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	Medical Professionals declare Gun Violence a Crisis by Lisa Miller, Zoe Carpenter The Nation, Foreign Correspondent, agencies USA   28 June 2016   Sandy Hook massacre victims'' parents harassed by ''truthers'', told children never existed, by Lisa Miller, Foreign Correspondent.   Families of America''s gun massacre victims, including those from the Sandy Hook school shooting and the latest rampage in Orlando, are being stalked by conspiracy theorists and "gun truthers" who claim the atrocities never happened.   Grieving parents from the Sandy Hook massacre are being told their children never died or never even existed.   The harassment started within days of the shooting, when a young man armed with a military-style assault rifle ran amok at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut, USA, in December 2012, killing 20 first graders and six teachers.   It continues to this day. "F*** you!! Your child never died at Sandy Hook," is one among thousands of online posts that Lenny and Veronique Pozner have had to deal with as they mourn their six-year-old son Noah.   "Where''s Noah going to die next?" is another.   Some "gun truthers" claim Sandy Hook was a government-sponsored stunt aimed at galvanising support for tougher gun laws.   "There are many conspiracies, many theories, one of which is that Noah is an actor and he''s never really died and that we''re all actors," Mr Pozner told Foreign Correspondent''s Lisa Millar.   Unlike most bereaved parents, Lenny Pozner refuses to ignore the trolls. He dedicates himself to confronting them.   So in a country awash with conspiracy theories — 9/11, JFK, Obama''s backstory — why does he bother?   "I have to absolutely defend the memory of my son — I have no choice," he said. "I know how some of these theories build up. They don''t fade away and the more time they spend online, the more accepted they become.   "The JFK conspiracy theory in the US is very accepted. Conspiracy theories erase history, they erase our memories, and how will this event (Sandy Hook) be remembered a hundred years from now? "So I think it''s important the work that I''m doing."   Mr Pozner has founded a group called the HONR network, which aims to "bring awareness to hoaxer activity" and "prosecute those who wittingly and publicly defame, harass and emotionally abuse the victims of high-profile tragedies".   There is no criminal law to protect bereaved families from trolling, so whenever Mr Pozner and his volunteers find a video or rant attacking victims of tragedy, they alert outlets like YouTube or Facebook. Or they go to police or other authorities and publish the complaints.   They have succeeded in removing many links to dark content, though thousands more remain.   Mr Pozner has received multiple death threats and takes precautions. A condition of his interview with Foreign Correspondent is that his face is not shown.   The harassers are not all faceless nobodies. One radio shock jock wrote of Sandy Hook: "It would take a fool not to question the motive behind it all: Is this all part of an evil pre-conditioning program?"   But Mr Pozner''s highest profile adversary has been James Tracy, whose status as a Florida university professor of communications won him huge publicity when he suggested Sandy Hook was bogus.   Professor Tracy even demanded the Pozners provide proof Noah once lived, and that they were his parents.   The university sacked Professor Tracy a few months ago. He is appealing the decision.   "That was a very strong success … a very powerful statement that that sort of behaviour is not acceptable," Mr Pozner said.   "A lot of people who are conspiracy theorists throw around this freedom of speech concept. But that''s not what it means — it''s not protection from abusing people."   For Mr Pozner, it is impossible to let go of the past, except in the most literal sense. He has moved interstate to an undisclosed location. Sandy Hook was too raw.   "The more time and the more distance, the less heavy it becomes," he said.   But many locals are frustrated the tougher national gun laws predicted after Sandy Hook never eventuated. And they are angered by the insidiousness of the "truthers".   "What''s frustrating is that the ones who don''t even own guns buy into that propaganda, the nonsense that this never happened or that it was a government false flag operation to take away people''s guns," said Eric Milgram, whose daughter evaded the shooter by hiding in the bathroom. "You know, that''s just a stupid, stupid idea."   Mr Milgram has this grim advice for families of this month''s Orlando killings: "Be prepared that when you speak out you will be harassed."   "These gun nuts, these extremists, these hoaxers, these nasty people, you''ve gone through a horrible trauma, be prepared that you''re going to be harassed on social media.   "People are going to call your house, they''re going to get your work phone number, they''re going to threaten you, they''re going to tell you that you''re part of a conspiracy. "You''re going to be victimised all over again."   June 2016   Medical Professionals declare Gun Violence a Crisis, by Zoe Carpenter.   The injured arrived at the Orlando Regional Medical Center in “truckloads.” They came with “multiple high-velocity” gunshot wounds to their arms, legs, and chests, from the assault rifle that Omar Mateen carried during his rampage at the Pulse nightclub. Nine died shortly after they arrived, while trauma surgeons, nurses, and other health workers, some who’d rushed to the hospital after being awoken in the night by urgent calls for help, worked to stabilize 35 others.   