Ta-Nehisi Coates

The investigation into the attack on the diplomatic mission and the C.I.A. annex in Benghazi that resulted in the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans also faulted State Department officials in Washington for ignoring requests from the American Embassy in Tripoli for more guards for the mission and for failing to make sufficient safety upgrades. 

The panel also said American intelligence officials had relied too much on specific warnings of imminent attacks, which they did not have in the case of Benghazi, rather than basing assessments more broadly on a deteriorating security environment. By this spring, Benghazi, a hotbed of militant activity in eastern Libya, had experienced a string of assassinations, an attack on a British envoy's motorcade and the explosion of a bomb outside the American Mission. 

Finally, the report blamed two major State Department bureaus -- Diplomatic Security and Near Eastern Affairs -- for failing to coordinate and plan adequate security. The panel also determined that a number of officials had shown poor leadership, but they were not identified in the unclassified version of the report that was released.

Ambassador Stevens had e-mailed his superiors in Washington in August alerting them to "a security vacuum" in the city. But the report found that in planning his trip there in September, he did not foresee that the compound could come under such a sustained attack, which included mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, despite the worsening security situation. 

"His status as the leading U.S. government advocate on Libya policy, and his expertise on Benghazi in particular, caused Washington to give unusual deference to his judgments," it said. 

Mr. Stevens was making his first visit to Benghazi in 10 months. But his plans for taking only two American security agents "were not shared thoroughly with the embassy's country team, who were not fully aware of the planned movements off the compound," the report determined.

Less than two months ago, Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher sent a foreboding text message to a secret girlfriend, expressing turmoil and frustration with his longtime girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins. In the message, Belcher said he "would shoot" Perkins "if she didn't leave him alone," according to police reports obtained by The Star. 

At the time, the secret girlfriend thought Belcher was joking.

Police found a bullet hole in the bathroom floor under Perkins' body that went through to the basement, possibly indicating she was on the floor when Belcher fired that round. Shepherd said she heard a "thump" before the gunshots. Police found eight spent shell casings and three bullet fragments in the bathroom and one spent bullet in the basement. Police observed 10 apparent gunshot wounds on the front of Perkins body, including to her neck, shoulder and chest, and five wounds on her backside. The medical examiner said four bullets remained in her body.

State Sen. Frank Niceley (R) told TPM on Tuesday he believes it's time for that to change. He plans to introduce legislation in the next session, which begins Jan. 8, that will require all schools to have an armed staff member of some kind. The current language of the bill -- which is in its early form -- would allow for either a so-called "resource officer" (essentially an armed police officer, the kind which most Tennessee high schools have already) or an armed member of the faculty or staff in every school in the state. The choice would allow schools that can't afford a resource officer to fulfill the requirement without having to pay for anything beyond the cost of the training and, presumably, the weapon. But Niceley said schools should use the wiggle room to train and keep on hand armed staff not in uniform. That's the best way to protect students, he said.

"Say some madman comes in. The first person he would probably try to take out was the resource officer. But if he doesn't know which teacher has training, then he wouldn't know which one had [a gun]," Niceley said by phone. "These guys are obviously cowards anyway and if someone starts shooting back, they're going to take cover, maybe go ahead and commit suicide like most of them have..."

"Look at it this way, you never see one of these whacko shooters go to a gun show and start shooting. They don't go down to the police station and start shooting," he said. 

The Southfield man killed by police after opening fire inside police headquarters Sunday was a veteran, described as a kind man who had lost the ability to speak. 

Harold J. Collins, 64, had been battling health problems for many years, including a tumor on his face, when he walked into the Southfield Police station on Sunday and without a word, tried to fire his gun on an officer behind protective glass. He was shot and killed by Southfield Police officers, but not before a Sergeant got shot in the left shoulder.

A chilling video shown in Hampden Superior Court today captured the moment an 8-year-old boy from Connecticut fatally shot himself with an Uzi submachine gun at a 2008 gun show in western Massachusetts.

The video, which showed the boy squeezing the trigger and the automatic weapon suddenly tilting upward and then backward in his small hands before he apparently shot himself, elicited shrieks from shocked spectators in the courtroom and the jury box.

Earlier Dr. Bizilj of Ashford, Conn., said he and his son Christopher, as well as Christopher's older brother, Colin, 11, had checked out the Oct. 26, 2008 show at the Westfield Sportsman's Cub and had a lunch of hamburgers and hot dogs before they decided they were interested in firing the submachine gun. 

Bizilj testified that his father-in-law, who was also along for the trip, shot the Uzi, then Bizilj shot the Uzi, and then Colin fired the Uzi. But the Uzi jammed for Colin and a "rangemaster" -- the person in charge of safety on the range -- switched the group to an even smaller "micro-Uzi" gun. Colin fired that weapon a little more. 

Then, Bizilj said, Christopher said, "Dad, can it be my turn now?" Bizilj said his youngest son fired 10 rounds, then the gun jammed. Bizilj said he was taking pictures and fiddling with his camera when he looked up to find his son was no longer in the viewfinder. 

