Facebook predicted to overtake Google in mobile display ad revenue this year

Shares of Facebook (FB) have begun to rebound since the company’s disastrous initial public offering this past May. After opening at $ 38 per share the company’s stock plummeted into the mid-20s over the summer months and eventually fell to a low of $ 17.55 in early September. Since then, however, Facebook shares have begun to bounce back after the company posted better-than-expected results in the third quarter. While Facebook stock is still down more than 25% on the year, it is rising steadily as analysts and investors become increasingly bullish about the company’s future as a leading advertising platform.

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According to a new report from eMarketer, Facebook is predicted to surpass Google (GOOG) in mobile display advertising in 2012. Google is expected to generate $ 339 million in mobile ad revenue this year, a significant increase from previous estimates of between $ 45 and $ 100 million. The research firm notes that Facebook is expected to capture an 18.4% share of the mobile display ad market in the U.S. this year, compared to Google’s 17% share, which is down from 23% in 2011.

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“Major ad publishers are strengthening their offerings much faster than previously expected,” said Clark Fredricksen, vice president of communications at eMarketer. “I don’t think anybody thought after the second quarter that Google and Facebook would be in position that they are now in the mobile ad marketplace.”

The company’s mobile ad revenue is expected to more than triple by 2014 when it will reach an estimated $ 1.2 billion. The firm predicts that Facebook and Google will continue to battle for the No.1 spot in the mobile ad market over the next few years. Facebook is expected to increase its lead to 25.2% in 2013, compared to Google’s 19.6% share. Google is estimated to bounce back in 2014, however, with a market leading 23.1% share, ahead of Facebook’s 22.7% share.

Despite the impressive numbers, eMarketer notes that mobile still represents a small slice of the total advertising market. In 2012, only 2.4% of total ad spending in the U.S. is expected to go towards mobile ads, but the market is expected to reach an 11% share by 2016 when it surpasses both radio and print spending.

This article was originally published by BGR

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Thousands mourn U.S.-Mexican singer Jenni Rivera

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Thousands of mourners on Wednesday packed a Los Angeles theater to pay their final respects to Mexican-American singer Jenni Rivera more than a week after her death in a plane crash.

Rivera, 43, best known for her work in the Mexican folk Nortena and Banda genres, died after the small jet she was traveling in crashed in northern Mexico on December 9.

Rivera’s family, dressed in white, led the memorial service eulogizing the singer. A bank of white roses was displayed in front of Rivera’s bright red coffin and a brass band performed musical interludes.

More than 6,000 people crowded into the theater about 30 miles north of her childhood home in Long Beach, California. Tickets for the service at the Gibson Amphitheatre sold out within minutes, organizers said.

The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Rivera was called the “Diva de la Banda.” She sold about 15 million albums and earned a slew of Latin Grammy nominations during her 17-year career.

“Jenni made it OK for women to be who they are,” her manager Pete Salgado said at the service. “Jenni also made it OK to be from nothing, with the hopes of being something.”

Rivera had five children, the first at age 15, and was married three times. Her third husband was baseball pitcher Esteban Loaiza. Rivera’s private life influenced her songs, which often referenced living through hardship.

“She’s a fighter and she knows it’s in all of us,” Rivera’s son Michael said between video tributes.

In recent years, Rivera branched out into television, appearing on a reality television show and serving as a judge on the Mexican version of the singing competition “The Voice.” Television broadcaster ABC was reported to be developing a comedy pilot for the singer.

Rivera’s plane crashed in mountains south of Monterrey killing all seven on board.

The singer was to perform in the city of Toluca, 40 miles southwest of Mexico City, in central Mexico after a concert in Monterrey. It is not clear what caused the crash.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Stacey Joyce)

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Female Vaccination Workers, Essential in Pakistan, Become Prey

LAHORE, Pakistan — The front-line heroes of Pakistan’s war on polio are its volunteers: young women who tread fearlessly from door to door, in slums and highland villages, administering precious drops of vaccine to children in places where their immunization campaign is often viewed with suspicion.

Now, those workers have become quarry. After militants stalked and killed eight of them over the course of a three-day, nationwide vaccination drive, the United Nations suspended its anti-polio work in Pakistan on Wednesday, and one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health campaigns has been plunged into crisis. A ninth victim died on Thursday, a day after being shot in the northwestern city of Peshawar, The Associated Press reported.

