United States – Page 61

Americans flock to Batman movie, regardless

The three 18-year-olds, friends since middle school, are about to go off separately to college this fall. But on Sunday, these avid fans of the Batman film franchise had no doubt where they wanted to be: Together, at the movies, watching “The Dark Knight Rises.”

“What happened in Colorado was horrible, but that guy was just a psycho,” said Sahil Agrawal, of Queens in New York City, waiting with friends David Kim and Danny Wong for an Imax showing on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “This wasn’t going to change our plans.”

The three were typical of hordes of fans who packed theaters across the country over the weekend, keeping plans to see the final installment of the phenomenally successful Batman trilogy despite Friday’s horrific shooting in Colorado. Despite the occasional jitter – reflected in the choice of a back-row seat, perhaps, or a glance to see what security was in place – the fans seemed determined to look beyond the shooting.

“I’m not going to let some nut who shoots people dictate what I’m going to do,” said Ron Bondy, 36, in Bismarck, N.D., a sentiment echoed by fans all over the country.

Not that there weren’t some evident qualms among moviegoers. At the same theater in Bismarck, Jen Jackson had insisted upon one thing to her husband: They were going to sit in the back row in case they needed to get out fast. The 29-year-old architect was also forgoing the popcorn – not as a precaution, but because nerves had stolen her appetite.

“I’ll be honest, I’m kind of scared,” said Jackson. She had hesitated to come at all. But her husband, Patrick, standing alongside her, was pragmatic: “I don’t think anything would happen in Bismarck.”

Warner Bros. and other studios banded together to withhold the usual weekend revenue reports until Monday, a day later than usual, out of respect for the victims. But industry estimates suggested the film was on track to be the third highest opening weekend ever, after “The Avengers” and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2.”

Katie Birkel had no intention of missing the occasion. She was at a Manhattan showing along with three friends, celebrating one of their birthdays. Birkel said she had been inspired by a statement from the film’s director, Christopher Nolan, after the tragedy, which occurred at the midnight showing in Aurora, Colo.

“He said that movies are about coming together and sharing an experience,” noted Birkel, 28. “I agree with that.”

Mike Sumner, standing a few steps behind her in a Batman T-shirt, said he was comforted by seeing the NYPD outside the theater – at least two officers were patrolling outside. “Colorado was an isolated incident,” he said. “I’m not afraid of copycats. Besides, I’m a New Yorker. We’re always vigilant.”

Police were also visible outside a theater in McAllen, Texas, near the Mexico border, where an officer firmly waved away drivers who attempted to stop in front.

Inside, Juan Carlos Rivera waited with his mother-in-law and his wife. The 38-year-old Brownsville resident said the family had been big fans of the first two movies and wouldn’t want to skip the third.

“It looks like it was an isolated incident,” Rivera said of the mass shooting. He said he’d probably sit on the aisle – not out of fear, but because his wife was pregnant and might need the restroom. “You can’t allow a random event like that to terrorize you,” he said.

Besides, many said in interviews, what was the chance that lightning would strike twice?

“I don’t think that that many people are crazy enough,” reasoned Dayna Freeman of Kansas City, Mo.

Her date, Tom Meyer, added that the theater – the Cinemark Palace at The Plaza – had excellent security. The two had bought their tickets on Sunday, but like most interviewed, they said the shooting in no way had sparked their curiosity. “No, I can’t imagine anything like that,” said Meyer.

Meyer added that he didn’t think the content of the movie had anything to do with the crime: “You can’t really attribute the actions of a nut to the movies,” he said. “Two years ago, he would have picked `Avatar.'”

Still, despite sharing that logic, some were showing nerves. In Hollywood, Fla., Steve Parenteau, 45, said he wasn’t thinking at all about the shooting. But his 13-year-old son, Noah, looked solemn, saying the Colorado tragedy was on his mind. “It’s scary,” he said. “I can picture it.”

And at a multiplex in downtown Chicago, roommates Sarah Cantor and Brittany Carter avoided a midnight showing. “I was relieved to know that we were going to a matinee,” said Cantor, 23.

Still, most moviegoers echoed the feeling that the attack could have happened anywhere, anytime.

“Things are going to happen wherever they’re going to happen, because people are nuts wherever,” said Rachel Cox, who saw the movie at Atlanta’s Midtown Arts Cinema. “Crazy travels, so I don’t really think it has anything to do with geography or the movie … crazy people are crazy.” Still, she added, she planned to sit in the back – because she likes the view from there, but also because she considered it safer, even before Colorado.

In midtown Manhattan, Randy Cordero and Megan Rivera sat on the pavement outside an AMC Loews Theater, waiting with soft drinks and a magazine for a late-afternoon show. They’d bought their tickets online Saturday, and said the shooting hadn’t affected their plans. They’d hoped for a midnight showing, but it was sold out.

“I don’t think it’ll happen to me, but it can always happen,” noted Cordero. But Rivera said there was one thing that would indeed cause her some concern: seeing someone in costume, especially as the Joker (New York’s police commissioner, Ray Kelly, said the shooter, James Holmes, had his hair painted red and said he was the Joker, but Aurora police have not confirmed that.) “I’d feel more cautious, and I’d think, `I’ve got to watch that guy,'” she said.

Waiting for an earlier show at the same theater was Devin Favors, 24, an event ticket broker from Brooklyn. He said he’d bought his ticket last week, but even if he hadn’t, nothing would have stopped him from seeing the movie.

After all, he said, “This is America. And you should be able to go where you want to go, and see what you want to see.” – AP

No use looking for mass murder motives, says US expert

Tempting as it might be, it’s futile to dwell on the motives behind a mass murder like the one at the midnight Batman screening in Colorado, a police officer turned threat assessment expert says.

Doing so means diverting critical attention from the real objective –spotting telltale behavior in an individual about to perpetrate a bloodbath, said Steve Albrecht in a telephone interview.

“We’re all shocked (but) it certainly doesn’t make people feel any better to know what the motive is,” said Albrecht, who heads the San Diego branch of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals.

“I’d want to working on interrupting the opportunity (to commit a mass murder), to stop these guys when they exhibit those (suspicious or worrisome) behaviours early on.”

James Holmes, 24, is suspected of donning a mask and body armor, then opening fire during a midnight showing of the latest Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado, killing at least 12 people and wounding nearly 60 others.

The bloodbath shocked Americans, even though the United States sees about 20 mass murders — defined as three or more deaths at the hands of a single perpetrator in a single uninterrupted incident — every year.

Albrecht, a former police officer in Holmes’ hometown San Diego who holds psychology and business degrees, is co-author of “Ticking Bombs: Defusing Violence in the Workplace” and advises businesses on threat assessment.

Speaking to AFP within 24 hours of Friday’s tragedy, Albrecht speculated that the Colorado gunman — who has yet to appear in court — was likely a “serial loser” in search of infamy.

Many troubled people never get beyond fantasizing about committing an act of violence, but “here’s a guy whose probably ruminated over this for weeks and months and moved from ideas to action,” he said.

“It was a lot of pre-attack preparation for a guy who’s hard to notice because he’s not part of an organized group or on a terror watch list. It’s very difficult to stop these people.”

Albrecht added: “I suspect we’re going to discover that the guy had a lot of issues that he chose to solve through this method” of raking a midnight movie audience with gunfire.

