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This article was published 13/2/2015 (1105 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Complex. Delicate. Much-debated. A struggle. One of the thorniest legal issues in Canada. A loaded question.

With a cringe and a sigh, those are the words lawyers, historians and indigenous experts start with when asked to define who exactly is Métis - the complicated, diverse, uniquely Canadian people who founded the modern province of Manitoba and then disappeared and dispersed for decades before rebounding today.

And, even people like University of Manitoba lawyer Aimee Craft, herself Métis, Anishinabe and Irish and immersed in the debate over indigenous identity, finds herself fighting the occasional "how Métis are you, really?" eyeroll.

As important as it is to define a group, especially when constitutional rights are at stake, Craft echoes the caution many offer when talking about the Métis - it's not her place to decide someone else's identity, especially since indigenous people have been the frequent victims of such a clumsy practice by government.
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"The question to ask is, what is your connection to that Métis heritage or that existing community and, just as importantly, what are you giving back to it?" says Craft.

Despite a cultural renaissance that dates back 50 years, despite the ennobling of Louis Riel, the protection of Métis rights in the 1982 Constitution and some big legal victories since, despite no longer being the "bastards of the plains", confusion about Métis identity persists.

Are you Métis if your mother is First Nations and your father is Mennonite?
(Probably not.)
Do you need to trace your ancestry back to the original Red River Métis settlement?
(Probably, in Manitoba at least.)
Are you Métis if you're from a mixed-blood community in Ontario or Quebec?
(That's touchy. Depends who you ask.)
Can you be blonde and blue-eyed and still be Métis?

If you didn't grow up fiddling and jigging and speaking Michif, can you still be Métis?

Can you be Anglo-Métis?

Do you need to have a certain amount of First Nations blood to be Métis?
(No, and the idea of a blood quantum is kind of offensive.)
Can you claim Indian status and Métis membership at the same time?
(Probably not.)
If you are Franco-Manitoban, are you also Métis?
(Not necessarily.)
Do people just call themselves Métis to get a scholarship?
(Sometimes, but it's not quite that easy.)
Is Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman really Métis?
(Yes, but he should probably get his membership card like his sister and cousins and make it official.)
"Being Métis means constantly swimming against the current," said Janet La France, one of the genealogists who trace people's Métis heritage at St. Boniface's Centre du patrimoine. "You're constantly staking your ground and proving that you exist and proving you deserve to exist."

Future benefits of being Métis

These questions, which are actually easier to answer in Manitoba's politically unified Métis environment, have taken on a new urgency, thanks to a recent landmark Supreme Court decision and another case likely to be heard this year.

Those cases could mean being Métis may eventually come with significant benefits much like those won by First Nations - some role in big developments like Bipole III that go through traditional Métis hunting and trapping land, a compensation deal to fix the mess the federal government made of land promised to the Métis after 1870, a more formal duty by the government to consult the Métis, money, programs and recognition.

First, there's the Manitoba Métis Federation decision, which delved back into the history of the province's founding, its entry into Confederation and the deal struck by Riel and his provisional government to protect Métis landholdings and give Métis children a head-start against the expected tsunami of white settlers.

Roughly 7,000 Métis children were promised 1.4 million acres of land by the federal government. But the process of identifying what land ought to be made available to which Métis children was an unmitigated mess, rife with, in the words of the court, "repeated mistakes and inaction that persisted for more than a decade."

As the process dragged on, children were swindled out of land by speculators. Allocations often involved the worst-quality land, scattered far from family. Scrip - paper credit - was given out instead, often far below market land values.

Where once the Métis made up 85 per cent of Manitoba and were the dominant political and cultural force, the land debacle was the beginning of a dramatic decline that lasted until after the Second World War.

The Métis land claim case took more than 30 years to work its way through the courts, and it almost bankrupted the MMF. The Supreme Court delivered its decision two years ago next month, ruling Canada acted inconsistently with the honour of the Crown when it bungled the land distribution.

The trouble is, two years later, no one yet knows what that decision means in practical, modern terms. If the federal government agrees to right the historic mess, it could mean negotiations and a settlement worth billions to Manitoba's Métis. Or it could ultimately only offer moral vindication to the descendants of the Red River settlement. No one yet knows.

Court cases muddy waters

Coming up next is the Daniels case, a case the Supreme Court agreed to hear, likely this year, that could dramatically expand the federal government's responsibilities to Métis and non-status Indians, effectively granting them similar rights now afforded to First Nations, including the right to be consulted on resource and land issues and access to federal programs.

The case could effectively make the Métis the collective responsibility of the federal government, a huge re-thinking of an already-murky relationship that more and more covers not just the traditional "postage stamp" province that entered Confederation but also the so-called Métis breadbasket in Western Manitoba and, really, anywhere Métis people trapped, traded or settled.
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These cases, especially Daniels, have also muddied the waters when it comes to legally defining the Métis. In Daniels, the Supreme Court may have to sort out, again, a definition of Métis. Does simply having "Indian ancestry" make you Métis, as the lower court suggested, or must you have something more, a historic and cultural connection to a unique Métis nation?

As the children of French or Scottish fur traders and First Nations mothers, the Métis in Manitoba quickly created a hybrid culture that took many local forms, expressed itself in many indigenous and European languages and spread all over a homeland that included Saskatchewan, Alberta and the Midwestern United States.

Historians and Métis activists in Manitoba describe a people known for their love of the land, for their large and close families dominated by elders, for jigging and fiddling and distinctive clothing decorated with colourful, stylized beadwork. The famous Red River cart allowed the Métis to dominate trade routes through the west and the famous red striped sash, a handy item when out on the buffalo hunt, is still their symbol.

MMF president David Chartrand talks about his family's entrepreneurial spirit, its fear of ever becoming wards of the government and a pride that made the Métis unwilling to showcase their poverty.

Unlike First Nations, confined largely to reserves for generations, the Métis were often able to blend, especially in the dark decades of racism and marginalization following the failed Northwest Rebellion and Riel's death. Many Métis people, if they were white enough and spoke French, passed as French and set aside their Métis roots. Others who grew up close to a reserve, who had a First Nations parent and who felt closer to First Nations culture, chose to take up their Indian status.

Chartrand himself is an example of this limbo. He grew up very poor in Duck Bay, to a single mother who took in washing to make ends meet. His village was just on the outskirts of the Pine Creek First Nation, home of Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Grand Chief Derek Nepinak, who is Chartrand's cousin. His granny lived on the reserve but didn't feel comfortable there. Métis folks in Duck Bay knew they were different from Pine Creek. There was plenty of interaction, but also animosity and division.

But, when Chartrand went to Dauphin for school, he was no longer distinct from his neighbours at Pine Creek. They were all treated like "Indians" when they went to town. "The darker ones got a hell of a beating," said Chartrand.

Chartrand spoke Saulteaux growing up. He doesn't speak Michif - the unique combination of Cree and French created by the Métis. He speaks English with a light French accent - he says "tree" for "three" and ends sentences with the classic French-Canadian "hein?"

"I'm still caught between two systems," said Chartrand. "First Nations don't think I'm equal to them and non-aboriginal society thinks I'm getting what all the Indians are getting."

Definition too narrow?

The MMF's definition of Métis is rigid and based on the idea the Métis were the founding nation of Manitoba. You have to trace your ancestors back to the original Métis settlement in Red River - something about 100 people a month come to the St. Boniface archives to do. That means using church records and census data to look for references to ancestors listed as half-breeds or copies of scrip issued to a Métis child after 1870.

If you can't trace your roots to Riel's Métis, the historic nation, you can't join the MMF and you're not officially Métis.

But many argue that definition is too narrow, that it excludes unique communities that have sprung up elsewhere that have only a tenuous connection to Riel's Métis Nation, if at all.

Université de Saint-Boniface professor Denis Gagnon has a $500,000 grant to study those communities and their Métis identity, in New Brunswick, Ontario, Labrador and beyond. Much like the Métis communities near Norway House or in Duck Bay, many sprung up near First Nations reserves. They were autonomous. They had a deep connection to the land and specific territorial claims and they developed a unique culture that survived for perhaps 150 years.

"They are not a nation. They are communities," said Gagnon. "The MMF and the national Métis council always play with this word. To be Métis is to be a nation. No, to be a nation is a kind of way of being Métis. It doesn't stop others who have distinct communities from also equally being Métis."

In some cases, those communities are now seeking recognition from the federal and provincial governments and from national Métis organisations, and they're bolstered by Supreme Court rulings.

Many consider those people "little m-Métis" - mixed-blood people who are unique but not as unique as the capital M Métis nation whose roots are in Manitoba.
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Here's the flipside to the ancestry-only definition: What if you can trace your ancestry to the Red River Métis but you've experienced no hint of Métis culture in your life - no jigging, no connection to the land, none of the racism or marginalization that is often passed through a family's DNA?

If being Métis in Manitoba means tracing your heritage to the original Red River settlment, doesn't that mean thousands of Manitobans with no personal link to the culture could call themselves Métis? And, doesn't that feed the perception that many people do just that, call themselves Métis just to get a scholarship or a job, just to check a box?

That's what Laura Kiefer wondered when she checked the box. She was applying to the Asper School of Business and remembered that an older sibling researched the family's genealogy and discovered a Métis connection. She frankly admits she checked the "aboriginal" box in hopes it would boost her chance of getting into business school.

"I quickly started to feel a bit guilty, as if I had abused the system," said Kiefer, who grew up in Lorette. "I decided to make a change and start trying to learn more about where I came from."

Now, she's an aboriginal student recruiter and vice-president of the Association of Aboriginal Commerce Students, learning more every day about her historic roots and what it means to be Métis.

That, according to Métis experts, is a common and completely legitimate experience, people looking for their Métis heritage with vague hopes of some benefit, only to discover a genuine connection with their past. Canadians of all stripes do this all the time. It's just that some quick Googling on Ancestry.com doesn't usually come with constitutional consequences.

