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            <h1 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Hurricane Harvey Is the Rainiest Atlantic Hurricane Ever Measured </h1>
            
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                        Hurricane Harvey</a>
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        <section id="article-section-1"><p>On Sunday morning, David Novak woke up and looked at the news. The evening before, Hurricane Harvey had stalled out over Houston; now it sent one band of rain after another smacking into the city. Streams were entering flood stage, interstates were underwater, and images of biblical flooding had begun to stream out of the country’s fourth-largest city.</p><p>Since 2014, Novak has been the director of the Weather Prediction Center at the National Weather Service. He had been following the storm for several days. And he knew it would get worse.</p><p>“We woke up Sunday morning, and we were seeing the event unfold, and we knew that what we were seeing on TV—it was not the end of the story,” he told me on Tuesday. “Looking at our forecast models, and other information, we had confidence that there was more rain coming.”</p><p>He consulted with his colleagues, who agreed with him that the agency needed to convey the <em>scale</em> of what was coming. “We felt we needed to say something,” he said. “You kind of scramble to the record books to see, how does this compare to other events? We could not find something similar, in terms of the aerial coverage of the event. We were concerned we were going to have amounts near 50 inches.”</p></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector1" targeting-pos="boxinjector1" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="1" data-object-name="boxinjector"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3], [320, 520], [320, 430], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-2"><p>By 11 a.m., Novak and his team had agreed on a statement, which was first distributed from the Weather Prediction Center’s Twitter account. It reads, in full:</p><blockquote>
<p>Local rainfall amounts of 50 inches would exceed any previous Texas rainfall record. The breadth and intensity of this rainfall are beyond anything experienced before. Catastrophic flooding is now underway and expected to continue for days.</p>
</blockquote><p>It now appears the Weather Prediction Center got it right. At least one rain gauge in Cedar Bayou, an area in Harris County, Texas, reports that 51.88 inches of rain fell as of Tuesday afternoon since Hurricane Harvey made landfall. This is the most rain ever recorded in the continental United States from a tropical cyclone. It also breaks the Texas state rainfall record for a single storm.</p><aside class="pullquote instapaper_ignore">Folks were not comprehending that the awful pictures on TV Sunday morning were going to get worse.</aside><p>Only one previous storm—tropical cyclone Hiki—has dumped more rain in the United States. In August 1950, it pelted Kauai, Hawaii, with 52 inches of rain.</p><p>This is a staggering amount. More rain has fallen on Houston in the past week <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/29/upshot/harvey-rainfall-where-you-live.html?mcubz=0" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'0',r'538407'">than on Seattle or Boston or Miami</a> since January 1.</p><figure><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en"><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Harvey?src=hash" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'1',r'538407'">#Harvey</a> in perspective. So much rain has fallen, we’ve had to update the color charts on our graphics in order to effectively map it. <a href="https://t.co/Su7x2K1uuz" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'2',r'538407'">pic.twitter.com/Su7x2K1uuz</a></p>
— NWS (@NWS) <a href="https://twitter.com/NWS/status/902174274571689984" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'3',r'538407'">August 28, 2017</a></blockquote>
</figure><p>The National Weather Service has even had to update its maps, adding extra colors to capture rainfall totals higher than 30 inches. Novak said he could remember no recalibration exercise quite like that in his career.</p></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector2" targeting-pos="boxinjector2" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="1" data-object-name="boxinjector"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3], [320, 520], [320, 430], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-3"><p>“It’s just amazing as a meteorologist to experience this, to live this—it’s awful,” he told me. “You’re in this awkward state of, you’re forecasting this, and you obviously want to be correct. At the same time, you don’t want to be correct because of the awful consequences that such a forecast means.”</p><p>When making dire forecasts like this one, the National Weather Service has begun to work with social scientists to make sure that its guidance leads to the “appropriate response,” Novak said. “When you have the confidence, you want to clearly communicate some of these dire situations. In other circumstances, you want to communicate in ways that are more calming.”</p><p>With Sunday’s unprecedented guidance, he felt he had made the right choice. But there is one word he would add.</p><p>“We were getting a sense that folks were not comprehending that the awful pictures on TV Sunday morning were going to get worse and last a long time,” he said. “If there was any one edit that we would make to the statement now, I’d add that ‘the breadth, intensity, <em>and duration</em> of the rainfall are perhaps beyond anything experienced before.’”</p><p>On Tuesday afternoon, the Weather Prediction Center announced that heavy rains would finally begin to move out of the Houston area, though it cautioned another foot of rain may fall in some places before the end. “Catastrophic and life-threatening floods are still expected through tomorrow for portions of Southeast Texas and East Texas.”</p></section>
    
