Free Republic

Directly after a mass shooting, in the minutes or hours or days between the first trickle of news and when police find a suspect or make arrests, it is very difficult to know what to do. Some people demand political action, like greater gun control; others call for prayer. In the aftermath of a violent shooting spree in San Bernardino, California, on Wednesday, in which at least 14 victims are reported to have died, people with those differing reactions quickly turned against one another. For example: Here’s the Washington editor at the liberal publication The Nation, George Zornick, on reactions...

A familiar refrain among proponents of intervention in Syria is that “doing nothing is not an option.” While a wide range of non-military options have been proposed in the public sphere, from increasing aid to rebel groups to plowing money into programs for refugees, there hasn’t been much in the Senate outside of the military intervention proposal passed by the Foreign Relations Committee. But Friday, Senators Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp floated one possible alternative: a bill that would demand that Bashar al-Assad sign Syria to the Chemical Weapons Convention treaty and take “concrete steps” to comply. If he failed...

Let’s get this out of the way immediately: the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s plan to replace the sequester cannot pass the 113th Congress. But then again, Paul Ryan’s (in)famous “Path to Prosperity” had zero chance of being passed by a Democratic Senate and being signed by Barack Obama when it was unveiled in spring 2011, and yet it met with widespread (and often laudatory) press coverage. So just because it won’t win a Congressional vote, it doesn’t mean the CPC sequester plan, unveiled Tuesday on Capitol Hill, should be ignored—especially because it has the notable advantage of being entirely sensible and...

When Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday, December 14, inexplicably bent on ending as many lives as possible, he was carrying a Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle and several high-capacity magazines. Sadly, this isn’t the first time the country has had to deal with the aftermath of a horrific shooting spree, nor is it the first time we’ve encountered an AR-15 in this context: only days earlier, it was the weapon of choice for a shooting at an Oregon mall that killed two people. Five months earlier, it was used by James Holmes in an attack that wounded...

Yesterday, the National Republican Senatorial Committee announced in a statement that it might yet fund the candidacy of Representative Todd Akin as he tries to unseat Senator Claire McCaskill in Missouri. “As with every Republican Senate candidate, we hope Todd Akin wins in November and we will continue to monitor this race closely in the days ahead,” said NRSC executive director Rob Jesner. (In August, the NRSC claimed that “if [Akin] continues with this misguided campaign, it will be without the support and resources of the NRSC.”) Will the NRSC actually go through with this, and thus likely bring American...