On the hunt for a new way to measure the impact of mass shootings The revelation came to my wife after many frustrating conversations with pro-gun lawmakers in the bowels of congressional offices on Capitol Hill. She’s a smarter gun law advocate and a survivor of the Highland Park parade…

Time to take stock of what’s important — I picked the wrong week to get cancer, I thought. I gazed over the downtown buildings of Chicago. On a normal June day, the skyscrapers would shine bright in summer sun. But a veil of grey smoke and soot had settled over the city–courtesy of fires thousands of miles away…

In the footage, a Fox News anchor mumbles to a camera man that films him. Behind him stands a podium strapped with microphones where the police just finished briefing the press on the Covenant School shooting in Nashville. They’re about to do a recap of the press conference when my…

Notes from the Range My wife was part of a mass shooting (see story). As part of her new-found activism, she’s traveled to Washington D.C., and worked with senators to figure out how we, as a country, can have some sort of smart gun management. The problem, she says, is not the lawmakers who…

Illustrations from zoom meetings.

Manny Oliver, an activist for smarter gun measures and the father of Joaquin Oliver, who was killed at the Parkland, FL, shooting, was arrested at the Capitol for speaking out and “disrupting” a heated debate about gun control in the House of Representatives…Junior senator Maxuel Frost hailed Oliver in a…

What are assault weapons, exactly, and why are they so slippery to define? The current definition of an assault weapon is part of the gun problem in this country. No one can seem to agree on a good definition. People have politicized the definition into a stalemate. The New York Times, in an article in 2013, lamented defining these guns “could never be…

Last month, I watched the city board meeting in McHenry County, IL. The city of McHenry was voting on becoming a “sanctuary city” for the recently passed Protect Illinois Communities Act. This meant they were discussing whether to comply with the recent ban on assault weapons. When it came time…

Sifting through the mess At first, reading all these posts about ChatGPT squeezed the panic glands in my brain. Should I pack it up and find another career? Is this singularity, and will the robot police be showing up at my door soon? But after I calmed down a bit, I said to myself…