Prior to the Columbine high school massacre, in which two students cut down 12 students and a teacher in 1999 before killing themselves, law enforcement agencies concentrated on building profiles of mass killers, Albrecht explained.

But as it emerged that anyone of any age, race, gender or socio-economic background could and did commit mass murder, the focus swung towards picking out acts of behavior that would reveal a solitary killer in the making.

“Now we’re really looking at behavior and moving away from profiling,” he said, recalling how a 1998 rampage in an Arkansas school in which five died had been carried out by two boys aged just 13 and 11.

Typical questions to ask: “What were the pre-attack behaviors that this guy exhibited? What were the relationship failures, relationship problems that he had? Was he disconnected from society and disconnected from reality?”

Elaborating on an essay he wrote on the topic for Psychology Today magazine, Albrecht said people “tend to rationalize the irrational behavior of the people around us” and thus skip over signs of an individual on the verge of violence.

“My suspicion is that they’re going to learn a lot of things (about the Aurora gunman), and that people were very concerned about this guy — but didn’t know what to do.” – AFP

Obama, Romney silent on gun control after theater shooting

The shooting that killed 12 people at a Colorado movie theater sidetracked the U.S. presidential race but President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney both stayed away from the polarizing topic of gun control.

The massacre Friday obliged both candidates to cast aside the increasingly bitter tone of the race and reach for a rare moment of American harmony. Obama and Romney swiftly stripped their day of overt campaigning that surely would have seemed crass given the enormity of the tragedy.

“There are going to be other days for politics,” Obama said from one key electoral state, Florida. From another one, New Hampshire, Romney said much the same.

A man opened fire on people watching the new Batman movie in an Aurora, Colorado, theater outside Denver. Twelve people were killed and dozens more were wounded by a suspect said to be using an assault rifle, a shotgun and a handgun in the attack.

“This is a time for each of us to look into our hearts and remember how much we love one another, and how much we love and how much we care for our great country,” Romney said at a podium stripped of campaign paraphernalia, in front of a large American flag.

Amid their calls for unity and prayer, neither Obama nor Romney said anything of gun control, an issue that has been all but absent from the campaign debate this year. Both men have shifted with the times, moving away from stances that favored tougher gun control laws.

The issue may rise anew.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a gun control advocate, said, “You know, soothing words are nice, but maybe it’s time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it.”

Twenty years ago, polls showed that a substantial majority of Americans – nearly 80 percent in 1990 – supported stricter limits on guns. Now Americans appear evenly divided between those who want tougher restrictions and those who want to stick with current laws.

Gun rights groups are a powerful lobby in the United States, where easy access to guns is a way of life in many of the more conservative and rural areas. The right to bear arms is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, alongside such basic rights as free speech and freedom of religion.

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama called for reinstating a federal ban on assault weapons that began during the administration of former President Bill Clinton and expired under President George W. Bush. But since his election he hasn’t tried to get that done or pushed other gun control proposals, either.

The powerful National Rifle Association has attacked Obama as an anti-gun zealot nonetheless.

At the same time, the president has deeply disappointed gun-control advocates. In its most recent assessment, in 2010, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence failed Obama on seven issues it deemed important.

“As someone who has suffered the lasting impact of gun violence, and president of Brady, I can tell you that we don’t want sympathy. We want action,” Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said in a statement.

As a U.S. senator, Obama voted to leave gun makers and dealers open to civil lawsuits, and as an Illinois state lawmaker he supported a ban on all forms of semiautomatic weapons and tighter state restrictions generally on firearms.

Romney backed some gun control measures when he was governor of Massachusetts, and when he challenged Sen. Edward Kennedy in 1994 he declared, “I don’t line up with the NRA.”

This spring, competing for the Republican presidential nomination, Romney told the NRA he was a guardian of the Second Amendment of the Constitution that guarantees the right to bear arms.

Following last year’s killing of six people and the wounding of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, Obama called for a series of steps to “keep those irresponsible, law-breaking few from getting their hands on a gun in the first place.”

Among those steps was a better background check system. And White House spokesman Jay Carney said Friday that system has improved.

But the administration has offered no legislation or detailed updates about how it is pursuing the president’s previous promises.

“The president believes that we need to take common-sense measures that protect Second Amendment rights of Americans, while ensuring that those who should not have guns under existing law do not get them,” Carney said.

Others, including Mayor Bloomberg, were looking for more specificity. The question is simple, he said in a radio interview: “What are they going to do about guns?” – AP

Batman shooter James Holmes was a ‘loner’

The man suspected of shooting 12 people dead at a screening of the new Batman movie in Colorado was often seen carrying guns to and from his home and was described Friday as a “loner.”

James Holmes, 24, was enrolled since June 2011 as a student in neuroscience at the University of Colorado, but was reportedly in the process of withdrawing from his PhD program.

In a photo released by the university, Holmes wore a burnt-orange T-shirt and sported a smile, but one neighbor at the apartment block where the suspect lived in Aurora recalled a subdued character.

“He was always wearing camouflage pants and a hat,” said Gabriel Macias, a Mexican who works at a meat factory and recalled seeing Holmes carrying guns and weapon cases to and from his apartment.

“We did not know him well because he talked to nobody. He was always locked up behind his door,” said Macias.

A second photo, from Holmes’s San Diego high school yearbook, showed him in a dark suit, this time flashing a toothy smile. He graduated from Westview High School in San Diego in 2006.

Melvin Evans, a security guard from a nearby building said he occasionally saw Holmes at a local bar.

“He was always by himself. Looked like a nice guy,” said Evans, 33. “I go to the bar every Sunday for Karaoke. I’ve seen him there every now and then. We would talk sometimes, the weather, you know.”

The FBI described Holmes as a white male, 6-foot-3 (1.9 meters) tall, born on December 13, 1987, with no significant criminal record and no links to terrorism.

Residents at the apartment block were removed in the wake of the shooting after it appeared that Holmes’s home had been booby-trapped.

Police in Aurora, Colorado, told reporters records showed that the shooting suspect’s only infringement in the city was a speeding ticket in 2011.

In an apartment rental application he submitted in early 2011, Holmes described himself as a “quiet and easy-going” student, the Denver Post said on its website (www.denverpost.com).

“No one knew him. No one,” it quoted a pharmacy student living in the same building — reserved for medical students, faculty and staff — in Aurora as saying.

The student, who only gave his name as Ben, said Holmes kept to himself and would not say hello or acknowledge other people in the hallway.

Ben also revealed he had called police shortly after midnight –coincidentally around the time of the massacre at a Batman premiere — to report a song blaring from inside Holmes’ apartment.

Ben could not make out the song, but it appeared to be playing on repeat.

Tom Mai, a next-door neighbor of the Holmes family in San Diego, remembered Holmes as a shy teenager who did not play or socialize with other youngsters in the neighborhood, the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper said.

“He said that he last saw him two years ago when he came home during summer recess from college,” it said on its website (www.utsandiego.com). “The family, he said, was nice and involved with a Presbyterian church.”

Holmes graduated from the University of California in Riverside in 2010 with a degree in neuroscience, said its director of communications Kris Lovekin, who added she could not release any further information about him.

