Opinion

The Great Debate

Public agrees: Next step is gun control

Quite frankly, thoughts and prayers can only go so far. They have limited ability to protect our families.  The time has come for our elected leaders – including President Barack Obama – to stand up and fight for our families and children, and their safety.

Obama’s comments Friday after the shooting tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 little children were killed along with six adults in the Sandy Hook Elementary School, were personal and touching. Yet the president’s only allusion to something like gun control were his words about taking “meaningful action.”

But the American people support stronger gun safety measures more than he believes or cares to say. Polls now demonstrate this to be true.

When our children are being shot at and killed in their schools, or movie theaters, we have to take meaningful action.  These tragedies  are too frequent, and are, as the president said, heartbreaking.

We need to talk about gun laws.  We need an open and honest debate about the tragedies happening in our communities, one after another. There are common-sense laws that can help prevent these tragedies, and Americans support them.

The trouble with U.S. terrorist watch lists

(Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)

By Bernd Debusmann

WASHINGTON, May 8 (Reuters) – What do the late Senator Edward Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, American Airlines pilot Kiernan O’Dwyer, Democratic congressman John Lewis and Sam Adams, aged 5, have in common? They have all been on one of America’s terrorist watch lists and found it easier to get on the list than off it.

That’s a trend almost certain to continue as the database grows relentlessly, resulting in a huge haystack of suspects in which to find the terrorist needle. There are no up-to-date figures on the size of that haystack but according to a report a year ago by the Justice Department’s inspector general, the “consolidated watch list” contained more than 1.1 million “known or suspected terrorist identities” by the end of 2008.

That corresponded to around 400,000 people, plus various aliases and ways of spelling names. If the growth rate of previous years is anything to go by, the database may well reach two million entries sometime before the end of this year. The government’s approach to the watch lists has fluctuated from rapidly expanding it after September 11 2001, to trying to trim it, as happened in the final year of the Bush administration.

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