After the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, students at MDI High School in Bar Harbor, Maine were scheduled to have a routine lock-down drill, in which students practice how to behave if their school is the site of a similar mass shooting; these drills teach children to sacrifice themselves by distracting the shooter before they are murdered in order to give other students a few more seconds during which the police might arrive and kill the shooter. Read the rest

Steve Boyett writes, "The NRA sells fear because fear sells guns, and selling guns is really what the NRA is all about. For decades they've insisted that the 2nd Amendment is the buffer against governmental tyranny. Now they're literally telling members to arm themselves against resistance to an authoritarian regime. I can't think of another organization that could air this ad without public censure. Every time I think America has hit bottom, it finds a shovel." Read the rest

After shooting Philando Castile dead during a traffic stop -- a killing that was livestreamed on Facebook by Castile's girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds -- the police obtained a secret warrant for Reynolds's Facebook account, including her private messages and deleted messages, accompanied by a gag order that banned Facebook from every discussing the warrant's existence. Read the rest