US gun debate overlooks daily violence

LARGO, Maryland (AP) — Florena Carter's shattered life didn't make national news.

Her son was killed on his 28th birthday in 2009. Carter's brother pulled the trigger. Her father shot himself soon afterward.

The horrifying family tragedy became one more private story in America's plague of gun violence. That year, 9,146 other people nationwide lost their lives in shootings.

The vast majority died in the type of daily gun violence that does not grab national headlines in the same way as the December massacre of 20 young children and six teachers at an elementary school in Connecticut, or the mass shooting last July in a Colorado movie theater that killed 12 people and wounded 70.

Those attacks became the focus of a bitter national debate over guns, which culminated with the defeat in the Senate of several proposals backed by President Barack Obama to tighten gun controllaws, including banning military-style assault weapons and expanding background checks to stop criminals and the mentally ill from buying firearms.

Often lost in America's divisive gun control politics are the stories of people whose urban communities suffer the most from shootings every day. Although violent crime has been declining in the United States, it still far outstrips the rate of other developed countries. FBI figures show 8,583 people were killed by guns in 2011, the last year for which numbers were available.

That is nearly 24 people a day.

The figure is far higher when counting the number of people who kill themselves with guns. The federal Centers for Disease Control listed 19,392 gun suicides in the United States in 2010, the latest figures available.

Among the hard-hit places is Prince George's County, the Washington D.C. suburb where Stefan Carter was killed by his uncle 3 1/2 years ago. The county in the state of Maryland has long suffered under a reputation for violent crime, even though the U.S. Census Bureau lists it as the wealthiest majority African-American county in the country.

Support for gun control tends to run high in places like Prince George's County. In other parts of the country, particularly states with large rural populations, people say firearms are essential for hunting and personal safety, a right that has been protected by the Second Amendment of the Constitution for more than 200 years.

As the American frontier expanded westward, gun ownership became culturally entrenched, and for many citizens, it remains a way of life. But other Americans believe the Second Amendment, adopted in 1791, no longer makes sense in modern urban settings like Prince George's County, where shootings tear at society.

Florena Carter, a 24-year veteran police officer, has concerns about the easy access to handguns for civilians. She is convinced that simply owning a gun made her brother more likely to use it.

Her son and her brother had been out on the town celebrating Stefan's birthday. When they were heading home, she said, her son tried to stop her brother from driving because the older man was intoxicated. They fought and Carter's brother pulled a handgun and shot Stefan.

Carter was at a loss to explain how the dispute escalated. The two men had been close; neither was prone to violence, Carter said.

"All I can think is that it was the alcohol and that he had a gun," she said.

That argument goes counter to rhetoric often cited by U.S. gun advocates who say that gun restrictions can't stop people who are determined to misuse guns. What's more, they argue, such shootings among family members should not deny law-abiding citizens from owning guns for self-protection.

Since the Connecticut school shooting, many gun-rights activists have insisted the solution is for more people to own guns, not fewer. Politicians in some states have proposed laws allowing school teachers to carry guns, arguing that shooters will be less likely to target public places where they know people are armed. Supporters argue that restricting firearms rights will only prevent people from defending themselves from criminals who will find a way to get guns no matter what.

But in Prince George's County, Carter doesn't buy the argument that guns make people safer. Last year, she worked with a county program known as Gift Cards for Guns, which allows people to anonymously turn in their weapons in exchange for a $100 gift card.

Carter said she had not known her brother owned a handgun but was told by police that he had bought it legally.

Maryland recently passed a law that will make it tougher to buy such guns. One of the toughest gun control measures in the country, Maryland's law requires licensing, fingerprinting, and safety training to purchase a handgun, bans the sale of 45 types of assault weapons and limits ammunition magazine capacity to 10 rounds.

The National Rifle Association, the most powerful gun rights lobby in the country, is expected to challenge the Maryland statute in the courts, delaying its going into force.

Maryland is among several states that passed tougher gun control measures in response to the Connecticut school shooting, even as the push for stricter federal laws died in the Senate. Among them was Colorado, a state with a proud frontier tradition where gun ownership is common.

That has given hope to some advocates that gun control might be gaining ground despite fierce opposition by the deep-pocketed NRA, which spends heavily in U.S. elections. Although Republicans and a handful of Democrats in the Senate defeated the push for expanded background checks, polls at the time showed that about 90 percent of Americans favor such a measure.

Maryland has routinely had the 2nd highest homicide rate per 100,000 residents of all 50 states, despite also having the 5th highest per capita income. It had a gun deaths rate of 6.8 per 100,000 in 2011, more than 2 percentage points higher than the national average of 4.7 per 100,000.

