held in secret and Flynn said he was unable to offer any insight into what evidence he presented or why the charges were dismissed. He predicted that some members of the Buffalo community would accuse him of not prosecuting the case aggressively enough.

I put all relevant evidence into that grand jury."

The union that represents officers McCabe and Torgalski issued a statement praising the decision, saying the men were "following departmental procedures." The two officers are not expected to face further charges.

Think about the lives lost.Think about the teachers.Think about the children.They were family, friends, and loved ones.And a gun killed them all.It was only last week that we posted a similar prompt in response to the racist massacre in Buffalo. Like all of our student forums, this one will be moderated.

Students might find their own ways to respond, perhaps through writing or art. It may also be helpful to look at how victims of other tragedies have been memorialized, in ways big and small. For example: The 26 playgrounds built to remember the children of Sandy Hook; the memorial for the Oklahoma City bombing, with its “field of chairs,” including 19 smaller ones for the children who lost their lives; and the New York Times Portraits of Grief series, which profiled those lost in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Here are more examples, from the El Paso Times. In what ways can your students or school respond, individually or collectively?

What is it like to be a student in the shadow of this violence? How have repeated mass shootings shaped young people? We invite your students to reflect on these questions in this writing prompt, and post their answers to our forum if they would like to join a public conversation on the topic.To help students think about the issue from different angles, we invite them to read the article “A ‘Mass Shooting Generation’ Cries Out for Change,” which was published in 2018 following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Then we ask questions such as:

The authors of the 2018 Times article described how the Parkland shooting moved students around the country to become more involved in activism. Do you think something similar will happen in the wake of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas? Why or why not? How do you think school shootings are shaping the generation of students who are in school right now?Invite your students to weigh in here.

Democrats moved quickly to clear the way for votes on legislation to strengthen background checks for gun purchasers. Republicans, even as they expressed horror about the shooting, did not signal that they would drop their longstanding opposition to gun safety measures. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas pointed the blame at Uvalde’s lack of mental health care, even though the suspect had no record of problems.

Which efforts might be the most effective? Students might also take a look at the forum on guns we posted during the 2016 election as part of our Civil Conversation Challenge in which we invited teenagers to have productive, respectful conversations on several issues dividing Americans. We received more than 700 responses to the questions we posed about gun rights, the Second Amendment and more.

This article takes on three of the most prominent rumors that have spread via online platforms such as Twitter, Gab, 4chan and Reddit and explains why they are false. What rumors are your students seeing in their feeds, and what steps can they take to find out the truth? From double-checking via sites like Snopes to learning habits like lateral reading, this article (and related lesson plan) has suggestions.

While the town of Uvalde grapples with the aftermath of the shooting, community members, local leaders and organizations have mobilized. Two local funeral homes said in social media posts that they would not charge families of victims for their funeral services. Volunteers have lined up to give blood for the shooting victims.

Gendron drove about three hours from his home in Conklin, New York, intending to kill as many Black people as possible, investigators have said. His attorney, Brian Parker, said he had not seen the indictment and could not comment, adding that prosecution and defense attorneys have been barred by a judge from discussing the case publicly.

More than one million people have died from Covid, a once unimaginable figure

An increase in drug deaths, combined with Covid, has led overall life expectancy in America to decline to a degree not seen since World War II.

Police killings of unarmed Black men continue long past vows for reform.

“You can’t underestimate the need for belonging,” she said. When something terrible happens, people want to connect with their “in-group,” she said, where they feel they belong, which can push people further into partisan camps.

Rabbi Mychal B. Springer, the manager of clinical pastoral education at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, has found herself returning to an ancient Jewish writing in the Mishnah, which says that when God began creating, God created a single person.

“The teaching is, each person is so precious that the whole world is contained in that person, and we have to honor that person completely and fully,” she said. “If a single person dies, the whole world dies, and if a single person is saved, then the whole world is saved.”

We can only value life if we are willing to truly grieve, to truly face the reality of suffering

“It’s not that we don’t care. We’ve reached the limit of how much we can cry and hurt,” she said. “And yet we have to. We have to value each life as a whole world, and be willing to cry for what it means that that whole world has been lost.”

