US ends ban of women in combat

On Wednesday, military officials announced that the United States will formally lift the ban on women serving in front line combat. Women have served in hostile combat before, but this announcement tears down another societal military barrier, especially following the Pentagon's decision to end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and allow openly gay people to serve in the military. According to the article, 84 women have died in combat in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 11 years, accounting for two percent of all casualties. A few countries have allowed women to serve on the front lines, such as Canada and Israel, but the need for women to fill these roles is apparently marginal.

I feel that if women do well in their training exercises and perform well in all the categories their superiors will be comparing them to other soldiers, then they should be allowed to fight in more hostile, combat situations, provided they want to. I think more monumental changes like this and the scrapping of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" will continue to open up job opportunities and break down discriminatory boundaries. How do you feel about the Pentagon's most recent announcement?

Albuquerque shooting leaves five dead

In New Mexico, five people are dead in what appears to be a family shooting. Just two months removed from the Sandy Hook massacre, an assault rifle is involved in another deadly shooting. Five people, including three elementary school age children, were found dead in their home outside Albuquerque on Sunday. The sheriff of Bernalillo County, Dan Houston, believes the main suspect to be a 15 year old boy who may or may not be a family member.

To me, it sounds like a teenager killing his two younger brothers and one younger sister, and then both of his parents. I have to wonder how somebody his age was able to acquire such a high caliber weapon. Assault rifles have been at the forefront of the argument against gun control lately, so this could be another example of why they need to be made much harder to get. Perhaps the gun was his father's. Either way, it seems like the problem here was that the boy had some serious issues with his family, and I think that schools, pediatricians, and especially parents need to make sure kids like this don't fall into this same dangerous path. Perhaps conversation and nonviolent conflict resolution should be stressed more in America's schools. On the other hand, we often see murders like this where people who knew the killer said he or she never showed any signs of being disturbed or being unstable in any way. It appears we need to diagnose troubled children, teens, and young adults sooner so we can more quickly get them the help they need to prevent more senseless violent crimes like the one in this article.

Do you think the problem is the availability of guns to teenagers, or adults close to the shooter not being able to get him help soon enough? Let me know in the comments.

All about me

I was born in Omaha in 1997 and grew up here. In my childhood, I went to Saint Pius X elementary school. My family owns a cabin on a lake roughly 45 minutes away from Omaha in Cedar Creek. When I was younger we would spend the weekends out at the cabin, but for the past year or so we’ve been essentially living out there full time. I love the lake, for swimming and waterskiing and boating. Several years back my dad and I built a waterslide using a lot of lumber from Menards and kitchen linoleum. Its length exceeds 150 feet and you can get some pretty serious speed on it. When it’s really cold in the winter like it is presently, the lake freezes over and the ice can get pretty thick. That’s when the waterslide transforms into a luge track for sledding on. A lot of people know that I’m pretty knowledgeable about football, particularly college. What people don’t know is that when I was a kid, I didn’t even like football. I never watched it or understood the rules, much to the dismay of my football-loving dad. One day, my dad rented Madden Football 2004 for GameCube from Blockbuster, and when I first played it, I couldn’t get enough. I played hours as the Seattle Seahawks, who would soon become my favorite team. Eventually, I began to watch more football on Saturdays and Sundays and learned the basic rules, and my dad and I would watch college football and he’d point out some of the subtler and less common rules. My focus shifted from professional to collegiate football, and these days I watch, probably unhealthy, amounts of college football each weekend. I guess that's pretty much it.