Keep the dead and the injured and their loved ones in your thoughts and prayers.

Here are some remains of the day:

* I haven't gone into this in detail because the numbers are all preliminary and don't reflect spending, but it seems that in the 3d quarter HRC raised $28 million, Bernie Sanders raised $26 million, and Ben Carson raised $20 million. These numbers are strictly for official campaigns, not Super-PACs.

* Rare discharge petition being used to bring Eximbank reauthorization to House floor.

* At Ten Miles Square, Mark Kleiman explains that the civic-minded marijuana legalization movement is being replaced by the producer-dominated marijuana legalization lobby that's far less benign.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer is underwhelmed by HRC's work requirement for students getting new federal aid.

* At Republic 3.0 Anne Kim discusses data-driven means for reducing water waste via leaks and ill-repaired infrastructure.

And in non-political news:

* Hurricane Joaquin now a Cat 4 storm as it hits the Bahamas.

That's it for Thursday. We'll close with George "Wild Child" Butler and "Put It All In There" from 1967.

Selah.

(REUTERS/Jason Reed)

The Treasury will run out of cash by Nov. 5 unless Congress raises the debt ceiling, Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said Thursday in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

Lew said that by that date the Treasury would “exhaust its extraordinary measures” and have $30 billion in cash, less than is often needed for a single day of federal government expenditures.

The new estimate sharpens pressure on Congress – and the outgoing speaker Boehner – to pass legislation to lift the debt ceiling, a once routine procedure that in recent years has drawn opposition of conservative Republicans eager to make a stand over federal spending.

Lew urged Boehner to move quickly to pass legislation raising the debt ceiling, warning that “there is no way to predict the catastrophic damage that default would have on our economy and global financial markets.” He added that “we have learned from previous debt limit
impasses that failing to act until the last minute and engaging in partisan brinksmanship can cause serious harm to business and consumer confidence, raise short-term borrowing costs for taxpayers, and negatively impact the credit rating of the United States.”

The Treasury secretary said that the date was earlier than expected because tax receipts over the past 10 days “were lower than we previously projected.” Treasury also has more information about military and retirement trust funds, Lew’s letter said.

Boehner, who will step down Oct. 30, is expected to push for an increase in the debt ceiling, but if the measure becomes the rallying point for a rebellion by conservative Republicans it could make it more difficult for him to seal deals on budget priorities.

Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member Sander Levin (D-Mich.) said that Lew’s letter and the “lower-than-expected receipts serve as a reminder of the uncertainty inherent in projections and the danger of going to the brink – as my Republican colleagues seem to want to do.”

In 2011, congressional delays in raising the government’s debt ceiling prompted Standard & Poor’s to downgrade Treasury debt for the first time ever.  Levin said that Republicans “should not be playing chicken with our country’s full faith and credit.”

I can’t recall any senator who was as nearly universally loathed by his colleagues as Cruz. There have been others who weren’t likeable. There were plenty who were self-interested and who preened and blustered as often as Cruz does—and who routinely elicited senatorial smirks and rolled eyes. There have been senators who frequently forced their colleagues to cast difficult and unpopular votes. And, of course, there is a long list of senators who ran for president and treated the Senate floor as a campaign stop. (And for some of them it worked). But no senator in my memory did all that with such abandon and was disliked with as much intensity as is Ted Cruz.

I won't bother to quote the whole thing. But aside from the usual high-minded defensiveness about the Senate when challenged by a cynical guttersnipe like the Junior Senator from Texas, Salter also thinks Cruz is playing conservatives as suckers:

He deliberately sets up conservatives to fail by goading them into empty gestures and self-defeating stunts like shutting down government, which make it harder to persuade more Americans to embrace conservative policies. They can’t even be described accurately as Pyrrhic victories. They’re just abject failures.

And Cruz bets on them to fail. He stokes the anger of grassroots conservatives in the hope that it devours everyone but him. He offers false hope and misinformation as a plan, stands defiantly in the imaginary breach, and scurries to blame others for his singular lack of success.

Yeah, that's all pretty accurate, but it's worth noting that congressional Republicans make empty gestures all the time, so where exactly is the bright line that makes everybody but Cruz courageous men and women of principle and only him a scoundrel? I mean, it's not like the entire GOP conference except for Cruz has been engaged in serious bipartisan legislative activity day-in and day-out, is it?

I can't definitively answer these questions, but one thing I am pretty sure about is that Ted Cruz and his people won't lose a moment's sleep over the hatred he's aroused and that Salter makes explicit and extensive. From the moment he arrived, his only purpose as a Senator has been to excoriate the GOP leadership of that body and depict himself as a lone tree standing in the RINO desert. This has, lucky for him, positioned him about as ideally as one can imagine given the poisonous atmosphere emanating from the GOP base. And for that, Salter can thank said base and its activists for vaulting Cruz past a party stalwart into a safe Senate seat--one that he can probably occupy as long as he likes--in the first place. Nobody made them vote for Cruz, and best I can tell, the one thing he's never lied about his intention to become exactly the nasty demagogue that Salter and so many others deplore.

