North Carolina Child Fatality Task Force executive director Kella Hatcher tells us about her group’s latest report and the big challenges our state faces in improving the health and well-being of our children. Read the 2023 report here.
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The bills are broadly aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of people deemed a risk to themselves or others. After he found out his fiancée had been shot and killed while walking her dog, a grief-stricken Rob Steele took his gun out of his safe. He unloaded the magazine, put the ammunition back in the metal box, then handed his firearm to a doctor.
...Whether in a grocery store, a place of worship, a shopping mall, a community celebration, at work or in school, you are at risk for becoming a victim of senseless gun violence. Why is America the only industrialized nation in the world that is plagued by frequent mass shootings? Has our form of democracy allowed the minority to run amuck when it comes to the rights of an individual to own any kind of gun vs. the majority’s right to live without fear of mass murder?
...“Thoughts and prayers” are no longer enough to protect children from gun violence, says Durham Hillside High School Principal William Logan. Gun violence proliferates, Logan said, because guns are too readily available, and lawmakers are unwilling to pass meaningful gun control laws.
...January has been yet another warm month in North Carolina and across much of the rest of the nation. After a brief and sharp holiday week plunge, temperatures have consistently felt more like mid-March – or, at least, what mid-March used to feel like. And while a globally warm winter certainly has some temporary advantages – especially for people living on the street and those trying to cope with temporarily inflated home heating costs – it’s hard not to be struck with a profound sense of unease at the rapid change afflicting the Earth's biosphere.
...The United States has averaged more than one mass shooting per day since January 2022, but elected officials refuse to act. My Nhan, 65, immigrated to the United States from Vietnam in the 1980s, and made her home in California’s San Gabriel Valley, in a community called Rosemead. Her niece, Fonda Quan, said she was ready “to start the year fresh,” and celebrate with her friends, according to the CBC. She never got the chance.
...State government has scores of vitally important roles to play in modern North Carolina. The list of agencies and missions is a long one. At a basic level, however, government’s most important task is – or at least ought to be – protecting the lives and health of the state’s residents. And so, while state lawmakers obviously have numerous priorities to weigh and debates to have during the 2023 legislative session that convenes tomorrow, one extremely efficient path for prioritizing their work, fulfilling their most basic duty, and making the state a measurably better place would be this: ending easily preventable deaths.
...For going on two decades now, NC Policy Watch has been fortunate enough to be able to feature the expertly crafted, frequently hilarious, sometimes disturbing, and always thought-provoking commentaries of one of the nation’s top editorial cartoonists, John Cole. While it would be worth your time to look through all of John’s contributions to Policy Watch from the past here are some his best entries from 2022.
...Public officials faced numerous questions last week in the immediate aftermath of the horrific mass shooting in Raleigh: Who was the perpetrator? Why did he do it? Exactly where and when did the killings take place? As we learned soon thereafter, however, police quickly pieced together the answers to some of those questions.
...Schools do not need more resource officers, armed guards or for that matter armed teachers. Schools need to become adept at gathering information, sharing intelligence and, most importantly, making sense of what they learn. In Uvalde, Texas we’ve learned far too well that good guys—many good guys—with guns can’t always stop a bad guy with a gun. In Florida, Nikolas Cruz is on trial for his life after killing 17 people at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.
...Industry sales and profits have skyrocketed as number of mass shootings has spiked WASHINGTON — The CEOs of major gun manufacturing companies told a U.S. House panel on Wednesday that their production of AR-15-style guns did not contribute to recent mass shootings that left 29 people dead, and that the killings were due to the actions of individual shooters.
...Why the weapon of choice for so many mass murderers is not what a lot of its defenders would have us believe Last month, after the horrific mass shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, Monday Numbers took a look at the AR-15 style semi-automatic assault rifles favored by mass shooters in America.
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