Here's another common scenario: What if you lost touch with your Métis heritage because a parent died, you were adopted or, most commonly, your family chose years ago to pass as white in hopes of ducking some of the racism rife in Manitoba over the last century? Does that make you any less Métis?

Sara Corley - light skinned, reddish hair, Anglo last name - didn't learn about her Métis heritage until she was 16. Her Métis father died when she was a baby, and she lost touch with his side of the family. She never, as she said, marinated in Métis culture.

It wasn't until she was in her late teens, when she got word her grandmother might soon die, that she made contact with her father's family, learned her ties to Marie-Anne Gaboury, the first European woman to travel and settle in Western Canada and the grandmother of Louis Riel, and learned how her grandparents were proud to be Métis but cloistered their culture to spare their children some of the burden of racism.

Now a university student studying psychology and indigenous issues, she's teaching her three young boys Métis culture, rebuilding connections with her extended family, especially near St. Laurent, immersing herself in the dances and the music.

"I realized I had this extra thing I didn't know about myself... I do feel like people are starting to let go of some of the shame that's associated with history and realizing the culture is beautiful," said Corley. "It starts with the hard stuff, and slowly we're going to sandpaper the rough stuff into something smooth."

A Métis story: Complicated identity

Justin Johnson's great-great-great grandfather, with his black eyes, wayward hair and grave look, stands just behind Louis Riel in the famous 1870 group photo of Riel's provisional government.

Justin Johnson, who identifies as Métis and Franco-Manitoban, is studying Master of Arts in Indigenous Governance at University of Winnipeg. With his thesis he is hoping to develop a Métis philosophy.

Just two years after the photo was snapped, that same ancestor, Andre Beauchemin, offered to cede his St. Vital seat so Riel could run.

When it comes to Red River roots, it doesn't get much more Métis than that.

And, yet, for years, Johnson's family concealed its remarkable lineage and its link to one of the founding peoples of the province.

"My grandmother would not speak of her Métis identity. My grandfather would rarely speak publicly of his Métis identity because he would lose his job," said Johnson, now a Master's student at the University of Winnipeg. "It was just not something we spoke about. It was never discussed around the table."

Adding to the burden of silence was the legacy of vanished land common to many Métis families. Johnson's ancestors farmed near Île-des-Chênes, just east of where Johnson grew up generations later in Lorette. But the federal government seized the land and turned it over to pioneers.

Growing up, gleaning tidbits from his grandparents, uncles and aunts, especially on his on mother's side, Johnson began to realize he wasn't just Franco-Manitoban.

"I stated to think, well, we're definitely not only white, that we had this mixture of French Canadian ancestry and indigenous ancestry," said Johnson, 23.

And, there were the close family ties, the endless teasing and joking, the storytelling - small things Johnson now sees as quintessentially Métis.

Johnson's family does have his grandfather's journals and notebooks, where he recorded his own thoughts and laid down those of other Métis leaders he read. Those scribblings, said Johnson, show how proud his grandfather was of his Métis heritage despite political and cultural pressure to blend in.

"He was honouring it by some kind of silence," said Johnson. "It hurts me to know that. How can you be silent and at that point still be proud?"

It wasn't until Johnson was in university and began to get active in the Franco-Manitoban community and the Conseil jeunesse provincial, a provincial youth council for francophones, that he started to get interested in his background. He researched his family genealogy, got his Métis card at 18 and nudged others in his family to do the same.

Now, as a Master's student, he's beginning to research the development of a particularly Métis political philosophy, one built around not just Riel's writings but the political documents of the time that sought to balance European, Métis and indigenous values.

"We often think that one of them has to win," said Johnson. "But you can be more than one thing, you can be two, you can be three and have different perspectives on an issue or on the fundamentals, and yet you can still live together."

Like most Métis people, Johnson is still juggling his French-Canadian, Irish, Scottish and Métis roots, trying to find the right way to describe a complicated identity.

"Lately, I say I'm a Red River Métis," said Johnson. "I feel as though I can publicly say I'm Métis. I can be proud of it and I can study it on my ancestors' land."

A Métis story: Family roots almost lost

On the day the Supreme Court of Canada ruled the Métis were deceived and defrauded out of thousands of acres of land, Shauna Mulligan remembers seeing a quick television news clip of a reporter live near Louis Riel's gravesite in St. Boniface.

It gave her goosebumps, and it still does thinking about it today, in part because the moment sharpened a history that's still fresh, that marks Mulligan's link with family roots she almost lost.

"For others who grew up with the fiddling and Métis culture and the food, that may be their primary link," said Mulligan, a 37-year-old former member of the Canadian Forces now finishing up her degree in native studies at the University of Manitoba. "For me, it's about finding those roots."

Mulligan knew as a kid she was Métis - her grandfather grew up near Batoche, Sask., spoke Michif, the language of the Métis people, as a child and always hung the famous red striped sash above his bed. He would talk about his love of the land and his connection to the Creator, Métis things Mulligan shrugged off as a child, and never really talked about at school.

"That was a very short trip to getting my butt kicked," she said.

It wasn't until she was well into adulthood, studying Métis and First Nations history and politics at university that her family's past, known but not discussed, became clear.
"I kind of put two and two together and said 'Oh, now I get it. Now I understand'," she said. "I was able to finally put a name to the things that I experienced."

Though she's still learning, she now identifies herself as Métis, and runs into all the typical questions that raises.

"As a matter of fact, I get 'You don't look Métis'," said Mulligan. "I do get friends who have known me for a while who give me the sideways look - 'but you're so pasty. You have blue eyes. I don't understand how can you be Métis.' "

Or she gets questions about whether she has a First Nations mother and French father, and has to muddle through an explanation of the unique and historic nature of Manitoba's Métis people.
"It's a complicated answer," she said. "It's not just this one thing makes me Métis."

Like most Manitoba Métis, Mulligan thinks a historic family connection to the original Red River settlers is vital, and she has a genealogy done for her grandfather to confirm hers.

"At the same time, understanding the process of self-identification is a huge thing and I wouldn't want to tell someone 'No, you're not Métis,' " said Mulligan. "That's a really complicated thing."

Mulligan and her mother haven't yet gathered up their birth certificates and other paperwork, along with her grandfathers genealogy, and taken it to the Manitoba Métis Federation to get a card, largely because the process is a bit daunting.

"The other day, my mom said 'I'm really glad you've waited because this is something I want to do with you, as a family,' " said Mulligan.

A Métis story: 'I'm 100 per cent Métis'

When Janet La France was seven or eight, her mom sat her down and revealed a family secret. They were Métis.

"She said it wasn't something that I should go spreading around," remembered La France. "The reason I shouldn't tell other people, or other kids, is that not everybody thought it was a good thing."

If being Métis was a small slander to protect herself against back then, it's still a source of frustration today, not because La France carries any shame but because so few Manitobans understand her heritage. People think the Métis are like unicorns. They're not a real people. They don't really exist.

"One of the classic things is people asking you "Oh, how Métis are you?" she said. "They mean, how Cree are you, or how Ojibway are you or how Assiniboine are you? If you tell them that your great-great-grandmother was 50 per cent, then their mind registers 'oh well, you're not that Métis...' They don't understand that a Métis person is not the sum of two parts."

La France didn't grow up with the stereotypical trappings of Métis culture - the jigging, the fiddling, the beaded folk-art. She grew up closer to her father's French-Canadian heritage. But, the family went to Festival du Voyageur and her mother made sure she had a pile of kid's books from Pemmican Publications, the Métis publisher.

And, through osmosis, she knew her grandfather, who died before she was born, was a natural storyteller and loved woodworking, traits she later associated with his Métis roots.

It wasn't until La France was a teenager, and a product of the French school system, that she began to become more acutely aware of her background and her links to Louis Riel's Métis nation.

"I was taught that Riel was a hero and martyr and the founder of our province," said La France. "I had a friend in the English school system, exactly the same age, same grade, and she was taught he was a traitor who deserved to die. It was such disparity between the two."

She laughs now at her teenage indignation. Years later, her mother got the family genealogy done at the St. Boniface's centre du patrimoine, the archives where La France now works, researching the Métis ancestry of others just like her.

They traced La France's grandfather's family to the Red River settlement, to men who came over with the fur trading companies and stayed to become carpenters and canoe-builders - not big names like Riel or Grant, just average Métis Joes.

Along with her mother and sister, La France then applied for her Manitoba Métis Federation card, and her harvesting permit, even though she's not really the type to go hunting or fishing.

The process of rediscovery is one thousands of young Métis people have made as they try to navigate one of the most complicated cultures in Manitoba, one defined by constant mixing, by mobility and by decades of camouflage.

That process was catapulted forward recently by the Supreme Court decision that found Manitoba's Métis were the victims of swindles, delays and mismanagement in the years following the birth of the province in 1870, and never received thousands of acres of land they were due.

It's a decision with unclear implications but that, for La France, reinforces the place of the Métis as one of Manitoba's founding nations.

"A decision like this, even though I don't think I will personally benefit, I'm interested in seeing how far have we come, really," said La France. "Maybe people are not going to constantly make a visual assessment or ask me how Métis I am or quantify my blood or not really believe me or tell me the Métis don't exist... I'm not the sum of two parts. I'm 100 per cent Métis."
maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca
Timeline: The history of the Métis Nation in Manitoba

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Complex. Delicate. Much-debated. A struggle. One of the thorniest legal issues in Canada. A loaded question. With a cringe and a sigh, those are the words lawyers, historians and indigenous experts start with when asked to define who exactly is Métis - the complicated, diverse, uniquely Canadian people who founded the modern province of Manitoba and then disappeared and dispersed for decades before rebounding today.

