GOP politicians are taking more-uncompromising positions on guns even as lawsuits and infighting have dragged down the flagship gun lobby.
Nearly a decade ago, the massacre of 20 children and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school threw the politics of gun violence into a state of suspension for a full week, as conservative politicians waited to hear from the powerful gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, before taking a stand.
This week, after another rampage, at a Texas elementary school that left 19 children and two teachers dead, Republican lawmakers didn’t wait for the NRA as they lined up within hours to rebuff any proposed gun-control measures.
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“The NRA is not a big player when it comes to spending on political advertising, but guns are still an issue that a lot of candidates are talking about,” said Travis Ridout, a politics professor at Washington State University and co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political ads. “A lot of it is by virtue of being pictured with a gun, and that sends a message that the candidate is not hostile to gun rights.”
In another sign of how the party has moved since the Newtown massacre, the baseless claim spread by Alex Jones that the shooting was staged has turned into a knee-jerk response for some Republican elected officials after new mass shootings. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, before she was elected to Congress, endorsed a false claim that the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., was staged, leading the House to remove her from her committee assignments. On the day of the vote last year, Greene acknowledged school shootings were “absolutely real.”
This month, the Arizona state Senate opened an ethics investigation into Sen. Wendy Rogers for a social media post that falsely suggested the May 14 mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket, which authorities have said was motivated by the gunman’s white-supremacist beliefs, was done by a federal agent. Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) on Tuesday tweeted and then deleted false information blaming the Texas shooting on a “transsexual leftist illegal alien.”
Lessons from fires of the past can help the West’s residents prepare for wildfires to come—and help our forests become more adapted to an era of fire.
Forestry scientists at Washington State University study wildfire and its impacts on the land, both bad and good. WSU Extension Foresters share current understanding about fire and how to reduce its ravages, helping rural landowners safeguard their homes, property, and natural resources.
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“The more we use fire as a land management tool, the less we need to be afraid of it,” says Mark Swanson, associate professor and faculty leader for WSU’s Forestry teaching and research program. “Native Americans were masters at using fire to reduce forest density and fuels. We profoundly need to learn from them.”
For nearly a decade, Swanson has been part of a multi-institutional team studying the effects of an unusual fire in California’s Yosemite National Park. In 2013, the Rim Fire burned more than a quarter-million acres on the west slope of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, entering Yosemite, where managers had used prescribed fire for decades to reduce fuels.
Last year, Swanson launched WSU’s new Wildland Fire Ecology and Management course, which prepares young forestry professionals to become entry-level wildland firefighters. The first batch of 25 students awaits certification this spring.
Students learn standard tools, concepts, and practices, from understanding forest and weather conditions to digging a fire line and building an emergency fire shelter.
“We’re trying to prepare our students to be safer in a world that will be more dominated by fire,” Swanson said.
Today’s question: What are two examples of civic participation in the United States?
By Michael Ritter, assistant professor of political science at Washington State University in Pullman
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Civic participation refers to various forms of political engagement. Perhaps the most straightforward is voting. But civic participation is more than just submitting a ballot. For example, the acceptable answers to this question on the U.S. Citizenship Test include not just voting, but also running for office, joining a political party, assisting with a political campaign, joining a civic or community group, contacting and expressing one’s concerns or viewpoints to an elected official, supporting an issue or policy, and writing to a newspaper.
The ability to participate in politics in so many ways is one of the cardinal features of American democracy, yet another important consideration is the extent to which one’s ability to participate is structured by individual as well as state-level institutional factors.
In their 1995 work “Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics,” political scientists Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady developed a theoretical framework of political participation known as the civic voluntarism model. A key premise, supported by extensive empirical testing, is that individual political participation choices are shaped by how many politically relevant resources someone has (factors that have a causal impact on a person’s likelihood of engaging in various forms of political participation).
The WSU Office of Research has awarded nine faculty with 2022 New Faculty Seed Grants.
The grant program provides support for junior faculty to develop research, scholarly, or creative programs that lead to sustained professional development and extramural funding. The program is sponsored by the Office of Research and the Office of the Provost.
Since the New Faculty Seed Grant program began in 2000, junior faculty have submitted 963 proposals to the program. Of these, 279 awards were given with $4.75 million invested in the program. Over the years, seed grant winners have submitted 734 external proposals related to their projects, bringing in over $49.4 million in externally funded awards.
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The 2022 New Faculty Seed Grant recipients in the College of Arts and Sciences include:
John Blong, Department of Anthropology, will apply a novel suite of methods to investigate how prehistoric people in the Great Basin region of western North America maintained food systems over millennia of climate change.
Andra Chastain, Department of History, will research how urban air pollution is represented, experienced, and ultimately understood as a public health crisis in Santiago, Chile; Mexico City; and Los Angeles.
Jacqueline Wilson, School of Music, will create an album of works for the bassoon by Māori composers to bring new depth to the Indigenous representation in the bassoon repertoire, combat monolithic racial depictions, and promote artistic sovereignty.
Since the turn of the century, global deaths attributable to air pollution have increased by more than half, a development that researchers say underscores the impact of pollution as the “largest existential threat to human and planetary health.”
The findings, part of a study published Tuesday in The Lancet Planetary Health, found that pollution was responsible for an estimated 9 million deaths around the world in 2019. Fully half of those fatalities, 4.5 million deaths, were the result of ambient, or outdoor, air pollution, which is typically emitted by vehicles and industrial sources like power plants and factories.
Ambient air pollution can be generated by a range of sources, including wildfires.
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Deepti Singh, an assistant professor at the School of the Environment at Washington State University, co-authored a separate study into how wildfires, extreme heat and wind patterns can deteriorate air quality.
She noted how in recent years smoke from wildfires in California and the American West has traveled across the United States all the way to the East Coast. At one point during the 2020 wildfire season, Singh said, residents in as much as 70 percent of the Western U.S. experienced negative air quality because of the blazes in the West.
“That wildfire smoke, you know, it has multiple harmful air pollutants,” Singh said. “We don’t even fully understand all the things that are in that smoke. But we know that it’s increasing fine particulate matter, which is something that directly affects our health. It’s something that we can inhale and it affects our cardiovascular and respiratory systems, and it can cause premature mortality and developmental harm—many, many different health impacts associated with that.”
