The following information comes from a self-proclaimed "Liberal" site on the world-wide-web. I've added my own commentaries, of course.

• Every 10 seconds a gun is made in America. 
  That's 3,153,600 guns per year, of all types for those of you without a caclulator.
  That probably includes arms made for the military. 
  
  
• A recent Justice Department study shows Americans own 65 million handguns.
  Since various groups have reported over 200 million guns in the country, I think this number
  is actually a little low.
  
  
• Handguns account for two-thirds of firearm crime and more than 80% of all firearm 
  homicide. Each year, nearly a million violent crimes are committed with handguns.
  And a good thing handguns are being used instead of rifles or shotguns! Consider that the U.S. Army
  medical instruction says that shotgun wounds cannot be classified the same as rifle or pistol wounds
  because "at close range they are as destructive as a cannon". 
  
  
• On an average day, more than a million Americans are carrying guns outside their workplace. 
  Two million more keep guns in their cars and trucks.
  If we use the figure of One Million violent handgun crimes a year (all types, including non-fatal, non-shooting),
  versus 3 million carrying incidents per DAY(!) then we have 1,095,000,000 or almost 1.1 BILLION carrying
  incidents per year! Out of that, one million "violent crimes" are committed per year -- or just 0.091%. 
  Seems pretty low to me.
  
  
• In 1968, Congress banned the importation of cheap, poorly made handguns known as 
  "Saturday Night Specials" or junk guns. No such regulations were applied to guns made
  at home. Since then, production and sales of American-made handguns have increased 
  dramatically.
  And I'd rather have the average street thug using that poorly made gun which may malfunction or
  be inaccurate than a higher quality gun, or a sawed-off rifle or shotgun!

http://hematite.com/dragon/antigunstat.html

The Hollywood studio behind the Batman movies has decided not to publish weekend box office figures after the Colorado theatre massacre.

Twelve people were killed and 58 injured when a gunman dressed in full body armour opened fire at a packed midnight premier of The Dark Knight Rises in Denver.

James Holmes, 24, was taken into custody outside the cinema after the attack. He is in solitary confinement and is due in court on Monday morning.

Within hours of the attack, Warner Brothers had cancelled the movie's Paris premiere, which was to have been accompanied by a press junket with the cast and crew including director Christopher Nolan and main star Christian Bale.

The company also cancelled red carpet events for the film in France, Japan and Mexico, although screenings will go ahead as planned.

Warner Bros has now confirmed it will not publish weekend takings - a form of crowing about box office success - until Monday.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-22/hollywood-declares-box-office-truce-after-massacre/4146666

THE DEATH of Alexander Cockburn at 71 robs political journalism of one of its most radical and honest voices. In his columns for The Village Voice, The Nation and The First Post (latterly The Week), and his articles for CounterPunch, he shared his controversial views on US foreign policy, global warming and the sins of corporate America.

In one memorable article for this website, he argued that Tillikum the orca whale, who drowned his trainer in a Florida aquatic park in 2010, was a victim of corporate enslavement. Like Spartacus, Tillikum chose to fight back.

“No one could skewer the banksters, the robber barons and the crony capitalists of this broken era quite so ably as Alex,” John Nichols, a fellow columnist on The Nation, wrote yesterday.

What turned out to be his final two columns, written about ten days before he died on Friday night from complications with cancer, were classic Cockburn.

Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/people-news/48094/farewell-our-radical-us-columnist-alexander-cockburn#ixzz21OQDR9M1

Hardly had the boyish visage of JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon quit CNN screens than it was succeeded by that of Bob Diamond, former chief executive of Barclays, accused of masterminding the greatest financial scandal in the history of Britain. Columnists shook with rage at the “reeking cesspool” being disclosed—disclosed, mind you, four long years after the Wall Street Journal broke the story that the Libor was being fixed. Libor, which stands for “London interbank offered rate,” is supposed to be based on the average rate of interest banks charge to borrow from one another. The rate is set every morning by a panel of banks. Each bank “submits” the rates at which it believes it can borrow from the collective money pool, from overnight to twelve months.

http://www.thenation.com/article/168834/barclays-and-limits-financial-reform#

THE AFTERMATH OF a national tragedy generally elicits two responses. The first is the expression of collective grief, a crucial element of the healing process. The second is the question, quintessentially if not uniquely American, of what can be done to prevent such events.