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America Gun Culture and history, Artworks taking a stance against gun violence - Josh Tatlonghari

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America Gun Culture and history, Artworks taking a stance against gun violence - Josh Tatlonghari

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The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution states, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Since the founding fathers of the U.S. affirmed the public's right to own guns in 1791, the nation has developed a deeply complex relationship with them-full of both obsession and abhorrence. The art world is not outside of this debate; artists throughout history have depicted the gun as both a fetishized object and a deadly weapon.

As headlines of mass shootings and gun-related deaths become all too frequent, we look to the artists who have, through their work, explored firearms, their accessibility, and gun violence to shed light on this complex matter. (It's worth noting that this article is not all inclusive and specifically focuses on artworks that address mass shootings and gun violence among civilians. There are countless artists making strides within the Black Lives Matter movement, tackling issues related to police brutality and abuse of power.) As the threat of mass shootings seems to only get worse with time (21 of the deadliest 28 mass shootings in the U.S. have occurred since 1980), here are seven artworks, made within the last 50 years, that examine the gun as a violent weapon in an effort to spark a much-needed dialogue.

Image via Open Culture

On November 19, 1971-in an intimate gallery space in Santa Ana, California-Chris Burden, the art world's Johnny Knoxville ( Jackass), stunned the art world when he allowed his friend to shoot him with a .22 rifle from a distance of 15 feet in front of a live audience. The bullet, which was supposed to slightly scrape Burden's arm, ended up going straight through his arm instead. The result was a visceral and bloody performance, which shot Burden to notoriety (pun intended), and challenged the very notion of fine art. Recorded on video, the footage of the performance is now a part of the MoMA and Whitney collections.

Amidst the height of The Vietnam War, the U.S. population was increasingly exposed to gun violence in the news and on TV, making people numb to it. In Fred Hoffman's 2005 book about the artist's work, Burden was quoted saying, "All of a sudden U.S. troops were shooting at protesting students... All of a sudden [the violence]... took on another dimension." Shoot re-sensitized viewers to the reality of gun violence, as Burden forced them to experience it in person, instead of mediated through the news. Not only is this performance piece still relevant as a pioneering gesture in the field of contemporary art, but it sadly continues to remind us that increasingly common media reports of violence often leave us desensitized and detached.

"Untitled" (Death by Gun), 1990

Image via MoMA

Cuban American visual artist Felix Gonzales-Torres created politically charged art throughout his career, and "Untitled" (Death by Gun) is no exception. Like much of his work, the piece is a sculptural installation within the Minimalist formal tradition. It consists of a stack of printed-paper, each sheet presenting 460 individuals killed by gunshot in the U.S. during one week in May of 1989. Each individual's picture is displayed, along with their name, age, and cause of death. While the cause of death is always gunshot, the circumstances vary from suicide to violent crimes. All of the details were taken from Time magazine. The work is somewhat ephemeral in nature, as viewers are encouraged to take a sheet of paper with them, diminishing the stack. (The piece is never completely depleted though, as museum staff members continually replenish the pile.) While Gonzales-Torres doesn't explicitly take a stance on the Second Amendment in the work, he engages viewers with a one-sheet take away listing the excessive and devastating deaths due to guns. But if holding a Gonzales-Torres artwork in your hand while facing the victims of gun violence doesn't make you think about gun control laws, we're not sure what will.

Courtesy of the Belger Collection

Contemporary artist Renee Stout's oeuvre ranges from assembled found objects to photography and painting, and usually reflects her African American heritage. When Stout made Baby's First Gun in the late '90s, she was highly influenced by the violent turmoil surrounding her inner-city Washington D.C. studio; primarily its effect on black youth. The piece is an aged wooden box that seems to be commemorating a milestone. When opened, the bottom half of the box holds a tin toy gun, while the top half shows a cookie-cut-out figure of a smiling African American girl. Underneath her, a fortune cookie message reads "Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it." Through the pastel colors and childish effigy, Stout highlights the nonchalant, playful attitude that many Americans have towards guns; and the fortune cookie quote suggests that this societal outlook on gun culture, deeply ingrained from a young age, is problematic. Baby's First Gun was featured in the multimedia exhibition UNLOADED, which originated at Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's SPACE gallery and examines the multiple viewpoints and intersections of identity surrounding gun use in the U.S.

BREN AHEARN
Active Shooter Directions #1, 2011

Photo by Miles Mattison

In Bren Ahearn's Active Shooter Directions series, the San Francisco-based artist emphasizes how gun violence has permeated community "safe" spaces, such as work and school. The artwork appropriates a "School Shooting Resource Card" from the police department at University of California, Davis, where Ahearn teaches. It lists resources and directions to create a safe place in the event that there's an active shooter. His use of embroidery for the piece creates an eerie tone, as the medium-typically associated with interior decoration, feminine craft, and comfort-largely clashes with the dreadful content on the cotton surface. The effect is unsettling; mass shootings are woven into the fabric of American identity and culture.

MEL CHIN
Cross for the Unforgiven: 10th Anniversary Multiple, 2012

Image courtesy of the artist

Another noteworthy piece included in the UNLOADED exhibition is Mel Chin's Cross for the Unforgiven: 10th Anniversary Multiple, a sculpture constituting eight AK-47s cut and welded in the shape of a Maltese cross, a symbol of Western resistance. The sculpture's composition renders the guns inactive, making them useless as weapons. The piece is a replication of an earlier 2002 work by Chin, and despite more than 50 school shootings taking place in the U.S., between the making of both pieces, Chin was able to purchase eight AK-47s in bulk just as easily in 2012 as in 2002. Thus, the work highlights the accessibility of firearms and lack of gun restrictions in the U.S. regardless of ever-increasing mass shootings.

JONATHAN FERRARA
Excalibur No More, 2014

Photo via Jonathan Ferrara Gallery

Artist, activist, and entrepreneur Jonathan Ferrara invokes the Arthurian legend of the Sword in the Stone with his piece Excalibur No More by sticking a shotgun in a boulder. In Ferrara's case, the gun cannot be removed; the artist's way of asking, "Aren't we done?" The artwork is part of a larger exhibition, put on by the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, titled "Guns in the Hands of Artists." In the exhibition's catalog, Ferrara describes the ease of purchasing the shotgun for the work, stating, "After I found the gun online, the seller brought it to the gallery and I gave him the money and he gave me the gun... no paperwork, no receipt, no record... totally legal... it blew my mind." The exhibition has traveled to cities devastated by gun violence, such as Miami, St. Louis, and Minneapolis. Somewhat surprisingly, Senator Tim Kaine, a gun owner and Second Amendment advocate, sponsored the exhibition in the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington. At the show, an essay by Kaine accompanied Excalibur No More, where the Senator wrote about his frustrations as a lawmaker, and his desire for "more sensible" regulations. Kaine was governor of Virginia in 2007 when the tragic Virginia Tech Massacre took place. Kaine, Ferrara, and the other artists involved in the exhibition hope to influence policy-makers by making their work highly visible.

Irons for the Ages, Flowers for the Day, 2015

Image via Klein Sun Gallery

Chinese artist Li Hongbo's installation at The SCAD Museum of Art illuminates the room, as a sea of rainbow paper blossoms ripple throughout the space. Upon closer examination, viewers are shocked to learn that each vibrant paper flower, when folded up, resembles a pistol. Hongbo typically manipulates paper in his art, a medium that evokes the Chinese tradition of paper lamps and decorations.

Image via The Creators Project

When discussing his installation with The Creators Project, he explained, "Everyone has a dream. Dreams of a comfortable life, a beautiful environment, a peaceful society and so on," he says. "But some selfish people damage others' lives and dreams because of their own excessive desires. They revert to guns, one of most deadly weapons be used to threaten and kill people who do not 'obey' their dreams of beauty." By underlying this stunning floral display with pistols, Hongbo compels us to reflect on the colorful lives ruined and threatened by guns. According to the artist, his goal is to make people see new perspectives, and re-contemplate things.

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7 Artworks Taking a Stance on Gun Violence

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The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution states, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Since the founding fathers of the U.S.

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Art and Religion - Dictionary definition of Art and Religion | Encyclopedia.com: FREE online dictionary

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Definition of Art and Religion - Our online dictionary has Art and Religion information from Encyclopedia of Religion dictionary. Encyclopedia.com: English, psychology and medical dictionaries

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Gun violence in The Work of Five Artist - Josh Tatlonghari

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Gun violence in The Work of Five Artist - Josh Tatlonghari

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In the last 20 years, gun violence has become part of the very fabric of American society. In the wake of the Orlando tragedy, which claimed 49 lives, the Senate let most Americans down by rejecting four measures aimed at curbing easy access to guns. The Brady campaign, a gun control advocacy nonprofit, estimates that 89 people die daily from gun violence, and as it stands, 2016 is slated to be the bloodiest year on record. Millions of guns are sold annually in "no questions asked" transactions-a practice that defies logic and fuels human suffering. While the U.S. government remains locked in partisan grandstanding that makes little difference to the lives lost (over 500 since the Orlando shooting), here are five artists who use gun related imagery to address our culture of violence and its human toll.

Hank Willis Thomas

In 2000, the artist Hank Willis Thomas lost his cousin Songha Thomas Willis to a random act of robbery and murder in a Philadelphia parking lot. In Memoriam, the artist engages with the violence surrounding black manhood in mainstream American media. Examining the black male body as a locus of both fear and desire, Thomas points to the longstanding relationships between blackness, violence and consumer culture.

In "Priceless #1" (2004), Thomas appropriates the ubiquitous language of advertising to depict the funeral of his murdered cousin. Here the well-known MasterCard slogan serves as a haunting reminder that life itself cannot be bought and sold.

