Waking up

My first coherent thought this morning was of the presents wrapped and waiting for children who are never going to open them in Newtown.

Request for opinions

My dad teaches American government at a community college in Los Angeles. Every semester he takes several topics and uses them for graded class discussions. Part of the process is giving the students a week or two in advance links and/or papers they should look at in order to know more about the topic.

For the first time, in the wake of Newtown, he's including gun control as a topic.

I will over the next couple of weeks ask some of you individually whether you would be willing to post publicly or write up an opinion that could be circulated to these students on some of the topics. Any of you who has a public posting on gun control or one of the related topics I'm going to list below, please let me know so that I can gather the link.

I WILL NOT TRY TO CIRCUMVENT ANYONE'S PRIVACY SETTINGS. If you're not interested in speaking publicly or circulating a paper privately, that's fine by me.

If anyone knows anything about things like extra large magazines or specialty weapons and ammo -- and how they are or aren't regulated in some jurisdictions, that would be great.

I've already given Dad some heads-up links to data about gun ownership versus gun crime world wide and gun crime statistics vis-a-vis jurisdictions with the death penalty.

Extra Topics:

Mental health and how health insurance covers preventive treatment for mental health (can be treated as one topic or linked together)

Videogames: the difference between first person shooters and other types of games.