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Old March 7th, 2013 #1
Stanley Russell
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Default Giffords, Tucson Victims Call For New Gun Controls

9 hours ago • Associated Press
by Cristina Silva

It was the place where former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords last spoke and walked without limitations; where Emily Nottingham's son became the first Congressional aide to die in the line of duty; where a 9-year-old girl was gunned down while waiting to shake hands with a politician.

Survivors of the 2011 shooting massacre that wounded 13 and killed six reunited for the first time Wednesday outside the Tucson shopping center where the horrific shooting occurred to deliver pleas for new gun controls.

Giffords, who is still recovering from her injuries, spoke for only a few seconds. She walked with her husband's help and placed a white flower bouquet along a memorial outside the Safeway grocery store in honor of the shooting victims.

"Be bold. Be courageous," Giffords said. "Please support background checks."

Giffords and Kelly had returned to the Safeway previously to visit the memorial, but Wednesday marked their first public event at the store since the shooting. Sheriff's deputies were there to provide security.

Shooting victims and families of the deceased gathered at the event, clutching bright, saffron-hued roses. Giffords gave some of them hugs.

At one point during the news conference, Giffords threw a victorious fist in the air and flashed a wide grin.

"Fight, fight, fight," she said, recalling the words she tells her husband before her regular therapy sessions.

The sun-kissed gathering Wednesday was far from the horror that took place on a similar morning 26 months ago.

Emily Nottingham recalled that her son's body was left on the sidewalk outside the supermarket for hours as investigators scrambled to make sense of the chaos. Her son Gabe Zimmerman, Gifford's director of community outreach, was 30 years old when he died in the shooting.

"It's very hard to be here today," Nottingham said. "The system is riddled with holes _ bullet holes. It needs to be fixed."

Susan Hileman described her excitement before the 2011 event as she waited to introduce her 9-year-old neighbor, aspiring politician Christina-Taylor Green, to Giffords. Green was the youngest of those killed.

"I looked at Gabby and I looked at Christina, and I could only imagine the sparks that would fly when the two of them got to shake hands. It was really going to be something," Hileman said, before her voice turned dark. "It really was something, wasn't it?"

Jared Lee Loughner, 24, was sentenced in November to seven consecutive life sentences, plus 140 years, in the Tucson shooting. The rampage happened at a meet-and-greet event organized by Giffords outside the grocery store on Jan. 8, 2011.

Giffords was joined Wednesday by her husband, Mark Kelly. Kelly said it was not difficult to return to the place where his wife nearly died. The hard part, he said, was persuading Congress to act.

A gun control group started by Giffords and Kelly began airing a new pro-gun control television ad in Arizona and Iowa on Tuesday. Giffords and Kelly support extending background checks to gun shows and Internet purchases. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to take up tougher firearm regulations Thursday, and some lawmakers have already expressed their opposition to universal background checks, including Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake.

"This discussion is not really about the Second Amendment," Kelly said. "It's about public safety and keeping guns out of the hands of the dangerously mentally ill."

Kelly, who was not present when the shooting occurred, recalled the events of the Tucson massacre. Kelly said Loughner walked directly toward Giffords and shot her once in the head before directing fire at the crowd around her. He released 33 bullets in 15 seconds, Kelly said.

"It was clear that the shooter had a history of mental illness, but he had easy access to a gun," Kelly said. "If things were different, he would have failed that background check."
http://billingsgazette.com/news/nati...48d19e9cd.html
 
Old March 7th, 2013 #2
Stanley Russell
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More gun laws = fewer deaths, 50-state study says
Thursday, March 7, 2013
By Lindsey Tanner, ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHICAGO — States with the most gun control laws have the fewest gun-related deaths, according to a study that suggests sheer quantity of measures might make a difference.

But the research leaves many questions unanswered and won't settle the debate over how policymakers should respond to recent high-profile acts of gun violence.

In the dozen or so states with the most gun control-related laws, far fewer people were shot to death or killed themselves with guns than in the states with the fewest laws, the study found. Overall, states with the most laws had a 42 percent lower gun death rate than states with the least number of laws.

The results are based on an analysis of 2007-2010 gun-related homicides and suicides from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The researchers also used data on gun control measures in all 50 states compiled by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a well-known gun control advocacy group. They compared states by dividing them into four equal-sized groups according to the number of gun laws.

The results were published online Wednesday in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

More than 30,000 people nationwide die from guns every year nationwide, and there's evidence that gun-related violent crime rates have increased since 2008, a journal editorial noted.

During the four-years studied, there were nearly 122,000 gun deaths, 60 percent of them suicides.

''Our motivation was really to understand what are the interventions that can be done to reduce firearm mortality,'' said Dr. Eric Fleegler, the study's lead author and an emergency department pediatrician and researcher at Boston Children's Hospital.

He said his study suggests but doesn't prove that gun laws — or something else — led to fewer gun deaths.

Fleegler is also among hundreds of doctors who have signed a petition urging President Barack Obama and Congress to pass gun safety legislation, a campaign organized by the advocacy group Doctors for America.

Gun rights advocates have argued that strict gun laws have failed to curb high murder rates in some cities, including Chicago and Washington, D.C. Fleegler said his study didn't examine city-level laws, while gun control advocates have said local laws aren't as effective when neighboring states have lax laws.

Previous research on the effectiveness of gun laws has had mixed results, and it's a ''very challenging'' area to study, said Dr. Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center For Gun Policy. He was not involved in the current study.

The strongest kind of research would require comparisons between states that have dissimilar gun laws but otherwise are nearly identical, ''but there isn't a super nice twin for New Jersey,'' for example, a state with strict gun laws, Webster noted.

Fleegler said his study's conclusions took into account factors also linked with gun violence, including poverty, education levels and race, which vary among the states.

The average annual gun death rate ranged from almost 3 per 100,000 in Hawaii to 18 per 100,000 in Louisiana. Hawaii had 16 gun laws, and along with New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts was among states with the most laws and fewest deaths. States with the fewest laws and most deaths included Alaska, Kentucky, Louisiana and Oklahoma.

But there were outliers: South Dakota, for example, had just two guns laws but few deaths.

Editorial author Dr. Garen Wintemute, director the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, said the study doesn't answer which laws, if any, work.

Wintemute said it's likely that gun control measures are more readily enacted in states with few gun owners — a factor that might have more influence on gun deaths than the number of laws.
http://www.telegram.com/article/2013...35/1052/news01
 
Old March 15th, 2013 #3
Roy Wagahuski
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Quote:
States with the fewest laws and most deaths included Alaska, Kentucky, Louisiana and Oklahoma.
I don't know about those others, but in the case of alaska this is what's called lying by omission: most of those deaths are suicides.

A place where a population of 1,000,000 are practically trapped indoors without sunlight for 6+ months every year can expect a lot of suicides -- particularly in america -- and those are typically by firearm.
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