This is a fun, quick read from Paul Krugman: "Wheee! The Heritage Foundation is engaged in frantic damage control."

Don't forget it's Mother's Day tomorrow, and your morning open thread begins below.

Crazy Wayne LaPierre returned to the spotlight with a rabblerousing speech at the National Rifle Association's convention in Houston, Texas, on Saturday. “We will never surrender our guns, never,” LaPierre told a cheering audience. The NRA executive vice president argued that tragedies like Newtown and Aurora are being used "to blame us, to shame us, to compromise our freedom for their agenda." He also noted the recent defeat of a background check bill in the Senate, saying it would have done nothing to prevent mass shootings.

“Our feet are planted firmly in the foundation of freedom, unswayed by the winds of political and media insanity,” LaPierre said. “To the political and media elites who scorn us, we say let them be damned.”

NBC News:

Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania, co-sponsored the background check bill. Toomey has said the bill failed to pass because members of the GOP did not want to hand the White House a policy victory.

LaPierre also referenced the Boston Marathon bombings and subsequent manhunt as an argument for putting guns in the hands of more Americans.

“How many Bostonians wished they had a gun two weeks ago?” LaPierre said. “Boston proves it. When brave law enforcement officers did their jobs in that city so courageously, good guys with guns stopped terrorists with guns.”

With the mass confusion in media coverage during the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, I shudder to think what would've happened if all of Boston had been running around with guns loaded and ready to blast. How many different people were identified as the Boston bomber(s) before that horrible night ended?

Let Wayne LaPierre be damned, and anyone else who puts anything before the importance of protecting our children; our true national treasure.

In February, David and Francine Wheeler, the parents of a child killed in the Sandy Hook tragedy, joined notable musicians including Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary and the folksinger Dar Williams to perform a concert for the community. The Wheelers and Yarrow joined Bill on Moyers & Company to discuss the path forward for gun control advocates and the power of music to bring about both healing and social change.

Yarrow said the concert was about “restoring the heart and soul of a caring community.” Watch two of the songs they performed.

The Wheelers, Peter Yarrow and others sing “Blowing in the Wind“:

[Via BillMoyers.com]

Some of the nation's best loved cartoonists are calling on Congress to not back down and take action to enact common sense gun laws that will prevent violence and save lives. Ruben "Tom the Dancing Bug" Bolling says, "I organized this video, getting cartoonists as diverse as Trudeau (Doonesbury), Spiegelman (Maus, etc), Keane (Family Circus), Mazzucchelli (Batman etc), Mo Willems (Pigeon, Knuffle Bunny) and others to illustrate a script advocating gun law reform narrated by Julianne Moore and Philip Seymour Hoffman ."

Via BoingBoing

Your morning open thread begins below...

A new video from MoveOn.org features a daughter asking her mother to do what she can to ensure senators keep dangerous guns out of schools by passing the Assault Weapons Ban. This is part of MoveOn.org members' gun violence prevention campaign, which advocates background checks, limits on high-capacity magazines, and a ban on assault weapons.

On Saturday, the mother of a young victim of the Newtown massacre, filled in for President Obama on his weekly radio and Internet broadcast. Francine Wheeler said the presence of her son Ben, who was six years old when he was killed along with 19 other first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, gave her the courage to speak out. "Thousands of other families across the United States are also drowning in our grief," she said in a push to get a gun control bill through Congress. "Please help us do something before our tragedy becomes your tragedy." Wheeler is the first person other than Vice President Joe Biden to deliver the address.

Her husband, David Wheeler, sat silently next to her as she made the recording in the White House Library. Both wore the small green pins that have become a symbol of the shooting:

Hi. As you’ve probably noticed, I’m not the President. I’m just a citizen. And as a citizen, I’m here at the White House today because I want to make a difference and I hope you will join me.

My name is Francine Wheeler. My husband David is with me. We live in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

David and I have two sons. Our older son Nate, soon to be 10 years old, is a fourth grader at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Our younger son, Ben, age six, was murdered in his first-grade classroom on December 14th, exactly 4 months ago this weekend.

David and I lost our beloved son, but Nate lost his best friend. On what turned out to be the last morning of his life, Ben told me, quite out of the blue, “ I still want to be an architect, Mama, but I also want to be a paleontologist, because that’s what Nate is going to be and I want to do everything Nate does.”

