Gabrielle Giffords & Mark Kelly: Our new campaign will launch a national dialogue and raise funds to counter influence of the gun lobby
“Special interests purporting to represent gun owners but really advancing the interests of an ideological fringe have used big money and influence to cow Congress into submission. Rather than working to find the balance between our rights and the regulation of a dangerous product, these groups have cast simple protections for our communities as existential threats to individual liberties. Rather than conducting a dialogue, they threaten those who divert from their orthodoxy with political extinction.
As a result, we are more vulnerable to gun violence. Weapons designed for the battlefield have a home in our streets. Criminals and the mentally ill can easily purchase guns by avoiding background checks. Firearm accessories designed for killing at a high rate are legal and widely available. And gun owners are less responsible for the misuse of their weapons than they are for their automobiles.
Forget the boogeyman of big, bad government coming to dispossess you of your firearms. As a Western woman and a Persian Gulf War combat veteran who have exercised our Second Amendment rights, we don’t want to take away your guns any more than we want to give up the two guns we have locked in a safe at home. What we do want is what the majority of NRA members and other Americans want: responsible changes in our laws to require responsible gun ownership and reduce gun violence.
We saw from the NRA leadership’s defiant and unsympathetic response to the Newtown, Conn., massacre that winning even the most common-sense reforms will require a fight. But whether it has been in campaigns or in Congress, in combat or in space, fighting for what we believe in has always been what we do.”
Read on: Americans for Responsible Solutions
“The world won’t change if you don’t shoulder the burden of responsibility.”
Ai Weiwei
“How does it feel seeing all these articles about your son?”
“I feel very proud, because he speaks for the average citizen…. [although] I wish he would just be an artist. One person cannot solve the problems of the whole country. But, if everyone ignores the country’s problems, what will happen?”
Ai Weiwei’s mother from
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
“The UN is warning of a looming famine and mass starvation in the Nuba Mountain region of Sudan. About 200,000 people on the Sudanese side of the border are at immediate risk of starvation.”
More than 1,000 floating nude Israelis pose for US art photographer Spencer Tunick’s first Middle East mass shoot in the Dead Sea, the lowest spot on earth which experts warn could dry out by 2050 unless urgent steps are taken to halt its demise. For Tunick, a Jewish American who has arranged naked human bodies over prominent landscapes and landmarks ranging from a Swiss glacier to the Sydney Opera House, a nude installation is an indicator of a host country’s openness. Photo: Jack Guez
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