Public Policy Commons^™

Thoughts And Prayers, Chloe Kardasopoulos

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Examining the symbolic Gun against its tangible counterpart illuminates abstract attachments of power and superiority this nation associates with the weapon. These elements loaded in the Gun transform the weapon into an object representative of American identity. Analyzing ideological commitments within the Gun guides a critical response to examine disproportionately increasing national gun violence against stagnant federal gun control. The ongoing gun debate must be analyzed in its entirety, beginning at its source - the Second Amendment. Scholars such as Gary Wills dissect the Second Amendment to extract its contextualized intent from modern writers’ manipulated interpretations. It is not the …

1911 Triangle Factory Fire — Building Safety Codes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

Can a crime make our world better? Crimes are the worst of humanity’s wrongs but, oddly, they sometimes do more than anything else to improve our lives. As it turns out, it is often the outrageousness itself that does the work. Ordinary crimes are accepted as the background noise of our everyday existence but some crimes make people stop and take notice – because they are so outrageous, or so curious, or so heart-wrenching. These “trigger crimes” are the cases that this book is about.

They offer some incredible stories about how people, good and bad, change the world around …

Crimes That Changed Our World: Tragedy, Outrage, And Reform: Chapter One: 1911 Triangle Factory Fire: Building Safety Codes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

This first chapter of the recently published book Crimes That Changed Our World: Tragedy, Outrage, and Reform, examines the process by which the tragic 1911 Triangle Factory Fire provoked enormous outrage that in turn created a local then national movement for workplace and building safety that ultimately became the foundation for today’s building safety codes. What is particularly interesting, however, is that the Triangle Fire was not the worst such tragedy in its day. Why should it be the one that ultimately triggers social progress?

The book has 21 chapters, each of which traces the tragedy-outrage-reform dynamic in a …