Mashable.com, which monitors social media, said Holmes was “an online ghost” with no apparent presence on sites like Facebook or Twitter, although people sharing Holmes’ name found themselves suddenly bombarded with attention.

In a statement, Holmes’ family said they were cooperating with investigators.

“We are still trying to process this information and we appreciate that people will respect our privacy,” the family said, after Holmes’ mother Arlen confirmed her son was the suspected shooter. – AFP

U.S. Supreme Court to rule on Affirmative Action today

In addition to a ruling on the constitutionality of the Affordable Healthcare law ( Obamacare) law today, the United States Supreme Court is also set to hand down a ruling on an Affirmative Action case which may impact parents with teens heading to college in the near future.

An Anglo-Saxon white female student who was rejected admission into the University of Texas argued that African American and Hispanic students with inferior credentials were admitted over her using via the school’s Affirmative Action plan.

This case, Fisher v. University of Texas, was a follow up to the last Texas Affirmative Action case the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals decided, known as Hopwood v. Texas. In that 1996 case, the Court ruled the school system’s Affirmative Action program was not narrowly tailored enough to meet a compelling state interest and then overruled a diversity admission policy at the law school. It stated the school could not use race as a factor in admission decisions.

To get around that decision and do its part to increase Black and Latino admissions, the University of Texas system opted on a plan to admit the top 10 percent of all high schools. That move caused minority student admissions to jump 21 percent.

However, when the US Supreme Court took up Affirmative Action in 2003 through Grutter v. Bollinger, the majority stated that diversity is an interest that schools can and should promote as long as they meet the strict standard: that its policy was narrowly tailored to meet the compelling interest in diversity promotion.

After that case, Texas expanded its Affirmative Action efforts beyond just the top 10% and started taking into account diversity when making admission decisions. It operated under that program until 2008 when Fisher sued after she was denied admission.

There are up to several dozen factors that each school use to determine who gets admitted and it’s easy for those who get rejected to point to race and use that as a basis for a judicial challenge. And that’s what happened here.

Fisher claims that the Affirmative Action policy at the University of Texast has become a racial quota system. The dissenting judge in the case below noted that use of a racial animus opens the door to numerical admission based on race alone. But, that was the minority opinion. Fisher managed to push her case up the ladder and was granted a review by the Supreme Court.

What will stand out this round is that the Supreme Court that heard the University of Michigan case, thereby empowering Texas to change its policy back then, is not the current court of 2012 which is dominated by conservatives, 5-4.

It gets even more complicated because Justice Elena Kagan, who was the solicitor general in the case below, has recused herself from the case.

That maneuver stacks the court with even more conservative Justices, increasing the odds that Affirmative Action may be struck down in its entirety or, at the least, in more extreme ways than before. Justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have taken anti-Affirmative Action stances in prior decisions. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Gingsburg and Stephen Breyer are more liberal and are more likely to uphold the Texas Affirmative Action program. Hence, this decision will hinge on Justice Anthony Kennedy, who under the current make up of the court has become the “swing” vote, though he’s voted with the conservative wing 63% of the time since 2010. However, he occasionally sides with the liberal wing, according to the SCOTUS Blog.

It’s worth noting that Kennedy has voted against Affirmative Action in the past. In 1989, he voted in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. against federal contractors setting aside 30% of contracts for African Americans. Also that year, he voted with the majority to allow disgruntled White workers in Martin v. Wilks to challenge Affirmative Action settlements. That same year, he also voted in Wards Cove Packing v. Atonio which challenged numerical underutilization of women or minorities.

Several groups have filed amicus briefs in this potentially landmark case.

Affirmative Action programs will not necessarily be automatically ruled unconstitutional, per se. But, the court may look to Texas’ Affirmative Action program, invalidate it, and possibly set up a higher bar for other colleges and universities to climb in order to use race in admission.

Such a move could, in effect, invalidate all government Affirmative Action programs nationwide.

Conservative think tanks are watching and hoping this will be the year that Affirmative Action goes by the wayside permanently. And it’s one more perfect hot button issue for the elections, just in time to see if the first Black president gets re-elected.

Californian ban on affirmative action stays

A federal appeals court on Monday rejected an attempt to revive preferential admissions for minorities at the University of California and reaffirmed the legality of Proposition 209, the state’s voter-approved ban on affirmative action.

The suit – filed by 55 UC applicants and an advocacy group called By Any Means Necessary, and supported by Gov. Jerry Brown – argued that the legal rationale for Prop. 209 had been undermined by developments since the initiative passed in 1996.

One development was a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing universities to consider applicants’ race as a factor in promoting campus diversity. The other was a 50 percent drop in admissions of Latinos, African Americans and American Indians at UC in the first year after Prop. 209 passed.

Minority enrollment has risen somewhat since then under UC policies to admit the top 4 percent from each California high school, and to give less weight to applicants’ scores on standardized tests.

Brown also argued against Prop. 209 in court, saying it created unfair barriers by outlawing preferences for minorities and women, while allowing other groups – military veterans, athletes, children of alumni – to seek preferential admissions.

But in a terse 3-0 ruling, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said similar arguments had been addressed and rejected in 1997, when another panel of the court upheld Prop. 209.

The 2003 Supreme Court decision allowed race-based affirmative action in some circumstances, but “it did not hold that such programs are constitutionally required,” Judge Barry Silverman said in the appeals court’s decision. He noted that the high court has granted review of a Texas case that could lead to a nationwide ban on preferential treatment of minorities.

California’s Prop. 209 barred state and local agencies from considering race or gender in employment, contracting and education. The lawsuit challenges only the measure’s application at UC, but a ruling striking down any part of Prop. 209 would have made all of it vulnerable.

The measure was defended in court by its sponsors, an organization led by former UC Regent Ward Connerly. Their lawyer, Ralph Kasarda of the Pacific Legal Foundation, said Monday’s ruling was “good news for everyone who values fairness and equal opportunity.”

The plaintiffs’ organization said it would ask the full appeals court for a rehearing.

US growth of distant suburbs falls to historic low

WASHINGTON (AP) — Stung by high gasoline costs, outlying suburbs that sprouted in the heady 2000s are now seeing their growth fizzle to historic lows, halting American city dwellers’ decades-long exodus to sprawling homes in distant towns.

New census estimates as of July 2011 highlight a shift in population trends following an extended housing bust and renewed spike in oil prices. Two years after the recession technically ended, and despite faint signs of a rebound, Americans again are shunning moves at record levels and staying put in big cities.

That is posing longer-term consequences for residential “exurbs” on the edge of metropolitan areas.

Construction of gleaming new schools and mega-malls built in anticipation of a continued population boom is cutting back. Spacious McMansions offering the promise of homeownership to middle-class families sit abandoned or half-built. Once an escape from urban problems, suburban regions hit by foreclosures are posting bigger jumps in poverty than cities.

The result: The annual rate of growth in American cities and surrounding urban areas has now surpassed that of exurbs for the first time in at least 20 years, spanning the modern era of sprawling suburban development.

“The heyday of exurbs may well be behind us,” Yale University economist Robert J. Shiller said. Shiller, co-creator of a Standard & Poor’s housing index, is perhaps best known for identifying the risks of a U.S. housing bubble before it actually burst in 2006-2007. Examining the current market, Shiller believes America is now at a turning point, shifting away from faraway suburbs in the long term amid persistently high gasoline prices.

