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9 Ridiculous Things in That BuzzFeed Post About Stopping Mass Shootings

by Unique Article Posted on September 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Oh, BuzzFeed, we love your serious reporting and we also love when you try to make ridiculous memes win the internets. But when you inadvertently help tenuous gun-lobby talking points go viral? Not so much.


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The Showdown Over Gun Laws From Coast to Coast


Newtown “Changed America,” But Will Congress Change Gun Laws?


Under Obama, Feds Holster Gun Cases


A Guide to Mass Shootings in America


10 Pro-Gun Myths, Shot Down


Want to Buy a Gun Without a Background Check? Armslist Can Help

See our full special report on gun laws and the rise of mass shootings in America.

Yesterday BuzzFeed staff writer Ryan Broderick posted a listicle titled “9 Potential Mass Shootings That Were Stopped By Someone With A Personally Owned Firearm.” That’s a pretty definitive headline for a post that can’t back up its claims.

“Can law-abiding citizens with guns combat mass shootings?” Broderick asks by way of introduction. That’s it—there’s no attempt to define his terms or explain the scope of his reporting. What exactly constitutes a “law-abiding citizen” or a “personally owned firearm”? And how do you define a mass shooting? Broderick doesn’t answer these potentially inconvenient questions, letting his post suggest that armed civilians are responsible for stopping nine mass shootings that were either in progress or about to start.

Contrast that with what my colleague Mark Follman has found in his extensive reporting on mass shootings (which is based on an clear explanation of the terms and criteria being used.) While pro-gun advocates claim that courageous gun owners have routinely stopped mass shootings, the reality is that armed civilians rarely respond to shooting rampages—and those who have are rarely, if ever, successful. Most of the examples they cite are either ambiguous or involve trained law enforcement or military personnel—not the ordinary citizens with personal firearms that Broderick alludes to in his clicktastic headline and just-asking-a-question subhead.

Here are the nine incidents listed in Broderick’s post and why they deserve a click on BuzzFeed‘s trademark “FAIL” button:

1. The Pearl High School shooting: In this case, a 16-year-old who’d killed two people and wounded seven was subdued by an assistant principal who retrieved a handgun from his truck. However, the shooting may have already been over when the assistant principal arrived. And he wasn’t an ordinary civilian: He was an Army reservist. All this is explained in issue of People whose image is in Broderick’s post. However, his sole link goes to David Horowitz’s Frontpage Mag (motto: “Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out”).

2. The Parker Middle School dance shooting: Another case where a teenaged shooter may have already finished his rampage, which killed one person and wounded three, when an armed adult showed up. Yet Broderick says definitively that the shooting “was ended” when a man with a shotgun intervened.

3. The Appalachian School of Law shooting: Another deadly incident in which trained law-enforcement personnel stepped in. From a New York Times article Broderick links to:

Mr. Odighizuwa was subdued by three law students who were experienced police officers, the authorities said.

”We’re trained to run into the situation instead away from it,” said one of the three, Mikael Gross, 34, of Charlotte, N.C., who ran to his car for his bulletproof vest and service pistol before tackling the suspect.

Though the article notes that Gross grabbed his service pistol, Broderick vaguely describes it as a “personally owned firearm,” suggesting that he carried it for personal use.

4. The New Life Church shooting: Broderick makes it sound like this shooting, which killed two people and wounded three, was stopped by “a former police officer” who just happened to be at church that day. In fact, she was a church security officer.

5. The Trolley Square shooting: Yet another incident where a off-duty cop got involved. The officer who confronted the shooter during this Salt Lake City shooting was “well-trained for such an event,” according to the local news article Broderick cites.

6. The Golden Market shooting: “The details are murky,” writes Broderick, “but according to reports, a man entered a Golden Market in Virginia in 2009 and began firing a gun.” The “reports” he links to are a breathless post on AmmoLand and a pro-gun op-ed in the Collegiate Times. The Richmond Times-Dispatch‘s account of the incident makes it sound like a botched robbery, not a thwarted mass shooting.

