Saturday, May 6, 2023, a mall in Allen, Texas: eight dead, including children, and at least seven more injured. In America we don’t need the headline above to know what happened there. It is only the latest event in an epidemic, a plague of guns, a monsoon of bullets. 
In just the past two weeks there have been mass shootings–defined as events in which at least four people are shot–in Cleveland, Texas (five killed), outside Tulsa, Oklahoma (six killed), and Atlanta, Georgia (one killed, four injured). It is only spring, but already this year there have been at least 202 mass shootings, more than the number of days so far in 2023. Last year, there were at least 647 of them.
Shootings are now the top cause of death of children and teens in the greatest nation on earth. Continue reading “Mass Shootings and Insanity”
come. In the meanwhile, the indictment by the New York City grand jury and prosecutor has already created feverish media reactions and the expected bombast from the former U.S. president. What to make of it all? These thoughts come to mind.
now only from one side of the political aisle? Does it matter? Does it exist?
Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol has already publicized evidence of presidential crimes, the Attorney General has been silent on the status of investigations into the former president’s conduct regarding his effort to have the election of President Joe Biden overturned, which led to the insurrection at the nation’s capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Meanwhile, according to a
commonly trained that legal reasoning is a learned skill much like that in scientific work. It is based on principles of deduction, according to which judges make decisions about laws by logically figuring out how the principles established in earlier court decisions–precedents–apply to the current dispute before them. In this perspective, judicial decision-making–especially in the higher courts with the best trained lawyers–is a matter of technique. It produces the correct legal answers based on facts and reason, free of bias and personal belief. Competent practitioners, therefore, should reach the same, right, answers.
More so than the President’s campaign’s efforts to coordinate with the Russians to favor his election. Even more so than the behavior in the impeachment’s own charges against the president: that for his personal political benefit he used the power of his presidency to withhold funds mandated by Congress for Ukraine’s military defense against Russian aggression, in order to extort that country to announce an investigation of a political rival (Joe Biden), and that in unprecedented fashion he obstructed the Congress’s investigation of those events. As such, it will either portend the end of our democracy or so diminish it that it will take generations to repair. 