Demographic changes also play a role: They include young singles increasingly delaying marriage and childbirth and thus more apt to rent and a graying population that in its golden years may prefer closer-in, walkable urban centers.

“Suburban housing prices may not recover in our lifetime,” Shiller said, calling the development of suburbs since 1950 “unusual” and enabled only by the rise of the automobile and the nation’s highway system. “With the bursting of the bubble, we may be discovering the pleasures of the city and the advantages of renting, investing our money not in a single house but in a diversified portfolio.”

The signs of longer-term bust are evident in places such as Kendall County, Ill., an outlying suburb of 116,000 people located about 50 miles southwest of Chicago. The nation’s No. 1 fastest-growing county from 2000 to 2010, Kendall was part of an exurban wave that more than doubled Kendall’s population and helped lift GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush to victory in 2004, offering Republicans the hope of a new era of conservative voters sprouting on the rural-urban edge.

By the late 2000s, however, Kendall County’s growth began to wane amid recession and rising gasoline costs. The county, like many other exurbs, eventually turned to Illinois Democrat Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential race for economic answers. By 2011, Kendall County’s annual growth had stalled further at 1 percent, dropping its county growth-rate rank to 236th.

Things were especially turbulent over the past 10 years for real estate agent George Richter, who has worked in Kendall County for more than two decades.

“New home construction couldn’t be built fast enough,” he said. “A lot of us in the industry were very, very nervous about how fast and large the annual growth rate and property value were. We knew there’s no way that something could continue on.” Now, he said, there’s little new construction.

Jeff Wehrli, a longtime Kendall County board member who runs an excavating company, said the signs of the slowdown are most apparent from devalued homes, foreclosures and a general uncertainty among residents.

“It’s going to take a while,” he said, speaking of a local recovery that he acknowledges will never reach the same levels as last decade. “Our economy has got to get back to the point where people can confidently sign off on a 40-year mortgage.”

About 10.6 million Americans reside in the nation’s exurbs, just 5 percent of the number in large metropolitan areas. That number represents annual growth of just 0.4 percent from 2010, smaller than the 0.8 percent growth rate for cities and their surrounding urban areas. It also represents the largest one-year growth drop for exurbs in at least 20 years.

By comparison, in 2006 exurban communities grew at an annual rate of 2.1 percent, compared with a population loss of 0.2 percent for inner cities.

In all, 99 of the 100 fastest-growing exurbs and outer suburbs saw slower or no growth in 2011 compared with the mid-decade housing peak – the exception being Spotsylvania County, Va., located on the outskirts of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, which has boomed even in the downturn. Nearly three-fourths of the top 100 outer suburban areas also saw slower growth compared with 2010, hurt by $3-a-gallon gasoline last year that has since climbed $1 higher.

Other areas showing big slowdowns are Pinal County outside Phoenix; Barrow, Paulding and Pike counties near Atlanta; Union and York counties outside Charlotte, N.C.; and Sandoval County near Albuquerque, N.M.

“The sting of this experience may very well put the damper on the long-held view among young families and new immigrants that building a home in the outer suburbs is a quick way to achieve the American dream,” said William H. Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer who analyzed the census data.

Over the past decade, the number of poor people living in the suburbs of major metro areas grew 53 percent, compared with 23 percent in cities. Suburbs were also home to roughly one-third of the nation’s poor population, outranking cities and rural areas.

The latest census data come amid an overall U.S. growth rate in 2011 of 0.9 percent, the lowest since the mid-1940s, due to fewer births and less immigration following the recent recession.

Fewer people are also moving around within the nation’s borders – just 11.6 percent of the nation’s population moved to a new home, the lowest since the government began tracking such information in 1948. That means fewer Americans are migrating to residential hot spots in the suburbs or Sun Belt metro areas such as Las Vegas, Phoenix and Atlanta, upending several of the population trends of the 2000s.

Metro areas showing renewed growth or slower losses last year included Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle and Detroit, where steep population drops in the downturn have largely bottomed out.

Other findings:

-Rural counties just beyond the edge of metropolitan areas saw growth drop sharply last year, hurt by the slowing of outward sprawl. From 2010-2011, these counties increased by 30,000 people on average, compared with annual growth of 174,000 in the 2000-2010 period, according to Kenneth Johnson, sociology professor at the University of New Hampshire.

As a whole, nonmetropolitan areas last year grew 0.1 percent, compared with 0.9 percent for large metro areas and 0.6 percent for small metropolitan areas.

-Charlton, Ga., led the nation last year as the fastest-growing county, followed by St. Bernard Parish, La., both increasing more than 10 percent. That is in contrast to the 2010 census, when St. Bernard Parish ranked last in percentage growth, due primarily to the effects of Hurricane Katrina.

-Texas had four of the nation’s fastest-growing large metropolitan areas: Austin, San Antonio, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.

-Los Angeles was the most populous county, with 9.9 million residents.

The census estimates used local records of births and deaths, Internal Revenue Service records of people moving within the United States and census statistics on immigrants. The estimates were for both counties and metropolitan areas, which include cities and surrounding suburbs.

Romney takes Wisconsin, Maryland, DC

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Mitt Romney tightened his grip on the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday night, sweeping primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington, D.C., with time left over to swap charges with President Barack Obama.

“Four more years?” Romney asked sarcastically of the president as supporters cheered in Milwaukee.

He said Obama was “a little out of touch” after spending four years surrounded by the trappings of power and had presided over near-record job losses as well as increases in poverty, home foreclosures, government debt and gasoline prices. In Washington, Obama said things could be worse – and he predicted they would be if Romney and the Republicans got their way.

The victories enabled Romney to pad his already-wide delegate lead over Republican rival Rick Santorum, who flashed defiance in the face of pressure to abandon his own candidacy in the name of party unity.

Wisconsin was the marquee contest of the night, the only place of the three on the ballot where Santorum mounted a significant effort. Romney’s victory there marked his fourth in little more than a month in a belt of industrial states that also included Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois.

Returns from 80 percent of the state’s precincts showed Romney with 42 percent of the vote to 38 percent for Santorum, 12 percent for Ron Paul and 6 percent for Newt Gingrich.

Returns from 92 percent of Maryland’s precincts showed Romney with 47 percent of the vote to 29 percent for Santorum, 11 percent for Gingrich and 10 percent for Ron Paul.

With all precincts counted in Washington, Romney had 70 percent of the vote to 12 percent for Paul and 10 percent for Gingrich. Santorum was not on the ballot.

“We won `em all,” Romney declared, a former Massachusetts governor now the nominee-in-waiting for a party eager to reclaim the White House.

For Romney, the end of the contested primary campaign could hardly come soon enough. Obama has gained in the polls in recent months, particularly among women, as Republicans vie among themselves for support from a conservative party electorate. Santorum has devoted more time to social concerns – including birth control – than Romney, who has generally stayed focused on economic issues.

Additionally, surveys indicate Americans are growing more optimistic about the overall state of the economy. Unemployment has fallen in recent months, but it is still at a relatively high 8.3 percent of the workforce.

Romney won at least 74 delegates in the three races, with 21 yet to be allocated.

