Like Big Tobacco, the Big Guns of the NRA are about to fade - Only a matter of time before sensible gun laws are enacted

People once believed that Big Tobacco would never be defeated, that it had legislators in its pocket, and that it carried such power and influence those laws curtailing tobacco products would never work.

That proved not to be so once the clear link between smoking and cancer was established, and there is no doubt that the tobacco lobby has been greatly diminished as a result.

The gun lobby right now looks a lot like the tobacco lobby, all-powerful, all influencing but the link that has been established between the safety of our children and the product they peddle has finally been irredeemably established. (Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland has just written an excellent comparison of the two.)

The children of Newtown, Connecticut have made that connection real and vital for this generation of Americans in an utterly indelible way. After Newtown there can be no going back on gun control.

The NRA mantra that guns had nothing to do with the violence in America is clearly false based on all known evidence.

In countries where guns are not available the number of deaths from homicides is dramatically lower.

Here are the 2010 figures, adjusted for population differential.

Number of Murders by Firearms, US, 2010: 8,775
Number of Murders by firearms, Britain, 2010*: 58
(equivalent to 290 US murders)

You can go around any country in the world with strict gun control laws and the same reality hits home. The more guns are available the more people die.

Such reality has finally permeated the American consciousness after Newtown, which is why the NRA, still shuttered in their own little archipelago, is unable to see what the real world is experiencing.

Like Big Tobacco though their power will surely ebb now that the link between cause and effect has clearly been established.

This country has a magnificent constitution, one of the great documents in world history, starting with the immortal phrase “We the People,"

But we cannot be bound only by the thoughts and opinions of men from the 18th century who know nothing of what the deadly meaning of the term the “right to bear arms” nowadays means.

We need to have a living constitution as it is experienced by each generation with changing needs and priorities. After Newtown that has never been more obvious—and the people now see it.

Gun toll; America 9,369 dead, Great Britain 14 -- get the picture? Obama should attend all the funerals in Newtown after massacre

A vigil was held in front of the White House on Friday night for the victims of the Connecticut shooting.

Here are the statistics; Murders with a firearm in one year: Great Britain, 14; Australia 59; Canada, 144: USA, 9,369.

Are we crazy or has the rest  of the world got lucky?

The fault lies in ourselves it seems. Gun violence is out of control.

I think President Obama should attend the funeral of every one of the 27 killed in Newtown, Connecticut.

That way he might show he is serious about efforts at gun control.

His spokesman Jay Carney made one of the dumbest comments in presidential press secretary history when he said on Friday, the day of the tragedy, that this was not the day to talk about the guns issue.

If not Friday, when? Before the next massacre happens?

At a time when the very heavens are screaming for action, Obama and his risk averse staff don’t get it.

The country wants action on this issue and they want it now.

It is appalling to see foreign leaders including the Queen line up and offer sympathy to the U.S. government.

I understand a gesture like that after 9/11 but the foreign leaders should be saying, “Hey America, get your gun house in order.”

The killer had legally held guns, he broke no law. We gave a complete psycho free access to guns -- where did we go so badly wrong?

That is the lesson here, the image of the U.S. worldwide once again is of a cowboy nation where they shoot school children, don’t they, in defense of their Second Amendment rights, a Second Amendment by the way, that is heavily qualified by its caveat sentence at the beginning.

I don’t think Thomas Jefferson and company intended for the right to kill little innocent children to be part of the plan. Amazingly, we have been suckered in these past few years into that position.

But it is time to cry halt now, before another lunatic somewhere decides he wants to top what happened in Newtown and kill even more of our children.

Obama must know there are issues that he must tackle before they fester and bleed and damage America’s soul even more.

The gun issue is now the key one of those.

He should listen to Mayor Bloomberg, the voice in the wilderness these past few years, and follow his plan.

At least then we might have some common sense applied.

The murder of more children seems to be the trade-off for keeping the gun lobby happy.

Can we really live with that? We know this country can do a lot better.

Muslim leaders need to incite less, understand more -- Failure to comprehend West means they lose all support

Still from movie "Innocence of Muslims"

The blood-dimmed tide was loosed again in the Middle East over the latest crazy reaction to a “film” that a five-year old would have shot better.

Have you actually watched the film that all the murder and mayhem has been about?

It is called “Innocence of Muslims” and I watched it on YouTube last night and thought it was some kind of hellish joke.

It is so badly put together and utterly impossible to follow that it is quite possibly the worst film ever made.