I don't expect Cruz to win the presidential nomination next year, but if he somehow does, it will be a lot of fun watching Senate Republicans dutifully line up to support him.

Friends and family wait outside of the Umpqua Community College campus, in Roseburg, Thursday, Oct. 1, 2015. Multiple people were killed after a gunman opened fire at the campus early Thursday. (AP Photo/Ryan Kang)

Within an hour of the terrible news — another mass shooting, a college campus, motives and many details unknown — the Internet had already revised the Wikipedia page for Roseburg, Ore., right in the first paragraph.

Roseburg is a city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Located in the Umpqua River Valley in Southern Oregon, it is the county seat and most populous city of Douglas County. Founded in 1851, the population was 21,181 at the 2010 census, making it the principal city of the Roseburg, OR Micropolitan Statistical Area. Interstate 5 runs through the community along with the South Umpqua River. Traditionally a timber town, Roseburg is the home of Roseburg Forest Products. On the 1st October 2015, a local college in Roseburg was attacked by a gunman who is believed to have killed at least 10 people. Details are pending.

This is what happens to places most of us had never heard of until the moment they became the dateline to a national tragedy. Forever their identity changes. Columbine. Newtown. Aurora. Now a small town in Southern Oregon with a rural community college nearby. From the instant of the shooting on, this is what we know of them: A horrific thing happened there.

In this way, a mass shooting becomes a crime not just against people — the victims, their families, the classmates who knew them — but against a place. Because now "Roseburg" will be a synonym for why-we-need-gun-control or what's-wrong-with-America or how-is-this-happening-again? And those sentiments crowd out any other thing worth knowing about the place. Even Charleston, a storied city widely recognized long before its own rampage, can't shake its new association with a slaughter.

For these smaller places, it's sad that this is how we come to know them, those of us who aren't from there. And it's sad that people from there will always have to say, "yes, that Roseburg." It's sad that this is another thing mass shootings do to us, creating a geography of their own of points on a map inseparable from violence.

In the spirit of widening that picture, here are some other things the Internet tells us about Roseburg, Ore.: The strawberries they grow there are delicious. There is a rare bookstore in town called Lost & Bound Books that advertises its hours on its door as "open by chance or by appointment." People in town have been worried lately about what snowpacks dissolving from climate change could mean for their streams and rivers. And when the sun rises in the morning, it comes up over a national forest to the east of town, and it looks like this:

The forest near Roseburg, Ore., courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management Oregon

Well, Esquire's Charlie Pierce has made a full, compelling case that's exactly what happened, and he's even found a villain:

I spent a little time Wednesday night examining my conscience, as we used to say around the ol' confessional, as regards the meeting between Papa Francesco and noted civic layabout Kim Davis. This contemplation was prompted by two things: first, an e-conversation I had with someone who had been part of the papal travelling party and second, the appearance of E. J. Dionne on Lawrence O'Donnell's show on MSNBC. According to the first person, there were a great number of people during the pope's tour who were simply hustled in and out for informal private audiences. According to Dionne, the meeting between Davis and the pope was brokered by Archbishop Carlo Vigano, the papal nuncio to the United States at whose residence the pope stayed during his time in Washington, which is when the meeting took place. Together, these facts set off my Spidey Sense about Vatican chicanery.

Vigano is precisely the kind of guy with the motive and the means to mousetrap the Holy Father into a meeting Davis and her legal team could exploit, you see.

The man is a real player within the institutional church. He first came to prominence as a whistleblower during one of the several investigations of the Vatican Bank, which may be what got him exiled to this godless Republic in the first place. Despite that fact, Vigano is well-known to be a Ratzinger loyalist and he always has been a cultural conservative, particularly on the issue of marriage equality. In April, in a move that was unprecedented, Vigano got involved with an anti-marriage equality march in Washington sponsored by the National Association For Marriage. (And, mirabile dictu, as we say around Castel Gandolfo at happy hour, one of the speakers at this rally was Mat Staver, who happens now to be Kim Davis's lawyer.) In short, Vigano, a Ratzinger loyalist, who has been conspicuous and publicly involved in the same cause as Kim Davis and her legal team, arranges a meeting with Davis that the legal team uses to its great public advantage. Once again paraphrasing New Orleans lawyer Lamar Parmentel from The Big Easy, the Vatican is a marvelous environment for coincidence.

Indeed, says Pierce, the whole incident showed how thoroughly Francis was surrounding during his American trip with members of the hierarchy who share the well-known conservative Catholic sense that the current ruler of the Holy See is betraying his righteous predecessors:

Ratzinger's fingerprints are all over this story. Vigano is a Benedict loyalist. Robert Moynihan, whose newsletter, Inside The Vatican, got the story first, is an actual lifelong Ratzinger protégé. And the Vatican press office acted just the way I'd want it to act, if I were the guy setting this up. First, it issues a silly non-denial denial, and then it merely confirms that the meeting occurred. At which point, the office clams up, leaving the story festering out there in the news cycle, and leaving the pope out there in the American culture war to twist in the wind. And, if this scenario is in any way accurate, it had its desired effect. The impact of what the pope actually said and did in America has been fairly well ratfcked.

