Since Sandy Hook, at least 374 children have been killed in homicides committed with guns.

In the sad world of mass shootings, ages of Newton victims set them apart

It took less than an hour to kill 20 young children in Connecticut. That’s five times as many as have been killed by guns in the District in 12 years. Nationwide, it has taken four months for the gun deaths of children under the age of 10 to equal the number killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Criminologists say the shootings at the school have stunned the country because they force everyone to confront the rarest and most shocking of deaths: young children killed en masse by a stranger wielding a gun at their school. “This is an act that is literally unprecedented in the U.S. — the mass slaughter of so many children by one person,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. “This is a very, very unusual phenomenon.” The Connecticut shootings “resemble more the acts of terrorists who prey on and kill large numbers of an innocent people than they do the everyday firearm killings,” Rosenfeld said. Since September, 20 children under 10 have been killed by guns in the United States. Eight were accidental and four were domestic killings, while eight were either bystander shootings or homicides by nonrelatives. None involved schools, and only one involved an outsider who killed more than one child. On Sept. 1, Kahlil Singleton, 8, was fatally shot in Hilton Head, S.C., while playing in his grandmother’s front yard. The boy was caught in the crossfire of a neighborhood feud involving several adults. A month later, Jorge Duran III, 3, was shot and killed by his father in the family’s apartment near Toledo, Ohio. The boy’s mother also was slain. And earlier this month, Ryder Rozier, 3, accidentally shot and killed himself in Logan County, Okla., with a gun he found on a nightstand in his uncle’s house. His uncle is an Oklahoma state trooper. Richard Berk, a professor of statistics and criminology at the University of Pennsylania, said that young children are more at risk of being killed by someone they know than by strangers. “These stranger killings are horrible, but [children are] more at risk from a family member or someone in their neighborhood,” he said. Although the number of youngsters killed by guns in this country steadily inched upward from 2008 to 2010, last week’s massacre of 20 first- and second-graders at Sandy Hook remains a statistical anomaly among rampage killings. In a study of 62 mass shootings in America since 1982 by Mother Jones magazine, only two cases involved elementary school children shot at their schools. In 1989, at the Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, Calif., a deranged man killed five children and wounded 29 before committing suicide. In 2006, a man killed five students at a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania. Three of the dead were under age 10. James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, said that people shoot young children because “they are the most precious members of society.” “If your intention is to get payback for society being unfair to you, then killing children hurts the most,” Fox said. Between 1999 and 2010, firearms cut short the lives of 1,705 children in the United States under the age of 10, including 21 in Maryland and 49 in Virginia, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The deaths of young children from gunshots are dwarfed by fatalities from other causes during that time: 8,499 drownings and nearly 16,000 in traffic accidents. In the District, where homicides claimed the lives of 2,294 people between 2000 and 2011, four were under the age of 10, according to police records. Three involved children being killed by stray bullets. Donte Manning, 9, died when a stray bullet pierced him as he played outside his Columbia Heights neighborhood in March 2005. Chelsea Cromartie, 8, died in May 2004 when an errant bullet smashed through her family’s living room window in Northeast. Darias Branch, 4, was found dead with his mother in a second-floor apartment in Southeast in October 2007, and Oscar Fuentes, 9, died when a bullet penetrated the front door of his family’s Columbia Heights apartment in November 2009. The rate in the District of deaths of children under 10 by gunfire is roughly double the national average of 0.24 per 100,000 population over the decade-long study period. Among the young victims killed nationwide by guns since 1999, nearly 60 percent were white and 61 percent male. About 1,280 of the deaths were homicides and 380 were unintentional, according to the CDC data. The causes of 45 deaths were undetermined, and two were suicide. Less than one percent of all homicides among school-age children happen on school grounds or on the way to or from school, according to the CDC’s School Associated Violent Death Study. “The vast majority of students will never experience lethal violence at school,” the study found. Although the question of why 20-year-old gunman Adam Lanza opened fire at the school may never be answered, Fox said that if the shooter had a negative experience as a child and wanted to get even with his school, the students were the “surrogates.” “It’s oftentimes murder by proxy,” he said. “They’re linked to the primary target. You can’t kill a school but you can kill kids and teachers to get even with the school.” In 2001, 160 children under 10 died by gunfire, the highest annual number between 1999 and 2010. The number dropped to 142 the following year, with a significant decline to 119 in 2003 and 2004, according to the CDC. Sixty-three of the 143 victims in 2006 were preschoolers under 5. In 2010, the most recent year that the CDC reported the statistics, 155 children under 10 died from gunfire. An overwhelming number of the gun deaths occurred in the South — 821 — six times as many as occurred in the Northeast, according to the data. Nearly 400 happened in the West and 360 in the Midwest. Fox said firearm deaths are higher in South, in part, because of relaxed gun laws and the prevalence of guns. “Gun laws in South Carolina and Georgia are not like they are in Massachusetts and New York,” he said. “A lot of guns used in crimes in the North come from the South.” Culture and upbringing also play a role in the rate of gun deaths, Fox said. “In the South, to resolve a dispute, you take it outside,” he said. “In the North, you take it to court.” Bonnie Berkowitz contributed to this report.

The alarming number of school shootings since 2012 killings in Newtown

There have been 95 shootings on K-12 and college campuses — an average of nearly one every week — in the two years since the deadly attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., according to a new analysis. These shootings have left 45 people dead and 78 injured.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Twenty children and six adults working at Sandy Hook were killed in the December 2012 assault in Newtown. Despite repeated calls around the nation for Congress to take action to prevent more gun violence, representatives and senators passed no legislation to address the problem. Since then, 49 shooting incidents have occurred on K-12 campuses and 46 on the college or university campuses, according to the new analysis, which was done by two groups, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and EVERYTOWN For Gun Safety. (See the list below.) A recent report released by the Office of the Child Advocate in Connecticut said that Adam Lanza, the killer at Sandy Hook, suffered from a number of mental disorders and that the public schools he attended “unwittingly” enabled his mother to “accommodate and appease” her son through a “lack of attention to social-emotional support” and by allowing him to study independently on the assumption that he was gifted, when, in fact, he wasn’t.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico  Here’s the list of school shootings since Newtown, from the analysis:

Sandy Hook Elementary shooting leaves 28 dead, law enforcement sources say

NEWTOWN, Conn.--A shooting rampage in this small Connecticut town on Friday morning left 28 people dead, including 20 children killed inside their elementary school, authorities said. The dead included the suspected gunman, whom law enforcement sources identified as Adam Lanza, 20. Police said that Lanza first apparently killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, at the home they shared in Newtown. Then he drove in her car to Sandy Hook Elementary, the school at which Nancy Lanza taught kindergarten. In the car, authorities said, were three guns: a .223 caliber “Bushmaster” rifle and two pistols, a Sig Sauer and a Glock. At the school, authorities said, Adam Lanza shot and killed six adults — including the school’s principal — and 20 children. They were shot in two different rooms of the school, police said. Police were called to the school after 9:35 a.m., and officers searched the classrooms for a shooter. When they found the gunman, however, he was dead by his own hand. No officer fired a shot. One other person was injured in the shooting, but survived. Friday’s shooting became the second-deadliest in U.S. history, after the rampage that killed 32 students at the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va. It happened in a country that had grown darkly accustomed to public shootings: just five months before, another gunman had killed 12 in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., in July. But the sheer scale of Friday’s killing — and the nature of its victims, small children shot in the sanctuary of a school — deepened its horror, and unleashed a shaking kind of grief. President Obama, in one of his most emotional speeches as president, wiped away tears as he spoke about the shooting from the White House’s briefing room. “Our hearts are broken today,” Obama said. He promised “meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this,” but did not say specifically what he might do. “I know there’s not a parent in America who doesn’t feel the same overwhelming grief that I do. The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between five and 10 years old,” Obama paused, seemingly unable to continue for a few moments. “They had their entire lives ahead of them — birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own.” Dorothy Hanson, who is the suspect’s grandmother and Nancy Lanza’s mother, said in a brief phone interview Friday that she could not fathom the violence that ended their lives. “I just can’t cope with it right now,” Hanson said through tears. “She was my daughter, and a beautiful girl and I loved her. I just can’t make any more comments than that right now.” Among the dead was the school’s principal, Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, according to law enforcement sources. Press reports said Hochsprung had been the school’s principal since 2010, and had been a schools administrator for 12 years before that. Local news organizations reported that she was married, with two daughters and three stepdaughters. “She was always enthusiastic, always smiling, always game to do anything,” said Kristin Larson, a former secretary of the school’s Parent-Teacher Association. In a phone interview, Larson choked up as she recalled Hochsprung hugging students at the start of the school year. “She wanted them to do well in school,” Larson said, “but she also wanted them to have fun.” Earlier on Friday, law enforcement sources had misidentified the shooter as Adam’s brother Ryan Lanza, 24. Based on reports from those sources, The Washington Post and many other news outlets also identified Ryan Lanza as the suspected shooter. Ryan Lanza was taken into custody near his home in Hoboken, N.J. on Friday; news reports showed him being escorted in handcuffs by police. But authorities said they do not believe he was involved in the crime. It was unclear what caused the initial confusion between the brothers. Beth Israel, who lived for a time on the same street as the Lanzas, recalled Adam Lanza as withdrawn, but not threatening in any way. “Overall, I would just call him a socially awkward kid, I don’t know, shy and quiet. Didn’t really look you in the eye,” Israel said in a telephone interview Friday night. “Just kind of a weird kid, maybe. I can’t tell you any specific incidents why [I thought so],” she said. But there was still something that troubled her about Adam Lanza. When Israel heard that Ryan Lanza — Adam’s brother — had been described by law enforcement sources as the shooter, she felt they had the wrong brother: “It has to be Adam, not Ryan,” Israel wrote on Twitter. Police described the school itself as one of the most horrific crime scenes that many had ever encountered, and officials said the first-arriving responders would be given counseling. Children who were evacuated from the school said later that they had been told to keep their eyes closed until they were outside. Police said that as the day went on, they had accounted for every child who attended the school, tracking down even those who were absent because of illness. All had been accounted for, they said. Perhaps the closest echo of this rampage, in the dark history of American massacres, might be a 1989 shooting in Stockton, Calif., where a drifter with an assault rifle opened fire on a schoolyard. Five children died, and 29 others were wounded before the gunman killed himself. That episode served as a catalyst for a string of laws restricting the use and importation of assault weapons. The guns used in Friday’s shootings were believed to have been purchased legally, and registered to a family member of Adam Lanza’s, a law enforcement source said. Police said they were summoned to the school by a number of 911 calls. Both state and local police converged on the school, according to Connecticut State Police Lt. L. Paul Vance, and “began a complete active shooter search of the building.” Meredith Artley, managing editor of CNN.com, described interviewing a woman who was at the school about 9:30 or 9:35 a.m. The woman was in a meeting with the principal, vice principal and school psychologist when they heard shots from the hall. The three school officials went into the hallway, and the vice principal came crawling back, shot in the foot, Artley said. The witness, who was not identified but has a 7-year-old at the school, told Artley that she later passed the principal and the psychologist lying in the hallway, surrounded by pools of blood. In this small town near the New York border, police cars began screaming toward the school. At Berkshire Motors, owner Jim Marcucilli thought he saw 40 police cruisers. He had been working on a car, but its owner, frantic, demanded back the keys. “Oh my God,” she said, according to Marcucilli. “I have to get my kid!” Later, Marcucilli learned that he had a connection to the Lanza family: he had helped Nancy Lanza with dead batteries over the years, and had even bought a car from her. Such connections are common in a small place like Newtown, he said. “You can’t get any closer to home” than an attack at the school, he said. “It’s definitely going to affect this community terribly.” Students inside the school were evacuated to a nearby firehouse, where television reporters saw parents tearfully reuniting with their children. Students recounted hearing police officers on the roof, and classmates so frightened they became sick to their stomachs. In interview with New York’s WABC television, student Brendan Murray said he was in the gym when he heard a banging sound. Students at first thought a custodian had knocked something over, but then they heard a scream. “Then a police came in and was like, ‘Is he in here?’ Then he ran out,” Murray said. “And then somebody yelled, ‘Get to a safe place!’ So we went to the closet in the gym.” Eventually, he said, police escorted the students out of the school and to the firehouse, where they reunited with their classmates. “We sat in our classes,” he said. “And were all really happy that we were all alive.” Parent Stephen Delgiadice told the AP that his 8-year-old daughter heard two big bangs and teachers told her to get in a corner. His daughter was fine. “It’s alarming, especially in Newtown, Connecticut, which we always thought was the safest place in America,” he said. The superintendent’s office said the district had locked down schools in Newtown. Schools in neighboring towns also were locked down as a precaution. A photo posted by The Newtown Bee newspaper showed a group of young students — some crying, others looking visibly frightened — being escorted by adults through a parking lot in a line, hands on each other’s shoulders. Mergim Bajraliu, 17, heard the gunshots echo from his home and raced to check on his 9-year-old sister at the school. He told the AP his sister, who was fine, heard a scream come over the intercom at one point. He said teachers were shaking and crying as they came out of the building. “Everyone was just traumatized,” he said. Richard Wilford’s 7-year-old son, Richie, is in the second grade at the school. His son told him that he heard a noise that “sounded like what he described as cans falling.” The boy told him a teacher went out to check on the noise, came back in, locked the door and had the kids huddle up in the corner until police arrived. “There’s no words,” Wilford said, according to the AP. “It’s sheer terror, a sense of imminent danger, to get to your child and be there to protect him.” Also Friday, White House press spokesman Carney told reporters that it was not the time to discuss gun control legislation. “We’re still waiting for more information about the incident in Connecticut,” Carney replied when asked if the massacre raised questions about gun policy. “As we do, I think it’s important, on a day like today, to view this as I know the president, as a father, does, and others who are parents certainly do, which is to feel enormous sympathy for families that are affected and to do everything we can to support state and local law enforcement and to support those who are enduring what appears to be a very tragic event.” He concluded, “I’m sure [there] will be rather a day for discussion of the usual Washington policy debates, but I don’t think today is that day.” Pressed on when that discussion would happen, the spokesman said it would — but not as we were still figuring out how the tragic massacre occurred. “I think that day will come, but today’s not that day, especially as we are awaiting more information about the situation,” he said.

Toddlers have shot at least 50 people this year

“Well, I was upset,” she replied, “because, unfortunately, dozens of toddlers injure themselves, even kill people with guns, because, unfortunately, not everyone who has loaded guns in their homes takes appropriate precautions.”    Since Jan. 1, there have been 51 shootings involving toddlers in the United States. By this date last year, there had been 47 toddler-involved shootings. In the majority of this year's cases, the child picked up a gun and shot himself or herself. (The overwhelming majority of toddler shooters are male.) In 16 of the 39 self-shooting incidents, the child's injuries proved fatal.        Georgia, on the other hand, has seen 10 toddler shootings since 2015. Texas leads the nation with 11. Michigan, Missouri and Tennessee all rank highly with seven shootings each. By contrast there hasn't been a single toddler shooting in New England since 2o15.  “Americans are shot by toddlers at least once a week.We need to lock them up. Not the guns — that’s just un-American,” the Brady Campaign says in the satirical video. “Round them up. Deport them. Get them out of our country. And keep them away from guns.”

Eugene Robinson: On guns, take action now

We are not helpless to stop the massacre of innocent children. We must begin — today, right now, this minute — taking guns out of the hands of madmen, and the first step should be a ban on military-style assault weapons such as the rifle used to turn a Connecticut school into a slaughterhouse. That won’t be enough to end all the carnage, but it will save some lives. It is admirable that President Obama, members of Congress and other elected officials are deeply horrified and saddened by what happened Friday in Newtown. But the moment calls for action, not words, and politicians who are too craven or stupid or ideologically rigid to finally move forward on gun control will have the blood of future victims on their hands. We must begin with the guns. Yes, there are other factors that play their roles in these mass shootings. We need to talk about mental-health issues. We need to explore why the assassin is always a troubled young man whose alienation was noticed by others but not adequately addressed. We need to examine the impact of hyper-violent video games on impressionable minds. We need to remember that horrors such as Columbine, Blacksburg, Aurora, Tucson and Newtown are statistically insignificant compared to the everyday bloodshed on our streets and in our homes. But we have to start somewhere. If we wait for a perfect, comprehensive, foolproof solution, we’ll do nothing. Tough, aggressively enforced, nationwide gun control is the most effective single initiative we could undertake, and shame on us if we wait another month, another week, another day. The National Rifle Association and other apologists for murder will object, of course. They will say that Connecticut’s gun control laws are already among the nation’s toughest, and yet they failed to prevent Adam Lanza from annihilating 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, his mother and himself. Therefore, these sophists will argue, gun control doesn’t work. What a crock. The truth is that gun control is ineffective because laws considered “tough” are, in reality, tragically weak. There is no reason an everyday citizen needs to possess a Bushmaster AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle — the gun used not only in Newtown but in the Aurora, Colo., movie theater shootings and as recently as last week in a deadly shooting at a shopping mall near Portland, Ore. At the very least, these high-powered weapons developed for use by soldiers, not hunters, should be outlawed — and surrendered to authorities for destruction. Lanza’s mother had the Bushmaster and several other guns in her arsenal, and because of the Second Amendment, it is hard to imagine legislation that could have eliminated all of them. But she knew her 20-year-old son had profound psychological problems. She should at least have been required to keep her weapons under lock and key, securely out of his reach. If you buy a gun for “protection,” it probably will never be fired in anger. There is almost no chance you will ever use it to defend yourself against an intruder. Much more likely than the home-invasion scenario is that you will use the weapon on yourself or someone you know — or that someone else in the household will use it, perhaps on himself or herself, perhaps on you. That some right-wing lawmakers and commentators have responded to Newtown by calling for teachers, principals and campus security guards to be armed is beyond obscene — and beneath contempt. More guns, with amateurs firing every which way, surely would have meant more dead children and more grieving families. “We can’t tolerate this anymore,” Obama said Sunday at the Newtown memorial service, the fourth such sad ceremony he has attended during his four years in office. “These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change,” Obama said. “We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society, but that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely we can do better than this.” We can, and we must. We should begin with a strict assault weapons ban. Here are 20 reasons why: Charlotte Bacon, 6. Daniel Barden, 7. Olivia Engel, 6. Josephine Gay, 7. Dylan Hockley, 6. Madeleine Hsu, 6. Catherine Hubbard, 6. Chase Kowalski, 7. Jesse Lewis, 6. Ana Marquez-Greene, 6. James Mattioli, 6. Grace McDonnell, 7. Emilie Parker, 6. Jack Pinto, 6. Noah Pozner, 6. Caroline Previdi, 6. Jessica Rekos, 6. Avielle Richman, 6. Benjamin Wheeler, 6. Allison Wyatt, 6. **_eugenerobinson@washpost.com _ ** **Read more from Opinions:** Jennifer Rubin: Resist the urge to rush new laws Jonathan Capehart: Yes, we must ‘do better than this’ Jonathan Bernstein: After Newtown, wait first, then use politics E.J. Dionne Jr.: We should mourn — and get angry Joseph A. Califano Jr.: Gun control in the lame duck The Post’s View: Time to talk about gun control Alexandra Petri: There are no words

Eliminate gun loopholes for domestic abusers

The debate over measures to reduce gun violence poses a cruel paradox. The most effective steps are politically unthinkable and likely unconstitutional. More restrained approaches, such as tighter background checks and reduced ammunition magazine sizes, have proved maddeningly impossible to maneuver through the political process and are open to the charge that they would not stop the killing. This critique is correct but unpersuasive. With hundreds of millions of guns in circulation, small tweaks will not stop the carnage; certainly no single tweak alone will. Yet that is an argument for achievable half-measures, not for paralysis. And despite the otherwise gridlocked politics of gun control, there may be a sliver of political hope for proposals to address a relatively small but especially heartbreaking aspect of the problem: the lethal mix of guns and domestic abuse. Since the 1990s, federal law has barred those convicted of domestic abuse from legally buying guns. But existing law suffers from a “stalker gap,” a “boyfriend gap” and a “restraining-order gap.” Individuals convicted of misdemeanor stalking offenses are not barred from passing background checks and buying guns. In addition, abusers who are not married, do not live together or do not share a child — those in dating relationships — aren’t covered by the ban. More controversially, although abusers subject to permanent restraining orders cannot legally possess or purchase guns, no such prohibition applies in situations where only a temporary order is in place. In other words, the protections are lowest at precisely the point when women are in the greatest danger. The numbers demonstrate both the gender gap in the nature of violent crime and how deadly these loopholes may be. As to the gender gap: Women are less likely than men to be the victims of violent crime, but when they are, the perpetrator is far more likely to be someone they know. Between 2003 and 2012, one-third of female murder victims were killed by a male intimate partner, compared with 2.5 percent of men, according to figures analyzed by the Center for American Progress. More than half of these killings were committed with guns. The numbers are staggering: 6,410 deaths, slightly fewer than the total number of U.S. troops who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, according to a study by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, having a gun in the house increases the risk of intimate-partner homicide by eight times compared with households without guns — and 20-fold when there is a history of domestic violence. As to the loopholes: One study of female murder victims in 10 cities found that 76 percent of women murdered by a current or former intimate partner experienced stalking in the preceding year. The share of victims killed in dating situations is rising; nearly half of those killed by intimate partners in 2008 were murdered by boyfriends, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. And in the 17 states that have expanded gun prohibitions to those subject to temporary restraining orders, overall intimate-partner homicides fell by nearly one-fifth. Nor do violent abusers simply turn to other methods when deprived of guns; according to Michigan State University criminologist April Zeoli, prohibiting those subject to domestic-violence restraining orders from having guns reduces not only firearm homicides but also murders by other means. Could confronting domestic violence be an exception to the general gridlock on gun violence? Americans for Responsible Solutions, the group co-founded by former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords after the Tucson shooting, has launched an effort to push for federal and state changes. In Congress, a proposal by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) that would close the stalker and boyfriend gaps just attracted a Republican co-sponsor, Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk; a companion bill in the House, by Michigan Democrat Debbie Dingell, is also backed by a Republican, Robert Dold of Illinois. A separate proposal, by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), would also bar those subject to temporary restraining orders from having guns, subject to later review. Unsurprisingly, if sadly, the National Rifle Association opposes even the Klobuchar-Dingell bill, saying it would “turn disputes between family members and social acquaintances into lifetime firearm prohibitions” and “manipulates emotionally compelling issues such as ‘domestic violence’ and ‘stalking’ simply to cast as wide a net as possible for federal firearm prohibitions.” Tell that, please, to the father of a daughter murdered by her boyfriend. Tell it to the sister of a young woman killed by a man who plea-bargained his stalking offense down to a misdemeanor. Emotional manipulation? Please. At that, the NRA has no parallel. _Read more fromRuth Marcus’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook._ **Read more on this topic:** Fareed Zakaria: Change your gun laws, America The Post’s View: The argument against common-sense gun control crumbles E.J. Dionne Jr.: How America can free itself from guns Colbert I. King: I’m a gun owner. The NRA doesn’t speak for me. Charles Krauthammer: Another massacre, another charade

2015 was a grim year for American gun violence

ONE-YEAR-OLD Maleah Williams was in her mother’s arms on Christmas Day in a parking lot where other children were playing with their new toys when she was shot in the head in a drive-by shooting. The Chapel Hill, N.C., toddler died three days later. What made her death even more hideous is that it wasn’t an anomaly. Twenty-six other people — including the owner of a barbershop in Alabama, a Texas grandfather and a young couple in Ohio — were shot and killed on Christmas Day 2015, according to the Gun Violence Archive. It counted 63 other people injured by gun violence in a tally that didn’t include suicides. In all, as The Post’s Christopher Ingraham observed, more people died in the United States on Christmas Day from shootings than the number of people killed in gun homicides in an entire year in Austria, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, Estonia, Bermuda, Hong Kong and Iceland combined. What sets the United States apart from these other countries is, of course, our irresponsibly lax policies on gun ownership. Weapons with military features that are designed for war are legally available to civilians. Any controls that do exist to try to prevent them or the more ubiquitous handgun from falling into the hands of people who shouldn’t have them are weak and easy to circumvent. The result is that the United States has more guns than other developed countries, and that translates into more homicides, accidental shootings and suicides. That Maleah was one of nearly 700 children under age 12 who were killed or injured in gun violence in 2015 is a national disgrace. That there were 2,671 other children between ages 12 and 17 who were killed or injured is a further abomination. A series of horrifically high-profile shootings in 2015 — 14 dead and 21 wounded in San Bernardino, Calif.; three dead and nine injured in Colorado Springs; nine dead and seven injured in Roseburg, Ore.; five dead and two wounded in Chattanooga, Tenn.; nine dead in Charleston, S.C. — have brought new attention to the issue of gun violence. President Obama, previously discouraged by his inability to get Congress to enact even modest reforms in the wake of the massacre of Connecticut schoolchildren in the weeks before another Christmas, rediscovered his voice on the issue. The Democratic candidates for president are talking about the need for gun control, something long seen as toxic to anyone on the campaign trail. Some states are exploring ways they can impose better limits. And there is encouraging work being done by gun-control advocates, such as Everytown for Gun Safety, in building grass-roots support by emphasizing the damage caused by gun violence. Its recently announced partnership with the National Basketball Association aims to be a counterbalance to the oversize influence of the National Rifle Association. 2016 is set to start; we hope for meaningful action so that it won’t end like other years, with another grim year-end tally cataloguing the lives needlessly lost because of guns and easy access to them. **Read more on this topic:** Jay Dickey and Mark Rosenberg: How to protect gun rights while reducing the toll of gun violence E.J. Dionne Jr.: The conservative evasion on guns Fareed Zakaria: Change your gun laws, America The Post’s View: The argument against common-sense gun control crumbles The Post’s View: America’s deadly game on guns

No time for Sandy Hook Elementary School horror

The most gripping realization to come out of the harrowing report on the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was how quickly it all happened. According to the report of the Connecticut State’s Attorney on the Dec. 14, 2012, horror, “From the time the doors of the school were locked at 9:30 a.m. until the time it is believed the shooter killed himself at 9:40:03, fewer than 11 minutes had elapsed.” The 48-page document was released Monday.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University When you read the narrative of Adam Lanza’s barbarous actions and his cowardly suicide using guns bought for him by the mother he killed earlier that morning, each minute of terror feels like an eternity. Kids huddled in classrooms with teachers who did everything they could to keep them safe, from distracting them with coloring books to shielding them with their bodies from the madman’s bullets. And the ensuing carnage played out over the intercom when an injured teacher who called 911 “inadvertently” turned on the school-wide system. The heartbreak of Newtown created a new class of gun-control advocates: parents of victims no older than 6 years old. The children’s murder renewed calls for something to be done to stop gun violence from destroying more families. President Obama could not speak about what happened without weeping. Legislation would be offered. But all the belief that this time would be different — after all, the ultimate safe space, a grade school, was the site of unimagined carnage — gave way to the usual pattern. The National Rifle Association called for more guns. Sensible legislation failed. And more mass shootings occurred, most notably at the Navy Yard in D.C. on Sept. 16.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University It took no time for someone with a gun to take the lives of innocents. It will take an eternity to keep guns out of the hands of those who should not have them, it seems. Follow Jonathan on Twitter: @Capehartj    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

Why is America so hostile to gun control?

