Here's a story from Pennsylvania, yesterday:

PARKSIDE — A borough woman allegedly shot and killed her husband early Saturday as he was teaching her to use a gun for the first time while they were drinking in their home, according to police and documents supporting her arrest on involuntary manslaughter and related offenses.

School shootings are rare. Gun use against violent intruders is also rare.

The real world of American gun use looks more like this:

You buy the gun to protect your home and family. But one day, your wife gets sassy. Maybe you've had a drink or two. And then … bang.

A Columbia [Tennessee] man accidentally shot himself in the knee while drawing a gun during a domestic dispute with his wife and was jailed four days later after being treated for the injury, according to an incident report.

And despite all the Malthusian nonsense, we've still got plenty of oil and natural gas, reports the National Journal's Amy Harder.

The Washington Examiner's Tim Carney takes up the question at the Atlantic, and I think you'll find his conclusions quite fascinating. 

[H]igh African American turnout — coupled with average white turnout — means that black voters have an outsized effect on the popular vote, relative to their percentage of the population. This gave Obama a great advantage in last year’s election. Essentially, he could win by substituting new black voters for lost white ones. And that’s what he did. His popular vote margin in Ohio, for example, can be explained solely by higher black turnout.

The flipside of this is that Republicans can greatly improve their position in presidential elections by just winning more black voters. Without near-unanimous support from African Americans, states like Virginia and Florida become much harder to win for Democrats, while North Carolina falls out of reach completely.

National Review's Betsy Woodruff profiles Infowars' Alex Jones:

Click on the picture below for a fascinating (and brief!) explanation of what today, April 30, 2013 means in the context of global history:

David Brooks on the state of American political think tanks:

Look at most think tanks. They used to look like detached quasi universities; now some are more like rapid response teams for their partisan masters.

It's a good joke, but there's a serious question here: why are think tanks allowed to issue tax receipts if they function as, effectively, either communications operations of existing political parties or else outright lobbying & PR organizations?

You've heard a million times that "the path to citizenship" for former illegal aliens will require payment of back taxes. Like so much in this debate, that turns out not to be true, as the Center for Immigration Studies reports today:

[T]he bill provides that amnesty applicants must have “satisfied any applicable federal tax liability” that has previously been “assessed” by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). A tax is “assessed” only when the IRS officially records that it is owed which occurs after a tax return has been submitted or after the IRS has conducted an audit. Since illegal immigrants working off the books do not submit tax returns and are generally not the subjects of IRS audits, it is unlikely that this provision will have any impact on the majority of amnesty applicants.

The bill also does not address employers’ federal payroll tax liability (e.g. Social Security and Medicare (FICA) taxes), nor does the bill address liability for state and local taxes.

There's one born every minute. Dzhohar Tsarnaev seems to have acquired something of a Facebook fan base.

I doubt this will change many minds, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the Boston bomber is also a throat-slitter.

Suspicions are growing stronger that the Tsarnaev brothers were the culprits in a gruesome murder of three of their closest friends, two of them Jewish, on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

More evidence of America's hardening class lines, per Sean Reardon of Stanford University:

Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor.

But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich. ...

Former London mayor Ken Livingstone appears on Iranian state television to blame America for the Boston bombing. Our friend Tom Doran jokes that Livingstone seems to be running for mayor of Karachi as his next job.

Very often, people get incredibly angry about injustices that they see. They would have been reading about the torture at Guantanamo Bay, at Baghram airbase. They would have read stuff about how, I think it is 54 different countries secretly collaborated with America for this rendition — people being snatched off streets taken to be tortured, because the Bush regime believed that they were all potential terrorists.

There was such ignorance in the Bush White House about Islam and about the history of so many disputes that exist in the Middle East. People get angry — they lash out. It’s the whole squalid intervention that has disfigured the record of the Western democracies. I think this fuels the anger of the young men, who — as we saw in Boston — went out, and, out of anger and demand for revenge, claimed lives in the West.”

Free trade comes at last to the salami industry, reports the New York Times:

The United States Department of Agriculture will relax a decades-long ban on the importation of many Italian cured-pork meat products from some regions of Italy starting May 28, including sought-after staples such as salami.

On Friday, the department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services announced that an in-country assessment had determined that four regions and two provinces of Italy are free of swine vesicular disease, a dangerous communicable ailment that infects pigs, and that “the importation of pork or pork products from these areas presents a low risk.”

Jason Collins is going to have a tough time. But it is for that exact reason that Jason Collins' decision to come out while he is still playing in the league — and I cannot underscore how important the "still playing" part of that statement is — will prove more important for all of us than we can possibly imagine. All of the players who have played with Jason Collins, and there are a lot, now have a friend that, it turns out, has been gay all along. That revelation alone is often enough to make one re-evaluate one's feelings about homosexuality. And then there is the fact that his teammates have been showering with this gay guy, and he didn't hit on them in the showers!

A healthy global economic system requires a hyperpower to keep the peace, and Democrats (prodded by Silicon Valley) are coming back into the game. Walter Russell Mead: