Reading Time: 6 minutes Why does the United States all-too-casually allow virtually anyone to buy an AR-15-style rifle, a fearsomely lethal weapon millions of American civilians have already joyfully acquired? I ask myself that question every time one of these awful weapons is used to kill many, many innocent people in a matter of minutes or even seconds—including the […]
Violence
Posted inViolence
Skipping America: US gun culture has the rest of the world keeping its distance
Reading Time: 6 minutes In late May of this year, while reeling from the news of the mass shootings in a Buffalo, NY grocery store and Uvalde, TX elementary school, I found myself thinking about which progressive country with sensible gun regulations I could emigrate to. A place where my husband and I could send our son to school […]
Posted inViolence
Mass killings: Why we need to see the murdered innocents
Reading Time: 7 minutes For several decades beginning in the 1950s, driver education classes in the United States included screenings of “shock films”—documentary shorts, narrated in police drama style, created to bring the reality of high-speed collisions home to young drivers. Names like Highway of Agony, Mechanized Death, and Red Asphalt were meant to terrify teenagers into driving safely. […]