My aunt called the reporters “carrion birds.” My mom was too stunned to say much of anything about them. It fell to me to field their calls: “Columbine,” this thing that wounded 24 and killed 13 and almost took my mother, was an all-day, wall-to-wall media happening. A pair of journalists from the New York Times even used an enrolled student as a ruse. My mom arrived at a coffee shop to tutor a boy who’d been unable to return to school, and there they were, tagging along. Interrupting education. Seeking any small anecdote on murderers the 24-hour news cycle had already turned forever into figures of anti-heroic intrigue.

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Earlier this week, the White Plains Journal News ran a story with the provocative title "The Gun Owner Next Door: What You Don't Know About the Weapons in Your Neighborhood." The story, written by Dwight R. Worley, made few bones about its slant, opening with the chilling details of the shooting murder of a Katona woman last spring.

But it wasn't the story that raised eyebrows. It was the revelation that after a Freedom of Information request, "Westchester provided the names and addresses of the county’s 16,616 active permit holders" to the paper. And, even worse, its online version featured an interactive map of all the "pistol permits registered with the Westchester County Clerk's Office," along with the invitation to "zoom in and out for more information and click on a dot to see details of a permit." The Journal did also mention, in an editor's note, that writer Dwight R. Worley owns a .357 Magnum. It didn't, however, include his New York City address.

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After years of playing coy, the dapper newsman Anderson Cooper finally officially came out of the closet in an open letter to Daily Beast writer Andrew Sullivan on July 2. But though it came as zero surprise, a few remained undeterred by the news.

I don't care, I'm still gonna make a run at Anderson Cooper. —Mindy Kaling (@mindykaling) July 2, 2012

 

When Aetna informed doctoral student Arijit Guha, just as he was in the midst of stage-4 colon cancer, that he'd reached his insurance coverage cap, the 31-year-old took his story to Twitter and found himself engaged in a public conversation with his insurer's CEO, Mark T. Bertolini. He wound up getting full coverage – and making the debate over health care intimate and urgent.

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Of course, it’s impossible to say with certainty which actions "Anonymous" actually pulled off, since its membership is ill-defined and anyone can claim association, not to mention that sometimes Anonymous hacktivists act alone or as part of a subgroup.  Even when Anonymous has put out one of its quintessential videos claiming responsibility for a hack or DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service—shutting down a website by flooding it with requests) attack, it hasn’t always turned out to be true.

Given that, below are Anonymous’ “Top 20” for 2012. With its widening arsenal and focus, one can only imagine what these Internet denizens have in store for 2013.

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When Westboro members planned to protest the funerals of children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, they were met by counter-protesters, including a group of bikers called the Patriot Guard Riders, which specifically organized to “shield the mourning family [of fallen servicemembers] and their friends from interruptions created by any protestor or group of protestors,” i.e., Westboro activists.

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“The statement by the NRA is without any evidence that it would be effective,” said Dr. Fred Rivara, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington and the editor-in-chief of the pediatrics division of the Journal of the American Medical Association, in an email to Salon.

In fact, there was an armed sheriff’s deputy at Columbine High School the day of the shooting. There was an armed citizen in the Clackamas Mall in Oregon during a shooting earlier this month. There was an armed citizen at the Gabby Giffords shooting -- and he almost shot the unarmed hero who tackled shooter Jared Loughner. Virtually every university in the county already has its own police force. Virginia Tech had its own SWAT-like team. As James Brady, Ronald Reagan’s former press secretary cum gun control advocate, often notes, he was shot along with the president, despite the fact that they were surrounded by dozens of heavily armed and well-trained Secret Service agents and police.

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"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," he pronounced fatuously.

As usual for the NRA, the solution to gun violence is more guns. But finally, Americans are seeing that for the destructive illogic that it is. LaPierre is truly one of the bad guys. We don't need guns to fight him, though, we just need votes. And we need the politicians elected with our votes to stand up for us.

Last June, President Obama told a roomful of donors that if he were to be reelected, "the fever may break" and the Republican Party might return to its common-sense roots. It won't be that easy. Obama and the Democrats can't passively wait for relief from the sickness that claimed the GOP, even though it may seem that the party is self-destructing on its own. They are going to have to fight.

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Naturally, the NRA was not too amenable to this, and hotel security escorted the protesters and their cardboard boxes filled with signatures to the street. Josh Nelson, an organizer with CREDO, which led the petition effort, said the activists had a simple message to the NRA: “We want them to stand down and get out of the way so Congress and the president can pass gun control legislation that will save lives.”

Nelson and several dozen volunteers had hoped to deliver the petitions to LaPierre and NRA staffers before the press conference. But when they entered the building, “the hotel staff informed us that it’s private property and that we are not welcome there, and they pushed us out the door,” he told Salon. He couldn't be sure that the NRA directed the staff to eject the protesters, or if the hotel was just doing its job to protect its clients.

