"I think there are many pressing issues of our time, and gun violence is one of them,” said Ofori-Atta, who has lost loved ones to gun violence. “As a journalist, I was looking for a place where I could devote my time, and resources, and talents to an issue of grave importance — one that is consequential, one that we grapple with, and something that is just a fact of American life.”

Older Americans have the highest gun ownership rates in the United States, with firearms in 40 percent of households headed by someone age 50 to 64 or age 65 and older, according to the Pew Research Center. And a disproportionate number of older Americans apply to carry concealed weapons, according to a 2012 study in the American Journal of Public Health. The reasons for such trends vary: older Americans tend to have more disposable income with which to buy guns; they’ve had a longer time to amass an arsenal; and many invest in arms as a way to counter the physical vulnerabilities that can come with aging. 

The FBI and police groups have followed this tact. The no name campaign is horrific recognition of what studies show and that’s that mass killers know exactly what they’re doing, and bank heavily on turning their killing spree into warped and perverse mass theater and spectacle. They know this is the kind of gory sensationalism that much of the media feeds on, and they’ll get the sick and sordid attention they crave. In less than a week after the Oregon college mass killing, there were shootings at Northern Arizona University, and Texas Southern University.

Obama’s vow to wield the executive pen whenever and wherever he thinks he must amounts to a frontal challenge to the GOP to cease its relentless, dogged, and destructive campaign of dither, delay, denial, and obstructionism to anything that has the White House stamp on it. The GOP knows this but that won’t stop it from eagerly spinning its politically self-serving line of Obama the dictator. 

Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions in our national gun control debate. The issue is not whether we should have gun control laws in this country — or what they should be.The issue, really, is why so many white middle-American men view any effort to regulate firearms as an assault on their very identity – and thus fight sane and rational laws as if their lives and liberties were at stake.

Alexis attributed his mental-health issues to his assignment in cleaning up contaminated debris at the 9-11 Ground Zero site, but the Navy claims no such record of this work. A report in British paper Daily Mail notes Alexis was seen exiting a subway near the World Trade Center just as the twin towers were collapsing. The sight, it says, quoting Alexis' father-in-law, left him "traumatized." Indeed, the career of Alexis runs parallel to the 9-11 era, when thousands of servicemen were assigned to secret combat missions that do not appear on their military records.

I didn’t know any victims of gun violence myself, but I did know that more than 30,000 Americans are killed every year by guns. After seeing my city recently come together so passionately to mourn the three people killed in the Marathon bombing that Monday, I couldn’t help but wonder why more people – especially the senators who voted against universal background checks – weren’t equally affected by these other 30,000 unnecessary deaths. 

Watkins said that gun violence has been a problem his whole life. He estimates that between 200 and 300 people were killed by guns in his Northeast neighborhood off of North Capital Street and Rhode Island Avenue when he was growing up. Watkins said one of the hardest things about being a gun violence survivor is the stereotypes people attach to him. People automatically think that he is a thug or involved with the drug world.

The tragedy in Newtown should provide a lesson in sympathy to us all. No matter what we feel and how we choose to handle those feelings, we should at least know that, theoretically, we have a responsibility to others, and that responsibility can inform and inspire the inchoate sympathies we all feel at one time or another in our lives. We could feel existential terror from realizing that if this happened in Newtown, Connecticut, then it can happen anywhere; burning indignation from accepting that Adam Lanza will never stand trial for his crimes; or vicarious heartbreak when we consider that many parents have been forced to bury their children in the days following the tragedy. 

The National Rifle Association (NRA) was inspired by the Black Panthers? Yes, according to Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, and author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America (W. W. Norton, 2011). "One of the surprising things I discovered in writing Gunfight was that when the Black Panthers started carrying their guns around in Oakland, Calif., in the late 1960s, it inspired a new wave of gun control laws. It was these laws that ironically sparked a backlash among rural white conservatives..."