Medical professionals have an intimate view of gun violence in America and its growing severity. Trained for the traumas of civilian life—car crashes, falls, injuries from natural disasters—emergency-room staff are more and more frequently responding to mass shootings, of which there have been 998 since the Sandy Hook killings, and treating wounds more commonly seen in a war zone. Gun violence has become so common that the American College of Emergency Physicians assembled a task force earlier this year to study firearm injuries and create guidelines for treatment.   That such a task force is needed reflects the assumption that, absent some policy change, mass shootings will continue to happen. “It is crazy,” acknowledges Dr. Jay Kaplan, the president of ACEP. Kaplan praised the response of the medical team in Orlando, but said that other hospitals may be less prepared to deal with a sudden influx of multiple patients with injuries from bullets shot in rapid succession, as from a semi-automatic weapon. “We’re seeing penetrative trauma at a far greater scale than we’ve seen in the past. And our feeling is, as emergency physicians, in conjunction with our trauma colleagues, we need to know more,” Kaplan said. “It’s like responding to a battlefield in a civilian community.”   For years, the National Rifle Association and its allies on Congress have tried to exclude medical professionals from the gun-control debate, insisting that gun violence is strictly a matter of constitutional rights and criminal justice; or, if health is implicated, only in regards to mental illness. The mass shooting in Orlando demonstrated the absurdity of this position: Try telling the doctors and nurses and first responders that several dozen gruesome, unnecessary deaths and injuries don’t amount to a health problem.   This week, the country’s largest physicians group,the American Medical Association, declared gun violence “a public health crisis” and reiterated support for modest gun control measures including mandatory waiting periods and background checks for all handgun purchasers. Though other health groups have made similar declarations in the past, the AMA’s resolution is potentially more significant, as the organization is one of the top lobbying groups in the country. “Gun-related violence takes about 30,000 lives every year, and these are generally young healthy people whose lives are abruptly ended as a result of a public-health problem that we have not done sufficient research into,” outgoing AMA President Dr. Steven Stack said in an interview.   The AMA also announced that it will start “actively” lobbying to overturn a de facto ban on federal research into the causes and consequences of gun violence, which Republicans have enforced since 1996. “Were we to be able to apply a scientific approach to [gun violence], it would at least allow us to be able to form a logical and evidence-based series of recommendations for what might be done to mitigate or ideally eliminate this as a problem. And only with that kind of research will we be able to advise the public as to what its options might be, and then society as a whole will have to determine what actions it can or is willing to take,” Stack explained. “We have some of the best and brightest public health scientists in the world in our country, and in the past when we have applied their talents and abilities to other complex problems, we have been able to markedly reduce the needless loss of human life.”   To understand the case for treating guns as a public-health issue, compare them to cars. Both are consumer items made by powerful industries, and they kill a comparable number of people each year. Car crashes have been extensively studied, and in response to that research legislators passed laws to make vehicles safer—think seat belts and airbags. Gun violence, on the other hand, has not been so comprehensively studied, and that’s insulated the firearms industry from regulation. In fact, guns are the only major consumer product not tested and regulated for health and safety at the federal level. Perhaps not coincidentally, while car-related deaths have declined steadily, firearm deaths are on a slow uptick.   Prohibiting the Centers for Disease Control from studying gun violence is just one of the tactics the NRA and Republican lawmakers have used to block discussion of the health risks of guns. Republicans in the Senate delayed the confirmation of the current surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, for well over a year simply because he’d tweeted that “guns are a health care issue.” At the state level, some legislatures have tried to prevent doctors from talking with patients about the risks of having a gun in the home, just as they counsel parents about the dangers of swimming pools.   But according to Dr. Sandro Galeo, the dean of the School of Public Health at Boston University, studying gun violence is “the definition of what public health should be doing—identifying causes of death so that we can do something about them.” Galeo, who researches firearm-related death and injury, speculated that the gun lobby’s resistance to a public-health framing stems from “fear that if we think of it as a health issue, we’ll start seeing the solutions as health solutions. And in some respects health solutions are more powerful solutions than what otherwise might be perceived as political solutions. Thinking of it as a health issue stands to bring it more into the mainstream.”   In other words, banning assault rifles might start to seem less like an unthinkable affront to an abstract “freedom” than a sensible step to keep actual human bodies healthy and whole. Politicians and the NRA can insist that guns have nothing to do with public health, but doctors and other trauma workers don’t have that luxury. They’re busy removing bullets, stitching up wounds, and mopping up blood.   http://bit.ly/28P4Tai http://www.thenation.com/subject/guns-and-gun-control/ http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/news/news/2016/2016-06-14-gun-violence-lobby-congress.page http://www.vpc.org/ http://www.bradycampaign.org/ http://www.demandaction.org/blog/2013-03-mayors-against-illegal-guns-leads-national-day-to-de http://americansforresponsiblesolutions.org/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/is-orlando-the-attack-that-forces-action-on-gun-control/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/gunned-down/ http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=54218#.V2CnKTV1BhF http://bit.ly/1tpGOOT http://igarape.org.br/en/homicide-monitor/ http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2530362 Visit the related web page