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        <p class="dek">Students have mourned and rallied the public after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High that left 17 dead.</p>
        
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            <p>Something was different about the mass shooting this week in Parkland, Florida, in which 14 students and three adults were killed.</p>

<p>It was not only the death toll. The mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High became the deadliest high-school shooting in American history (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre">edging out Columbine,</a> which killed 13 in 1999).</p>

<p>What made Parkland different were the people who stepped forward to describe it. High-school students—the survivors of the calamity themselves—became the voice of the tragedy. Tweets that were widely reported as coming from the students expressed grief for the victims, pushed against false reports, and demanded accountability.</p>

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">We are too young to be losing friends like this.</p>
— Javi 🥀 (@Javier_Lovera__) <a href="https://twitter.com/Javier_Lovera__/status/964183117350297600?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 15, 2018</a></blockquote>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Bari Weiss and the Left-Wing Infatuation With Taking Offense</h3>
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        <p class="dek">Outrage mobs are chipping away at democracy, one meaningless debate at a time.</p>
        
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            <p>The mob was unusually vociferous, even for Twitter. After the California-born ice skater Mirai Nagasu became the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics, the <em>New York Times</em> writer Bari Weiss <a href="https://twitter.com/splinter_news/status/963191268917567489">commented</a> “Immigrants: They get the job done.”</p>

<p>What followed that innocuous tweet was one of the sillier, manufactured controversies I have ever seen on Twitter. Twitter’s socially conscious denizens probably only realized they should be outraged at Weiss after they saw other people being outraged, as is so often the case. Outside of Twitter, some of Weiss’s <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-york-times-diversity-bari-weiss-tweet_us_5a833d4ee4b0cf06751f3f44"><em>Times</em></a><a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-york-times-diversity-bari-weiss-tweet_us_5a833d4ee4b0cf06751f3f44"> colleagues</a> were also offended by the tweet—and even hurt by it. <a href="https://splinternews.com/can-someone-explain-this-bari-weiss-tweet-to-me-1822942452">The</a><a href="https://splinternews.com/can-someone-explain-this-bari-weiss-tweet-to-me-1822942452"> critics’</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/soledadobrien/status/964009334178009088">objection</a> was that Nagasu isn’t herself an immigrant, but rather the child of immigrants, and so calling her one was an example of “<a href="https://twitter.com/chrissyteigen/status/963232760868425728?ref_src=twsrc%255Etfw&amp;ref_url=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%252Fentry%252Fchrissy-teigen-bari-weiss-mirai-nagasu_us_5a830bbbe4b00ecc923ed36d">perpetual othering</a>.”</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Mueller's Message to America</h3>
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        <p class="dek">The clear goal of the special counsel is to speak to the American public about the seriousness of Russian interference.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p dir="ltr">With yet another blockbuster indictment (why is it always on a Friday afternoon?), Special Counsel Robert Mueller has, once again, upended Washington. And this time, it is possible  that his efforts may have a wider effect outside the Beltway.</p>

<p dir="ltr">For those following the matter, there has been little doubt that Russian citizens attempted to interfere with the American presidential election. The American intelligence agencies  publicized  that conclusion more than a year ago in a report issued in January 2017, and it has stood by the analysis whenever it has been questioned. But some in the country have doubted the assertion—asking for evidence of interference that was not forthcoming.</p>

<p dir="ltr">Now the evidence has been laid out in painful detail by the special counsel. If any significant fraction of what is alleged in the latest indictment is true (and we should, of course, remind ourselves that an indictment is just an allegation—not proof), then this tale is a stunning condemnation of Russian activity. A Russian organization with hundreds of employees and a budget of millions of dollars is said to have systematically engaged in an effort (code named “Project Lakhta”) to undermine the integrity of the election and, perhaps more importantly, to have attempted to influence the election to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump. Among the allegations, the Russians:</p>