Thomas' "Raise Up" (2014) struck a chord with many when the artist posted an image of the work on his Instagram shortly after a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner. This piece links the deaths of Garner and Michael Brown -whose last words were "Hands up, don't shoot"-to the countless other lives lost to hate across the globe. "Raise Up" contains a multitude of meanings, including surrender, worship, and emancipation. The disembodied heads and arms face away from us, turned to possibly a preacher, but in the wake of recent gun violence tragedies, a gun is more likely.

Cornelia Parker

British artist Cornelia Parker has made a career out of transforming objects through scale and material in order to illuminate the fragility and absurdity of human experience. Manipulating objects rich with historical significance, such as charcoal from a Southern black congregation church destroyed by arson, Parker tests the boundaries of meaning and association. P arker's series Avoided Objects , transforms or blocks the meanings of smaller objects with just as powerful a result as her large-scale works, which she is best known for. In "Embryo Firearms" (1995), Parker rendered two Colt .45 guns into beautiful, innocuous objects, referencing but not capable of violence.

The Colt .45 is arguably the most popular gun in America. Often referred to as "the gun that won the West," it's an American icon that has been depicted in films, paintings, and songs over the past 150 years. Famous Colt .45 owners include Buffalo Bill, Theodore Roosevelt, and General George Patton. In "Embryo Firearms" the guns are depicted in their earliest stage of production, where they exist in form but not in function. In presenting these guns in their earliest stage of development-as embryos-Parker ties together birth and death in the same objects. They speak to the potential for violence that passive materials have when put into the right hands. Objects are not born violent, we make them that way.

Yosman Botero

Bogota-based artist Yosman Botero stacks layers of painted plexiglass sheets on top on of another to create optical illusional paintings. His compositions resemble sculpture because of the sense of weight that his subject matter have with the added depth and shadowing from layering. In the past, his subject matter spanned from abstraction (spirals and bubbles) to cloudscapes to hyperrealistic looking people.

Born in Cúcuta, on the borders between Colombia and Venezuela, his home was a conflict zone because of the illegal gasoline and goods trade that took place between the two countries. In gun mandalas, shimmering gold guns point outward on a black background, the colors reference the old categorization of gasoline as black gold.

Raul Martinez

Taking design in a different direction, Raul Martinez' Bullet Rug series is an ongoing project in which the artist weaves "ballistic maps" with used bullet casings that he collects in various places around the globe. The rug pictured here contains around 15,000 used .4 caliber bullet casings. To "weave" the rug, Martinez first drills holes into the sides of each casing, runs string through the holes, and then weaves each string into the rug on a large loom. The process is meditative and craft-oriented, in opposition to the process that produced his material, the firing of a gun.

Through his labor-intensive activity, Martinez speaks to geopolitical movements that don't always make front-page news: "In Guatemala, for example, the casings came from Israel, which was involved in training their military. In the Middle East, the shells can tell us what countries have been supplying weapons to people in the area, like the USSR and the USA."

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

There are no guns in Felix Gonzalez-Torres ' piece "Untitled (Death by Gun)" (1990). Rather, the piece points to the accumulation of bodies by gun death. Using the commercial offset process of photolithography, the artist created stacks of printed paper, each depicting 460 individuals killed by guns in one week in the US. Though the subject matter is a departure from the artist's usual subject matter-gay rights and the AIDS crisis-his action-based practice, such as a disappearing pile of candy representing his partner's depleting life in "Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA)" (1991), is perfectly suited to the tragic consequences of gun violence. Viewers are invited to take a sheets of paper, provoking an uneasy mirroring act between the disappearing stack and the lives lost due to gun violence.
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Gun Violence In The Work of Five Artists

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In the last 20 years, gun violence has become part of the very fabric of American society. In the wake of the Orlando tragedy, which claimed 49 lives, the Senate let most Americans down by rejecting four measures aimed at curbing easy access to guns.

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Student take the lead in US gun control debate newsletter - Josh Tatlonghari 

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Student take the lead in US gun control debate newsletter - Josh Tatlonghari 

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Guns in the US: The statistics behind the violence Website Article - Josh Tatlonghari

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Guns in the US: The statistics behind the violence Website Article - Josh Tatlonghari

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In the same period, an average of 517 people were killed annually in terror-related incidents. Removing 2001, when 9/11 occurred, from the calculation produces an annual average of just 31.

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Guns in the US: The statistics behind the violence

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In the same period, an average of 517 people were killed annually in terror-related incidents. Removing 2001, when 9/11 occurred, from the calculation produces an annual average of just 31.

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The history of art and culture in Eritrea |

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The nine ethnic groups of the country provide Eritrea with a variety of lifestyles and cultures. The sea is central to the people of the coast, while the lowlanders' lives are oriented around

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The Economist offers authoritative insight and opinion on international news, politics, business, finance, science, technology and the connections between them.

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"The quality of place, the reaction to immediate contact with earth and growing things that have a fugal relationship with mountains and sky, is essential to the integrity of our existence on this planet," the famous American photographer Ansel Adams wrote in his autobiography. From the romantic painters of the late 18th century to Adams to contemporary figures like Pedro Reyes and Agnes Denes, artists have long had a fascination -- and deep respect -- for the planet on which we exist.

With the words "global warming" and "climate change" never far from the headlines, artists like Adams and co. are more relevant than ever. Tying together the scientific and creative worlds in acts of beauty and activism, sculptors, painters, photographers and more have the power to make environmentalism a priority and bring green initiatives to the forefront of cultural conversations. Behold, 18 green artists who are making climate change and conservation a priority.
1. Olafur Eliasson's Icebergs

Olafur Eliasson. Your waste of time. 2013. Installation view of EXPO 1: New York at MoMA PS1. Photo: Matthew Septimus.
For " Your waste of time," Olafur Eliasson displayed pieces of ice that broke off from Iceland's largest glacier, Vatnajökull. Exhibited in a refrigerated gallery space powered by solar panels, the ice "sculptures" represented 800 years of Earthly existence, putting human's physical experience in perspective. "The obvious lesson of Mr. Eliasson's installation, 'Your waste of time,' is that global warming is wreaking havoc on nature," Ken Johnson wrote in The New York Times last year.
2. David Maisel's Photographs of Open Pit Mines

David Maisel, The Mining Project (Butte, Montana 9), 1989, Archival Pigment Print, 2013, 48 x 48 inches, Edition of 5, Courtesy of the artists and Haines Gallery
At first glance, David Maisel's gorgeous photographs seem to celebrate the natural beauty of another planet, but his deep blue swirls and red craters actually depict the aerial appearance of environmentally impacted sites in the United States transformed by water reclamation, logging, military tests and mining. "With the mining sites, I found a subject matter that carried forth my fascination with the undoing of the landscape, in terms of both its formal beauty and its environmental politics," Maisel writes on his website.
3. Luzinterruptus' Waste Labyrinth
The art collective Luzinterruptus has a history of tackling political and social issues in Europe. The "Labyrinth of Plastic Waste" is but one example.

"We were looking to demonstrate, in a poetic manner, the amount of plastic waste that is consumed daily," Luzinterruptus explained in a statement. "In addition to focusing attention on the big business of bottling water, which leads to very serious problems in developing countries, whose citizens have watched as their aquifers have been privatized with impunity for the exclusive enrichment of large business owners and ruling classes without scruples."
4. Amanda Schachter and Alexander Levi's Harvest Dome

Architects Amanda Schachter and Alexander Levi's massive " Harvest Dome 2.0," assembled from 450 umbrellas and 128 bottles, once floated around the inlet of Inwood Hill Park in New York City. Deemed a piece of "performance architecture," the 24 by 18-foot structure further proves the world's garbage can we reused in many unexpected ways.
5. John Sabraw's Toxic Sludge Paintings

Using toxic runoff found in the Ohio River region, artist and professor John Sabraw produces his own DIY pigments -- bold yellows and reds that are sourced from the oxidized sludge of abandoned coal mines. Rather than using imported iron oxide from China to make his paint colors, he taps into the water's heavy metals left over from abandoned coal mines, bringing to light the region's pollution problem in the process.

" The artist, like the scientist, has a crucial role to perform in our society," Sabraw explained to HuffPost. "See things differently, act on this vision, report the failures and successes."
6. Naziha Mestaoui's Virtual Forests

Naziha Mestaoui's "One Beat One Tree" projects virtual forests onto city spaces, blurring the boundaries between the natural world and advancing technology. The digital trees actually grow in rhythm with a person's heartbeat, as viewers can connect to the series via a smart phone sensor. And with each virtual plant, a physical one is grown in regions throughout the world, from Europe and Latin America to Africa and Asia. Since its inception two years ago, the project has already sparked the growth of 13,000 trees.
7. Rachel Sussman's Oldest Things

Photographer Rachel Sussman has been traveling the globe for the past 10 years, searching for the world's oldest living things with camera in tow. From the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback to Greenland's icy expanses, she captures portraits of organisms capable of lasting for 80,000 years, shining a light on our planet's resilience in the face of human intervention. "Extreme longevity can lull us into a false sense of permanence," Sussman wrote for Brain Pickings. " But being old is not the same as being immortal."
8. Barry Underwood's Electric Landscapes

Combining elements of painting, photography, performance, cinema and land art, Barry Underwood renders environmental issues like light pollution and deforestation in electric splendor."My attempt is to portray environmental issues that are not delivered in a heavy-handed way," Underwood explained to HuffPost. "Rather in a way that draws attention in a pleasing way, then if contemplated could unfold a message of dissidence or a natural discord."
9. Paulo Grangeon's 1,600 Pandas.

