Author: TheConversation

By Susanna Lee, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Georgetown University At the end of May, it happened again. A mass shooter killed 12 people, this time at a municipal center in Virginia Beach. Employees had been forbidden to carry guns at work, and some lamented that this policy had prevented “good guys” from taking out the shooter. This trope, “the good guy with a gun,” has become commonplace among gun rights activists. Where did it come from? On December 21, 2012, one week after Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,...

By Christopher J. Ferguson, Professor of Psychology, Stetson University In the wake of the El Paso shooting on August 3 that left 22 dead and dozens injured, a familiar trope has reemerged: Often, when a young man is the shooter, people try to blame the tragedy on violent video games and other forms of media. This time around, Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick placed some of the blame on a video game industry that “teaches young people to kill.” Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California went on to condemn video games that “dehumanize individuals” as a “problem...

By Linda R. Phillips and Lisa Marie O’Neill, Professor Emeritus of Gerontological Nursing and Associate Director of Research and Education, University of Arizona About 16% of older adults are victims of some form of mistreatment and the number of reported cases of elder abuse is steadily increasing. Because of poor record-keeping, however, those of us who study elder abuse don’t know if the trend reflects an actual increase, an increase because of growing numbers of older adults, or only an increase in reporting due to greater awareness. Elder abuse involves intentional or unintentional acts that result in physical, emotional...

By Jeremiah Johnson, Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering, North Carolina State University Shared dockless electric scooters, or e-scooters, transport riders over short distances in cities. Ride share companies promote them as an environmentally friendly choice that reduces dependence on cars. To properly assess these claims, it’s important to consider all relevant environmental factors, including the materials and energy required to manufacture scooters, the impacts of collecting them daily for charging and redistributing, and the electricity that charges their batteries. I study methods for assessing environmental impacts of products and materials. In a newly published study, I show that e-scooter...

By Iain Boyd, Professor of Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan Flying faster than the speed of sound still sounds futuristic for regular people, more than 15 years after the last commercial supersonic flights ended. The planes that made those journeys, the 14 aircraft collectively known as the Concorde, flew from 1976 to 2003. It traveled three times faster than regular passenger aircraft, but the airlines that flew it couldn’t make a profit on its trips. The reason the Concorde was unprofitable was, in fact, a side effect of its speed. When the plane sped up past the speed of...

By Monica H. Swahn, Professor, Epidemiology and Public Health, Georgia State University The news about the tragic deaths of several American tourists in the Dominican Republic in May 2019 has created an outcry and a media frenzy. As of June 30, there were at least nine deaths with similar circumstances in the past few months. The FBI and Dominican authorities are investigating, and one theory is that alcohol was the cause of these deaths. The FBI has reportedly taken samples of alcohol for testing, and the hotels where some tourists died have removed alcohol from the minibars in the...