It makes “The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” look like “Ben Hur,” and “Ali Baba” look like high literature.
How millions of Muslims can take such grave offense that people have died because of this piece of garbage is hard to believe.

More to the point, the Muslim leadership needs to stop fueling the flames every time some idiot casts aspersions on their religion.

Catholics did not riot when the “Piss Christ” exhibition took place in New York featuring a crucifix in a jar of urine.

Nor did Jews riot when violently anti-Semitic texts were approved for schools in many Muslim countries.
I understand it is a complex issue but let’s call a spade a spade. The “movie” I watched on YouTube has as much to do with Americans and the American government as I have with Genghis Khan.

Attacking America is a reflex action of course, anti- Americanism is always the safe fallback, the better to keep the attention away from many of their own despotic leaders.

But Muslim leaders really need to come into the 21st Century and stop the demonization that is leading to such violence.

It is destroying any hope of a common understanding.

They need to look at the mote in their own eye as we all do. A parody Twitter account of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, posted: “Wow! Good thing I just bombed mosques, killed women and children and I didn’t make an anti-Muslim video! People would be after me!”

That says it all.

As W.B. Yeats wrote,

“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

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NYPD top cop Ray Kelly may be all wrong in the Etan Patz case -- Latest suspect Pedro Hernandez just one of three so far to be fingered

NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly

The Etan Patz murder 33 years ago was one of the most significant in America's crime history.

Nothing was ever the same again after the six-year-old left his parent's West Village apartment  in New York to walk to school alone for the first time.

He never made it and his murder had never been solved.

Many crime experts date the explosion of fear in America over crime to that killing - the moment when we all felt less safe

Now it may become significant again for a very different reason.

Police Chief Ray Kelly has essentially accused a 51-year old, Pedro Hernandez, of carrying out the killing.

Except there is no evidence other than a confession by Hernandez whose family admits he has deep psychiatric problems.

There is no body, no witnesses, no physical evidence linking him to the crime.

If Hernandez withdraws his confession the police have no case.

Worse, a man called Jose Ramos, a convicted pedophile, was ruled to have committed the crime in a civil case by a Manhattan judge in 2004.

"Investigators both from federal prosecutors' office and the FBI over an extended period of time built up a tremendous amount of circumstantial evidence," Murray Weiss, a police reporter who covered the Patz case told CBS.

The lawyer for the Patzs , Brian O'Dwyer, said at the time that winning the lawsuit made it clear. "The point is to establish once and for all that Ramos is responsible for Etan's death."

So who is it, Hernandez or Ramos?

Or maybe it is someone else altogether; just a few weeks back cops tore apart a basement seeking to link a third man, Othniel Miller, to the killing.

They found nothing but Miller’s estranged wife claimed he confessed to the crime.

So that's three suspects right there.

When the Lindbergh child killing happened in 1932, over thirty delusional people admitted to the crime.

The Etan Patz case is getting just as crazy.

Ray Kelly may well have made a massive mistake here. First the press conference essentially announcing guilt, then the arrest, then the trial, then the verdict..

It is all backwards, like this tragic case has long been.

I believe it is a case almost impossible to solve bar some incredible evidence find.

"It's going to be very difficult to convince a jury," Larry Kobilinsky, a doctor of forensic science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told CBS .

"Normally we collect the physical evidence and talk to the witnesses; then we catch a suspect, interrogate him and then sometimes they confess," said Kobilinsky. "This is just the reverse."

He has it right.

Murdered Irish bar owner and a rape victim share different fates -- Judges decide 75 years for rape and only 3.5 years for murder

George Gibbons' father and siblings stand in front of the Court after Monday's sentencing. (Credit: Queens Ledger)

A Queens New York judge this week sentenced Peter Rodriguez to 3 and half to 7 years in jail for snuffing out the life of George Gibbons, a beloved Irish bar owner in Queens.

On Monday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Richard Carruthers gave a 75-year to life sentence to former NYPS cop Michael Pena for grabbing a 24-year-old teacher off the street. The jury was unable to decide whether Pena was guilty of rape.

The victim was a new schoolteacher on her way to her first day at work.

Pena will be 103 before being eligible for parole. Rodriguez 36,will be under 40.

The disparity in sentencing makes for an incredible contrast

Horrific as the rape crime was, family can still hold and touch the schoolteacher and comfort her. Hopefully with time she can move on and make a good life for herself.

I’m not saying the sentence was not justified

But George Gibbons lies in a lonely grave and his killer got off with a wrist slap.

Where is the justice?