French sculptor Paulo Grangeon used an unlikely medium to illuminate the reality of animal endangerment across the world. For his traveling exhibit, "Pandas on Tour," he created 1,600 papier-mâché bears meant to represent the actual number of pandas left on the planet (recent estimates actually place the number slightly below that, at 1,596). Launched in 2008 in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund, Grangeon's project has traveled to landmarks in more than 20 countries, including the Eiffel Tower.
10. Daan Roosegaarde's Vacuum
Ask a Dutch artist to solve the problem of blanket pollution in Beijing and what do you get? If you've tracked down Daan Roosegaarde, you'll get "Smog," a system of underground copper coils meant to suck up airborne particles using an electrostatic field. It's like a vacuum cleaner that operates on a similar principle to statically charged balloons.
11. Aida Sulova's Trash Cans

A Kyrgyz street artist named Aida Sulova confronted the rampant garbage problem in Bishkek by using trash bins as a canvas. According to Wooster Collective, the street artist pastes photographic images of open mouths on garbage cans throughout the city to "remind people that what they throw into the world, eventually ends up inside us."
12. Chris Jordan's Portraits of Consumption

Cell phones #2, Atlanta 2005
Photographer Chris Jordan puts consumption into perspective with his series "Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption." His works show the debris we as a society leave behind, from massive dumps of cell phones, to crushed cars and circuit boards, all squeezed together in hypnotic quantities. "I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination," Jordan explained in an email to The Huffington Post. "The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity."
13. Gabriel Orozco's Found Objects

For the 2012 installation " Sandstars," Gabriel Orozco arranged over 1,200 objects from the Isla Arena, Mexico trash repository on the Guggenheim Museum's floor, accompanied by a dozen large, gridded photographs depicting the individual objects in a studio setting. The found treasures bring hints of the ignored wastelands into a gallery setting, forcing viewers to confront the effects of industrial and commercial refuse.
14. rAndom International's Rain Room
The 2013 phenomenon that was the " Rain Room" invited MoMA viewers to experience a deluge of falling water without getting wet. According to the museum's description for the exhibition EXPO 1: New York, "the work invites visitors to explore the roles that science, technology, and human ingenuity can play in stabilizing our environment."
15. Agnes Denes's Wheatfields

Agnes Denes, Wheatfield, 1982, Courtesy of the artist and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects
Agnes Denes is a giant among land artists. Her most well-known project is probably the 1982 piece "Wheatfield -- A Confrontation," in which she planted a field of golden wheat on two acres of a landfill near Wall Street and the World Trade Center in Manhattan. She weeded, irrigated and cultivated the mini oasis, bringing the essence of rural America into the throngs of America's urban epicenter. The confrontation was between nature and artifice.
16. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Surrounded Islands

Christo and the late Jeanne-Claude are well known for their massive land artworks that serve to remind viewers of the natural wonders scattered around the planet. For " Surrounded Islands," the two artists encircled 11 islands in Biscayne Bay, Miami with 6.5 million square feet of floating pink woven polypropylene fabric. In the process, they cleaned up 40 tons of garbage from the floating land masses.
17. Mathilde Roussel's Living Sulptures

French artist Mathilde Roussel created a series of living grass installations that take the shape of human beings. Made of recycled material and fabric filled with soil and wheat grass seeds, the pieces are meant to symbolize the centrality of food. " Observing nature and being aware of what and how we eat makes us more sensitive to food cycles in the world -- of abundance, of famine -- and allows us to be physically, intellectually and spiritually connected to a global reality," the artist explains.
18. Pedro Reyes' Grasshopper Burgers

Queens Museum, courtesy Laila Bahman
For "The People's United Nations (pUN)" exhibition at Queens Museum in New York, Mexican artist Pedro Reyes made climate change and geo-engineering points of focus for his diplomatic performance piece. He even served grasshopper burgers during a lunch break to participants in the 193-person assembly to highlight the carbon footprint of meat. " Protein from insects is the way of the future," the artist proclaimed to HuffPost.

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18 Green Artists Who Are Making Climate Change A Priority

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"The quality of place, the reaction to immediate contact with earth and growing things that have a fugal relationship with mountains and sky, is essential to the integrity of our existence on this planet," the famous American photographer Ansel Adams wrote in his autobiography.

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Actionable measures on energy-usage will meet their fate this week, with United Nations talks and public protests planned as part of Climate Week NYC. Climate change is arguably the most pressing sociopolitical issue of our time, with famine, poverty, and mass-relocation hanging in the balance. The romantic, rambling idylles and shimmering rivers of J. M. W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich feel as quaint now as they were foreign to viewers at the time of their unveiling, viewers accustomed to Earth being represented as debased and unpredictable, an unruled beast man ached to conquer. Our contemporary landscape, too, feels foreign: seas are rising, fires spreading, and ice melting. It's a process unseen by the majority of us across the globe who live in urban environments. But artists of today have internalized this fraught relationship and are responding in kind.

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Nine Artists Leading the Discussion on Climate Change

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Actionable measures on energy-usage will meet their fate this week, with United Nations talks and public protests planned as part of Climate Week NYC. Climate change is arguably the most pressing sociopolitical issue of our time, with famine, poverty, and mass-relocation hanging in the balance. The romantic, rambling idylles and shimmering rivers of J.

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Problem: Overloading of the atmosphere and of ocean waters with carbon. Atmospheric CO2 absorbs and re-emits infrared-wavelength radiation, leading to warmer air, soils, and ocean surface waters - which is good: The planet would be frozen solid without this.

Unfortunately, there's now too much carbon in the air. Burning of fossil fuels, deforestation for agriculture, and industrial activities have pushed up atmospheric CO2 concentrations from 280 parts per million (ppm) 200 years ago, to about 400 ppm today. That's an unprecedented rise, in both size and speed. The result: climate disruption.

Carbon overloading is only one form of air pollution caused by burning coal, oil, gas and wood. The World Health Organization recently estimated that one in nine deaths in 2012 were attributable to diseases caused by carcinogens and other poisons in polluted air.

Solutions: Replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. Reforestation. Reduce emissions from agriculture. Change industrial processes.

The good news is that clean energy is abundant - it just needs to be harvested. Many say a 100 percent renewable-energy future is feasible with existing technology now.

But the bad news is that even though renewable energy infrastructure - solar panels, wind turbines, energy storage and distribution systems - are already widespread, and getting cheaper and more efficient all the time, experts say we're not applying them quickly enough to prevent catastrophic climate disruption. Barriers in policy and finance remain to be overcome.
Picture gallery: The big smog: Cities plagued by air pollution 2. Deforestation.
Problem: Species-rich wild forests are being destroyed, especially in the tropics, often to make way for cattle ranching, soybean or palm oil plantations, or other agricultural monocultures.

Today, about 30 percent of the planet's land area is covered by forests - which is about half as much as before agriculture got started around 11,000 years ago. About 7.3 million hectares (18 million acres) of forest are destroyed each year, mostly in the tropics. Tropical forests used to cover about 15 percent of the planet's land area; they're now down to 6 or 7 percent. Much of this remainder has been degraded by logging or burning.

Not only do natural forests act as biodiversity reserves, they are also carbon sinks, keeping carbon out of the atmosphere and oceans.

Solutions: Conserve of what's left of natural forests, and restore degraded areas by replanting with native tree species. This requires strong governance - but many tropical countries are still developing, with increasing populations, uneven rule-of-law, and widespread cronyism and bribery when it comes to allocating land use.
Picture gallery: Burning down the Amazon 3. Species extinction.
Problem: On land, wild animals are being hunted to extinction for bushmeat, ivory, or "medicinal" products. At sea, huge industrial fishing boats equipped with bottom-trawling or purse-seine nets clean out entire fish populations. The loss and destruction of habitat are also major factors contributing to a wave of extinction - unprecedented in that it is caused by a single species: humans. The IUCN's Red List of threatened and endangered species continues to grow.

Not only do species inherently deserve to exist, they also provide products and "services" essential to human survival. Think bees and their pollinating prowess - necessary for growing food.

Solutions: Concerted efforts need to be made to prevent further loss of biodiversity. Protecting and restoring habitats is one side of this - protecting against poaching and wildlife trade is another. This should be done in partnership with locals, so that wildlife conservation is in their social and economic interest.

Picture gallery: Looming extinction crisis
4. Soil degradation.
Problem: Overgrazing, monoculture planting, erosion, soil compaction, overexposure to pollutants, land-use conversion - there's a long list of ways that soils are being damaged. About 12 million hectares of farmland a year get seriously degraded, according to UN estimates.

Solutions: A wide range of soil conservation and restoration techniques exist, from no-till agriculture to crop rotation to water-retention through terrace-building. Given that food security depends on keeping soils in good condition, we're likely master this challenge in the long run. Whether this will be done in a way equitable to all people around the globe, remains an open question.

Picture gallery: When the earth turns to dust
5. Overpopulation.
Problem: Human population continues to grow rapidly worldwide. Humanity entered the 20th century with 1.6 billion people; right now, we're about 7.5 billion. Estimates put us at nearly 10 billion by 2050. Growing global populations, combined with growing affluence, is putting ever greater pressure on essential natural resources, like water. Most of the growth is happening on the African continent, and in southern and eastern Asia.

Solutions: Experience has shown that when women are empowered to control their own reproduction, and gain access to education and basic social services, the average number of births per woman drops precipitously.

Done right, networked aid systems could bring women out of extreme poverty, even in countries where state-level governance remains abysmal.

Picture gallery: Remember when we used just one earth?

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Five of the world's biggest environmental problems | DW | 11.10.2016

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Problem: Overloading of the atmosphere and of ocean waters with carbon. Atmospheric CO2 absorbs and re-emits infrared-wavelength radiation, leading to warmer air, soils, and ocean surface waters - which is good: The planet would be frozen solid without this. Unfortunately, there's now too much carbon in the air.