The World Health Organization and Unicef ordered their staff members off the streets, while government officials reported that some polio volunteers — especially women — were afraid to show up for work.

At the ground level, it is those female health workers who are essential, allowed privileged entrance into private homes to meet and help children in situations denied to men because of conservative rural culture. “They are on the front line; they are the backbone,” said Imtiaz Ali Shah, a polio coordinator in Peshawar.

The killings started in the port city of Karachi on Monday, the first day of a vaccination drive aimed at the worst affected areas, with the shooting of a male health worker. On Tuesday four female polio workers were killed, all gunned down by men on motorcycles in what appeared to be closely coordinated attacks.

The hit jobs then moved to Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, which, along with the adjoining tribal belt, constitutes Pakistan’s main reservoir of new polio infections. The first victim there was one of two sisters who had volunteered as polio vaccinators. Men on motorcycles shadowed them as they walked from house to house. Once the sisters entered a quiet street, the gunmen opened fire. One of the sisters, Farzana, died instantly; the other was uninjured.

On Wednesday, a man working on the polio campaign was shot dead as he made a chalk mark on the door of a house in a suburb of Peshawar. Later, a female health supervisor in Charsadda, 15 miles to the north, was shot dead in a car she shared with her cousin.

Yet again, Pakistani militants are making a point of attacking women who stand for something larger. In October, it was Malala Yousafzai, a schoolgirl advocate for education who was gunned down by a Pakistani Taliban attacker in the Swat Valley. She was grievously wounded, and the militants vowed they would try again until they had killed her. The result was a tidal wave of public anger that clearly unsettled the Pakistani Taliban.

In singling out the core workers in one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health initiatives, militants seem to have resolved to harden their stance against immunization drives, and declared anew that they consider women to be legitimate targets. Until this week, vaccinators had never been targeted with such violence in such numbers.

Government officials in Peshawar said that they believe a Taliban faction in Mohmand, a tribal area near Peshawar, was behind at least some of the shootings. Still, the Pakistani Taliban have been uncharacteristically silent about the attacks, with no official claims of responsibility. In staying quiet, the militants may be trying to blunt any public backlash like the huge demonstrations over the attack on Ms. Yousafzai.

Female polio workers here are easy targets. They wear no uniforms but are readily recognizable, with clipboards and refrigerated vaccine boxes, walking door to door. They work in pairs — including at least one woman — and are paid just over $2.50 a day. Most days one team can vaccinate 150 to 200 children.

Faced with suspicious or recalcitrant parents, their only weapon is reassurance: a gentle pat on the hand, a shared cup of tea, an offer to seek religious assurances from a pro-vaccine cleric. “The whole program is dependent on them,” said Mr. Shah, in Peshawar. “If they do good work, and talk well to the parents, then they will vaccinate the children.”

That has happened with increasing frequency in Pakistan over the past year. A concerted immunization drive, involving up to 225,000 vaccination workers, drove the number of newly infected polio victims down to 52. Several high-profile groups shouldered the program forward — at the global level, donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations and Rotary International; and at the national level, President Asif Ali Zardari and his daughter Aseefa, who have made polio eradication a “personal mission.”

On a global scale, setbacks are not unusual in polio vaccination campaigns, which, by dint of their massive scale and need to reach deep inside conservative societies, end up grappling with more than just medical challenges. In other campaigns in Africa and South Asia, vaccinators have grappled with natural disaster, virulent opposition from conservative clerics and sudden outbreaks of mysterious strains of the disease.

Declan Walsh reported from Lahore, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.

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F.T.C. Pushes Antitrust Inquiry Against Google Into January

WASHINGTON — Google was prepared to start the holidays early this week, by settling its antitrust dispute with federal regulators without a harsh punishment.

But in shelving its inquiry until January, the Federal Trade Commission has put stronger penalties back on the bargaining table, people briefed on the investigation who were not authorized to speak publicly about it said Wednesday.

For two years, the F.T.C. has been looking into whether Google abuses its market power by favoring its own services over rivals in search results. Google and the agency had been planning to sign a settlement this week that would have said Google would change some of its behavior but that would not have been subject to court action.