The mountain of calamities, and the paralysis over how to overcome it, points to a nation struggling over some fundamental questions: Has our tolerance as a country for such horror grown, dusting off after one event before moving on to the next? How much value do we place in a single human life?

Valuing life and working for healing means going outside of one’s self, and one’s own group, she said.

“This will require collective action,” she said. “And part of the problem is we are very divided right now.”

American culture often prizes individual liberty above collective needs. But ultimately humans are born to care about others and to not turn away,

“Human beings are born for meaning,” she said. “We have very, very large souls. We are born for generosity, we are born for compassion.”

What is standing in the way of a proper valuation of life, she said, is “our very, very disordered relationship with death.”

n the United States, denial of death has reached an extreme form, she said, where many focus on themselves to avoid the fear of death.

That fear cuts through “all tendrils of conscience, and common good, and capacity to act together,” she said, “because in the final analysis we have become animals saving our own skin, the way we seem to save our own skin is repression and dissociation.”

The United States is an outlier in the level of gun violence it tolerates. The rate and severity of mass shootings is without parallel in the world outside conflict zones.America has “a love affair with violence,”

Violence is an almost a normal part of life in the United States, she said, and valuing life takes consistently asking how am I committed to nonviolence today? It also means giving some things up, she said — many people think of themselves as nonviolent, but consume violence in entertainment.

“The question that should scare us is, what will it take to make us collectively bring about this change?

“Maybe this is our life’s work,” she said. “Maybe this is our work as humans.”

“But when I slow down I realize there is something alive in our culture that has harmed those people,” she said. “Whatever that something is, it is harming all of us, we are all vulnerable to it, it wields some sort of influence upon us, no matter who we are.”

A widely cited 2006 report estimated that 18% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions were attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs and poultry. However, analysis performed by Goodland, with co-writer Jeff Anhang, an environmental specialist at the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, found that figure to now more accurately be 51%.

a molecule of CO2 exhaled by livestock is no more natural than one from an auto tailpipe.

Today, tens of billions more livestock are exhaling CO2 than in preindustrial days, while Earth’s photosynthetic capacity (its capacity to keep carbon out of the atmosphere by absorbing it in plant mass) has declined sharply as forest has been cleared.

One way in which this will be particularly troublesome for livestock producers will be that crops grown for feed will be refocused on biofuel sources.

“Misinformation is the new playbook,” Bob Kelly, the mayor of Great Falls, said. “You don’t like something? Create alternative facts and figures as a way to undermine reality.”

“We’ve run into the uneducable,” Ellen Sievert, a retired historic preservation officer for Great Falls and surrounding Cascade County, said. “I don’t know how we get through that.”

Steve Taylor, a former mayor of Neihart (pop. 43) whose family owns a car dealership in Great Falls, is a conservative who voted for Donald J. Trump twice, though he said he has regretted those votes since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Fellow Republicans, he said, have painted the heritage area as a liberal plot

“They make it a political thing because if you have a Democrat involved, then they are all against it,” he said. “It’s so hard to build something and so easy to tear it down. It’s maddening. It’s so easy to destroy something with untruths.”

And she came across a vein of conspiratorial accusations that national heritage areas were a kind of Trojan horse that could open the door to future federal land grabs.

Beginning in 2013, Ms. Weber teamed up with local preservationists, formed a nonprofit, enlisted local businesses and raised $50,000 for a required feasibility study. In 2014, the Great Falls City Commission included the heritage area as part of its official growth policy.

The proposal would take in four National Historic Landmarks: Lewis and Clark’s portage route around Great Falls; Fort Benton, a pioneer town along the Missouri River that was the last stop for steamships heading west from St. Louis in the 1800s; the First Peoples Buffalo Jump, a steep cliff over which Blackfoot hunters herded buffalo to their deaths; and the home and studio of C.M. Russell, the turn-of-the-century “cowboy artist” whose paintings of the American West shaped the popular image of frontier life.

The park service requires demonstrations of public support, which Ms. Weber and her allies solicited. For six years, the process went on largely undisturbed. Ms. Weber hosted dozens of public meetings and was a regular on local radio stations. Opponents made scarcely a peep.