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The company is two years old, and started out by selling its lightweight brand of armor, RynoHide, to the military and police organizations. But in response to school shootings, Amendment II quickly branched out to include armor in children's products, first selling only a dozen at a time "to survivalist types" known as "preppers" at weekend gun shows.

They are now selling to "everyone." In the wake of Newtown, Amendment II’s Chief Operating Officer Rich Brand said to Fox13, “At this point, it’s transcended to everyone. Anyone who’s sending out a child into the world, seeing what can happen now, they want to protect their children.” So many people are flocking to buy the company's backpacks, which retail between $150-300, that there's a wait list and the Web site has crashed multiple times.

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Blame Obamacare and abortion. We heard, early out of the gate, from Mike Huckabee, who didn’t wait for the funerals to start blaming the liberal banishment of God from schools and government, including “tax-funded abortion pills,” by which the Personhood proponent meant birth control. “We dismiss the notion of natural law and the notion that there are moral absolutes and seemed amazed when some kids make it their own morality to kill innocent children. We diminish and even hold in contempt the natural family of a father and mother creating and then responsibly raising the next generation and then express dismay that kids feel no real connection to their families or even the concept of a family.”

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What is not helpful, though, is using a tragedy to promote an agenda rooted in fear, hate or reactionism. But, of course, there are a few loud right-wingers doing just that, and the theories are so nutty that they're hard not to gawk at.

Here are the craziest (and therefore, saddest) conspiracy theories right-wingers are using to explain the Newtown, Conn., massacre:

1. Damsels in distress

National Review writer Charlotte Allen argues that Newtown shooting could have been minimized, or prevented altogether if more Prince Charmings worked at the school:

But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.

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As part of an NRO symposium called "Newtown Answers," Charlotte Allen writes:

There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.

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This weekend I will fly to JFK—silently aware of the grim ballistic association—and then drive with my wife and eight-year-old daughter to Newtown, CT.

To celebrate Christmas.

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District officials said that they didn't know about the weapon until 3 p.m., however. “Once the teacher knew there was a weapon in the classroom, the student was apprehended in 30 to 45 seconds and immediately brought down to the office and the police were on site within five to 10 minutes,” said Granite School District spokesman Ben Horsley.

Parents were notified around 5:30, though many had learned the news from their children before then.

The student has been suspended and taken into a juvenile facility.

h/t Mediaite

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Then Victoria Soto's memorial overwhelmed me. Two of my daughter's best friends are elementary school teachers; I felt their bravery and vulnerability in a whole new way. On Monday a CNN interview with principal Dawn Hochsprung's teary, 20-something daughter Erica, begging her mother to "come back, just come back" undid me, making me miss my own mother and think about my daughter someday missing me. All of us have multiple identities that let pain find us in many different ways.

The only person I haven't been able to think about is Nancy Lanza, the first victim, shot in her bed with her own gun by her own son, the terminally mentally ill Adam. I shrink from the story despite the fact -- or because of it -- that we had things in common. She was close to my age, divorced, with children in their 20s. But I've been blessed; my daughter is as much a joy today as she was as a first grader.

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Another small detail emerged in the course of the interview, this time about Adam Lanza.

Lanza was vegan, according to Hanoman, because he "didn’t want to hurt animals.”

You can watch the full interview below.

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According to a report from the Pew Research Center, more than half of all parents polled have begun to restrict their children's news access in the wake of Friday's mass shooting.

Fully 71 percent of parents with children in elementary school are trying to restrict how much coverage of the events their children watch, compared with only 36 percent of parents with older children. Six in ten parents (60 percent) with both elementary-school-age and older children are restricting how much coverage their children watch.

Parents have long grappled with age-appropriate ways to talk with their children about grown-up tragedy, with a number of instructional guides offering suggestions. But the question remains: How much is too much information to share with your kids?

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Although the Discovery rep didn't link the show's cancelation to the recent shooting in Newtown, Conn., Fox notes that criticism flooded into the show's Facebook page in the aftermath of the massacre, and notes that many in Hollywood are beginning to question the role entertainment plays in promoting gun culture.

Similarly, the AP reported that this weekend's premieres for Tom Cruise's new action movie, "Jack Reacher," and the comedy "Parental Guidance" were postponed out of respect for the Sandy Hook victims, and Fox pulled new episodes of "Family Guy" and "American Dad" "to avoid potentially sensitive content."

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The scholarly journal American Behavioral Scientist devoted two issues in 2009 to the 10^th anniversary of the Columbine High School mass killings and what, if anything, we have learned from them. Gary Kleck, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University, contributed an essay in which he called mass school shootings “the worst possible case for gun control.”

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