Civil Rights

The double whammy of the Supreme Court decision on partial-birth abortion combined with questions about how the Virginia Tech campus shooter got his gun will propel the social issues of abortion and gun control back to the top of the agenda in the presidential race. In both cases, the likely beneficiary will be Hillary Clinton and the loser will be Rudy Giuliani. Hillary, who Gallup has sagging in popularity (down 45-52), clearly needs a shot in the arm. The partial-birth abortion decision will cause women to rally to her candidacy if she exploits it properly. For Rudy, the news is less good. As a moderate trying to make it in the Republican primary, nothing could be worse than an increase in focus on the issues of abortion and guns. While his pro-choice and pro-gun-control record will resonate well with the general electorate, it is anathema to the hardened party base. All of this could stimulate an entry into the race by Fred Thompson, whose positions on guns and abortion are more in line with right-wing views.

On gun control, how times have changed.

Not so long ago, the lament was: Why’s it take a campus massacre like Columbine to get any action on gun control? Today, the lament is just the opposite: Why, even after a campus massacre like Virginia Tech, is there no action on gun control?

This is not exactly a rerun of Profiles in Courage. In the wake of the mass murder at Virginia Tech, not one Democratic presidential candidate has talked about gun control. Not one. Nor have but a handful of Democrats in Congress. Read more...

All across America today, while we mourn together the tragic loss in Virginia, nuts are buying guns, candidates are bragging they kill bunnies with semiautomatic weapons, and politicians tremble with fear of gun lobbies.

And more young Americans die.

We don’t need another debate about the talking points for and against gun control. We need a serious national discussion to find a way to protect legitimate hunters while preventing any nut case, psychotic and sicko from getting a gun to kill more children.

Virtually every day in Iraq, there are tragedies and outrages equal to Virginia Tech. Read more...

As America comes to grips with the deadliest shooting in its history, this should be a time for grief, sorrow and reflection. This should not be a time for politics, but sadly, that seems to be where certain members of Congress and other advocacy groups seem to be headed.

According to today’s Opinion Journal’s Political Diary, Paul Helmke, former mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind., and current president of the Brady Campaign, immediately issued a statement calling for more gun control measures to be put on the books. While his sense of timing is a bit grotesque, Mr. Helmke should know that lawmakers can’t legislate sanity; a deranged individual who apparently obtained his firearms legally and senselessly killed his classmates can’t be stopped by more gun control laws. Read more...

If no one had a gun, no one would get shot. But if a few students had had guns at Virginia Tech on Monday, the man who killed 32 people there would probably have been stopped sooner. He would not have had the luxury of time to reload between bouts of execution-style murder of the innocent. What does the massacre suggest about the need for gun control? Scroll down and answer our Quick Poll! question: "Do the murders at Virginia Tech make the case for more or less gun control?"

Whatever we do, let’s not panic over the mass murder at Virginia Tech.

Don’t let anybody suggest, for example, that such a heinous act has anything to do with how easy it is to get your hands on a gun in Virginia.

After all, we know that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. We also know that gun control only makes it harder for law-abiding citizens to get guns; it does nothing to keep them out of the hands of criminals. Read more...

Many of us are still reeling from Monday’s shooting at Virginia Tech, the deadliest in our history. Sadness, sorrow, anger and frustration are the many emotions that continue overwhelming me. In an era where we need answers instantly, oftentimes there are no explanations for the irrational behavior of people.

If you're angry at the world over a breakup with your girlfriend, why take your emotional loss out on innocent people who have no involvement with your trauma or loss? If your grief is beyond the point of repair, why not just kill yourself before involving college students, kids who are just trying to make the most of their educational experience and prepare themselves for life? Why would you in your selfish and pathetic way affect the lives of 33 families, who are now in utter shock and disbelief, overcome with sorrow at the loss of their loved ones? Read more...

We live in a society that has grown more sensitive to people of the same sex marrying than ever before. Look at the field of presidential candidates, almost 60 percent of whom (no matter how they feel personally) are showing sympathy and tolerance for this so-called institution of marriage. It's also well known that many of these married couples, in order to legitimize their lifestyle, adopt children immediately: Pop psychologists and other experts will do their darnest to make a convincing argument, that what matters most is the child having a home with love and financial stability. What is often not discussed in these debates is the life expectancy of couples in same-sex marriage versus those in heterosexual unions. Did you know that the average spouse in a gay union lives to the age of 52, compared with age 77 for heterosexual couples? Let's just trace the history of these marriages. It’s critical that we separate what is factual from this powerful PR campaign. According to figures generated by the census bureaus of Denmark and Norway, in Denmark, the country with the longest history of gay marriage, between 1990 and 2002, men married to women died at a median age of 74, while the 561 partnered gays died at a median age of 51. In Norway, men married to women died at a median age of 77 and the 31 gays at a median age of 52. In Denmark, women married to men died at a median age of 78 compared to a median age of 56 for the 91 lesbians. In Norway, married women died at a median age of 81, as compared with 56 for the six married lesbians. Considering these statistics, do you now believe that vulnerable children should be raised in such an unstable environment?

If I heard it once, I heard it a hundred times. Every time I warned that new, unlimited police powers under the Patriot Act could be used by the FBI against law-abiding citizens, some conservative know-nothing would insist, “Oh, no. The FBI would never do anything like that!”

Oh, yeah? Well, now we know: The FBI could, and would, and did.

Thanks to a report by the Justice Department’s own inspector general, we now know the FBI used “national security letters,” under the Patriot Act, without a court order -- and without any evidence of links to terrorists -- to obtain phone, bank, and credit card records of thousands of innocent Americans. Read more...

As the Democratic 2008 presidential campaign moves forward, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination, claim to be legends of the civil rights movement benefiting from the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet neither was there when white police beat black Alabamans 42 years ago. Obama was born in 1961 and the confrontation at Selma took place in 1965. Hillary, on the other hand, was born in 1947 and had the advantage of being involved with the civil rights movement. But in 1964, a year after Martin Luther King’s famous address at the Lincoln Memorial, she was a 17-year-old class president at Main East High School in the Chicago suburbs describing herself as “an active Young Republican” and “a Goldwater girl, right down to my cowboy outfit.” Read more...