National Forum

Recent news that the violent crime rate in the United States is down, perhaps by as much as 33 percent, is encouraging, to say the least. Nevertheless, for a country that is not suffering through a civil war and is only rarely the victim of internal...

By the time this article is published, the citizens of two states, Oregon and Colorado, are likely to have followed Florida's lead in voting to "close the gun show loophole" - a gap in the Brady law that allows the ownership of firearms to change hands...

They have taken my metal from me, watch, rings, the hooks of my bra. They have given me earphones tuned to National Public Radio. They have spread a cloth over me as if I were a loaf of bread being set to rise or a body at the morgue. I glide into the...

Why are people fascinated by serial killers? The plethora of books, movies, and television documentaries about them attests to the public's obsession with these human killing machines. Yet compared with the number of spouses who kill their partners or...

Michael Carneal, the fourteen-year-old killer in the Paducah, Kentucky, stool shootings, had never fired a real pistol in his life. He stole a .22 pisfired a few practice shots, and took it to school. He fired eight shots at a school prayer group, hitting...

"I don't want to be that type of kid who comes to school and just takes out a gun and starts shooting." -Bobby, age 12, from a city in the West The other day I walked into school and a girl was carrying balloons and one of the them popped. Everyone in...

Fights. Shootings. Killings. If you surf across channels during a normal weekday evening, you are likely to find violent stories unfolding. The violence may seem senseless or aimless, even gratuitous. But the use of violent images is not a random event...