Aug 8, 2013
A little bit of #GunFAIL news to start the morning, beginning with this summer's fourth child accidentally shot by a family member in East Centeral Indiana. Why East Central Indiana? No particular reason, other than that they seem to have the guns around. But that's just one of the patters that's emerged in the reporting. Since mid-June, four kids ages 13 and under have been accidentally shot by family members, three of whom have died. The most recent of them, it was reported, came from a family that "practiced gun safety." Which led to a discussion of other recent cases of kids accidentally shot and killed whose families likewise "practiced gun safety." It happens. The bulk of the show, however--in fact, the entirety of the rest of the show--was given over to continuing discussion of the Snowden/NSA saga. Armando joins in for a bit as we finished up the reading of Jay Rosen's "Toobin principle" piece, and relied on other concurrent discussions, including a NYT piece on a super-cheap surveillance device built by a security researcher that basically erases whatever's left of your "reasonable expectation of privacy" in your electronic communications, to take a deep dive into some of what's wrong with our surveillance regime and what might be our misplaced faith in the system's ability to address abuses.