It's a good pot-boiling tale, and a convincing one. But it's a reminder that even in an institution like the Catholic Church that is supposedly an absolute monarchy ruled by the Vicar of Christ, there's a lot more going on that what one man wants to say.

In the former, he placed Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. In the latter, Gov. Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Carly Fiorina and Gov. John Kasich.

But Romney was definitive in predicting the front-runner’s fate: “Donald Trump will not be the nominee. Ultimately our nominee will come from the mainstream conservative bracket. I don’t know who that will be.”

“The gun free zones are the areas that tell licensed gun owners that you are not allowed to carry your weapon in this facility…If you’re going to perpetrate some act, you know that most people are not going to be armed,” CNN “military analyst” Rick Francona said a few minutes after the shooting.

A retired Navy Seal, Jonathan Gilliam, also appearing on CNN, went even further. Blaming the “gun free zone” for the scope of the tragedy and adding “the only thing that’s going to stop a gun is another gun.”

Umpqua Community College, however, was not a gun free zone. A 2011, state court decision prohibited public colleges from banning guns on campus. The decision stemmed from a suit filed by the Oregon Firearm Education Foundation, a gun rights group. There was an effort to pass a new law to reinstate the ability of public colleges to ban guns. That measure was defeated by gun rights advocates.

The post UCC Was Not A ‘Gun Free Zone’ Because Public Colleges In Oregon Can’t Ban Guns appeared first on ThinkProgress.

As pro-Israel extremism reaches new depths with the notorious Canary Mission project, the FBI investigates growing threats against Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions activists.

Related Entries

• September 30, 2015 VIDEO: Palestinian Flag Is Raised at United Nations Headquarters
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UPDATE: The best information we have is that 7 to 10 people are dead and another 20 injured. Several reports suggest the shooter is in custody, perhaps wounded.

“Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told Congress in a new letter that thanks in part to lower-than-expected quarterly tax receipts, the extraordinary measures to forestall breaching the debt limit, combined with the new revenues, will run their course just a week after the resignation of Speaker John A. Boehner (R-OH) takes effect.”

The press secretary said President Obama still prioritizes gun control but he is “quite realistic that we’ll need to see a fundamental change in terms of the way the American people communicate this priority to Congress before we’ll see a different outcome in the legislative process,” according to Politico.

“We’ve not yet seen that kind of strong bipartisan support across the country translate into legislative support in the United States Congress that’s sufficient to pass legislation that would, again, implement these kinds of common-sense solutions,” Earnest continued. Though Congress has done nothing, a number of states have stepped up to implement background checks, and Oregon’s new law that implemented universal background checks for even private gun sales went into effect last month.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder also weighed in, calling for gun control measures. “Is the answer to our gun violence epidemic to do nothing? Again? Come on America! We solve problems,” he tweeted.

This isn’t the first time the White House has turned to the topic of gun control following a mass shooting. After the Newtown shooting in Sandy Hook, Connecticut in 2012, Obama made an impassioned plea for popular gun control reforms.

“Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose?” he said at the time. “I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer is no. We’re not doing enough. And we will have to change.”

Following the more recent shooting at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, Obama also expressed frustration that Congress had done nothing, despite bipartisan support for reforms to gun purchases.

“I have had to make statements like this too many times. Communities have had to endure tragedies like this too many times,” Obama said hours after police apprehended shooter Dylann Roof. “We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. Now is the time for mourning and for healing. But let’s be clear. At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.”

The post After UCC Shooting, White House Points Finger At Congress For Abandoning Gun Control appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Happened to get a call from Donald Trump a moment ago. Asked him about his thoughts on the Oregon shooting. Quote: pic.twitter.com/i9ytO9i67j

— Philip Bump (@pbump) October 1, 2015

He added that mass shootings are “happening more and more” — the Oregon shooting is the 45th shooting at a school in 2015 and the 142nd shooting since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. He also said “we have to get to the bottom of it” without mentioning any kind of gun reform.

Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton told reporters in Massachusetts that “it is beyond my comprehension that we are seeing these mass murders happen again and again and again.”

“We have got to get the political will to do everything we can to keep people safe. I know there is a way to have sensible gun control measures that help prevent violence, prevent guns from getting into the wrong hands and save lives. And I am committed to doing everything I can to achieve that,” she said.

Here is what Hillary Clinton said to me about the Oregon shooting after her event in MA. pic.twitter.com/uWrU9ykj09

— Dan Merica (@danmericaCNN) October 1, 2015

Other candidates tweeted their reactions:

Praying for Umpqua Community College, the victims, and families impacted by this senseless tragedy.

— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) October 1, 2015

My heart is with those who lost so much today in Oregon. -O’M

— Martin O'Malley (@MartinOMalley) October 1, 2015

My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families of this terrible tragedy at Umpqua Community College.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) October 1, 2015

The thoughts and prayers of Ohioans go out to the families & victims of the tragic shooting in Oregon today. -John

— John Kasich (@JohnKasich) October 1, 2015

It's with a heavy heart that we all pray for those killed or injured in Oregon today. #UCCShooting

— George E. Pataki (@GovernorPataki) October 1, 2015

The post Presidential Candidates React To Mass Shooting At Oregon Community College appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Today, the agency finalized its new ozone standard, which environmental groups are calling inadequate, insufficient, and “weak-kneed.” The rule, mandated by the Clean Air Act, reduces acceptable ozone levels from 75 parts per billion to 70 ppb.

“This action falls far short of what’s needed to protect the one in 10 children who live with asthma,” Lisa Garcia, a vice president at Earthjustice, said in a statement. “The science shows that ozone is dangerous to these kids at the levels allowed by this new standard.”

The environmental law group predicted that the new standard would be challenged in court.

Gound-level ozone — more commonly known as smog — is a serious health hazard. It has been linked to asthma and lung disease. In past decades, the United States has lowered levels of ground-level ozone significantly, due largely to efforts through the Clean Air Act, including emissions limits on cars and trucks. Ozone primarily affects children, the elderly, and people with asthma, but the current standard of 75 ppb leads to impacts for healthy adults who spend a significant chunk of their time outside as well.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy called Thursday’s announcement “another milestone in EPA’s long history of protecting people and the environment.” On a call with reporters, she emphasized that she used her own judgment, based on the newest scientific studies, to set the standard. A 70 ppb standard was within the recommendations made to the agency, she said.

Lowering the standard will prevent 160,000 missed school days, 230,000 asthma attacks, and up to 660 premature deaths per year by 2025, according to the EPA. The benefits will be worth $2.9 billion to $5.9 billion per year — up to four times as much as implementing the standard will cost, McCarty said.

The EPA is required, under the Clean Air Act, to review ozone limits every five years. The 75 ppb limit was set in 2008. However, the EPA’s own science advisory group had recommended going as low as 60 ppb.

“The recommended lower bound of 60 ppb would certainly offer more public health protection than levels of 70 ppb or 65 ppb and would provide an adequate margin of safety,” the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee said last year.

In fact, the EPA previously said a standard of 60 ppb would help prevent 4,000 to 12,000 premature deaths and 21,000 hospital visits. It would also reduce the number of missed school and work days by 2.5 million.

Many groups — including medical groups — applauded the new standard. “The EPA’s stronger ozone standard is a great step forward in reducing the amount of dangerous pollutants in our environment, and will ensure cleaner air for asthma and allergy patients,” Dr. Cary Sennett, president and CEO of AAFA, said in a statement. “However, AAFA supports an even lower standard of 60 ppb, which would better protect the health of the American people.”

According to projections from the EPA, only 14 counties in the United States, outside of California, will not meet the standard by 2025. Attainment timelines are “quite long,” McCarthy said. California, she said, had additional “challenges.”

The fight against lowering the limit has been strong. The National Association of Manufacturers paid for advertisements this summer claiming, “It’s not just manufacturers who will bear this burden, Americans across the country will feel the costs of this expensive, new regulation.” Ground-level ozone can be released by chemical manufacturers, power plants, autobody paint shops, print shops, agricultural operations, and even gas-powered lawn equipment, as well as cars and trucks.

The post EPA Announces New Ozone Limits, Disappointing Environmental Groups appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Pruitt’s request arises from the same set of circumstances that led Fallin to delay the state’s plan to execute an inmate named Richard Glossip. Like many states, Oklahoma’s execution protocol calls for a series of three drugs — one that is supposed to act as a painkiller, one to paralyze the inmate and then a third that stops the inmate’s heart. Oklahoma typically uses potassium chloride as the third drug in this sequence, but they discovered shortly before Glossip’s execution was supposed to begin that they’d actually received a supply of a different drug — potassium acetate.

Both potassium chloride and potassium acetate have therapeutic uses, and are typically used to treat medical conditions arising out of low potassium levels. No state, however, uses potassium acetate as part of its execution protocol and it is not clear whether this drug would actually be effective in stopping a person’s heart.

A spokesperson for Pruitt said that it is “extremely frustrating to the attorney general, that the Department of Corrections did not have the correct drugs to carry out the execution.” Nevertheless, in a statement to the press, Pruitt indicated that he believes executions must be halted until his office “gains confidence” that the state Department of Corrections “can carry out executions in accordance with the execution protocol.”

Oklahoma was the scene of two botched executions where inmates were effectively tortured to death during their execution by lethal injection. One of these inmates was heard saying “my body is on fire” and that a drug injected into him felt “like acid.”