The proposal for the Big Sky Country National Heritage Area, encompassing most of two central Montana counties that are together roughly the size of Connecticut, was the brainchild of Jane Weber, a U.S. Forest Service retiree who spent a decade on the Cascade County Commission.

Ms. Grulkowski’s interest was piqued.At the time, she was becoming engrossed in the online world of far-right media. From her home on 34 acres in Stockett, a farming community of 157 people south of Great Falls, she watched videos from outlets like His Glory TV, where hosts refer to President Biden as “the so-called president.” She subscribed to the Telegram messaging channel of Seth Keshel, a prolific disinformation spreader.

Then the 2020 political season arrived.

By May, their campaign had reached the state capital, where Mr. Gianforte signed the bill barring any national heritage area in Montana after it passed on a near-party-line vote. A heritage area, the bill’s text asserted, would “interfere with state and private property rights.”

In two hours of talking at his farm, Mr. Bandel could offer no evidence to back up that claim. He said he distrusted assurances that there were no such designs. “They say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to do it right. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. I think Adolf Hitler said that, too, didn’t he?” Mr. Bandel said. “The fear of the unknown is a huge fear.”

Mr. Bandel said he trusted Ms. Grulkowski with the details.

But when pressed, Ms. Grulkowski, too, was unable to identify a single instance of a property owner’s being adversely affected by a heritage area. “It’s not that there are a lot of specific instances,” she said. “There’s a lot of very wide open things that could happen.”

That somewhat amorphous fear was more the point.

“We didn’t believe in any of that stuff until last July,” Ms. Grulkowski said. “Then we stumbled on something on the internet, and we watched it, and it took us two days to get over that. And it had to do with the child trafficking that leads to everything. It just didn’t seem right, and that was just over the top. And then we started seeing things that are lining up with that everywhere.”

One thing Ms. Grulkowski does not do — because she refuses to pay — is read The Great Falls Tribune, the local daily. It’s not what it once was, with just eight journalists, down from 45 in 2000, said Richard Ecke, who spent 38 years at the paper before the owner, Gannett, laid him off as opinion editor in 2016. He is vice chairman of the proposed heritage area’s board.

In the paper’s place, information and misinformation about the heritage area spread on Facebook and in local outlets that parroted Ms. Grulkowski. Last winter, a glossy magazine distributed to Montana farmers put the subject on its cover, headlined “Intrusive Raid on Private Property Rights.”

Ms. Grulkowski now has ambitions beyond Montana. She wants to push Congress not to renew heritage areas that already exist.Buoyed by the trust her neighbors have placed in her, she has begun campaigning for Ms. Weber’s old seat on the county commission, in part to avenge the way she feels: mistreated by those in power.She doesn’t feel she’s been told the whole truth.

And it undercut the first-day assessment by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who praised law enforcement for their "quick response" to the attack, which he said saved lives.

Reports since then reveal a grisly, wrenching scene, where terrified students waited for help as the shooter, armed with an assault rifle, continued his rampage. One student told of laying on top of a classmate, smearing her blood on her so both would appear dead, to save them both. The girl who was injured died at the hospital from her injuries, raising questions about whether she would have survived if the reaction had been quicker.Abbott, a vociferous gun rights proponent who last year signed a law allowing people to own guns without a license or training, was originally scheduled to speak at the NRA convention. Thursday night, his office said the governor would instead head to Uvalde, supplying a video speech to show at the NRA meeting.

Well-known sports figures decried the gun violence and what they called inaction by elected officials to address it. During Thursday evening's baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays, both teams abandoned their usual game-update tweets for a series of tweets on gun violence."The devastating events that took place in Uvalde, Buffalo and countless other communities across our nation are tragedies that are intolerable," the Yankees said on the team's official Twitter account, referring to the racist-motivated murder of 10 Black shoppers in Buffalo on May 16.

“A grieving process allows us to heal. When we deny that process, that’s when the numbness sets in. Then beyond that we start feeling symptoms of anxiety, and beyond that — depression,” said Whaley-Perkins. “So it’s really important for people who are vulnerable or have previous traumas that you don’t wait to see if it’s going to go away. Healing is extraordinarily important.”AdvertisementAccording to Whaley-Perkins, a community should be a group of people that provide safety, can be trusted, and where one can be vulnerable with their feelings. For many in Philadelphia, where they practice their faith is also where communities resides.

