Year: 2016

Gun Control? “Your Side Won”

First published many years ago. I’ll just keep doing so. Tom Tomorrow, one of my favorite cartoonists, summarizes gun control and killings quite well. Click through to read. “Barring some seismic realignment in this country, the gun control debate is all but settled–and your side won. The occasional horrific civilian massacre is just the price…
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“Rancher on horseback lassos bike thief”

Too good of a headline to pass up. And nice picture, too. From the Daily News.

All in the Family (II): Another Nexus of Baltimore Violence

Forgive me for speaking ill of the dead, as I did a few days ago. But today the Baltimore Sun has a feature about a man who has had two sons murdered. Tragic. It really is. Nobody should have to deal with one child murdered, much less two. But being cynical and a former Baltimore…
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Who speaks for the rapist?

Apparently, in the Stanford rapist case, the judge. If you’re still in denial that our justice system can be mean and even racist, would you at least consider that it often benefits the rich and privileged? And then can you see that these two statements are essentially one and the same? Here’s very interesting take…
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Legal summary of the Baltimore trials

This isn’t new, it was just hard to figure out. And I wanted to add it to my Baltimore Primer. What exactly was argued in the acquittal of Officer Nero was hard to figure out. Mostly because the State’s Attorney, Mosby, has repeated changed her story. Initially she claimed the stop of Freddie Gray illegal…
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Is this what the Ferguson Effect looks like?

Take this fightat North Avenue Beach in Chicago. Seems like mostly a bunch of stupid frat bro’s, one wearing an SAE tank top. (“These people” also have problems.) Why does does this have to do with the Ferguson (or “Viral Video”) Effect? Well, if you’re looking for an example of how fear or negative publicity…
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All in the Family

Here’s another one for the record books. This isn’t the first time somebody has been shot at a funeral. Kevin Rector and Justin George of the Sun observe, “Gunfire has marred other services in recent years to mourn deceased victims of violence in Baltimore.” And this is probably not even the first time a father…
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Good News From NYC, Not-Bad News From Baltimore, Horrible News from Chicago

In New York City, year to date, murders continue to be lower than last year (124 vs 140) and higher than record-low 2014 (112). Given the rise of homicide in so many other cities, this is great news. In Baltimore there were 26 murders in May. It’s hard to call this exactly “good news.” But…
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The New York Times goes to the Hood

I applaud any effort to focus on the victims of violence in America. Too often nobody knows or cares about this real carnage in this country. So over Memorial Day weekend the New York Times went to the bad parts of Chicago to sightsee: [We] dispatched a team of reporters, photographers and videographers to virtually…
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Burgled in NOLA

We were burgled while out eating dinner in New Orleans. Not that I knew it then, but right before we left the home, somebody in the St. Roch League of Non-Aligned Residents reported: A 30ish black male about 5’6″ wearing a blue t shirt and gold shorts on a light colored bike (off white, I…
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