Legal woes for pro-gun mom: Florida woman who taught 4-year-old how to use firearms faces 180 days in prison after being shot by him

www.salon.com|Antoaneta Roussi

A pro-gun mother who was accidentaly shot by her 4-year-old son could face misdemeanor charges and up to 180 days in prison for allowing her child access to a firearm, The Associated Press reports.

Jamie Gilt, 31, of Florida, placed a loaded .45-caliber handgun in the front seat of her pickup truck, while riding with her son, Lane, on March 8, according to authorities. However, the gun, which was not in a holster and didn’t have a safety lock on, slid underneath the back seat and into the hands of the little boy, said Putnam County Sheriff’s Capt. Gator DeLoach.

Gilt’s son, who had recently learned how to unbuckle himself out of his child seat, saw the gun on the floor and picked it up, according to reports. He managed to shoot his mother in the back, with the bullet exiting through her chest and into the windshield. Lane was not harmed.

Former GOP insider explains how politicians exploit gun culture: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and the real reason why no one can talk sense about guns

www.salon.com|Jimmy LaSalvia

Nobody can look at the number of gun-related tragedies in American in recent years without seriously questioning our laws and our attitudes regarding guns. Too many on the left see government-based proposals as the only solution, and too many on the right reject those proposals without recognizing the problem or offering solutions of their own. In the case of gun violence they are both right and they are both wrong.

I am a strong supporter of gun rights and oppose strict gun control measures, but you don’t have to be for more gun control to be against gun violence. The truth is that government shouldn’t have to take your guns away, because the very real evidence of the dangers of gun ownership should be enough for you to do the smart thing and rid your homes of guns.

After calling President Obama a “liar,” NRA’s Wayne La Pierre challenges him to a debate on gun control: “Let America decide who to trust”

www.salon.com|Sophia Tesfaye

Charging that a “narcissistic” President Obama “has laid waste to the America we remember,” National Rifle Association (NRA) head Wayne LaPierre challenged the president to “a one-on-one, one hour debate” on gun control.

“The American people know a liar when they see one,” LaPierre said in an over eight-minute long video released on Wednesday. “He has proven time and time again to be unworthy of our trust,” the gun lobby leader said of Obama.

We need to talk about Ben: Kylo Ren, “Star Wars” and the media narrative of the mentally ill school shooter

www.salon.com|Lauren Duca

Before Kylo Ren was a modern iteration of Darth Vader, he was Ben: the problem child of Leia Organa and Han Solo, who murdered a group of his Jedi trainee peers. On-screen in “The Force Awakens,” he’s all theatrical evil and Pantene-commercial hair, but it’s the off-screen arc that is the most disturbing and fascinating facet of the character. Zooming in on his sinister back story, Kylo Ren presents a sci-fi version of the “mentally ill” school shooter with whom we’ve become all too well acquainted in the news.

Ayn Rand will destroy the GOP: Paul Ryan, gun control and the brazen, cynical politics of self-interest

www.salon.com|Aaron R. Hanlon

Ryan, like many politicians on both sides of the aisle, is being cynical. True, it’s particularly disconcerting when someone exercises that kind of cynicism in response to a president crying for the dead—the dead schoolchildren, the dead churchgoers, the dead on the streets of Chicago—and all other varieties of gun-murdered citizens—but Ryan and the Republicans are hardly our only detached cynics. They are, however, our most open and brazen ones, particularly on the issue of modest gun-control measures of the sort that—it’s a cliché at this point to state—a vast majority of Americans and Republicans support.

This is on the Republican Party: The missing context of Obama’s executive action on gun control

www.salon.com|Eric Boehlert

After President Obama unveiled new executive orders aimed at reducing gun violence, a constant media theme has been that the proposals are deeply controversial. But are they? Or are media outlets providing a disjointed look by giving a skewed, Republican-friendly take on the issue by stressing conflict where very little exists?

A key component of Obama’s initiative is to expand the pool of people who count as gun dealers, which would require more people to be licensed. That would mean more buyers being screened. It’s the White House’s concerted effort to bypass obstructionist Republicans to close the so-called “gun show loophole.”

