Ending a war is not enough. The challenge for post-conflict situations in Africa is to escape the inter-war lawlessness maintained and reproduced by groups that have access to arms.
Outside the courthouse in Charleston, South Carolina.
Grace Beahm/The Post and Courier via AP
Two major trials in the killings of black victims in South Carolina start this week. Learn about the state’s past and present struggle with racial violence in this roundup.
Donald Trump addresses members of the National Rifle Association.
REUTERS/John Sommers II
The candidate endorsed by the NRA this year wasn’t always so pro-gun. A sociologist and physician explains how Trump’s position on guns could play out if he were to win in November.
Jose Louis Morales sits and prays under his brother Edward Sotomayor Jr.’s cross for victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.
REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
Richard Lachmann, University at Albany, State University of New York
Are Americans at increasing risk of being killed in a terrorist attack? A sociologist explains how the way we remember the dead may make it feel that way.
Guns have another kind of price tag.
Jim Young/Reuters
The current debate over the right to bear arms versus regulation is at a stalemate, but a new dialogue that focuses on the social burden of firearms might provide a new way forward.
Olympic and Paralympic track star Oscar Pistorius arrives at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria, South Africa, for his sentencing.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
Under South African law, murder carries a minimum sentence of 15 years for first-time offenders. But courts may deviate from this if they find ‘substantial and compelling circumstances’ to do so.
Mourners at a vigil after the Charleston shooting.
REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Six of the nine people who died were black women. One year later, a Brandeis professor examines how black women have endured a legacy of racial violence in the U.S.
How is the violence perpetuated by Omar Mateen and Brock Turner related?
NBC News; Reuters
BU researchers on the prevalence of mass shootings and gun violence, why parents often underestimate how easily their kids could access a gun and why we know so little about how to solve this problem.
Gun control activists rally in front of the White House in Washington DC, earlier this year.
REUTERS/Carlos Barria
All sides in the debate on gun control in the United States are quick to point to numbers they say back their arguments. But are they playing fair with those figures?
Though the perpetrators of the mass shooting in California appear to have acquired their guns legally, the vast majority used in violent crimes are obtained illegally.
South Africa’s homicide rates have declined consistently since democracy, but remain among the highest in the world. They are about four times the global average at more than 30 per 100,000 people.
Obama makes a statement about the shootings in Oregon on Oct. 1, 2015.
REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Researchers explain why gun violence is a public health emergency, why parent often underestimate how easily their kids could access a gun – and why we know so little about how to solve this problem.
American journalists Alison Parker and Adam Ward were shot dead live on air, allegedly by a former colleague.
EPA/WDBJ7
Mainstream media and social media go different ways on the ethical questions raised by the airing of video showing on-camera shooting of journalists.
In this photo James Holmes and his defense attorney Daniel King sit in court for an advisement hearing at the Arapahoe County Justice Center, June 4 2013.
Andy Cross/Pool/Reuters
Jurors will likely be presented with conflicting notions of sanity and insanity. And they will be forced to confront widely held cultural assumptions about mental illness and violence.
Despite declining gun fatalities, there should be no room for complacency in Australia, with an estimated 260,000 illegal guns in Australia – including this MP5K 9mm machine gun, seized in Queensland in 2013.
Dan Peled/AAP
The rate of fatal shootings has fallen in Australia, the US and other nations in recent decades. Yet anti- and pro-gun ideology still makes it hard to have a sensible discussion about gun violence.