The president of the United States and the mayor of the District of Columbia both used this week to address violence within the sphere of their responsibilities. And they are catching flak for it. President Obama’s focus was on the weapons that now kill as many people as car accidents and on the need for gun-control measures. He said at the White House on Tuesday: “Every single year, more than 30,000 Americans have their lives cut short by guns — 30,000. Suicides. Domestic violence. Gang shootouts. Accidents.” And he added this grabber: “In 2013 alone, more than 500 people lost their lives to gun accidents — and that includes 30 children younger than 5 years old.” The next day, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) went to the city’s Eastern Market Metro station to announce the formation of a task force to combat gun robberies, which last year increased to 1,249, 10 percent more than the 1,112 recorded in 2014. This year isn’t off to a good start — 25 gun robberies in the first six days of 2016. Robberies without guns numbered 28. Yet robberies aren’t the only crime on the rise in our nation’s capital. Last year ended with 162 murders. There were 105 in 2014. Something, however, may get lost in these numbers. How can the toll taken by death be measured with any degree of accuracy? It’s impossible to quantify the sense of loss and grief that follows; the sadness, emptiness and loneliness that death leaves behind. The families and friends of those 30,000 people whose lives were cut short by guns may have some idea. The damage isn’t limited to gun deaths. What is the impact of more than 3,000 total street robberies in a city? Gauge the distress of having possessions taken by force — imagine the fear, anger, insecurity and unwanted memories that robbery leaves behind. The violence assailed by Obama and Bowser is disturbing. So is the opposition mounted against them for trying to do something about it. Criticism of Obama’s proposed regulations to ensure that laws on the books are enforced as written and intended is sickening. Unlike the “he’s gonna take away your guns” rhetoric coming out the mouths of some gun enthusiasts and their sycophantic Republican presidential hopefuls, Obama’s plan to reduce gun violence is light stuff. It would: ● Require all those in the business of selling firearms to be licensed and to conduct background checks. ● Overhaul the FBI’s background check system to make it more efficient and effective and provide the bureau with more staff. ● Beef up staffing of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to crack down on firearms trafficking. ● Increase funding for mental-health treatment and mental-health reporting to the background check system and direct the departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security to pursue research into gun-safety technology. Several law professors who looked at the constitutionality of Obama’s executive actions said that they “ensure robust enforcement of the law” and are “entirely compatible with the will of Congress and the President’s constitutional authority.” But listen to the resisters. “Obama wants your guns,” says Ted Cruz’s campaign website. Obama is “making an end-run around the Constitution” to “restrict one of the basic, fundamental principles of our country,” Donald Trump’s campaign manager told CNN. “Just one more way to make it harder for law-abiding people to buy weapons to be able to protect their families,” said Marco Rubio on Fox News. “Obama’s executive orders trample on the 2nd Amendment,” said a Jeb Bush tweet. Obama “is advancing his political agenda,” a Ben Carson tweet said. Forget about saving lives. Better to save political hides from National Rifle Association attacks. The president’s proposals should triumph over demagoguery and plain stupidity. But don’t cut the gun lobby short. Fear of NRA money and power makes cowards out of congressmen. The local climate for reform may not be any better. This is a city where many people are afraid to venture out of their homes after dark, where going to and from school can be hazardous and where guns — and those who would use them — seem as plentiful as the air. Though overall crime rates are down in the District, murders and gun robberies are up. In August, Bowser proposed a public safety plan to combat the violence. She contended that if the D.C. Council had adopted her proposals — more money for more cops in high-crime areas, stiffer penalties for crimes on buses and subway trains and in D.C. parks, cracking down on repeat offenders — last year’s jump in homicides might have been avoided. But Bowser is at loggerheads with key council members over the direction of crime-fighting and criminal justice reforms. And so? Nothing. Handwringing, finger-pointing . . . Obama, urging action, cited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words “the fierce urgency of now,” because people are dying. “The constant excuses for inaction,” the president declared, “no longer suffice.” Even as national and D.C. lawmakers turn a deaf ear to that message. _Read more fromColbert King’s archive._ **Read more on this issue:** E.J. Dionne Jr.: The gun lobby’s con game will come to an end The Post’s View: President Obama’s gun reforms are sensible — but long overdue The Post’s View: Caving under NRA fire

No ‘excuse for inaction’ on gun control

THE BUSHMASTER .223-caliber semiautomatic rifle that Adam Lanza carried into Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday is a frightful killing machine. Just take a look at the manufacturer’s catalogue for this best-selling firearm. “At home on the range and on patrol,” it boasts. “Take on the predators with devastating performance.” The Bushmaster is known for a design that can be configured for hunting, police work, range shooting and more. But the last place on earth this weapon should have been was in an elementary school. On Friday, Mr. Lanza wielded a Bushmaster to kill 20 children ages 6 and 7 and six adults in a rampage at the school that lasted some 10 minutes. He carried high-capacity magazines allowing him to fire off 30 bullets before he had to reload. A coroner said most of the victims were hit with at least three bullets — and some with up to 11 — that exploded with devastating lethality, tearing them apart from inside. The Bushmaster was a juggernaut of death. Obviously, something snapped in this young man that points to evil beyond comprehension. Yet the tragedy leads to an inescapable conclusion. There is no defensible reason for civilians to own a Bushmaster or other semiautomatic rifles, known more broadly as assault weapons. This is essentially a military weapon, a version of the M-16, capable in some cases of shooting bullets at more than 2,000 feet per second. It does not belong in private hands, any more than M-1 Abrams tanks belong on Rockville Pike or mortars in the backyard. Gun-owner advocates who point out that violent crime has fallen in recent years, in the absence of new gun controls, are correct. The link between guns and violence is not always clear-cut. But the link between a certain kind of mass murder and a particular killing technology is clearer. It makes sense to reimpose strict limits on these assault weapons, including a ban on high- capacity magazines with more than 10 bullets each. These magazines have figured in several of the most heinous mass shootings in recent years, including the one that severely wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) in 2011. The Bushmaster is also a source of grief for Mexico, where it has become a favorite weapon of warring drug cartels. In his remarks in Newtown on Sunday, President Obama noted that this was the fourth time in his presidency he has consoled a community grief-stricken by a mass shooting. He made clear he no longer wants to be simply the consoler in chief. “We can’t tolerate this anymore,” he said. “No single law — no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world, or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society. But that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely, we can do better than this.” Yes, we can. We can start by locking up these killing machines. Mr. Obama endorsed an assault weapons ban when running for president in 2008, but in office he has been cautious. The loss of life in Connecticut demands a move from caution to action. **Read more Opinions on this debate:** Jennifer Rubin: What to do about monsters? Jonathan Capehart: ‘Surely, we can do better than this’ Jonathan Bernstein: After Newtown, wait first, then turn to politics E.J. Dionne Jr.: Now is the time for meaningful gun control Joseph A. Califano Jr.: Gun control lessons from Lyndon Johnson The Post’s View: Time to talk about gun control Alexandra Petri: There are no words for what happened in Newtown

Adam Lanza is recalled as a ‘rambunctious kid’ with family problems

Adam Lanza was his name. Adam P. Lanza, 20, obscure in life, infamous in death. A really rambunctious kid, as one former neighbor in Newtown, Conn., recalled him, adding that he was on medication. He was the son of an accountant. A family member told investigators that he had a form of autism, a law enforcement official said. And he will long be remembered. On Friday morning, police say, he shot and killed his mother in their home. And then, carrying firearms and an abundance of ammunition, he drove to Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School and started shooting. By the time he turned one of the guns on himself, police say, he had killed 20 children, all of them first-graders, and six more adults. Adam Peter Lanza — a new addition to a dreadful list, the roster of killers who targeted students: Seung Hui Cho at Virginia Tech (32 dead); Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High in Colorado (13 dead), Charles C. Roberts IV at a little Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania (five dead). The litany of massacres goes on. As scores of investigators worked Friday to piece together what happened at the school and why, the barest details of Lanza’s life began to emerge. His parents, Nancy and Peter Lanza, separated about a decade ago, and his mother remained in the family’s home with her sons, Adam and Ryan Lanza, according to Ryan Kraft, 25, who was a neighbor. The separation hit the children hard, Kraft recalled. When Nancy Lanza would go out to dinner with friends, she sometimes relied on Kraft to watch Adam Lanza, who was too boisterous for Ryan Lanza to manage. “He would have tantrums,” Kraft said. “They were much more than the average kid [had].” Yet he was not prone to violence, Kraft said. “The kids seemed really depressed” by the breakup, Kraft said of the Lanza brothers. Ryan Lanza, 24, now lives in Hoboken, N.J. Police questioned him Friday, but law enforcement officials said he was cooperating and is not suspected of having anything to do with the shootings. For several hours Friday, authorities and the news media misidentified the shooter as Ryan Lanza, who, like his father, is an accountant, a law enforcement official said. The Wall Street Journal quoted a friend of Ryan Lanza’s as saying that Lanza works for Ernst & Young. “He [is] a little shy, but very nice and sweet,” the friend, Katie Colaneri, 24, of Hoboken, told the Journal. Nancy Lanza put the best face possible on her domestic troubles, the former neighbor said. “Nancy was really pleasant,” Kraft said. “She would come by the house and have a glass of wine with my mom.” The couple’s divorce was finalized in 2009, according to court records. Beth Israel, who lived for a time on the same street as the Lanzas, recalled Adam Lanza as withdrawn but not threatening in any way. “Overall, I would just call him a socially awkward kid, I don’t know, shy and quiet. Didn’t really look you in the eye,” Israel said in a telephone interview Friday night. “Just kind of a weird kid, maybe. I can’t tell you any specific incidents why [I thought so],” she said. At a vigil in Newtown, a man of about Adam Lanza’s age was visibly distraught. “I knew Adam in high school,” he said, declining to give his name. “He always seemed like a quiet type. He was never really sociable. When you try to communicate with him, he would just kind of like have one- or two-word responses. “He was a wicked smart kid, he excelled in everything,” the man said. “He graduated high school three years early.” The man defended Adam’s mother and objected to some reports about her. “I know her. My family knew her. She was a respectable collector [of guns]. She used them responsibly. It’s not her fault that any of this happened.” At the vigil, Catherine Urso said her son went to high school with Adam Lanza, who “was very remote, reclusive.” Lanza and his friends, she said, “always gathered alone in a corner in the school.” A law enforcement official — who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is far from finished — said Adam Lanza fatally shot his mother in her home, then drove in her car to Sandy Hook Elementary. He had two semiautomatic pistols and a .223-caliber rifle, law enforcement officials said. He apparently used only the handguns, which were later found in the school. The rifle was found in the vehicle. Peter Lanza, a vice president and tax specialist at GE Energy Financial Services, is remarried and lives in Stamford, Conn., according to the Stamford Advocate. When he arrived home Friday and was approached by a reporter, the paper reported, he appeared “surprised and horrified” and declined to comment on the massacre. A woman who is a close friend of Peter Lanza’s became highly emotional in a brief telephone interview Friday. “His son was doing wonderfully,” she said of Adam Lanza. “This is inconceivable. Peter adores his children. His son was doing so well.” Lynch reported from Newtown, Conn. Sari Horwitz and Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Child gun deaths are not ‘accidents’

A 26-YEAR-OLD woman driving on a Milwaukee highway was shot and killed Tuesday by her 2-year-old son, who was sitting in the back seat and got hold of a gun. The circumstances of her death are tragic but sadly not that unusual. On that same day, a 3-year-old boy in a suburb of Atlanta fatally shot himself after finding his father’s pistol in a backpack. The previous week saw two other toddlers — a 3-year-old in Louisiana and a 2-year-old in Indiana — fatally shoot themselves. The deaths in all likelihood will be catalogued as accidents. But these horrible incidents are not, as the dictionary defines “accident,” unexpected happenings. They are events that are not only predictable but also entirely preventable. So far this year, according to data compiled by  Everytown for Gun Safety , at least 77 people under age 18 have unintentionally shot either themselves or another person. There have been 36 deaths. Among the victims were Patrice Price, the mother of three who died on the side of a Wisconsin highway and was remembered for her smile and generosity; 3-year-old Holston Cole, whom family friends described as full of life before finding his father’s gun in their Georgia home; and Kiyan Shelton, a 2-year-old in Indianapolis who climbed onto a kitchen counter and got his mother’s handgun from her purse. The grief — and in some cases guilt — of their families is unimaginable. So, too, will be the lifelong emotional damage to children who, through no fault of their own, become unwitting killers. It has long been known that guns and children make for a deadly combination, and there are obvious steps that can be taken. But thanks to the national gun lobby, many states (including Wisconsin, Georgia and Indiana, the scenes of three of the recent shootings) haven’t adopted stronger laws to prevent children from accessing unsecured guns. Thanks to the gun lobby, technology that could make guns safer and more secure, such as biometric gun safes or grips, is not being developed. Even basic research that would improve public-health surveillance of unintentional child gun deaths and could be used to develop more effective educational campaigns for gun safety isn’t being conducted, because Congress is cowed by the gun lobby. Perhaps the most pernicious example of the disregard for children’s safety are efforts to promote laws that would gag pediatricians and other doctors from asking questions about gun ownership. Such laws allow a doctor to ask parents if they use childproof medicine containers and whether they lock up cleaning supplies but not if they keep guns secure. Children grab guns because they don’t know any better. The adults who prevent actions that might keep guns out of the hands of children don’t have that excuse. **Read more:** The Post’s View: Keeping guns out of children’s hands The Post’s View: The gun lobby maddeningly prevents development of safer, childproof weapons Angelica Zen and Alice Kuo: Do you own a gun? Why your kid’s doctor needs to know. The Post’s View: 2015 was a grim year for American gun violence The Post’s View: America’s deadly game on guns

Chicago grapples with gun violence; murder toll soars

CHICAGO — Flags flew at half-staff all across the winter-draped city last week to honor the dead in Newtown, Conn. The massacre was unspeakable, and yet Chicago counts far more homicide victims every month — many of them young people — than died in the carnage in Connecticut. Their deaths usually go unmarked. Since Jan. 1, Chicago police have recorded 2,364 shooting incidents and 487 homicides, 87 percent of them gun-related. Shootings have increased 12 percent this year and homicides are up 19 percent. Young people are often targets. In the school year that ended in June, 319 Chicago public school students were shot, 24 of them fatally. The total does not include school-age children who had dropped out or were enrolled elsewhere. In the wake of the Newtown school shootings, as the nation talks anew of guns and the laws that regulate them, President Obama’s adopted home town of Chicago is struggling to retake its most violent neighborhoods from the gunmen who shoot with impunity. A Chicago Tribune editorial Thursday said the national gun debate must carry beyond mass shootings “to focus on cities such as Chicago, which is nearing 500 homicides for the year. It has to focus on why the United States has the highest rate of gun ownership of any industrialized nation and the highest rate of violent crime.” Obama, a former community organizer and Illinois state senator on the city’s South Side, noted the persistence of urban violence last week when he cited “a street corner in Chicago” when listing prominent shooting episodes that included Sandy Hook Elementary, a Colorado movie theater and a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. He also spoke about gun violence and its costs in 2007 at a South Side church. “Our playgrounds have become battlegrounds,” he said. “Our streets have become cemeteries. Our schools have become places to mourn the ones we’ve lost.” Five years later, one of the most serious challenges faced by a city now run by Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D), Obama’s former White House chief of staff, is how to stop the guns from blazing. Police and social workers alike are asking why, exactly, Chicago’s homicide rate has remained so high. Homicide rates in Chicago and New York were similar in the 1990s. Even though killings in both cities dropped substantially, Chicago’s current rate is three times higher than New York’s, said Jens Ludwig, director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. It is also higher than the rate in Los Angeles, a sprawling city long associated with gang violence. “The gun violence problem in America gets a lot of attention when 20 white kids in Connecticut get shot all at once, but in general it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it really needs to,” Ludwig said. “It’s a huge problem and it’s very localized — and it’s localized among the most disadvantaged people in the city.” One puzzle is that gun violence has remained high in Chicago while the incidence of other crimes has fallen. “Our struggle is with violence and particularly gang violence and more specifically gun violence,” Chicago Police Superintendent Garry F. McCarthy told WBEZ radio this week. He cited free-flowing weaponry on Chicago’s streets as a major challenge for the 12,500 members of the city’s police force. Seizing guns, he said, offers limited benefit, with Chicago already claiming guns at a rate three times greater than Los Angeles and nine times higher than New York. “We’re in a position where we’re drinking from a fire hose,” said McCarthy, who also served in Newark and New York City. “Guns are bought legally and transferred illegally, and those are the guns that are ending up killing people here.” Emanuel called this week for a ban on assault weapons. McCarthy cautioned against expecting too much from that one step. Among other measures, he favors longer sentences for illegal firearms possession and emphasizes the need to limit large ammunition magazines. Chicago and the state of Illinois have seen gun-control measures thrown out by federal courts, most recently this month when the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a ban on carrying concealed firearms. City Council member Joe Moore said there is only so much that local authorities can do. “Obviously, we’ve got a problem. Gun violence is way too high in Chicago,” said Moore, whose district lies on the quieter North Side. “Sensible gun regulations really have to be done on a national level. Because guns are so transportable, you can’t rely on cities or even states to carry the burden.” Tio Hardiman, director of CeaseFire Illinois, says gun violence should be seen not just as a crime but as a public health scourge. In addition to doing “a lot more to stop the flow of illegal guns coming into the city,” he said, authorities should pay more attention to mental health and help the most vulnerable young people. “You have to address the thinking,” Hardiman said. Bullets flew Nov. 26 on the South Side as the first mourners stepped outside St. Columbanus Catholic Church, where as many as 500 people had gathered to lament the death of a reputed gang member. Two young men were hit. One died. Police said both were foot soldiers in the Gangster Disciples who had come to church to bid farewell to their late comrade. In a gang war that benefits only funeral directors and gravediggers, it seemed fitting that St. Columbanus was once the home church of Al Capone’s wife and his mother. On the sidewalk outside St. Columbanus this week, not 10 minutes from where Obama gave his 2007 gun violence speech, Larry Steele talked about three splintered gangs fighting to control neighborhood street corners. These are the Chicago street corners Obama mentioned at his election victory rally Nov. 6 and again in his post-Newtown remarks from the White House. Steele, a contractor, has seen violence aplenty during his 54 years on the South Side, but “there was never anything like this. It’s just a sad thing to see. The people don’t come together, and everyone’s fighting for something they can’t have. The street corners. The corners don’t belong to them.” In the Park Manor neighborhood that should be safe, Steele said, residents are sometimes afraid to walk through a group of loitering young men, because they fear getting caught in a drive-by shooting. “The guns are used to mark their territory. I guess it’s block by block,” said Steele, who has watched Chicago police staking out gang funerals and believes tougher gun penalties would help. “A lot of guys do time like a piece of cake. . . . They go into the system and come right out.” A few blocks away, near the corner of East 75th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Ron Smith sees the young men and their guns as they pass in front of his window at League Styles Barber Shop. “They all have ’em,” he said. Smith says arming even more people to stop the young gunmen sounds promising but would probably be pointless: “It would turn into the wild, wild West. Wyatt Earp.” “At this point, it’s about reaching the kids that can be reached. Trying to help them achieve something,” Smith said, adding that Obama and the federal government could help in a time of debilitating city and state budget deficits. “If they had more programs for the youth, more things for them to get involved in, they wouldn’t be out here on the streets doing what they’re doing.”

On anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings, people gather for anti-gun protest at the NRA

The morning after 20 children and six adults were gunned down at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., Fairfax County mother Klara Bilgin drove to the nearby headquarters of the National Rifle Association. There, she stood in the cold with her husband and two sons, ages 4 and 5. “We didn’t know what to do with ourselves,” she said. “So we came here.” The next day, they returned and found others had joined them. And over the past year, it has become a monthly tradition to protest gun violence in front of the mirrored blue windows of the NRA. On Saturday, the anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, a small crowd stood in the cold holding signs and small T-shirts with the names and ages of victims. Across the country, the date was observed with simple memorials and private prayers. Many preferred not to link the deaths to political issues. NRA spokesmen did not respond to requests for comment Saturday. But Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, objected to the protest when asked about it. “I think it’s unfortunate they’re doing that,” he said. “Let the people mourn, a year later, the loss of their children, without making a big political thing of it,” he said. “Newtown was about mental health, not about guns. . . . It wasn’t what weapon [shooter Adam Lanza] chose. A gun is a piece of metal. It’s the fact that he would even consider murdering his mother, murdering little children and a bunch of adults.” Saturday morning at the White House, President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama lit 26 candles and bowed their heads. “We haven’t yet done enough to make our communities and our country safer,” Obama said in his weekly address. “We have to do more to keep dangerous people from getting their hands on a gun so easily. We have to do more to heal troubled minds.” In a Southeast Washington park Saturday afternoon, people huddled under bright umbrellas in the cold rain and rang tiny bells. Knowing there were so many marking the anniversary with moments of silence, Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, said, “We are having a moment of ‘No more silence.’ ” In front of the NRA offices, Lauren Ambrosini said she came because she could not quite believe she lives in a society in which, periodically, she has to ask her preschool and kindergarten students to lie silently on the floor — a drill to prepare for the unthinkable. Administrators help by rattling the doorknobs, as though they are madmen intent on getting in, Ambrosini said. The exercise terrifies the children, she said. “I have little girls asking, ‘Are bad people going to come in here with guns?’ ” Patricia Maisch, 64, an owner of a small business, came because she feels it is long past time to act. After the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado 14 years ago, she thought, “How awful — someone should do something.” After the shooting at Virginia Tech six years ago, she thought, “How awful — surely someone will do something.” Then, nearly three years ago, she saw a gunman open fire in her home town of Tucson at an event hosted by then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D). The woman next to her fell dead with three gunshot wounds — one of six people to die — and Maisch said she would have been next if men had not knocked the shooter, Jared Loughner, to the ground next to her. She saw Loughner reaching for the magazine to reload and she took it away from him. For the next two years, she said, she thought the saddest thing imaginable was the memory of parents holding the body of their 9-year-old daughter that day. Then Sandy Hook happened, and she realized that not all parents get to hold their children one last time, because some weapons rip such gaping wounds into the bodies. In the past year, Bilgin said, she has found herself taking her sons to the malls and movie theaters less often. Public places no longer feel as safe as they once did. When her sons go to birthday parties and play dates, she wonders whether the families’ guns are safely locked away. And she learned how strongly many Americans feel about their right to bear arms. Van Cleave said later by phone that people would never dream of protesting outside Ford Motor’s headquarters because a drunk driver hit and killed a family of five. But if a gun results in a death, they blame the gun. He said the types of restrictive laws advocates have demanded would ensure that only criminals were armed. At the protest, some drivers passing by honked in support. A man pulling out of the NRA parking lot rolled down a window as a speaker was introducing a singer and yelled, “Get a life, losers!” The activists, muffled against the cold in fat parkas and hand-knit scarves, sang “Amazing Grace.” Then they packed their signs into plastic bags and, knowing the monthly tradition would continue, said, “See you all January 14.”

Children are dying because of America’s lax gun policies

THE TOLL of gun violence on American children is laid out in the grim numbers of a new government study. Nearly 1,300 children are killed and nearly 6,000 injured every year. That is more than three children killed a day and more than 15 children a day treated for gunshot wounds. The heartbreaking tragedy embodied in those numbers can be seen through the prism of three days that preceded the study’s release. A 4-year-old girl in South Carolina was accidentally shot to death Friday by her 6-year-old sibling. Two girls were wounded Friday in a shooting during a picnic at a Chicago elementary school. An 8-year-old boy in Mississippi was caught in gunfire and shot in the head Saturday while he slept in the back seat of his mother’s car. An 11-year-old Florida boy was taken to the hospital Saturday in grave condition after accidentally shooting himself in the eye. A 4-year-old Pennsylvania boy fatally shot himself Sunday after getting hold of a gun. So commonplace are bloody weekends such as this in the United States that, according to the report published Monday in Pediatrics by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gun-related deaths are the third-leading cause of death overall among children ages 1 to 17 years. The study confirms previously released information but is the most comprehensive, with an examination of national databases that track death certificates, emergency- room visits and coroner and medical-examiner records. More than half of gun deaths were homicides, with many connected to domestic violence. Boys, particularly African Americans, were the most vulnerable to risk of gun homicide, and suicide, which accounted for more than a third of gun-related deaths, sharply increased from 2007 to 2014. The report frames the impact of gun violence on children as a serious public-health problem that demands attention and scientifically sound solutions. It calls for programs to help youths manage their emotions and their problems and cites the usefulness of laws that prohibit people who are subject to domestic violence protective orders from possessing firearms. It also underscores the importance of safely storing guns to prevent both unintentional and intentional shootings. The risk of suicide increases in homes where guns are kept unlocked and loaded, and a previous analysis of school shootings by Everytown for Gun Safety showed that more than half the perpetrators obtained guns from home. There are no laws at the federal level making it a crime to leave a firearm accessible to a child, and, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, just 14 states have laws that make adults criminally liable for negligently storing firearms when a child gains access. Massachusetts is the only state that generally requires all firearms be safely stored in a locked container or with a trigger lock when the owner is not carrying the gun. We can, of course, thank the National Rifle Association and the lawmakers who cower before it for this lunacy. Opposed to any kind of restrictions, the gun lobby has fought storage standards as an invasion of privacy for gun owners. It offers as a substitute an educational gun safety program for children that uses Eddie Eagle and other cartoon characters to instruct kids who discover a gun to “stop, don’t touch, run away, tell a grown-up.” It’s good advice, but as every parent knows, children don’t always do as they are told. Children do look to adults for protection. That, at a minimum, should include requiring the safe storage of guns. **Read more on this topic:** The Post’s View: Children continue to be traumatized by shootings. When will America act? Robert J. Spitzer: The NRA wants to suppress one of guns’ most important safety features The Post’s View: Gun violence isn’t just about who dies — it’s also about who gets wounded and lives Colbert I. King: The guns that don’t make the news — one by deadly one The Post’s View: The nation’s capital, where children live in fear

Chart: The U.S. has far more gun-related killings than any other developed country

The Sandy Hook Elementary shooting that killed 27, including 20 children, is already generating the same conversation that every mass shooting in America generates: Why are there so many shootings? One piece of this puzzle is the national rate of firearm-related murders, which is charted above. The United States has by far the highest per capita rate of all developed countries. According to data compiled by the United Nations, the United States has four times as many gun-related homicides per capita as do Turkey and Switzerland, which are tied for third. The U.S. gun murder rate is about 20 times the average for all other countries on this chart. That means that Americans are 20 times as likely to be killed by a gun than is someone from another developed country. The above chart measures data for the nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes all Western countries plus Turkey, Israel, Chile, Japan, and South Korea. I did not include Mexico, which has about triple the U.S. rate due in large part to the ongoing drug war. The rate in several developing countries, particularly in Latin America, is significantly higher. Honduras, which has been called the murder capital of the world, has an average firearm murder rate that's about 20 times America's. But make no mistake: For a rich, developed country, the U.S. gun-related homicide rate is very, very high.

Guns kill more people. So why does terrorism get all the attention?

_Tom Diaz is a former senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center and the author of“The Last Gun: How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What It Will Take to Stop It.” _ The next time you play airport security theater — remove shoes, display laptop, toss water bottle — think of the children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Think of the moviegoers in Aurora, Colo., the citizens in Tucson peaceably assembled to meet with Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the worshippers at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., and Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old Chicago girl killed by gunfire days after coming to Washington with her high school band for President Obama’s second inauguration. “Unfortunately, what happened to Hadiya is not unique,” Obama said in Chicago on Feb. 15. “It’s not unique to Chicago. It’s not unique to this country. Too many of our children are being taken away from us.” These victims were casualties of domestic battles. Most died from wounds inflicted by military-style weapons designed to kill large numbers quickly. Then ponder this: Americans suffer assaults on their privacy — they are groped in public and wiretapped en masse — and surrender their constitutional protections against unwarranted searches in the name of the war on terror, yet they cannot muster the will to protect children from mass murder with military-style weapons. We have spent more than $1 trillion on homeland security since Sept. 11, 2001, yet have withheld annual funding of less than $3 million for research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on gun violence. Why are the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments subject to erosion in the name of homeland security, but the Second Amendment is beyond compromise in the name of saving innocent lives? The risks of terrorism are not so much greater than the risks of gun violence that a disproportionate response is justified. Between 1969 and 2009, according to a 2011 Heritage Foundation study, 5,586 people were killed in terrorist attacks against the United States or its interests abroad. By comparison, about 30,000 people were killed by guns in the United States every year between 1986 and 2010. This means that about five times as many Americans are killed every year by guns than have been killed in terrorist attacks since Richard Nixon took office. The Transportation Security Administration has an annual budget of about $8 billion and has spent about $60 billion on aviation security since 2001. The TSA employs about 62,000 people, of whom 47,000 are airport screeners. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — the principal federal agency charged with regulating the gun industry— has a budget of about $1.2 billion. It employs roughly 5,000 workers, about half of whom are special agents charged with carrying out criminal investigations. These huge allocations turn the reality of risk on its head. In the nine years after 2001, 340 people were killed and 267 injured in attacks on civil aviation worldwide. Our perception of the relative dangers of terrorism and gun violence is distorted. We don’t know it, and our leaders don’t bother to tell us. Indeed, they conspire with the gun industry to hide it. Beyond immediate danger, humans are poor judges of risk — witness texting drivers and iPod-entranced jaywalkers. Yet, with education, risk perception can change. We’ve altered risk perceptions about smoking, unprotected sex, seat-belt use and the need for police to wear body armor. These changes were driven by fact-based research and clear advice on how to lower risk. Americans needed no further evidence of the risk of terrorism than the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. President George W. Bush standing on the twin towers’ rubble with a bullhorn sparked a national consensus about what to do. That consensus has been sustained by a vast, federally funded security industry that extends even into academia. The Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security lists 375 colleges and universities that offer homeland security programs. Platoons of security experts from the industry and its academic branch continually warn us in seminars and congressional hearings of the need to keep the money flowing. The greater risk of gun violence is masked. The media report lavishly on mass shootings but often fail to cover the much higher number of Americans killed and injured in gun violence daily. In Chicago last month, Obama said that 443 people were killed by guns in that city in 2012, and 65 of them were children — “a Newtown every four months.” Every day, about 80 Americans die from gunshots and about twice as many suffer nonfatal injuries, often lifelong debilitations. I researched a week of U.S. news stories about gun violence in August 2011 and then compared them with CDC averages; I found that about eight times more gun deaths and 60 times more gun injuries occurred than were reported. The gun industry and the National Rifle Association have shut down federal information sources. Until Obama changed the policy by executive order in January, the CDC was forbidden to research gun violence under a law passed in 1996. In 2003, the ATF was forbidden to release summary data from millions of crime-gun traces. We value ignorance over knowledge of a threat that takes more lives than terrorism many times over. Congress and two presidents — Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — have presided over this flight from fact. It has been politically safer to pander to the visceral fear of terrorism than to stand up to the gun industry. Hopefully, this is changing. While Congress muddles along its familiar, shameful path of rhetoric and preemptive surrender — Republican legislators recently voiced their opposition to keeping records of gun sales — Obama has clearly articulated the fundamental causes of U.S. gun violence. By taking the issue to the American people, he may get the support of the majority who want real change. A Johns Hopkins poll released in January showed that 89 percent of Americans wanted to require background checks for all firearms sales; more than 80 percent wanted to prevent “high-risk individuals,” including people who have violated restraining orders, from owning guns; 69 percent wanted to ban sales of semiautomatic assault weapons; and 68 percent wanted to prohibit the sale of large-capacity ammunition magazines. If we are to protect the homeland, we must also protect our children and all innocent citizens from the epidemic of violence inflicted by military-style guns. **digger2004@hotmail.com **  On gun control, taxes and other issues, Democrats must seize this moment

Obama in Newtown, Conn.: ‘You’re not alone in your grief’ over school massacre

NEWTOWN, Conn. — President Obama offered words of solace to a heartbroken and inconsolable community Sunday, meeting with loved ones of the dead from Sandy Hook Elementary School and lamenting at a nationally televised memorial service that the United States has failed in its duty “to keep our children, all of them,” safe from harm. “Whatever measure of comfort we can provide, we will provide,” Obama vowed, addressing a grief-stricken audience of hundreds in the auditorium of the town’s high school. Many more listeners crowded near speakers in the school’s gym, while others huddled outside in a cold drizzle, holding candles and weeping at times. “Whatever portion of sadness we can share with you to ease this heavy load, we will gladly bear,” the president told them. “Newtown, you are not alone.” Two days after the massacre of 20 children and six adults by a young man firing a military-style semiautomatic weapon in a hallway and classrooms at Sandy Hook Elementary, Obama, apparently alluding to gun-control laws, vowed to “use whatever power this office holds . . . in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this.” “No single law, no set of laws, can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society,” he said. “But that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely we can do better than this.” The president’s visit to this community of 27,000 people, about 30 miles west of New Haven, came as the debate over gun control raged anew and as investigators continued the laborious job of sorting out precisely what happened Friday morning at Sandy Hook, and why. Earlier Sunday, authorities disclosed that the 20-year-old gunman, Adam P. Lanza, stormed into the elementary school with “numerous” high-capacity ammunition magazines for the .223-caliber Bushmaster assault rifle that he used to carry out the carnage. He then fatally shot himself. They said Lanza had hundreds of bullets in 30-round magazines when he shot out a pane of glass and entered the locked school at 9:30 a.m. He also had two semiautomatic pistols, officials said, but he apparently fired only the rifle. Before driving to the school, Lanza fatally shot his mother, Nancy Lanza, 52, in her pajamas in her bed, at the Newtown home they shared, police said. The two pistols and the Bushmaster were among a half-dozen firearms legally registered to Nancy Lanza, authorities said. It remained unclear Sunday which weapon was used to take her life. She suffered multiple gunshot wounds to the head, an autopsy found. The specifics of Adam Lanza’s weaponry, publicly disclosed by police, raised questions about how he had obtained so many magazines. And it suggested that the attack could have been even worse. When he died, Lanza still had numerous rounds of unspent ammo, and authorities later found a shotgun in the car he used. Why he chose the school remained a mystery Sunday, at least to the public, as authorities disclosed only the barest details of what they said almost certainly will be a protracted investigation. Initial reports that Nancy Lanza had been a kindergarten teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary turned out to be erroneous. The school’s 436 surviving students will not return to Sandy Hook, Newtown’s school superintendent announced Sunday. There will be no school Monday and perhaps not for the rest of the week; it will be a week of funerals in Newtown. The first is Monday, for 6-year-old Noah Pozner. Eight other funeral services were being planned at Newtown’s St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church, where 10 of the 20 young victims were parishioners. When it is time for school again, the Sandy Hook students will attend an unused school in a neighboring town. As dusk gave way to darkness after a cold, damp day of bottomless communal grief, hundreds of mourners of all ages slowly converged on Newtown High School for the service of remembrance. Among them was Kristen Rosengrant, with her young sons. “As a mom, I’ve been so upset,” she said, waiting in line to get in. “I don’t think anything is going to help the families. But it’s nice to show concern.” In the packed auditorium, Obama asked, “Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children, all of them, safe from harm?” He added: “I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer’s ‘no.’ We’ve not done enough. And we’ll have to change.” Without referring specifically to gun-control legislation, the president said he intends to “engage my fellows citizens, from law enforcement to mental-health professionals to parents and educators” in search of new ways to combat gun violence. “Because what choice do we have? We can’t accept events like this as routine.” ********Although every mass shooting prompts a public discussion of gun control, the issue has been politically dormant for years, with elected officials who favor stricter regulations appearing reluctant to pursue a debate that they consider unwinnable. But the enormity of the Newtown shootings — the slaughter of 20 defenseless grade-schoolers, ages 6 and 7, and the country’s horrified, heartsick reaction — seems to be generating a louder-than-usual chorus of calls for tougher gun laws. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) said Sunday that the time is right to reenact the federal ban on assault weapons, which expired in 2004. New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) said Obama should push for such legislation now, while the nation stares aghast at the devastation wrought by a killer wielding a military-style rifle. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) vowed to introduce a bill to ban such weapons, and Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy (D) told CBS News’s Bob Schieffer that the rampage seems to prove that his state’s strict gun laws are not strict enough. “Obviously they didn’t prevent this woman from acquiring that weapon and obviously allowed the son to come into possession of those,” Malloy said. He added, “When someone can use an assault weapon to enter a building . . . [and] have clips of up to 30 rounds on a weapon that can almost instantaneously fire those, you have to start to question whether assault weapons should be allowed.” Most opponents of gun control on Capitol Hill have stayed silent. The executive producer of NBC’s “Meet the Press” tweeted that the show “reached out to ALL 31 pro-gun rights Sens in the new Congress to invite them to share their views” on the program Sunday, but none agreed to appear. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), a gun-rights advocate who visited Newtown on Sunday, recalled his reaction to the killings: “I wept. I said a prayer.” But the tragedy will not alter his position on regulating firearms, he said. He said Congress instead ought to pay more attention to how the nation treats the mentally ill. “I’m in exactly the same place on [firearms] as I was before,” he said, adding that he senses no new support among Republicans for gun-control legislation. The magazine-fed .223-caliber rifle from which a law enforcement official said Lanza fired “dozens and dozens” of rounds was manufactured by North Carolina-based Bushmaster Firearms International. It is a semiautomatic civilian version of a more potent weapon, the U.S. military’s standard-issue M-16 rifle. Semiautomatic refers to the weapon’s mechanics. A separate trigger pull is required to fire each bullet. Inside the rifle, the compressed gas produced by each explosive discharge is channeled under high pressure through a tube. The pressure activates a mechanism that lifts a fresh round from the magazine and shoves it into the firing chamber. This happens so quickly that after each round is discharged, the rifle is to ready fire again in an imperceptible fraction of a second — meaning it is capable of firing as rapidly as the shooter is able to squeeze the trigger, let go and squeeze again. The main difference with the military model, in use since the early 1960s, is that the M-16 has a thumb switch that converts the rifle to automatic, allowing the shooter to fire bullets in a continuous blur, machine-gun-style, simply by squeezing the trigger and holding it. Regardless of the version, however, the killing power of those high-velocity, .223-caliber slugs is the same, whether fired in Sandy Hook Elementary last week or 40-plus years ago in the jungles of Vietnam. Each of the Newtown victims, ages 6 to 56, was shot at least twice and some were hit by as many as 11 bullets, authorities said. “I’m very mindful that mere words cannot match the depth of your sorrow, nor can they heal your wounded hearts,” the president said in the auditorium. “I can only hope you know that you’re not alone in your grief, that our world, too, has been torn apart — that all across this land of ours, we have wept with you, and we’ve pulled our children tight.” Duggan and Fahrenthold reported from Washington. Michael Leahy in Washington contributed to this report.

In two years, police killed 86 people brandishing guns that look real — but aren’t

On a warm September evening in Columbus, Ohio, panicked witnesses called police to report that a group of boys had robbed a man at gunpoint and fled into a maze of alleys and fences on the city’s east side. In the fading light, Officer Bryan Mason cornered two of the boys in an alley, where, according to police, 13-year-old Tyre King pulled a gun from his waistband. Mason fired three rounds, striking the teen in the head, chest and torso. The black gun police recovered at the scene looked like their own department-issued, polymer-framed Smith & Wesson Military and Police semiautomatic pistol. It even had a laser sight. But police would soon learn that King’s weapon was a BB gun — a facsimile of the gun Mason used to shoot and kill the teen. At a news conference the next day, Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs waved a stock photograph of the BB gun. “Our officers carry a gun that looks practically identical to this weapon,” she said. “. . . It looks like a firearm that could kill you.” Police across the country say that they are increasingly facing off against people with ultra-real-looking pellet guns, toy weapons and non-functioning replicas. Such encounters have led police to shoot and kill at least 86 people over the past two years, according to a Washington Postdatabase of fatal police shootings nationwide. So far this year, police have fatally shot 43 people wielding the guns. In 2015, police also killed 43. The Post analysis is the first accounting of fatal police shootings involving people armed with air guns, toys or replicas, a phenomenon last studied in depth more than 25 years ago, ****when Congress first sought to address the problem of police shootings involving toy guns. The 86 shooting deaths are among the nearly 2,000 people shot and killed by police since 2015, which The Post is tracking, something no government agency does. Police recovered a wide variety of the weapons in the fatal shootings, but almost all had one thing in common: They were highly realistic copies of firearms. Of those, 53 were pneumatic BB or pellet guns that fire small-caliber metal balls or pellets. An additional 16 were Airsoft guns, which use compressed air cartridges to fire plastic BBs. Thirteen were replicas, two were toys, one was a starter pistol and one was a lighter. Experts who study the domestic market for pellet and Airsoft guns said consumer demand for replica firearms has grown. “They are red hot,” said Tom Gaylord, an industry consultant who runs a popular blog for the Ohio-based Pyramyd Air, one of the largest air gun retailers in the country. Pyramyd Air declined to comment. Police say it is virtually impossible to train officers to identify imitation firearms from any distance. Short of eliminating the guns, police have little choice but to assume the guns are lethal. Efforts to stop production of the guns or radically alter their appearance have mostly failed because of resistance from gunmakers and gun rights groups, such as the National Rifle Association. “We’re talking about this 26 years later, and I’m not sure anything has really changed except that tragic occurrences continue to happen,” said Chuck Wexler, who runs the Police Executive Research Forum, a policing policy think tank that studied the issue in 1990 for Congress. “A toy gun in a country with 300 million real guns is hard to distinguish.” The role of imitation firearms in fatal police encounters reemerged as a national issue in 2014, when Cleveland police fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was playing with a BB gun in a park. Police were responding to a call about a man with a gun outside a local recreation center. The shooting was among a spate of controversial and deadly encounters with police that helped galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement. Of the 86 fatal shootings involving imitation firearms since 2015, the most common theme was mental illness: 38 of those killed had a history of it, according to their families and police reports. Fourteen of the calls were domestic disturbances. Ten others began as robberies. The remaining circumstances range from patrolling neighborhoods to serving arrest warrants to making traffic stops. Of the people killed, 50 were white men. The oldest person killed was Robert Patrick Quinn, 77, who was fatally shot in Pittston, Pa., as he rode his motorized scooter outside an apartment complex while waving a realistic-looking pellet gun. Half of the shootings happened at night. In almost every case, police said the victims failed to comply with an officer’s orders. In 60 cases, police said they pointed guns at officers. Among the dead are Ernesto Flores, a mentally distraught 52-year-old man who after a standoff with police in April 2015 stepped out of a pink stucco home in Montclair, Calif., holding a BB gun. **** Police opened fire, killing Flores in front of his family. One of only five women killed by police was 17-year-old Shelly Haendiges, who was shot in Kokomo, Ind., after police responded to a robbery call and found her pointing a pellet gun at a store clerk. Her family said she suffered from mental illness. Two of the most recent shootings happened in October in Elkton, Md., where police shot and killed Brandon Jones and Chelsea M. Porter, both 25 and of Dover, Del., after they pointed BB guns at police who were trying to arrest them. The BB gun recovered after police killed King, the Ohio teenager, was made by Umarex USA, one of the largest air gun and firearm manufacturers in the world and the self-proclaimed “king of replicas.” Umarex makes air guns under the Beretta, Colt, Smith & Wesson, HK, Ruger and Browning brands. It sells BB guns that are copies of such firearms as the iconic Colt Peacemaker, which was first produced in the 1870s, and the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine, a mainstay of specialized military and police units. The Umarex 40XP BB gun that King allegedly brandished sells for about $50 in stores, including Walmart. Gunmaker Sig Sauer makes air guns that are advertised as “carbon copies” of their most popular lethal firearms, including the P226 semiautomatic handgun. A commercial on the Sig Sauer website displayed the BB gun and the lethal P226 as reflections of each other in a mirror. Umarex USA and Sig Sauer did not return repeated calls seeking comment. Gun rights groups, including Gun Owners of America, based in Virginia, have lobbied against laws that seek to alter air guns to make them distinguishable from firearms. Michael E. Hammond, a legal adviser to the gun-rights group, said the alterations never seem to be enough for those who dislike guns. “It all arises out of this general animus and media-fed fear of anything that has to do with guns,” Hammond said. The NRA declined to comment. In Ohio, where King and Rice were killed, the state does not regulate BB guns and also allows firearms to be openly carried. The day after Rice’s death, black legislators in Ohio tried to regulate the guns, introducing a law requiring all BB and pellet guns sold in the state to have special markings or be brightly colored. The bill died in committee. Two years later, police shot King. “Why is it that a 13-year-old would have nearly an exact replica of a police firearm on him in our neighborhoods, an eighth-grader involved in very, very dangerous conduct in one of our neighborhoods?” Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther (D) said at a news conference after the shooting. In the 1980s, a string of police shootings of children prompted Congress to pass the first and only federal regulations on toy guns. In 1983, 5-year-old Patrick Andrew Mason was alone in his Stanton, Calif., home when an officer who was called to the unit to do a welfare check mistook the boy with his red toy gun for a burglar; the boy was fatally shot while his single mother was away at work, according to news reports. In 1988, officers in San Francisco responding to a report of shots fired mistook a plastic toy gun for a .22-caliber pistol and shot a 13-year-old mentally disabled boy in the head, killing him. Parents began to push manufacturers to make the guns appear less realistic. Retailers such as Toys ‘R’ Us stopped carrying realistic toy guns, and toy manufacturers began adding an orange plug to toy guns. After several states restricted the use of imitation firearms, Congress in 1988 passed a law requiring the bright orange barrel plug on all toy guns. The law applied to water guns, many replicas and Airsoft guns that fire nonmetallic projectiles, but it exempted BB, pellet guns and replicas of antique firearms. The law also mandated two studies on whether the new orange tips would prevent shootings. In one study, FBI recruits were confronted by assailants carrying firearms or guns with orange tips. The recruits had two seconds to decide whether to shoot. When faced with unmarked replica pistols or guns with orange tips, officers shot 95 percent of the time. “It is clear from this study that the orange plug marking system does not help police officers distinguish between toy guns and real guns,” concluded the 1989 report, which was managed by the National Institute of Justice. The second study a year later reached the same conclusion, saying that police response when confronted with the guns was linked to environmental factors — such as what a police dispatcher tells an officer. Calls for service in a high-crime area, for example, might lead officers to consider “a worst case scenario,” said the report, overseen by the Police Executive Research Forum. But it was the behavior of the person holding the toy gun that mattered most. “If they are told there’s a person with a gun acting in a threatening manner, that’s what they respond to,” said David L. Carter, a professor at Michigan State University who spoke to officers in 27 law enforcement agencies for the 1990 study. Last year, Congress revisited the issue when Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) introduced a bill that would force the country to enact a law similar to California’s, which requires the entire surface of all toy and BB guns be painted a bright color. “No child should ever die because a police officer or anyone else mistakes a toy gun for a real weapon,” Boxer said in a news release at the time. The bill stalled in committee. Twelve states and the District and Puerto Rico have banned the guns or imposed restrictions on their use, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In the District, realistic-looking toy or air-powered guns cannot be possessed in public. In 2012, D.C. police seized about 450 imitation guns, according to the most recent data available. Baltimore’s City Council this month passed a similar ban, responding to an April shooting and wounding by police of a 14-year-old carrying a BB gun. In 2015, Boston outlawed imitation firearms in public. The law allows police to confiscate those guns, and they have seized 139 this year. Boston Police Commissioner William B. Evans said if a facsimile gun has been used in a crime, police will charge a suspect with possession of a real gun. “They are the exact same unless you have it in your hand and take it apart,” Evans said. In March in Gainesville, Fla., Alachua County sheriff’s officers were called to a parking lot where they encountered 16-year-old Robert L. Dentmond, who was armed with what appeared to be an AR-15 assault rifle. Dentmond was a high school sophomore who had lived in foster care, according to police reports. His mother went to prison and his father physically abused him, the records show. He was on probation for burglary. One bright spot for Dentmond was Cayla Todd, his girlfriend of one month. But on the night of March 20, Todd said they fought online and that she ended the relationship. Dentmond sent her a Facebook message, which investigators later found. “I’m finna have the police shoot me,” Dentmond wrote. At 10:07 p.m., Dentmond called police and said that he was at the Majestic Oaks Apartments with an M-16. When deputies and officers from the Gainesville Police Department arrived, they saw the 6-foot tall Dentmond, dressed in gray pajama pants and a blue jacket, in the middle of a dimly lit parking lot holding a gun. Crouching behind dumpsters and parked cars, police ordered him to drop the gun, according to police. “Drop it now, or you will be shot!” officers yelled. After 24 minutes, Dentmond leveled what looked to officers like an assault-type rifle and began walking. Nine officers opened fire and didn’t stop until the gun fell from his hand. He died at a hospital. After the shooting, police saw Dentmond’s weapon had broken in two, according to a state report. When picking up the pieces, an officer noticed that their weight “did not feel right” and they seemed to be plastic. Officers did not learn until the next morning that Dentmond’s gun was a toy, an Airsoft rifle with the orange tip removed. “Some of them broke down in tears,” Alachua County Sheriff Sadie Darnell said. “It’s not a high-five situation. It’s a devastating career-long and lifelong impact.” Grant McDougall, the psychotherapist who evaluated the deputies after the shooting, said they all wished that they could go back and change the outcome. “Every single one of them — some of them very graphically — grieved the loss, even if they would sit here and tell me they did the right thing,” McDougall told The Post. A grand jury investigating the shooting cleared the officers and suggested that the state ban imitation firearms. “It is dangerous and unfair to all for law enforcement to confront a situation where to all appearances a real weapon is involved, only to be subjected to intense second-guessing after the fact when that turns out not to have been so,” the jury said. Dentmond’s family could not be reached for comment. Todd told The Post that police could have done more. “He was only 16 years old. He didn’t need to die,” she said. Three months later, it almost happened again. In June, Alachua County deputies got a call that two groups of young men were driving around with AK-47s. The department sent every available unit, and they quickly came upon a black Honda Civic and a black Toyota Camry. Men wearing werewolf masks were hanging out of the cars’ sunroofs waving what appeared to be Heckler & Koch MP5 machine guns, according to Darnell and records. Police disarmed the men. The guns were plastic toys, and the gunmen, university students were making a movie for a film contest. “This is what those of us in law enforcement are so concerned about,” Darnell said. “You never know what’s real or what’s not, so part of the solution is to ban the sale of toy or replica guns.” In Columbus, Ohio, Chief Kim Jacobs has spent the past few months explaining to outraged community members why one of her veteran police officers fatally shot a 13-year-old carrying a BB gun. She wants people to understand how a mix of panicked reports of armed mayhem and a real-looking gun can turn deadly. Complicating the matter is that the officer, Bryan Mason, had been involved in three shootings since 2009, one of them fatal. In 2012, Mason shot and killed a man who was pointing a firearm at another person. In all cases, Mason’s use of force was ruled justified by the department. Jacobs said Mason would not be allowed to comment until the conclusion of the investigation. Jacobs said the shooting has taken its toll on everyone, including Mason. “You go to work and you do your job, and then all of the sudden you’re under criminal investigation,” Jacobs said. King’s family has no sympathy for Mason. “Ain’t nobody held accountable,” said his father, Maurice Cardwell. “There’s no wrongdoing over there it seems. And you’re killing kids?” Sept. 14 started out like most days for Tyre King. His parents described him as an astute child who worked selling candy, cutting grass and trimming hedges. After King returned from school that day, he finished his homework and left his house. At 7:42 p.m. witnesses called 911 to report a robbery. The callers said a gunman wearing a hoodie and baggy pants fled the scene. The robbery victim came on the line and told dispatchers, “I’m not going to mess with it over $10.” Another witness said seven or eight armed men were running away with police chasing them. “Oh, he’s shooting them. Oh, my God,” a caller said, apparently describing police shooting King. Chanda L. Brown, an attorney for the family, said they had serious doubts that King was involved in the robbery and that he did not own a BB gun. Police have not disclosed the source of the gun. Brown said that she thinks King was shot running away, not pulling a gun. The only person charged in the robbery is Demetrius E. Braxton, 19. His attorney, Lodema M’Poco, ****told The Post last week that Braxton admits he used the gun to commit the robbery while King and others waited nearby. M’Poco said Braxton then passed the gun to King, who put the weapon in his pants. Braxton said that after police ordered him and King to the ground, King ran and Mason shot him. M’Poco said Braxton did not see King pull the BB gun from his pants. Braxton pleaded guilty last month to felony robbery charges. In court he described the episode as a “lapse in judgment. As the oldest, I should have been the one to tell everybody, ‘Let’s not do this,’ ” the Columbus Dispatch reported. Brown, the King family’s attorney, said police failed to train officers how to deal with children with BB guns. “Anyone that takes the blame and puts it on a 13-year-old instead of an officer that’s been trained — or should be trained — in how to evaluate and respond to situations like this, I think they’re missing the bigger picture here,” Brown said. “Shooting should be the last resort.” For Jacobs and other officers, they seldom have the benefit of weighing all the evidence and making a decision. “People don’t really understand the dynamics of a police-involved situation, how fast they occur,” Jacobs said. “They all have families, they want to go home at the end of their shift.” Lee Powell, Teaganne Finn, Josephine Peterson and Taylor Hartz contributed to this report. This article was produced in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, where Courtney, Houston, Finn, Peterson and Hartz are students.

