Karen Finney: The record increases in minority voter registration and turnout have actually inspired a whole new generation of measures designed to pervert the law and blunt the impact of America’s growing minority population.

Tom Degan: It was obvious by their questions to the lawyers making the anti-voting-rights argument that the five right-wing neanderthals on the bench have every intention of going gently into that dark night of voter suppression.

Anthony Samad: America’s gun fascination, turned assault weapon fascination, has come to a head. Assault weapons never had any business on the streets on America. They are a function of the overproduction of military weaponry, a vestige of the Cold War, when America refused to reduce its defense budget and allow the military industrial complex to broker weapons throughout the world—without regard for where they ended up.

Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Everyone is the same the moment we cast our ballot. However, that equality depends on equal access to the ballot, something which regrettably is not automatic and that must be actively protected.

Wilson Riles: It is the frame of mind that exists all over the political landscape that says guns can be an instrument of offensive political action and that there are humans whom it is OK to kill. It is that which we must eliminate. That is the radicalism that is too far.

Carl Matthes: I can only hope that Mahony was better trained at leading souls to salvation than he was at saving children from the abusive actions of some of his priests.

Tina Dupuy: Any talk of gun safety needs to include tort restoration. Give us back our right to take manufacturers who neglect to make their products safer to court. Give us back our right to hold dealers accountable when they turn a blind eye to selling to straw purchasers and the mentally ill.

Peter DrDonald Cohen and Peter Dreier: To encourage America’s gun manufacturers to act responsibly, unions, religious organizations, major pension funds and government agencies should withdraw their investments and business dealings from gun manufacturers that make the deadly assault weapons that kill the innocent.eier and Donald Cohen

Karen Finney: Increased fear increases sales. It also increases dollars coming into the coffers of the NRA — perhaps LaPierre’s message was never intended to be “mainstream” or target the 80 percent of gun owners and 90 percent of Americans who support a background check.

Lydia Howell: Sandy Hook penetrated our national numbness to gun violence but, we could get stuck in stubborn circular arguments like Roe. V. Wade opponents make, deliberately distracting from real issues.

Brent Budowsky: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has reiterated his opinion that the Constitution is not a living document that should reflect the lessons of history but is, instead, a stale document that is (in his words) “dead, dead, dead.”

David Love: So, what do you make of a country where a third grader brings a gun to school to ward off bullies?

Allan Johnson: Our culture rarely focuses on the connection between men and violence. Quite simply because men won’t like it if you do. We are a nation tiptoeing around men’s anger, men’s ridicule, men’s potential to withhold resources (such as funding for battered women’s shelters and sexual assault programs)

Michael Eisen: It is a tragic irony that the only reason Swartz had to break the law to fulfill his quest to liberate human knowledge was that the same academic community that rose up to support his cause after he died had routinely betrayed it while he was alive.

Julie Driscoll: Those of us who, like Supreme Court Justice Scalia, believe that there are limits to 2nd Amendment rights are becoming increasingly sickened by the mantra that somehow denying people the right to own assault weapons and high capacity clips is trampling on 2nd Amendment rights.

Bruce Reilly: School police have been key builders of the School to Prison Pipeline. Fistfights and the joint in the bathroom no longer result in detention or suspension anymore: now they are imprisonment, expulsion, and an often insurmountable mountain to climb towards any “normal” adult lifestyle.

Joseph Palermo: Like the old Jim Crow “race wage” the “gun wage” allows lower middle-class white men to feel a little less besieged by immigrants, feminists, blacks and Others.

Tom Hall: The NRA isn’t about protecting people or constitutional rights, but rather about driving sales for an industry of sociopaths selling to a market of wannabe psychopaths, with absolutely no regard to the costs to real people,