The post Oklahoma Attorney General Asks Court To Halt All Executions In His State appeared first on ThinkProgress.

For those fans, we turn the clocks back to our December 2001 issue, when the Nats were still the Montreal Expos. Dayn Perry took a look at the team's relocation chances and why Washington seemed like the perfect fit. In addition to wanting a team in a large metropolitan area, Major League Baseball needed to maintain its legal monopoly over the sport — about which lawmakers might be a little more understanding if they could score some seats. Perry writes:

What D.C. also boasts that competitors such as Charlotte, Las Vegas, and Portland, Oregon, do not is the political advantage that inescapably resides in the nation's capital. More than campaigning, kissing babies, and lengthy recesses, Congress loves baseball. And while that's true of most red-blooded Americans, lawmakers have a special reason to want a team. Imagine congressmen being able to give important constituents tickets to a game at a brand-new field next to RFK stadium (the most likely site) that boasts a view of the Capitol Dome over the center field fence. Now imagine lobbyists slipping lawmakers those tickets. (Don't underestimate the lure of free tickets: In 1999, congressional ethics committees decided that the $98 club seats at Washington's MCI Center---home to the NBA's Wizards and NHL's Capitals---could be "reinterpreted" to cost $49.50 if lawmakers forfeited parking and waitress service, so that lobbyists could slip them tickets without running afoul of the $50 cap on gifts to congressmen.)

You can read the whole prescient story right here.

Numerous people are reportedly dead in a shooting on the campus of a community college in rural Oregon. It's the latest incident of gun violence in a series this year, including a shooting at a movie theater in Lafayette, La. and another at a church in Charleston, S.C.

It is not yet clear how many people have been killed in Thursday morning's incident at Umqua Community College in Douglas County or the full circumstances of the shooting.

In this post, adapted from previous versions after mass killings in the past, we explore America's unique role among advanced countries as a place where support for guns is widespread -- as is violence involving firearms. There are some perhaps surprising findings -- gun ownership in the United States is declining overall, for instance. But although mass killings have occurred with increasing frequency in recent years, support for gun rights is still resolute in America.

Here are answers to a few questions you might have about guns and mass shootings, including:

How common are mass shootings in this country?
How many people own guns?
Are mass shootings becoming more common?
When were deadliest shootings in U.S. history?
Is the United States an especially violent place, compared to other countries?
Where is violence most common in America?
Is the number of guns related to the number of homicides?
Is gun control?
Is there public support for gun control?
What about for particular gun control policies?
How do mass shootings affect public opinion on this issue?

 1. Shooting sprees are not rare in the United States. 

Mother Jones tracked and mapped shooting sprees over the three decades from 1982 to May of last year. They counted "at least 61 mass murders carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii," they found.

A Congressional Research Service report published in 2013 counted 78 incidents over roughly the same period, in which 547 were killed. Definitions of mass shootings vary. The report excludes those for whom terrorist ideology or criminal profit was a motivation. The Mother Jones staff limited themselves to indiscriminate killings of at least four people in public places by lone shooters.

It's too early to say how this latest incident will alter the counts.

In most cases, the Mother Jones staff found, the killers had obtained their weapons legally: 

2. Gun ownership in the United States is declining overall, but nearly a third of households still have a gun.

The General Social Survey has been asking Americans about whether they have a gun in their home for decades, and last year essential tied the record low level of gun ownership reached in 2010. As you can see the chart below, 31 percent of adults reporting having a firearm in their household in 2014. That is 17 percentage points below the peak gun ownership from 1977 to 1980.

Survey data released last year by the Pew Research Center broke down the demographics of gun ownership more broadly. They wrote:

Overall, about a third of all Americans with children under 18 at home have a gun in their household, including 34% of families with children younger than 12. That’s nearly identical to the share of childless adults or those with older children who have a firearm at home.

The new research also suggests a paradox: While blacks are significantly more likely than whites to be gun homicide victims, blacks are only about half as likely as whites to have a firearm in their home (41% vs. 19%). Hispanics are less likely than blacks to be gun homicide victims and half as likely as whites to have a gun at home (20%).

Pew found that gun ownership is concentrated among older adults, rural residents, and whites, especially white Southerners. Whites in the South are more likely to own guns than whites in other regions.

Authorities have yet to identify the shooter or shooters in Thursday's incident.

 3. Active shooter events have become more common in recent years.

A report published by the FBI last year, studying active shooting situations between 2000 and 2013, found that these kinds of incidents were happening more and more recently. The first seven years of the study found an average of 6.4 active shootings per year, while the last seven years of the study found that number jumped up to 16.4 incidents per year.

Active shooting incidents are defined by federal agencies as "an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area." (This is different from mass killings, which are episodes in which three or more people are killed, according to the FBI. While many active shooting incidents wind up being mass killings, more than half of the episodes in the FBI study did not meet that definition.)