“Unless we change fundamentally how we educate our society, unfortunately people will still find a way to do these things,” said Shemtov. “We are all different — but we were all created by God with a purpose. Everybody has to start where they can start. If you’re not in the position to make national or local change, we can all change how we treat ou

As the country reckons with how to move forward, interfaith leaders in Philadelphia look to balance healing with collective action. To Chad Dion Lassiter, who is a national race relations expert and executive director of Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, taking care of oneself, of one’s community, and finding the motivation to take action are made possible by taking the healing process seriously.

Two years ago, after the deadliest mass shooting in Canada’s history took place in Nova Scotia, his government banned military-style assault weapons. Last week, it carried out previously announced firearms record-keeping regulations.

As of May 18, Canadians who purchase a nonrestricted firearm, basically a rifle or shotgun, must provide identification as well as a valid firearms license. Businesses are required to keep these records, which may be viewed by the police with a warrant.

“Conservatives very much associate themselves now with the opposition to gun control, but that wasn’t always the case,” Blake Brown, a history professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, told me. He said that Liberals and Conservatives passed firearms control measures in the 1950s and 1960s, and that both parties strengthened Canada’s gun laws in the years following the 1989 Montreal massacre.

“Certainly there have been periods in American history where they’ve been more aggressive in gun control than in Canada,” he said. “But, overall, the trend has been that Canada has seen themselves differently when it comes to firearms.” That has led to stricter gun laws amid fears of importing American gun violence.

It found that shotguns and rifles in Canada’s illegal market generally enter the system through legal purchases. That’s unlike illicit handguns, it said, which tend to be smuggled into Canada.

Since there is no systemic data collection on the origins of crime guns, one internal Statistics Canada presentation I read emphatically placed it in the “What we don’t know” category.

Without gun tracing and better data, the full picture of the United States’ effect on gun crimes in Canada will remain incomplete and based on haphazardly-tracked incidents like that of the gun-toting drone.

Who was attracted to this movement? Many were careerists: people happy to serve as apparatchiks, following whatever the party line happened to be at the moment.

when I say that I miss voodoo economics, what I really mean is that I miss the illusion — which I shared — that the impact of its rise would mainly be limited to the politics of taxes and spending. What we now know is that the embrace of crank economics presaged the general moral collapse of the Republican establishment.

This collapse opened the door for paranoia and conspiracy theorists of all kinds

There is, I would argue, a direct line from the Laffer curve, to Jan. 6, to Buffalo.

“This type of content is disseminating redpills at lightning speed to massive audiences,” the American Futurist, a website identifying as fascist, posted on its public Telegram channel on Sept. 17, using a phrase that describes dramatically reshaping someone’s worldview. “In terms of propaganda it’s unmatched.”

The propaganda — documented in videos, chat forum messages and screen recordings of neo-Nazi activity shared exclusively with The Washington Post by the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the SITE Intelligence Group — is helping to fuel a resurgence in online interest in Hitler on the American right, experts say

content glorifying, excusing or translating Hitler’s speeches into English has racked up some 25 million views across X, TikTok and Instagram since Aug. 13.

The videos are gaining traction as former president Donald Trump and his Republican running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, have advanced conspiracy theories popular among online neo-Nazi communities, including baseless claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating pets.

Experts say the latest generation of AI tools, which can conjure lifelike pictures, voices and videos in seconds, allow fringe groups to breathe fresh life into abhorred ideologies, presenting opportunities for radicalization — and moderation challenges for social media companies.

One user hosted a livestream on the video-sharing site Odysee last year teaching people to use an AI voice cloning tool from ElevenLabs and video software to make Hitler videos. In roughly five minutes, he created an AI voice clone of Hitler appearing to deliver a speech in English, railing about Jews profiting from a capitalist system.

The user, who uses the handle OMGITSFLOOD and is identified as a “prominent neo-Nazi content creator” by the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks white supremacist and jihadist activity online, said on the livestream that Hitler is “one of the best f — king leaders that ever lived.” The user added that he hoped to inspire a future leader like Hitler out there who may be “voting for Trump” but “just hasn’t been pilled.”