That is due in large part to crime in Prince Georges County and the economically hard-hit city of Baltimore, according to the FBI and Census Bureau. Gun deaths have fallen dramatically in Prince Georges as the county government implements aggressive policies to build up the six most troubled neighborhoods, from programs to keep students in school to better street lighting, road repairs and demolition of abandoned buildings. The number of homicides has fallen from a high of 169 in 2005 to 64 last year.

Homicides are dropping similarly in other U.S. cities, prompting some to argue stricter gun measures are not needed to combat daily violence. But Prince Georges police chief Mark Magaw has welcomed Maryland's tough new gun law as a strong crime-fighting tool in his still-violent county.

So does Carter, who told her story at a gathering of other women coping with the loss of family members to gun violence. They have all been counseled by a group known as Community Advocates for Family and Youth.

Carter, now a board member of the organization, said she was still suffering despite sessions with police department psychologists when she found CAFY. Her husband had died of leukemia just five months before her son was killed.

"I thought, 'my God couldn't do that to me,'" she said.

Carter dabbed away tears as she recalled the early December morning 3 ½ years ago when the phone rang with the news of her son's death.

"My son was my only child. I don't have any grandchildren, and now I don't have hope of any," she said. "My son was two classes short of graduating with a dual degree."

In the passing weeks, Carter said she noticed that her father appeared increasingly depressed. She figured it was a natural reaction to the tragedy — until he killed himself.

Her brother will be out of prison in about two years, serving a sentence shortened because he accepted a plea deal. Carter doesn't know if she can forgive him.

"I love my brother. I've known him longer than my son. I changed his diapers," she said. But when he's released, "I just can't see us having a relationship."

Fearful Myanmar Muslims shelter in monastery

An army officer walks with brooms in front of a burned building that housed an orphanage for Muslim children in Lashio, northern Shan State, Myanmar, Thursday, May 30, 2013. Many Buddhists and Muslims stayed locked inside their homes and shops were shuttered after two-days of violence in Lashio town, near the border with China, the latest region to fall prey to the country's spreading sectarian violence.(AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)

A fireman moves debris following sectarian violence between Buddhists and Muslims in Lashio, northern Shan State, Myanmar, Thursday, May 30, 2013. Many Buddhists and Muslims stayed locked inside their homes and shops were shuttered after two-days of violence in Lashio town, near the border with China, the latest region to fall prey to the country's spreading sectarian violence. (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)

LASHIO, Myanmar (AP) — More than 1,000 Muslims who fled Myanmar's latest bout of sectarian violence huddled Thursday in aBuddhist monastery guarded by army soldiers as calm returned to this northeastern city, though burnt out buildings leveled by Buddhist rioters still smoldered.

The army transported terrified Muslim families by the truckload out of a neighborhood in Lashio where overturned cars and motorcycles that had been charred a day earlier left black scars on the red earth.

"We heard things could get worse, so we waved down soldiers and asked them for help," said 59-year-old Khin Than, who arrived at the monastery Thursday morning with her four children and sacks of luggage along with several hundred other Muslims. "We left because we're afraid of being attacked."

The violence in Lashio this week highlights how anti-Muslim unrest has slowly spread across Myanmar since starting last year in western Rakhine state and hitting the central city of Meikhtila in March. President Thein Sein's government, which inherited power from the military two years ago, has been heavily criticized for failing to contain the violence.

In Lashio on Thursday, Buddhist monks organized meals for the newly arrived refugees, who huddled together in several buildings in the monastery compound.

Although a few Buddhist men could still be seen Thursday riding motorbikes with crude weapons such as sharpened bamboo poles, no new violence was reported. Several banks and shops reopened as residents emerged to look at destroyed Muslim shops. Trucks of soldiers and police crisscrossed main roads. They guarded the ruins of Muslim businesses that were reduced to ashes on Tuesday and Wednesday, erecting roadblocks from twisted debris.

At one corner, where the charred remains of a three-story building still smoldered, Muslim residents sorted through rubble for anything salvageable. One family packed electronics from their shop into the back of a truck.

A woman who had fled a mob a day earlier was still in a state of shock.

"These things should not happen," said the woman, Aye Tin, a Muslim resident who slept overnight in a local Red Cross compound. "Most Muslims are staying off the streets. They're afraid they'll be attacked or killed if they go outside."

The rioting began Tuesday after a Muslim man splashed gasoline on a Buddhist woman and set her on fire. Buddhist mobs responded by burning down several Muslim-owned shops, a mosque and an Islamic orphanage. Roving motorcyclists continued the violence on Wednesday, leaving one person dead and four injured.

