America Is Sick. And It’s Not Just The Swine Flu
Gun Violence Constitutes A National Public Health Emergency
The big news this weekend was Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s Sunday press conference during which she declared a “public health emergency” in response to a possible swine flu epidemic. In Mexico, 103 people have died. In the U.S., 20 people have contracted the virus, none are in critical condition. The great concern is the possibility of the risk of quick transmission.
Sunday morning, before the swine flu story hit the networks, I was reading the news and was struck by several separate stories of children being shot by guns. I read three that morning and another later that afternoon. Gun violence has been on my mind for a while now, so I did some digging. It turns out, 32 Americans die every day from gun violence. Eight of them are children. In the ten years since Columbine, 300,000 Americans have died from gun violence. And it’s getting worse: we’ve had several mass shootings this year, including 57 killed in the space of a month.
According to Daniel Vice of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, “In a typical weekend in the United States, more people are shot and killed than in an average year in Australia; the same is true in Britain, and other countries that have tougher gun laws.” Even accounting for differences in total populations, there is no comparison.
America needs the Matthew Shepard Act. America needs stricter gun laws. America needs to stop cowtowing to the NRA, the Religious Right, and homophobic conservatives.
On Friday, in his New York Times column, Bob Herbert wrote,
“There is no way to overstate the horror of gun violence in America. Roughly 16,000 to 17,000 Americans are murdered every year, and more than 12,000 of them, on average, are shot to death. This is an insanely violent society, and the worst of that violence is made insanely easy by the widespread availability of guns.
When the music producer Phil Spector decided, for whatever reason, to kill the actress, Lana Clarkson, all he had to do was reach for his gun — one of the 283 million privately owned firearms that are out there. When John Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Malvo, went on a killing spree that took 10 lives in the Washington area, the absolute least of their worries was how to get a semiautomatic rifle that fit their deadly mission.
We’re confiscating shampoo from carry-on luggage at airports while at the same time handing out high-powered weaponry to criminals and psychotics at gun shows.”
That’s right. Think about it. We’re confiscating bottles of shampoo and making you take off your shoes at the airport, we’re declaring (and rightly so) a “public health emergency” in response to a possible swine flu epidemic that has yet to take one life in this country (no one is saying it won’t), yet from the same weekend that the Secretary of Homeland Security announces a national public health emergency, here are some headlines:
Three shot at NYC Barbecue, 13 year old critical: “A gunman shot wildly into a crowd at an outdoor barbecue in Harlem early this morning, hitting three people and leaving a 13-year-old boy in critical condition, police said.”
3 Virginia men hurt in shooting at Hampton University: “A former Hampton University student armed with three guns followed a pizza delivery man into the student’s former dorm early Sunday, shot the delivery man and a dorm monitor, then turned the gun on himself, university officials said.”
Georgia professor sought in shooting death of wife, two others: “A University of Georgia professor who police suspect in the fatal shootings of his ex-wife and two men outside a theatre near campus on Saturday disappeared in his Jeep after dropping his children off with a neighbor, authorities said.”
Suspects Sought in Shooting of Oakland Children: “Oakland (CA) police say two girls, ages 1 and 4, and a 14-year-old boy were wounded when shooting erupted between two groups of young men around 2:15 p.m. Saturday”
12-year-old girl, man wounded in Marquette Park shooting: ” A 12-year-old girl and 19-year-old man were shot Sunday night in the (Chicago) Southwest Side’s Marquette Park neighborhood.”
Victim Shot Dead on South Side: “A 31 year-old man is dead after being shot Sunday afternoon while visiting a friend on the Far South Side.”
Sheriff: Man killed 2 deputies after being stunned: “Two deputies killed by a soldier they were trying arrest for beating his wife exchanged multiple rounds with the man who began shooting while on the ground after he was shocked with a stun gun, authorities said Sunday, a day after the men were killed.”
Can we honestly say that gun violence has not reached levels of a national public health emergency also? We’re declaring a national public health emergency for the possibility of an epidemic, an epidemic for which we have on hand, millions of readily-accessible and distributable TamiFlu vaccines. If there were a disease that was killing 32 Americans every day, 8 of them children, wouldn’t we also be declaring a national public health emergency for that?