That pushed his total to 646 of the 1,144 needed to clinch the nomination. Santorum has 272 delegates, Gingrich 135 and Paul 51.

Interviews with voters leaving Republican polling places in Maryland and Wisconsin showed an electorate more concerned with a candidate’s ability to ability to defeat Obama than with the strength of his conservatism, his moral character or his stand on the issues. Similar soundings in earlier states have consistently worked to Romney’s advantage.

Voters in both states were less apt to be born again or evangelical Christians than in most previous contests – 37 percent in Wisconsin and 33 percent in Maryland. Based on earlier contests, that, too, suggested an advantage for Romney.

Increasingly, Romney and many senior figures in his party have begun behaving as if the primaries were an afterthought, hoping to pivot to the fall campaign and criticism of Obama.

“He gets full credit or blame for what’s happened in this economy and what’s happened to gasoline prices under his watch and what’s happened to our schools and what’s happened to our military forces,” Romney said of the president while campaigning in Waukesha, Wis.

Obama, in a speech to the annual meeting of The Associated Press, said a House-passed budget written by Republicans was “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it. … It is a prescription for decline.”

When he wasn’t focusing his rhetoric on Obama, Romney prodded Santorum to quit the race, suggesting a refusal to do so could cost the party the election in November.

“The right thing for us, I think, is to get a nominee as soon as we can and be able to focus on Barack Obama,” Romney said in an interview with Fox News. “You have to remember that it was Ross Perot that allowed Bill Clinton to win” in 1992, he added, a reference to the Texan who ran as an independent that year.

Santorum, in his home state of Pennsylvania, took note of the calls for him to exit the race.

“Ladies and gentleman, Pennsylvania and half the other people in this country have yet to be heard, and we’re going to go out and campaign here and across this nation to make sure that their voices are heard in the next few months.”

Santorum made little or no effort in Maryland, was not on the ballot in Washington, D.C., and concentrated much of his time in Wisconsin in rural areas.

He all but conceded defeat in advance in Wisconsin, retreating to Mars, Pa., for an election night appearance in his home state.

Wisconsin was the fourth industrial state to vote in a little more than a month after Michigan, Ohio and Illinois, a string that Romney has exploited to gain momentum as well as a growing delegate lead in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. He and a super PAC supporting him have greatly outspent his rivals in state after state.

The surveys of voters in Maryland’s and Wisconsin’s GOP presidential primaries were conducted for AP and the television networks by Edison Research. They included results among 1,243 voters interviewed Tuesday as they left polling places at 25 randomly selected sites in Maryland, and among 2,095 Wisconsin voters as they left 35 polling places across that state. Results from both states had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Already, the early outlines of a general election ad war are visible. Obama’s re-election campaign is airing commercials in a half-dozen battleground states that accuse Romney of siding with Big Oil “for their tax breaks, attacking higher mileage standards and renewables.”

The ads are a rapid response to $3 million in commercials aired by an outside group, American Energy Reliance, blaming the president for rising gasoline prices.

In his campaign for the Republican nomination, Romney has collected endorsements from former President George H.W. Bush, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a tea party favorite, and Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, author of a conservative budget that Republicans pushed through the House last week and is certain to play a prominent role in the fall campaign for the White House.

At the same time, Romney continues to struggle for support from some of the party’s most reliable conservative voters. In the past five weeks, while winning across the Midwest, he has lost to Santorum in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, all part of the traditional Southern political base.

Trayvon Martin case shows up American racial divide

(Reuters) – Tracy Martin had been looking for his son Trayvon since the night before. He went to bed figuring the teen must have gone to the movies and turned off his phone. When Trayvon still wasn’t home in the morning, Martin called the police.

After a flurry of phone calls back and forth, an officer told him a police unit was on the way. “So I went outside waiting for Trayvon to show up,” Martin said.

Instead of one squad car with his son in the backseat, three vehicles pulled up: a police cruiser, an unmarked sedan and another official-looking car. Martin would discover the third car belonged to a chaplain.

It was not yet 8 in the morning, barely 12 hours since the shooting that took place about 100 yards away, and Martin was still unaware of the fate of his son.

The February 26 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, 17, at the hands of George Zimmerman, 28, a neighborhood watch captain who said he acted in self-defense, has riveted the nation, largely because of race. Trayvon Martin was black. George Zimmerman is white and Hispanic.

For about 10 days, the story remained obscure. Television news from nearby Orlando aired a few segments. The Orlando Sentinel published two brief articles, and the twice-weekly Sanford Herald ran 213 words. Otherwise, there was media silence. This is an account of what happened before everyone knew Trayvon Martin’s name.

BREAKING THE NEWS

When Tracy Martin greeted the police that morning, a plainclothes detective asked him to describe his son. “He asked me what he last had on. He asked me if I had any recent pictures,” Martin said.

“I showed him a recent picture in the camera and he shook his head and said, ‘OK, let me go to my car and get something.'” The detective returned with a folder.

It was drizzling, and he asked Martin if they could go inside. When they were seated he pulled out a photo. It was Trayvon, dead at the scene – his eyes rolled back, a tear on his cheek, saliva coming from his mouth. “From that point, our nightmare,” Martin said.

“YOU GOT ME”

The night his son was killed, Martin, 45, was out to dinner with his fiancée, Brandy Green. Martin, who was divorced from Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, in 1999, is a truck driver from Miami who has a long-distance relationship with Green, a resident of the Retreat at Twin Lakes subdivision in Sanford where Zimmerman also lived.

Martin would visit Green on weekends, making the four-hour drive to the Orlando suburb of Sanford. In late February he was able to bring his son because Trayvon, a junior, was serving a 10-day suspension from Miami’s Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School. He’d been caught with a plastic baggie that contained traces of marijuana.

On Wednesday, the day after receiving the news, Martin went to the Sanford Police Department looking for answers – and his son’s body. Police took him to a room and played some of the 911 recordings of neighbors who called to report a disturbance followed by a gunshot.

They did not play an earlier call to a police non-emergency line, during which Zimmerman reported a “suspicious guy” and ignored the operator’s suggestion to quit following him. Investigator Chris Serino then took Martin to another room and told him Zimmerman’s version of events.

Sanford police have stopped talking to reporters about the case, and Serino has never spoken publicly about his role in it, but here is how Martin recalls what Serino said: “He told me Zimmerman’s story was that Zimmerman was of course following him and that Trayvon approached his vehicle, walked up to the car and asked Zimmerman, ‘Why are your following me?’ Zimmerman then rolls his car windows down, tells Trayvon ‘I’m not following you.’ He rolls his car windows up.

“Trayvon walks off. Zimmerman said he started running between the buildings. Zimmerman gets out of his car. He comes around the building. Trayvon is hiding behind the building, waiting on him. Trayvon approaches him and says, ‘What’s your problem, homes?’ Zimmerman says ‘I don’t have a problem.’

“Zimmerman starts to reach into his pocket to get his cellphone, and at that point Trayvon attacked him. He says Trayvon hits him. He falls on the ground. Trayvon jumps on top of him, takes his left hand and covers Zimmerman’s mouth and tells him to shut the F up and continues to pound on him.

“At that point Zimmerman is able to unholster his weapon and fire a shot, striking Trayvon in the chest. Trayvon falls on his back and says, ‘You got me.'” The Martin family has been telling their story as part of a campaign to have Zimmerman arrested. He himself has kept quiet.