7. The New York Mills AT&T store shooting: A good example of a planned mass shooting being averted—by a cop. In this 2010 incident, a 79-year-old man with a handgun walked into an AT&T store, wounded one employee and apparently planned to kill several others whose names were on a list in his pocket. An off-duty police officer who was in the store shot and killed the shooter.

8. The Clackamas Town Center shooting: Nick Meli, an off-duty security guard, drew his concealed handgun on the shooter during this 2012 rampage that left three dead at an Oregon mall. Broderick doesn’t mention that Meli was a guard, but asserts that shooter Jacob Roberts “retreated” after seeing Meli produce his weapon, which he did not fire for fear of hitting a bystander. It’s not clear if Meli affected the outcome of the incident, which ended with Roberts killing himself. After a 926-page investigative report on the shooting was released, a sheriff’s spokesman told The Oregonian, “We have no information that the suspect’s—Roberts’—actions were ever influenced by anything Mr. Meli did. But I also can’t deny it.”

9. The San Antonio Theater shooting: In December 2012, a 19-year old opened fire at a San Antonio restaurant where he and his ex-girlfriend worked. He then shot at a police car and headed into an adjacent cinema, where he wounded one person. He was pursued and wounded by a security guard who was an off-duty sheriff. Breitbart described it as a would-be “mass shooting,” and Glenn Beck’s The Blaze suggested that the suspect had intended to shoot up a crowded theater. Yet the shooting appears to have been sparked by the breakup and it’s unclear how many people the suspect intended to kill. Broderick doesn’t acknowledge this uncertainty, adding more fodder to the questionable premise that more “good guys with guns” can stop the next mass shooting before it happens.

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9 Ridiculous Things in That BuzzFeed Post About Stopping Mass Shootings

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Even nuclear weapons are going green

by Unique Article Posted on August 13, 2013

Even nuclear weapons are going green

By John Upton

Pantex PlantThe project’s logo.

If the nuclear apocalypse comes, at least it will be a little more climate-friendly.

Construction of five 400-foot wind turbines is beginning today at America’s main site for assembling, disassembling, and maintaining its nuclear arsenal.

The 2.3-megawatt turbines are expected to produce more than half of the power used at the Pantex Plant in the Texas Panhandle. When the blades start spinning next summer, the facility will be the largest federally owned wind farm.

“The windfarm will play a key role in helping Pantex achieve President Obama’s directive that the federal government lead the way in clean energy and energy efficiency,” says a Pantex press release. And the turbines will save the government millions in energy costs too.

The project is part of a broader campaign to make the nation’s nuclear weapons system more eco-friendly. It has a slogan — “Greening the nuclear security enterprise” — and its very own logo featuring a nuke, some wind turbines, wheat, a steer, and, of course, an American flag.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Government doesn’t know exact route of Keystone XL

by Unique Article Posted on July 10, 2013

Government doesn’t know exact route of Keystone XL

By John Upton

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You might think that one would need to know the precise route of a huge planned pipeline in order to assess its environmental impacts. But the State Department apparently disagrees.

Thomas Bachand has been trying to find out the precise route of Keystone XL for his Keystone Mapping Project. When he submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the State Department, which is responsible for assessing Keystone, it responded with a big shrug of the shoulders. From the department’s June 24 letter to Bachand:

[T]he Department does not have copies of records responsive to your request because the Environmental Impact Statement for the Keystone pipeline project was created by Cardno ENTRIX under a contract financed by TransCanada Keystone Pipeline LP, and not the U.S. government.

Neither Cardno ENTRIX nor TransCanada ever submitted GIS information to the Department of State, nor was either corporation required to do so. The information that you request, if it exists, is therefore neither physically nor constructively under the control of the Department of State and we are therefore unable to comply with your FOIA request.

DeSmogBlog lists some of the important questions left unanswered because we lack the specific route info:

Where will KXL intersect rivers or cross ponds that provide drinking water? What prized hunting grounds and fishing holes might be ruined by a spill? How can communities prepare for possible incidents?