The gun lobby maddeningly prevents development of safer, childproof weapons

“IF A child can’t open a bottle of aspirin, we should make sure that they can’t pull a trigger on a gun.” We are haunted by that recent comment by President Obama in the wake of the heartbreaking death of 3-year-old Manal Abdelaziz Jr. The boy was with his father in the family’s North Carolina convenience store Sunday when he spotted a gun lying on a shelf and picked it up, accidentally shooting and killing himself. His father was just five feet away and, according to one police officer, “had taken his eyes off the child for just a moment” when the shooting occurred. The loss of any child is unbearable, but what makes Manal’s death so devastating is that it was entirely preventable and that its circumstances — a curious child, a gun loaded but unsecured and unattended — are all too commonplace. Already in this barely begun new year, a 9-year-old boy in southern Colorado died after being shot in the head by his little brother, a 2-year-old in Texas shot himself in the hand when he picked up a gun his father was cleaning and a 2-year-old boy in Florida shot himself in the face with a gun he found in his grandfather’s truck. Last year, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, there were more than 270 incidents in which a child 17 or younger fired a gun unintentionally and harmed someone — most often themselves or other children. A report co-written by the group showed American children are 16 times more likely to be killed in unintentional shootings than their peers in other high-income countries, even as research indicates that incidents involving death or injuries are significantly underreported in federal data. Nearly two-thirds of the incidents, the group concluded, likely could have been prevented if the firearms had been stored securely. The president, in calling for new technologies to boost gun safety, invoked the 30 children younger than 5 years old who died in unintentional shootings in 2013. “There is no reason for this,” he said. It is maddening — and disgraceful — that development of safer, childproof weapons has fallen victim to the unreasonable clout of the national gun lobby. Not only have firearms been exempted from regulation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, but also gun manufacturers who think there is market for “smart gun” technologies have been intimidated into not developing products that would help save lives. And not just those of children. Consider, for example, the difference technology would have made if the stolen gun recently used to shoot a police officer in Philadelphia had been programmed for use only by its legal owner. If the arguments used by the gun lobby had been applied to auto safety, there would be no seat belts or air bags, and more lives would have been lost, not saved. Mr. Obama’s vow to work with the private sector to update firearms technology is a prudent and long-overdue step in the right direction. **Read more about this topic:** The Post’s View: President Obama’s gun reforms are sensible — but long overdue The Post’s View: 2015 was a grim year for American gun violence The Post’s View: The access children have to guns is alarming The Post’s View: Keeping guns out of children’s hands

There is no reason mass killers can still legally buy their weapon of choice in America

IT IS no coincidence that the same type of weapon was used to massacre schoolchildren in Connecticut, moviegoers in Colorado, office workers in California and, on Sunday, revelers at a nightclub in Florida. The killers knew the best way to achieve their sick goal of dispatching as many people as possible: Use assault-style weapons capable of firing dozens of rounds in seconds. “The people we’re talking about, once they get into ‘I want to kill a lot of people,’ it’s not a leap for them to see that these guns are made and designed for war,” Tom Diaz of the Violence Policy Center told the New York Times after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012. Nor should it be a leap for a civilized country to prohibit the sale and ownership of weapons designed for war. After the country’s worst mass shooting, and before another American venue is turned into a slaughterhouse, Congress should reinstate the ban on assault-style weapons and the high-capacity ammunition magazines that make them even more lethal. Authorities said that the gunman responsible for Sunday’s carnage at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, in which 49 people were killed and 53 others wounded, was armed with an AR-15-type assault rifle he had recently purchased legally. It is the kind of weapon that has been used with horrifying frequency. According to a database compiled by Mother Jones magazine, 7 of 8 high-profile public mass shootings since July of last year involved assault-style weapons. A lawyer representing the families of those killed and injured in the Sandy Hook school shooting, in a lawsuit against the manufacturer and distributor of the gun used to kill 26 children and adults, characterized assault weapons as “the gold standard for mass murder of innocent civilians.” A ban on assault weapons was in effect from 1994 to 2004. There were some imperfections in the law, but rather than fix those Congress bent to pressure from the national gun lobby and let the law lapse. Even more grotesque was Congress’s failure to implement a ban on assault weapons and other common sense gun reforms proposed by President Obama in the wake of 6-year-olds being slaughtered in their classrooms in Connecticut. We have no illusions that the horror of Orlando will cause Congress to jump up and take action. But for the first time in a long time, gun control is being talked about as part of the campaign for president. Before Sunday’s events, Hillary Clinton had made gun law reform a centerpiece of her campaign, and on Monday she called for reinstating the ban on assault weapons. Weapons of war belong in the armed forces, not in gun shops that cheerfully furnish them to those with one goal only: killing as many innocents as possible, as quickly as possible. **Read more on this topic:** The Post’s View: Gun violence in America is out of control The Post’s View: The gun debate America needs to have The Post’s View: A depressingly endless loop of mass shootings David Ignatius: Trump’s Islamophobia helps to motivate the Islamic State

The nation pauses to grieve

The principal’s name was read first in the Connecticut state Capitol building on Friday morning, one week after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown that took the lives of 20 first-graders and six adults. _Dawn Hochsprung._ __The names of the teachers, the school psychologist and the behavioral therapist followed. Then the children. Between each name, softly, a bell was rung. _______Charlotte Bacon, six years old._ _Dong._ _____Daniel Barden, age 7._ _Dong._ ___Olivia Engel, age 6._ _Dong._ _Josephine Gay, age 7._ State consumer counsel Elin Swanson Katz had to stop several times, clearing her throat slightly and swallowing her emotions, before she could continue reading the list. _Noah Pozner, age 6._ _Caroline Previdi, age 6._ _Jessica Reckos._ Pause. _Also age 6._ In Newtown, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and other public officials stood on the steps of the Edmond Town Hall as a different bell rang 26 times to mourn Chase, Jack, Emilie, Madeline and the others gunned down when Adam Lanza stormed their school and opened fire with a high-powered Bushmaster rifle. The wind whipped and rain fell during the ensuing moment of silence, which was also observed at churches and schools and public buildings nationwide. Under umbrellas and huddled in raincoats, people throughout Newtown stood alongside impromptu memorials and roadside tributes and listened. Lanza, 20, is believed to have shot his mother, Nancy Lanza, four times in the head before going to Sandy Hook. He ended the rampage by taking his own life. The killings have launched an emotional national debate over gun laws and a promise by President Obama to seek a ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips. Obama has appointed Vice President Biden to head a White House commission that will formulate gun control proposals as soon as next month. The executive director of the powerful National Rifle Association, at a news conference Friday morning just 90 minutes after the moment of silence, urged the country to focus not on curbing gun ownership, but on ways of making schools safer, possibly including posting armed police officers in every school to prevent or stop future attacks. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, appearing at a Northeast Washington elementary school, said limiting the availability of firearms was a key concern. “Last week the dreams of 26 individuals were cut short,” said Duncan, who visited Newtown on Thursday to attend the wake for Hochsprung. “I can’t help but wonder how things might have been different if [Lanza] didn’t have access to guns.” Duncan, who will serve on the commission Biden is heading, said he would meet with people, including hunters and sportsmen, to ask their advice. He said he did not want to limit the conversation to reviving the assault rifle ban, which expired in 2004. “Let’s go further, and ask what we as a community can do to stop gun violence,” Duncan said, speaking in an auditorium at Neval Thomas Elementary School that was filled with holiday decorations and children singing Christmas carols. “We have common values that go beyond the right to bear arms. We value our freedom, we value our safety. . . . We value the right to live our daily lives and pursue our dreams without fear.” Duncan was joined at the school by D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray, schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson and other local leaders. At the Washington National Cathedral, leaders of different faith communities also gathered to mark the one-week anniversary of the massacre. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, reiterated the pledges of representatives of different faith traditions to work to change gun laws as well as social and cultural norms when it comes to violence. Speaking of those killed in Newtown, Budde said, “We pledge to honor their memory by doing what we all know is right.” Rajwant Singh, chairman of the Sikh Council on Religion and Education, recalled the shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin four months ago where seven people — including the gunman — were killed. “Those bullets that hit Sandy Hook have hit the Sikh community again,” Singh said, adding that people who are moved to action now should “continue to raise their voices to stop this violence.” In an open letter to Newtown published by the Hartford Courant on Thursday night, first lady Michelle Obama said her heart “aches for you and your families.” “Like so many Americans, I wish there were something — anything — I could do or say to ease your anguish,” Obama wrote. “But I know that I cannot begin to imagine the depths of your grief.”

Richard Cohen: The killing of children, our national shame

The shock of Newtown, Conn., is its Norman Rockwell quality. It is a sampler of a place with high-steepled churches and the usual gathering spots — coffee shops and such, and repeated testimonies to the serenity of the town. But what happened there — the sheer horror, the incomprehensible number of victims — tends to obscure how ordinary the death of children by gunshot has become. This is a collective massacre long ignored. Really, guns don’t kill people. Apathy does. I cite now a report from the well-regarded Children’s Defense Fund. In 2008 and 2009, 5,740 children — “one child or teen every three hours, eight every day, 55 every week for two years” — were killed by guns. In 2008, 408 of them were under the age of 15; 148 were under 10. A year later, 354 under 15 and 151 under 10 were killed by gunfire. All in all, 34,387 children were wounded by guns in those two years. A disproportionate number of those kids were black or Hispanic. African-American children accounted for 45 percent of those victims but were only 15 percent of the total child population. Sometimes, they were merely sitting on a stoop or leaving a church. The newspapers almost daily report such tragedies. What the ghetto, the inner city, the blighted neighborhood, the storied ’hood itself have in common with the bucolic Newtown is the mayhem of guns. This is a national calamity; a national absurdity. Great legal minds in this country are marshaled in the cause of keeping us armed to the teeth. The National Rifle Association insists on the purported right to be armed in the workplace. Employers blanch — it can be awkward to fire an armed recalcitrant, I imagine — but there is a supposed constitutional right to bear arms, the Supreme Court affirms, as if this is the nation it was in 1789. I got my first and last weapon in the army. It was the vaunted M-14, and I was told to love it. I had to call it a weapon or a piece or a rifle, but never a gun — 20 pushups for that — and I had to clean it and disassemble it and, under pain of court martial, make sure it was free from rust. This was the very heart of gun culture. The rifle was our most essential tool — what the hammer is to the carpenter — but even so, when we ended the day, we were forbidden to keep a single bullet. To do so was a grave offense because even people who love guns know that every barracks contained a nut — some young hothead who fantasized about settling a score with a bunkmate or with the customarily sadistic drill sergeant. But out in the world, virtually anyone can get a gun and the bullets to go with it. You have to have yellow eyes, pointy teeth and a Transylvanian accent to be denied the right to pack a weapon. Adam Lanza’s mother, Nancy, had at least three of them at home, including a version of the Army’s AR-15, a combat weapon. We consider this normal in this country. Why? When was the last Indian attack in that part of Connecticut? What militia did she belong to? Go into a drugstore and you get carded to buy Sudafed. It’s easier in some cases to buy a gun. I despair. Experience tells me that nothing will change. The struggle between gun owners and all others is virtually an even match in the public opinion polls, but as every politician knows, it’s the zealots who kill you at the polls. It is also a struggle between city people and country folk — a collision between those of us who fear guns and those of us who adore them. We cannot even agree on what scares us the most. The memory of the Newtown horror will fade. These places — Newtown, Tucson, Aurora, Columbine — become “Jeopardy” questions, and someone will point out how rare they are. But far from rare — and hardly noticed — is the routine mayhem caused by guns — handguns, not combat stuff — and the daily shooting of children. Every weekend we aggregate a Newtown. It is our national shame. **_cohenr@washpost.com _ ** **Read more from Opinions:** Jennifer Rubin: Resist the urge to rush new laws Jonathan Capehart: Yes, we must ‘do better than this’ Jonathan Bernstein: After Newtown, wait first, then use politics E.J. Dionne Jr.: We should mourn — and get angry Joseph A. Califano Jr.: Gun control in the lame duck The Post’s View: Time to talk about gun control Alexandra Petri: There are no words

7 other school shootings that shocked the world

On Tuesday morning, Taliban gunmen disguised as soldiers stormed an elite Pakistani army high school. They killed at least 141 students and teachers in one of the bloodiest attacks in the country. It took nine hours until the hostage situation was over. The Post's Tim Craig reported that army convoys drove from the scene even as victims' families wept on the streets or carried hastily made plywood coffins to a hospital filled with the dead.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Schools have attracted attackers in the past — many shootings shocked the world, and even today the names of the cities they occurred in are connected to the atrocities that were committed there. Here are some of the school shootings that must not be forgotten. **On Sept. 1, 2004, more than 300 people died during the Beslan school hostage crisis in North Ossetia, Russia**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico When pro-Chechen rebels entered the School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia, on Sept. 2004, they took about 1,200 students, parents and teachers hostage. For three days, the hostage-takers barricaded themselves in the building. Finally, gunfire was exchanged between Russian armed forces and the pro-Chechen rebels. More than 300 people at the school died in the siege. **26 people died during a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Two years ago, Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut became the scene of a horrifying attack in which a gunman opened fire, killing 26 people. He later died, as well. Nearly 700 students were in the school when the shooting started. The gunman had earlier fatally shot his mother at their home. **On April 26, 2002, 17 people were killed in a school rampage in Erfurt, Germany**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico After having been expelled from school, a student went on a rampage, targeting his former friends and teachers. In total, 18 people (12 of them teachers) died in the attack in the eastern German city of Erfurt. The shooting occurred in the city's Gutenberg Gymnasium, a school comparable with American high schools. Today, 12 years after the attack, students and teachers still grapple with the incident. Robert Kiehl, a surviving teacher against whom the attack was targeted, said in a newspaper interview in 2012: "What connected us (students and teachers) after the attack were our nightmares."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **16 people died March 11, 2009, at the Albertville School Center in Winnenden, Germany**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Also in Germany, 16 people were killed in 2009 in a school shooting in the western city of Winnenden. Several were injured as well. The 17-year-old attacker attended the school until one year before the assault. He primarily targeted girls and women.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The incident sparked a debate about tougher gun laws in Germany because the attacker had stolen his weapon from his parents. His father was later charged and convicted for incorrectly storing his weapon, a mistake that paved the way for the massacre, according to public prosecutors. **In the Scottish town of Dunblane, 18 people were killed March 13, 1996**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In 1996, the Scottish town of Dunblane was the site of Britain's deadliest school shooting. Back then, an attacker walked into Dunblane Primary School, carrying several weapons and killing 17 people — most of them children. He then committed suicide. The 43-year old attacker had previously owned a shop and worked as a Scout leader. A subsequent public debate led to an official inquiry and several firearms acts. Virtually all handguns were banned in Britain as a consequence. **At Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., 15 people died April 20, 1999**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history, two students, dressed in black trench coats, opened fire at Columbine High school in Littleton, Colo., in 1999. The two attackers killed 12 students as well as a teacher. The assailants killed themselves after also injuring more than 20. **The Ma’alot massacre left more than 20 hostages dead on May 15, 1974**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Three members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine launched an attack on Netiv Meir Elementary School in Ma'alot, Israel, in 1974. Investigators believe the incident was aimed at disrupting the 26th anniversary of Israeli independence, set to be celebrated May 15. Overall, 115 people were taken hostage, and more than 20 of them died when Israeli special forces stormed the building after a standoff that lasted two days. The vast majority of those killed were children.

Gunman kills mother, then 26 in grade school rampage in Connecticut

NEWTOWN, Conn. — This time, the shooter killed 27 people, including his elementary-schoolteacher mother, her principal and 20 children, most of them kindergartners. Then the shooter killed himself. Friday morning’s massacre in Newtown, Conn. — the second-deadliest shooting event in U.S. history — took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where more than 600 children from kindergarten through fourth grade spend their days. About 9:30 a.m., the day was interrupted by a burst of sound on the school intercom: screams. That was enough for some teachers to move their students away from doors and windows. In one room, a teacher locked her students in a closet, a move parents said saved their children’s lives. In another class, a teacher heard two blasts and ordered students into a corner. Jessica Eisele, a fourth-grader at Sandy Hook, was in the gym when the shooting began. “On the loudspeaker, there was screaming and crying and she heard gunshots and then silence,” said her brother Nick, 15. A janitor ran through the halls, shouting that a gunman was in the building. Witnesses heard dozens of pops coming from two classrooms and a hallway. In the main office, the principal, vice principal and school psychologist heard the noise and stepped into the hall to investigate. A witness told CNN that the vice principal crawled back into the office after being shot in the foot. The principal and psychologist were later found dead. Around Newtown, word spread by text, phone and the sound of dozens of emergency vehicles thundering toward the school. At Berkshire Motors, owner Jim Marcucilli thought he saw 40 police cruisers speed by. He had been working on a car, but its owner, frantic, demanded her keys back. “Oh, my God,” she said, “I have to get my kid.” Joseph Wasik, 42, wasn’t too worried when his wife, Lynn, called to say she had received a text alert from the school. Like schools nationwide, Sandy Hook had been on lockdown before, always for events that turned out to be nothing. Earlier this year, reports of a loose bear seen in town had activated the system. But when Wasik flipped open his laptop and saw a report of a school shooting, he got in his car and headed to Sandy Hook, where his daughter Alexis is a third-grader. “I flew down there,” said Wasik, an electrician. When he arrived, the backup of emergency vehicles and panicked parents extended half a mile beyond the school. Wasik parked on the first lawn he could find and ran. “It was chaos, cars blocking everything, a SWAT team,” he said. “All these parents screaming for their kids.” Children were ushered out of the building, instructed to close their eyes as adults guided them through the halls. Some were so scared they vomited. The students were moved into the parking lot, single file, hands on one another’s shoulders. Some wept, some smiled, some stared at the pavement. A few of the children had blood on their clothes. Helicopters circled above and dozens of emergency vehicles arrived from nearby towns. Firefighters rushed over to parents holding children and wrapped them in blankets to warm them from the December chill. In a first-grade classroom, a boy, seeing that his teacher had been shot, bolted out the back door and kept running, friends said. The boy ended up on Church Hill Road, half a mile away, where a man picked him up and took him to the firehouse where other students were gathered. Stephen Delgiadice’s 8-year-old daughter cowered with her classmates in a corner of their room until police led them out. “It’s alarming, especially in Newtown, Connecticut, which we always thought was the safest place in America,” he told the Associated Press. His daughter was unharmed. Law enforcement sources identified the shooter as Adam Lanza, 20, the son of Nancy Lanza, whose body was found at the Newtown home she shared with Adam. Authorities earlier Friday had misidentified the gunman as Ryan Lanza, Adam’s older brother. Ryan Lanza was questioned by police, who concluded that he had no connection to the massacre. Ryan said he had not been in contact with his brother for more than two years. Reached at her home in Florida, Nancy Lanza’s mother said she could not fathom the violence that took her daughter’s life. “I just can’t cope with it right now,” Dorothy Hanson said through tears. “She was my daughter and a beautiful girl and I loved her. I just can’t make any more comments than that right now.” Adam Lanza was unusually prone to tantrums as a child and took medication for behavioral issues, according to friends and neighbors of the family. Nancy and Peter Lanza separated about 10 years ago and divorced in 2009. Nancy remained in Newtown, and Peter, who remarried, lives in Stamford, Conn., friends said. Once again, flags were lowered to half-mast across the land. In a television address, President Obama said that “as a nation, we have been through this too many times.” He broke off and took a long breath to suppress a sob. He wiped his eyes and pushed ahead. “These children are our children.” Along with many other politicians, he pledged “meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this,” but did not offer specifics. White House spokesman Jay Carney said Friday was a day “to feel enormous sympathy for families that are affected and to do everything we can to support state and local law enforcement. . . . I’m sure [there] will be a day for discussion of the usual Washington policy debates, but I don’t think today is that day.” The death toll in Newtown is second only to that of the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, in which 32 were killed. The massacre at Sandy Hook occurred five months after a gunman in Colorado killed 12 people in a movie theater where the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises” was opening, and two years after a shooter in Tucson killed six people and injured 13, including then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.). Newtown, a town of 28,000 eight miles outside Danbury and an hour’s drive northeast of New York City, is an affluent community with good schools and a population dominated by college graduates. Sandy Hook is a well-regarded school; year after year, its students score far higher than the state average on standardized tests. Sandy Hook’s principal, Dawn Hochsprung, had recently installed a new security system in which the school doors were kept locked all day starting at 9:30 a.m. Some parents said the shooter probably was able to walk in unquestioned because school employees knew he was a teacher’s son. Adam Lanza arrived at Sandy Hook in his mother’s car, law enforcement sources said. Hochsprung, known for her infectious laugh, dressed up last month as the Book Fairy — replete with light-up dress and crown — to inspire children to read. Hochsprung, who was married and had two daughters and three stepdaughters, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday that her students were “enjoying the rehearsal for our 4th grade winter concert.” Police found three firearms: two handguns, a Sig Sauer and a Glock, and a .223 Bushmaster brand rifle. A law enforcement official said the weapons were obtained legally and were registered to a family member. After police determined that the shooter was not at large, the students were taken to a nearby firehouse, where they sat with classmates as teachers wrote up a list of everyone who was there. Parents, many of them sobbing, arrived to reunite with their children. “It was elbow-to-elbow people crying,” Wasik said. “No one could tell you where to go. People were screaming, ‘Please say it’s not mine, please say it’s not mine.’ ” The parents who could not find their children’s names on the list gathered in another room, where Gov. Dan Malloy (D) visited them, bringing bits of news, none of it good. Wasik ran into a friend, Steve, the father of a first-grader. “Steve,” Wasik recalled saying, “you find your kid?” “No, I haven’t found my son,” the distraught man replied. “Nobody knows where he is. Where is he? Where is he?” Wasik moved on, the dread and primal panic mounting until finally, 20 minutes after he ditched his car, he caught sight of his daughter. The relief was disorienting. He tried to comfort his child, call his wife and text his parents. His wife arrived and the three of them huddled with Alexis. His daughter “was a wreck,” Wasik said. “She saw some things.” The family plans to get out of town while they figure out how to explain the unexplainable to a third-grader. “I don’t see her ever going back to that school,” Wasik said. When the Wasiks were allowed to leave the firehouse, they saw their friend Steve again. He was with his wife and a police officer. “We found out later,” Wasik said. “They lost their child. He was in the first grade.” After dark, much of Newtown gathered at St. Rose of Lima Church for a memorial mass. Hundreds who could not fit in the church stood outside; several dozen formed a circle, holding hands, and sang “Silent Night.” Tim Cervera, 13, a student at Newtown Middle School, went to the church because his neighbor, a young girl, was killed. “I was scared that they would come get us at our middle school,” Tim said. Ray Horvath, a bear of a man, leaned against a tree in tears. A teacher at Sandy Hook, he recalled one of the children who had been killed. “He was a total pain in the ass, but we loved him,” he said. Horvath said he left school on Friday morning five minutes before the shooting began, and then he stopped: “I can’t say any more.” __

America’s deadly game on guns

A SPARE few paragraphs in the local and national media described the death of Shelby Elizabeth Sims. The 23-year-old South Carolina woman was killed early on Nov. 14 by her husband when, as police recounted, his gun fired while he waved it around during a card game. Her death demands attention not because it is an anomaly but rather an example of the tragically commonplace: pointless deaths that occur when guns are readily available. Jeremy Sims, 25, who has been charged by Spartanburg County authorities in his wife’s death, was drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana before his gun went off, police said. Had Mr. Sims not had access to a gun, probably the worst consequence of his behavior would have been a hangover. Instead, his wife of four years is dead, their child was placed in protective custody and he faces a murder charge. Most of the national debate about gun violence has centered on mass shootings; but for all their unquestioned horror, they account for just a fraction of the carnage that results from guns. Nearly 300 people a day are shot in murders, assaults, attempted and successful suicides and unintentional shootings. Every day, on average, nearly 90 people die from gun violence. Particularly heartbreaking, as we have written, are the instances of children who are accidentally killed, too often by other children. The numbers — and the tragedies behind them — are a result of U.S. gun policies that allow and even encourage firearms to circulate freely. We do not know why Mr. Sims had a gun or why, as police said, he brought it to a card game. Perhaps, like many Americans who have bought into the argument of the gun lobby, he thought it necessary for self-defense. But having guns in homes actually increases risks. There is a higher chance that a gun in the home will result in an accidental shooting, be used in a suicide or a suicide attempt, or escalate an argument to a lethal end than that it will be used for self-protection. This country can continue to ignore those facts, but, in doing so, it plays a deadly game. **Read more about this topic:** The Post’s View: Shot and killed over a puppy The Post’s View: Keeping guns out of children’s hands E.J. Dionne Jr.: The conservative evasion on guns Fareed Zakaria: Change your gun laws, America The Post’s View: The argument against common-sense gun control crumbles

At least 44 school shootings since Newtown — new analysis

There have been at least 44 school shootings on K-12 or college campuses in 24 states — an average of more than three a month — since the deadly 2012 attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., according to a new analysis. Twenty-eight people have died and 37 have been injured.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Twenty children and six adults working at Sandy Hook were killed in the December 2012 assault in Newtown, leading to renewed calls around the nation for Congress to take action to prevent more gun violence. Legislators did nothing.  Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, which did the analysis along with the national organization called Mayors Against Illegal Guns, said in a statement: Mayors Against Illegal Guns was co-founded in 2005 by then New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and then Boston Mayor Thomas Menino. The analysis says:     *[WSU]: Wayne State University

Michael Bloomberg: Media falls short on gun violence coverage (video)

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) told NBC's Jimmy Fallon on Thursday that more media attention needs to be paid to the nation's gun violence problem, which he argued only catches the notice of the press after mass shootings like the one in Newtown, Conn. "There's 33 people killed in America with guns every single day of the year," Bloomberg said on "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon." "And nobody seems to care. It only catches the press's attention when it's young kids concentrated. And it was terribly tragic -- but there are kids killed every day all across this country." Bloomberg is one of the nation's most vocal gun control advocates. After the shooting in Newtown, the mayor called on President Obama to make the issue his top priority. "There's just too many guns in the world and certainly in this country. And we've just got to do something about it," said Bloomberg. Lawmakers have fallen short when it comes to supporting existing regulations on guns, Bloomberg said. "Congress doesn't vote money to fund enforcement," said the mayor. Bloomberg also said he met this week with former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who nearly lost her life during a 2011 shooting rampage. Check out the clip below.