Creating the video required only a few-second sample of Hitler’s speech taken from YouTube. Without AI, the spoofing would have demanded advanced programming capabilities. Some misinformation and hate speech experts say that the ease of AI is turbocharging the spread of antisemitic content online.

“Now it’s so much easier to pump this stuff out,” said Abbie Richards, a misinformation researcher at the left-leaning nonprofit watchdog Media Matters for America. “The more that you’re posting, the more likely the chances you have for this to reach way more eyes than it ever would.”

“These disguised Hitler AI videos ... grab users with a bit of curiosity and then get them to listen to a genocidal monster

On TikTok, X and Instagram, the AI-generated speeches of Hitler don’t often bear hallmarks of Nazi propaganda. A video posted on TikTok in September depicted a silhouette of a man who seemed to resemble Hitler, with the words: “Just listen.”

Over a slow instrumental beat, an AI-generated voice of Hitler speaks English in his hallmark cadence, reciting excerpts of his 1942 speech commemorating the Beer Hall Putsch, a failed Nazi coup in 1923 that vaulted Hitler to prominence. The video, which is no longer online, got more than 1 million views and 120,000 likes, according to Media Matters for America.

“There’s a big difference between reading a German translation of Hitler speeches versus hearing him say it in a very emotive way in English,” she said.

Frances-Wright compared them with videos that went viral on TikTok last year in which content creators read excerpts of Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” manifesto, drawing replies from young Americans such as, “OMG, were we the baddies?”

On TikTok, users can easily share and build on the videos using the app’s “duet” features, which allow people to post the original video alongside video of themselves reacting to it, Richards said. Because the videos contain no overt terrorist or extremist logos, they are “extremely difficult” for tech companies to police, Katz added.

Jack Malon, a spokesperson at YouTube, said the site’s community guidelines “prohibit content that glorifies hateful ideologies such as Nazism, and we removed content flagged to us by The Washington Post.”

ISD’s report noted that pro-Hitler content in its dataset reached the largest audiences on X, where it was also most likely to be recommended via the site’s algorithm. X did not return a request for comment.

that doesn’t mean Nazism is on the decline, said Hannah Gais, a senior research analyst at the center. Right-wing extremists are turning to online forums, rather than official groups, to organize and generate content, using mainstream social media platforms to reach a wider audience and recruit new adherents.

The number of active neo-Nazi groups in America has declined since 2017, according to annual reports by the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center, partly as a result of crackdowns by law enforcement following that year’s deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.

While it’s impossible to quantify the real-world impact of far-right online propaganda, Gais said, you can see evidence of its influence when prominent figures such as conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, billionaire Elon Musk and Trump adviser Stephen Miller espouse elements of the antisemitic “great replacement” conspiracy theory, or when mass shooters in Buffalo, El Paso and Christchurch, New Zealand, cite it as inspiration.

posts glorifying or defending Hitler surged on X this month after Carlson posted an interview with Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper, which Musk reposted and called “worth watching.” (Musk later deleted his post.)

the pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Dominick McGee posted to X an English-language AI audio recreation of Hitler’s 1939 Reichstag speech, which garnered 13,000 retweets, 56,000 likes and more than 10 million views, according to X’s metrics.

extremists are often among the first groups to exploit emerging technologies, which often allow them to maneuver barriers blocking such materials on established platforms.

“But in the broader scheme of politics, it can have a desensitizing or normalizing effect if people are encountering this content over and over again,” he said.

As Mr Trump cast his votes at Central Synagogue in Manhattan on Tuesday morning, he said: "It's just an honour, and my whole reason for doing this is to make America great again."

Hillary Clinton was twice elected senator for New York, and a defeat there would be a devastating political blow.

For Mr Trump, a win in New York will reduce the chances of a contested nomination at the Republican party convention in July.The big question is whether he will make a clean sweep of all 95 Republican delegates at stake in New York by earning the majority of votes.

"We are not taking anything for granted,'' Mrs Clinton said. "Tell your friends and your family, everyone, to please vote tomorrow [Tuesday]."