Peter Rodriguez had a previous record when he drove the wrong way, likely drunk, on the Long Island expressway. After killing George he fled the scene and was not arrested for days.

I know the Gibbons family well and there is no Irish family as well respected.

Their loss was tragic and a community mourned with them. On Monday, 100 people showed up in court to question why Rodriguez got such a light sentence.

Eddie Gibbons, George’s uncle, now deceased, was a leading figure in the community for years.

His store and pub, the Poteen Still, was a home from home for many, making the Irish papers available in his store and playing a leading role in helping out young Irish undocumented.

Eddie's brother, George senior, is cut from the same cloth, a man renowned for his good deeds and his work tin helping Irish immigrants, and his kids have carried on the great family tradition.

Now they are shattered and to add insult to injury Rodriguez has got a slap on the wrist.

Where does the justice come in? How much was George Gibbons’s life worth?

Not that much according to a Queens DA and a judge who agreed a plea deal.

Sometimes the system sucks.

Fox Anchor Greg Kelly seems like a victim not a rapist in allegations against him -- Case doesn't add up against son of NYPD Chief Ray Kelly

NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and his son Greg

Greg Kelly seems like the victim in the rape case alleged against him.

That may not be the politically correct thing to say but I bet it turns out to be the truth.

There is something deeply suspicious about how this whole affair has entered the public domain.

Three months after an alleged rape a woman walks into a police station and makes an accusation.

She must know after that length of time a successful prosecution is almost impossible.

There is no possible physical evidence, no doctor's report, no third party, seemingly, other than her boyfriend who has his own questions to answer quite obviously.

So is there another motive?

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The son of the NYPD Chief Ray Kelly and a very successful anchor for Good Day New York on Fox News has been a singular outstanding guy throughout his career.

A former marine, he covered the White House and America's various wars before taking over the Good Day New York slot.

Now his career is in deep jeopardy because of a rape accusation, four months old when it was made.

It is an incredibly serious allegation, which, if true, deserves the full punishment of the law.

But that seems like a massive outside possibility.

What happened that night after Kelly and the paralegal woman whom he had met and went for drinks with will strictly be a he said/she said series of allegations.

We know they willingly went back to her law firm because she told him her boyfriend was home in her place.

We know they texted and talked after the alleged assault and that the woman later claimed she was pregnant by him.

We also know that her boyfriend, clearly angered by what had transpired, tried to raise it publicly with Kelly's father, the police commissioner .

Kelly is in a no win situation until the District Attorney decides whether to proceed with charges or not.

But it seems to me that the allegations against him are flimsy to say the least.

I suspect the boyfriend was very angry when he heard about the encounter and this stems from that moment.

But time will tell.

The New York Post this morning reports that investigators “don’t buy her story,”

“It sounds like a bunch of BS” the source said.

Another source said, “It sounds like she got caught [cheating] by her boyfriend, and then he forces her hand: ‘If you’re not lying, you better report.’

As I said much more to come out.

Phoebe Prince's mother, Anne O'Brien, breaks her silence- Emotional appearance on CNN's Piers Morgan -VIDEO

Phoebe Prince

It was heartbreaking to watch Anne O'Brien, Phoebe Prince's mother give her first TV interview on the CNN show Piers Morgan Tonight.

Dressed in black, she was clearly still deeply grieving for her 15-year-old daughter who was badly bullied and committed suicide in January 2010 after moving to Massachusetts from Ireland and attending school at South Hadley High.

At several points in the interview there were tears in her eyes and a hesitancy in her answers.

She retained a dignified presence but clearly the death of her daughter has changed her life forever.

As she has said about Phoebe “It is impossible to measure the impact of Phoebe’s death upon our lives, “There will be no more reading to Phoebe, no more hearing her lovely soprano voice.

“How do you measure a future that should have been rightfully hers? Phoebe was a beautiful, intelligent, gregarious daughter, with a kind heart, able to show compassion for others.

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She was also painfully honest.

Asked by Piers Morgan if she hoped that Phoebe's death changed anything she said;

"Ideally I'd like it to be that children treat each other in a more civilized fashion but I'm not too hopeful about that."

"I think to say oh yes, everything is going to be different to each other because of Phoebe is naive.

Last May, five former South Hadley High School students – Ashley Longe, Flannery Mullins Sean Mulveyhill, Kyla Narey and Sharon Velazquez – were found guilty of misdemeanor counts in the Prince bullying case.

"It's - that level of aggression towards another human being is just beyond my understanding," she said.

"It was almost planned.

