Free Republic

A gruesome holiday season exercise: Think of some firearms and accessories that might have added to the body counts of Aurora and Newtown. More starkly, imagine the means by which coming Auroras and Newtowns will be made more deadly. The exercise starts with a militarized baseline, as both shooters unloaded designed-for-damage rounds from high-capacity magazines loaded into assault rifles. Improving their killing efficiency would require one of two things: the ability to shoot more bullets faster, or more time. A fully automatic machine gun would provide the first. More minutes to hunt, meanwhile, might be gained by employing a noise...

Writing for Salon this week, Alexander Zaitchik reports about Glenn Beck's connections to Washington state. glenn-beck The report, which includes references to The News Tribune's coverage of the 1979 drowning death of Beck's mother in Commencement Bay, raises questions about whether Beck is telling the truth about that tragic event: Was it suicide, as Beck claims, or was it an accident? The controversial radio and television talk show host, who stirred a furor over his branding of President Barack Obama as a "racist" earlier this year, is expected to travel to his boyhood home of Mt. Vernon this weekend to...