Sanford police have declined numerous requests for comment on any aspect of the story, even before a special prosecutor overseeing the case invoked a state law that restricts otherwise public information in the course of an active criminal investigation.

Zimmerman has not spoken publicly, since any statements he makes could affect future litigation against him. Though he is free, he remains in hiding.

His father, brother, and defense lawyer, Craig Sonner, have said in interviews that Zimmerman is not racist and has been unfairly vilified. He feared for his life during his altercation with Trayvon Martin, they say, and was justified in using deadly force. In his conversation with Martin, Serino referred to Zimmerman’s background as “squeaky clean.”

Zimmerman had been arrested in 2005 for shoving a state alcohol agent officer during an argument at a bar. Charges were dropped after he entered a special program for first-time offenders. Later that year, his then-girlfriend took out a restraining order, accusing him of domestic violence.

Sanford police released Zimmerman without charge, but Martin says Serino told him he would challenge Zimmerman’s account. “The detective’s words were, ‘I want to interview him again to catch him in a lie,'” Martin said.

A law-enforcement source, who had been informed of the case by investigators, told Reuters that Serino was eager to bring a charge but encountered resistance from the office of the prosecutor, State Attorney Norman Wolfinger.

“Chris (Serino) would have made a recommendation for manslaughter, but Norm Wolfinger’s office wanted it to be a slam dunk,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They don’t want to hear that this is wrong or that is wrong with the case. That’s the way this county does business.” Wolfinger on Monday broke a long silence about the case, denying reports he quashed police intentions to charge Zimmerman with manslaughter.

Although police found no contradictions within Zimmerman’s story, their decision not to arrest Zimmerman was lambasted by critics and has sparked demonstrations around the country.

For now there is one arbiter who matters. Special Prosecutor Angela Corey, a state attorney from northern Florida appointed by Scott on March 22, has taken over the investigation and will decide whether charges are warranted.

ZIMMERMAN DROPS OUT OF SIGHT

Immediately after the shooting, while waiting for police to arrive, neighbor Selma Mora Lamilla saw Zimmerman pacing back and forth, holding his head in his hands. “He was like, ‘Oh my God, what just happened?'” said Mora Lamilla’s roommate, Mary Cutcher.

Zimmerman understood the magnitude of his situation right away, said Joe Oliver, a family friend and colleague of Zimmerman’s at mortgage risk management firm Digital Risk LCC.

“The day after, he went into his job to let them know what was going on,” said Oliver, who has spoken to Zimmerman at least twice since the shooting. “That is the last I know of anyone seeing George.”

Zimmerman and his wife moved out of the townhouse they rented in the Twin Lakes complex almost immediately, Oliver said, and they are now living in seclusion. Across town in Sanford’s black neighborhood, word spread quickly that a black teenager had been killed.

The shooter, said to be white, had gone free. As in many cities in the South, Sanford has a long history of racial tension, and black mistrust of the police runs deep. In 2011, a previous Sanford police chief was forced out of the job after a white police officer’s son was captured on video sucker-punching a black homeless man outside a bar.

Sanford police did not arrest the assailant until video of the attack surfaced on local TV and provoked an outcry from Sanford civil rights leaders. Now, once again, anger was building. A rumor that superiors had quashed an investigator’s intent to charge Zimmerman had already made the rounds in the black community, said Velma Williams, the only black member of the five-person Sanford city commission.

“People were getting suspicious, saying we knew that was going to happen based on history,” Williams said in an interview. She went to see Police Chief Bill Lee on Thursday, March 1, four days after the shooting.

“I told him, ‘I can see a train coming down the track at 50 miles an hour, and you better get a handle on this,'” Williams said. “He said to me, ‘You can rest assured that it’s a thorough and objective and fair investigation.'”

Three weeks later, on March 22, when there was still no arrest and the city commission had voted “no confidence” in Lee by 3-2, the chief announced his temporary resignation. Lee told a news conference that while he stood by the Sanford Police Department, he was stepping aside.

“It is apparent that my involvement in this matter is overshadowing the process,” he said. “I do this in the hopes of restoring some semblance of calm to the city, which has been in turmoil for several weeks.”

TRAYVON MARTIN AS JOHN DOE

At the time of the shooting, Trayvon Martin was not carrying identification – only $22, a cellphone, and the now familiar bag of candy and can of iced tea. His body, taken to the Volusia County Medical Examiner’s office, was tagged as a John Doe.

Although Martin had identified his son to police on Monday, February 27, and asked Serino the next day to issue police clearance for releasing the body, not until Wednesday was a funeral director permitted to drive it back to South Florida. In Miami, the boy’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, 46, a program coordinator for the Miami Dade Housing Authority, stayed home in bed.

“Every little thing kind of frustrates you, especially if you don’t have the body … Just to know the funeral home had the body gave us some comfort,” Fulton said.

“I cried every day. There was nothing else I could do as a mother. Thank God his dad was able to run around and take care of things,” she said. The family held a viewing on Friday, March 2. The memorial service and interment were Saturday. The painful work of laying Trayvon to rest was complete. Now would begin the more difficult search for justice.

FINDING BEN CRUMP

Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton wanted George Zimmerman arrested. They believe he stalked their son because he was black, and they were outraged that Sanford police had accepted Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense.

Lee, the police chief, would contend under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law that police could not arrest Zimmerman without evidence to contradict his story. Martin turned to Patricia Jones, his sister-in-law.

An attorney herself, she knew whom to call: Benjamin Crump, the state’s best-known civil rights attorney, based in Tallahassee. Crump and law partner Daryl Parks had previously gained renown representing the family of a black teenager who died in a boot-camp-style youth detention center in 2006, winning the boy’s family $7.2 million in damages from the state of Florida and Bay County.

On Tuesday, February 28, Crump was at the Duval County Courthouse in Jacksonville, about 125 miles north of Sanford, arguing that public records should be released in civil litigation over Antonio Cooks. Cooks, a black bail bondsman, had been shot and killed by Jacksonville Sheriff’s Officer Jason Bailey while Cooks was serving a warrant and Bailey was responding to a burglary call.

During a break in the hearing, Crump noticed messages from Tyrone Williams, another attorney he knows, and Jones. They urgently asked for his help. Soon Jones put him in touch with Tracy Martin.

“I told him to believe in the system,” Crump said of that first call. “I really believed they were going to arrest Zimmerman. I said, ‘He’s a neighborhood watch person with a gun. Of course they are going to arrest him just for that.'” “Then 48 hours passed and they still hadn’t arrested him,” Crump said. “After that we just had to do what we had to do.”

He took the case pro bono. Realizing he needed a lawyer who knew Sanford and Seminole County, Crump turned to Natalie Jackson, a former Navy intelligence officer who founded the Women’s Trial Group, which specializes in cases for women and children. Her mother lives in Sanford.

Now Crump and Jackson needed a media strategy. On March 5, Jackson brought in Ryan Julison, a publicist who had worked with her on a number of high-profile cases. After speaking with Tracy Martin, Julison said he also took the job for free and went to work pitching the story to national media.

Crump knew from his experience on the boot-camp case that publicity could force officials to act, but it would require persuading two people who had never stood before a television camera to withstand the spotlight.

