After the Tragedy: Va. Tech Shootings Revive Debate over Gun Control
The rampage at the Blacksburg, Va., campus touched a nerve over gun safety on college campuses, including among Virginia lawmakers who had recently sparred over a firearms ban.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Each year since its occurrence in 1999, the April 20 anniversary of the Columbine High School tragedy renews debate about the desirability of stricter controls on firearms. Recent surveys, however, find Americans less disposed to gun control than they were in the years surrounding the shootings. Read full analysis at Pewresearch.org
How important are PSCs? There are many issues related to the war in Iraq that compete for coverage on a daily basis. U.S. military personnel and their families far outnumber private military contractors. Still, funding for PSCs comes, directly or indirectly, from taxpayer dollars. And even within the military there is heated debate about the […]
The Attorney General faced a grilling from Congress, the Supreme Court weighed in on abortion rights, hundreds were slaughtered in a single day in Iraq, and a vicious storm wreaked havoc on the East Coast. But each of those events last week was completely overshadowed by the media’s non-stop coverage of the horrific events that unfolded on the campus of Virginia Tech.
Even when they were covered, PSCs were often tangential aspects of larger stories about other Iraq-related issues or events. Many sprang from U.S. government actions or reports, such as the Washington Post’s April 23, 2005 story “Contractor, Army Office Fell Short” which ran on the front of the financial section.. Another example was USA Today’s […]
One thing Web sites clearly promote and project is an image of the candidate that they (and their strategists) think will work best. So what are those images? What buzz words are popular this year—and which ones define which parties? The Most Frequent Words The words “children” and “family” are the next most popular. They […]
Key West, Florida Some of the nation’s leading journalists gathered in Key West, Florida, in May 2006 for the Pew Forum’s biannual Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life. Conference speakers James Davison Hunter, author of the widely acclaimed Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, and long-time critic Alan Wolfe, author of […]
Although a right to personal privacy is not mentioned in the Constitution, most judges and legal scholars acknowledge that a measure of privacy is essential to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. The exact extent of that privacy, however, is highly contested. Indeed, some of the most hotly debated high court decisions in U.S. […]