Argument

More venom dripping from the fangs of many of the usual suspects today in the reader comments attached to the story of the midday armed robbery of a jewelry store in the Columbia mall. Much of the banter centers on the idea that bringing mass transit into Columbia from Baltimore and Washington will make such incidents more frequent. One commenter got blasted by others for suggesting that this premise constitutes thinly veiled racism. OK, for the sake of civility, I’ll take that protestation at face value.

The argument could be heard first, neighbors said. Then the police lights began flashing through their windows. Residents in Baltimore's Upton neighborhood, not unfamiliar with police activity, said they peered outside. A man they recognized as a neighbor lay on the concrete in just his boxer shorts, not moving much and apparently wounded, they said. "I heard the argument, and I came down to the first floor to look and saw all the police and the man laying on the ground. I thought it was a dead body," said Sanyika Fitzpatrick, a 15-year resident of Walton Court, a residential box of homes northwest of downtown and across Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard from Maryland General Hospital.

Although Dr. Benjamin Carson's same-sex marriage remark was an unfortunate enthymeme, surely well-educated Hopkins students have the intellectual capacity to understand the unstated premise of his argument ("Hopkins chides Carson for gay-marriage remarks," April 6): Once you reduce the qualification for marriage to a single characteristic for the sake of inclusiveness, you can't object to the word being used for any situation that fits that characteristic. Polygamists, for example, argue that they too enter into loving, caring relationships.

I grew up with guns in my house. There are guns in my house. I understand the sport of the shooting range and the sport of hunting. I understand the argument, while not finding it convincing, that guns in the home protect you. What I do not understand is any argument for assault weapons in private hands. Assault weapons were created to kill people - just as one did so effectively in the hands of a 20-year-old at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Now is the time to have a reasoned discussion of gun ownership and of gun control.

Lance Armstrong's well-orchestrated apology tour has brought back a bad memory: all the wasted hours I spent reading his book, "It's Not About the Bike. " I was one of many readers captivated by his dramatic tale: hot-headed young rider gets felled by testicular cancer, and battles back -- against disease and doubters -- to win the Tour de France. It made me a huge fan of Armstrong and the grueling race that takes cyclists around France.  But in light of the overwhelming evidence that Armstrong was not clean when he won the tour a record seven times (and seven straight)

Thank you for publishing "My word" by Maria Santo titled "Murder is not condoned by civilized societies; abortion should be illegal. "  Her article is a well-expressed argument of the biological facts  concerning conception and the terrible toll that abortion brings to the individual and our country.  There are life-affirming solutions to unplanned pregnancies which should be stressed to the mother.  She then will not have to live with...

A 68-year-old Baltimore man was in custody Friday, accused of killing his brother in a Thanksgiving Day argument. Harry Patterson Jr., who turns 69 Saturday, has been charged with first-degree murder, second-degree murder, two assault counts and a weapons charge after the stabbing death of his younger sibling, Robin Patterson, 51. Police said the incident occurred Thursday in the 4400 block of Belvieu Ave., and stemmed from an argument between...

So now the Republicans want to turn the debate over requiring insurance companies to cover contraceptives into a debate about religious freedom? They argue no one should be forced to support (with their tax dollars) activities that conflict with their religious views. I'll set aside for the moment the argument that insurers covering free contraceptives actually save money in the long run due to reduced health-care costs. I'll also set aside the fact that most Catholic women don't agree with the all-male bishopric that is setting the rules for them.

AUSTIN, Texas - Congratulations to the Supreme Court on its 6-3 decision in the Texas sodomy law case and to all those, including the gay rights groups and the American Civil Liberties Union, who have fought so long and hard to rid the legal system of this manifest injustice. The Sunday chat shows featured a number of curious contentions over this legal decision: It was interesting to see rank bigotry against gays trying to disguise itself as a legal argument. Justice Antonin Scalia was foremost in this camp, throwing a public tantrum devoid of legal reasoning over the decision.

I am disappointed in the narrow-minded view of the Sept. 6 letter, "Same-sex marriage amounts to experimenting on children. " The letter-writer states that "Marriage across time and culture has always been a loving, committed relationship between a man and a woman. " This statement does not take into account that over 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. What about unhappy marriages where a woman or man is being beaten or verbally abused by their spouse? She also states that "marriage provides a safe environment for children and connects them to their biological parents".

