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Gun industry targets children for sales pitch

Mike McIntire, New York (NY) Times

 

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A junior shooter receiving tips on a military rifle last fall from an Army marksmanship instructor at a clinic at Fort Benning, Ga. Youth shooting clinics and competitions often receive financial support or supplies from firearms-related businesses. Michael Molinaro/United States Army Marksmanship Unit

 

January 26, 2013 | Threatened by long-term declining participation in shooting sports, the firearms industry has poured millions of dollars into a campaign to ensure its future by getting guns into the hands of more, and younger, children.

 

The industry's strategies include giving firearms, ammunition and cash to youth groups; weakening state restrictions on hunting by young children; marketing an affordable military-style rifle for "junior shooters" and sponsoring semiautomatic-handgun competitions for youths; and developing a target-shooting video game that promotes brand-name weapons, with links to the websites of their makers.

 

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Related:

 

The Hitler gun control lie, Alex Seiz-Wald, Salon <>

  • Gun rights activists who cite the dictator as a reason against gun control have their history dangerously wrong
  • Tell ALEC's corporate funders to stop sanctioning profit-driven gun violence
  • Watch: Hyper-Pro-Gun Activist's Argument Gets Destroyed By Smart Lady's Calm Decency

 

 

 

The Users of the University

Pundits may claim it's time for higher education to become more "practical," but their own educational histories tell a very different story.

Jordan Fraade, Dissent Magazine / AlterNet

 

This article is made possible with the generous contributions of all reader supported Evergreene Digest readers like you. Thank you!

 

 

Photo Credit: J. Henning Buchholz | Shutterstock.com

 

January 4, 2013  |  Here’s a trick you can try at home. Next time you hear a pundit say that to preserve America’s competitiveness or dynamism, we must replace the liberal arts with something more “practical,” take a second to check what they studied. Thomas Friedman, who asserts that students should study engineering and science because “average is over”? Mediterranean Studies, Brandeis. Charles Murray, who advocates shifting huge numbers of students into vocational training? History, Harvard. Dori Jones Yang, an accomplished writer and journalist who nonetheless told parents to funnel their children into “practical” disciplines? European history, Princeton.

 

This fun exercise in ad hominem reveals something important. When you studied whatever you wanted to at a prestigious private university, it’s much easier to tell students to tighten their belts and think of “U.S. global leadership.” The latest example of this convenient self-exemption comes from Florida Chamber of Commerce spokesman Dale Brill, a self-described “liberal arts guy” who studied at Lenoir-Rhyne College, a private college in North Carolina. Sheepskin safely in hand, Brill now spearheads Florida’s Blue Ribbon Task Force on State Higher Education Reform. Its latest recommendation for the state’s public university system: students in “strategic areas” (engineering, science, and pre-professional tracks) should have their tuition frozen while everyone else offsets the cost with higher tuition.

 

Full story...

 

Special Project | The War on Children: Week of December 23

  • The United States is one of the few countries in the world that puts children in supermax prisons, tries them as adults, incarcerates them for exceptionally long periods of time, defines them as super predators, pepper sprays them for engaging in peaceful protests, and, in an echo of the discourse of the war on terror, describes them as 'teenage time bombs.' 
  • 10 New Items including:
  • Gay Michigan Teen, Committed Suicide After Intense Bullying
  • US DOJ Alleges Mississippi County Jails Kids for School Dress Code Violations, Tardiness
  • School District: 12-Year-Old "Was Herself Responsible" For Being Raped
  • Ban on gay change therapy faces first legal test
  • Poor Kids
  • Minnesota Teen Denied Confirmation For Supporting Gay Marriage
  • Selling the Soul of Public Education
  • Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) school program under attack
  • Hardworking students? Yes, but ...
  • Archbishop Nienstedt Responds to A Catholic Gay Mother's Concerns

David Culver, Ed., Evergreene Digest

 

Gary Markstein

 

 

Gay Michigan Teen, Committed Suicide After Intense Bullying, Huffington Post

  • Pacheco's suicide was the second such case in Michigan's Genesee County. In January, Flushing teen Jarrod Nickell also committed suicide after experiencing bullying in school, according to his parents.
  • He's on the Anoka anti-bullying task force?