This isn’t the first time Bachand has been blocked in his efforts to map the proposed pipeline. From his blog:

Last year when I requested the data from TransCanada, I was told that releasing it would be a “national security risk.” Despite this, TransCanada only carries $200 million in third party liability insurance. By contrast, cleanup costs for the 2010 pipeline spill in Kalamazoo, Michigan are $1 billion and climbing.

How very thoughtful of TransCanada to be concerned about risks.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Map of the Day: Who the NSA Listens To

by Unique Article Posted on June 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Guardian has gotten access to information about an NSA program that categorizes the information it collects:

The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks. The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message.

It’s hard to know what to think of this. The map shows which countries are surveilled most intensively, and it turns out that NSA collected about 3 billion pieces of data on U.S. communications over a one-month period this year. That’s a lot. On the other hand, it turns out that this is only about 3 percent of the total that NSA collects globally, which suggests that their focus really is pretty emphatically on non-U.S. communications.

On a side note, geeks might be interested to know that Boundless Informant—yet another great NSA name, no?—is hosted on free and open-source software. Congrats, open source movement!

UPDATE: It’s probably worth noting that the 3 billion number is for DNI data—Digital Network Intelligence. Data collection from American sources makes up about 3 percent of the global total of DNI. But in the same month, NSA also collected about 124 million pieces of DNR data—Dial Number Recognition. It’s possible that the U.S. percentage of this is much greater than 3 percent. But we don’t know.

It’s also worth noting that these numbers appear to relate to the source of the data, not the nationality of the person being surveilled. Those are two different things.

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Map of the Day: Who the NSA Listens To

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Oklahoma’s cyclones were all kinds of freaky

by Unique Article Posted on June 6, 2013

Oklahoma’s cyclones were all kinds of freaky

By John Upton

Brian Khoury

A scene from Oklahoma last Friday.

Not only did Friday’s tornado outburst in Oklahoma lead to at least 20 deaths, but analysis by NOAA has revealed that it included the widest tornado ever recorded in the U.S. and one twister that spun the wrong way.

The diameter of the El Rino tornado, which on Friday killed three famous weather chasers, reached a mind-boggling and record-breaking 2.6 miles. Both the El Rino cyclone and the Moore tornado, which struck nearby a week earlier, were rated EF5, the most damaging type of cyclone on the Enhanced Fujita scale. From LiveScience:

“To have two EF5s within less than two weeks in the same general area — that’s highly unusual,” [University Corporation for Atmospheric Research scientist Jeff] Weber told LiveScience. “Off the top of my head, I haven’t heard of it happening before.”

The tornadoes were made possible by “perfect” tornado conditions in the area, which have been intermittent for weeks, Weber said. Specifically, the alignment of the jet stream is bringing dry, cold air down from the north and allowing it to interact with warm, moist air from off the Gulf of Mexico, which sets up a volatile situation.

Like a wedge, the cold air collides with the warm air and causes it to rise, since warm air is less dense, Weber said. This rising warm air has created thunderstorms that have, in turn, spawned tornadoes.

It’s not just the size and power of the tornadoes that was remarkable. NOAA says that one of the tornadoes that struck Friday was a rare anticyclonic tornado:

You might think that an anticyclonic tornado would work in reverse of a typical tornado, replacing house roofs and putting cars back where they were before the normal tornado struck. But in fact, an anticyclonic tornado spins clockwise, whereas most other Northern Hemisphere storms spin counterclockwise.

From The Washington Post‘s Capital Weather Gang:

Leading tornado researcher Joshua Wurman (of the Center for Severe Weather Research) and his team were in the field monitoring the deadly EF5 twister when they spied another funnel, but spinning backwards, on their two “Doppler on Wheels” mobile radar units.

“At that point we bailed east towards Oklahoma City,” Wurman said. “I’m very happy my team had a radar out there. We only knew about [the anticyclonic tornado] because of the radar; otherwise we may have driven into it.”