He rushed over to find his son on the ground and put his hand behind him to pick him up only to find his head had been grievously wounded.

"I think you can imagine this has gone through my head a thousand times," Bizilj said, referring to his decision to bring his sons to the show.

But what troubles me most about this suggestion -- and the general More Guns approach to social ills -- is the absolute abandonment of civil society it represents. It gives up on the rule of law in favor of a Hobbesian "war of every man against every man" in which we no longer have genuine neighbors, only potential enemies. You may trust your neighbor for now -- but you have high-powered recourse if he ever acts wrongly. 

Whatever lack of open violence may be procured by this method is not peace or civil order, but rather a standoff, a Cold War maintained by the threat of mutually assured destruction. Moreover, the person who wishes to live this way, to maintain order at universal gunpoint, has an absolute trust in his own ability to use weapons wisely and well: he never for a moment asks whether he can be trusted with a gun. Of course he can! (But in literature we call this hubris.) 

Is this really the best we can do? It might be if we lived in, say, the world described by Cormac McCarthy in The Road. But we don't. Our social order is flawed, but by no means bankrupt. Most of us live in peace and safety without the use of guns. It makes more sense to try to make that social order safer and safer, more and more genuinely peaceful, rather than descend voluntarily into a world governed by paranoia, in which one can only feel safe -- or, really, "safe" -- with cold steel strapped to one's ribcage.

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While we are having this discussion over Newtown, political scientist Patrick Egan asks us to remember that, overall, this is a much less violent country than it was a few decades ago, and it is also a country in which people own fewer guns.

I think it's easy to fall into a conversation about "America's gun culture," but we should keep in mind that we are talking about a shrinking group of people who collectively own a shocking number of guns:

A decreasing number of American gun owners own two-thirds of the nation's guns and as many as one-third of the guns on the planet -- even though they account for less than 1% of the world's population, according to a CNN analysis of gun ownership data.

To state the obvious, there is something more than self-defense at work here.

While we're all talking about what might done about gun safety, it's also worth talking about what might be done in the realm of mental health. This piece, provocatively entitled "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother," is really worth a read.

Liza Long recounts her long fight to help her young mentally ill son, and the great fear that he will someday harm her, her two younger children, or someone else:

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me. A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7- and 9-year-old siblings knew the safety plan--they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me.

Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.

That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn't have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.

We still don't know what's wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He's been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood-altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.

This piece is a gripping read. I think, as parents, we think of our influence as all-powerful. When a kid succeeds, we like to point to the home; when he doesn't, we do the same. And yet here is an illness that has no respect for the old words of "discipline" and "toughness."

With that said, I didn't hear any mention of a father in this piece. I don't want to overstate the value of fathers, and some fathers (chronically abusive ones, for instance) can contribute the most by exiting the scene. Yet, on some level, parenting is work, and when all hands are called to deck (as must be the case when your son is threatening murder and suicide), a set of hands here is missing.

These spree shooting are almost wholly perpetrated by men. Perhaps this is just a matter of genes. But I also wonder about what we (as fathers) are communicating to our boys about what the world owes, and the methods they may use to secure it.

People should have the ability to defend themselves. Mass shootings take many lives in part because no one is firing back at the shooters. The shooters in recent massacres have had many minutes to complete their evil work, while their victims cower under desks or in closets. One response to the tragic reality that we are a gun-saturated country is to understand that law-abiding, well-trained, non-criminal, wholly sane citizens who are screened by the government have a role to play in their own self-defense, and in the defense of others (read The Atlantic article to see how one armed school administrator stopped a mass shooting in Pearl Mississippi). I don't know anything more than anyone else about the shooting in Connecticut at the moment, but it seems fairly obvious that there was no one at or near the school who could have tried to fight back.

Last spring, Ellen DeGeneres presented Mr. Booker with a superhero costume after he rushed into a burning building to save a neighbor. But Newark had eliminated three fire companies after the mayor's plan to plug a budget hole failed. 

In recent days, Mr. Booker has made the rounds of the national media with his pledge to live on food stamps for a week. But his constituents do not need to be reminded that six years after the mayor came into office vowing to make Newark a "model of urban transformation," their city remains an emblem of poverty. Cory Booker's promise -- captured in two books, two documentaries and frequent television appearances -- was to save a city that had been hemorrhaging residents, industry and hope since the riots that ripped it apart 45 years ago. 

But a growing number of Newarkers complain that he has proved to be a better marketer than mayor, who shines in the spotlight but shows little interest in the less-glamorous work of what it takes to run a city.

Asked about complaints from residents and business owners that garbage is not picked up, abandoned buildings are not boarded up and public spaces are in disrepair, the mayor talked about a new system that allows him to track which streets need snowplows and which departments are paying for too much overtime -- even when he is out of town. 

He invited a reporter to see the system in action. He then called to apologize that he could not be there: "I'm in and out of New York all day." Instead, his staff demonstrated the system. 

Mr. Booker was on his way to host a reading at a bookstore on the Upper West Side, filmed by CNN. He then spoke at a benefit at Cipriani and attended a movie premiere at Google's New York headquarters. Afterward, he announced on Twitter, "I sat on a panel with Richard Branson."

