Fear

"Everybody got a pistol. This must really please the NRA" -- from "Gun" by Gil Scott-Heron So maybe the NRA is about to get its wish. Here we are, a little over three weeks after the massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., a little over two weeks after the National Rifle Association said there should henceforth be armed guards at every school, and at least one school system, Marlboro Township in New Jersey, is taking its advice....

A national outbreak of fungal meningitis linked to a tainted steroid killed two Marylanders. Nearly two dozen people living with the disease and hundreds of others who may have been exposed fear they may be next. Sheila Smelkinson began suffering in July from pain in her lower back and right leg that kept the Pikesville resident awake for all but a few hours each night. Cortisone shots, one in August and a second in September, relieved her discomfort - until she received a call informing her the medication was among batches contaminated with fungus in a Massachusetts pharmaceutical facility.

I don't drink and I am a riflery enthusiast. Millions of Americans enjoy both. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drunk driving kills over 1,000 children each year. Banning alcohol because of drunk driving would be more logical than banning rifles because of shooting sprees ("Obama pushes on guns," Dec. 20). We are being asked to give up our Second Amendment rights out of irrational fear, just like we were asked to give up our Fourth Amendment rights after Sept.

Gun shops are calling it the "Obama gun stimulus. " Baltimore-area gun stores say they have seen a spike in sales of assault-type rifles and other semiautomatic weapons since the Sandy Hook elementary school shootings in Connecticut and the subsequent talk by President Barack Obama, Gov. Martin O'Malley and other politicians of gun restrictions. "Our numbers are even too high to give you a quote," said Jim Blucher, a salesman at Clyde's Sport Shop in Halethorpe. "Obama and O'Malley have become our best customers, politically.

Affable Barry Alvarez is back coaching the Wisconsin Badgers football team, and we're all better for it. Speaking the university's athletic board Friday, he revealed another motivation for the Big Ten to go after Maryland and Rutgers: keeping Penn State. The fear was that shifting conference footprints might leave Penn State feeling alienated on the East Coast and tempted to join another conference. With Pitt to the west and Syracuse to the north, it doesn't take much imagination to see that Penn State could have looked at the ACC. Here's Barry: “That northeast corridor, all the way to the south, continues to grow…[Big Ten commissioner]

Injuries may have sapped the Ravens of starting linebackers Ray Lewis and Terrell Suggs for Sunday's contest against the Washington Redskins, but the Ravens will still feature free safety Ed Reed in their defensive backfield. And the Redskins are fully aware of the eight-time Pro Bowler's potential to wreak havoc at FedEx Field. “Ed Reed, he's the top of that defense,” Washington's exciting rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III said after Wednesday's practice. “With Ray Lewis being out, he is the leader of that defense.

A 25-year-old Baltimore man who pleaded guilty to murder-for-hire and witness-murder conspiracy charges this year in the 2011 killing of a 19-year-old associate was sentenced Monday to 35 years behind bars, plus five years of supervised release, according to the Maryland U.S. attorney's office. Tavon Dameon Davis ordered the hit on 19-year-old Isiah Callaway after Callaway was arrested trying to open fraudulent bank accounts in Baltimore County in December 2010, prosecutors said.

The editors of the Associated Press Stylebook discourage the use of the word homophobia , and this is their explanation: "Phobia means irrational, uncontrollable fear, often a form of mental illness. In terms like homophobia, it's often speculation. The reasons for anti-gay feelings or actions may not be apparent. Specifics are better than vague characterizations of a person's general feelings about something. " Their ruling on this point in reasoned, principled, and wrong-headed.  An article at Slate   quotes George Weinberg, the psychologist who popularized the word in 1972, as why he used the term phobia : He identified people displaying an strongly vehement dislike of gay people.

By now all of the Twinkies, Ho Hos and other Hostess baked goods have been stripped from grocery store shelves — and countless tributes paid via Tweets, blogs and Facebook posts. After more than 80 years in business, Hostess declared it was going under last week, dropping off the last of its Wonder Bread and Zingers deliveries, possibly ending jobs for more than 18,000 people, and marking yet another sad demise of a venerable American business institution. Now, in a perhaps ill-fated 11th-hour round of negotiations with its workers, Hostess is struggling to escape the Great Recession sandpit, or get bought out. Yet this octogenarian snack king is really just the victim of another movement sweeping the country over the past couple decades: "low-fat" and "health food" trends, and the current government-sponsored anti-obesity campaign.

Michael Dubb's Greed and Fear took the overland route to victory in Saturday's feature at Laurel Park, the $100,000 Safely Kept Stakes for 3-year-old fillies. Sent to post at 4-1 under Horacio Karamanos for trainer Rudy Rodriguez, the Bob and John filly broke from the outside post in the field of nine, traveled four-wide down the backstretch, then swept up and around on the leaders around the turn and drew off in the stretch to an impressive, 11/4-length score in 1 minute, 25.13 seconds for the seven-furlong distance.