More from Herbert:
“The toll on children and teenagers is particularly heartbreaking. According to the Brady Campaign, more than 3,000 kids are shot to death in a typical year. More than 1,900 are murdered, more than 800 commit suicide, about 170 are killed accidentally and 20 or so are killed by the police.
Another 17,000 are shot but survive.”
The sad fact is that we’ve become so complacent, “blasé”, as Bob Herbert put it, that these daily deaths are nothing but daily statistics. Gun violence is the symptom of a sickness. Acceptance of it is the illness that is clouded by right-wing Second Amendment touting teaparty terrorists who happily support an escalating murder rate in the false name of protecting their own civil rights, while denying true civil rights, the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to those 32 Americans who die every day. Those 32 Americans who are gunned down each day no longer have the opportunity to exercise their civil rights, those rights that proud NRA gun-toting, secessionist-threatening, teaparty sign-waving, tax-cutting crazy, Obama-hating, homophobic Conservative “patriots” pretend matter to them.
Despite what gay rights activist Jonathan Rauch says, guns are not the answer. From his piece, “The Right Kind of Gun Rights“:
“Although gay life in America is safer today than it once was, anti-gay violence remains all too common. The FBI reports more than 7,000 anti-gay hate crimes in 2005 alone, and since 2003 at least 58 people have been murdered because of their sexual orientation. Perhaps because gay-bashings often begin in intimate settings, the home is the single most prevalent venue for anti-gay attacks. In public, of course, gay-bashers make sure that no cops are around. For that matter, sometimes the police are part of the problem, responding to gay-bashings with indifference, hostility, sometimes abuse. ”
Nine years ago, one of the first columns I wrote for National Journal told the story of Tom G. Palmer. One night some years ago in San Jose, he found himself confronting a gang of toughs, as many as 20 of them, intent on gay-bashing him. Taunted as a “faggot,” threatened with death, Palmer (and a friend) ran for their lives, only to find the gang in hot pursuit. So Palmer stopped, reached into his backpack, and produced a gun. The gang backed off.
If no gun? “There’s no question in my mind,” Palmer told me in 1999, “that my friend and I would have been at least very seriously beaten, and maybe killed.”
That may or may not be. But tell that to the friends of openly gay, 15 year-old Lawrence King. Via The New York Times:
“On the morning of Feb. 12, Lawrence was in the school’s computer lab with 24 other students, said Mr. Keith, the police spokesman. Brandon walked into the room with a gun and shot Lawrence in the head, the police said, then ran from the building. Police officers caught him a few blocks away.
Unconscious when he arrived at the hospital, Lawrence was declared brain dead the next day but kept on a ventilator to preserve his organs for donation, said the Ventura County medical examiner, Armando Chavez. He was taken off life support on Feb. 14.”
It’s time to stop the sickness that is acceptance of gun violence. The Right can scream all they want about Second Amendment rights. Or how, if everyone had a gun we wouldn’t need The Matthew Shepard Act. Who knows. Maybe 15 year-old Larry King could have easily whipped out a gun and convinced his attacker he meant business…
Pass the Hate Crimes Bill. Get the Second Amendment back in line. Go to the Framers’ intent. Get the god-damn guns off the streets. The more time we take, the more people die. When will we make it stop?
(image: Philippe Kurlapski)
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Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner is under fire after releasing a video declaring that new allegations against him are false, yet he is “taking time to reflect” on a path forward.
Politico on Monday afternoon reported that a woman who dated Platner, Jenny Racicot, “says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.”
“Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner,” Politico reported, “for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.”
In a video posted to social media eleven minutes after the Politico story dropped, Platner says, “I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me. Any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false.”
He said he and his supporters “were united in a love of Maine, a belief that our politics must change, in a focus on defeating Susan Collins.”
“So, regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful the political reality will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love, the people that I love, the movement I belong to, and the goal of defeating Susan Collins.”
“Those were the goals when we launched this campaign. And they remain my goals today.”
“Throughout it all, you never turned your back on me. And I will not turn my back on you now. Every one of you deserves to see that vision come to fruition and see Susan Collins defeated. And we will use every tool at our disposal to do so.”
The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a political commentator who served as the communications director for the Jeb Bush 2016 presidential campaign, blasted Platner.
“I’m sorry but ‘we are taking time to reflect on the best path forward’ is not an option on the table,” Miller wrote. “Either it’s false and you campaign with vigor or it’s true and you get out / apologize to everyone you let down.”
