monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

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But you still seem unable to acknowledge the fact that handguns are used to more often than rifles during mass shootings.

I wasn't disputing that — I suggested that while the dead would be just as dead, the wounds inflicted by the higher velocity projectiles would be more horrific.

Why are you obsessing on those weapons.

When a gunman attacked a high school in Parkland, Fla., on Wednesday, killing 17 people, the event marked a depressingly familiar milestone.

As of this week, seven of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history have all happened since 2007. The Parkland massacre is now the eighth-deadliest attack.

The nation's mass-shooting problem seems to be getting worse. And the latest, most serious shootings all seem to have one new thing in common: the AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle.

The AR-15 typically has large magazines, shoots rounds at higher velocities than handguns, and leaves more complex wounds in victims.

In each one of the older shootings on the 10-deadliest list — including the 2007 attack on Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., that left 32 victims dead — the shooters carried handguns. (The exception is the 1984 San Ysidro massacre, where the gunman also used a shotgun and an Uzi semiautomatic carbine.)

But in all of the latest incidents — Newtown, Conn., in 2012; San Bernardino, Calif., in 2015; Orlando, Fla., in 2016; Las Vegas, 2017; Sutherland Springs, Texas, 2017 — the attackers primarily used AR-15 semiautomatic rifles.

There are a couple of theories that might suggest why AR-15s would be associated with deadlier attacks. AR-15 rifles shoot small but high-velocity .223-caliber rounds that often shatter inside victims' bodies, creating more devastating injuries than the wounds typically left by larger but lower-velocity handgun rounds.

Shooters also commonly use the rifles with 30-round magazines, which allow them to fire more rounds uninterrupted, compared with the smaller magazines commonly used in handguns.

Details were still coming in about Wednesday's shooting in Florida, but officials say the suspected gunman, Nikolas Cruz, 19, was armed with at least one AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and "countless magazines," according to Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel.

There's one thing that does make the Parkland massacre unusual. Of the 10 deadliest mass shootings, Cruz is the only suspected gunman who escaped, survived and will likely face trial — giving the public a chance to learn why the massacre happened.

By the way, tag abuse has ended. People can only add tags to their own threads now.

That prevents people from adding helpful tags to threads, but it also eliminates the name-calling tags.

Asked by CNBC whether Trump’s tariffs would apply to all countries, no exemptions, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross says this: “That’s what the president seemed to announce yesterday.”

Fox News Executive Editor and Executive Vice President John Moody, who’s been with the news network since 1996, has retired just one month after the network yanked a controversial column he penned about diversity in the Olympics.

A Fox News spokesperson confirmed Moody’s retirement Friday, telling TPM: “John Moody has retired from Fox News.”

A person close to the situation told CNN that Moody was already planning to retire before the backlash over his column, which slammed the U.S. Olympics for its efforts to attract a diverse group of athletes for the Winter Games.

“Unless it’s changed overnight, the motto of the Olympics, since 1894, has been ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger.’ It appears the U.S. Olympic Committee would like to change that to ‘Darker, Gayer, Different.’ If your goal is to win medals, that won’t work,” Moody wrote in the column that was deleted after it drew outrage early last month.

It’s possible that McMaster’s ouster has nothing to do with his views on North Korea, and that he’s merely being sacrificed for his various affronts to Donald Trump’s ego. It’s also possible that McMaster won’t end up being ousted at all.

But given the fact that he was apparently the “adult” in the White House most open to pushing an emotionally volatile reality star into a war with nuclear state, it’s hard to feel much concern at the thought of his exit.

The White House is preparing to replace H.R. McMaster as national security adviser as early as next month in a move orchestrated by chief of staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary James Mattis, according to five people familiar with the discussions.



…A leading candidate to become President Donald Trump’s third national security adviser is the auto industry executive Stephen Biegun, according to the officials.



Biegun, who currently serves as vice president of international governmental affairs for the Ford Motor Company, is no stranger to the White House. He served on the National Security Council staff from 2001 to 2003, including as a senior staffer for then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.



Rice introduced Biegun to Mattis, recommending him for a position in the administration, according to a close associate of Rice. After Mattis met with Biegun at a think tank event he was convinced Biegun would be a good fit for the national security adviser role, the associate said.



Two people close to Biegun said he would need several weeks to get his financial affairs in order to be able to join the administration this spring.

The most recent Pew Research Survey has more detail about the generational divide. It shows that the old saw that young people would naturally grow more conservative as they age, or that their Democratic loyalties were an idiosyncratic response to Barack Obama’s unique personal appeal, has not held. Younger voters have distinctly more liberal views than older voters:

It is hard to focus on this trend at a moment when Republicans have full control of government, and are heading into an election where gerrymandering gives them a large advantage in maintaining Congress. But this fact runs headlong against a much longer deterioration of the conservative position within the electorate. Many conservatives supported Trump precisely because they were panicked about this trend. So far, Trump is merely accelerating the demise they feared.

In the long run, as John Maynard Keynes quipped, “We are all dead.” But over the long run, the Republicans are especially dead.