 4. Of the 12 deadliest shootings in the United States, at least half happened after 2007.

As this map by The Washington Post shows, several of the deadliest shootings ever in the United States have happened in just the past few years -- including the massacres at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. and at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. These were the two shootings that claimed the most lives, and the third deadliest shooting was in 1991 in Killeen, Tex.

 5. America is an unusually violent country. But we're not as violent as we used to be.

Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke University, made this graph of deaths due to assault in the United States and other developed countries. We are a clear outlier -- along with Estonia and Mexico. Yet this country is a far less violent place than it was 40 years ago, with the rate of deaths due to assault declining by roughly half.

As Healy writes, "The most striking features of the data are (1) how much more violent the U.S. is than other OECD countries (except possibly Estonia and Mexico, not shown here), and (2) the degree of change—and recently, decline—there has been in the U.S. time series considered by itself."

 6. The South is the most violent region in the United States.

In a subsequent post, Healy looked at deaths due to assault in different regions of the country. Just as the United States is a clear outlier in the international context, the South is a clear outlier in the national context:

 7. More guns tend to mean more homicide.

The Harvard Injury Control Research Center assessed the literature on guns and homicide and found that there's substantial evidence that indicates more guns means more murders.

This holds true whether you're looking at different countries or different states. Citations here.

 8. States with stricter gun control laws have fewer deaths from gun-related violence.

In 2011, economist Richard Florida dove deep into the correlations between gun deaths and other kinds of social indicators. Some of what he found was, perhaps, unexpected: Higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness were not correlated with more deaths from gun violence. But one thing he found was, perhaps, perfectly predictable: States with tighter gun control laws appear to have fewer gun-related deaths. The disclaimer here is that correlation is not causation. But correlations can be suggestive:

"The map overlays the map of firearm deaths above with gun control restrictions by state," Florida wrote in 2012. "It highlights states which have one of three gun control restrictions in place - assault weapons' bans, trigger locks, or safe storage requirements. Firearm deaths are significantly lower in states with stricter gun control legislation. Though the sample sizes are small, we find substantial negative correlations between firearm deaths and states that ban assault weapons (-.45), require trigger locks (-.42), and mandate safe storage requirements for guns (-.48)."

 9. Gun control, in general, has not been politically popular -- and its popularity has been declining lately.

Since 1990, Gallup has been asking Americans whether they think gun control laws should be stricter.

The answer, increasingly, is that they don't.

"Less than half of Americans, 47%, say they favor stricter laws covering the sale of firearms, similar to views found last year," Gallup says. "But this percentage is significantly below the 58% recorded in 2012 after the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, spurred a nationwide debate about the possibility of more stringent gun control laws. Thirty-eight percent of Americans say these laws should be kept as they are now, and 14% say they should be made less strict."

 10. While general gun control isn't that popular, particular policies are.

While many Americans strongly support the right to bear arms, they also support specific restrictions, such as background checks, assault weapons bans and a federal database to track guns. Here's 2013 data from Pew Research Center.

 11. Shootings don't tend to substantially affect views on gun control.

That is what the Pew Research Center found after polling Americans after mass shootings in the United States. In fact, Pew reported late last year that for the first in more than 20 years, Americans showed more support for gun rights than gun control. That's what Pew found after Newtown.

And before other mass shootings, as well:

In fact, more people say gun ownership protects people from a crime.

*Earlier versions of this post were authored by Ezra Klein and Zachary Goldfarb, with contributions from Mark Berman.

Today a shooter opened fire at a community college in Oregon. Early media reports indicate numerous fatalities and a number of additional people wounded. That brings the total of mass shootings this year -- incidents where 4 or more people are killed or injured by gunfire -- to 294.

There have been only 274 days this year. The shootings are captured in this calendar, drawn from the the Mass Shooting Tracker. The tracker draws some criticism because its definition is broader than the FBI's definition, which requires three or more people to be killed by gunfire. But the broader definition is nonetheless a useful one, because it captures many high-profile instances of violence — like the Lafayette theater shootings — that don't meet the FBI's criteria.

Charleston. Lafayette. Virginia. Now, Roseburg Oregon. But beneath the steady drumbeat of these high-profile cases lay the hundreds daily mass shootings that most of us never hear about. 11 wounded in a Georgia barroom. Six shot outside a Tulsa nightclub. A pregnant mom and grandmother killed, an infant wounded in Chicago.

We've gone no more than eight days without one of these incidents this year. On six days in September, there were 3 mass shootings or more. If the initial casualty figures in Oregon hold up, that would bring the total of deaths by mass shooting this year to 380 so far, with well over one thousand injured.

And of course, there's the broader universe of nearly 10,000 people killed and 20,000 wounded in nearly 40,000 gun violence incidents so far this year.

These numbers only tell the smallest part of the story. And these very numbers will need to be updated again tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that.

In a letter published in both the Washington Post and Financial Times, the chief executives from Mars, General Mills, Unilever, Kellogg, Nestle, New Belgium Brewing, Ben & Jerry’s, Clif Bar, Stonyfield Farm, and Dannon asked U.S. and global leaders to “meaningfully address the reality of climate change.”