Amazingly, Wurman’s encounter was not El Reno’s first with cyclonic and anticyclonic tornado pairings. On April 24, 2006, such a duo touched down in the area.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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In the AP and Rosen Leak Cases, Both Sides Have Made Mistakes

by Unique Article Posted on May 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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Matt Cooper, who was threatened with jail time during the Valerie Plame case, writes today that laws can only go so far to protect journalists from government intrusion:

This is one of those areas where custom carries more weight than statute, the custom being the general good sense of prosecutors not to go after reporters for their information….The current shield law being considered by Congress has lots of national-security exceptions and probably wouldn’t have helped me or the current subjects, the AP and James Rosen of Fox News. It’s better than nothing from where I sit, but it also means that no court will ever grant unconditional protection to reporters to hide their sources. Prosecutors and others are always going to have the opportunity to persuade a court that national security overrides First Amendment issues. The best we can count on is that prosecutors will use their powers with discretion, especially since in most national security cases they wind up not prosecuting for any leak itself but for false statements to the FBI.

For a contrasting opinion, Cooper recommends reading Walter Pincus, one of our best and longest-serving national security reporters:

When First Amendment advocates say Rosen was “falsely” characterized as a co-conspirator, they do not understand the law. When others claim this investigation is “intimidating a growing number of government sources,” they don’t understand history.

The person or persons who told the Associated Press about the CIA operation that infiltrated al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Kim — or someone else — who informed Rosen about North Korea, were not whistleblowers exposing government misdeeds. They harmed national security and broke the law.

The White House Correspondents’ Association board issued a statement May 21 saying, “Reporters should never be threatened with prosecution for the simple act of doing their jobs.” But it admitted, “We do not know all of the facts in these cases.” The board added: “Our country was founded on the principle of freedom of the press and nothing is more sacred to our profession.”

I worry that many other journalists think that last phrase should be “nothing is more sacred than our profession.”

Taken together, these pieces strike the right balance. Cooper is right that journalists are customarily left alone, and the government would be wise to take this custom seriously. Pincus is right that journalists customarily take care not to blow legitimate intelligence operations just for the sake of a few sentences in a routine story, and they’d be wise to take this custom seriously.

Rosen and the AP should have been more careful, and their actions deserve more scrutiny than their fellow reporters have given them. At the same time, the government overreached when it seized their phone records. It overreached in the Rosen case because Rosen’s records weren’t absolutely necessary to find the leaker, and it overreached in the AP case by phrasing its subpoena so broadly. That deserves scrutiny of its own. There’s no tension in believing both of these things at the same time.

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In the AP and Rosen Leak Cases, Both Sides Have Made Mistakes

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Oceans are absorbing excess heat, for now

by Unique Article Posted on April 12, 2013

Oceans are absorbing excess heat, for now

By John Upton

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/ Willyam BradberryMissing heat has shown up in the oceans, particularly in shallow tropical depths.

Pity the oceans. Not only do we dump oil and plastics and all kinds of nasty chemicals and garbage into them. Turns out we’re dumping heat into them too.

Studies of ocean temperatures are revealing that a lot of the excess heat we’re creating by pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is ending up in the oceans.

That’s helping to keep the atmosphere cooler than scientists had previously projected; the rise in surface temperatures slowed during the first decade of this century. (The effects of aerosols spat out by volcanoes and other phenomena are also thought to have helped keep temperatures on the surface of Earth lower than expected.) That may seem a good thing from the perspective of terrestrial creatures like us. But the oceans won’t suck up all that heat forever.

A new paper published in Nature Climate Change by scientists from Spain and France identified where much of the missing heat had ended up:

Most of this excess energy was absorbed in the top 700 [meters] of the ocean at the onset of the warming pause, 65% of it in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Our results hence point at the key role of the ocean heat uptake in the recent warming slowdown.

