On Monday Cedric Anderson, the estranged husband of a special education teacher, Karen Smith, walked into her primary school classroom in San Bernardino, California, and shot dead both her and eight-year-old Jonathan Martinez; injured two other children; and then fatally shot himself. Martinez was the 67th child under the age of 11 to be shot dead in America this year. (Four more have been killed since then.) Smith, who had married Anderson just a few months earlier, was just one of the estimated 50 women in the US to be shot dead by a current or former partner each month. Of the 91 mass shootings so far this year, almost one a day, all of those where the identity of the shooter is known were committed by men.

Within three days of the launch of Beyond the blade, the Guardian’s year-long series looking at the young victims of knife crime, another young person had been stabbed to death. Pierce Wilkinson, 13, was killed with his mother, Tracey, in Stourbridge in the West Midlands.

Back in late September 2013, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives was throwing one of its episodic hissy fits about Obama­care. Shortly before the GOP shut down the government for over two weeks, one of its members laid out the Tea Party negotiating strategy for refusing to set a budget for the biggest economy in the world. “We have to get something out of this,” said Indiana Representative Marlin Stutzman. “And I don’t know what that even is.” Genius.