It was a week of dealing with a new mass shooting
It's that time of the week when subscribers get their own Paste BN Opinion newsletter. These are the columns, from this week, that got your attention. So we're bringing them back today.
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Jayland Walker left his gun in the car. Then Akron police shot him 60 times.
By Suzette Hackney
Merriam-Webster defines the word overkill this way.
1: a destructive capacity greatly exceeding that required for a given target
2: an excess of something (such as a quantity or an action) beyond what is required or suitable for a particular purpose
3: killing in excess of what is intended or required
If Jayland Walker were still alive, he might have a thing or two to say about overkill. (READ MORE)
Highland Park's July 4th parade massacre and the horrifying commonness of American shootings
By Rex Huppke
The news had just broken: A mass shooting. Highland Park, a far-north suburb of Chicago. A Fourth of July parade. Multiple people dead, the shooter still at large.
We live in a different suburb about an hour from where the shooting happened. My first thought was: One of my son’s friends is about to pick him up and head to a mall.
I felt a flash of panic. Where exactly were they heading?
“We’re hiding” (READ MORE)
Highland Park mom's text: 'We're hiding.' Then she and her daughter fled in terror.
By Rex Huppke
HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. – The face of the man standing in front of Erin Vine turned almost white with fear. That’s when she knew the pops she heard weren’t Fourth of July fireworks. They were gunshots.
She grabbed her 6-year-old daughter, Nina, and ran, dodging paradegoers as they fled the shooting, racing south down Green Bay Road and around the corner to a cluster of garbage bins behind the stores that line the parade route.
Vine pulled a recycling bin and a wooden pallet in close, so she and her daughter were fully enclosed. She sent three quick texts to her husband, Eli:
“Gunshots”
“Omg” (READ MORE)
Alito's America: Where 'eminent' jurists believe in witches but women are the hysterics
By Casey Blake
Here we are in the Year of Our Lord 2022, where those who’d burn witches at the stake are eminent jurists but women are the real hysterics.
There is very little that remains unsaid, or un-yelled, in America today about abortion.
For those of us who would have preferred to make our own gynecological choices without state lawmakers at our exam table stirrups, it’s a devastating, exhausting moment. The grief is surreal, and we know it’s only begun. (READ MORE)
Is America on brink of civil war? Such predictions are overblown and dangerous.
By Christopher Blattman
In 2016, democracy rating organizations began downgrading the United States, some scoring American institutions below that of El Salvador, then Nigeria, then Iraq. Then, following the Jan. 6 insurrection last year, articles and books began predicting something scarier: another civil war.
The most sensational accounts foretold a national breakup, neighbor killing neighbor. The more level-headed ones warned of something still dire: a far-right insurgency waging a long campaign of bombings and attacks. The disturbing evidence emerging from the Jan. 6 congressional hearings merely underscores such concerns.
These worries are understandable but flawed. (READ MORE)