“I got on the phone with Tracy Martin and I told him, ‘It’s not going to be any fun, but this is the only way to find justice,'” Julison said. “You are going to have to bare your soul and express your emotions and your inner grief.” Martin and Fulton agreed. There was only one problem. At first, the media weren’t interested. Julison pitched the story to a long list of media contacts.

Eventually, on March 7, Reuters published a story titled “Family of Florida Boy Killed by Neighborhood Watch Seeks Arrest.” The next day, CBS News aired a segment on “This Morning,” and by 10 a.m. a crowd of reporters gathered at Natalie Jackson’s law office for a news conference with Ben Crump and Tracy Martin. A media firestorm had begun.

EPILOGUE: THE 911 RECORDINGS

The day after the news conference, on March 9, Velma Williams went back to see Police Chief Bill Lee with community activist Kenneth Bentley. “We said, look, chief. Last time I was here I told you a train was coming down the tracks and it was going 50 miles an hour,” Williams recalled.

“I said it’s going 150 miles an hour now. And it doesn’t have any brakes.” Back in New York, civil rights activist Al Sharpton was monitoring events, his interest piqued by an earlier call from Crump.

After the police chief told reporters on March 12 he lacked a probable cause to arrest Zimmerman, Sharpton took up Trayvon Martin’s cause on his MSNBC show, fueling cable television competition.

The twist that catapulted Martin’s shooting into a world story was the release of recorded 911 emergency calls, including one that captures screams for help in the background that end with a gunshot.

Chief Lee had resisted Crump’s requests to make the tapes public, but he was overruled by Sanford Mayor Jeff Triplett. On the night of Friday, March 16, Triplett invited Trayvon Martin’s parents and their legal team into his office to listen to each of the calls, which he played on his computer.

“When we got to the cries for help, that was when Sybrina burst into tears,” recalled Jackson. “She said, ‘That’s Trayvon. That’s our son.’ She ran out of the room crying.” (Zimmerman’s brother, Robert, would later swear the voice belonged to George.)

“The mayor himself started to cry,” Jackson said. “Everybody in the room was in tears.” Mayor Triplett overruled his police chief and distributed disks of the phone calls to the media that night. They have been broadcast unceasingly ever since.

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Lee Aitken and Prudence Crowther)

Racist T-shirt mocks Trayvon Martin’s killer

Expanding the definition of “cracker,” a t-shirt featuring the photo of the man who shot Trayvon Martin is now available for purchase.

As seen at left, the shirt has a picture of George Zimmerman and the words “Pussy Ass Cracker.” Zimmerman, a 28-year-old Hispanic, killed Martin, 17, last month while acting as a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Florida.

The shirt’s “pussy ass cracker” line is apparently a reference to lyrics from the rapper Plies’s song “100 Years,” which bemoans stiff sentences handed out by racist judges.

Romney scores big win over Santorum in Illinois

(Reuters) – Republican Mitt Romney cruised to an easy victory over top rival Rick Santorum in Illinois on Tuesday, moving him one step closer to clinching the party’s volatile battle for the presidential nomination.

Romney’s comfortable win gave him a fresh burst of momentum in the White House campaign and new ammunition for his argument that it is time for Republicans to rally around his campaign and end an increasingly bitter nominating battle.

“Elections are about choices, and today hundreds of thousands of people in Illinois have joined millions across the country to join our cause,” Romney told cheering supporters in Schaumburg, Illinois, a Chicago suburb.

“I’m offering a real choice and a new beginning,” he said, touting his business experience and ignoring his rivals to focus his criticism on President Barack Obama. “I have the vision and the experience to get us out of this mess.”

With 62 percent of the votes counted, Romney had 47 percent and Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, had 35 percent. Romney’s remaining rivals, Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. House of Representatives speaker, and libertarian congressman Ron Paul, lagged badly. Gingrich was in fourth place.

Though he has failed to convince many conservatives, Romney has more than twice as many delegates to the nominating convention as Santorum, and Romney’s campaign has argued that his rivals cannot catch him in the contest to pick a challenger to Obama in the November 6 election.

Santorum and Gingrich hope to keep Romney from capturing a majority of delegates by the time the nominating contests end in June, leaving the choice up for grabs among the party’s mostly conservative delegates heading into the August nominating convention in Tampa, Florida.

“We don’t need a manager,” Santorum told supporters in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, after the results were announced. “We need someone who is going to pull government up by the roots and throw it out.”

The win in Illinois allowed Romney to expand his lead in delegates over Santorum. Heading into the voting, Romney had 521 delegates to Santorum’s 239 in the race for the 1,144 needed to win the nomination, according to a count by CNN.

DELEGATE NUMBERS

There were 54 delegates to be allocated in Illinois from Tuesday’s voting, but Santorum was not eligible to win many of them because he failed to meet deadlines to file a slate of delegates in some districts.

Romney and Santorum had launched a new round of attacks on each other ahead of the vote, with Romney calling his rival an “economic lightweight” and Santorum accusing Romney, the former head of a private equity firm, of being “a Wall Street financier” who would have a hard time winning in November.

Santorum, a staunch social conservative, campaigned heavily in rural southern Illinois and courted conservatives who distrust Romney for the moderate stances he took as governor of liberal Massachusetts.

But the Illinois result followed a bad week for Santorum, who spent two days campaigning in Puerto Rico before losing badly there on Sunday. In an effort to minimize the importance of Romney’s business experience, he also told a campaign rally he did not care about the unemployment rate.

The diverse electorate in Illinois paid off for Romney, who has been unable to translate his substantial financial and organizational advantages into broad support in many states.

Exit polls showed Santorum won among voters who said they were Evangelical Christians, very conservative or strongly supported the conservative Tea Party movement, but those blocs were smaller than in states where Santorum has done well. Evangelicals made up about four of every 10 voters in Illinois, compared to more than seven in 10 last week in the Mississippi and Alabama primaries, which Santorum won.

Romney, a multimillionaire who has struggled to connect with blue-collar voters, slightly led Santorum as the candidate who best understood the average Americans’ problems, exit polls showed.

Despite his poor finish, Gingrich pledged to keep pushing until the convention.

“This campaign will spend between now and when the delegates vote in Tampa relentlessly taking the fight to President Obama,” Gingrich said in a statement.

Record gun sales on fears of Obama re-election

by Joel McDurmon

Star-Telegram.com (Ft. Worth) reports that fears of an Obama re-election are sustaining record high gun sales which began with the President’s first days in office:

Enthusiasts are stocking up on guns and ammunition, and some in the industry are wondering whether sales are spiking as they did after Democrat Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008.

That rush created a nationwide shortage.

“We’re at the top of the roller coaster and we’re about to plummet down the side,” said DeWayne Irwin, owner of the Cheaper Than Dirt gun store in north Fort Worth, which set a sales record for the month of February. “It’s fixing to happen again. I don’t know if it will be to the same extent it was before, but I see it coming.

“Look who the Republicans are trying to put against Obama,” he said. “It’s the Keystone Kops and people are getting scared. People are terrified he’s going to get re-elected and then he won’t care about getting votes next time. He’ll just pass whatever legislation he wants.”