“The challenge presented by climate change will require all of us — government, civil society and business — to do more with less. For companies like ours, that means producing more food on less land using fewer natural resources. If we don’t take action now, we risk not only today’s livelihoods, but those of future generations,” the letter reads. “We are asking you to embrace the opportunity presented to you in Paris, and to come back with a sound agreement, properly financed, that can affect real change.”

The letter comes at a time when corporations are ramping up their own sustainability goals — just last week, Nike, Walmart, Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble, Salesforce, Starbucks, Steelcase, and Voya Financial all committed to transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy. But at a roundtable discussion on Capitol Hill Thursday, sustainability representatives from many of the food companies represented in the letter urged their industry to go farther than just internal sustainability commitments.

“The reality is, Unilever can hit all its goals and it won’t make a difference, alone, in and of itself,” Tom Langan, external affairs director at Unilever, said during the roundtable. “We need to work together. We need governments to be involved.”

The roundtable was sponsored by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Sen. Chris Gibson (R-NY). In his opening remarks, Whitehouse commented on the “historic” nature of the event, noting that it was the first time in a very long time that a Democratic elected official and a Republican elected official had sat side-by-side and spoken publicly about the challenges of climate change. He also noted that the food companies’ willingness to push for climate action outside of their own operations marked a change in how businesses are reacting to climate change.

“For a long time the corporate community has seen it as their role to reduce their carbon footprint, but quietly — don’t talk about it and whatever you do, don’t lobby on it. I see that changing,” Whitehouse said, adding that he hoped that Paris’ December negotiations would result in “a signed international agreement among major corporations.”

As the representatives from food corporations spoke, each reiterated their company’s commitment to sustainability. Kim Nelson, who works in external relations for General Mills, spoke of the company’s recent announcement to cut its greenhouse gas emissions throughout its entire supply chain 28 percent by 2030. Some spoke of how climate change has already impacted their business, while others spoke of unique steps their companies have taken to move towards a more resilient, sustainable business model. According to Lagan, disruptions due to climate change are expected to cost Unilever $335 million a year. Paul Bakus, president of corporate affairs at Nestle, talked about declines in the company’s pumpkin harvests, a drop he “firmly” believes is because of climate change.

At the end of their statements, each representative underscored the need for government action in the face of climate change.

“Government stepping forward is pro-planet, pro-business, and pro-people,” Barry Parkin, the chief sustainability officer at Mars, said. “There is no conflict here.”

The post Food Industry To Congress: We Need You To Act On Climate Change appeared first on ThinkProgress.

But some criminal justice advocates believe the possible reforms do not go far enough. To win Grassley’s approval, mandatory minimums are still on the table for certain crimes — and expanded for others.

The new Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act reduces mandatory minimums for nonviolent offenders. Enhanced mandatory sentences, which have kept nonviolent offenders behind bars for extended time, would also be restricted to people who commit serious drug offenses and violent crimes. The Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the mandatory sentencing disparities between powder and crack cocaine, would be applied retroactively — impacting at least 6,000 people behind bars. Moreover, the bipartisan bill scales back the federal three-strikes rule for certain drug offenses, but includes mandatory life sentences for people convicted of two “serious violent felonies” plus a “serious drug offense.”

“One of the greatest accomplishments of the bill is the scope and comprehensive review that they’ve taken to various aspects of the system,” Executive Director Christine Leonard of the Coalition for Public Safety told ThinkProgress. “It’s looking at people who would be subject to sentences in the future. They’re looking at people who are serving their sentences now, and within each of those categories, taking a closer look at particularly vulnerable populations like the elderly and youth. It’s a completely different paradigm and I think the impact will be far-reaching.”

While the bill is considered historic, many believe the reduction of certain mandatory minimums is not enough, and are concerned that the bill also expands minimum sentences for firearm carriers, domestic violence offenders, and people supporting terrorism.

“What we’d like to get to is what President Obama recommended during his NAACP speech: reducing or altogether eliminating mandatory minimum sentences,” Nazgol Ghandnoosh of the Sentencing Project told ThinkProgress. “We know that these sentences, especially at the federal level, are a major driver of long prison sentences and therefore a major driver of mass incarceration.”

“We’d rather have judges exercise their discretion in sentencing. We don’t believe that we would be at risk of seeing lenient sentences or seeing a major reduction in plea bargain rates,” she continued. “That’s one one of the reasons that some senators continue to support mandatory minimums. They want to make sure to maintain a high rate of plea deals.”

However, draconian mandatory minimums have kept low-level offenders embroiled in the system — often without a chance of release. Advocates of eliminating them altogether also point to the gross racial disparities in sentencing, which disproportionately impact black men. The high costs of imprisoning non-violent, low-level offenders for long periods of time is another major grievance shared by conservatives.