NRA: The president cried in order “to create the illusion that he’s doing something to keep people safe”

www.salon.com|Scott Eric Kaufman

On “The Kelly File” Thursday night, host Megyn Kelly spoke to the NRA Institute for Legislative Action’s Chris Cox about his organization’s decision not to attend President Barack Obama’s town hall meeting on gun control with CNN.

Kelly asked Cox if his organization would be willing to meet with the president, to which he replied, “let’s be clear what this is really about — this president is trying to create an illusion that he’s doing something to keep people safe. He needs to do that because the truth is his policies have failed miserably.”

He cries for Americans alone: Our wars and violence destroy families — those kids deserve Obama’s tears too

www.salon.com|Ben Norton

At news conference Tuesday, Obama announced he’s taking executive action to address gun violence. Tears fell from his eyes as he dramatically spoke of the tragedy, as he lamented that American children are dying.

But what of all the countless other children killed by the U.S. government, overseen by the Obama administration? Do they not get tears too?

Gun violence is a horrific problem in the U.S., and Obama is right; it is not normal. No other country has such an extremely high incidence of gun violence. If there is an element of truth to the myth of American exceptionalism, it is that America is exceptionally violent.

And there is no doubt that Obama’s tears are genuine. It is indeed a horrific tragedy that American children — or anyone else — has to die from senseless gun violence. The president no doubt feels genuine remorse at this deplorable reality.

But genuineness and moral hypocrisy are not mutually exclusive; one can feel genuine sympathy about one form of injustice or oppression while ignoring or even actively carrying out another.

Obama cries and the right whines: Conservatives mock president for his tears — proving again they’re heartless fools

www.salon.com|Amanda Marcotte

During Tuesday’s speech on gun control, President Obama choked up and started to cry when talking about the deaths of first graders at Sandy Hook Elementary at the hands of a crazed gunman. It was a moving and relatable moment. As inured as most of us have sadly become to the loss of life from mass shooting, the idea of some monster littering the bodies of helpless children with bullets still has power. That invoking this horror would cause tears was completely understandable.

Or at least to most people, that is. For right wingers, such a reaction from a grown man was preposterous. Real men don’t get upset at the bullet-ridden corpses of 6-year-olds, it was quickly determined. He’s either faking it or he’s not a real man.

The NRA is backing terrorism: Wingnuts and “patriots” are the real safety threat we should fear

www.salon.com|Melissa Duclos-Yourdon

It’s impossible to engage publicly in our country’s debate about gun safety legislation without being drowned out by the “patriots” screaming about their “freedom.”

After I published an essay on Salon last fall imploring legislators to stand up to the gun lobby and pass meaningful gun safety laws, helpful Internet commenters were quick to remind me that my fears did not trump their freedom. I am a teacher, and I wrote the essay following the school shooting at Umpqua Community College, after I learned that my own college instructed teachers to fight back against active shooters with staplers if necessary. My fears, then, were fears for my life, for my students’ lives, and for the lives of my children. Those lives, to the many vocal opponents of gun safety (who certainly do not represent all gun owners in this country), are less important than their easy and unrestricted access to guns.

“It gets me mad”: Tearful, determined Obama renews hope tighter gun regs are possible in inspiring speech

www.salon.com|Amanda Marcotte

For years now, most liberals have basically abandoned any hope that sensible gun safety laws would be passed in this country. The gun industry owns the Republican Party and will not tolerate losing a single sale, no matter who dies needlessly for it. Right-wing America has made the gun its favorite social signifier, a cross between a religious and psychosexual artifact. The obsessive belief that liberals are out to steal their guns is clearly a stand-in for all sorts of unspeakable and inchoate culture war terrors on the right, creating an explosive temper tantrum the second anyone even mentions the idea of gun control. The size and shape and loudness and irrationality and childishness of it is so over the top and impossible to manage that most liberals have given up.

But in Tuesday’s news conference, President Obama made a convincing counter-argument that conservatives aren’t the only people who can bring passion to this debate. Surrounded by families of victims of gun violence — the overcrowding of the room helping make his point for him — Obama spoke movingly of the need to do something, even if progress is slow, to reduce all the killing.

