Outside the Beltway

The prospects for gun control appear to be dimming.

Are we heading toward an era where a diagnosis of mental illness becomes an instrument for state oppression?

Keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people while protecting individual liberty isn’t easy.

The Manchin/Toomey proposal on background checks isn’t perfect, but it isn’t horrible either.

Mother Jones’s recording of a secret McConnell campaign strategy meeting is much less than meets the eye.

Illegal aliens will henceforth be be called, well, something.

President Obama has unveiled a set of restrictions that wouldn’t have stopped the Sandy Hook Massacre. Some are nonetheless be good policy.

Despite the push it’s likely to receive, most of President Obama’s gun control proposals will barely even see the light of day in Congress.

The ultimate impact of the Newtown tragedy on the nation’s gun laws is likely to be very limited.

Would Liability Insurance Help Minimize Threats to Public Safety?

Sharing some thoughts and soliciting feedback on what the 2nd amendment means.

Conor Friedersdorf contends “The U.S. Already Had a Conversation About Guns—and the Pro Side Won.”

My latest for The Atlantic, “Stop Feeling Sorry for American Veterans, has posted.

Once again, the usual suspects are exploiting tragedy for political purposes.

After a decade of war, suicides are surging among American troops.

A new book would classify most of us who consume alcohol as “almost alcoholics.”

We’re working longer than ever and working even when we’re “off.”

The Care Quality Commission has found widespread neglect of elderly patients in the British National Health Service.

Prisons can be so overcrowded as to constitute cruel and inhuman punishment.

Pfc. Bradley Manning is being treated worse than a Prisoner Of War, and he hasn’t been convicted of a crime yet.

Oregon Congressman David Wu was showing signs of mental breakdown during his recent re-election campaign.

Yesterday, Eric Fuller, one of the victims of last week’s shooting in Tuscon, blamed Sarah Palin, John Boehner, Glenn Beck and Sharron Angle for the tragedy. Today he was arrested for making a death threat to a local Tea Party leader.

Factions on the right and left continue to charge one another with trying to politicize the Tucson murders. They’re now nitpicking the memorial service.

Jared Loughner could have possibly been stopped, and treated, if someone had said something.

We really need a better understanding of mental health disorders in this county, and events like those over the weekend underscore this fact.

There’s a lesson to be drawn from the tragedy in Arizona, but it isn’t the one the media is talking about.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that someone would attempt to draw a comparison between Saturday’s shootings in Arizona and the Oklahoma City bombing, but the two events really don’t have anything in common.

Gustavus Adolphus College librarian Barbara Fister explains why she loves getting rid of books.