Rania Khalek Dispatches from the Underclass

Tag / Newtown

Authorities have yet to determine what motivated suspects Tamerlan, 26, and Dzhokhar, 19, Tsarnaev to set off two home-made bombs at Monday’s Boston Marathon, killing three and severely injuring over 170 people. Nonetheless, the bombings have been labeled an “act of terror”, implying that a known political motive is not necessary for an attack in the US […]

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Yesterday evening, a 49-year-old woman in Oakland, California was shot and killed by a stray bullet while walking to the store, marking the city’s 124th homicide of 2012. Thus far, a google news search of “Oakland woman shot” has produced just four articles about this particular shooting. As I wrote earlier this week, the media usually pays […]

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Diane Ravitch has a must-read blog post about the heroic actions of the six teachers of Sandy Hook Elementary School who died protecting their children. You’ve probably already heard the heart-wrenching stories about teachers using their bodies to shield their little ones from the gunman as almost every news outlet has covered this at length. […]

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The trauma being faced by the surviving children of the Newtown school massacre is a daily reality for their mostly poor black and brown counterparts in cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore. That’s because gun violence is most prevalent in America’s impoverished inner-cities, where researchers say the PTSD rate could be as high as 40 […]

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By now, you’ve probably heard that there are nearly 300 million privately owned guns in the United States, almost one gun per person. As disturbing as that is, what’s even scarier is this: A minority of Americans own all of these weapons and just 20 percent are hoarding the majority of them. Following the massacre at […]

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