Six-time Major League Baseball All-Star Jose Canseco didn't realize there was still a bullet in the chamber of his gun after he came home from the shooting range, and shot himself while cleaning the weapon.
A quirk of Alabama's legislative system makes the need for state constitutional amendments to happen more frequently than elsewhere. Problem is, this latest batch is quite a doozy.
Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republican Party know all too well that a union vote tends to be a vote for the Dems. There's a reason why they use divisive issues like guns and religion to pry precious union votes from the other side of the aisle (66 percent of union members voted for Obama in 2012). It would also be fine if union members just stayed home on election day. However, if they do, this may be the last election that there's even a union for them to identify with.
The data is in, and definitive: the assault weapons ban didn't work. So why is Senator Dianne Feinstein still pushing for it? And what options are there that can end the scourge of violence plaguing the US.
The trauma that shooting victims suffer lasts long after their physical wounds heal. And while research shows shockingly high rates of PTSD among shooting victims – more than 40 percent at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital – money for screening is hard to come by.
After the passage of gun safety bills in the Colorado legislature last year, Republicans and their gun lobby allies predicted, we'd even go as far as say hoped for, a crippling boycott of the state's vital tourism industry. This prediction quickly proved unfounded, as the most likely indicator of a boycott by pro-gun tourists — a reduction in hunting licenses — didn't take place. That isn't the only set of numbers showing an explosion in the state's tourism.
Numbers tell stories. Based on statistics from 2010, "24/7 Wall St." ranked Missouri eighth for overall gun violence. Missouri had 14 gun injury deaths per each 100,000 people — only 11 states had a higher rate. The story these numbers tell isn't surprising. Almost all of these states are poor, Southern or Western and deep red or getting redder. Missouri isn't quite as poor or — maybe — as red as some, but given the inclinations of the Republicans who run our legislature, we'll soon be charter members of the hard-scrabble, hand-to-mouth, red-state contingent.
On Tuesday, Governor Jay Nixon shone a brief light of sanity on the gun debate playing out in the US when he vetoed a bill allowing teachers to carry weapons to school.
Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange (a name fit for Superman's nemesis) decided that the polls would be a great place to bring your handgun. Can you say, "intimidation"?
Two police officers were having lunch at a strip mall pizza buffet when a man and a woman fatally shot them in a point-blank ambush, then fled to a nearby Wal-Mart where they killed a third person and then themselves in an apparent suicide pact, authorities said. One of the shooters yelled, "This is a revolution!" but a motive remains under investigation, Las Vegas police spokesman Larry Hadfield said.