Ben’s love of fun and his excitement at the wonders of life were unmatched His boundless energy kept him running across the soccer field long after the game was over. He couldn’t wait to get to school every morning. He sang with perfect pitch and had just played at his third piano recital. Irrepressibly bright and spirited, Ben experienced life at full tilt.

Until that morning. 20 of our children, and 6 of our educators – gone. Out of the blue.

Continue reading »

On Wednesday, March 20th, the 44th anniversary of her marriage to John Lennon, Yoko Ono tweeted this powerful photo of her late husband’s blood-splattered glasses, the ones he wore the night he was murdered.

"31,537 people are killed by guns in the USA every year. We are turning this beautiful country into a war zone."

"Together, let’s bring back America, the green land of peace."

"The death of a loved one is a hollowing experience. After 33 years our son Sean and I still miss him.”

Yoko Ono Lennon

We miss him, too. Open thread below...

Franklin Sain, a 42-year-old Colorado Springs man, was arrested last Friday for threatening Colorado lawmaker Rep. Rhonda Fields (D-Aurora) over gun control legislation that she is currently sponsoring and that recently passed in the state House.

Franklin Sain is accused of threatening Fields and her daughter using racial and sexual slurs.

Fields told KOA Radio that she does not know Sain, and said "All I know is the kinds of things that he said were very inappropriate, and they're alarming, and they were very intimidating."

"It started last week around the 13th or the 14th," Fields told KOA. "And then the emails got worse; it started to escalate until it got to a letter that was sent to the Capitol. At first, I was really taken aback by the tone and the language in it, especially the racial overtones - I've just never seen something like that before. No one has ever said those things or written those things towards me in the last two-and-a-half years that I've been serving the state. So, I was like 'Wow, this is unbelievable.' And then they kept coming."

9News has obtained the arrest affidavit, and now the full scope of threats allegedly left by Sain over a nine day period are viewable. The threat of violence and use of racist language is prevalent throughout the messages, and they messages appear to escalate in tone by the ninth day. Caution: The language used is explicit and extremely offensive.

There are many misspelled words and incorrect grammar usage in the messages, and they appear as written in the affidavit, along with censoring of offensive words.

According to an affidavit, one of the letters alleged to have been written by the Colorado Springs man reads, "Rhonda Fields, mother of [Field's daughter]. Death to both." The letter goes on to say "There will be blood! I'm coming for you, N----- B----."

In one of the emails, Sain allegedly wrote, "hopefully somebody Gifords [sic] your asses with a gun."

The following is one of seven emails police say Sain sent to Fields:

"THANKS N----- C---! You really think passing nay more laws will stop gun violence? You and that other N----- OBAMA are living in fantasy land. Chicago and DC have the most strict gun laws in the nation and more people die from gun violence than anywhere. You f---ing c---s are pathetic excuse for civil servants. Hell, n-----s love shooting themselves with GATS, isn't that what your people call it. What you have done here is creater [sic] criminals out of law abiding citizens, and put yourself out of a job. You politicians have no idea what you are even doing anyway, do you know how long it takes some to change a magazine, less than a second, so what if some with experience decides to flip out and bring their gun in with 5 or so 10 round magazines, they can do the same amount of damage. Limiting magazine sizes is stupididty, [sic] and will not work..."

Then the most unhinged of Sain's messages also refers to Field's daughter:

Rhonda Fields, N----- C---, Mother of -----, Death to Both, All N----- Back to Africa, F--- you, F--- Your Laws, I Keep my 30 Round Magazines, There Will Be Blood!, I'm Coming For You, N----- B----

Sain told police that he didn't mean to threaten Fields, and regrets the language he used. He has no prior record, and is the chief operating officer at SofTec Solutions in Englewood, Colorado, where he does consulting work for the government and private organizations

House Speaker Mark Ferrandino and two other Democratic Reps also received similar threatening messages.

Tuesday afternoon, SofTec announced the suspension of Sain via Facebook:

"SofTec Solutions, Inc. has been informed of allegations against our employee, Mr. Frank Sain. We are shocked to learn of these allegations and are taking this matter very seriously. If true, these actions are highly inappropriate and will not be tolerated. Pending SofTec’s investigation into this matter, Mr. Sain has been suspended immediately from further duties at SofTec. SofTec Solutions is a minority-owned, small business and we employ a large diverse workforce. We will absolutely not tolerate any racial, sexual, gender-based slurs or threats of violence by employees."

