Yesterday was deemed a day to appreciate your guns in America, and boy did we. Five people were shot at gun shows in North Carolina, Ohio and Indiana. These were not, however, the only instances of gun violence yesterday.

As happens everyday, numerous people were either injured or killed by guns on “Gun Appreciation Day,” be it on purpose or accidentally. Spanning Alaska to Florida, here are those people:

A 14-year-old suburban Atlanta boy shot and killed his 15-year-old brother while playing with their mother’s handgun.

A 26 year old was shot and killed while driving in San Francisco.

A man was found dead from a gunshot wound in his home in Kansas City, Kansas.

A woman in an El Paso County, Texas shooting range was hit in the knee by a bullet that ricocheted off a trash can.

Two women were shot to death in a Dallas-area home.

Two women were injured after someone opened fire at a crowded soccer field in Las Vegas.

A 15-year-old girl was shot while sleeping in her bed when her Anchorage home was shot at.

A 7-year-old boy in Tallahassee shot a 5 year old with a gun he found in a 22-year-old relative’s room.

A Huntsville woman shot her boyfriend after the two had an argument.

A 23-year-old man died after being accidentally shot in a Greshman, Oregon home.

A Cleveland father has been charged in connection with the death of his 6-year-old daughter from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

One man was shot in Elyria, Ohio, just west of Cleveland, early Saturday morning.

A man was found shot dead in a parking lot in Greenville County, South Carolina.

Two people were shot and killed outside an inn in Hampton, Virginia.

At least 10 people were shot in Chicago, at least two were fatal.

A Colorado Springs man was driven to the hospital with a gunshot wound.

A Jackson, Mississippi police officer was shot while responding to a disturbance call.

One man was shot at a Martin Luther King Jr. parade in Jackson.

Two men and one woman were shot at a home in Oakland.

An 11-year-old boy was shot in an Oklahoma City apartment complex.

Police in Richmond, Virginia are looking for three men who shot another man in his thirties.

Police believe gang violence is to blame for the shooting death of one man in Santa Ana, California.

An early morning shooting in Tuscaloosa injured two teenagers.

http://gawker.com/5977431/heres-a-list-of-people-injured-or-killed-by-guns-on-gun-appreciation-day

Chris Mooney | Thu Jan. 24, 2013 3:06 AM PST

In the mainstream political press, the standard practices of neutrality and balance carry with them an implicit assumption: that Democrats and Republicans are separate but equal in their ideological biases, with each group just as inclined to support its own team and attack the other side. The trouble is, data from psychologists and political scientists suggest that this might be a naïve approach. At worst, it may fundamentally misunderstand the nature of American politics.

The latest evidence on this head comes from pollster and political scientist Dan Cassino of Fairleigh Dickinson University. In a national survey, Cassino examined belief in political conspiracy theories on both the left and also the right. He did so by asking Americans about two "liberal" conspiracy beliefs—the 9/11 "Truther" conspiracy, and the idea that George W. Bush stole the 2004 election—and two conservative ones: the "Birther" theory that Obama was born in Kenya, and the claim that he stole the 2012 vote.

The results were hardly symmetrical. First, 75 percent of Republicans, but only 56 percent of Democrats, believed in at least one political conspiracy theory. But even more intriguing was the relationship between one's level of political knowledge and one's conspiratorial political beliefs. Among Democrats and Independents, having a higher level of political knowledge was correlated with decreased belief in conspiracies. But precisely the opposite was the case for Republicans, where knowledge actually made the problem worse. For each political knowledge question that they answered correctly, Republicans' belief in at least one conspiracy theory tended to increase by two percentage points.

What's up with this? Cassino views these data as just one more indicator of an "asymmetry" in how Democrats and Republicans, or liberals and conservatives, respond to politics—with Republicans tending to be more partisan and tribal (and in this particular case, more willing to believe conspiracies about their political opponents), and Democrats less so. And while Cassino admits that his latest study wouldn't, in and of itself, constitute definitive proof of ideological asymmetry, he thinks it fits into a bigger body of evidence.

The rest: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/conspiracy-theory-partisan-bias