Horror at Sandy Hook Elementary

We’ve been here before. A breaking news report about gunshots at a school. We’re used to hearing about high schools, colleges and universities on lockdown because of a madman or men targeting the innocent. Think Columbine, Virginia Tech. But what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., this morning was frighteningly different. In Columbine or Virginia Tech — or in the countless shootings at schools around the country that get far less attention — it was someone from within the school community who turned violence on their fellow students. Not at Sandy Hook.The gunman allegedly walked in from the outside. He reportedly entered the kindergarten classroom where his mother taught and opened fire. In all 27 people, 20 children and seven adults, were killed at the school. The children ranged in age from 5 to 10 years old. Schools are supposed to be safe spaces. Increasingly they rarely are. But elementary schools have always been viewed as sacrosanct. Not only because the little ones inside couldn’t possibly do something so evil as mass murder, but also because we never thought for a minute that a stranger would target such a place for carnage. This massacre is unlike anything we have seen in a long time, if ever. The horror of this moment, the power this tragedy has on our nation was made plain in the emotional statement by President Obama. Rare is the time a president sheds tears, rarer still this president. But when a madman singles out lives so young and so innocent for murder, how could he not? How could we not? “Our hearts are broken today,” the president said, speaking for all of us.

Connecticut school shooting: NRA’s power, Obama on gun violence, 9/11 for schools?

Obama asks Cabinet members for proposals to curb gun violence: “President Obama on Monday began the first serious push of his administration to attempt to reduce gun violence, directing Cabinet members to formulate a set of proposals that could include reinstating a ban on assault rifles. The effort will be led by Vice President Biden, according to two people outside the government who have spoken to senior administration officials since Friday, when a gunman killed his mother and rampaged through Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., killing 20 children, six adults and himself.” (Washington Post) Room for Debate asks: Efforts to limit the sale and possession of assault rifles and multiround ammunition clips, or to require background checks and waiting periods for the purchase of guns, have been halted for years by fears that the powerful National Rifle Association would defeat any politician who proposed such measures. Polls showing falling support for gun control have reinforced those fears. But is the N.R.A. so powerful? And is public opinion against all restrictions? Would recent shootings like the one that killed 20 children in a Connecticut school on Friday strengthen the chance that such proposals could be adopted? (New York Times) Gun lobbyist: Americans should be ‘prepared’ to take on elected officials with guns. (ThinkProgress) A 9/11 for schools? “Let’s hope not. If the reaction to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School is anything like the reaction to Sept. 11, we’re in for a decade or more of frantic overreaction and wasteful, destructive policies based on the false promise of perfect safety,” writes Cato’s Gene Healy. (Washington Examiner) Gun control ignorance: “Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of “gun control” advocates? The key fallacy of so-called gun-control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law- abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available,” writes Hoover’s Thomas Sowell. (National Review) CAP’s Larry Korb, Alex Rothman and Max Hoffman: How to cut $100 billion from the defense budget. (Politico)

Giffords tells Congress ‘Too many children are dying’ from gun violence

On Dec. 14, 2012, after having already killed his mother, a gunman shot and killed 20 little kids and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. On Dec. 11, 2012, a gunman shot and killed two shoppers and wounded another at the Clackamas Town Center Mall near Portland, Ore.. On Aug. 5, 2012, a gunman shot and killed six worshipers and wounded three others in a Sikh temple near Milwaukee, Wis.  On July 20, 2012, a gunman shot and killed 12 people and wounded 58 others in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. On Jan. 8, 2011, a gunman shot and killed six people and wounded Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 12 others in a grocery store’s parking lot in Tucson, Ariz. These places — a school, a shopping mall, a temple, a movie theater, and a parking lot — aren’t dangerous places. Yet, these 53 kids, teens, and adults who were merely going about their daily lives found that on that one day, their safe place wasn’t so safe anymore. Perhaps that’s why — finally — two years after their colleague was shot, the U.S. Congress began to try to do something about gun violence in America. On Jan. 30, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to ask the question that so many Americans desperately want answered: “What should America do about gun violence?”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The need to do something about gun violence is imperative. In 2010, 4,097 children and young adults between the ages of 1 and 24 died after being shot by someone else, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). In total, 11,078 people died from what the CDC calls an “interpersonal” firearm fatality that year. (It’s often reported that more than 30,000 people die in America each year from firearms. Sadly, more than half of those deaths are suicides.)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The experts offered several solutions: conduct more and better background checks for all gun buyers, including those who buy firearms at gun shows, online, and from friends; limit the number of rounds high-capacity devices can shoot before reloading; ban assault weapons; fix the country’s mental-health system; give guns to schoolteachers and station armed guards at schools. Former astronaut Mark Kelly, whose wife, Gabby Giffords, was shot in the head by a mentally ill young man, wants to make it harder for the mentally ill to purchase guns. “I can’t think of anything that would make our country safer,” Kelly said. Kelly, a gun-owner himself, said that he and his wife own guns to “defend ourselves, to defend our families, for hunting, and for target shooting.” We’ll “never give up our guns” he said, yet after what happened to his wife, he insists that now is the time to act to reduce gun violence. He and Giffords co-founded Americans for Responsible Solutions to try to do exactly that.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Not everyone agreed that guns are the problem. Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association, came to “give voice” to the NRA’s 4.5 million active members. After pointing out that the NRA teaches gun safety and responsibility, he said that rather than banning guns, we should “throw a blanket of security” around our school children and enforce “the thousands of gun laws already on the books.” He insisted that background controls won’t work because “criminals will never submit to them.” LaPierre doesn’t just oppose background checks. He opposes gun restrictions of any type, including the assault weapons ban that Sen. Diane Feinstein, (D-Calif.), introduced earlier this month. “Gun ownership is a fundamental, God-given right,” LaPierre concluded.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University David Kopel, adjunct professor of law at the Denver University College of Law and associate policy analyst at the Cato Institute, generally shared LaPierre’s views. Kopel said that “lawful armed self-defense in the schools, not only by armed guards, but also by teachers” is the only way to stop the violence in schools. Kopel holds up the state of Utah as a model to emulate. In Utah, adults who pass background checks and complete a safety training class can carry guns — including teachers at schools. For those who worry that teachers might shoot each other or threaten students or that kids might wrestle the guns away from their teachers, Kopel reassured us: “We’ve never had an attack on a Utah school.” While the experts told us what to do about gun violence, it was former Arizona congresswoman Giffords, who told us why _._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University “Too many children are dying. Too many children,” Giffords almost whispered, speaking slowly and with difficulty the eight most important words that anyone would utter during the entire four-hour hearing. _Joann Weiner teaches economics at The George Washington University. She has written for Bloomberg, Politics Daily, and Tax Analysts. Follow her on Twitter:_ _@DCEcon_ _._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

Counting the young victims of firearm violence

LOBBYISTS FOR the National Rifle Association (NRA) have spent considerable time and money to discourage the collection and sharing of information related to guns and gun violence. Keeping the public in the dark about the facts is helpful in advancing an extreme agenda. In particular, the gun lobby has used the under-counting of gun accidents involving children to oppose reasonable policies that could help prevent deaths and injuries caused by the careless handling and storage of firearms. An investigative report by the New York Times has presented powerful evidence that federal statistics are incomplete on the number of children killed when a firearm is accidentally discharged. The Times’ Michael Luo and Mike McIntire reviewed hundreds of firearm deaths of children, going as far back as 1999, and — in four of five states examined — found twice as many accidental shootings as were tallied in federal statistics because of reporting peculiarities by medical examiners. By calling into question statistics that show children are more likely to die in falls or by drowning than from the accidental discharge of a firearm, the Times’ report undermined a key argument of the NRA in opposing sensible laws about safe storage of guns and the need to develop technology to make weapons childproof. The madness of opposition to common-sense safeguards was underscored by the heartbreaking stories of a baby fatally shot in his crib by his 2-year-old brother; a 3-year-old who killed himself with a pistol temporarily hidden under a couch by his father; and the 12-year-old girl killed by her brother whose finger slipped on a shotgun. “There are no accidents. There are simply irresponsible, stubborn, cowardly adults unwilling to stand up against the gun lobby and those who support it,” said Jodi Sandoval, whose 14-year-old son was killed in 2012 by a friend who didn’t think the gun he pointed at his friend was loaded. As troubling as the Times’ findings is what’s not known because of the NRA’s successful efforts to stamp out scientific research related to guns. The group successfully lobbied Congress in 1996 for an amendment that was widely interpreted as a ban on gun violence research at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only 18 states receive funding to participate in the CDC’s violent-death-reporting system. Scientific research, so critical in improving people’s lives and health, is virtually missing when it comes to guns and the violence that kills and injures tens of thousands of people each year. President Obama, in the aftermath of the Newtown, Conn., shooting and the horror of its 20 little victims, signed an executive order requiring more research on gun violence by the CDC and other federal agencies. But funding from Congress is questionable. It should not be too much to expect that this country gets an accurate count of how many of its children die each year in accidents involving guns and then uses that information to help devise solutions that can spare families such anguish. **Read more about this topic:** Eugene Robinson: The NRA’s tone-deaf rhetoric Aaron Kupchik: The flaws in the NRA’s school-security proposal Philip Caputo: Guns do kill people

National Cathedral to host vigil on one-year anniversary of Sandy Hook shootings

In lieu of a public remembrance ceremony in Newtown, Conn., a vigil will be held at Washington’s National Cathedral on Dec. 12, two days before the one- year anniversary of the shooting rampage that killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The 75-minute event, scheduled to start at 3:45 p.m., will also honor more than 30,000 people across the United States who have been killed by guns in the 11 months since the Newtown shootings, said Dave Ackert, founder and chairman of the Newtown Action Alliance, which advocates for changing gun laws, and its charitable and educational sister organization, the Newtown Foundation, which is organizing the event. “The reality is that it’s not just Newtown; Newtown opened a lot of people’s eyes but it’s a national problem,” Ackert said, adding that families affected by gun violence are expected to travel to Washington from around the country for the vigil. “It’s crazy,” he said. “We’re raising a generation of kids who instead of selling Girl Scout cookies are selling bracelets to remember the kids who died in their community because of guns.” The vigil is being held in Washington to deflect attention from Newtown as the anniversary date approaches. “The whole community is wanting to be alone and remember the tragedy in our own way, and need media to stay away,” said Ackert, who has several neighbors whose family members were killed at the school. President Obama’s advisers have been informed of the vigil, Ackert said, adding, “We would obviously love and welcome the Obamas. They’ve been strong advocates, and I know that they’ve been touched and moved by Sandy Hook and every time there’s another shooting across the nation.” Since the Sandy Hook shootings, gun control advocates have called for tighter gun laws; at the same time, pro-gun groups have moved to counteract restrictions on owning or carrying them. Last month, a Washington state Second Amendment group announced a “Guns Save Lives” day to be held on the anniversary of the shootings. After a barrage of public outcry, the group moved its event to the following day. After federal legislation for tougher gun laws fell short by five votes in the Senate in April, a group of Sandy Hook families last week announced a new campaign to address gun violence, with the goal of recruiting 500,000 parents to join their cause in the next month. Citing changes in legislation on drunk driving, smoking and gay marriage that started from grass-roots efforts, the group is pushing for conversations to take place in local communities and schools. Newtown first selectman Patricia Llodra has posted a call on her blog for groups and individuals to “pledge an act of kindness to each other” in the weeks leading up to the anniversary. “Maybe this tragedy can serve as a reminder for all families to set aside a few minutes to talk together about the importance of compassionate acts — that those acts become the glue that binds us together in our humanity,” she wrote.

Trump promised to end the “American carnage.”  Gun deaths are up 12 percent

Gun deaths are up over 12 percent year-over-year. Firearm injuries are up nearly 8 percent. The number of children under the age of 12 shot by a gun has increased by 16 percent, while instances of defensive gun use are up nearly 30 percent.  In the first 200 days of 2014, for instance, the Archive's team of researchers tallied 6,206 gun deaths, not counting suicides. Three years later that figure has jumped by well over one-third, to 8,539 fatalities. Since 2014, total firearm injuries are up 50 percent. Shootings of children are up by nearly 30 percent. Reports of defensive gun use have doubled.

Curbing gun violence: If not now, when?

another version The president said last night at the prayer vigil in Newtown: “This is our first task, caring for our children. It’s our first job. If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged. And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we’re meeting our obligations? Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children, all of them, safe from harm?” A moment later he said: “Since I’ve been president, this is the fourth time we have come together to comfort a grieving community torn apart by mass shootings, fourth time we’ve hugged survivors, the fourth time we’ve consoled the families of victims. And in between, there have been an endless series of deadly shootings across the country, almost daily reports of victims, many of them children, in small towns and in big cities all across America, victims whose — much of the time their only fault was being at the wrong place at the wrong time. We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.” This is a gun issue and a mental health issue and a culture-of-violence issue all rolled into one. No one thinks there’s a magic wand to stop the carnage, but such mass shootings are not an inevitable part of our society. I don’t know how this will play out and whether it will become more of a story about mental illness or more of a story about gun laws. We don’t know very much about the shooter. We’ll know more in the days ahead. Support for tighter gun control has waned the last two decades, but I have to think this tragedy will make a lot of people look hard at ways to reduce the lethality of mass shootings, if possible. If not now, when? What would it take? In a matter of minutes the guy killed six adults and 20 first-graders at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. The killer used a military-style rifle to fire hundreds of bullets from 30-round magazines. The hospitals mobilized to care for an influx of wounded people, but the influx never materialized, because the attack was so lethal. Bill Bennett said yesterday that maybe one person in each school should be armed. Really? That’s going to help? We need MORE guns in schools? (BTW, there was an amazing story from the school nurse on 60 Minutes: During the attack she hid in a closet and didn’t emerge for nearly 4 hours. By that point it had long since been a national news story, and SWAT team members supposedly had combed every nook and cranny of the school. She finally came out, much to the surprise of the state police.) Here’s a link to my story from Friday. And here’s the story in today’s paper, headlined “Anguished Search for an Explanation.“ Excerpt: Slowly, amid rumor and misinformation, a picture of the killer is emerging, and it is dismayingly familiar. Adam Lanza was yet another young, withdrawn, middle-class male who for some unimaginable reason graduated from his adolescence as a mass murderer. What happened Friday in Newtown, Conn., was a variant on what the country has witnessed repeatedly in recent years. Once again, it was a pseudo-commando attack, as if the killer were playing a video game and racking up points for every victim. Once again, the crime appeared to be staged for maximum shock value. And once again — just as in Aurora, Colo., this past summer — there was the element of overkill, with multiple weapons, a military-style rifle and massive amounts of ammunition. Lanza, 20, shot his mother, Nancy Lanza, at home, and then invaded Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he killed 20 first-graders and six adults, firing 30-round clips from a .223 Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle before taking his own life. How many bullets? “Hundreds,” Connecticut State Police Lt. J. Paul Vance said Sunday. Detectives recovered evidence at the Lanza home that might help explain the killer’s thinking, but authorities have not revealed what they found. For the moment, the Newtown massacre remains as inexplicable as it is horrifying. “We don’t have a specific reason,” Vance said. The location and lethality of the Newtown tragedy, and the preciousness of the victims, have turned the holiday season into a period of national soul-searching and calls for action to curb gun violence. Newtown dominated the Sunday talk shows. President Obama flew to Connecticut to join the mourning, and people nationwide revisited with new urgency the complex issues of gun laws, mental illness and access to mental health care. The Newtown discussion necessarily sweeps in the news media, which give the killers a notoriety they couldn’t have achieved legitimately. The discussion touches on Hollywood, which markets spectacular make-believe violence. Also implicated: The computer gaming industry, which profits from ultra-realistic shooting games that are bloodier than ever. “I point the finger unreservedly at the entertainment industry, which has spawned and cultivated gaming that by design is increasingly real, geared to action as the shooter’s point of view, increasingly dehumanizes victims, and increasingly rewards players by how many they kill,” said Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist and chairman of the Forensic Panel, who works on more than 20 homicide cases a year. Although the profile of the mass shooter is often a familiar one, that is true only after the fact — when it’s too late. And the overwhelming majority of young men who play violent video games and are social misfits do not commit any crimes at all, much less shoot up a grade school. How does society tell the truly dangerous ones from the ones who are just a little weird? “We’re not even good at predicting minor violence. When you’re talking about preventing a mass shooting, that’s a needle in a haystack,” said Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. “You can’t just go out and lock up all the socially awkward young men in the world.” [Click here for take 2 of story]

Richard Cohen: Bloomberg’s crusades mean more people will die

Question: What do the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union have in common? Answer: The determination to stop New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg from having his way with guns. The NRA defends the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. The ACLU defends the Fourth Amendment’s constraints on “stop- and-frisk.” Between the two, guns will remain on the street and more people will die. The numbers are irrefutable. Last year, 419 New Yorkers were murdered, mostly by gunfire. In 1992, the figure was 1,995. That works out to approximately four fewer New Yorkers a day who were not killed by guns. Yes, crime has fallen across America, but nowhere has the drop approached New York City’s. Some of that is due to whiz-bang policing, computers and all that jazz. But some of it is due to stop-and-frisk. There are simply fewer guns on the street. (The New York Police Department estimates that in 1993, “as many as 2 million illegal guns were in circulation in New York City,” many of them imported from Virginia.) Rightly or wrongly — a court will ultimately decide — the city’s stop-and- frisk program has collided with the Fourth Amendment’s injunction against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” More controversially, U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin has ruled that the program is racial profiling at its most pernicious and that, too, is illegal. After all, of an incredible 4.4 million stops, an overwhelming number were of black or Hispanic men — and resulted in relatively few arrests. It did not seem to matter to the judge that an equally overwhelming number of both assailants and victims were also black and Hispanic men. Her gavel came down. The city was guilty. It may well be. The issue before the court was not the effectiveness of stop- and-frisk but its constitutionality. I have zero faith in the impartiality of this particular judge — she seemed determined to embody the conservative stereotype of a liberal, activist judge — but her reading of the Constitution is hardly bizarre. Repressive police measures can often depress crime, but at considerable cost to our civil liberties and our sense of community. Still, the very same people who insist on an unforgiving interpretation of the Fourth Amendment and, more to my point, an unforgivably dense interpretation of racial statistics, wail when the same strict standard is applied to the Second Amendment. They use common sense to argue that the Founding Fathers could not have intended for every George Zimmerman to stalk the night, packing heat. There were 11,078 people killed by guns in 2010 and an additional 19,392 used guns to commit suicide. This is hardly the militia that the Founding Fathers intended. The same holds for racial profiling. The numbers are proof not of racism but of a lamentable fact: Black and Hispanic men are disproportionately stopped because they are disproportionally the perpetrators of gun crime. The four persons a day that have not been killed by guns are statistically not white. They are black or Hispanic. Mike Bloomberg is driven by metrics, and his numbers are generally pretty good. The city’s crime rate is way down. Park acreage is way up. Vast sections of the city have been spruced up, huge numbers of housing units have been added, bike lanes have multiplied — and smoking, I think, is punishable by death. Much of the good stuff is a consequence of lower crime rates. The mayor can rattle off streets that have come back to life — stores, restaurants, housing and all of them paying taxes. Reducing crime saves lives. It also brings in money. New Yorkers may be tired of Bloomberg after three terms, but he has, I contend, done a bang-up job. His major failure, though, may well turn out to be his war on guns. He has put his money into defeating pro-gun Democratic members of Congress, and he adamantly defends stop-and-frisk, especially from the charge of racism. His national anti-gun initiative has largely gone nowhere, and now his stop-and- frisk program may be coming to an end. In both cases, Bloomberg has failed to appreciate the political dimension of what he was attempting. The conservative political culture adores guns, and the liberal culture of a city that has grown accustomed to a low crime rate endorses a simplistic notion of racism. Both sides have, so to speak, stuck to their guns — and, as a result, more people will die. _Read more fromRichard Cohen’s archive._ **Read more on this topic:** Ruth Marcus: Justice served on ‘stop and frisk’ policies The Post’s View: Fixing New York’s flawed ‘stop and frisk’ policing Richard Cohen: The invasive police strategy that pacified New York Michael Bloomberg: ‘Stop and frisk’ is not racial profiling Katrina vanden Heuvel: A populist uprising in New York

Newtown and the fog of incomplete information

Four hours after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn, a designated spokesman, armed with talking points provided by law enforcement or informed by media reports, might have said all or most of the following: All of the above statements, published within hours of the shooting, are wrong. I cite these misstatements not as a knock against the media or the law enforcement sources that fed journalists these accounts. An unimaginable tragedy exploded in our midst. Many were slaughtered within easy reach of our global communications center, with no language, time or cultural barriers. And yet, in the early stages, people got a lot of it wrong. Days later, the motive of the suspected gunman, Adam Lanza, remains unknown. Now switch to Benghazi, a world away. In the fog of an armed assault, four are left dead in restricted space with local sources limited by language and reliability. Yet, when the Washington account of the attack, presented five days later and based upon official talking points, turned out to be inaccurate on certain points, charges of lying and attempts to mislead were flung around in Washington with reckless abandon. “I don’t trust her,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. With all the investigative resources at our disposal, we still don’t have the full Sandy Hook story, three days later. Another headlong, and heedless, rush to judgment.

Sandy Hook shooting: How can we protect our kids in a culture that accepts guns?

We live in a society that makes it very, very easy to kill kids, although we want to pretend that isn’t true. The 20 young children gunned down inside Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday were swaddled in federally regulated, fire-retardant blankets, rode in elaborate car seats plastered with safety stickers, and learned to ride bikes with elbow pads, knee guards and safety helmets. Some of them may never have had a Twinkie pass their lips. Cribs, bouncy seats, cough medicine, scooters, sugary snacks — we have no problem regulating the life out of those. But how do we keep our children safe in their kindergarten classrooms when we live in a culture that has persuaded itself to accept guns? Parents across the nation were undone by this tragedy. The president had to stop and wait, wait until his urge to sob had passed when he spoke of the “beautiful little kids” killed in Newtown, Conn., on Friday morning. All day long, my Facebook feed had parents changing their profile pictures to their little ones. One friend left work early to surprise her kids. Another said she just has “to pause and bow down in prayer” for the children who died and those who witnessed it. What has happened to our culture that we even have this category — school shootings — by which to measure a horror that should otherwise be inconceivable, immeasurable and unfathomable? The dead are children who just wrote Christmas letters to Santa asking for Mario Wii games or American Girl dolls. They are kids who unwrapped a Princess Barbie or a remote control car for Hanukkah while Grandma wondered if it wasn’t too much. We worry about the hormones in their milk, the violence in “Spongebob Squarepants,” and yet this country tolerates the existence of a military-style assault weapon built for no purpose other than killing lots of people on a battlefield — fast. People will continue to say that the right to bear arms is written into our Constitution. It’s a sticker on a truck, a political statement swathed in red, white and blue, a stand on tradition, individualism and a huge gun lobby soaked in cash and merciless about winning, winning, winning. “This latest terrible tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School is no fluke,” said Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund. “It is a result of the senseless, immoral neglect of all of us as a nation to fail to protect children instead of guns and to speak out against the pervasive culture of violence. It is up to us to stop these preventable tragedies.” President Obama also spoke to this disease in our nation, where mass shootings are now routine. “As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it is an elementary school in Newtown or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago, these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods and these children are our children,” he said. “And we’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” But America already knows how this is going to go. We’re getting scary good at this. There will be school counselors and vigils and maybe some protests. We will all hug our kids extra-hard. I don’t know whether I’m going to be able to let my kindergartner and third-grader go to their sleepover this weekend. I am too shaken to let them out of my sight. There will be great work done by reporters in the next few weeks, uncovering how the shooter was able to get his hands on the weapons. Schools will reexamine safety procedures. It might get even harder for the babysitter to come pick up a child or for Mom to drop off a forgotten lunch. And parents will agree to whatever draconian new measures are imposed, because what else can we do? The drills for surviving a school shooting will now begin in kindergarten. Or maybe preschool. Sandy Hook will become a database entry, next to Columbine and Stockton and Virginia Tech. But nothing will change when it comes to guns in America. That is something rotten and infected in our culture. And it breaks my heart, at least 27 different ways. For previous columns, go to washingtonpost.com/dvorak.