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1)

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/02/19/us/florida-parkland-shooting-marches/index.html

2)

https://www.womensmarch.com

3)

http://dailycampus.com/stories/2018/2/26/dont-attack-young-people-for-having-different-religious-beliefs

4)

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2018/02/thousands-protest-deadly-drug-war-philippines-180224084450606.html

5)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/26/government-dragging-its-feet-over-plastic-bottle-scheme-say-mps

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1. gun shot at florida
2. rape victims
3. World war 2
4. Overseas filipino workers gets abused physically and emotionally
5. human rights

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Orlando shooting: 49 killed, shooter pledged ISIS allegiance (gun violence) -Josh Tatlonghari

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Orlando shooting: 49 killed, shooter pledged ISIS allegiance (gun violence) -Josh Tatlonghari

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49 killed in Florida nightclub terror attack

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Forty-nine people were killed at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, in what marks the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

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https://www.google.ca/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/5169357/gun-control-rally-walkouts-us-capitol

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/20/las-vegas-shooting-police-report-gunman-motive-mystery-stephen-paddock

http://www.newsweek.com/list-school-shootings-america-2013-380535

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5a8ac240e4b004fc31946d11/amp

https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/07/us/connecticut-shootings-fast-facts/index.html

Miriele Silla

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Las Vegas shooting: gunman was on losing streak and 'germophobic', police say (Gun Violence) - Josh Tatlonghari

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Las Vegas shooting: gunman was on losing streak and 'germophobic', police say (Gun Violence) - Josh Tatlonghari

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After three months of investigation, police have learned that Stephen Paddock, who carried out the Las Vegas shooting in October, was a high-stakes gambler on a losing streak, obsessed with cleanliness, possibly bipolar and was having difficulties with his live-in girlfriend.

But hundreds of interviews and thousands of pieces of evidence have not answered the key question: why did Paddock open fire from a high-rise hotel suite, killing 58 people and injuring more than 800 in the deadliest shooting in modern US history?

Sheriff Joe Lombardo of Clark County released a preliminary report on Friday on the 1 October attack on an outdoor concert staged from a room at the Mandalay Bay casino-hotel. He said he did not expect criminal charges to be filed against Paddock's girlfriend, Marilou Danley, who had been named as the only person of interest in the case.

Investigators believe Paddock acted alone. He did not leave a suicide note or manifesto before he was found dead in the room.

Weeks before the shooting, the couple stayed at Mandalay Bay. Paddock was acting strangely, Danley told investigators. She remembered him constantly looking out of the windows overlooking an area where the concert would be held the next month. He moved from window to window to see the site from different angles, the report said.

Paddock had become "distant" in the year before the shooting and their relationship was no longer intimate, Danley said in an interview with investigators. She described him as germophobic and said he had strong reactions to smells.

Paddock, who fatally shot himself in his hotel room, had told friends and relatives he always felt ill, in pain and fatigued.

His doctor thought he may have had bipolar disorder but told police Paddock refused to discuss the possibility, the report said. The doctor offered him antidepressants but Paddock accepted only a prescription for anxiety medication. Paddock was fearful of medication and often refused to take it, the doctor told investigators.

The 64-year-old retired accountant and real estate investor had lost a "significant amount of wealth" since September 2015, which led to "bouts of depression", the sheriff has said. Paddock paid off his gambling debts before the shooting, according to the report.

Danley was in the Philippines at the time of the shooting. In the days before the attack, Paddock sent her a $100,000 wire transfer. She has said she found that odd and thought he might have been breaking up with her when he sent her the money and told her to use it to buy a home for her family there.

During an interview with the FBI after she returned from the Philippines, Danley said investigators would find her fingerprints on bullets used during the attack because she would sometimes help Paddock load high-volume ammunition magazines, according to FBI warrant documents.

Investigators found 23 rifles and a handgun in Paddock's hotel suite and more than a dozen of the rifles were fitted with "bump stock" devices that allowed rapid-fire shooting similar to fully automatic weapons. Dozens of guns were strewn around the room, some left inside a bassinet.

In their report, police released never-before-seen photos from inside the hotel suite, including one shot through a broken window, showing the concert venue still littered with personal belongings.

Paddock fired more than 1,100 bullets, mostly from two windows on the 32nd floor of the hotel, into a crowd of 22,000 people attending the Route 91 Harvest Festival, Lombardo has said. That includes about 200 shots fired through his hotel room door into a hallway where an unarmed hotel security guard was wounded in the leg and a maintenance engineer took cover.

Before the attack, Paddock had researched Swat tactics and searched online for other potential public targets, including in Chicago, Boston and Santa Monica, California, the sheriff said.

His research also sought the number of attendees at other concerts in Las Vegas and the size of the crowds at Santa Monica's beach. Among his searches was "do police use explosives", the report said.

Four laptops and three cellphones were found inside his hotel suite. On one of the computers, investigators found hundreds of photos of child abuse. The same computer was used to search for the height of the Mandalay Bay, how to remove hard drives from laptops, the location of gun shows in Nevada and information about several other Las Vegas casinos.

A federal grand jury is hearing evidence in a case that spun off from the shooting investigation, the sheriff said. The FBI has "an ongoing case against an individual of federal interest", Lombardo said, declining to elaborate.

Spokeswomen for the FBI and federal prosecutors in Las Vegas declined to comment.
Topics

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Las Vegas shooting: gunman was on losing streak and 'germophobic', police say

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After three months of investigation, police have learned that Stephen Paddock, who carried out the Las Vegas shooting in October, was a high-stakes gambler on a losing streak, obsessed with cleanliness, possibly bipolar and was having difficulties with his live-in girlfriend.

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- Josh Tatlonghari

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Senator Joseph Tydings of Maryland, appealing in the summer of 1968 for an effective gun-control law, lamented: "It is just tragic that in all of Western civilization the United States is the one country with an insane gun policy." In one respect this was an understatement: Western or otherwise, the United States is the only modern industrial urban nation that persists in maintaining a gun culture. It is the only industrial nation in which the possession of rifles, shotguns, and handguns is lawfully prevalent among large numbers of its population. It is the only such nation that has been impelled in recent years to agonize at length about its own disposition toward violence and to set up a commission to examine it, the only nation so attached to the supposed "right" to bear arms that its laws abet assassins, professional criminals, berserk murderers, and political terrorists at the expense of the orderly population-and yet it remains, and is apparently determined to remain, the most passive of all the major countries in the matter of gun control. Many otherwise intelligent Americans cling with pathetic stubbornness to the notion that the people's right to bear arms is the greatest protection of their individual rights and a firm safeguard of democracy-without being in the slightest perturbed by the fact that no other democracy in the world observes any such "right" and that in some democracies in which citizens' rights are rather better protected than in ours, such as England and the Scandinavian countries, our arms control policies would be considered laughable.

Laughable, however, they are not, when one begins to contemplate the costs. Since strict gun controls clearly could not entirely prevent homicides, suicides, armed robberies, or gun accidents, there is no simple way of estimating the direct human cost, much less the important indirect political costs, of having lax gun laws. But a somewhat incomplete total of firearms fatalities in the United States as of 1964 shows that in the twentieth century alone we have suffered more than 740,000 deaths from firearms, embracing over 265,000 homicides, over 330,000 suicides, and over 139,000 gun accidents. This figure is considerably higher than all the battle deaths (that is, deaths sustained under arms but excluding those from disease) suffered by American forces in all the wars in our history. It can, of course, be argued that such fatalities have been brought about less by the prevalence of guns than by some intangible factor, such as the wildness and carelessness of the American national temperament, or by particular social problems, such as the intensity of our ethnic and racial mixture. But such arguments cut both ways, since it can be held that a nation with such a temperament or such social problems needs stricter, not looser, srun controls.

One can only make a rough guess at the price Americans pay for their inability to arrive at satisfactory controls for guns. But it can be suggested in this way: there are several American cities that annually have more gun murders than all of England and Wales. In Britain, where no one may carry a firearm at night, where anyone who wants a long gun for hunting must get a certificate from the local police chief before he can buy it, and where gun dealers must verify a buyer's certificate, register all transactions in guns and ammunition, and take the serial number of each weapon and report it to the police, there are annually about .05 gun homicides per 100,000 population. In the United States there are 2.7. What this means in actual casualties may be suggested by the figures for 1963, when there were 5,126 gun murders in the United States, twenty-four in England and Wales, and three in Scotland. This country shows up about as badly in comparative gun accidents and, to a lesser degree, in suicides. There is not a single major country in the world that approaches our record in this respect.

Americans nowadays complain bitterly about the rising rate of violent crime. The gun is, of course, a major accessory of serious premeditated crime. Appealing for stronger gun controls in 1968, President Johnson pointed out that in the previous year there had been committed, with the use of guns, 7,700 murders, 55,000 aggravated assaults, and more than 71,000 robberies. Plainly, stronger gun controls could not end crime, but they would greatly enhance enforcement of the law (as New York's Sullivan Law does) and would reduce fatalities. Out of every one hundred assaults with guns, twenty-one led to death, as compared with only three out of every one hundred assaults committed by other means. In five states with relatively strong gun laws the total homicide rate per 100,000 population-that is, homicides from all causes-runs between 2.4 and 4.8. In the five states with the weakest gun laws this rate varies from 6.1 to 10.6.

In 1968, after the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., there was an almost touching national revulsion against our own gun culture, and for once the protesting correspondence on the subject reaching senators and representatives outweighed letters stirred up by the extraordinarily efficient lobby of the National Rifle Association. And yet all that came out of this moment of acute concern was a feeble measure, immensely disappointing to advocates of serious gun control, restricting the mail-order sales of guns. It seems clear now that the strategic moment for gun controls has passed and that the United States will continue to endure an armed populace, at least until there is a major political disaster involving the use of guns.

Today the urban population of the nation is probably more heavily armed than at any time in history, largely because the close of World War II left the participating countries with a huge surplus of militarily obsolescent but still quite usable guns. These could be sold nowhere in the world but in the United States, since no other country large enough and wealthy enough to provide a good market would have them. More weapons became available again in the 1950's, when NATO forces switched to a uniform cartridge and abandoned a stock of outmoded rifles. These again flooded the United States, including about 100,000 Italian Carcanos of the type with which John F. Kennedy was killed. Imported very cheaply, sometimes at less than a dollar apiece, these weapons could be sold at enormous profit but still inexpensively-the one that killed Kennedy cost $12.78.