Some say the uptick in sales at gun stores could also be linked to anything from the arrival of tax refunds to a spending spree by fans of the National Geographic Channel’s Doomsday Preppers show, which chronicles people preparing for the end of the world.

Nationwide, more people than ever are buying firearms.

Last year, the FBI received more than 16.3 million inquiries from people running criminal background checks on potential gun buyers. That’s up from 12.7 million in 2008 and 11.4 million in 2007, FBI records show.

One website, Ammo.net, has called Obama “the greatest gun salesman in America.”

Romney takes 3 states, Santorum 2, Gingrich 1

WASHINGTON (AP) — Mitt Romney won three primaries, Rick Santorum countered coolly with a pair and the Republican rivals dueled for supremacy in Ohio on a Super Tuesday that stretched from one end of the country to the other in the most turbulent Republican presidential race in a generation.

Newt Gingrich won a home-field primary in Georgia, and Rep. Ron Paul looked to three caucus states for his first victory of the campaign season as Republicans choose a challenger for Democratic President Barack Obama.

Romney, who won at home in Massachusetts and in Vermont and Virginia, said, “This is a process of gathering enough delegates to become the nominee, and I think we’re on track to have that happen.”

But Santorum’s showing – he led in the North Dakota caucuses, too – on top of Gingrich’s triumph was fresh evidence that Romney’s rivals retain the ability to outpace him in parts of the country despite his huge organizational and financial advantages.

Santorum waited until Oklahoma and Tennessee fell into his column before speaking to cheering supporters in Ohio.

“We’re going to win a few. We’re going to lose a few. But as it looks right now, we’re going to get a couple of gold medals and a whole passel of silver,” he said.

Ohio was the marquee matchup of the night, the second industrial state showdown in as many weeks for the former Massachusetts governor and the former senator from Pennsylvania.

With the vote tallied from 49 percent of the Ohio precincts, Santorum was gaining 38 percent, to 36 for Romney. Gingrich had 15 percent and Paul 9.

There were primaries in Virginia, Vermont, Ohio, Massachusetts, Georgia, Tennessee and Oklahoma. Caucuses in North Dakota, Idaho and Alaska rounded out the calendar.

In all, 419 delegates were at stake in the 10 states, and Romney’s wins, by overwhelming margins, allowed him to pad his earlier lead for the nomination.

He picked up at least 90 during the evening, Gingrich 39 and Santorum 34 and Paul at least 6.

That gave the former Massachusetts governor 293, including endorsements from members of the Republican National Committee who automatically attend the convention and can support any candidate they choose. Santorum had 126 delegates, Gingrich 72 and Paul 31. It takes 1,144 delegates to win the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., this summer.

In interviews as voters left their polling places, Republicans in state after state said the economy was the top issue and an ability to defeat Obama was what mattered most as they made their Super Tuesday choices.

They also indicated nagging concerns about the candidate they supported, even in Massachusetts, There, one-third of all primary voters said they had reservations, and about three-quarters of those voted for Romney.

Massachusetts is a reliably Democratic state in most presidential elections, but in Ohio, 41 percent of primary voters said they, too, had reservations about the candidate they supported. No Republican has ever won the White House without capturing Ohio.

Gingrich’s victory was his first since he captured the South Carolina primary on Jan. 21, and the former House speaker said it would propel him on yet another comeback in a race where he has faded badly over the past six weeks.

Obama, the man they hope to defeat in November, dismissed the almost-constant criticism of his foreign policy efforts and accused Republicans of “beating the drums of war” over Iran. “Those folks don’t have a lot of responsibilities. They’re not commander in chief,” he said. Unopposed for the Democratic nomination to a second term, he stepped into the Republican race with a Super Tuesday news conference at the White House, then attended a $35,800-a-ticket fundraiser a few blocks from the White House.

Ohio was the day’s biggest prize in political significance, a heavily populated industrial state that tested Santorum’s ability to challenge Romney in a traditional fall battleground. Georgia, Gingrich’s home political field, outranked them all in the number of delegates at stake, with 76, a total that reflected a reliable Republican voting pattern as well as population.

Romney, the leader in the early delegate chase, flew to Massachusetts to vote and said he hoped for a good home-state win.

He also took issue with Obama, saying, “I think all of us are being pretty serious” about Iran and its possible attempt to develop nuclear weapons.

Gingrich effectively acknowledged he had scant Super Tuesday prospects outside Georgia, where he launched his political career nearly three decades ago. Instead, he was pointing to primaries next week in Alabama and Mississippi, and he told an audience, “With your help, by the end of next week we could really be in a totally new race.”

The polls show the president’s chances for re-election have improved in recent months, as the economy has strengthened, unemployment has slowly declined and Republicans have ripped into one another in the most tumultuous nominating campaign the party has endured since 1976.

The former Massachusetts governor campaigned into Super Tuesday on a winning streak. He captured the Washington state caucuses last Saturday, days after winning a little-contested primary in Arizona and a hard-fought one in Michigan. He won the Maine caucuses earlier in February.

The victories helped settle his campaign, which was staggered when Santorum won a pair of caucuses and a non-binding Missouri primary on Feb. 7.

Santorum and Gingrich have vied for months to emerge as the sole conservative alternative to Romney, and they battered him as a moderate who would lead the party to defeat in November.

But Romney, backed by a heavily financed super PAC, countered Gingrich’s victory in the South Carolina primary with a comeback win in Florida. Last week, it was Santorum’s turn to fall, as Romney eked out a win in Michigan after trailing by double digits in some polls 10 days before the primary.

Santorum’s recent rise has translated into campaign receipts of $9 million in February, his aides announced last week.

Even so, Romney and Restore our Future, the super PAC supporting him, outspent the other candidates and their supporters on television in the key Super Tuesday states.

In Ohio, Romney’s campaign purchased about $1.5 million for television advertisements, and Restore Our Future spent $2.3 million. Santorum and Red, White and Blue, a super PAC that supports him, countered with about $1 million combined, according to information on file with the Federal Election Commission, a disadvantage of nearly four to one.

In Tennessee, where Romney did not purchase television time, Restore Our Future spent more than $1 million to help him. Santorum paid for a little over $225,000, and Winning our Future, a super PAC that backs Gingrich, nearly $470,000.

In Georgia, where Gingrich acknowledged he must win, the pro-Romney super PAC spent about $1.5 million in hopes of holding the former House speaker below 50 percent of the vote, the threshold needed to maximize his delegate take.

While the day boasted more primaries and caucuses than any other in 2012, it was a shadow of Super Tuesday in 2008, when there were 20 Republican contests.

There was another big difference, a trend away from winner-take-all contests to a system of allocating delegates in rough proportion to a candidate’s share of the popular vote.

Sen. John McCain won eight states on Super Tuesday in 2008 and lost 12 to Romney and Mike Huckabee combined. But six of McCain’s victories were winner-take-all primaries, allowing him to build an insurmountable delegate lead that all but sealed his nomination

Santorum, Romney in tight race for Ohio

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are in a tight race to win the Republican presidential primary in Ohio.

With 36 percent of Ohio’s precincts reporting, Santorum has 39 percent and Romney has 36 percent. Santorum has also won Tennessee and Oklahoma, while Romney has won primaries in Massachusetts, Vermont and Virginia as voters went to the polls in 10 states.

Newt Gingrich has won in his home state of Georgia.