Connecticut report: Motive still a mystery in Newtown elementary school massacre

A state investigation of last year’s elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., concluded that the shooter acted alone and had “significant mental health issues,” but investigators were unable to determine conclusively a motive for the attack or why he targeted the school. A 48-page report released Monday by Connecticut’s lead investigator in the case, State’s Attorney Stephen J. Sedensky III, said that Adam Lanza, 20, shot his mother four times with a .22-caliber rifle as she lay in bed in their Newtown home, then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School, which he had once attended. There, he forced his way in and used a Bushmaster XM15-E2S semiautomatic 5.56mm rifle to kill 26 more people — 20 children and six adults — and wound two other adults before committing suicide with a Glock 10mm handgun as police closed in. Lanza “acted alone and was solely criminally responsible for his actions of that day,” the report said. “Moreover, none of the evidence developed to date demonstrates probable cause to believe that any other person conspired with the shooter to commit these crimes or aided and abetted him in doing so.” Therefore, it said, “there will be no state criminal prosecution as result of these crimes” and “the investigation is closed.” The report added: “The obvious question that remains is: ‘Why did the shooter murder twenty-seven people, including twenty children?’ Unfortunately, that question may never be answered conclusively, despite the collection of extensive background information on the shooter through a multitude of interviews and other sources. The evidence clearly shows that the shooter planned his actions, including the taking of his own life, but there is no clear indication why he did so, or why he targeted Sandy Hook Elementary School.” ![Sandy Hook](http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_296w/2010-2019/Wires/Images/2013-11-25/AP/Connecticut_School_Shooting-0397c.jpg) Lanza “had significant mental health issues that affected his ability to live a normal life and to interact with others,” the report said. But he “did not recognize or help himself deal with those issues,” it said. “What contribution this made to the shootings, if any, is unknown as those mental health professionals who saw him did not see anything that would have predicted his future behavior.” Lanza was familiar with and had access to guns and ammunition and had “an obsession with mass murders,” notably the April 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, the report said. However, he gave no indication “that he intended to commit such a crime himself,” the investigators found. Authorities had previously determined that Lanza fired 154 shots with the Bushmaster within five minutes. He took the weapon, the commercial version of the M-16 military assault rifle, and three other firearms from the home of his divorced mother, Nancy Lanza, who had assembled an arsenal in the house on the outskirts of Newtown. “All of the firearms were legally purchased by the shooter’s mother,” Sedensky’s report said. The Dec. 14 massacre prompted a national outcry, leading to calls for tighter gun laws and increased school security. President Obama urged Congress to pass legislation requiring universal background checks on firearms purchases, banning the sale of assault weapons and limiting the capacity of ammunition magazines to 10 rounds. But the National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress mounted a campaign against any new gun-control legislation, and a bill that would have expanded background checks was defeated in the Senate. The long-awaited report by Sedensky, the Danbury state’s attorney, did not include the full state police evidence file. A Connecticut law passed this year in response to the massacre prohibits the release of photographs, video and other images of homicide victims if the material might invade their privacy or that of their surviving family members. Sedensky has gone to court to fight release of the 911 tapes from Sandy Hook and has resisted calls from Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy (D) to divulge more information sooner, the Associated Press reported. The news agency has waged a legal battle for the release of the tapes. New Britain Superior Court Judge Eliot Prescott said Monday that he will listen to the 911 recordings before ruling on whether they can be publicly released, AP reported. According to Monday’s report, the first Newtown police officer arrived at the school less than four minutes after the initial 911 call, which was received shortly after 9:35 a.m. A minute after the officer arrived, Lanza shot himself in the head, and police waited nearly five minutes more before entering the school. At the house where Lanza and his mother lived, investigators found black trash bags taped over the windows of his bedroom and a computer room. A computer hard drive was intentionally damaged, and information from it has not been recovered. However, the investigators found that Adam Lanza spent considerable time playing video games — both violent and nonviolent — and that he was preoccupied with mass shootings. Among the belongings found at the home was “a spreadsheet with mass murders over the years listing information about each shooting,” the report said. Also found were two videos showing suicide by gunshot, a computer game called “School Shooting” in which the player controls a character who enters a school and shoots at students, images of Lanza holding a handgun and a rifle to his head, and a five-second video dramatization depicting children being shot. In addition, the report said, there were “materials regarding the topic of pedophilia and advocating for rights for pedophiles,” although “not child pornography.” The report said that in 2005, Lanza was found to have Asperger’s syndrome, with “significant social impairments and extreme anxiety,” as well as a lack of empathy and “very rigid thought processes.” It mentioned that he had obsessive-compulsive disorder and “couldn’t stand to be touched.” But he refused to take medication or undergo behavioral therapy. He had a cellphone but never used it, and stopped talking to his mother at some point, communicating with her only by e-mail even though they were living in the same house. An autopsy found that Lanza, 6 feet tall and 112 pounds at the time of his death, had no drugs in his system.

‘Surely, we can do better than this’

A key piece of my post on the horror at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday turned out to be wrong: Adam Lanza did not enter the kindergarten classroom where his mother taught. She had no connection to the school. She wasn’t even there when he killed her. Now that we know Lanza murdered his mother at home then shot his way into the school only compounds the disbelief and revulsion of such an unfathomable act. Nor were the children Lanza murdered between the ages of 5 and 10 years old, as we first thought. As the front page of Sunday’s Post and New York Times made dramatically clear, most of Lanza’s targets were just 6 and 7 years old. That they sustained multiple wounds, that Lanza had a semi-automatic weapon, two handguns and hundreds of bullets at the ready, that he stopped to kill himself only upon hearing the approach of first-responders broadens the scope of this tragedy far beyond our fears. E. J. Dionne is right: This time has to be different. Yes, President Obama must lead on this issue. But his voice must be the loudest among many. Whatever action he takes must be backed up by a Congress unshackled from its bipartisan fear of the National Rifle Association. This is where Michael Bloomberg comes in. In the blunt-spoken mayor of New York City, we have an anti-illegal guns advocate who is unafraid to take on the NRA. That he is a billionaire gives him the financial power to put his money where his mouth is and to attempt to match the financial power of the NRA. Said billions also give Bloomberg the independence to tell the gun lobby to stuff it. This year he started Independence USA PAC, a super PAC that has as one of its goals electing members of Congress who will crack down on illegal guns. Mayors Against Illegal Guns is a Bloomberg creation that now has a coalition of more than 700 mayors from across the country. Oh, Bloomberg hasn’t been shy about slamming Obama and other elected officials who haven’t used their power to make us safer from gun violence. But now it’s time for all of us to join in the effort. There is a right to bear arms, but no right is absolute. So, when an elementary school is no longer sacrosanct, the laws must change. As @stone_circle tweeted late Sunday afternoon, “Guns are not SACRED. Children ARE.” “We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change,” the president said last night in Newtown, Conn. “We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society, but that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely we can do better than this.” Yes, we can. Yes, we must. It starts with him. It continues with us. _FollowJonathan Capehart on Twitter. _

‘Guns don’t kill people, toddlers do’: The shocking new gun-control PSA focused on children

There are numerous proposals floating around Congress for reducing America’s gun violence epidemic, including: Shutting down online gun sales. Strengthening background checks. And banning people on the terrorist watch list from purchasing firearms. But in its latest PSA, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has introduced a solution for ending gun-related deaths that you’ve probably never considered: Cracking down on America’s toddlers. “Americans are shot by toddlers at least once a week,” the one-minute video notes. We need to lock them up. Not the guns — that’s just un-American. Round them up. Deport them. Get them out of our country. And keep them away from guns.” The idea of deporting toddlers is clearly satirical, but the organization claims that it highlights an actual problem. “This PSA is satire,” Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign, said. “But the public health crisis it calls attention to is anything but. Whether the trigger is pulled by a toddler, a convicted felon, domestic abuser, or terrorist, we have a problem in America with guns too easily falling into the wrong hands. And that translates to hundreds of lives lost or changed forever every single day.”  Researchers relied on several sources of information, including news reports, public sources and data collected by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonpartisan research group, the paper reported. What did researchers discover? “During the first six months of this year, minors died from accidental shootings — at their own hands, or at the hands of other children or adults — at a pace of one every other day, far more than limited federal statistics indicate.” Researchers also concluded that, in at least one year, government statistics failed to capture the full extent of accidental gun deaths involving minors. In 2014, the study reported, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that 74 minors died from accidental discharges of firearms. The AP and USA Today review, however, put that number far higher, at 113, for the same year. “Deaths and injuries spike for children under 5, with 3-year-olds the most common shooters and victims among young children,” USA Today reported. “Nearly 90 3-year-olds were killed or injured in the shootings, the vast majority of which were self-inflicted.”  According to Ingraham: The AP and USA Today analysis found that states in the Deep South — places like Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Georgia — have some of the highest per capita rates of accidental shootings involving minors. “The extent of the problem is a little bit shocking,” Lindsay Nichols, an attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence in San Francisco, told USA Today. “The extent of the undercount is a little bit shocking. A lot of it provides further evidence that this is such a horrible pattern that continues and that more action is needed.”  Investigators believe that Jeremiah Banks woke up just before 3 a.m. and went into his parents’ bedroom, where he found his father’s handgun on a dresser. The boy went into the living room, police said, and shot himself in the head. “Detectives will meet with the Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office (LCSAO) in the near future and review the case for possible charges,” police said. “The mother and father are not in police custody.”

My son was killed at Sandy Hook. We need to do more to prevent another Charleston.

June 17 was the last day of school at Sandy Hook Elementary. My Facebook news feed was filled with pictures of smiling children looking forward to the fun summer days ahead. One picture in particular made me cry. A group of boys, many of them familiar faces, had just finished third-grade. They were my son Dylan’s classmates, but Dylan wasn’t in the picture. Dylan was killed in his first grade classroom on Dec. 14, 2012, alongside 19 other first graders and six educators. While I continue to be grateful for the children and adults who survived that day, sadness and anger overcome me each time I see pictures like these. Dylan should be there, too. Schools should be safe places. That night, my news feed filled with another tragedy. Nine worshipers were killed at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. My heart breaks for the victims, their families and their community.  Sympathy, compassion and love are fundamentally required. But broken hearts do not make change. While the motives for this hate crime may be very different from the crime that took my son from me, there are similarities. Access to firearms. Mental health issues. Ignored signs that violence was imminent. And the destruction of yet another seemingly safe place. Are we honestly surprised? Every year in the U.S., 500,000 acts of gun violence are committed — including homicide, suicide and injury. Almost 90 people dying every day. Are there any safe places left in America? When did we become a country that accepts this level of daily violence? How many times can we watch the news filled with these preventable horrors and then look away to get on with our own lives, all the while hoping that the next news story isn’t about our town?  How much longer are we going to incorrectly believe that we cannot do anything about gun violence? We must reject the narrative that it is hopeless and we are helpless. These acts of violence are preventable and there are actions we can all take in our own homes and community to make a difference. In 70 percent of all gun violence acts (including suicides), at least one other person was told an act of violence would be committed. We need to educate ourselves, and our children about the warning signs. And we need to train ourselves to reach out to trusted adults when we hear or see threats. No person should be afraid to go to church, school, a movie theater, a grocery store or just walk down the street and wonder if they might not ever go home again. I refuse to accept that our public spaces are dangerous. I refuse to teach my surviving son to live his life in fear of other people. We are not an unsafe country.  But we are failing as a society to look after each other, intervene and get people help. We are failing to deal with the toxic combination that we see in acts of violence. Sometimes it’s irrational fear, hatred and racism. But for many Americans who lack the skills to cope with stress and anger, or for the very few with severe mental illness, easy access to a firearm leads to tragic loss. And make no mistake, the ripple effects that damage families and communities reverberate over a lifetime.

A Father’s Day gift for kids: Protect them from gun violence

_Mark Barden is advocacy director of Sandy Hook Promise. David Wheeler is a volunteer for the organization. Their sons Daniel Barden, 7, and Benjamin Wheeler, 6, were among the victims of the Dec. 14, 2012, shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School._ __ This is the second Father’s Day we will have spent without our sons Daniel and Ben, who were murdered a year and a half ago at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. But unlike last Father’s Day, when we grieved quietly, passing the day in solemn remembrance with our families and surviving children, this Father’s Day we feel compelled to speak out. What has changed since the Sandy Hook shooting? There have been74 more school shootings, according to the group Everytown for Gun Safety, which tracks news of firearms being discharged at schools as a result of assaults, homicides, suicides and accidental firings. Seventy-four, including tragedies such as those just this month in Seattle and Troutdale, Ore. How could that number not make you outraged? Incensed? Incredulous? How is it that after our beautiful sons were murdered, along with 18 of their classmates and six brave adults, we have seen no major federal policy passed to address this problem? Why is it that we now see summer not as a time of celebration and vacation but as a relief from having to read about new school shootings because kids are no longer at school or on campus? And now so many school shootings later, with so many families facing the same agony and pain we face this Father’s Day, we have to ask a question. In a first-of-its-kind live Tumblr forum last week, President Obama expressed his frustration that we as a nation have not been able to make more progress on reducing gun violence by keeping guns out of the hands of those who choose to inflict “unbelievable damage.” The president recalled seeing the face of Richard Martinez, who lost his son last month in the mass shooting near the University of California at Santa Barbara, and said, “As a father myself, I just could not understand the pain he must be going through.” He spoke about the “primal scream that he [Martinez] gave out. Why aren’t we doing something about this?” We understand that pain all too well. But before Dec. 14, 2012, we didn’t think it could happen to us, despite seeing reports of other gun violence and hanging our heads in this same disbelief. Richard Martinez didn’t think it would happen to him. The families who lost loved ones to the shootings since Santa Barbara didn’t think it would happen to them. They now join the terrible club of parents who have lost children to gun violence, a club that grows by thousands every year. Our question is the same: Why aren’t we doing something about this? We know that Father’s Day is meant to be a day when fathers sit back on their couches, watch sports and take it easy. But this Father’s Day, we ask you to do one thing differently. Look at your children, your beautiful, growing, pesky children who bring you so much joy and sometimes cause you so much heartache, and ask yourself — really ask yourself — this: Am I doing everything I can to keep them safe? Because the answer to that question, if we all answer honestly, clearly is no. We believe we have reached the tipping point, but it is up to all of us — people of good faith and conscience — to make our voices known. There is wide popular support for the common-sense solutions that we know can make a difference, from comprehensive mental-health reform and expanded background checks to better gun safety solutions. But only a small, vocal minority speaks out beyond the polls. Since the shooting that took our children, we have been working with Sandy Hook Promise to advance common-sense legislation that could prevent incidences of gun violence and educate Americans on the causes of gun violence — with a focus on mental wellness, community connectedness and gun safety. We do this because it gives us hope. We do this to honor the children we’ve lost, and those who survive, because we believe that fathers inspired to work together can overcome their political differences and sweep away this sense of powerlessness. So this Father’s Day, do one thing you didn’t do last Father’s Day that will ensure the safety and protection of your children. Join us at Sandy Hook Promise, join another group working for this cause or take action on your own. Send one postcard, one e-mail, one text. And then go hug your kids a little tighter and cherish every moment you have with them. **Read more:** Danny Franklin: Framing the danger of guns as a public health risk will change the debate over gun control Fred Hiatt: Searching for the tipping point on gun control E.J. Dionne: The gun supremacists’ folly

Gunfire at Columbine reverberates in recent slayings

It was a Tuesday morning in April 1999. Wearing full-length trenchcoats, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School, hiding guns, knives and bombs. A witness heard Harris yell: “Go! Go!” The two pulled guns from beneath their coats and the 45-minute massacre ensued. They moved down the hallways, firing shots and pitching pipe bombs at classmates. Less than an hour after the nightmare began, Harris and Klebold had murdered 12 students and one teacher, injured dozens of others and then killed themselves. Within a few years, it became apparent that this tragedy that traumatized the nation would have even darker repercussions. There were indications that this mass murder had inspired a new generation of killers to commit copycat crimes or, at the very least, use it as a reference point in their twisted minds as they planned their own attacks. Sociologist Ralph Larkin found that Columbine gave new meaning to rampage shootings. Unlike killings before them, Harris and Klebold’s attack had a political quotient. Many murderers — or attempted ones — since have referred to Columbine as an inspiration.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Among them was Adam Lanza. The 20-year-old had an obsession with mass murderers — in particular, the two who forever changed Columbine High School. Before his 2012 attack, police later discovered, he had downloaded surveillance footage of a school shooting in Cleveland, video of a mall shooting and of a gunshot suicide — and videos about Harris and Klebold.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday But Lanza’s plans were bigger than theirs. He murdered his mother before terrorizing Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., killing 20 children and six adults. Then, like those before him, he killed himself. In both rampages in the past week — one in Seattle and one in Las Vegas — the shooters had a preoccupation with Columbine, according to police and people who knew them.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Aaron Ybarra, who was jailed last week in connection with the killing of a student at Seattle Pacific University, was obsessed with Columbine — even visiting the site prior to his attack.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday The married couple, Jerad and Amanda Miller, who allegedly killed two cops and a civilian in Las Vegas on Monday, reportedly told a neighbor they planned a Columbine-style attack. They have also been linked to white supremacist and neo-Nazi rants.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday In Larkin’s 2009 study, which was published in American Behavioral Scientist, he said Columbine influenced subsequent rampage shootings in several ways. He wrote:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday “Klebold and Harris were overtly political in their motivations to destroy their school. In their own words, they wanted to ‘kick-start a revolution’ among the dispossessed and despised students of the world. They understood their pain and humiliation were shared by millions of others and conducted their assault in the name of a larger collectivity.” The Millers called for a revolution as well. The couple ambushed Las Vegas police officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo as the men were eating lunch Sunday at a CiCi’s Pizza. Jerad Miller walked up and reportedly shot Soldo in the back of the head. Then they turned on Beck, who tried to fire back, but had suffered too many gunshot wounds. The Millers covered Beck with a Revolutionary War-era flag that read “Don’t Tread on Me” and placed a swastika on his body. The Gadsden flag has been associated with the American Tea Party movement and, by some, with the Confederacy. The couple then pinned a note to Soldo’s body that stated, “This is the beginning of the revolution.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday From there, the couple invaded a nearby Wal-Mart. Jerad Miller raised a handgun, fired a round and shouted, “Get out. This is a revolution. The police are on the way.” It wasn’t until after Sunday’s slayings that neighbors at the Millers’ apartment complex reportedly revealed something disturbing: The duo had plans for a mass shooting. Brandon Moore, a resident of the complex, told the Las Vegas Sun, “They were handing out white-power propaganda and were talking about doing the next Columbine.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday So was Ybarra. Though the 26-year-old apparently masked his demons well, he confided in a counselor during summer 2012 that he could hear the voice of a long-dead Columbine killer “telling him to hurt people,” the Seattle Times reported. Sometimes the voices scared him, he said. Still, he told his counselor he identified with Harris.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Then last Thursday, Ybarra allegedly opened fire, killing one and wounding several others before a Seattle Pacific student pepper-sprayed him, got him in a chokehold and took him to the ground. Police said he was armed with more than 50 shotgun shells. The Columbine thread runs through a series of other recent slayings. Natalie Carpenter threatened “mass carnage” at Columbine High School last year.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday John LaDue, who idolized the killers, planned to massacre junior and senior high school students in Minnesota on this year’s April 20 anniversary of the Columbine shootings.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Darion Aguilar, who went on a rampage earlier this year at a shopping mall in Maryland, uploaded a photo of himself clad in cargo pants and boots to social media before killing two skateboard store employees at 11:14 a.m. — when the Columbine slayings started.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday “Aguilar’s weapon, attire, backpack containing explosives, and method of suicide were all similar to those used in the Columbine incident,” a police report stated.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Larkin said, in essence, the Columbine killers gave those after them a sense of mission. “Klebold and Harris, in their spectacular assault on Columbine High School, gave a voice to outsiders, to loser students, to those left out of the mainstream, to the victims of jock and ‘prep’ predation,” he wrote. “To a persecuted and angry student who wishes to attack his school and community, such social policies are an invitation and a dare. To such a student, payback consists of killing convenient targets, making a statement, and dying in a blaze of glory.”

NRA-backed federal limits on gun lawsuits frustrate victims, their attorneys

A legal shield written by Congress to benefit the firearms industry is posing unexpected hurdles for parents in Newtown, Conn., and victims of other mass shootings, who want to use the courts to hold gun makers accountable and push them to adopt stricter safety standards. The law, approved in 2005 after intense lobbying by the National Rifle Association, grants gun companies rare protection from the kind of liability suits that have targeted many other consumer product manufacturers. It was introduced amid a wave of lawsuits brought by city governments, which argued that gun companies had created a “public nuisance” by encouraging the proliferation of weapons. Advocates for gun makers said such suits threatened to destroy the industry and imperil Americans’ constitutional right to bear arms. But over the past eight years, the legal shield has increasingly been used to block a different stripe of legal action — suits brought by victims and their families alleging that gun makers had failed to equip their firearms with proper safeguards or that gun dealers sold weapons improperly. Attorneys for victims of mass shootings, such as the massacre Dec. 14 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown and last summer’s rampage in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater, say they have been surprised by the legal constraints they would face in challenging the gun industry. “It makes no logical sense. . . . If their wallets were threatened, they would have a greater interest in making firearms safer,” said Veronique Pozner, whose 6-year-old son, Noah, was one of the 20 children killed at Sandy Hook. Pozner, who has been eyeing a lawsuit, has been discussing the gun industry’s protections with a lawyer she and other Newtown parents recently retained. “I am looking at anything that can be done to prevent this from happening to another family,” she said in an interview this week, describing the searing memories of her fallen son. “I don’t want his life to be a statistical blip.” Pozner said she wants to press the maker of the semiautomatic rifle used in the crime, alleging it failed to install a high-tech safety device that might have prevented Adam Lanza from firing the gun, which he took from his mother. Marc Bern, a New York trial lawyer representing family members of Aurora victims, said the gun law severely limited his clients’ options. He is pursuing a case against the movie theater company, although some of his clients had expressed interest in trying to pursue companies that provided guns or ammunition to the shooter. “We looked at the gun industry, but they were able to insulate themselves with this law,” Bern said. “It is absolutely outrageous that the gun industry is not accountable when virtually every other industry in this country is accountable.” Officials from the NRA and the gun industry defend the law as necessary to protect U.S. companies from costly, and what they see as unfair, litigation that seeks to blame manufacturers and sellers for crimes they did not commit. Attorneys for victims in Newtown and other recent shootings, however, say they do not necessarily seek to hold gunmakers liable because a gun was used to commit a crime. These lawyers say they are seeking safety improvements, like those that resulted from decades of suits against the auto industry, which argued that car makers could be liable for damages if they failed to adopt feasible safety measures. And just as legal action helped lead automakers to add seat belts and air bags, potential litigants in gun cases say they want firearms makers to add readily available safety features, such as biometric locks that would allow a gun to be fired only by its licensed owner. Yet when plaintiffs have brought a variety of lawsuits against gun companies and dealers, they have run up against the industry’s unusual liability shield. In 2009, for instance, the Illinois Supreme Court rejected claims by the family of a child killed by his 13-year-old friend, who was playing with his father’s loaded Beretta 9mm pistol. The family argued that the gun’s design was flawed because the device meant to register ammunition in the chamber was inadequate and that the company should be held responsible. But the court ruled that the company was protected by the industry’s legal shield. Now, the massacre at Sandy Hook is focusing new attention on the gun liability law, called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. Some Democrats in Congress are pushing legislation, sponsored by Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), to roll back the law and make it easier for suits against the gun industry to proceed. Lawrence G. Keane, general counsel of the Newtown-based National Shooting Sports Foundation, the industry’s trade organization, noted that Congress adopted the law with “overwhelming” majorities and predicted that any repeal effort would fizzle. “It’s not going to happen,” said Keane, who lobbied for the shield and displays a picture of President George W. Bush signing the law on the wall of his office, just a few miles from Sandy Hook. “Suing law-abiding firearms manufacturers for the criminal misuse by third parties of firearms that were lawfully sold amounts to suing Ford for drunk-driving accidents.” The law prohibits suits against gun dealers and manufacturers “for the harm caused by those who criminally or unlawfully misuse firearm products.” It applies not only to federal courts, but also actions at the state and local levels. Although far-reaching, the law allows liability suits to proceed in rare cases where a manufacturer or seller knowingly broke federal laws governing the sale and marketing of guns and in cases involving an alleged defect in the design or manufacture of the weapon, such as a malfunctioning trigger. Advocates for gun companies say the law is working properly if it is thwarting suits that seek to find fault with law-abiding gun sellers or makers. “Since its enactment, we have seen state and federal courts across the country dismiss personal injury and wrongful death lawsuits arising out of criminal or unlawful firearm use because it is simply unfair to hold manufacturers and distributors responsible for the wrongful acts of others,” said Craig A. Livingston, a California lawyer who has represented gun manufacturers, including Beretta in the Illinois case. “While legitimate product liability suits are being allowed to proceed, those in which an injury or death was caused by the intentional discharge of a firearm are not. That is exactly how Congress drew it up.” The NRA played a major role in securing passage of the law, besting other influential groups such as the American Bar Association, which had argued that the measure would infringe on the traditional right of Americans to seek redress in the courts. At the time of its passage, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre called the measure “the most significant piece of pro-gun legislation in 20 years,” adding that “history will show that this law helped save the American firearms industry from collapse under the burden of these ruinous and politically motivated lawsuits.” The vote in Congress came after a years-long effort by the NRA and its allies. The campaign drew on the support of the Bush administration, which weighed in with a White House memo backing the law as crucial to the economic well-being of an important industry and a letter from a top Pentagon lawyer saying the measure would help “safeguard our national security by limiting unnecessary lawsuits against an industry that plays a critical role in meeting the procurement needs of our men and women in uniform.” The liability exemption sets firearms apart from nearly every other industry. A handful of products have been granted limited immunity. Vaccine makers, for instance, have certain protections against suits from injured patients. Internet service providers are shielded from many suits over defamation or copyright infringement. Legal scholars say the breadth of the protections granted to the gun industry is rare for consumer product manufacturers. “To give a product manufacturing industry a substantial immunity is really distinctive,” said Robert L. Rabin, a Stanford University law professor who specializes in product liability cases. “The auto industry, the home supply industry, none of the industries that manufacture products that are ubiquitous in the market have that sort of insulation from liability.” John Goldberg, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in product liability, said the gun industry protections, although unusual, did not reflect a “dramatic taking away” of consumers’ rights. The success of safety-related lawsuits involving third-party crimes was never assured, he said. “If you didn’t have this statute, would the plaintiffs always win? I don’t think so,” Goldberg said. The constitutionality of the liability shield is being tested in a case pending before the Alaska Supreme Court, alleging that a gun store in Juneau should be held liable for the death of a shooting victim. In this case, family members of the victim say the store erred because the shooter, a drifter, left cash on the counter and then took the gun from the store without undergoing a required background check. Jonathan Lowy, director of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence’s Legal Action Project, who is arguing the Alaska case, says the lawsuit claims in part that the legal shield is unconstitutional because it infringes on the rights of state courts. The Obama administration, which has tangled with the NRA and the firearms industry over gun control, has filed a brief supporting the constitutionality of the legal shield’s reach at the state level, citing the Interstate Commerce Clause. Lowy said lawyers have to be creative in finding legal strategies to get around the shield. “You have to dig in the weeds to see there are still ways to bring causes of action,” he said. In a case involving a white supremacist who used a pair of guns to shoot up a Jewish community center and the surrounding neighborhood in Los Angeles in 1999,  a court dismissed the case brought by the family of one victim, a postal worker, against Glock, the U.S.-licensed maker of the pistol used to kill him. But four other victims, who survived, were able to press a lawsuit. They are suing a separate company, which produced the 9mm semiautomatic rifle used against them. The case was allowed to proceed because the Chinese manufacturer had no U.S. license and was not covered by the legal shield.