US DOJ Alleges Mississippi County Jails Kids for School Dress Code Violations, Tardiness, Nicole Flatow, Think Progress

  • Once those children are in the juvenile justice system, they are denied basic constitutional rights.
  • School District: 12-Year-Old "Was Herself Responsible" For Being Raped
  • Poor Kids

School District: 12-Year-Old "Was Herself Responsible" For Being Raped, Melanie Jones, Watchdog.net

  • Tell Moraga School District: 12-Year-Old Girls Aren't "Responsible" For Being Raped!
  • Don't let Minnesota priests use sacraments as political weapons

Ban on gay change therapy faces first legal test, Lisa Leff, Associated Press / Seattle (WA) Times

Lawyers for the state argue the ban is appropriate because it seeks to protect young people from a practice that has been rejected by mainstream mental health associations that regard homosexuality as a healthy part of the human experience and say that efforts to change an individual's sexual orientation can be harmful, particularly to children.

 

Poor Kids, Frontline, PBS

  • Frontline explores the economic crisis as it's rarely seen - through the eyes of children. 
  • What poverty means to children and to the country’s future.

Chan Lowe

 

Minnesota Teen Denied Confirmation For Supporting Gay Marriage, Meredith Bennett-Smith, Huffington Post

Selling the Soul of Public Education, Maya Schenwar, Truthout

When it comes to teachers, Rahm Emanuel needs to sit down, shut up and listen to their more-than-reasonable demands. And when it comes to the future of public education, all of us need to think hard about one of the most important responsibilities of a democratic society to its citizens - and then support Chicago's teachers as they move into the history-making struggle of the next few weeks.

School reform’s propaganda flick

 

Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) school program under attack, Southern Poverty Law Center

  • The American Family Association (AFA) has asked their supporters to harass local schools so they'll drop out of Mix It Up At Lunch Day, a highly successful, free program we launched 11 years ago as a way to encourage inclusiveness and respect. In their warped view, bullying a gay child is acceptable as long as it's done in the name of religion. 
  • Christian Group Finds Gay Agenda in an Anti-Bullying Day

Hardworking students? Yes, but ..., Chuck Chalberg, Minneapolis (MN) Star Tribune

  • We tell high school graduates to go to college. We overpromote and overcharge. Then we bend over backwards overlooking the overextended lives of our overworked students
  • 5 Biggest Lies About America's Public Schools -- Debunked

Archbishop Nienstedt Responds to A Catholic Gay Mother's Concerns, Truth Wins Out

  • "I urge you to reconsider the position you expressed in your letter. Your eternal salvation may well depend upon a conversion of heart on this topic." 
  • Child abuse in my church

 

Section(s): 

Is Education a Human Right or a Privilege for the Wealthy?

  • Education, like health care and other public goods, is under attack in the neoliberal agenda that treats everything as a commodity. 
  • More people, including students, recognize that access to free, high-quality education is a human right that does not belong in the marketplace.
  • US DOJ Alleges Mississippi County Jails Kids for School Dress Code Violations, Tardiness

 

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, Truthout

 

This article is made possible with the generous contributions of all reader supported Evergreene Digest readers like you. Thank you!

 

 

(Photo: Igal Koshevoy / Flickr)

 

 

Thursday, 13 December 2012 | Over the last 40 years, higher education in the United States has been transformed into a commodity that produces automatons to serve big-finance capitalism, prevents campuses from being a source of societal transformation and creates modern indentured servants through debt slavery.

 

Today, there is over $1 trillion in college debt with graduates entering a job market that cannot fully employ them, resulting in rapidly rising defaults. In fact, while tuition has grown 72 percent since 2000, employment for graduates with bachelor degrees has declined by almost 15 percent over the same time period.

 

Full story...