Eighteen children were killed on Friday morning in a shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., about 65 miles northeast of New York City, according to a person who had been briefed on the shooting. Another law enforcement official said preliminary reports suggested there could be as many as 20 fatalities.

"We've got bigger fish to fry," Obama said of pot users in Colorado and Washington during an exclusive interview with ABC News' Barbara Walters. 

"It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational users in states that have determined that it's legal," he said, invoking the same approach taken toward users of medicinal marijuana in 18 states where it's legal.

What I think is that at this point, Washington and Colorado -- you've seen the voters speak on this issue. And as it is, the federal government has a lot to do when it comes to criminal prosecutions. It does not make sense from a prioritization point of view for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that under state law that's legal.

Griffin acknowledged his appreciation for black Washington Redskins fans proud of his transformative debut season -- and noted how he hopes to erase lingering stereotypes concerning African-American quarterbacks. 

"For me, you don't ever want to be defined by the color of your skin,'' Griffin said at the end of Wednesday's post-practice news conference in reference to a question about Martin Luther King, Jr. "You want to be defined by your work ethic, the person that you are, your character, your personality. That's what I've tried to go out and do. 

 "I am an African-American in America. That will never change. But I don't have to be defined by that.'' 

"My question is, and it's just a straight, honest question: Is he a brother, or is he a cornball brother," Parker said. "He's not really. He's black, he does his thing, but he's not really down with the cause. He's not one of us. He's kind of black, but he's not really like the kind of guy you really want to hang out with." 

Parker said he wants to know more about Griffin's personal life before he can accept Griffin as authentically black. "I want to find about him," Parker said. "I don't know because I keep hearing these things. We all know he has a white fiancee. Then there was all this talk about he's a Republican, which there's no information at all. I'm just trying to dig deeper into why he has an issue. Because we did find out with Tiger Woods, Tiger Woods was like, 'I've got black skin, but don't call me black.' So people wondered about Tiger Woods." 

Asked by fellow panelist Skip Bayless about the fact that Griffin braids his hair, Parker said that's an aspect of Griffin that he approves of. "That's different, because, to me, that's very urban," Parker said. "Wearing braids is, you're a brother. You're a brother if you've got braids."

According to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the Judiciary Committee is planning a hearing early next year to examine federal policy towards two states that legalized marijuana in November. 

Colorado and Washington each passed ballot measures in 2012 permitting residents to enjoy the drug recreationally and setting up a system to regulate and tax its use. But there's still a cloud hanging over the pot party. Federal drug laws are still unchanged and the White House has made clear that it's not on board with legalization on any level. 

President Obama and the Justice Department are still considering their best response. Options include lawsuits to block portions of the state referenda or even federal prosecution of low-level drug offenders, a job currently left to state and local governments.

In the low-income and heavily black and Latino district of Central Los Angeles, for example, people given a court appearance summons were ordered to appear at the Central Arraignment Court on Bauchet Street. The defendants often did not realize that they had been charged with a crime because the summons looks like a traffic ticket. They appeared before a judge who told them they had been charged with a misdemeanor, and that if they plead guilty they would be fined up to $100. 

The judges routinely recommended defendants waive their right to a trial. The vast majority of defendants wanted to be released and put this experience behind them. They accepted the judge's recommendation and plead guilty. Most people found the money to pay the fine and court costs and gave it little thought until they applied for a job, apartment, student loan or school and were turned down because a criminal background check revealed that they had been convicted of a "drug crime." 

Twenty years ago, misdemeanor arrest and conviction records were papers kept in court storerooms and warehouses, often impossible to locate. Ten years ago they were computerized. Now they are instantly searchable on the Internet for $20 to $40 through commercial criminal-record database services. Employers, landlords, credit agencies, licensing boards for nurses and beauticians, schools, and banks now routinely search these databases for background checks on applicants. The stigma of a criminal record has created huge barriers to employment and education for hundreds of thousands of people in California.

If you aren't naturally attuned to the frequency at which internet conservatives are currently shaking with rage, you might've been surprised when you visited right-wing aggregation site the Drudge Report this morning and were confronted with the following headline, in 40-point type: "'N*GGER. N*GGER. N*GGER. N*GGER. N*GGER. N*GGER. N*GGER.'" Clicking on the headline wouldn't satisfy your confusion: it linked to The Hollywood Reporter's review of Quentin Tarantino's new slave-revenge movie Django Unchained -- a review that barely touches on the word's use in the movie. It's just a review...

This isn't the first time Django Unchained has been on the Drudge Report this week. On Monday, it got a photo and headline above the main story: "UNCHAINED: Foxx Jokes About Killing 'All The White People' In New Movie..." Above the headline, Drudge had a production still of Foxx, in a cowboy hat, holding a revolver. 

The link took readers to Jamie Foxx's Saturday Night Live monologue, which was one of Monday's big "stories" in the online conservative media. "Black is in," Foxx had riffed. In his new movie, he said, "I play a slave. How black is that? [...] I get free. I save my wife and I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?"