Gun Violence Takes a Child’s Life, And Many More, in Chicago

Courtesy of progressillinois.com/sites/progressillinois.com

There have been many mass shootings in America just within the past few years. But among these high-profile murders are countless low-profile ones like this, reported by ChicagoTribune.com:

Father of University of California Shooting Victim Speaks Out

Click on image to view video at YouTube.com

I was sent a video recently by MoveOn.org that moved me to tears. In it, the father of a victim of the shooting rampage at the University of California, Santa Barbara was interviewed. Please watch it.

Smart rifle: Dystopian SF novel just around the corner.

Later On

Hendrik Hertzberg has a good column in the New Yorker:

Soon after the Isla Vista mass shooting, an e-mail from Breitbart News, one of the slicker right-wing Web sites, popped into my inbox. Considering the source, the breathless subject line was startling: THE WORLD’S FIRST SMART RIFLE – NOW IN SEMI-AUTO

A smart gun, as you probably know, is one that can be fired only by an authorized person, such as the weapon’s legal owner. Anyway, that’s the usual meaning. The way a smart gun works, smartplanet.com explains, “is that the gun’s biometric system is set up to recognize the rightful user through a unique identity marker such as a person’s fingerprint, magnetic rings, RFID chips or other proximity devices.”

A smart gun is a technological fix. If guns were smart, we wouldn’t need to worry so much about their falling into the wrong hands—such as the hands…

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