	Information Inequality is a Global Issue by Daniel Bruce Internews Chief Executive in Europe   May 2016   Access to information is a fundamental freedom. That’s the central theme of this year’s World Press Freedom Day, on May 3. The aim is certainly laudable, but is information access alone really enough? In a world where inequality in all forms is rampant, are we doing enough to ensure socially inclusive access to information? As it stands, access to information remains unequally distributed, particularly for already vulnerable populations.   This stark information inequality manifests itself in many different ways. Take gender: Women around the world are excluded in both subtle and overt ways from participating equally in the creation and dissemination of information. Globally, women occupy less than one third of full-time media and ICT positions, and even fewer work in senior leadership roles. Only 10% of news stories worldwide focus on women, and roughly 80% of “experts” interviewed are men. Beyond that, only 21% of women in developing countries have access to the Internet, which limits equitable educational and employment opportunities.   Worse still, when women take a role online, particularly as journalists, two out of three experience harassment. In many cases, this becomes so significant that they remove themselves from the conversation and self-censorship defeats information equality.   We hear of this happening repeatedly from Colombia to Pakistan to Sri Lanka and beyond. As Colombian activist and lawyer Carolina Botero Cabrera recently told us, “We found that many [journalists] decided to leave online media altogether, especially those who were engaged in really sensitive issues, such as mining, bribes and corruption. They simply decided to erase their online profiles because the harassment they were being subjected to was so nasty.”   Another problem is language; access to information is obviously only meaningful if it’s linguistically appropriate. More than 55% of all websites are in English, yet only 24% of the global population speaks English as a first or a second language. Hundreds of ethnic minority communities risk being left behind because of insufficient information access in their own languages. The issue becomes more pronounced when languages are new to the online environment, such as Burmese with its non-standard alphabet.   Language can also be a complex barrier at local level, where countries are increasingly relying on online media and communications. Sri Lanka, for example, emerged from a brutal 27-year civil war in 2009 and has since been taking tentative steps towards a fragile democracy. It has two primary language groups, Sinhalese and Tamil. Very few people are bi-lingual and the media and information environment is deeply divided along linguistic lines; Sinhalese media for the Sinhalese population and Tamil media for the Tamils. In this island state the lack of access to a shared media keeps people locked into their own echo chambers, creating barriers to the much-needed dialogue and healing that must follow the end of the civil war.   A third factor that locks people into information inequality is censorship and surveillance. All too often, activists and journalists working in conflict zones or closed environments are compromised by state surveillance and censorship. While there are many very good tools that have been developed by the global open source technology community to provide excellent, secure communications, they remain difficult to use. In the heat of the moment, they are abandoned.   Last year, when President Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo announced that he would amend electoral law to extend his term, people took to the streets in protest. Kabila immediately responded with a brief shutdown of the Internet and a suspension of SMS services. 72 attacks against journalists were documented in 2015, with security forces responsible for more than half of these attacks, according to a report by Journaliste en Danger, a Congolese press freedom organization. Many journalists responded with self-censorship to remain safe. So whilst on paper DRC is committed to key principles of press freedom and information access, the living reality is often very different.   Beyond simply growing access to information, we are calling for a reduction in global information poverty for the world’s most vulnerable and underserved populations. This means building equitable access to meaningful information that is robust and hard to unravel. This means ensuring market incentives and good policy are in place to ensure a diversity of voices in any given community.   This means promoting information inclusion for historically excluded groups such as women, ethnic and religious minorities and LGBTI populations. This means ensuring access is as safe and secure, and that governments are held to account on their commitments.   If we neglect to pay attention to the growing gap between those who have access to trusted information that enables them to advance in their lives and those who do not, the broader global inequalities that we care about will only deepen. Visit the related web page
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