Biden: Gun-control laws may have saved children in Newtown

Vice President Biden gave an impassioned plea for Congress to double down on new gun-control measures, including an assault weapons ban, by suggesting the laws could have prevented some of the deaths in Newtown, Mass. "For all those who say we shouldn't and can't ban assault weapons," Biden said, also mentioning limiting the capacity of ammunition magazines. "How can they say that? Take a look at those 20 beautiful babies."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Biden, who met Thursday in New York with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Newtown families, said that if the gun-control measures would have saved just one life in Newtown, it would have been worth it. Biden also suggested that Adam Lanza might have been killed sooner had he had to spend more time reloading. "Think about Newtown," Biden said. "Think about how many of these children or teachers may be alive today had he had to reload three times as many times as he did." The assault weapons ban will not be part of the gun-control package that will be voted on in Congress and appears to be all but off the table at this point. But Biden and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough have both kept pushing for the ban.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

Homicides remain steady in District, Prince George’s

A year-end surge of fatal shootings pushed the District’s homicide count for 2014 over 100 for the second consecutive year since the city hit a half-century low of 88 in 2012. Early in December, city officials privately expressed hope that there would be fewer than 100 killings in 2014. Starting Dec. 10, the District went 12 days without a homicide. But eight people were fatally shot since Dec. 23, including four on Christmas Eve, bringing the total to 105. Although street violence remains a significant problem in the District and its suburbs, there was a grim theme through 2014: killings that were linked to domestic and family violence. Within that category is an even grimmer statistic: An unusual number of infants and young children were slain, most — according to police — by a parent or caregiver. In the District, at least 17 of last year’s victims were killed by relatives or others close to them, police said, up from 12 in 2013 and nine in 2012. Four of the victims were 3 years old or younger. Homicides investigated by Prince George’s County police dropped from 56 to 54, with 19 of those domestic-related and seven of those victims younger than 4. In Montgomery County, police investigated 18 homicides in 2014, more than double the eight cases from a year before. Among the victims, police said, were three children ages 1, 2 and 3. Cities across the country are confronting different trends in violent crime. In New York, the number of homicides continued to fall, reaching a little more than 320. With a population of about 8.4 million, that puts its per capita rate among the lowest in the country. It’s the equivalent of 25 killings in a city the size of Washington. The number of homicides remained steady in Philadelphia, rose in Boston (ending a four-year decline) and fell in Baltimore. Killings edged down in Chicago, although, according to news reports, gun violence went up. Violent crime jumped 12 percent in Los Angeles, the first increase in a decade, while the number of killings remained about the same, according to news reports. In the District, Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier identified the disturbing trend of domestic killings midway through 2014 when she noted a high number of women slain. The chief singled out the killing of a 31-year-old woman who police said was strangled and stabbed in front of her young son. “Horrible,” the chief said. Prince George’s State’s Attorney Angela Alsobrooks carries the names of the seven children slain in the county last year and reads them aloud at public meetings. “The deaths of the children keep me up at night,” Alsobrooks said. “To have a community where it’s possible to have seven children be murdered, something about that enrages me.” One child in Prince George’s was killed by a bullet fired into a home. A father is suspected of drugging his 3-year-old son. Police said another man slit the throat of his 3-year-old daughter before he was shot by officers. A mother is accused of suffocating her two children, ages 1 and 3, with plastic bags. Alsobrooks noted one case in which a man charged with killing a toddler by smashing his head into a wall said the boy had given him a look that “challenged his manhood.” Three infants killed in the District had not yet turned 1. A 3-year-old boy was beaten so severely that the first-degree murder charge filed against the mother’s boyfriend adds that the killing was “especially heinous, atrocious or cruel.” And a newborn was dismembered and later given a named by police — Baby Alvarado. In Montgomery, police say that a mother, along with her companion, stabbed her four children, killing a 1- and 2-year-old. The mother and companion told authorities that they were “Demon Assassins” cleansing the children of evil spirits. Of all child deaths, the county’s top prosecutor, John McCarthy, said, “You’re talking about complete innocence.” Two painful cases not on any homicide list involve children who remain missing but are now feared dead. Montgomery authorities suspect that Jacob and Sarah Hoggle, who were 2 and 3 years old when they disappeared, were killed by their mother, who suffers from mental illness. And D.C. police believe that Relisha Rudd, who disappeared at age 8, was killed by a janitor who befriended her at the shelter where she and her family lived. He was later found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The District also had an unusual number of children struck by stray bullets, as well as five homicide victims older than 70. Among them was former White House press secretary James S. Brady, 73, who was shot in the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and died Aug. 4. A medical examiner concluded that the decades-old bullet wound caused his death and ruled it a homicide. Police count such killings when the medical examiner makes a ruling, and thus Brady became the District’s 70th homicide of 2014. In Northern Virginia, music teacher Ruthanne Lodato was killed in February in a case police have linked to a suspected serial killer. She was among four people slain in Alexandria last year. Fairfax County counted six homicides, and there were six in Loudoun, including one in Leesburg. In Prince William County, the shooting deaths of two young people in Woodbridge caused particular concern in the community. A 16-year-old Woodbridge High student was killed in a case police said was drug-related, and a 19-year-old was slain about a week later. In the Virginia suburbs, there were also several cases in which women were slain and police said that husbands or boyfriends were responsible. Alsobrooks, the top prosecutor in Prince George’s, said the county is trying to reduce domestic violence by focusing its information campaign on reaching men, when for many years “we’ve only been talking to women.” She called that “an incomplete solution.” Police in the county have created a specialized domestic-violence unit that responds to calls and connects victims with social services. Despite the concerns, overall crime is down in Prince George’s and the District. It was not long ago that Prince George’s recorded annual homicide figures in the triple digits. Between 2000 and 2010, the county averaged 126 slayings a year. Homicides are now down nearly 40 percent compared with four years ago. Now, resources can be better focused on domestic disputes. “We’re now at a point to look more closely at things that have been issues but may have been overlooked because our crime numbers were so much higher in the past,” Prince George’s Police Chief Mark Magaw said. In addition to the cases investigated by county police in 2014, Laurel and Greenbelt each reported one homicide. In Montgomery, an additional homicide was investigated by Takoma Park police and another by federal authorities. Although killings rose in the District, it is a long way from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, when more than 450 were killed during some years. The number dropped to under 200 in 2004 and under 100 in 2012 for the first time since 1963. Among last year’s 104 victims were the 12 people killed in the mass shooting at the Navy Yard. Violent crime in the District has fallen, as have robberies, but assaults with guns were up. Incidents of property crime, such as theft, also increased. The homicide counts do not include those that were ruled justified. The District’s first homicide of 2014 had begun with a domestic dispute. Persistent arguments over her husband’s failure to help pay household bills prompted Claudia Hall, 53, to put Alphonso Cleveland out of their apartment in Northeast Washington. Their final argument — over an unpaid cable bill — came New Year’s Day, and it ended with Cleveland choking and stabbing Hall to death. “He took a good person from us,” said the victim’s sister, Irene Hall. Cleveland, initially charged with second-degree murder, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to serve nine years. The Halls liked to dance. Three sisters and a brother, each born a year apart, never missed a holiday. And so after a giddy News Year’s party on the Southwest Washington waterfront, Claudia Hall excitedly called each of them to relive the moment. “That was the last time Ms. Hall’s family was to hear her voice,” a prosecutor wrote in his sentencing memorandum. Irene Hall said that her sister’s life at home was difficult but that she never talked about it. “I don’t think about Alphonso so much,” Hall said. “I’m angry with him for all that he has done to this family and what he has taken from us. He took a good person, a lady who was prepared for life.” Although Hall doesn’t want to think of what her sister endured with her husband, she offers this sober advice: “Don’t be afraid to walk away.”

A teacher’s open letter to Congress: What kids need two years after Sandy Hook

Today is the second anniversary of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in which 20 children and six adults were killed by a gunman named Adam Lanza who then killed himself. There have been repeated calls since then for Congress to take some action to prevent more gun violence but none has been taken. Since the Dec. 14, 2012 Newtown killings, there have been more at least 44 school shootings on K-12 or college campuses in 24 states, according to a new report. In this post, Marie Corfield, a New Jersey art teacher, mother and activist, writes an open letter to elected officials asking them to do something, finally. Corfield gave me permission to publish this piece, which appeared on her blog.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico  Here’s what she wrote:  *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

After Sandy Hook: What can be done to curb gun violence in America?

**Matt Bennett:** After the catastrophe in Newtown, the gun debate has radically changed. Gun safety advocates, so long frozen out of the discussion in Washington, now suddenly have momentum on our side. Where before we were trying to thread a tiny needle—to find a small measure or two that could escape or survive the wrath of the NRA—now we are preparing to embark on a negotiation. Like any negotiation, both sides should come to the table with a list of demands. The NRA’s list is already clear: nothing. No new gun laws. On our side, some are proposing renewal of the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004. And renewing it with some updates would be an important step. As Brad Plumer has detailed, the ban would outlaw the sale of assault rifles like the one used at Sandy Hook, as well as high-capacity clips that allow such rapid carnage. That’s good, but it’s not enough. It’s been nearly 20 years since the last significant federal gun safety legislation. There is more we can do to reduce gun violence without infringing the rights of law-abiding gun owners. No new law is going to end gun crime or put a stop to future mass shootings. But now that the NRA has been forced into a negotiation, we should go in with a list of serious demands. **New to Think Tanked? FollowThink Tanked on Twitter.** **Roger Pilon:** The Newtown tragedy cries for a change in public policy, but if we’re serious about wanting to reduce the carnage from random mass shootings, stiffer gun control laws are no answer. Marginal gains might be had from, say, regulating gun show transactions or large round magazine sales. But as study after study has shown, no credible correlation can be drawn between such laws and gun violence. As in most such cases, the Newtown guns were legally obtained, after all. Our mental health policies doubtless need attention, but that’s a complex issue, fraught with civil liberties implications – like gun control itself. Self-defense is one of our oldest, most basic rights, as the Supreme Court held when it ruled that the Constitution protected the qualified right of individuals to own guns. That brings us to a practical answer that does have promise. The best protection against an unstable person with a gun is another person with a gun. That’s why the police have guns. But they can’t be everywhere. As they raced to the Sandy Hook School, or Virginia Tech, or Columbine, the killing of defenseless people continued. Yet as David Kopel shows in the Wall Street Journal, we have many examples, as recently as last week at a mall in Oregon, where ordinary citizens with handgun permits saved many lives. We’ve learned that the Sandy Hook principal “lunged” at the killer. Suppose she’d shot him. How many children would be alive today if she had? Gun-control advocates often recoil from such suggestions. Perhaps they believe we can confiscate 300 million guns from law-abiding citizens. That won’t happen. What we can do, if we’re serious, is reduce the risk with trained and armed people in otherwise “gun-free zones.” Do I wish it were otherwise? Yes. But it’s not. That’s the real world. **Donna Cooper:** Let’s face it: Nothing is certain. We often employ expensive cancer treatments with less than a 50 percent chance of success because it is imperative to use all the tools we have to save lives. Yet when it comes to measures to stop dangerous individuals from legally purchasing guns, the demand for guaranteed solutions paralyzes lawmakers. Since the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, there have been 21 more mass murder killings that have cut short 187 lives and injured at least 167 innocent victims. All of these mass shootings were committed by disturbed individuals who often used semi-automatic weapons. The facts of these tragedies suggest it’s time to get serious about mental health as one way of helping save lives. While most people suffering with mental illness are not dangerous, the National Threat Assessment Center finds that 78 percent of youth who gunned down others in school attacks had histories of suicide attempts or suicidal thoughts. Yet only 34 percent of these individuals ever had a mental health evaluation prior to the attack and a mere 17 percent had been previously diagnosed with a mental health or a behavioral disorder prior to the attack. This lack of professional intervention is especially troubling in light of the fact that from 2009 to 2011, states cumulatively cut more than $1.8 billion from their budgets for mental health services. And federal budget cuts are expected to take a much larger toll on services. We need well-funded public mental health protocols that mimic successful physical health strategies, including periodic check-ups, research and testing of new treatments and care for those diagnosed with illness. **John Hudak:** In the wake of the Newtown tragedy, President Obama wants to act, but can he? This question has sent media, analysts and citizens scrambling for answers since his words at the Memorial Vigil Sunday night: “…I’ll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement, to mental health professionals, to parents and educators, in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this…” In some ways, the president’s formal options to change policy in a direct way are quite limited. Yet, his informal powers to influence the media narrative, public opinion and Members of Congress may be the true source of his power in this arena. Presidents typically find the power to act in a direct way through power delegated from Congress or through vague provisions in federal or common law. However, in the context of gun control/rights, Congress and the courts have been clear and have offered the president little discretionary power. The president can direct the attorney general to increase enforcement of weapons trafficking and illegal sales. Yet, meaningful gun control policy must come from a legislative remedy rather than an executive one. Instead, the president can use the informal and persuasive powers of his office to try to move and shape legislative proposals to address this issue. He must work with and within Congress—rather than around Congress—to achieve his goals. Outside of gun control, the president can direct funding priorities (grants, contracts, etc.) toward research into mental health issues, school safety, and gun violence. This research can inform legislators as to the best solutions. In addition, the president can use what is learned from this tragedy to develop regulations related to the Affordable Care Act to maximize coverage, access, and treatment for mental health care. Beyond these areas, solutions generally require Congressional action. **What are your ideas on reducing gun violence? Share your thoughts below.**

It’s been 20 years since the Brady bill passed. Here are 11 ways gun politics have changed.

_Updated at 12:30 p.m._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which went into effect in 1994. The law -- named after James Brady, who was shot during an attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 -- made background checks a requirement for gun purchases from licensed dealers. From the law's passage until 2009 -- the latest year statistics are available -- over 107 million Brady-mandated background checks were conducted. Gun politics have also changed since the passage of the Brady bill. Here are a few notable examples. The New York Times did a study in December 2013 analyzing gun policy since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School the previous year, a year when 71 other children were killed by gun violence. Around the country, 1,500 state gun bills were proposed, 109 became law, and 70 of those new laws loosened existing gun legislation. According to a Gallup poll from January 30, 2014, 55 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with existing gun policy.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University 46 senators did.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Fifty-four senators were for it, 46 were against -- and it couldn't pass without a 60-vote threshold. Only 56 senators voted yes on the Brady bill. The background checks bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), would have required checks on all commercial gun sales, and was a part of the big federal push on gun violence policy after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. The president did sign 25 executive actions related to gun-violence prevention in 2013, however.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University In October 2013, 1 percent of respondents saw violence and crime as the most pressing issue in the country.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University In a 1993 Gallup survey, 55 percent of the country had a favorable opinion of the NRA. At the end of 2012, 54 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of them.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University In the 2011-2012 election cycle, they spent $24.8 million.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Gabby Giffords, who was shot at a constituent meeting in Arizona in 2011, started Americans for Responsible Solutions, a gun-control focused 501(c)4. The group raised nearly $12.5 million this year. Michael Bloomberg started Mayors Against Illegal Guns in 2006. The organization has spent nearly $2 million lobbying since its formation. According to the National Journal, "gun- control groups spent five times as much on federal lobbying in 2013 as they did the year before, but the NRA and others still outpaced them by more than 7-to-1."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University In 2013, 48 percent of Americans thought that.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University In 2011, about 9,900 people were murdered by guns, according to FBI data. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that 18,253 gun homicides happened in 1993, while 11,078 gun murders occurred in 2010.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University  _Must-reads:_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University "After government shutdown, dozens of lawmakers gave to charity" -- Ed O'Keefe, The Washington Post    *[WSU]: Wayne State University "Obama Launches Program for Disadvantaged Minority Youth" -- Carol E. Lee and Jared A. Favole, The Wall Street Journal    *[WSU]: Wayne State University "Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by GCHQ" -- Spencer Ackerman and James Ball, The Guardian    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

Toddlers have shot at least 23 people this year

But this type of thing happens more often than you might think. Since April 20, there have been at least seven instances in which a 1- , 2- or 3-year-old shot themselves or somebody else in the United States:  In the vast majority of cases, the children accidentally shoot themselves. That's happened 18 times this year, and in nine of those cases the children died of their wounds.   Looking at a map of where toddlers are pulling the trigger, some states stand out sharply. Georgia is home to the highest number of toddler shootings, with at least eight incidents since January 2015. Texas and Missouri are tied for second place with seven shootings each, while Florida and Michigan are tied for fourth, with six shootings apiece. You might think that toddler shootings are simply a function of population — the more people who live in an area, the more toddlers are likely to shoot someone. But that doesn't appear to be wholly the case. California and New York are two high-population states that have seen only three toddler shootings between them since 2015.   Perhaps other factors are at play as well. There could be cultural factors — norms surrounding gun use and ownership, for instance — that may make these shootings more likely in some areas than in others. Sussing out cause and effect in these cases, in other words, is still largely a guessing game. And it's a game made much more difficult by Congress's efforts to restrict the type of gun research that agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are allowed to conduct.  A table containing links to the sources for all shootings is below.

Children continue to be traumatized by shootings. When will America act?

ON SEPT. 28, 2016, there was a shooting on the playground of Townville Elementary School in South Carolina. A teacher and two students were shot, one of whom — a 6-year-old boy — later died. National media coverage was limited, a sad sign of how accustomed the country has become to these shootings, especially when “only” one child dies. But the damage from what happened on that playground in 12 deadly seconds extends far beyond those killed or wounded. That should further prod efforts to combat gun violence. A searing examination by The Post’s John Woodrow Cox of the children who witnessed last fall’s shooting revealed scars and struggles. Recurring nightmares, inability to focus and fear of leaving home were just some of the symptoms. These elementary school children are suffering post-traumatic stress similar to that of combat veterans returning from war. In an article filled with heartbreaking details, one stands out: that balloons were banned at the spring school festival because, as the principal observed, “Noises are different now.” Even more heartbreaking is that the students of Townville are not alone. An analysis by The Post found that beginning with the shootings at Columbine High in Colorado 18 years ago, more than 135,000 students attending at least 164 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus. That doesn’t include other incidents — accidents, after-school assaults, suicides — in which children have been exposed to gun violence. The damage extends to parents, grandparents and siblings forced to cope with trauma. Imagine having to reassure your 7-year-old son that he couldn’t have done more to protect a friend gunned down, or not knowing if your daughter will ever recover from what she witnessed in those 12 bloody seconds. This week marks the first anniversary of the deadliest shooting in the country’s history, when 49 people were killed and more than 50 injured at a nightclub in Florida. Since then, there has been little progress in adopting national common-sense gun control laws — such as expanded background checks — that a majority of the American public supports and that would help keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people. The gun lobby, believing it has a receptive audience with Republicans in control of Congress and the White House, is pushing an extreme agenda that would deregulate the sale of gun silencers, federally mandate concealed-carry laws in every state and even eliminate gun-free school zones. Countering the gun lobby is a growing grass- roots movement for gun control that has claimed some victories on the state and local levels in closing loopholes and strengthening protections. That is encouraging, and we wish them more success because far too many children already have died — or been traumatized — by gun violence. **Read more on this topic:** John Feinblatt: Congress shows its hypocrisy on gun control The Post’s View: Grass roots for gun control Uma Loganathan: My father was killed at Virginia Tech. I’m still fighting the NRA’s dangerous agenda. The Post’s View: Congress should turn a deaf ear to the NRA’s campaign against silencers

Nancy Pelosi bringing Newtown resident to State of the Union

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will bring a child from Newtown, Conn. and her mother to the State of the Union, she told reporters Friday.* The names of the guests were not immediately available.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University At the same news conference, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said he's bringing Carol Price, "who lost her son to gun violence many years ago, and her son's death actually stimulated the Maryland gun legislation many years ago to require trigger locks be sold with guns so you wouldn't have these awful tragedies."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The invitations are part of a campaign by Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.) to get his fellow lawmakers to bring victims of gun violence to the speech. Langevin, a quadriplegic, was accidentally shot at 16 by a police officer and has used a wheelchair since.   Pelosi's office later clarified that the fourth grader does not attend Sandy Hook Elementary but instead goes to a different school in Newton. Her office said they will not be releasing the name of the child or her mother, who will also attend the speech.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University An aide said Pelosi invited the child after she wrote the Democratic leader a letter explaining that she had launched a petition drive in Newton to urge Congress to ban assault weapons. The letter, as released by Pelosi's office, is below: _* This post originally stated that the child went to Sandy Hook Elementary School; she attends another school in Newtown._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

Here’s how U.S. gun violence compares with the rest of the world

In the wake of Friday's deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Conn., gun-control advocates have taken to social media to call for more stringent firearm restrictions. The United States has notoriously liberal gun control laws, and it has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world -- an average of 88 per 100 people, according to a 2007 Small Arms Survey. These maps, put together by the Guardian's Simon Rogers, reveal how we compare with the world: But countries with the most guns don't necessarily have the most gun-related homicides. The world's crime figures come from the UNODC annual crime survey, and while it does not include key nations, such as Russia, China and Afghanistan, it does include most other developed countries. The dubious distinction of having the most gun violence goes to Honduras, at 68.43 homicides by firearm per 100,000 people, even though it only has 6.2 firearms per 100 people. Other parts of South America and South Africa also rank highly, while the United States is somewhere near the mid-range. Still, America sees far more gun violence than countries in Europe, and Canada, India and Australia, which is perhaps how it gets its bloody reputation among comparatively peaceful nations. When a person kills another in the United States, though, he or she generally uses a gun: 60 percent of U.S. homicides occur using a firearm, which is the 26th-highest rate in the world. (In other gun-permeated countries, such as Finland (45.3 guns per 100 people), only about 19 percent of homicides involve a firearm. Guns don't always kill people, it seems, but they certainly play a role.

Yearly homicide count a complicated tally

****On the morning of the last day of 2014, the District’s homicide count stood at 106. By nightfall, it was 105. Anthony Cornell Jones, who was shot in Southeast in September, was taken off the list. For three months, the 39-year-old stood as last year’s 81st homicide victim. But authorities ultimately concluded that the person who shot him was acting in self-defense, making the shooting legally justified. Jones, along with two others during the course of 2014, were added, then removed, from the grim tally that chronicles the pulse of killings in the District. The case shows how a jurisdiction’s homicide count — commonly seen as a measure of violence in cities and counties across the country — is not a precise measure of the number of killings in a calendar year. It excludes some violence, and it sometimes includes violence from previous years. A city’s homicide count can be used to judge the success of a mayor or police chief. It can stain a city as lost to despair — the way Detroit is now, the way Washington used to be. The FBI publishes a comprehensive list of homicides every year and immediately warns not to compare cities, followed almost immediately with lists comparing cities. The media and politicians are equally guilty of using that one statistic to declare their city safe or dangerous. The homicide number is widely believed to be the most reliable crime statistic, even though it represents a minuscule percentage of any big city’s overall crime. In the District, fewer than 2 percent of last year’s violent crimes were criminal homicides. New York recorded 321 killings in 2014, out of 104,000 felonies, less than one-half of 1 percent. A homicide is technically a killing of one person by another, which include accidents and those justified by self-defense. But the police generally count only the deaths being investigated at that moment as crimes. Thus, initially, three fatal shootings in the District went on the list, under the belief the acts were criminal, and were removed after investigators proved otherwise. A robber killed by a man who wrestled away a shotgun from him and fired never made the list, as it seemed justified from the start. Same for the killing of a 13-year-old boy whom police said was accidentally shot by his best friend. All involved one person taking the life of another. All were ruled homicides. Police said none was a crime. Fatal shootings by police — there were at least two in the District last year — are usually kept off and added later if the shooting comes back as unjustified, though that is rare. The list also doesn’t always reflect the number of killings within a jurisdiction, but rather the number of killings investigated by the police agency that keeps the list. For instance, Prince George’s County police recorded 54 homicides in 2014. That does not include Laurel and Greenbelt, which have their own departments, and each one investigated a single slaying last year. Similarly in Virginia, Loudoun County’s tally of three did not count a killing in Leesburg. Another quagmire is how the dead show up on the list in the first place. It’s often not when a person is shot, and not even when the person dies. It is when the medical examiner rules the person’s death a homicide. It’s then up to authorities to decide whether to investigate that homicide as a crime. That’s how month-old Hakeem Brown and hours-old Baby John Doe Alvarado died in 2013 and ended up as the District’s second and 10th homicides of 2014. It’s how 53-year-old Carmen Payne could be strangled in October 2013 and become homicide No. 34 in April 2014. And it’s how James S. Brady, shot in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, became the District’s 70th homicide of 2014. A medical examiner ruled that the decades-old bullet caused his death. Cases are recorded this way so numbers from previous years don’t keep changing. But the list is used to measure a city’s safety and well-being, and violence that occurred in the previous year, or the previous generation, perhaps speaks better to conditions when the guns were fired than when the victim succumbed to the wounds. Similar arguments are taking place as cities grapple with how to count murders. Those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York don’t show up on the police department’s homicide list. The FBI created a separate category. Boston didn’t include the three people killed in the 2013 marathon bombings because it was a terrorist attack, not a typical street crime. The District included the 12 killed at the Navy Yard in 2013. In 2013, Baltimore police reported 235 homicides to the public but 233 to the FBI. The deaths of two young children — one left in a hot car, the other asphyxiated when her mother rolled over on her in bed — fit Baltimore’s definition but not the FBI’s, according to a department spokesman. Suspects in both cases were charged with manslaughter. In the District, Tonya Reaves, 53, was killed in September while riding a bicycle in Northwest. Police charged the driver with second-degree murder, but Reaves is not among the 105 homicide victims of 2014. The explanation from D.C. police: Victims in traffic fatality cases are never listed on the homicide chart.