A lawyer for John Joseph Merzbacher, a former Catholic school teacher imprisoned for raping a student decades ago, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case after a federal appeals court rejected an earlier argument that he should be set free. In a 21-page petition, Merzbacher's attorney H. Mark Stichel asks the high court to resolve several legal questions, including whether a defendant's claim that he would have taken a plea deal if offered, even while proclaiming his innocence, demonstrates a "reasonable probability" that he would have followed through.

Although Dr. Benjamin Carson's same-sex marriage remark was an unfortunate enthymeme, surely well-educated Hopkins students have the intellectual capacity to understand the unstated premise of his argument ("Hopkins chides Carson for gay-marriage remarks," April 6): Once you reduce the qualification for marriage to a single characteristic for the sake of inclusiveness, you can't object to the word being used for any situation that fits that characteristic. Polygamists, for example, argue that they too enter into loving, caring relationships.

With blood still streaked on the doorway of a Southwest Baltimore home where a man was shot earlier in the morning, a woman who rented a room there nonchalantly recalled hearing the four shots. "After the first shot, I screamed and dropped to my knees and ran upstairs," said the woman, who identified herself as Cheryl Nancy, 25. Two of her four children stood on the front stoop, near a pack of cigarettes and a flask-sized bottle of vodka. It's not the first such incident of violence she's seen.

Baltimore Police say a man was stabbed to death early Sunday morning after apparently getting into an argument with two other people near the Inner Harbor. Police said the incident occurred at about 2:18 a.m. Sunday in the 200 block of East Pratt Street. The victim, identified by police as a 20-year-old black male, was leaving work when two individuals approached him and became engaged in an argument. The argument escalated and the victim was stabbed multiple times in the upper body, police said.

The 80-year-old man killed in Northeast Baltimore on Monday - after a punch caused him to fall and hit his head, police said - was the inspiration for the 1990s TV show "Roc. " John Wood formed the basis for the lead character on the Fox show portrayed by Baltimore actor Charles S. Dutton. Dutton grew up in Wood's neighborhood, and in the show portrayed a trash worker who believed in an honest day's work and went beyond his means to help his neighbors. Wood retired as a Baltimore sanitation worker after more than 35 years, his wife said.

A 45-year-old man has been charged with stabbing another man who he believed had damaged his motorcycle outside a Glen Burnie tavern late Sunday, Anne Arundel County Police said. The man, who police said was drunk, allegedly drove off and crashed his Harley Davidson at a nearby intersection after the altercation. Brian Scott Smith, of the unit block of Magnolia Avenue, has since been arrested and charged with multiple crimes in the incident, including attempted second-degree murder, police said.

In the third and final debate, Barack Obama scored huge points with the media, college kids and die-hard liberals -- in other words, his base -- when he mocked Mitt Romney's concern about our historically small Navy. "But I think Governor Romney maybe hasn't spent enough time looking at how our military works," the president said. "You -- you mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military's changed.

Police released have released new details about a double shooting that occurred early Monday in the Cedmont neighborhood in northeast Baltimore. The two men were shot around 1:35 a.m. police said, after getting into an argument with a third man who then pulled a gun on them. Police responded to a report of a shooting in the 4200 block of Belmar Ave. at 1:37 a.m., and found the makings of a crime scene, including blood, said Det. Kevin Brown, a police spokesman. Police were then called to a local hospital, where they found the two shooting victims, one with gunshot wounds in the leg and arm, and the other with a gunshot wound to the hip. A police investigation found that the two men got into a verbal dispute with another man after leaving a bar. The man pulled out a handgun and shot the two men as they tried to flee on foot.

Unless you waited in line for five days to get one of the coveted audience seats at the Supreme Court, you probably experienced this week's oral arguments on same-sex marriage as something of a Ken Burns film. Websites and TV broadcasters played audio of the proceedings as cameras panned over drawings made by courtroom artists. The only thing missing was some kind of soundtrack, maybe a dulcimer plucking folkishly, for it to be worthy of a PBS pledge drive. But if this treatment is evocative — or necessary, when a documentarian like Burns is working with a long-ago historical event such as, say, the Civil War or the early days of baseball — it seems downright archaic for something happening right now. Somehow, at a time when we've come to expect real-time access to news events everywhere else, what happens in the Supreme Court remains largely away from public view.

Regardless of whether the Supreme Court is ready to declare a constitutional right to gay marriage, it has the responsibility to fully recognize the decisions Maryland and eight other states, plus the District of Columbia, have made to allow same-sex couples to wed. There is little other conclusion that could be drawn from the arguments today on the constitutionality of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which banned all federal recognition of same-sex...