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        <p class="dek">Tech analysts are prone to predicting utopia or dystopia. They’re worse at imagining the side effects of a firm's success.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p dir="ltr">The U.S economy is in the midst of a wrenching technological transformation that is fundamentally changing the way people <a href="https://www.cydiageeks.com/best-sleep-tracking-apps-for-apple-watch.html">sleep</a>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wework-story-how-adam-neumann-changing-way-we-work-live-aman-mehta">work</a>, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-restaurant-robot-waiters-2016-7">eat</a>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/future-retail/546119/">shop</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/style/tinder-relationship-dating-study.html">love</a>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/06/the-rise-of-speed-listening/396740/">read</a>, and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930/">interact</a>.</p>

<p dir="ltr">At least, that’s one interpretation.</p>

<p>A second story of this age of technological transformation says that it’s mostly a facade—that the last 30 years have been <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/books/review/the-powers-that-were.html">a productivity bust</a> and little has changed in everyday life, aside from the way everyone reads and watches videos. <a href="https://som.yale.edu/blog/peter-thiel-at-yale-we-wanted-flying-cars-instead-we-got-140-characters">People wanted flying cars</a> and got Netflix binges instead.</p>

<p dir="ltr">Let’s call these the Disrupt Story and the Dud Story of technology. When a new company, app, or platform emerges, it’s common for analysts to divide into camps—Disrupt vs. Dud—with some yelping that the new thing will change everything and others yawning with the expectation that traditionalism will win out.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Full Text of Mueller's Indictment of 13 Russians</h3>
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    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/priscilla-alvarez/" itemprop="url" title="Priscilla Alvarez" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Priscilla Alvarez</span></a></span> and <span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/taylor-hosking/" itemprop="url" title="Taylor Hosking" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Taylor Hosking</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">The special counsel indicted the Russian nationals and three Russian entities for allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election, the Department of Justice announced Friday.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p dir="ltr"><em>On Friday, February 16, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein announced that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, had indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges that including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft. This is the full text of that <a href="https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download">indictment</a>.</em></p>

<hr><p dir="ltr" style="text-align: center;">IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT</p>

<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: center;">FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA</p>

<p><br>
* * CRIMINAL NO. v. * * (18 U.S.C. §§ 2,371, 1349, 1028A)</p>

<p>UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</p>

<p>v.  </p>

<p>INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY LLC</p>

<p dir="ltr">        A/K/A MEDIASINTEZ LLC A/K/A</p>

<p dir="ltr">        GLAVSET LLC A/K/A MIXINFO</p>

<p dir="ltr">        LLC A/K/A AZIMUT LLC A/K/A NOVINFO LLC,</p>

<p dir="ltr">CONCORD MANAGEMENT AND CONSULTING LLC,</p>

<p dir="ltr">CONCORD CATERING,</p>

<p dir="ltr">YEVGENIY VIKTOROVICH PRIGOZHIN,</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Why Don't More Female Figure Skaters Wear Pants?</h3>
    </a>
    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/ashley-fetters/" itemprop="url" title="Ashley Fetters" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Ashley Fetters</span></a></span></li>
        

    </ul>
    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-17T09:30:00" />
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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">Leggings and yoga gear are common sights at practice rinks. But in competition, gender-coded costumes still prevail.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>Last weekend, one of the buzzier stories out of the Olympic ladies’ figure skating short program competition was one you might call … surprisingly surprising. The French figure skater Maé-Bérénice Méité made headlines: for the fact that she skated to a Beyoncé medley, and even more so, for the fact that she did it in pants.</p>

<p>More accurately, she did it in a bedazzled black unitard, but that didn’t stop news outlets and viewers on Twitter from pointing out Méité’s eye-catching, subtly subversive pants. “This French figure skater may not have won a medal, but her pants took people's choice,” <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/french-figure-skater-may-not-won-medal-pants-took-peoples-choice-181422813.html">raved</a> Yahoo! News, and AOL <a href="https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2018/02/12/pyeongchang-2018-figure-skating-outfits-from-the-winter-olympics/23359525/">named</a> Méité’s bodysuit to its list of “most dazzling figure skating outfits” of these Olympic Games.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">What Mueller's Indictment Reveals</h3>
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    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/david-a-graham/" itemprop="url" title="David A. Graham" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">David A. Graham</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">The special counsel detailed how a Russian effort to widen divisions in American society launched in 2014 morphed into active support for the candidacy of Donald Trump.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>A <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/rosenstein-mueller-indictment-russia/553601/">37-page indictment </a>filed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Friday lays out the most detailed picture of how the Russian government sought to interfere in the 2016 election, meddling with voters to sow division in American society, and encouraging the election of Donald Trump in what the defendants referred to as “information warfare against the United States of America.”</p>