The agency may now demand a consent decree — a formal order detailing anticompetitive behavior and an agreement that if the company does the same thing again, it could be fined and subject to court sanctions. Google has instead offered voluntary concessions.

But the people briefed, and others close to the negotiations, said the agency was unlikely to take a second look at one of the major issues — Google’s dominance in specialized search, like travel and local reviews — because the legal hurdles remain high.

Google has long said that it does not believe it has broken antitrust laws and that the agency’s case against it is weak. Jill Hazelbaker, a Google spokeswoman, said that it continued to cooperate with the F.T.C. but declined to comment further.

Cecelia Prewett, an F.T.C. spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Competitors of Google called for the agency to use the additional time to take harsher legal action against Google. Failing to do so would hurt consumers in many ways, including by allowing Google too much control over private data, said Pamela Jones Harbour, a former F.T.C. commissioner and a lawyer representing Microsoft.

Supporters of Google said its case had already been made.

“If in 19 months they did not offer the kind of evidence and facts to support a case or conclude the behavior was such that it was posing legal difficulties, then frankly another couple weeks isn’t going to make a difference,” said Ed Black, chief executive of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, of which Google is a member.

Regulators’ decision to delay resolution of the case offered a glimpse of the tense negotiations and a series of missteps that have bedeviled the negotiations.

As details of a possible settlement appeared in news reports over the last week, Google’s competitors began arguing that a settlement without court-enforced sanctions was meaningless.

At the F.T.C., people close to the agency said, commissioners grew irked that they were being portrayed as spineless. In a parallel investigation, European regulators were said to be wringing a more stringent agreement from Google.

But it was unclear that Jon D. Leibowitz, the F.T.C. chairman, could get the two votes necessary to approve a tougher case against Google.

The five commissioners had yet to vote on possible sanctions. Julie Brill, a Democrat commissioner, supported strong antitrust action, while Edith Ramirez, the commission’s other Democrat, has resisted the strictest sanctions, said the people who have been briefed on the inquiry.

J. Thomas Rosch, a Republican, questioned whether the agency had the evidence to bring a case on search manipulation, but also expressed skepticism at a settlement that did not involve a consent decree, the people briefed said. Maureen K. Ohlhausen, the other Republican commissioner, opposed the government’s interference in private enterprise, they said.

Each of the commissioners and an F.T.C. spokeswoman declined to respond to queries about their views on the settlement.

Throughout the deliberations, both sides have complained about leaks to the news media of details of private meetings and settlement terms.

Edward Wyatt reported from Washington and Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 20, 2012

An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled the surname of the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission as Liebowitz, rather than Leibowitz.

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Robert Bork, failed Supreme Court nominee, dies at age 85

Robert H. Bork, whose failed Supreme Court nomination in 1987 infuriated conservatives and politicized the confirmation process for the ensuing decades, died Wednesday at the age of 85. 

The former Yale law professor and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit had a history of heart problems and had been in poor health for some time.

But Bork was a towering figure for an early generation of conservatives. In the 1960s and '70s, he argued that a liberal-dominated Supreme Court was abusing its power and remaking American life by ending prayers in public schools, by extending new rights to criminals, by ordering cross-town busing and by voiding the laws against abortion.

He was an influential legal advisor in the Nixon administration and served as a footnote to history in the Watergate scandal. When the embattled president ordered the firing of special counsel Archibald Cox, the attorney general and his deputy resigned in protest. Bork, who was in the No. 3 post as U.S. solicitor general, then carried out Nixon’s order.

But Bork’s biggest moment came during the Reagan administration in the 1980s. He left Yale and came to Washington when Reagan appointed him to the U.S. court of appeals in the District of Columbia. The job was seen as a steppingstone to the high court.

In 1986, Bork was passed over for a younger colleague when Reagan named Judge Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court. A year later, Bork’s turn came when Justice Lewis Powell, the swing vote on the closely divided court, announced his retirement.

Democrats, led by Sen. Edward Kennedy, launched an all-out attack on Bork’s nomination, saying he would set back the cause of civil rights, women’s rights and civil liberties.