"It is astounding that there never was a stop mechanism..an internal stop mechanism for some of tese kids to say this is going too far.But I also think the culture in the school helped enable that."

However, she said that the new bullying legislation, known as Phoebe's law, which mandates that schools treat the issue far more seriously, will be her daughter's legacy.

She paid a moving tribute to former DA Elizabeth Scheibel who pursued the bullying charges and forced a trial for her role in that and the new Phoebe law.

But she had contempt for school authorities who allowed the bullying to continue.

School Superintendent Gus Sayer was especially responsible.

"It was very painful because you realize as a parent no matter what I did, no matter how many times I called the school, no matter how many people I might have spoken to there, that she didn't stand a chance there."

“The school personnel will never be held accountable,’’ she previously told the Boston Globe . “It’s unfair.’’

She also drew differences between the defendants and their reaction to Phoebe's death.

"All we ever wanted,’’ O’Brien has said is “For these kids to take ownership of what they did, and to show genuine remorse."

Some clearly did, some did not.

They can get on with their lives, but it is clear Anne O'Brien is stuck in a lonely devastating place.

By telling her story last night however, she once again helped children everywhere who are being bullied by coming forward and focusing on an issue that needs to be addressed.

She deserves great credit for her courage.




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From Dublin to Miami, America’s top cop John Timoney tells his story

John Timoney did not exactly have a great start in life in America. He came here as a 13 year-old in 1961 from Dublin.

His mother decided to return home four years later to Ireland, after his father died.

John, who was 17 at the time, wanted to stay, and he did with his brother, Ciaran.

He joined the cops, like so many Irish before him, and if the story ended there it would have been a total success.

His new book, "Beat Cop to Top Cop", with a foreword by Tom Wolfe no less, makes clear how far the one-time Liberties, Dublin schoolboy came.

Timoney went far. So far, that he was named “America’s Top Cop” by Esquire magazine. He should have been commissioner in New York, but for a blatantly political appointment by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He did however, serve in the top job in Philadelphia and Miami.

Along the way, he became known as one of the most forward-thinking cops in America, a man who was on the cutting edge of every major policing breakthrough in recent decades.

This is a remarkably frank memoir where Timoney talks about the waste of time that so many investigations of police actions are. He says corruption is never the real problem in police forces, but finding a successful way to fight crime is.

Timoney drove down the crime level in New York, Philadelphia, and Miami to record low levels. In the last two instances he was the top cop.

In New York he was chief of department under Bill Bratton, and together with Jack Maple, a genius at spotting criminal trends, they came up with the now famous strategy that transformed police departments everywhere.

As Timoney tells it, it was really about dealing with crime in a strategic fashion.

Instead of waiting for crimes to happen, they analyzed patterns from previous crimes, identified areas those crimes were happening in, created task forces and empowered local commanders to deal directly with those issues.

It all sounds so easy in retrospect, but amazingly, it had never been done.

“We worked to spot patterns early on, deploy resources quickly and make arrests,” Timoney writes.

They also held the famous CompStat meetings, for comparative statistics, when commanders from all over the city were brought together to talk about those trends.

As Timoney notes, such meetings were invaluable in identifying crime trends that previously had gone undetected for months.

I attended one such meeting while reporting on Timoney when he was police chief in Miami. It was amazing to hear this Irish cop dissect and analyze crime patterns in different neighborhoods in a matter of moments just by speaking to the commanders on the ground.

As Timoney points out, one of the major successes in New York was the fact that top brass at Police Plaza now knew what was happening on the street through those kind of meetings, instead of being trapped in an ivory tower.

His account of his early days as a beat cop in the Bronx, his time on the drugs squad, his spell as a captain in the Chinatown precinct all read like movie material.

It is when he is discussing policing methods, however, that the book is at its strongest.

He explains in detail how he handled massive events such as the Democratic and Republican conventions, and the Free Trade Association meeting in Miami, which had caused huge riots in Seattle.

In every case, calm and cool pre-, during, and after planning worked almost to perfection.

Timoney also discusses serial rapists and the travesty that DNA from rapists is piled up in every lab in the U.S. waiting to be tested for matches, but hard-pressed police department labs are only doing a fraction of the work needed.

Timoney has proven to be a huge gift from Ireland to America. He has helped save so many lives in three American cities and has blazed the way for other police chiefs to follow him.

As Wolfe says in his introduction to the book, “Believe me, you have a treat in your hands, the product of the sharp eyes and insightful Irish utterances”… of John Timoney.