Under the Radar

America's New Year's Resolution: Gun Safety

The fantastical fears of the '50s and '60s have been replaced by the very real fears of the 21st century, writes our Moorestown columnist.

It was business as usual as I shared another New Year’s Eve with Rod Serling: He smoked, I ate my weight in cookies left over from the holiday baking orgy. It was inevitable we would find ourselves together again, Rod and I, since we’ve been a pre-midnight duo for at least 12 years. For those of us growing up in the '50s and '60s, the Twilight Zone was our “must-see” TV. We were as obsessed with spacemen as young’uns today are smitten with vampires. We fretted about flying saucers. We practiced hiding under our desks and in coatrooms during frequent air raid drills at our sturdy brick schools. We envied our neighbor’s bomb shelter with its orderly rows of Campbell’s soups and olive-drab gas masks, and whined for one of our own. On the last…

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Ryan Lanza, Wrongly Named As Mass Murderer, Left To Grieve

Hoboken man learns his brother allegedly killed 27 people, including their mother.

Ryan Lanza was at his job in Manhattan on Friday when news outlets began to report that he allegedly had massacred 20 school children in a sleepy Connecticut town. The reports said Lanza, a 24-year-old Quinnipiac University graduate, had murdered someone in his Hoboken apartment and then drove to Newtown, Conn., where he used a .223 caliber rifle to kill 27 people before turning the gun on himself. The dead included his mother, Nancy, a kindergarten teacher. Lanza's thoughts quickly went to his developmentally disabled younger brother, Adam, whom he began to fear was connected to the violence at Sandy Hook Elementary School, friends said. As media reports continued to connect Ryan Lanza to the shooting and plastered his face across world, …

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