It has been estimated that between five and seven million foreign weapons were imported into the United States between 1959 and 1963. Between 1965 and 1968 handgun imports rose from 346,000 to 1,155,000. Domestic industries that make cheap handguns are approaching an annual production of 500,000 pistols a year. Thus a nation in the midst of a serious political crisis, which has frequently provoked violence, is afloat with weapons-perhaps as many as fifty million of them-in civilian hands. An Opinion Research poll of September, 1968, showed that 34 per cent of a national sample of white families and 24 per cent of blacks admitted to having guns. With groups like the Black Panthers and right-wing cranks like the Minute Men, not to speak of numerous white vigilante groups, well armed for trouble, the United States finds itself in a situation faced by no other Western nation. One must ask: What are the historical forces that have led a supposedly well-governed nation into such a dangerous position?

It is very easy, in interpreting American history, to give the credit and the blame for almost everything to the frontier, and certainly this temptation is particularly strong where guns are concerned. After all, for the first 250 years of their history Americans were an agricultural people with a continuing history of frontier expansion. At the very beginning the wild continent abounded with edible game, and a colonizing people still struggling to control the wilderness and still living very close to the subsistence level found wild game an important supplement to their diet. Moreover, there were no enforceable feudal inhibitions against poaching by the common man, who was free to roam where he could and shoot what he could and who ate better when he shot better. Furthermore, all farmers, but especially farmers in a lightly settled agricultural country, need guns for the control of wild vermin and predators. The wolf, as we still say, has to be kept from the door.

Finally, and no less imperatively, there were the Indians, who were all too often regarded by American frontiersmen as another breed of wild animal. The situation of the Indians, constantly under new pressures from white encroachments, naturally commands modern sympathy. But they were in fact, partly from the very desperation of their case, often formidable, especially in the early days when they were an important force in the international rivalries of England, France, and Spain in North America. Like the white man they had guns, and like him they committed massacres. Modern critics of our culture who, like Susan Sontag, seem to know nothing of American history, who regard the white race as a "cancer" and assert that the United States was "founded on a genocide," may fantasize that the Indians fought according to the rules of the Geneva Convention. But in the tragic conflict of which they were to be the chief victims, they were capable of striking terrible blows. In King Philip's War (1675-76) they damaged half the towns of New England, destroyed a dozen, and killed an estimated one out of every sixteen males of military age among the settlers. Later the Deerfield and other frontier massacres left powerful scars on the frontier memory, and in the formative days of the colonial period wariness of sudden Indian raids and semimilitary preparations to combat them were common on the western borders of settlement. Men and women, young and old, were all safer if they could command a rifle. "A well grown boy," remembered the Reverend Joseph Doddridge of his years on the Virginia frontier, "at the age of twelve or thirteen years, was furnished with a small rifle and shot-pouch. He then became a fort soldier, and had his port-hole assigned him. Hunting squirrels, turkeys and raccoons, soon made him expert in the use of his gun."

A LOADED VIEW OF PEACETIME AMERICAN HISTORY

That familiarity with the rifle, which was so generally inculcated on the frontier, had a good deal to do with such successes as Americans had in the battles of the Revolution. The Pennsylvania rifle, developed by German immigrants, was far superior to Brown Bess, the regulation military musket used by British troops. This blunt musket, an inaccurate weapon at any considerable distance, was used chiefly to gain the effect of mass firepower in open field maneuvers at relatively close range. The long, slender Pennsylvania rifle, which had a bored barrel that gave the bullet a spin, had a flatter and more direct trajectory, and in skilled hands it became a precision instrument. More quickly loaded and effective at a considerable distance, it was singularly well adapted not only to the shooting of squirrels but to the woodsman's shoot-and-hide warfare. It struck such terror into the hearts of British regulars as to cause George Washington to ask that as many of his troops as possible be dressed in the frontiersman's hunting shirt, since the British thought "every such person a complete Marksman." The rifle went a long way to make up for the military inconsistencies and indifferent discipline of American militiamen, and its successes helped to instill in the American mind a conviction of the complete superiority of the armed yeoman to the military professionals of Europe.

What began as a necessity of agriculture and the frontier took hold as a sport and as an ingredient in the American imagination. Before the days of spectator sports, when competitive athletics became a basic part of popular culture, hunting and fishing probably were the chief American sports, sometimes wantonly pursued, as in the decimation of the bison. But for millions of American boys, learning to shoot and above all graduating from toy guns and receiving the first real rifle of their own were milestones of life, veritable rites of passage that certified their arrival at manhood. (It is still argued by some defenders of our gun culture, and indeed conceded by some of its critics, that the gun cannot and will not be given up because it is a basic symbol of masculinity. But the trouble with all such glib Freudian generalities is that they do not explain cultural variations: they do not tell us why men elsewhere have not found the gun essential to their masculinity.)

What was so decisive in the winning of the West and the conquest of the Indian became a standard ingredient in popular entertainment. In the penny-dreadful Western and then in films and on television, the western man, quick on the draw, was soon an acceptable hero of violence. He found his successors in the private eye, the F.B.I, agent, and in the gangster himself, who so often provides a semilegitimate object of hero worship, a man with loyalties, courage, and a code of his own-even in films purporting to show that crime does not pay. All mass cultures have their stereotyped heroes, and none are quite free of violence; but the United States has shown an unusual penchant for the isolated, wholly individualistic detective, sheriff, or villain, and its entertainment portrays the solution of melodramatic conflicts much more commonly than, say, the English, as arising not out of ratiocination or some scheme of moral order but out of ready and ingenious violence. Every Walter Mitty has had his moment when he is Gary Cooper, stalking the streets in High Noon with his gun at the ready. D. H. Lawrence may have had something, after all, when he made his characteristically bold, impressionistic, and unflattering judgment that "the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." It was the notion cherished also by Hemingway in his long romance with war and hunting and with the other sports that end in death.

However, when the frontier and its ramifications are given their due, they fall far short of explaining the persistence of the American gun culture. Why is the gun still so prevalent in a culture in which only about 4 per cent of the country's workers now make their living from farming, a culture that for the last century and a half has had only a tiny fragment of its population actually in contact with a frontier, that, in fact, has not known a true frontier for three generations? Why did the United States alone among industrial societies cling to the idea that a substantially unregulated supply of guns among its city populations is a safe and acceptable thing? This is, after all, not the only nation with a frontier history. Canada and Australia have had theirs, and yet their gun control measures are far more satisfactory than ours. Their own gun homicide rates, as compared with our 2.7, range around .56, and their gun suicide and accident rates are also much lower. Again, Japan, with no frontier but with an ancient tradition of feudal and military violence, has adopted, along with its modernization, such rigorous gun laws that its gun homicide rate at .04 is one of the world's lowest. (The land of hara-kiri also has one of the lowest gun suicide rates-about one fiftieth of ours.) In sum, other societies, in the course of industrial and urban development, have succeeded in modifying their old gun habits, and we have not.

One factor that could not be left out of any adequate explanation of the tenacity of our gun culture is the existence of an early American political creed that has had a surprisingly long life, albeit much of it now is in an underground popular form. It has to do with the antimilitaristic traditions of radical English Whiggery, which were taken over and intensified in colonial America, especially during the generation preceding the American Revolution, and which became an integral part of the American political tradition. The popular possession of the gun was a central point in a political doctrine that became all but sacrosanct in the Revolution: a doctrine that rested upon faith in the civic virtue and military prowess of the yeoman; belief in the degeneration of England and in the sharp decline of "the liberties of Englishmen" on their original home soil; and a great fear of a standing army as one of the key dangers to this body of ancient liberties. The American answer to civic and military decadence, real or imagined, was the armed yeoman.

By the same reasoning the answer to militarism and standing armies was the militia system. It had long been the contention of those radical Whig writers whose works did so much to set the background of American thought, that liberty and standing armies were incompatible. Caesar and Cromwell were commonly cited as the prime historical examples of the destructive effects of political generals on the liberties of the people. The Americans became confident that their alternative device, an armed people, was the only possible solution to the perennial conflict between militarism and freedom. Their concern over the evils of repeated wars and institutionalized armies was heightened by the eighteenth-century European wars in which they were inevitably involved. Blaming the decay that they imagined to be sweeping over England in good part on the increasing role of the military in the mother country, they found their worst fears confirmed by the quartering of troops before the Revolution. John Adams saw in the Boston Massacre "the strongest proof of the danger of standing armies." The Virginian George Mason, surveying the history of the nations of the world, remarked: "What havoc, desolation and destruction, have been perpetrated by standing armies!" The only remedy, he thought, reverting to one of the genial fictions of this school of thought, was the ancient Saxon militia, "the natural strength and only stable security of a free government." Jefferson reverted to the idea of a popular Saxon militia by providing in his first draft of the Virginia Constitution of 1776 that "no freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms."

Washington, who had to command militiamen, had no illusions about them. He had seen not a single instance, he once wrote, that would justify "an opinion of Militia or raw Troops being fit for the real business of fighting. I have found them useful as light Parties to skirmish in the woods, but incapable of making or sustaining a serious attack." Despite the poor record of militia troops in the Revolution, as compared with the courage and persistence of Washington's small and fluctuating Continental Army, the myth persisted that the freedom of America had been won by the armed yeoman and the militia system, and the old fear of a standing army was in no way diminished now that it was not to be under the command of an English aristocracy but of native American generals. In the mid-1780's, when the Americans had won their independence and were living under the Articles of Confederation, Secretary of War Henry Knox found himself the administrator of an army of about seven hundred men. In the 1790's, when it was proposed under the Constitution to add only about five hundred more, Pennsylvania Democrat Senator William Maclay anxiously observed that the government seemed to be "laying the foundation of a standing army"! Only the disastrous performance of militiamen in the War of 1812 persuaded many American leaders that the militia was a slender reed upon which to rest the security of the nation.