People are getting shot by toddlers on a weekly basis this year

This week a 2-year-old in South Carolina found a gun in the back seat of the car he was riding in and accidentally shot his grandmother, who was sitting in the passenger seat. This type of thing happens from time to time: A little kid finds a gun, fires it, and hurts or kills himself or someone else. These cases rarely bubble up to the national level except when someone, like a parent, ends up dead.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But cases like this happen a lot more frequently than you might think. After spending a few hours sifting through news reports, I've found at least 43 instances this year of somebody being shot by a toddler 3 or younger. In 31 of those 43 cases, a toddler found a gun and shot himself or herself. In August, for instance, a 21-month-old in the St. Louis area found a loaded handgun at his grandmother's house and shot himself in the torso. His mother took him to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Earlier in the year a Michigan 3-year-old found a loaded .40-caliber handgun in a closet while his dad and brother were outside. He shot himself in the head and died before rescue workers arrived.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _[This is what one year of gun deaths in America looks like]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The stories go on and on like this: Roughly once a week this year, on average, a small child has found a gun, pointed it at himself or someone else, and pulled the trigger. Boys are disproportionately likely to do this: I could find only three cases where a girl under the age of 4 wounded someone with a gun. In 13 of the 43 total incidents, a child's self-inflicted injuries were fatal. In two other cases, another person died after being shot by a toddler: a father in Alabama, and a 1-year-old in Ohio.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In one instance, a 3-year-old managed to wound both of his parents with a single gunshot at an Albuquerque motel.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico  Shootings by toddlers have happened in 24 states so far this year. Missouri has seen the most, with five separate incidents. Florida has had four. Texas, three. Due to the low number of total cases and the isolated nature of these incidents I'd caution against drawing broad conclusions from the map above. But it is worth noting that the shootings don't necessarily follow broader population trends. California, the most populous state in the nation, hasn't had any. Nobody has been shot by a toddler in New England or the Upper Midwest. These numbers are probably an undercount. There are likely instances of toddlers shooting people that result in minor injuries and no media coverage. And there are probably many more cases where a little kid inadvertently shoots a gun and doesn't hit anyone, resulting in little more than a scared kid and (hopefully) chastened parents. Notably, these numbers don't include cases where toddlers are shot, intentionally or otherwise, by older children or adults. Dozens of preschoolers are killed in acts of homicide each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But I haven't included those figures here.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _[How often do children in the U.S. unintentionally shoot and kill people? We don’t know.]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico These cases are invariably referred to as "accidents" in media reports. But as Everytown for Gun Safety, a group that advocates for stricter gun laws, argues, many incidents like this are preventable. In a study of accidental shootings by children of all ages (not just toddlers), they estimate that "more than two-thirds of these tragedies could be avoided if gun owners stored their guns responsibly and prevented children from accessing them."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico There are policy and technical responses to preventable childhood gun deaths as well. States and localities could require guns to be locked up at home, a policy supported by 67 percent of Americans. Various types of smart gun technology, which prevent anyone other than their owners from firing a given gun, exist as well. But gun lock requirements and smart guns have been vehemently opposed by the National Rifle Association and its allies.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Instead, the NRA continues to promote a response that seeks to solve gun problems with more guns, and aims to broaden the saturation of firearms in nearly every sphere of public and private life, from homes to schools to churches to bars to airports and beyond. In a country with more guns than people, it's only natural that a certain number of small children are going get their hands on an unsecured firearm, with tragic consequences.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _[Guns in America: For every criminal killed in self-defense, 34 innocent people die]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Depending on where you stand on gun policy, you may feel that 13 dead toddlers in 10 months is too many. Or, you might reason that stuff happens, and that this is part of the price we must pay to protect our gun rights.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico I've included my tally of toddler shootings below. News sources are linked in the City column. Know of any this year that I missed? Drop me a line.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **More on guns and gun policy:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico There are now more guns than people in the United States    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico So far in 2015, we’ve had 274 days and 294 mass shootings    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This photo captures America's relationship with guns    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico You have to see how many more people are killed by guns in America to actually believe it    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Men who had guns but weren’t shot by police: Guess what many have in common?

So far this year, 509 people have been shot and killed by police in the United States, according to The Washington Post’s Fatal Force database. Most had guns, and most were white, but a quarter were black — a disproportionate number, given the country’s African American population. Yet police officers frequently arrest suspects armed with guns who have shot and killed one or more people, who have shot at or killed cops, who have threatened men, women and children. And they arrest them without incident or loss of more life, according to the letter of the law. I did a bit of research and found plenty of examples. And, not surprisingly, lots of those gunmen were white. To read more examples, visit my Facebook page. **Twitter: @petulad** **Read more Petula Dvorak:** An 11-year-old buries her mother after hearing the gunshots that killed her A home that looks perfect, until bigotry rears its ugly head Frigid offices, freezing women, oblivious men: An air-conditioning investigation McDonnell may be in the clear with the court, but the public is another story

Children write to Obama urging stricter gun measures

When President Obama takes the podium Wednesday afternoon to unveil the most expansive gun-control agenda in decades, he will be joined by children who wrote to him after the Newtown shooting urging him to take action against gun violence.  Here is a look at what some of those children had to say, in their own words: “I [am] not that into politics but my opinion is that it should be very hard for people to buy guns,” wrote Julia Stokes, an 11-year-old resident of the District. “The only thing they do is harm or kill and guns should only be used in most horrible event where others will get hurt if they are not. I know that laws have to be passed by Congress but I beg you to try very hard to make guns not allowed, not just for me, but for the whole United States.” “I am writing you to ask you to STOP gun violence,” wrote Taejah Goode, a 10-year-old from Georgia. “I am very sad about the children who lost their lives in Conn. So, I thought I would write to you to STOP gun violence. Thank you Mr. President.” “Please don’t let people own machine guns or other powerful guns like that. ... We should learn from what happened at Sandy Hook,” wrote Grant Fritz, an eight-year-old boy from Maryland. The White House isn't the only party to focus on children in an effort to further its argument in the gun control debate. The National Rifle Association on Tuesday released a new Web video charging that Obama is an "elitist hypocrite" because he is "skeptical" about increasing the number of armed guards in schools even as his two daughters enjoy Secret Service protection. “Are the president’s kids more important than yours?” the ad's narrator asks. “Then why is he skeptical about putting armed security in our schools when his kids are protected by armed guards at their school?"

Eugene Robinson: Stop the gun madness

Guns _do_ kill people. Our national New Year’s resolution must be to stop the madness. It is shameful that gun control only becomes worthy of public debate following an unspeakable massacre such as Newtown — and even more shameful that these mass killings occur so often. What usually happens is that we spend a few weeks pretending to have a “conversation” about guns, then the horror begins to fade and we turn to other issues. Everything goes back to normal. “Normal,” however, is tragically unacceptable. In 2010, guns took the lives of 31,076 Americans. Most of the deaths were suicides; a few were accidental. About a third of them — 11,078 — were homicides. That’s almost twice the number of Americans who have been killed in a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Britain, by comparison, the number of gun homicides in 2010 was 58. Here we’d consider that a rounding error. What explains the difference? Well, I spent a few years as The Post’s London bureau chief, and I can attest that Britain has the same social ills that we have — crime, unemployment, alienation, racial strife, mental illness. Britain also has a powerful, rural-based constituency determined to protect the right of hunters to spend weekends blasting away at shadows in the woods. Gun-loving Brits are no less passionate than gun-loving Americans. But Britain recognizes the obvious distinction between guns legitimately used for sport — shotguns, hunting rifles, some target pistols — and those meant only to kill human beings. Most handguns are banned. All automatic and semiautomatic firearms, including the kind of assault weapons used at Newtown, Aurora, Tucson, Virginia Tech and the other mass shootings in this country, are banned. In Britain, individuals must have a “good reason” to obtain a license to own a firearm. Self-defense is generally not considered an adequate reason — nor should it be, since research suggests that guns actually make the owner more vulnerable. In an often-cited paper published in 1993 by the New England Journal of Medicine, a research group headed by Arthur Kellermann examined homicide records in the Memphis, Seattle and Cleveland metropolitan areas and concluded that guns “actually pose a substantial threat to members of the household.” “People who keep guns in their homes appear to be at greater risk of homicide in the home than people who do not,” Kellermann’s paper said. “Most of this risk is due to a substantially greater risk of homicide at the hands of a family member or intimate acquaintance. We did not find evidence of a protective effect of keeping a gun in the home, even in the small subgroup of cases that involved forced entry.” The National Rifle Association has been trying to discredit Kellermann’s findings for 20 years, and surely won’t stop now. The NRA’s appeal to public opinion is based on cultivating a state of paranoia: _You need a gun because bad people have guns and they’re coming to get you._ Hence the unbelievable response by NRA chief Wayne LaPierre to the Newtown killings. The solution isn’t to take assault weapons out of the hands of madmen, LaPierre argued, it’s to put armed guards in the schools so there can be a great big gunfight when the homicidal madmen show up. Never mind that armed officers at Columbine tried, and failed, to stop that massacre. Just be paranoid. Fight guns with more guns. This must be the year when America says: No more. The solution certainly _is_ to take assault weapons out of the hands of madmen. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) pledges to introduce legislation banning assault weapons and large-capacity magazines as soon as the new Congress convenes. This should be just the beginning. President Obama gave a moving tribute to the Newtown victims — who included 20 children, seven adults and the troubled assassin — then followed up by assigning Vice President Biden to come up with concrete proposals. That’s all well and good. But we’ve had our fill of elegies and blue-ribbon task forces and reports destined to gather dust. We don’t need talk, we need action — and we need it now. Politicians, beginning with the president, must show the courage to stand up to the gun lobby. They must do it for the children of Newtown. They must do it for all the 11,000 men, women and children who otherwise will not live to see New Year’s Day 2014. **_eugenerobinson@washpost.com _ ** **Read more on this from Opinions:** Harold Meyerson: Why does America have so many guns? Fareed Zakaria: The solution to gun violence is clear The Post’s View: Gun control at center of Tucson shooting case The Post’s View: The gun lobby speaks Charles Krauthammer: The roots of mass murder

Accidental fatal shootings like the one that killed PopSmoothe are rare

In a country with an estimated 270 to 310 million guns, fatal accidental shootings are very rare. There were just 600 in 201o, according to the Centers for Disease Control, compared to 19,308 suicides and 11,015 homicides that same year.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday In Prince George’s County, a 6-year-old child accidentally shot and killed himself with a revolver he found in a backpack in 2012. But aside from that tragedy, police hadn’t investigated many other fatal accidental shootings when they responded to a frantic 911 call on Jan. 9 from a residence in Brandywine.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Errick Lamarr Pratt Jr., an aspiring hip hop artist who was known as PopSmoothe, lay dying inside with a bullet wound to his head. The 23-year-old had been shot with his own gun, a Mossberg .22-caliber rifle, as a friend toyed with it.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday After investigating the incident, Prince George’s police and prosecutors decided last month not to pursue charges against PopSmoothe’s friend, Tyrez Noels, 22.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday “There’s nothing to indicate that this was anything other than a tragic accident,” Prince George’s County police spokeswoman Julie Parker said.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a non-profit focused on preventing gun violence, from 2005 to 2010, nearly 3,800 people in the U.S. died from unintentional shootings and  1,300 victims of were younger than 25. Here are a few examples of accidental shooting that occurred recently in the Washington area. On March 18, 2013: A Sterling teenager was fatally shot after he apparently entered a home thinking it was his own and was mistaken for a burglar or home invader. Police said Caleb Gordley, 16, had been drinking and entered a neighbor’s home through a back window.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday On Oct. 27, 2013:  a 12-year-old was killed in  an accidental shooting in Madison County, Virginia, police reported. On March 18, 2013: Baltimore police were called to a home, where they found a 46-year-old man suffering from a single gunshot wound. Police said the man, Vygants Tomas Campe, who was a visitor in the home, was lying on a sofa in the first-floor living room while the home’s owner was handling a pistol upstairs. Police said the pistol discharged. A bullet went through floor and hit Campe, who was lying on the sofa. The man later died.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Jason Nichols, a lecturer in department of African American Studies at the University of Maryland, said people who handle guns do not always have the proper training or respect for the power of the weapons. “If you ask a lot of people living in D.C., they probably know someone who shot themselves—just as often as they know people who shot other people,” Nichols said. “I know two people who shot themselves with a weapon. One guy shot himself in the foot. I think it is important, if you are going to handle a weapon, respect the weapon and the power it has to take someone’s life away. Unfortunately, things happen like the accident in Brandywine.” PopSmooth lost his life, Nichols said, because he and his friends “didn’t understand the power of the weapon or how to use one.”

‘You’re gonna die’: Woman indicted in threats to father of Sandy Hook victim

A woman in Florida was charged with making death threats to the father of a boy who was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting massacre — threats she made because she believed the attack was staged. In 2012, Noah Pozner, 6, was shot to death, one of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Conn., in which a gunman killed 27 people, including 20 young children at an elementary school, before turning the gun on himself. Earlier this year, the boy’s father, Lenny Pozner, objected to a professor who has repeatedly argued that the massacre was an elaborate hoax, and the professor was fired. Afterward, Pozner started receiving death threats on his phone. He was with his daughters when he checked his voicemail, but he quickly shut it off, alarmed. “You’re gonna die you [expletives and slurs deleted],” he heard.  “… And what are you going to do about it? “You can do absolutely nothing. … this is coming to you real soon [expletive deleted]. You going to die,” and “You [expletive deleted] look behind you, justice is coming to you real soon.” Pozner was jolted, he said, not just because of fear but he worried that his children might hear it. Lucy Richards, 57, of Tampa, was arrested Monday after a grand jury indictment on four felony counts of transmitting threats, the U.S. Justice Department said in a statement. A year ago, Noah Pozner’s parents wrote a letter to the Sun-Sentinel, saying that a professor at Florida Atlantic University had harassed them for proof that the murders really happened, and arguing that his position at the university gave his claims unjustified credibility. James Tracy was fired by the university. A post apparently written by Tracy maintained that Sandy Hook was faked, that no one was killed and that  “local co-conspirators” were paid to pretend to grieve their young children. Tracy sued the university. He did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Wednesday night. Then the threats against Pozner intensified. He knew there were people who contended that the shootings never happened, that paid actors staged the tragedy in an effort to promote gun control. But he was surprised by the intensity of the reaction when he questioned the conspiracy theory. He noted that such conspiracy theories have had similarly unusual reactions, such as when a gunman walked into a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., on Sunday and fired shots, later telling police he was searching for child abuse victims because of a conspiracy theory that went viral. In January, after the death threats, Pozner wrote, “It’s been three years since my son’s life was snuffed out by an act of senseless violence and I’m left in a fog of disbelief.” On Wednesday, he said he was comforted to know the system was working, to protect the victims of violent crimes from re-victimization. “This is a heavy month,” he said. Next week is the fourth anniversary of the shooting.

Fact-checking the third Clinton-Trump presidential debate

The final presidential debate once again demonstrated Donald Trump’s thin grasp of the facts and his willingness to make poorly sourced or inaccurate claims. Hillary Clinton, for the most part, was more factually accurate. Here’s a roundup of 24 of the more notable claims. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of claims in debates. Clinton is essentially right: There were nearly 34,000 firearm deaths in the United States in 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 60 percent were from suicides, not homicides. This is consistent with what Clinton has said about the Heller decision. The Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in 2008 in Heller v. District of Columbia held that the Second Amendment of the Constitution affords private citizens the right to keep firearms in their homes and that such possession need not be connected to military service. In a private fundraiser in 2015, Clinton was recorded as saying that the Supreme Court was “wrong on the Second Amendment” and called for reinstating the assault-weapons ban, which expired in 2004. “The idea that you could have an open carry permit with an AK-47 over your shoulder walking up and down the aisles of a supermarket is just despicable,” she said. On her campaign website, Clinton calls for more comprehensive background checks, repealing the gun industry’s immunity from lawsuits for negligence, revoking the licenses of gun dealers who knowingly supply weapons to straw purchasers and gun traffickers, and toughening laws and regulations to prevent domestic abusers and the mentally ill from obtaining guns. She also calls for a renewal of the assault-weapons ban. None of these proposals would restrict a person from buying a gun to keep at home for self-defense (unless that person was convicted of domestic abuse). Clinton was referring to the Supreme Court’s decision in Heller v. District of Columbia. But the major issue in the case was not whether children would have access to guns; it was whether the District’s ban on private possession of handguns violated the Second Amendment.   One of the arguments that the city government made was that handguns cause accidents that frequently involve children. The city also cited the use of handguns in domestic violence and argued that handguns are particularly vulnerable to theft, and therefore can end up with criminals. Trump is now strongly against women’s right to abortion, but he once supported it. In 1999, Trump publicly said he was a supporter of abortion rights as a matter of women’s choice. In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump was asked whether he would ban abortions, or at least “partial-birth” abortions. He said he would not, and that he is “pro-choice in every respect.” “I’m very pro-choice,” Trump said in that 1999 interview. “I hate the concept of abortion. … But still, I just believe in choice.” But now on the presidential campaign trail in 2016, Trump is a vocal opponent of women’s rights to abortion — even to the point of saying that women who receive illegal abortions should be subject to “some sort of punishment.” Trump explains that he hadn’t given it much thought from a policy perspective when he was a businessman. And now that he is a presidential candidate, he says he is decidedly antiabortion.   Trump asserted that abortions can take place just one day before birth. This doesn’t really happen. Most abortions take place early in the pregnancy. One-third take place at six weeks of pregnancy or earlier; 89 percent occur in the first 12 weeks, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights. Only 1.2 percent of abortions — about 12,000 a year — take place after 21 weeks. (The Supreme Court has held that states may not prohibit abortions “necessary to preserve the life or health” of the mother.)     This is correct. Trump has a long history of outsourcing a variety of his products and has acknowledged doing so. We know of at least 12 countries where Trump products were manufactured: China, the Netherlands, Mexico, India, Turkey, Slovenia, Honduras, Germany, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam and South Korea. Further, Trump products transited other countries through the packaging and shipping process — meaning workers in more than 12 countries contributed to getting many of Trump’s products made, packaged and delivered to the United States.    Trump misunderstands a $6 billion figure that appeared in a 2014 management alert from the State Department Inspector General. The alert summarized a variety of recent audits that indicated paperwork deficiencies in closing out contracts that were issued in Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa. But no money is missing or lost, a point that the IG emphasized in a letter to The Washington Post in 2014. Instead, the alert highlighted missing paperwork, not dollars. Trump is also wrong to blame Clinton. We examined the audit reports referenced in alert and concluded that easily two-thirds, or perhaps more, concerned contracts that predated Clinton’s tenure at State.   But that ignores the fact that he joined his father’s thriving real estate business after college and that he relied on his father’s connections as he made his way in the real estate world. For instance, Fred Trump — along with the Hyatt hotel chain — jointly guaranteed the $70 million construction loan from Manufacturers Hanover bank, “each assuming a 50 percent share of the obligation and each committing itself to complete the project should Donald be unable to finish it,” according to veteran Trump chronicler Wayne Barrett in his 1992 book, “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall.” Trump also benefited from three trusts that had been set up for family members. In 1976, Fred Trump set up eight $1 million trusts, one each for his five children and three grandchildren, according to a casino document. (That today would be worth about $4 million in inflation-adjusted dollars.) The casino document lists several other loans from Trump’s father to his son, including a $7.5 million loan with at least a 12-percent interest rate that was still outstanding in 1981. The Wall Street Journal on Sept. 23 reported that a 1985 casino-license document showed that Donald Trump owed his father and father’s businesses about $14 million. In a 2007 deposition, Trump admitted he had borrowed “a small amount” from his father’s estate: ‘I think it was like in the $9 million range.” And as Trump’s casinos ran into trouble, Trump’s father also purchased $3.5 million gaming chips, but did not use them, so the casino would have enough cash to make payments on its mortgage — a transaction that casino authorities later said was an illegal loan.  Trump is technically correct on the timeline, but Clinton’s staff had requested the emails to be deleted months before the subpoena, according to the FBI’s August 2016 report. Moreover, there’s no evidence Clinton deleted the emails in anticipation of the subpoena, and FBI director James B. Comey has said his agency’s investigation found no evidence that any work-related emails were “intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.”  On July 23, 2014, the State Department agreed to produce records pertaining to the 2012 attacks in Libya, for the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s investigation. In December 2014, Clinton aide Cheryl Mills told an employee of the company that managed her server to delete emails on her server unrelated to government work that were older than 60 days. On March 4, 2015, the Benghazi Committee issued a subpoena requiring Clinton to turn over her emails relating to Libya. Three weeks later, between March 25 and 31, the employee realized he had not deleted the emails that Mills requested in December 2014, he told the FBI. The employee then deleted the emails and used a program called BleachBit to delete the files.   Trump cited a 2012 Pew Center on the States study as the source of this claim during the debate, while indicating that there may be potential voter fraud during this election. But this study looked at ways to make the election system more accurate, cost-effective and efficient. It did not say that these problems indicated signs of isolated or widespread voter fraud. About 24 million (1 in every 8) voter registrations were significantly inaccurate or no longer valid because people moved, had died or were inactive voters. More than 1.8 million records for people who are deceased, but whose registrations were still on voter rolls. About 2.75 million people were registered to vote in more than one state. This could happen if voters move to a new state and register to vote without notifying their former state. Outdated technology, shrinking government budgets and paper-based registration systems contributed to inaccuracies and inefficiencies.    Trump expressed lukewarm support the first time he was asked about it on Sept. 11, 2002, and was not clearly against it until he was quoted in the August 2004 Esquire cover story titled “Donald Trump: How I’d Run the Country (Better).” But by the middle of 2004, many Americans had turned against the war, making Trump’s position not particularly unique. In light of Trump’s repeated false claim that the Esquire article shows he was against the war in Iraq, Esquire has added an editor’s note to its August 2004 story, saying, “The Iraq War began in March 2003, more than a year before this story ran, thus nullifying Trump’s timeline.”  Premiums are expected to increase overall in 2017, but Trump is cherry-picking from the highest proposed increases in the insurance marketplace. State-by-state weighted average increases range from just 1.3 percent in Rhode Island to as high as 71 percent in Oklahoma. But the most common plans in the marketplace will see an average increase of 9 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s July analysis. These plans have been used as the benchmark to calculate government subsidies. The vast majority of marketplace enrollees (about 8 in 10) receive government premium subsidies. They are protected from a premium increase (and may even see a decrease) if they stay with a low-cost plan. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, “anecdotal examples of premium hikes or averages across insurers can provide a skewed picture of the increases marketplace enrollees will actually face.”   Broadly speaking, people who are in the United States illegally aren’t granted the same rights as people here legally — both civilians and veterans. Unauthorized people, who are not granted any deferred-action status that deems them lawfully present in the country, are not eligible to receive Social Security benefits or any other federal means-tested benefits. And even though the unauthorized population can’t collect the benefits, they paid about $12 billion into the cash flow of the Social Security program in 2010, according to the Social Security actuary. (Some undocumented immigrants could theoretically collect benefits — illegally — if they’ve overstayed their visas or falsely obtained a Social Security number.) That means the U.S. government gets far more than it pays out when it comes to unauthorized immigrants. To support this claim, Trump’s campaign has cited three instances of veterans being treated “worse” than illegal immigrants: consequences for criminal convictions, cost to the government, and wait times. We explored each point in depth and found each lacking in evidence.  This lacks some context. Clinton is saying she would not add to the debt already projected to grow.  That $200 billion could be canceled out by Clinton’s business tax reform plan, which is estimated to generate $275 billion in revenue. At that point, indeed, her plan would “not add a penny to the national debt” beyond its currently projected growth. If the full $275 billion is generated, it would even result in a modest deficit reduction. But since Clinton has not released a detailed plan for the business tax reform plan, the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has not been able to score it yet.   How can a federal agency, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, endorse a candidate? Trump is actually referring to the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council, which is the union representing ICE officers. The National Border Patrol Council, the organization representing 16,500 Border Patrol agents, also endorsed Trump. Both unions said this was the first time they endorsed a presidential candidate. This answer was in reference to the a recent New York Times report that Trump had reported a $916 million loss in 1995, which would have been large enough to allow Trump to avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years. As he did in the second debate against Clinton, Trump named Buffet to say that Clinton’s wealthy supporters had also avoided taxes.  “I have paid federal income tax every year since 1944, when I was 13. (Though, being a slow starter, I owed only $7 in tax that year.) I have copies of all 72 of my returns and none uses a carryforward,” Buffet said in a statement.   Clinton is correct. The Clinton Foundation does not dole out grants, like a typical foundation, but instead directs the donations it raises directly for specified charitable activities. So simply only looking at the grants does not tell the whole story about the foundation’s activities.   Interestingly, this is a fact-checked talking point by immigration activists who had criticized Obama for deporting too many people.   Not exactly. Clinton supported the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which authorized the construction of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. The fence is mostly vehicle barriers and single-layer pedestrian fence. Trump has called for a border wall of precast concrete, as tall as 30 to 60 feet.   Trump has no evidence to make this claim. The United States accepted about 13,000 Syrian refugees in the 2016 fiscal year, and Clinton wants to increase that number. But refugees spend as long as two years being vetted by U.S. counterterrorism experts. So not only would it be difficult to infiltrate the system, but it would be time-consuming, compared to simply getting a tourist visa to enter the country.  This is such an over-the-top statement. There are estimates from left-leaning groups that claim as many as one million jobs were lost by NAFTA. But these are not universally accepted estimates. Many economists say that the job losses in manufacturing cannot be easily blamed just on NAFTA.  No one really knows the job impact of various trade agreements, but both sides will argue vigorously over the figures. Then-President Bill Clinton famously declared that “I believe that NAFTA will create a million jobs in the first five years of its impact.” Two years later, after a financial meltdown in Mexico and the collapse of the peso evaporated any job gains from NAFTA, the economist who generated million-job forecasts famously said he would stay away from job forecasting in the future.