From Reuters:

Lead author Virginie Guemas of the Catalan Institute of Climate Sciences in Barcelona said the hidden heat may return to the atmosphere in the next decade, stoking warming again. …

Caroline Katsman of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, an expert who was not involved in the latest study, said heat absorbed by the ocean will come back into the atmosphere if it is part of an ocean cycle such as the “El Nino” warming and “La Nina” cooling events in the Pacific.

She said the study broadly confirmed earlier research by her institute but that it was unlikely to be the full explanation of the warming pause at the surface, since it only applied to the onset of the slowdown around 2000.

The study builds upon a paper published last month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. That research, as summarized by the blog Skeptical Science, found that “about 90% of overall global warming goes into heating the oceans, and the oceans have been warming dramatically” during the past 15 years. “The slowed surface air warming over the past decade has lulled many people into a false and unwarranted sense of security.”

So it seems that before we bake our own homes, we’re going to boil the oceans. And then our homes will be baked anyway.

Chilling.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

tweets

, posts articles to

Facebook

, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

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Whatever Happened to the $100 Million Mark Zuckerberg Gave to Newark Schools?

by Unique Article Posted on March 28, 2013

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Reports are surfacing that Mark Zuckerberg and other technology leaders are planning to launch a new, yet-to-be-named advocacy group that will push for immigration and education reform. The move is a big deal for Zuckerberg, who has mostly avoided politics in the past, but has a reported $13.3 billion to put into the game if he chooses to.

What would this influence look like? There could be clues from Zuckerberg’s last foray into advocacy work, the high-profile $100 million he donated to Newark public schools in the fall of 2010. That September, Zuckerberg appeared with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Newark Mayor Cory Booker to announce the donation on the Oprah Winfrey Show. This was right before the premier of The Social Network, which portrayed Zuckerberg as a narcissist who stole the idea for Facebook.

News of the donation captured national attention for a moment, then faded. In Newark, a local foundation established by Zuckerberg and the state have spent more than two years deciding how to best create a schoolyard revolution with $100 million dollars. At first, the “Facebook money,” as it’s called in Newark, helped the state hire consultants and establish several new charter schools. But the reform effort has floundered at moments: The first million dollars went towards a poorly conducted community survey that had to be re-worked by Rutgers and New York University, and criticism was fierce when a foundation board established to decide how the Facebook money was spent included only one Newark resident: Cory Booker. (“Yes, it’s their money. But it’s Newark’s kids,” an op-ed that ran in the Star-Ledger read.)

Then last November, nearly $50 million of Zuckerberg’s money went to pay for a new teacher’s contract, the first in New Jersey to offer performance pay for teachers who are deemed as “highly effective.” The contract offers up to $12,500 in bonuses for the teachers rated as the best in the district. It’s the first contract in New Jersey to offer performance-based pay, a policy that’s been instituted in a few cities such as Washington, DC. In DC, the plan was so controversial that it might have cost Mayor Adrian Fenty his job. “I think it helped—I know it helped—to be on our side of the table and have deeper pockets,” one school district official said about the Newark negotiations.

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Whatever Happened to the $100 Million Mark Zuckerberg Gave to Newark Schools?

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The Greatest Senatorial Hair Cuts of All Time

by Unique Article Posted on March 28, 2013

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Plus: Read more about the history of the Senate hair salon where lawmakers get their taxpayer-subsidized budget cuts.

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The Greatest Senatorial Hair Cuts of All Time

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VIDEO: Can We 3D Print Our Way Out Of Climate Change?

by Unique Article Posted on March 25, 2013

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Tech optimists’ crush of the decade is surely 3D printing. It has been heralded as disruptive, democratizing and revolutionary for its non-discriminatory ability to make almost anything: dresses, guns, even houses. The process—also known as “additive manufacturing”—is still expensive and slow, confined to boutique objets d’art or lab-driven medical prototyping. But scaled up, and put in the hands of ordinary consumers via plummeting prices, 3D printing has the potential to slash energy and material costs. Climate Desk asks: can 3D printing be deployed in the ongoing battle against climate change?

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VIDEO: Can We 3D Print Our Way Out Of Climate Change?

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