The Democratic campaign has turned increasingly negative, with both candidates trading barbs about their qualifications.

The primaries are the state's most decisive in decades in selecting the candidates, and polls will be open until 21:00 (01:00 GMT Wednesday)

In a campaign event in Buffalo, Mr Trump told his supporters that "no New Yorker" could vote for Mr Cruz, who did "not represent what we need.''

"It's very close to my heart because I was down there, and I watched our police and our firemen down at 7/11, down at the World Trade Center right after it came down, and I saw the greatest people I've ever seen in action," Mr Trump said.

Once lagged economic effects are taken into account, party differences in economic performance are shown to be the effects of economic conditions inherited from the previous president and not the consequence of real policy differences. Specifically, the economy was in recession when Republican presidents became responsible for the economy in each of the four post-1948 transitions from Democratic to Republican presidents. This was not the case for the transitions from Republicans to Democrats. When economic conditions leading into a year are taken into account, there are no presidential party differences with respect to growth, unemployment, or income inequality.

In the wealthier districts across the state, the news is better: 72 percent of students in “low need” districts are graduating ready for college or careers. But even that is well under the 95 percent of students in those districts who are now graduating.

A common reaction, Dr. Tisch said, is shock and hesitancy. There are fears of plummeting real estate values, as well as disagreement, particularly in rural areas, with the idea that all students need to be prepared for college.

what if the template for football’s future is not the fate of boxing but rather that of the tobacco industry?

About 18 percent of American adults now smoke — fewer than one in five. Tobacco’s shift from integral part of American life to its fringes took about half a century.

The proposed settlement has been almost universally perceived as a victory for the league. With it, the N.F.L. bought itself — cheaply, considering its $9 billion in annual revenue — a degree of short-term business certainty. It initially agreed to set aside $765 million for brain-injured players or, in the case of those who died, their heirs. After Brody, who presides over the suit, said the fund might not cover payments to all those who qualified, the league agreed to a deal with no upper limit on its liability. But because of how the settlement delineates which afflictions qualify for financial compensation and caps the awards on what can go out to individuals, the N.F.L.'s total liability, paid out over decades, may not rise much beyond $1 billion

That’s nothing for an entity as rich as the N.F.L. Goodell, the league’s commissioner, made $44 million last year — or nearly nine times the maximum payment for the most severely brain-damaged N.F.L. retiree.

But the settlement does get money into the hands of some players who need it desperately, perhaps soon. It also sets aside $112 million for lawyers, who, if the case had gone to trial, might have waited years to be paid.

It is shortsighted, however, to assume that the N.F.L. and its owners will emerge from the settlement unscathed or that the league’s economic and cultural status are not under threat. Now that the N.F.L. has acknowledged that its product comes with dire health consequences, the sport, below the professional level, faces legal and regulatory challenges that will most likely intensify in the coming years.

It’s possible that the very thing meant to protect players — new protocols that define how they should be evaluated for a possible brain injury, and how long they should be kept out of play if one is diagnosed or suspected — will actually put school districts, administrators and coaches at more legal risk. Now that they have, in a sense, been forewarned, what happens if they don’t follow the protocols or don’t have certified athletic trainers on staff or coaches smart enough to deal with possible concussions while they are also deciding on the right third-down play?

What’s more, insurers may in time deem the sport too risky. Health insurers might treat it as a costly risk factor like smoking or a bad driving record. As football becomes more and more regulated, many districts may reasonably conclude that it’s more than they can handle.

“but you have to ask how the concussions issue changes the landscape from a law-enforcement perspective. I think it has to over time, because we now know that players are suffering repeated insults to the parts of the brain that cause changes in behavior.” Rates of smoking plunged and the industry declined because tobacco use could not be made safe. The N.F.L. may be at a similar juncture now. It has instituted rules changes to make its own games less violent and is funding and promulgating supposedly less dangerous ways to play at the youth level. But there is no assurance that any of it will make football any more healthful than low-tar cigarettes made smoking. The burden will fall on the N.F.L. to litigate the concussion issue in public and prove that its sport does not rob participants of their consciousness.