The summer of 1987 saw campaign-style attacks on Bork’s reputation.  In televised hearings, the bearded, heavy-set professor tried to explain his views, but he won few converts. The Senate defeated his nomination by a 58-42 vote.

In his place, Reagan eventually chose Judge Anthony Kennedy, who was confirmed unanimously. The switch proved to have lasting consequences. Kennedy cast decisive votes to uphold Roe vs. Wade and to preserve the ban on school-sponsored prayers.

Bork stepped down from the bench a year after his defeat, but wrote several books renewing his criticism of liberalism. In the past year, he served as a chairman of Mitt Romney’s advisory committee on the judiciary and the courts.

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Facebook CEO Zuckerberg donating $500M in stock

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he is donating nearly $ 500 million in stock to a Silicon Valley charity with the aim of funding health and education issues.

Zuckerberg donated 18 million Facebook shares, valued at $ 498.8 million based on their Tuesday closing price. The beneficiary is the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a nonprofit that works with donors to allocate their gifts.

This is Zuckerberg’s largest donation to date. He pledged $ 100 million in Facebook stock to Newark, N.J., public schools in 2010, before his company went public earlier this year. Later in 2010, he joined Giving Pledge, an effort led by Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. CEO Warren Buffett to get the country’s richest people to donate most of their wealth. His wife, Priscilla Chan, joined with him.

In a Facebook post Tuesday, Zuckerberg, 28, said he’s “proud of the work” done by the foundation that his Newark donation launched, called Startup: Education, which has helped open charter schools, high schools and others.

With the latest contribution, he added, “we will look for areas in education and health to focus on next.” He did not give further details on what plans there may be for funds.

“Mark’s generous gift will change lives and inspire others in Silicon Valley and around the globe to give back and make the world a better place,” said Emmett D. Carson, CEO of the foundation.

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“Best Funeral Ever” premiere delayed after Newtown school shootings

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Fans of death-centric reality TV will have to wait a little longer to dig into TLC‘s “Best Funeral Ever.”

TLC has pushed back the premiere of the special to January 6 at 10/9c in light of the school shootings in Newtown, Conn. last week.

“Best Funeral Ever” was initially scheduled to premiere on December 26 at 8/7c.

“Best Funeral Ever” centers around the Golden Gate Funeral Home in Dallas, which specializes in elaborate specialty funerals catering to the deceased’s interest. In the special, a doo-wop singer famous for his rib-sauce jingle receives a barbecue-themed sendoff, while a disabled man who was unable to ride roller coasters in mortal life receives a State Fair-themed funeral.

Since last Friday’s horrific shootings, a number of programs and other entertainment-related events have been moved out of sensitivity. Syfy, for one, decided not to air its scheduled episode of “Haven” on Friday night, because it contained elements of fictionalized school violence.

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Lawyer Says Ritual Circumcision Is Protected Activity

A lawyer for Orthodox Jewish groups asked a federal judge on Tuesday to throw out a New York City regulation requiring parents to sign a consent form before their infant sons undergo a form of Jewish ritual circumcision in which the circumciser uses his mouth to remove blood from the incision.

The lawyer, Shay Dvoretzky, said the practice, which is prevalent in parts of the ultra-Orthodox community, is a constitutionally protected religious activity. He said that requiring ritual circumcisers, known collectively as mohelim, to be involved in conveying the city’s perspective on the procedure would infringe upon their rights of free speech.

“That lies at the heart of First Amendment protection,” Mr. Dvoretzky said.

But a lawyer for the city argued that the regulation was necessary and that the practice most likely caused 11 herpes infections in infants between 2004 and 2011. Two of the infected babies died; at least two others suffered brain damage.

“The health department is not looking at the religion in determining what to do about this conduct,” said Michelle L. Goldberg-Cahn, a lawyer for the city. “The city is looking at the conduct.”

The Orthodox groups, including Agudath Israel of America and the Central Rabbinical Congress, sued the city in October to block the regulation, which was approved by the New York City Board of Health in September but is suspended until a ruling is issued in this case. The groups say that the procedure is safe and that the city has not definitively linked infections to the practice.

Infectious disease experts, several of whom filed briefs in support of the regulation, widely agree that the oral contact, known in Hebrew as metzitzah b’peh, creates a risk of transmission of herpes that can be deadly to infants because of their underdeveloped immune systems.