The ACLU echoed the Sentencing Project’s reservations with the new mandatory rules. “We have deep concerns about other aspects, especially the expansion of some mandatory minimum sentences. We believe that punishments must fit the crime and that a cookie-cutter approach too often gets in the way of justice,” said Executive Director Anthony Romero.

Nevertheless, the long-time advocates of criminal justice reform are optimistic about what the bill can do in the future.

“I would hope that other members of Congress and policymakers and citizens across the country will see what progress these conversations have reached in terms of this broad group of senators that have come together on this issue,” Leonard said. She believes the next frontier is implementing substantive changes at the state level.

“There’s an overwhelming number of people sentenced in the state populations, and [they] also need to be reviewed. Some states have already adopted reforms, but there’s a lot more that needs to be done.”

Ghandnoosh also thinks lawmakers should pivot to what happens upon inmates’ release.

“We have to remember that most people in federal prison have drug convictions. When people come out of prison with a drug conviction, they’re barred from access to a lot of federal benefits,” she noted. “In many states they’re barred from food stamps and cash assistance. We have to think not just about who we’re sending to prison and how long we’re keeping them there but also think about how to reduce the barriers that we’ve imposed for people after they’re released.”

“[The bill is] so significant because it brings together bipartisan leadership, including Senate leadership that had been reluctant to support criminal justice reform in the past. It begins to exercise the muscle for bigger reforms in the future.”

The post Criminal Justice Advocates React To The Senate’s Long-Awaited Criminal Justice Reform Package appeared first on ThinkProgress.

[Russian airstrikes] “do not go beyond ISIL [ISIS], [Jabhat] al-Nusra or other terrorist groups recognized by the United Nations Security Council or Russian law,” Lavrov said. “If it looks like a terrorist, if it acts like a terrorist, if it walks like a terrorist, if it fights like a terrorist, it’s a terrorist, right?” Lavrov added that Russia did not consider the opposition Free Syrian Army to be a terrorist group.

Syria’s now in its fifth year of civil war and over 250,000 people are estimated to have been killed, with a further 11 million displaced. There are around 4 million refugees, mostly residing in Syria’s neighboring countries, but as food aid dissipates many refugees are expected to join the tens of thousands already attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Turkey into Europe. More than 2,800 people have already died on such a voyage and many more are expected to attempt it this winter.

Russian airstrikes started Wednesday near the cities of Homs and Hama in what Russia’s Defense Ministry said were attacks against ISIS, also known as ISIL or the Islamic State. Opposition activists and Syrian Civil Defense units, a group of volunteers who perform duties similar to the Red Cross, however, said that ISIS was nowhere near the targeted areas — a claim buttressed by maps that layout which actors are in control of the various parts of Syria.

Rhetoric aside, Russia has been transparent about using Syrian Army intelligence to conduct airstrikes. “All the airstrikes of the Russian aviation are coordinated with the Command of the Syrian Army,” a video post, showing the airstrikes on the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Defense Facebook page, said on Thursday.

Instead, it seems the airstrikes hit rebel groups. Some of these groups are backed by the U.S. and its allies in the Gulf States. The move looks like it could go as far as to embolden ISIS, a strategy that some analysts have argued is part of the Assad regime’s plan to paint itself as fighting a war against Islamic radicals.  

“Russian troops are backing Assad in the fight against groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, which are themselves opposed to ISIS,” Igor Sutyagin, a Russian strategic analyst, told the Guardian last week. “If Russian troops do eventually join combat, therefore, they would also — technically — be assisting ISIS.”

This is a notion supported also by Syrian rebel groups and various civilians who are sympathetic to the rebel cause of dislodging Assad’s brutal regime.

“Western-backed Syrian opposition chief Khaled Khoja said the Russian strikes had killed 36 civilians and no rebel fighters, and accused Russia of seeking only to keep Assad in power,” Reuters reported on Thursday.

“I am living in an area under the regime’s control,” Latakia resident and Syrian opposition supporter Abu Mohammed, 27, told the Guardian. “And I can tell you they are very happy about what is happening. They feel proud of all of the bombing and the killing [of] the civilians. The regime hates us more than [ISIS]. They consider us the real enemy.”

In the short run, the airstrikes will give a boost to the Assad regime, but they are also likely to be beneficial to ISIS. With their opponents in the various opposition groups depleted by airstrikes, ISIS is also likely to benefit. And while Assad may see this as a way to increase support for his fight for survival, it could also be detrimental for any future political solution in Syria.

“Russia’s actions are likely to stir up a hornet’s nest,” Brian Katulis, a senior fellow with a focus on National Security and the Middle East at the Center for American Progress told ThinkProgress, “and what Russia is doing in Syria may end up creating the greatest rallying cry and recruitment tool for terrorist networks across the region since the Bush administration took America to war in Iraq in 2003.”

The post Russia Says It’s Entering The Syrian War To Counter ISIS. It Might Do The Opposite. appeared first on ThinkProgress.