<p>“The conspiracy had as its object impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful governmental functions of the United States by dishonest means in order to enable the Defendants to interfere with U.S. political and electoral processes, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” the indictment states. There are 16 defendants, including three organizations and 13 individuals, who are charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States by impairing enforcement of election law as well as wire fraud and bank fraud.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Why Amazon Pays Some of Its Workers to Quit</h3>
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    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/alana-semuels/" itemprop="url" title="Alana Semuels" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Alana Semuels</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">The company’s unusual offer—to give employees up to $5,000 for leaving—may actually be a way to get them to stay longer.</p>
        
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            <p dir="ltr">On Monday, Amazon <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-laying-off-corporate-employees-in-rare-cutback/">reportedly</a> began a series of rare layoffs at its headquarters in Seattle, cutting several hundred corporate employees. But this week, something quite different is happening at the company’s warehouses and customer-service centers across the country: Amazon will politely ask its “associates”—full-time and part-time hourly employees—if they’d prefer to quit. And if they do, Amazon will pay them as much as $5,000 for walking out the door.</p>

<p dir="ltr">Officially called “The Offer,” this proposition is, according to Amazon, a way to encourage unhappy employees to move on. “We believe staying somewhere you don’t want to be isn’t healthy for our employees or for the company,” Ashley Robinson, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote to me in an email. The amount full-time employees get offered ranges from $2,000 to $5,000, and depends on how long they have been at the company; if they take the money, they agree to never work for Amazon again. (The idea for all this <a href="https://hbr.org/2008/05/why-zappos-pays-new-employees">originated</a> at Zappos, the online shoe retailer that Amazon bought in 2009.)</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Swiss Have Liberal Gun Laws, Too</h3>
    </a>
    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/krishnadev-calamur/" itemprop="url" title="Krishnadev Calamur" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Krishnadev Calamur</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">But they also have fewer gun-related deaths than the U.S.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>In February 2011, Swiss citizens voted in a referendum that called for a national gun registry and for firearms owned by members of the military to be stored in public arsenals.</p>

<p>“It is a question of trust between the state and the citizen. The citizen is not just a citizen, he is also a soldier,” Hermann Suter, who at the time was vice president of the Swiss gun-rights group Pro Tell, told the BBC then. “The gun at home is the best way to avoid dictatorships—only dictators take arms away from the citizens.”</p>

<p>Apparently many of his fellow Swiss agreed. The referendum was easily defeated. Gun ownership in the country<strong> </strong>has <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4137689?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">deep historic roots</a> and it is tied to mandatory military service for Swiss men between the ages of 18 and 34. Traditionally, soldiers were allowed to keep their weapons at home in order to defend against conquering armies. These fears came close to being realized during the Franco-Prussian War on 1871; as well as World War I, when the Swiss border was threatened; and World War II, when the country feared a Nazi invasion.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">'Show Us the Carnage' </h3>
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    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/james-fallows/" itemprop="url" title="James Fallows" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">James Fallows</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">None</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>After a previous horrific massacre via AR-15, the one in Las Vegas last winter in which a single murderer killed or injured <em>more than 900</em> people<i>, </i>readers wrote about that weapon and its history. For reference, those items were:</p>

<ul><li>“<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/why-the-ar-15-is-so-lethal/545162/">Why the AR-15 Is So Lethal</a>”</li>
	<li>“<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/11/the-nature-of-the-ar-15/545414/">The Nature of the AR-15</a>”</li>
	<li>“<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/11/why-the-ar-15-was-never-meant-to-be-in-civilians-hands/545438/">Why the AR-15 Was Never Meant to be in Civilian Hands</a>”</li>
	<li>“<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/11/on-the-military-and-civilian-history-of-the-ar-15/545660/">More on the Military and Civilian History of the AR-15</a>”</li>
</ul><p>Now we have another massacre; more “thoughts and prayers” and other <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/deeply-saddened/553478/">pious but empty rituals</a> by legislators who will not do a single thing to reduce the chances of the next one; and more reaction from readers.</p>

<p>Can <em>anything</em> be done, by anyone or any organization, to stop the onslaught of gun violence? Readers suggest three approaches, involving: the media, the responsible gun-owning community, and the political opposition to the NRA.</p>


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