Journalist Ryan Grim, commenting on Platner’s video, noted that Platner “strongly suggests he is considering dropping out. Already Troy Jackson and Chellie Pingree, both gubernatorial candidates, are being kicked around in Maine circles as potential replacements.”
Several others, including Puck News’ Peter Hamby, predicted Platner will be dropping out.
Platner had postponed several campaign events before the Politico story was published.
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 6, 2026
President Donald Trump is facing backlash after posting a video of children — including showing their unblurred faces — graduating from kindergarten, with some of the girls purportedly wearing hijabs.
“President Trump posted a captionless video of graduating kindergarteners on Truth Social on Monday, goading his supporters into verbally attacking little children simply for being Muslim,” The New Republic reported. “The clip is from Gateway STEM Academy, a majority-Black K-8 public charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota. It shows about 21 children in caps and gowns on stage singing a song together. Most of the girls are wearing hijabs.”
The original post of the video which Trump reposted reads: “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab … in kindergarten.”
Trump did not add any comments. TNR called the post “Islamophobic, weird, and creepy,” while noting that the comments section of Trump’s post was filled with calls “by racist, xenophobic MAGA supporters” to “deport the children and ban hijabs.”
TNR also noted that it “should come as no surprise that Trump isn’t above attacking children who just learned how to read, but this post is still particularly discomforting—and will certainly contribute to the already potent level of anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and in Minnesota.”
Critics blasted Trump.
“There is something deeply unsettling about the president of the United States—the most powerful person in the world—going after kindergarten schoolchildren in Minnesota because they wore hijabs, as Trump has done this morning on his website,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein wrote.
One social media commentator wrote, “Trump posted an unblurred video of more than a dozen Muslim kindergartners to Truth Social, exposing the children’s faces while targeting them for their religion.”
Another added, “Trump is a bigot. The president took to Truth Social to attack kindergarteners in hijabs. These are little kids. The president isn’t just a bigot, he’s also a coward.”
The original video was posted to the X social media platform in June.
U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) at the time commented, “If you are in a public school in America, you should be speaking english.”
Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump’s apparent efforts to delay releasing the $5.8 million civil judgment to E. Jean Carroll are being met with a warning by the journalist’s legal team, who suggest there could be a legal maneuver for Trump to employ to forgo paying the judgment in either of the two cases he lost.
According to The Guardian, on July 4, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered Trump to release the $5.8 million judgment, which is in escrow, to Carroll by this coming Tuesday — or explain why he would not do so.
Carroll’s attorneys think Trump may be trying to buy time to mount another legal strategy, telling the judge that Trump’s request for an extension “appears to be little more than yet another play for time.”
“The case is separate from Trump’s appeal of a Manhattan civil jury’s 2024 award of $83.3m to Carroll for defamation,” The Guardian explains. “But her lawyers have suggested a legal scenario in which the president might seek to conjoin the cases and further delay payment of both.”
Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) wrote, “We can only assume that defendant is seeking … to buy time so he can try to concoct some new basis to put off paying plaintiff presumably in connection with his forthcoming petition and motion for a rehearing.”
Trump’s former attorney, Justin Smith, in one of his final acts, wrote to the Supreme Court suggesting that his client would be appealing the $83.3 million civil judgment.
Smith argued that the Supreme Court “may wish to consider the petitions together,” given they involve the same parties.
The larger judgment case involves possible questions of presidential immunity, and that has Carroll’s attorneys concerned.
“A conjoined case, Carroll’s lawyers fear, could result in both judgments being wiped out,” The Guardian reports.
The president has also made clear he is no fan of Judge Kaplan, after the jurist made several rulings that “angered” Trump.
“What else can you expect from a Trump Hating, Clinton appointed judge, who went out of his way to make sure that the result was as negative as it could possible be,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2023, “speaking to, and in control of, a jury from an anti-Trump area which is probably the worst place in the US for me to get a fair ‘trial’.”
Image via Reuters
Platner Scorched Over ‘Taking Time’ Video After New Accusation
Trump Sparks Fury Online After Posting Unblurred Video of Muslim Kindergartners in Hijabs
One Legal Maneuver Threatens to Undo Everything E. Jean Carroll Won
Inside the Group Helping MAGA Voters Walk Away — And What Finally Pushed Them
