Word: gunness
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...voting against their own interests. The last 30 years of American politics have witnessed an extraordinarily duplicitous—and, unfortunately, extraordinarily successful—program by conservative politicians and commentators to annex small-town America by shamelessly pandering to ugly stereotypes that paint rural voters as religiously minded, gun toting, nativists. Now that tradition can count amongst its ranks another prominent practitioner in the form of Hillary Clinton, who, in the face of increasingly onerous roadblocks in her path to the nomination, has elected to employ the tired old cultural bludgeons which have long misrepresented rural voters as something...
...Meanwhile, even in states that do share mental health data, people can still buy guns without anyone checking the database at all. Under current federal law, unlicensed gun dealers at gun shows, for example, do not need to do a background check before they sell a weapon...
...really knows how many weapons are sold this way. Gun-control proponents say it could be nearly 40% of guns; gun-rights groups say the number is under 3% - mostly just family members selling rifles to each other over kitchen tables. A bill to close the gun-show loophole in Virginia was killed by legislators after the Virginia Tech massacre. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass similar legislation...
...major lesson of Virginia Tech appears to be that most subsequent legislative changes happen only in the locale of the incident - and even then only incrementally, in a very narrow way that applies to the specific shooting and not to the gun problem generally. "I'm very concerned that there is this level of acceptance - that these shootings are just going to happen no matter what," says Thom Mannard, president of States United to Prevent Gun Violence. "What never really seems to occur is a real, thorough discussion on the fact that often the only common denominator in these tragedies...
...executive power. The same was true of Joseph Stalin and his titular Head of State, Mikhail Kalinin. Nikita Khrushchev combined the offices of the Gensek and Prime Minister, while Leonid Brezhnev combined his leadership of the party with the role of head of state, because he desired the 24-gun salute and red carpet treatment on his foreign visits. In March 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev became the first and last President of the Soviet Union - but his power continued to derive from his position as Secretary General of the Communist party. It was the first President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin...