Attorney General Eric Holder strongly condemned "stand your ground" laws Tuesday, saying the measures "senselessly expand the concept of self-defense" and may encourage "violent situations to escalate." On the books in more than 30 states, the statutes have become a focal point of a complicated ...
Starkly different outcomes in Florida gun cases
Two Florida towns, 200 km apart. Two people firing weapons at unarmed aggressors, purportedly in self-defense. George Zimmerman, the 29-year-old neighborhood watch commander, fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin but was acquitted by a jury that apparently concluded he was in fear for his life. ...
Race takes backseat at Zimmerman trial
Thousands streamed into Fort Mellon Park, hard against the south shore of Lake Monroe, on that night in March 2012. An unarmed African-American teenager in a "hoodie" sweatshirt had been killed the month before in this central Florida city, but the agitated crowd felt ...
Giffords tries gentler touch on guns
It was day two of Gabrielle Giffords' whirlwind nationwide tour to revive the push for tougher gun laws. The former congresswoman's husband, Mark Kelly, woke up early, placed his black case of firearms into the car trunk and raced across a vast stretch of ...
After Newtown shooting, mourning parents enter into the lonely quiet
They had promised to try everything, so Mark Barden went down into the basement to begin another project in memory of Daniel. The families of Sandy Hook Elementary were collaborating on a Mother's Day card, which would be produced by a marketing firm and ...
The rifleman: behind assault weapons' rise
Rene Carlos Vos, an arms dealer in Alexandria, Virginia, began hanging around the Washington headquarters of the National Rifle Association in the mid-1980s. The NRA's staff were intrigued to see the garrulous, back-slapping Vos in the group's seventh-floor suite, home to its lobbying operation ...
Stronger U.S. gun law fails to pass in Senate
The Senate’s rejection of a bipartisan bill to expand background checks for gun purchases reveals the difference in power between public opinion and a united minority.
As the U.S. Senate prepares to begin debate this week on the biggest gun-control bill in nearly two decades, the gun rights lobby and its Senate allies are working on a series of amendments that have the potential to do the opposite — loosening ...
Prospects for a bipartisan deal to expand federal background checks for gun purchases are improving with the emergence of fresh Republican support, according to top Senate aides. The possibility that after weeks of stalled negotiations senators might be on the cusp of a breakthrough came ...
The Maryland House of Delegates passed what would be among the most restrictive U.S. gun-control measures Wednesday, voting to ratchet up the state's already tough rules by requiring fingerprinting of gun buyers, new limits on firearm purchases by the mentally ill, and bans on ...
Gun deaths are shaped by race in the United States: Whites are far more likely to shoot themselves, and blacks are far more likely to be shot by someone else. The statistical difference is dramatic, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the ...
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Tuesday declared politically dead the effort to ban military-style assault weapons, a setback for President Barack Obama and gun-control advocates who are pushing the Senate to move quickly on bills to limit gun violence. Reid is preparing to move ...
