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Keywords: Firearms

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Only in America

    • Peter Craven
    • 25 July 2024

    It’s easy, isn’t it – much too easy – to invoke the standard response that only in the so-called Land of the Free could these things transpire. A vulgar, mendacious man who has refused to believe that he lost the last election is now the improbable victim of an assassination attempt. And the incumbent president, who has not done badly at his impossible job, surrenders his chance at re-election.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    An American crisis

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 15 July 2024

    Following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, politicians, including the US President were quick to condemn the shooting, all saying it had no place in American society or democracy. Tell that to children killed by gunfire. Every day, guns take young lives in the US. Gun violence was recently declared a national health crisis in the United States. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Thoughts and prayers

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 08 May 2024

    'Thoughts and prayers': Is it now a tired, worn-out cliché, its usefulness questionable? It is now used so many times to render its meaning, its core message, void. Sometimes more than words are needed. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    US gun culture and travel advisories

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 13 September 2019
    3 Comments

    The attack, and the travel advisories it prompted, was disquieting: I'd visited El Paso before, had driven from there all along the Mexican border to the remote artists' refuge of Marfa. Now I was about to embark on a journey through New Mexico, and onwards through a different part of Texas. I'd never relied on travel advisories before.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Resist the normalising of gun culture

    • Susan Biggar
    • 04 April 2019
    4 Comments

    I was on a train in Melbourne's CBD when word came through there was a suspected gunman at Flagstaff Station. It turned out to be a false alarm. After Christchurch and One Nation's attempts to cosy up to the NRA, it is not surprising guns are on our minds. For most Australians this is unfamiliar and uncomfortable. That's the way it should stay.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Hubris and hate speech in Mark Latham's Nation

    • Moira Rayner
    • 26 March 2019
    11 Comments

    How is it that with so few people 'on the ground', with sharp divisions among its spokespeople, and with the flight of PHON candidates, once elected, to continue to hold their seats as 'independents', the party may sneak into a position where, as Ashby and Dickson mused, they 'hold the balls of the government' in their sweaty little hands?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Finding hope in shared struggle after trauma

    • Zoë Krupka
    • 20 June 2018
    1 Comment

    Using memoir as a kind of litmus, Atkinson challenges the myth that traumatic events are socially 'out of character' and asks us to look at how by its very nature, patriarchy demands the abuse of its most vulnerable citizens.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Florida shooting and the cult of individuality

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 16 February 2018
    6 Comments

    The mass murderous gun, even in the hands of a disgruntled teenager, remains a manifestation that will linger in the face of legislative apathy and constitutional fervour. A civilised society may not require such guns, but US civilisation expresses a frontier brutality that refuses to abandon them.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Palestine's 1948 'catastrophe' is an ongoing daily reality

    • Nahed Odeh
    • 12 May 2017
    11 Comments

    On 15 May, Palestinians and our allies all over the world commemorate the Nakba. In Arabic, Nakba means 'catastrophe', and it refers to the violent displacement of Palestinians that began in 1948. Growing up in Palestine, I know that while the Nakba started in 1948, Palestinians have been living under a continuous Nakba since then: the Nakba didn't end, it's ongoing. For me, the Nakba is when a foreign regime determines my and my family's movements on a land we lived on for generations.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Trump, masculinity and class

    • Colin Long
    • 10 February 2017
    15 Comments

    Much commentary on Trump's victory has veered between two explanations: either there is large proportion of the electorate with 'deplorable' attitudes to women and minorities; or economic dislocation has produced an angry white working class eager to punish political elites. These explanations are not mutually exclusive. The willingness to ignore or welcome Trump's misogyny is a symptom of the undermining of a deep sense of masculinity that, for some men, is their primary identity.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Faith and humanism behind Tim Winton's curtain

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 26 October 2016
    1 Comment

    'When I was a kid I liked to stand at the window with a rifle and aim it at people.' So begins the opening, titular essay. It is a singularly arresting entre to an essay that charts the author's complex relationship with firearms (part awe, part terror), by way of commenting on the place of guns in Australian society. In this collection of essays Winton adopts this mode frequently, weaving (sometimes deeply) personal narratives into stirring, thoughtful commentary on a broad range of social and political issues.

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  • MEDIA

    A fascist by any other name

    • Jeff Sparrow
    • 17 November 2015
    15 Comments

    In journalism, 'he said, she said' often functions as an evasion. Reporters' loyalty should be to accuracy, which isn't about compromise between extremes. When denialists and climate scientists take diametrically opposed stances, the truth doesn't lie somewhere in the middle. Sometimes, one side's right and the other's just wrong. The same can be said of reporting about the rightwing United Patriots Front. While they deny being fascists, that's what they are, and that's what we should call them.

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