What’s the most forbidden topic in America? asked Timothy Egan. It’s not sex or religion. It’s gun violence. We are “the most armed society in the world,” with more than 300 million guns in private hands, and 9,146 gun homicides in 2009—a rate nearly 20 times higher than that of other supposedly civilized countries. “But don’t bring that up.” Sports […]
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One violent movie does not a mass killer make, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. But the pornographic violence that now fills popular films has “the cumulative power to desensitize and destabilize” impressionable minds. Disturbed young men like James Holmes, the accused Aurora, Colo., killer, may be unable to process the nihilistic, sadistically violent world of movies like […]
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Gun violence now costs Americans an estimated $229 billion a year, including the expense of imprisoning gun offenders, medical treatment for the roughly 31,000 people killed and 75,000 wounded each year, lost wages, and loss of quality of life among victims and their families, according to an analysis by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. By the same measures, […]
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“NONVIOLENCE IS NOT A WEAPON OF THE WEAK. IT IS A WEAPON OF THE STRONGEST AND THE BRAVEST.” – Gandhi
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“When we are violent to our enemies, we do violence to ourselves. When we brutalize others, we brutalize ourselves. And eventually we run the risk of becoming our oppressors.” – Arundhati Roy
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“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
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A vicious racist ideology is taking hold in Myanmar, said Burmese blogger Maung Zarni. A “neo-Nazi Buddhist movement” known as 969, led by “fascist monks,” is trying to drive the Ro-hingya Muslims out of the country. Nobody is stopping these fundamentalists—not the military, and certainly not opposition leader and human-rights advocate Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been photographed wining […]
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■ A Sudanese pastor has been reunited with his family in Minnesota, 15 years after he sent them to America to escape anti-Christian violence. Cheing Chut’s family fled southern Sudan in the 1990s, but the First Adventist minister stayed behind to ensure his congregation’s safety. After 9/11, Sudan was named a sponsor of terrorism, making immigration to the U.S. nearly […]
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