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A Death in the Village

On Janna’s way to work this morning, she snapped this image with her iPhone and emailed it to me.  She’s done that in the past with a copper moon, and a Steve Jobs memorial, but these flowers, and this mourning this morning was different.

This shrine was filled with hurt and rage and you can find it all right now at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on the corner of West 8th Street and the Avenue of the Americas; for this is the spot where Mark Carson, a 32-year-old Gay man, was gunned down a few days ago — shot in the face by an impromptu stalker just for being who he was — and so the latest Greenwich Village New York City hate crime is now on the police blotter, written in blood on a public sidewalk.

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Too Close for Comfort with Guarda Nacional Republicana Guns

I spent Monday morning sitting outside our local council tribunal in Odemira waiting for a civil case to be heard.

I came face to face with one of the few things in this life that makes me physically and mentally uncomfortable.  Unusually for a tribunal on the civil circuit as opposed to the criminal circuit — the local GNR (Guarda Nacional Republicana, the Polícia de Portugal) were “tooled up” — yep I was in the same room as a gun — in fact not just one gun — but four.

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The Dead and the Scared: How Sandy Hook Stood Up to a Gunman

I’m not sure if there’s much more left to to say in the wake of the Sandy Hook killings in Connecticut that hasn’t already been shot to death before — except that it was excellent how, together, teachers and students faced down death that day — while our politicians will never be similarly brave because they are more terrified of the long and ugly shadow of the NRA than they are of dead children.

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In Love with the Gun: A Deadly Night for the Dark Knight

The East Coast awakened to the news overnight of at least 12 deaths and 50 woundings in Aurora, Colorado as a 24-year-old madman opened fire during the midnight showing of The Dark Knight movie.

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Jesus Magnets

A friend of mine recently returned from a trip to the “Rusty Midwest Bible Belt” and gave me two refrigerator magnets he bought in a Church store.

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When A Gun At an Airport Indicates Forgetfulness

While traveling to California and back, I was certainly glad that, for whatever reason, the TSA did not ask my family to undergo the scary full body screening. I was apprehensive about being asked to choose to do either that or go through a rather unpleasant pat down that some people have characterized as feeling like being molested. I have always wondered how efficient the TSA really is at actually catching people who are up to no good, and when I found out about a gentleman who somehow made it past the TSA and flew without either a valid ticket or a passport, I really had to wonder. It therefore made me raise an eyebrow when I read about the case of Tam Nguyen, who was imprisoned because he brought a handgun to the airport — albeit not intentionally.

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The Slash Record Review

SuperGenius guitarist Slash — of Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver fame — released a new album this week called, genuinely enough, “Slash” and it is the number one selling album on iTunes right now.

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