As he spoke about the deaths from gun violence, particularly the young children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, he started to choke up, tears welling in his eyes and spilling out.

Gun fanatics are winning the Republican civil war

www.salon.com|Heather Digby Parton

In his ongoing YOLO campaign (You Only Lameduck Once) President Obama took matters into his own hands yesterday and announced that he was going to try to do something about gun violence even though the bloodthirsty NRA and its minions were going to shriek like crazed harpies about liberty and revolution and do everything in their power to stop it. It’s his last year in office and he figures he might as well try to save a few lives. Good for him.

As of this writing the proposal has not been formally announced but it’s reported that he will issue executive orders to close the “private seller” loophole, which would require everyone who sells a gun as a business transaction to submit a background check. (As it is now, only licensed dealers have to do this.) It’s also expected that he’ll issue an order requiring that licensed dealers report lost or stolen guns to the authorities. It’s hard for me to believe that these slight reinterpretations of the law are even controversial but apparently making gun ownership subject to any sort of oversight is tantamount to a coup.

You know things are bad when Michael Moore agrees with the NRA: America is running on fear — and it’s killing us

www.salon.com|Scott Timberg

We’re nearing the conclusion of a year that’s seen roughly one mass shooting per day in the United States, and all kinds of theories have been dragged out to explain their frequency. It’s the precarious state of mental-health treatment. It’s the violence of video games, television, and movies. It’s the huge number of guns – something like 300 million – floating around. It’s gun shows and lax regulations.

All of these may be major or minor factors. But the filmmaker Michael Moore has a different theory, and he finds himself half-concurring with a group he rarely agrees with. “So what is it about us?” he asks in a piece in The Hollywood Reporter about the way the U.S. far outpaces other countries in gun violence. “It’s clear that the NRA is actually half-right in their slogan, ‘Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.’ We just need to modify that to: “Guns don’t kill people — Americans kill people.’ ”

We have gun violence all wrong: Mass shootings only tell a fraction of the story

www.salon.com|Lois Beckett

According to articles this week across the Internet, there has been an average of one mass shooting every day in the United States: 355 so far this year. It’s a jarring statistic, and one that has gone viral in the wake of this week’s massacre in San Bernardino, California.

But there are two problems with the number: It doesn’t actually provide a clear estimate of how often the country has seen shooting rampages like the one in San Bernardino. And it obscures the broader reality of gun violence in America.

White guys are killing us: Toxic, cowardly masculinity, our unhealable national illness

www.salon.com|Chauncey DeVega

When the New York Times editorial board issued its powerful condemnation of America’s gun culture, they went beyond mere outrage in response to the recent murder sprees in San Bernardino, California, and Colorado Springs, Colorado. The Times went so far as to suggest that “assault rifle”-style weapons should be banned from civilian ownership. As is our national ritual, President Obama also condemned gun violence, and just as he has been forced to do too many times during his tenure, pleaded that Americans must find a way to stop killing each other. The American people do in fact support stronger gun control laws; the NRA, functioning as the lobbying arm for the gun industry, opposes even the most basic common sense gun laws. The NRA wins while the American people die.

We’ve given up on saving our kids: This is our Sandy Hook anniversary shame

www.salon.com|Hayley DeSantis

I remember my exact location when I heard about the Sandy Hook Elementary mass shooting. I had been working in a first-grade classroom, a few months into my internship, discovering my passion for educating and inspiring children. I found myself glued to the screen, my brain not able to communicate what I had witnessed. I remember crying, picturing in my mind the teachers cramming students into the small closets and hearing the screams.

After a moment, a great wave of realization washed over me. This could easily be my classroom, and it took less than a second to comprehend that I would certainly fight for my students in that situation. But I thought that I shouldn’t have to make that decision; teachers shouldn’t have to be armed with handguns to protect their students. Schools are created to be warm and secure environments where students blossom, not where young lives are suddenly cut off without a chance to grow to exceed expectations and bring change to the world.