Close to home

Eighth-graders from Danvers as well as Swampscott were inside the Holocaust Museum in Washington earlier today when a white supremacist pulled out a gun, began shooting and killed a security officer. The Salem News and the Danvers Herald both report that none of the students were injured.

Two years ago, our daughter was on that annual trip and I was a chaperone. I'd been to the museum several years before that to do research for "Little People," my book on dwarfism. What happened today was a horrifying event.

We've now had three terrorist murders in the United States in the past few weeks — abortion doctor George Tiller, assassinated by a prolife extremist; Army recruiter William Long, gunned down by an apparent Muslim convert enraged by U.S. policy; and now this. What is going on?

Our terrorism manufacturing policy

In my latest for the Guardian, I write about the New York Times and the myth of Guantánamo recidivism.