Presidential spokesman Ye Htut said 25 people had been detained so far. He said all those arrested were from Lashio.

The violence is casting fresh doubt over whether Thein Sein's government can or will act to contain the racial and religious intolerance plaguing a deeply fractured nation still struggling to emerge from half a century of military rule. Muslims, who account for about 4 percent of Myanmar's roughly 60 million people, have been the main victims of the violence since it began last year, but so far most criminal trials have involved prosecutions of Muslims, not members of the Buddhist majority.

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Associated Press writer Aye Aye Win contributed to this report from Yangon, Myanmar.

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Why'd the FBI Kill Tamerlan Tsarnaev's Accomplice-to-Be if He Was Unarmed?

Why'd the FBI Kill Tamerlan Tsarnaev's Accomplice-to-Be if He Was Unarmed?

Law enforcement officials are walking their claims of self-defense all the way back a week after the shooting of Ibragim Todashev — the 27-year-old man who was about to officially confess to a triple murder in Massachusetts and finger Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev while he was at it — in his Orlando home by anFBI agent. The Washington Post and Orlando's NBC affiliate both now report that Todashev was unarmed and alone in a room with the single FBI agent when he was killed early on the morning of May 22, two evolving details that continue to raise questions about why investigators used lethal force against a man who may not have posed a lethal threat but who definitely had key information on Tsarnaev.

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The Post's Sari Horwitz and Peter Finn report that Todashev "lunged at the agent and overturned a table," at which point, according to Orlando's WESH, "the FBI agent believed he could have possibly been going for his gun or the sword in the room, and that's when the agent opened fire." So, yes, there may have been a giant sword somewhere in Todashev's apartment near Universal Studios, and there could yet be missing pieces in the bizarre public puzzle of this terrorism subplot — the FBI said in a second statement about the case Wednesday that an internal review of the incident was still underway, and the Boston bombing investigation has not been short on misinformation coming from anonymous law enforcement officials. But some initial reports after the Jack Bauer-style saga surfaced last Wednesday insisted that Todashev, after orally confessing to a grisly 2011 killing in Waltham, Massachusetts, attacked the agent with a knife. Within a day, but under the radar, some of the anonymous officials began to change their story, backtracking about the Todashev confession standoff and telling outlets like the AP that "it was no longer clear what had happened." The FBI has only said in a statement that "a violent confrontation was initiated by the individual."

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Todashev's family and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which pressed for a separate Department of Justice inquiry on Wednesday, have insisted that he did not have access to a weapon and that the killing "was not justified." Of course, at that point Todashev was a half-confessed murderer in the grisly throat-slitting of a drug-deal setup turned violent killing himself, but at his apartment late last Tuesday night, he was clearly outnumbered and outgunned: After weeks of cooperating with investigators, Todashev was being interviewed for multiple hours by multiple federal agents and, according to the FBI, at least two Massachusetts state police officers and other law enforcement officials. The narrative floating around the press had been that Todashev, a mixed martial arts fighter and friend of Tsarnaev back in Boston, was going to or could have killed someone.The Washington Post's sources may debunk that:

An agent sustained non-life-threatening injuries, later described by one law enforcement official as "some cuts and abrasions."

An official said that according to one account of the shooting, the other law enforcement officials had just stepped out of the room, leaving the FBI agent alone with Todashev, when the confrontation occurred.

Again, pass the salt with this anonymous reporting, and we still don't have details on the confrontation between this would-be Bauer and Tsarnaev's would-be accomplice. But that "some cuts and abrasions" line does jibe with what FBI officials told CNN on May 23 — that the agent "sustained non-life-threatening injuries," and if Todashev was alone with one agent, well, maybe he wasn't exactly outnumbered and maybe he made his move. Increasingly this is becoming a sideshow between one agent and one strange man when it might have been something of a major break in the case against the Tsarnaev brothers — at the very least, a written confession from Todashev before he died would have provided a legally justified sign that Tsarnaev had been a drug dealer or a killerbefore he took what had been thought as the fateful trip to Russian in 2012, that he had been criminally violent before he was hypothetically radicalized.

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But if we are now discounting stories about the knife and a standoff with multiple agents, what makes us so sure those stories about how Todashev was supposed to sign a confession implicating him and Tsarnaev are so solid themselves? Todashev's father is now stating that the 2011 triple homicide in Waltham, which Todashev reportedly confessed to, was not part of Todashev's earlier interrogations with the FBI. No, that's not supposed to make you feel better.

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