On Tuesday, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald, of Federal District Court in Manhattan, heard oral arguments in the case, one that pits the sanctity of ancient religious rituals against the rigors of both modern medicine and secular government regulation. She said her decision would come within a few weeks.

Her sharpest inquiries were directed at Mr. Dvoretzky, the lawyer for the Orthodox groups.

She raised a hypothetical situation in which a single religious group amputates left pinkie fingers at birth, and asked Mr. Dvoretzky whether the city would have the authority to regulate the activity. He said it would depend upon whether the practice caused immediate, serious harm.

Judge Buchwald also said there was a direct comparison to consent requirements placed on physicians when they perform a circumcision.

Mr. Dvoretzky called that an “apples and oranges” comparison, because a physician would not perform a metzitzah b’peh.

“Wait a second,” Judge Buchwald interrupted. “They can’t perform any circumcision without consent. It’s a surgery.”

Mr. Dvoretzky said the city should undertake a broad education campaign, to prevent all infant herpes infections.

But Judge Buchwald said such a campaign would have little impact, because the risk of infections is medically well-known.

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Newport Beach dock renters may withhold holiday love

Marcy Cook embraces the holiday season. The tell? Start with the teddy bears dressed as Santa. More than 1,500 stand sentry around and inside her Newport Beach waterfronthome. Garland and strings of lights threaten to strangle the place like kudzu.

"We decorate a little bit, if you haven't noticed," said Cook, 69. "It's the highlight of the year for us."

Each Christmas, Newport Harbor is ablaze in lights as homeowners go to extraordinary lengths to complement the city's annual Christmas Boat Parade — an indelible tradition that renews itself Wednesday night and continues through Sunday.

But this has been a stressful season here along the tranquil waterfront lined with multimillion-dollar homes.

An increase in city rental fees for residential docks that protrude over public tidelands created a furor when it was approved last week by the City Council.

It also prompted a call to boycott the boat parade and festival of lights by a group calling itself "Stop the Dock Tax."

"It costs us thousands of dollars to voluntarily decorate our homes and boats to bring holiday smiles to nearly 1 million people," organization Chairman Bob McCaffrey wrote to the city. "This year, we are turning off our lights and withdrawing our boats in protest of the massive new dock tax we expect the City Council to levy."

Pete Pallette, a fellow boycott proponent and harbor homeowner, told city leaders the group would call off the boycott only if the council delayed voting on the rent hike. "Otherwise," he vowed, "game on."

In a place where homes come with names and mega-yachts bob in the harbor, it might appear the wealthy are wielding a weapon most often reserved for the masses. A holiday blackout, proponents say, will underscore their displeasure.

Newport's dock fee, which has stood at $100 a year for the last two decades, will now be based on a dock's size. The city says rents will increase to about $250 for a small slip to $3,200 annually for a large dock shared by two homeowners.

"People have been paying $8 a month all these years to access what is public waters," said Newport Beach City Manager Dave Kiff. "That's a pretty good deal. The City Council didn't think the increase it approved was too extreme."

Many did.

They packed council meetings when the hike was discussed, accusing the city of an excessive money grab.

They brushed aside the city's rationale: Statelawmandates cities charge fair market rents for the private use of public lands, and Newport Beach was only now catching up.

And they were unmoved by arguments that the extra revenue will go exclusively to badly needed repairs to a harbor that, despite outward appearances, needs a lot of work.

The city's five-year plan for the harbor calls for $29 million in long-overdue maintenance. Its silt-filled channels haven't been fully dredged since the Great Depression. Ancient, leaky sea walls protecting neighborhoods need to be repaired or replaced.

"We have the makings of a perfect storm like they did on the East Coast" during Superstorm Sandy, said Chris Miller, the city's harbor resources manager. "The sea walls are nearing the end of their useful life."

Even with the rent increases, Newport's dock owners will contribute a tiny fraction of that cost — the rest coming from the federal government and the city's general operating fund.

As dock owners fumed over having to pay more, others recoiled at the proposed boycott of the boat parade, which dates to 1908 when a single gondola led eight canoes illuminated by Japanese lanterns around the harbor. It has now swelled to a decent-sized armada of dozens of boats — some carrying paying customers — that circle past the decorated harbor-front homes.