 

Related:

 

US DOJ Alleges Mississippi County Jails Kids for School Dress Code Violations, Tardiness, Nicole Flatow, Think Progress

  • Once those children are in the juvenile justice system, they are denied basic constitutional rights.
  • School District: 12-Year-Old "Was Herself Responsible" For Being Raped
  • Poor Kids

 

Not Senseless, Not Random: The Deadly Mix of Race, Guns & Madness

  • But none of (what we need to do) will be likely unless, in our grief and fear, we also muster up clarity and outrage. Right now - before the public debate is recaptured by questions of which politician said what to whom.
  • Special Project | The War on Children: Week of December 16
  • The US Military Approves Bombing Children
  • 60 Mass Shootings Since Tucson
  • Sikh temple shooting sheds light on world of 'hate rock’
  • Batman Shooter and His Psyche Drugs

Rinku Sen, ColorLines

 

At a time when corporations are buying up elections - not to mention the 24-hour news cycle - help ensure that a source for truly independent journalism lives on. Support all reader supported Evergreene Digest today by using the donation button in the above right-hand corner. 

 

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Lydia Howell

 

(August 6 2012) It could be terrorism, but we don't yet know. It could be someone who has a beef with Sikhs. It's too early to talk about gun control. These statements ran in a continuous loop through my head yesterday, even when I wasn't watching coverage of the mass shooting at an active gurdwara in a suburb of Milwaukee. Throughout the day, the hollowness in my solar plexus signaled grief and the tightness in my throat signaled panic, and I felt deep, deep resistance to the notion of saying anything about it. What is there to say that isn't a cliche?

 

Details are going to emerge in the coming days, but I already know what they'll amount to. A white man, in his 40's, nursing resentment over 9/11 for more than a decade, planned for a long time to kill some "enemies." The guns will turn out to be legally acquired, or if not, so accessible as to make the law meaningless. The man will turn out to be mad. In the debate, people will argue that the cause is racism...no, it's gun

control...no, it's mental health. It is impossible for us to navigate the deadly tangle of all three.

 

Full story...

 

Related:

 

The US Military Approves Bombing Children, Robert Dreyfuss, Nation

  • Some Afghan kids aren’t bystanders
  • If Our Drones Are So Accurate, Why Do Their Missiles Keep Hitting Children? Obama's Drone Presidency
  • There must be accountability for US drone strikes
  • US detained hundreds of Afghan teenagers

Special Project | The War on Children: Week of December 16, David Culver, Ed., Evergreene Digest 

  • The United States is one of the few countries in the world that puts children in supermax prisons, tries them as adults, incarcerates them for exceptionally long periods of time, defines them as super predators, pepper sprays them for engaging in peaceful protests, and, in an echo of the discourse of the war on terror, describes them as 'teenage time bombs.' 
  • 10 New Items including:
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    • 5 Biggest Lies About America's Public Schools -- Debunked
    • Child abuse in my church
    • Texas district expands corporal punishment policy
    • How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps
    • Test-and-Punish Doesn't Educate, but It's Profitable for Testing Companies
    • A Chicago Teacher Speaks Out: This Is Why We Fight
    • How to Kill Student Curiosity in 12 Easy Steps
    • What's Race Got to Do With It? A History of Child Care in America
    • "No Excuses" and the Culture of Shame: The Miseducation of Our Nation's Children

60 Mass Shootings Since Tucson, Brady Campaign

  • There have been 60 mass shootings in the United States since the January 8, 2011 massacre in Tucson, Arizona.
  • Sign the Brady Campaign petition to President Obama and Governor Romney to provide solutions to gun violence.
  • Batman Shooter and His Psyche Drugs

Sikh temple shooting sheds light on world of 'hate rock’, Patrick Condon and Todd Richmond,  Associated Press / Minneapolis (MN) Star Tribune

  • The subculture acts as a money raiser and recruiting tool for white supremacists, insiders say.
  • Hollywood skirts blame in 'Dark Knight' shooting

Batman Shooter and His Psyche Drugs, Gary G. Kohls, Duty to Warn

The Taboo Question: What were the brain-altering psych drugs that the Batman Shooter might have been taking or withdrawing from?

 

 

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