In the meantime the passion for a popular militia as against a professional army had found its permanent embodiment in the Second Amendment to the Constitution: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." By its inclusion in the Bill of Rights, the right to bear arms thus gained permanent sanction in the nation, but it came to be regarded as an item on the basic list of guarantees of individual liberties. Plainly it was not meant as such. The right to bear arms was a collective , not an individual, right, closely linked to the civic need (especially keen in the absence of a sufficient national army) for "a well regulated Militia." It was, in effect, a promise that Congress would not be able to bar the states from doing whatever was necessary to maintain well-regulated militias.

The Supreme Court has more than once decided that the Second Amendment does not bar certain state or federal gun controls. In 1886 it upheld an Illinois statute forbidding bodies of men to associate in military organizations or to drill or parade with arms in cities or towns. When Congress passed the National Firearms Act of 1934 forbidding the transportation in interstate commerce of unregistered shotguns, an attempt to invoke the Second Amendment against the law was rejected by the Court in what is now the leading case on the subject, United States v. Miller (1939). In this case the Court, ruling on the prosecution of two men who had been convicted of violating the National Firearms Act by taking an unregistered sawed-off shotgun across state lines, concluded that the sawed-off shotgun had no "reasonable relationship to the prevention, preservation, or efficiency of a well-regulated militia." The Court ruled that since the gun in question was not part of ordinary military equipment, its use was unrelated to the common defense. The Court further found that the clear purpose of the Second Amendment was to implement the constitutional provision for "calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions" and declared that the Second Amendment "must be interpreted and applied with that end in view."

While the notion that "the right to bear arms" is inconsistent with state or federal gun regulation is largely confined to the obstinate lobbyists of the National Rifle Association, another belief of American gun enthusiasts enjoys a very wide currency in the United States, extending to a good many liberals, civil libertarians, and even radicals. It is the idea that popular access to arms is an important counterpoise to tyranny. A historian, recently remonstrating against our gun policies, was asked by a sympathetic liberal listener whether it was not true, for example, that one of the first acts of the Nazis had been to make it impossible for the nonparty, nonmilitary citizen to have a gun-the assumption being that the German people had thus lost their last barrier to tyranny. In fact Nazi gun policies were of no basic consequence: the democratic game had been lost long before, when legitimate authorities under the Weimar Republic would not or could not stop uniformed groups of Nazi terrorists from intimidating other citizens on the streets and in their meetings and when the courts and the Reich Ministry of Justice did not act firmly and consistently to punish the makers of any Nazi Putsch according to law. It is not strong and firm governments but weak ones, incapable of exerting their regulatory and punitive powers, that are overthrown by tyrannies. Nonetheless, the American historical mythology about the protective value of guns has survived the modern technological era in all the glory of its naïveté, and it has been taken over from the whites by some young blacks, notably the Panthers, whose accumulations of arms have thus far proved more lethal to themselves than to anyone else. In all societies the presence of small groups of uncontrolled and unauthorized men in unregulated possession of arms is recognized to be dangerous. A query therefore must ring in our heads: Why is it that in all other modern democratic societies those endangered ask to have such men disarmed, while in the United States alone they insist on arming themselves?

A further point is of more than symptomatic interest: the most gun-addicted sections of the United States are the South and the Southwest. In 1968, when the House voted for a mild bill to restrict the mail-order sale of rifles, shotguns, and ammunition, all but a few of the 118 votes against it came from these regions. This no doubt has something to do with the rural character of these regions, but it also stems from another consideration: in the historic system of the South, having a gun was a white prerogative. From the days of colonial slavery, when white indentured servants were permitted, and under some circumstances encouraged, to have guns, blacks, whether slave or free, were denied the right. The gun, though it had a natural place in the South's outdoor culture, as well as a necessary place in the work of slave patrols, was also an important symbol of white male status. Students in the Old South took guns to college as a matter of course. In 1840 an undergraduate at the University of Virginia killed a professor during a night of revelry that was frequently punctuated by gunfire. Thomas Hart Benton, later to be a distinguished Missouri senator, became involved, during his freshman year at the University of North Carolina, in a brawl in which he drew a pistol on another student, and was spared serious trouble only when a professor disarmed him. He was sixteen years old at the time. In the light of the long white effort to maintain a gun monopoly, it is hardly surprising, though it may be discouraging, to see militant young blacks borrowing the white man's mystique and accepting the gun as their instrument. "A gun is status- that's why they call it an equalizer," said a young Chicago black a few years ago. "What's happening today is that everybody's getting more and more equal because everybody's got one."

But perhaps more than anything else the state of American gun controls is evidence of one of the failures of federalism: the purchase and possession of guns in the United States is controlled by a chaotic jumble of twenty thousand state and local laws that collectively are wholly inadequate to the protection of the people and that operate in such a way that areas with poor controls undermine those with better ones. No such chaos would be tolerated, say, in the field of automobile registration. The automobile, like the gun, is a lethal instrument, and the states have recognized it as such by requiring that each driver as well as each car must be registered and that each driver must meet certain specified qualifications. It is mildly inconvenient to conform, but no one seriously objects to the general principle, as gun lobbyists do to gun registration. However, as the United States became industrial and urban, the personnel of its national and state legislatures remained to a very considerable degree small town and rural, and under the seniority system that prevails in Congress, key posts on committees have long been staffed by aging members from smalltown districts-worse still, from small-town districts in regions where there is little or no party competition and hence little turnover in personnel. Many social reforms have been held back long after their time was ripe by this rural-seniority political culture. Gun control is another such reform: American legislators have been inordinately responsive to the tremendous lobby maintained by the National Rifle Association, in tandem with gunmakers and importers, military sympathizers, and far-right organizations. A nation that could not devise a system of gun control after its experiences of the 1960's, and at a moment of profound popular revulsion against guns, is not likely to get such a system in the calculable future. One must wonder how grave a domestic gun catastrophe would have to be in order to persuade us. How far must things go?

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Senator Joseph Tydings of Maryland, appealing in the summer of 1968 for an effective gun-control law, lamented: "It is just tragic that in all of Western civilization the United States is the one country with an insane gun policy."

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1. Gun shot at Florida
https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/15/us/florida-shooting-victims-school/index.html
http://time.com/5158678/what-to-know-about-the-active-shooter-situation-at-florida-high-school/
2. Rape Victims or sexual assault
https://psa.gov.ph/content/rape
http://www.bravemissworld.com/category/share_your_story
3. Overseas Filipino workers gets physical and emotionally abused.
http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/970330/ofw-filipino-workers-middle-east-kuwait-senator-abuse-death-demafelis
https://youtu.be/V7Nvv8Yhu3c
4. Drugs abuse
http://www.drugfreeworld.org/real-life-stories.html
5.  Paris Massacre
https://www.cnn.com/2015/11/13/world/paris-shooting/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2015/12/08/europe/2015-paris-terror-attacks-fast-facts/index.html

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BuzzFeed Video - Me and Mass Shooting (Gun Violence) Josh Tatlonghari

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BuzzFeed Video - Me and Mass Shooting (Gun Violence) Josh Tatlonghari

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We grew up on mass shootings. It's time for our generation to take action. Contact your representative in the Senate and House: http://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/ http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/ Register to vote: https://www.rockthevote.com/register-to-vote/ Support LGBT Community: http://www.hrc.org/ Even if you're young, you can still make social change: https://www.dosomething.org/us/ Check out more awesome videos at BuzzFeedVideo!

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March for our lives (official website) Josh Tatlonghari

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March for our lives (official website) Josh Tatlonghari

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Find a chapter

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OUR POWER 2020

Our Power will keep up our movement despite the obstacles because we all deserve a safer, more peaceful America. This is our year to make sure young people get a say in the future of this country.

A PEACE PLAN FOR A SAFER AMERICA

We have a bold, comprehensive policy platform to end the gun violence epidemic in America that claims nearly 40,000 lives every year. If we're going to end this, we need to address the root causes of gun violence. Created by survivors, so you don't have to be one.

DEMAND CHANGE

Now is the time for the youth vote to stand up to the gun lobby when no one else will.

This is the price of each student's life in Florida, based on the millions of dollars politicians have accepted from the NRA. It's up to us to change this.
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So it's #InaugurationDay, we kicked a fascist out of office. This is exciting. MFOL has never existed outside of the Trump era. As Biden enters his role as president, we remind him who delivered this win, BIPOC youth.
about 2 days ago

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Join the fight! Sign up to be a part of March For Our Lives in your community. Our Power will keep up our movement despite the obstacles because we all deserve a safer, more peaceful America. This is our year to make sure young people get a say in the future of this country.

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Using Religion for Political Gains
https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865625506/Why-politicians-turn-to-religion-in-times-of-uncertainty.html

Women Today
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/sep/29/women-better-off-far-from-equal-men

Overpopulation and Mental Health
https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/where-you-live-has-a-big-effect-on-mental-health-1.203966

Orlando Florida Nightclub Shooting
https://www.npr.org/2016/06/16/482322488/orlando-shooting-what-happened-update

Racial Disparities In US Police Forces
https://www.vox.com/cards/police-brutality-shootings-us/us-police-racism

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Climate change causing the vast meltage of the glaciers.
- Ariel Aledia

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Ariel Aledia

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Pollution
Ariel Aledia

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Ariel Aledia

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Climate and tech pose the biggest risks to our world in 2018

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September 2017 was the most intense month on record for extreme weather events, as well as the most expensive US hurricane season since 2005 with economic losses in excess of $300 billion.

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Ariel Aledia

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The Biggest Environmental Challenges of 2017

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Perspectives from our global and regional leaders on the most pressing issues facing people and the planet.