"The boycott is ridiculous," said Shirley Pepys, whose frontyard on Balboa Island has been taken over by a family of penguins dressed for a Hawaiian luau.

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Mind: A Misguided Focus on Mental Illness in Gun Control Debate

The gunman, Adam Lanza, 20, has been described as a loner who was intelligent and socially awkward. And while no official diagnosis has been made public, armchair diagnosticians have been quick to assert that keeping guns from getting into the hands of people with mental illness would help solve the problem of gun homicides.

Arguing against stricter gun-control measures, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and a former F.B.I. agent, said, “What the more realistic discussion is, ‘How do we target people with mental illness who use firearms?’ ”

Robert A. Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute, told The New York Times: “To reduce the risk of multivictim violence, we would be better advised to focus on early detection and treatment of mental illness.”

But there is overwhelming epidemiological evidence that the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts. Only about 4 percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness.

This does not mean that mental illness is not a risk factor for violence. It is, but the risk is actually small. Only certain serious psychiatric illnesses are linked to an increased risk of violence.

One of the largest studies, the National Institute of Mental Health’s Epidemiologic Catchment Area study, which followed nearly 18,000 subjects, found that the lifetime prevalence of violence among people with serious mental illness — like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder — was 16 percent, compared with 7 percent among people without any mental disorder. Anxiety disorders, in contrast, do not seem to increase the risk at all.

Alcohol and drug abuse are far more likely to result in violent behavior than mental illness by itself. In the National Institute of Mental Health’s E.C.A. study, for example, people with no mental disorder who abused alcohol or drugs were nearly seven times as likely as those without substance abuse to commit violent acts.

It’s possible that preventing people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other serious mental illnesses from getting guns might decrease the risk of mass killings. Even the Supreme Court, which in 2008 strongly affirmed a broad right to bear arms, at the same time endorsed prohibitions on gun ownership “by felons and the mentally ill.”

But mass killings are very rare events, and because people with mental illness contribute so little to overall violence, these measures would have little impact on everyday firearm-related killings. Consider that between 2001 and 2010, there were nearly 120,000 gun-related homicides, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Few were perpetrated by people with mental illness.

Perhaps more significant, we are not very good at predicting who is likely to be dangerous in the future. According to Dr. Michael Stone, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia and an expert on mass murderers, “Most of these killers are young men who are not floridly psychotic. They tend to be paranoid loners who hold a grudge and are full of rage.”

Even though we know from large-scale epidemiologic studies like the E.C.A. study that a young psychotic male who is intoxicated with alcohol and has a history of involuntary commitment is at a high risk of violence, most individuals who fit this profile are harmless.

Jeffery Swanson, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University and a leading expert in the epidemiology of violence, said in an e-mail, “Can we reliably predict violence?  ‘No’ is the short answer. Psychiatrists, using clinical judgment, are not much better than chance at predicting which individual patients will do something violent and which will not.”

It would be even harder to predict a mass shooting, Dr. Swanson said, “You can profile the perpetrators after the fact and you’ll get a description of troubled young men, which also matches the description of thousands of other troubled young men who would never do something like this.”

Even if clinicians could predict violence perfectly, keeping guns from people with mental illness is easier said than done. Nearly five years after Congress enacted the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, only about half of the states have submitted more than a tiny proportion of their mental health records.

How effective are laws that prohibit people with mental illness from obtaining guns? According to Dr. Swanson’s recent research, these measures may prevent some violent crime. But, he added, “there are a lot of people who are undeterred by these laws.”

Adam Lanza was prohibited from purchasing a gun, because he was too young. Yet he managed to get his hands on guns — his mother’s — anyway. If we really want to stop young men like him from becoming mass murderers, and prevent the small amount of violence attributable to mental illness, we should invest our resources in better screening for, and treatment of, psychiatric illness in young people.

All the focus on the small number of people with mental illness who are violent serves to make us feel safer by displacing and limiting the threat of violence to a small, well-defined group. But the sad and frightening truth is that the vast majority of homicides are carried out by outwardly normal people in the grip of all too ordinary human aggression to whom we provide nearly unfettered access to deadly force.

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