Katrina launched a debate about hurricane preparedness, the Sept. 11 attacks a broad inquiry into anti-terrorist efforts. Only for one category of tragedy, mass shootings, is the obvious set of questions — What went wrong? What should be changed? — so emphatically off the table, at least for politicians. The reality of modern politics, which is to say the political firepower wielded by the National Rifle Association, stifles any serious discussion of gun control. That has been the arc, as predictable as it is disappointing, of political responses to last week’s massacre in Aurora, Colo., most notably from President Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

The closest the president edged to the topic was on Sunday, when he expressed hope that “we all reflect on how we can do something about some of the senseless violence that ends up marring this country.” Such as? White House press secretary Jay Carney semi-elaborated: “The president’s view is that we can take steps to keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them under existing law,” he told reporters. But there is no indication that existing law would have done anything to stop James Holmes, the suspected gunman.

Mr. Romney was similarly heavy on soothing rhetoric and light on specifics. “Today, we not only feel a sense of grief but perhaps also of helplessness,” Mr. Romney said after the shooting. “But there is something we can do. We can offer comfort to someone near us who is suffering or heavy-laden. And we can mourn with those who mourn in Colorado.”

New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) was right to call out both candidates on such inadequate responses. “Soothing words are nice,” Mr. Bloomberg said Friday. “But maybe it’s time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they’re going do about it.”

No gun control law, however restrictive, can reliably stop every massacre. But in the aftermath of Aurora, Tucson and Virginia Tech, politicians should not be permitted to evade a serious discussion of whether additional restrictions are warranted. The assault-weapons ban that expired in 2004, although riddled with loopholes, would have covered the AR-15 rifle used in the shooting. During the 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama supported renewing the ban, but he has since been silent on the subject. Mr. Romney once supported the ban as well, but he has renounced that view.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obama-and-romneys-discreditable-silence-on-gun-control/2012/07/23/gJQA7ScH5W_print.html

IZHEVSK, Russia — The nickname of this town, home of the factory that makes Kalashnikov rifles, is the “Armory of Russia.” Over the years, it has armed a good number of other countries, too, as the lathes and presses of the Izhevsk Machine Works clanged around the clock to forge AK-47s and similar guns for insurgents and armies around the world.

But these days, many of Izhevsk’s weapons are headed somewhere else: the United States.

Despite the gun’s violent history — or perhaps because of it — American hunters and gun enthusiasts are snapping up tens of thousands of Kalashnikov rifles and shotguns. Demand is so brisk that the factory has shifted its focus from military to civilian manufacture over the last two years. United States sales of the civilian versions, sold under the brand name Saiga, rose by 50 percent last year, according to officials at the factory, known as Izhmash.

Over all, the United States is the world’s biggest market for civilian guns. That is partly because of comparatively lenient gun ownership laws, which have become a topic of renewed debate after a rampage last month in which a masked gunman killed 12 people and wounded 58 in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater. Although no Kalashnikovs were involved, police say one weapon used by the man charged with the shootings, James Eagen Holmes, was a popular semiautomatic pistol made by the Austrian company Glock.

Russian weapons accounted for a tiny portion of the $4.3 billion American gun market last year, but Saiga sales rose far faster than the overall growth rate of 14 percent in 2011.

“I bought a Saiga because it was made in Russia, right beside its big brothers, the AKs,” Josh Laura, a garage door installer and former Marine in Maryville, Tenn., said in a telephone interview. “No rifle in the world has been as reliable as this one.”

Selling rifles to Americans and other civilians is fundamental to the efforts to save Izhmash, which has made Kalashnikovs since soon after their invention in 1947 but is now struggling.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/business/a-kalashnikov-factory-in-russ...      

see toon at top...

A clothing designer who had been fired from a Midtown Manhattan company shot and killed a former co-worker in the shadow of the Empire State Building on Friday morning and was then killed by the police, in a hail of gunfire in which nine bystanders were hurt, the authorities said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/nyregion/empire-state-building-shootin...      

Moral of the story: don't be a bystander...