It's become routine now. Not long after news breaks of a mass shooting words like "gun control," "gun free zones," and "Second Amendment" begin to float around. We never have a serious conversation after such tragedies because the debate is always reduced to basic talking points that come without thorough consideration. The obvious questions are ignored. Instead, we get the same debate between people like conservative commentator Dana Loesch and CNN personality Piers Morgan.

Mark Twain once said that history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

“In the era of voting wars, the right to vote is itself subject to continued partisan, regional, and racial conflict.  It is time to resolve the fights and fulfill the promise of American democracy, by joining together in an effort to make the right to vote, at last, a part of our basic covenant as a nation.”  (Jonathan Soros & Mark Schmitt, “The Missing Right:  A Constitutional Right to Vote,” Democracy:  A Journal of Ideas, Spring 2013. 

Mivr / shutterstock.com

Poverty is increasingly becoming a deterrent to academic achievement. Research indicates that 46.2 million Americans, or about 15 percent of the population, lived in poverty in 2011. Nationally, 22 percent of children live in poverty.

Few people have been talking about how the Syrian conflict will affect the 2016 presidential elections, but there is a high chance that it will.

DavidPino Photography //

Revolutions! Coups! Internal and multinational tension! Economic sanctions! Chemical weapons! Russian ally! Many of these terms can describe the goings-on in any number of Middle Eastern nations, but they all apply to Iran, the regional superpower. Unfortunately, Russia is planning on selling weapons to Iran as leverage for the U.S. not to strike Syria.