Boy, this is a bad idea on so many levels. Teachers are already in high-stress positions — imagine dealing with middle-school-age, hormone-racing kids all day for one thing. Add on the responsibility of being in charge of your firearm, to keep it safeguarded yet accessible on the chance someone is going to come in randomly guns-ablazing? It sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, but apparently we’ve got states ready to go forward with this “plan” to address gun massacres in schools.

Wow. In these tough times, I can’t imagine what I’d think if I lived in a crime-ridden area and my elected officials opted for this decision. Oakland has the fifth highest crime rate in the nation.

A house in Webster, New York was ablaze and, according to CNN, were shot at as they tried to put out the flames. Two firefighters were killed, others injured.

Stories like this make me sad and curious — how many people in the U.S. are as intellectually challenged as this man? Has the nation been so dumbed down that it’s not difficult to come across countless stories of jack@ssery like this just casually surfing the news?

The NRA holds a powerful lobbying presence on Capital Hill and has enjoyed success with its legislative agenda to expand public exposure to weaponry despite large numbers of citizens, including children and adolescents, losing their lives in numerous mass shootings, often involving high-powered weaponry (a timeline of mass shootings since Columbine is provided here). However, the organization finds itself increasingly at odds with gun owners (both NRA and non-NRA members), as well as the general public in key swing states, who disagree with the organization’s hardline anti-gun control approach.

As reported in the New York Post, the NYPD has found that in the areas where Occupy Sandy (and other neighborhood non-profits) have been most active there has been less crime.

Residents of areas like Brooklyn’s Red Hook, where Occupy Sandy has a strong presence, say they feel safer and have been spared the looting and other crime that exist in neighborhoods where activists are not so plentiful.

Officers of the NYPD are similarly pleased.

All the New York papers are reporting on the NYPD shooting and killing of an innocent, unarmed, young Bronx man as he fled a bodega where robbers had held him and the store manager at gun point. Two different video cameras caught two different angles of the officer’s shooting which the NYPD is calling a cut and dried case of an unfortunate accident. As is their wont, NYPD Spokesman Paul Browne and Police Chief Ray Kelly are throwing an “everything but the kitchen sink” array of reasons at us, explanations and excuses (many of them self-contradictory, all of them unconvincing) to try to put this to bed and get us all to move along.

Speculation over why GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney originally excluded reporters from his Jerusalem King David Hotel fundraiser is perhaps beside the point. Nobody in the American press is going to center a story around the event upon the fact that this hotel was the scene of an awful act of terrorism, perpetrated upon the British in July, 1946.

Yes, what about the children? It was the football program before the children who suffered rape and molestation by former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, according to the findings in a 200-page report released today in the Penn State-funded probe led by Louis Freeh.

The Tampa Bay Times has published its investigation of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which has received wide attention because of the alleged murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. In its review of the numerous cases in which it was invoked, the newspaper found its has been cited in many ways that no one expected.