In your Feb. 16 editorial, titled “Our View: We are not helpless to stop gun violence,” you made many compelling points, but you left out an often-neglected fact: Almost without exception, it is men who commit these heinous acts of violence. It is also men who are responsible for most domestic abuse, violent crime, sexual […]

Each morning I open my newspaper with fear and trepidation over what might have happened overnight, from preventable opioid overdoses, to tragic stories of child abuse and the deaths of children who fell through the cracks of a broken system. I encounter former students underemployed in service jobs or parents who sadly tell me their […]

I remember the National Rifle Association safety class taught in the spring of 1955, when I was in the seventh grade at Rollinsford Grade School in Salmon Falls, New Hampshire. The teacher brought a single-shot, .22-caliber rifle to school – with no ammunition that I remember – and the emphasis was on gun safety. Never […]

Greg Kesich’s Feb. 28 column, “Pro-gun faithful treat debate over gun policy more like a holy war,” is compelling in its case for gun reform and provocative in illuminating how gun ideology can become “a kind of religion.” There is, thankfully, another kind of religion altogether, and it can see us through our deadlock. There […]

I study birds for a living – I’m a wildlife biologist – and I love my job, because birds are truly amazing creatures. For example, a veery is a rust-colored thrush smaller than a robin, with a beautiful song. One veery, which sang near the Presumpscot River last summer, spent the previous winter in Brazil. […]