Between 2010 and 2012, Pop Warner, the nation’s largest youth-football program, experienced a 10 percent drop in participation after years of steady growth. It attributed the decline to concerns over concussions. There’s no reason to think its numbers won’t continue to fall.

here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people

After the 1967 urban uprisings, the Kerner Commission found that “police actions were ‘final’ incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders.”

don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.

even a member of the task force, Tracey Meares, noted in 2017, “policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”

The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence. But police officers break rules all the time.

Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints over nearly two decades

The final report of the Obama administration’s President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing resulted in procedural tweaks like implicit-bias training, police-community listening sessions, slight alterations of use-of-force policies and systems to identify potentially problematic officers early on.

We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison.

What about rape? The current approach hasn’t ended it. In fact most rapists never see the inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who experience sexual violence never report it to anyone.

In 2015, The Buffalo News found that an officer was caught for sexual misconduct every five days

When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement — and they shudder

As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.

People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation.

“I’ve seen a growing awareness, a wake-up, to the systemic oppression of people of color,” said Ms. LaDuke, an enrolled member of the White Earth Ojibwe Nation. “There is a movement toward justice for Native people. People want to listen.”

“There was an event that happened in 1621,” Ms. Coombs said. “But the whole story about what occurred on that first Thanksgiving was a myth created to make white people feel comfortable.”

In the period between Indigenous People’s Day and Thanksgiving, she said she is “inundated with people who might have some awareness with the pain over the characterizations that comes with this time.”

Hiʻilei Julia Hobart, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, said current events allow students to see more clearly the shared legacies of African-Americans, many of whose enslaved ancestors were forced to work land stolen from Native Americans, whose agricultural know-how was also co-opted.

Monday’s rampage in Illinois marked the 15th time this year that four or more people were killed in a shootin

Of the 90,498 gun deaths in 2020 and 2021, 38,796 were homicides. Nearly 21,000 of those victims were Black men.

In 2020, while the overall crime rate nationwide fell, “that was not true for shootings,” Cook said. That year, he said, there was an “unparalleled” surge in people killed by firearms compared with 2019.

Solving more shootings, particularly nonfatal ones, “would interrupt the cycle of retaliation,” Cook said, and might improve local trust in the police. “That would be a productive use of money,” he said.

Police nationwide in 2020 “cleared” about half of all homicides, according to the FBI, which usually means that someone was arrested and charged or the case was closed another way, including the death of the attacker.

But three decades of research has established that people with mental illness are responsible for just a small percentage of interpersonal and gun violence.

“Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge. Period,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said shortly after the Uvalde shooting in May.

It’s clear that many other factors are more closely associated with gun violence than mental illness. They include experiencing trauma and violence during childhood, being young and male, living in neighborhoods where violence is more prevalent, poor impulse control, poor anger control, and perhaps most of all, easy access to a firearm.

There is one major, well-established connection between mental illness and gun violence: suicide.

officials must help create environments where there is less trauma in the home, support families and strengthen services for children in schools.

In 1994, Duke University gun violence researcher Jeffrey W. Swanson calculated that if all active psychotic and mood disorders were eliminated overnight, interpersonal violence would be reduced by just 4 percent

“We don’t have gun control as much as we have people control,” he said. “We try to figure out the people who are so dangerous that we have to limit their access to guns.”

In many other countries, guns are tightly restricted, but the United States has taken a different route, he said.

people in Florida with serious mental illnesses, including some who were committed to a psychiatric facility involuntarily or for a short-term emergency hold, 0.9 percent were arrested for a violent crime involving a gun within seven years — about the same rate as the general population.

The 1998 MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study, which followed 951 people who had been released from three psychiatric facilities, found that 23 committed 67 acts of interpersonal gun violence — a rate of 2 percent — in the next year. Just 19 of those acts, committed by nine people, were against strangers.

The consistent invocations of mental health after massacres such as those in Buffalo, Uvalde and Highland Park are ways for officials to distance themselves from the horror of the event, to explain the unfathomable,

“It’s a tragedy that demands explanation, and the stigma of mental illness is something that fuels pseudo-explanations,” she said. “It’s a fake explanation. Why has this man done this terrible thing? The answer is because he’s mentally ill. How do you know he’s mentally ill? Because he’s done this terrible thing.”