TUESDAY, JULY 10, 2007
Tuesday Edition: Only 22 States Share Records With FBI Gun Database
Stateline.org says more than half of all states do not share data that would make it more difficult for the mentally ill to buy guns. And of the states that do participate, nine states have sent fewer than 10 records to the FBI -- suggesting that many other cases go unreported. Stateline.org found:
Following the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history at Virginia Tech on April 16, Congress and the Bush administration are mounting a campaign to get states to participate in a federal program designed to keep the mentally ill from buying firearms.
Only 22 states, including Virginia, now provide records of those with disqualifying mental health histories to the
National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), an FBI database that lets gun dealers across the country identify potentially dangerous buyers before selling them weapons.
The database, set up by Congress as part of the 1993 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, essentially serves as a registry of those prohibited from buying guns for reasons ranging from illegal residence in the United States to dishonorable discharge from the armed services. In the case of the mentally ill, the law bans sales to those "who have been adjudicated as a mental defective or have been committed to a mental institution."
These states do send data to the FBI:
- Alabama
- Arkansas
- Arizona
- California
- Colorado
- Florida
- Iowa
- Kansas
- Kentucky
- Maryland
- Michigan
- Missouri
- North Carolina
- New Hampshire
- New York
- Ohio
- South Carolina
- Tennessee
- Utah
- Virginia
- Washington
- Wyoming
If your state is on the list, find out how many cases have been reported. If it is not on the list, find out why. What would opponents fear would happen if the names of potential gun buyers who are mentally ill were reported to the FBI?
Baseball Card TroublesThanks to Al's Morning Meeting reader Rob Davis, who pointed me to this piece in
The San Diego Union-Tribune. The story tells about the declining industry of baseball trading cards:
The sports trading card business, a $1.2 billion industry in 1991, has seen its stock decline steadily as it faces massive overproduction and waning interest from investors and children alike. Sales of sports cards last year were about $270 million.
Long gone are the days when the latest baseball card release would send swarms of boys to the local drugstore. Also over is the rampant speculative investing that defined much of the 1980s and early 1990s, when people bought cards thinking they could fund their early retirement with a mint rookie card of Jose Canseco -- now valued at a whopping $6.
There is a lot of turmoil in the baseball card world. One of the two big players in the baseball card industry,
Topps, is for sale. Major League Baseball, meanwhile, is tightening the number of card sets that may be sold. But one of the biggest challenges is how to get kids interested in baseball cards again.
In an era of multimillion-dollar contracts and corporate skyboxes, it's not surprising that children would be squeezed out of the baseball card business as well.
But it's not just the prices. In an always-connected world with splashier sports like football and basketball, it's hard to find anyone under 30 who really cares about the game, said [Pete] Williams, [the author of
"Card Sharks: How Upper Deck Turned a Child's Hobby Into a High-Stakes, Billion-Dollar Business.]
"They've lost a generation," he said
.
Whereas kids once used cards as a way to track their favorite players' stats, nowadays players switch teams so often that it is hard to create a bond and statistics are widely available on the Internet. Watching a baseball game -- which used to mean a special trip to the ballpark -- is now as easy as turning on the TV, where there are dozens of channels devoted to sports.
"Today, kids have so many different options -- video games, Xboxes, the Internet," [Brian] Fleischer, [price guide editor for
Beckett Baseball], said. "It's not so exciting to spend a buck and get a card."
Colin Hagen, baseball's vice president for domestic licensing, agreed that too many children have turned away from card collecting. To reach out to them, Major League Baseball made sure that both Topps and Upper Deck focused increased marketing on the youth market with advertising on TV channels such as Nickelodeon and magazines such as
Sports Illustrated Kids.
Upper Deck has created a Web site where kids can enter codes from their baseball cards to rack up points for prizes. More than 160,000 children have signed on to the site to participate.
Pokemon and Yugioh have replaced baseball cards among kids.
Forbes lists the top 10 baseball cards of all time.A
"how-to" for baseball card collectors.
The Library of Congress has an online card collection of 2,100 cards from 1887 to 1914.
A timeline of baseball card history.
A Gas-Price Tipping PointMaybe we are about to reach a tipping point -- the price at which drivers will simply stop driving as much because gasoline prices are too high.
That is what may be happening right now in Washington state, where gasoline consumption is now at its lowest rate since 1968.
When I was in Vancouver, British Columbia, two weeks ago, gasoline was near four bucks a gallon -- it actually topped $4 last week. Last week I was in Wyoming, where the price of gas was about $3.50 a gallon.
Journalist Uncovers Broken Environmental Cleanup SystemAl's Morning Meeting reader Dan Stockman, a reporter at
The Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, Ind., dropped me this note:
The secret to the investigation was a trick in Microsoft Excel many people probably don't know exists -- the software can compare dates. We used it to see how much time passed between when polluters applied to the state's program and when they submitted clean-up plans and told the public about the contamination they caused. The results were not good.
What looks like some hardcore analysis was as simple as using Excel to perform subtraction and calculate averages, but the result was a great story.
Al's Morning Multimedia: Cool, New Weather StuffCheck out guiWeather, which maps lightning, tropical conditions and more on Google Maps.
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor's
Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story
excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as
original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly
from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided
whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends on the
accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and
inaccuracies found will be corrected.
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