The full arrest affidavit is available online here, but caution, as the language is explicit and offensive. Sain is scheduled to appear in court on March 8, 2013.

By Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica

President Obama has directed the Centers for Disease Control to research gun violence as part of his legislative package on gun control. The CDC hasn't pursued this kind of research since 1996 when the National Rifle Association lobbied Congress to cut funding for it, arguing that the studies were politicized and being used to promote gun control. We've interviewed Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who led the agency's gun violence research in the nineties when he was the director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

We talked to Rosenberg about the work the agency was doing before funding was cut and how it's relevant to today's gun control debate. Here's an edited transcript.

There's been coverage recently about how Congress cut funding for gun violence research, but not much about what the agency was actually researching and what it was finding. You were in charge of that. Tell us a little bit about what the CDC was doing back then.

There were basically four questions that we were trying to answer. The first question is what is the problem? Who were the victims? Who was killed? Who were injured? Where did they happen? Under what circumstances? When? What times of the year? What times of the day? What was the relationship to other events? How did they happen? What were the weapons that were used? What was the relationship between the people involved? What was the motive or the setting in which they happened?

The second question is what are the causes? What are the things that increase one's risk of being shot? What are the things that decrease one's risk of being shot?

The third question we were trying to answer is what works to prevent these? What kinds of policies, what kinds of interventions, what kinds of police practices or medical practices or education and school practices actually might prevent some of these shootings? We're not just looking at mass shootings, but also looking at the bulk of the homicides that occur every year and the suicides, which account for a majority of all gun deaths.

Then the last question is how do you do it? Once you have a program or policy that has been proven to work in one place, how do you spread it? How do you actually put it in place?

So what were you were able to find before funding got cut off?

One of the critical studies that we supported was looking at the question of whether having a firearm in your home protects you or puts you at increased risk. This was a very important question because people who want to sell more guns say that having a gun in your home is the way to protect your family.

What the research showed was not only did having a firearm in your home not protect you, but it hugely increased the risk that someone in your family would die from a firearm homicide. It increased the risk almost 300 percent, almost three times as high.

It also showed that the risk that someone in your home would commit suicide went up. It went up five-fold if you had a gun in the home. These are huge, huge risks, and to just put that in perspective, we look at a risk that someone might get a heart attack or that they might get a certain type of cancer, and if that risk might be 20 percent greater, that may be enough to ban a certain drug or a certain product.

But in this case, we're talking about a risk not 20 percent, not 100 percent, not 200 percent, but almost 300 percent or 500 percent. These are huge, huge risks.

I understand there was also an effort to collect data on gun violence through something called the Firearm Injury Surveillance System. What did that involve?

We were collecting information to answer the question of who, what, where, when, and how did shootings occur?

We were finding that most homicides occur between people who know each other, people who are acquaintances or might be doing business together or might be living together. They're not stranger-on-stranger shootings. They're not mostly home intrusions.

We also found that there were a lot of firearm suicides, and in fact most firearm deaths are suicides. There were a lot of young people who were impulsive who were using guns to commit suicide.

So if you were able to continue this work, what kind of data do you think would be available today?

I think we'd know much more information about what sorts of weapons are used in what sorts of firearm deaths and injuries.

Continue reading »

Chicago police on Sunday that said they are questioning two people in the shooting death of a young mother whose sister stood behind President Obama during his speech on gun violence on the same day. Janay McFarlane, 18, was shot to death on Friday night while walking through North Chicago with a friend, who police said may have been the intended target. MacFarland’s death came just hours after her 14-year-old sister, Destini Warren, attended a speech by President Obama decrying the city’s gun violence.

McFarlane's mother, Angela Blakely, said Sunday: "I really feel like somebody cut a part of my heart out."

Blakely said the bullet that killed McFarlane was meant for a friend. McFarlane was supposed to graduate from an alternative school this spring, her mother said, and wanted to go into the culinary arts.

"I'm just really, truly just trying to process it, knowing that I'm not taking my baby home any more," Blakely said.

Among the survivors, Janay MacFarland leaves behind her three-month-old son, Jayden, pictured below in a family photo: