Cartoon by Frank Cotham. For more from this issue: http://nyr.kr/ZJvbvy

(Source: newyorker.com)

  Peter Manseau on America’s history of “melancholy accidents,” or, the gunfail of our forebears: 

The power of #gunfail (and, when its victims are not children, its black humor) is found in its predictability: today or tomorrow, sure as a cartoon time bomb, there is bound to be another bang. Yet its haunting quality is not merely a matter of the sad certainty of fatal accidents stretching far into the future. It’s also about our collective past. We have been failing with guns for so long, there ought to be a way to hashtag history. If we could, a narrative would emerge of a nation that fancies itself created and sustained by guns but that, in fact, sees its people culled by them with unnerving frequency.

…

Inadvertent suicides and other firearm-induced injuries were so frequent in early America that a regular report of “melancholy accidents”—the #gunfail of our forebears—could be found in newspapers across the country throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though these reports also took note of drownings and horse-tramplings, guns provided their assemblers with the most pathos per column inch…

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/Y1MxYH

(Source: newyorker.com)

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—As the national conversation about guns enters its fifth month, the National Rifle Association C.E.O. Wayne LaPierre gave it his seal of approval today, saying that he hopes the conversation continues “forever.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/102qIWW

“The scale of the defeat suffered by the ban’s supporters is shocking. This wasn’t a close call; it was a body blow.”

Alex Koppelman on the N.R.A.’s win on assault weapons: http://nyr.kr/10ieVpQ

Photograph by T. J. Kirkpatrick/Getty.

To return to any place is, associatively or figuratively, to reconstruct any event that happened at that place—especially if it’s a personally or universally defining event. To acutely mark that spot with an architectural artifact like a monument or memorial makes it impossible to miss, but also denies us the architectural setting of everyday life that enabled—or witnessed—that event in the first place. And such monuments can also seem, all too easily, to relieve us from our duty of further recollection and reflection. To demolish whatever stood at a place may seem like erasing that place’s defining event from history. But, conversely, to restore a place too completely to some earlier state can become a form of erasure, a denial that any disruption has ever happened. 
…

Shootings, events defined by immediate sightlines and ballistic trajectories, are an especially spatial and architectural kind of violence, and some ineffable part of their violence is to space itself—to the very airspace or geographical coördinates at which shots were fired or taken. The architectural task in the long aftermath of such shootings is not only to repair structural damage but to calibrate a balance between remembering and forgetting sufficient for daily life to continue nearby—and to figure out how the shapes, materials, and details of buildings can participate in that calibration. The architectural task is not only to provide actual security and defensibility but to figure out how the ways you see and move through buildings can affect your feelings of being at risk or at home.

Thomas De Monchaux talks to Erlend Haffner of the Oslo design firm Fantastic Norway, who has been hired to rebuild the summer camp on Utoya Island, which was the site of a mass shooting in July, 2011, about the process of rebuilding violent places: http://nyr.kr/16c0vKo

Photograph: Courtesy Fantastic Norway.

(Source: newyorker.com)

Cartoon by Edward Koren. For more from this issue: http://nyr.kr/XwWIm7

(Source: newyorker.com)

In the aftermath of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, last December, there has been much public discussion about the necessity of greater vigilance regarding mental-health issues—about our ability to recognize red flags early and get potentially dangerous individuals into treatment. It’s a reassuring notion, and less divisive, certainly, than calls for greater gun control or for censoring video games. But, as the [Amy] Bishop story [which I recount in a piece the current issue of the magazine (“A Loaded Gun”)] makes clear, this kind of early-warning system is often difficult to institute in practice. Amy Bishop shot her own brother, after all. She punched a woman at a pancake restaurant. She stood accused of mailing a bomb to one of her supervisors at Harvard. Red flags don’t get much brighter than that. Yet nobody stepped in. Why not?

Continue reading Patrick Radden Keefe on gender-bias in the criminal-justice system: http://nyr.kr/YhD78p

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In what he called “the happiest day of my life,” National Rifle Association C.E.O. Wayne LaPierre marked Valentine’s Day by marrying his longtime gun, an AK-47 assault rifle. Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/12FXFZy

Oscar Pistorius, who ran in the Olympics on carbon-fibre blades, has been arrested and charged with the murder of his girlfriend. Her name was Reeva Steenkamp and she was twenty-nine years old. There has been talk in the press that he mistook her for an intruder, and maybe he did—the investigation is in its first stages…

Amy Davidson on Oscar Pistorius, his girlfriend, and his gun: http://nyr.kr/12OHUnE

Photograph by Thembani Makhubele/Reuters.