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DES MOINES, Iowa (KCCI) -- *Editor's Note: A previous version of this article wrongly said Geroge Zimmerman used "Stand Your Ground" as a defense in his trial for the killing of Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman's attorneys used a self-defense justification that did not include the "Stand Your Ground" provision, though jurors said afterwards it was a factor in their discussions before acquitting Zimmerman.

Anyone in Iowa could use deadly force anywhere if they believe such force is necessary to avoid injury or risk to ones life or safety under a bill including a stand-your-ground provision.

A subcommittee in the Republican-controlled Iowa Legislature approved the comprehensive gun measure, House Study Bill 133, on Thursday, and supporters said the law provides much-needed clarity on the right to protect and defend. But opponents worry its giving a license to kill.

Its a good idea for our laws to be strengthened up, said Tom Hudson, manager of CrossRoads Shooting Sports. Right now, there is nothing that specifically speaks that you have the ability to make the discerning judgment your life is in jeopardy, and you can take necessary steps to defend yourself.

Under the proposed bill, Iowans could use deadly force anywhere if they believe its necessary to avoid risking their life.

People could use deadly force even if an alternative course of action is available, and it allows people to be wrong in that estimation of danger.

But opponents like Veronica Fowler, of the Iowa American Civil Liberties Union, said the legislation would open doors for a lot of tragedies.

This bill, were concerned, could embolden people to basically shoot other people in situations where they might not otherwise, she said.

Fowler said since states like Florida adopted stand-your-ground laws, justifiable homicide rates have tripled.

Stand your ground came to prominence in the George Zimmerman killing of of Trayvon Martin.

Hudson argued this doesnt justify disparity of force. The intent would be for people to use the lowest level of force necessary.

They will have the right to defend themselves, Fowler said. If somebody invades your home and there is a shooting that happens, the self-defense law is in place. We feel that covers it.

The bill would also allow people to carry concealed weapons without a permit, prohibit colleges from banning weapons on campus, allow firearm permits to last a lifetime, prohibit local governments from passing gun restrictions, allow children under age 14 to use guns with supervision and allow guns on the Capitol grounds.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Iowa panel OKs gun bill with stand-your-ground provision - KCRG.com - KCRG

Students stroll around the campus of Spelman College, a historically black college in Atlanta. Chris Shinn/Courtesy of Spelman College hide caption

Students stroll around the campus of Spelman College, a historically black college in Atlanta.

Tales of talented black students on majority-white campuses running through a racial gauntlet that has them questioning their brilliance, abilities and place are familiar to parents like me who have a college-bound child at home.

The trauma that sometimes comes with being a black student at predominately white institutions is tangible. In their 2015 paper, "Reimagining Critical Race Theory in Education: Mental Health, Healing and the Pathway to Liberatory Praxis," Ebony McGee, a professor at Vanderbilt University, and David Stovall, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found that black college students who weather the effects of studying and living on predominately white campuses suffer from a "physical and mental wear-and-tear that contributes to a host of psychological and physical ailments."

"We have documented alarming occurrences of anxiety, stress, depression and thoughts of suicide, as well as a host of physical ailments like hair loss, diabetes and heart disease," McGee said in an article on Vanderbilt's website, adding that calls for black students to draw on mental toughness and perseverance what researchers are referring to these days as "grit" overlook the additional burden black students bear as they face off against overt and covert racism.

"We have witnessed black students work themselves to the point of extreme illness in attempting to escape the constant threat of perceived intellectual inferiority," McGee said. "We argue that the current enthusiasm for teaching African American students with psychological traits like grit ignores the significant injustice of societal racism and the toll it takes, even on those students who appear to be the toughest and most successful."

At a historically black college or university (HBCU), students with diverse economic, social and geographic backgrounds share similar cultural and emotional frames of reference that can take the edge off the rigors of college life.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that over the past three years, nearly a third of HBCUs have seen at least a 20 percent increase in applications a spike that correlates with nationwide protests over high profile incidents like George Zimmerman's acquittal in Trayvon Martin's shooting death and Sandra Bland's jail death after a controversial police traffic stop.

Those protests spilled onto college campuses after students at the University of Missouri, citing volatile racial aggression against students of color, demanded and got the November 2015 resignation of the school's president and chancellor, who protesters said failed to address racial problems on campus. Success by Mizzou's students sparked sit-ins, rallies and protests at more than 100 colleges and universities, reverberating all the way through to earlier this month, when Yale University announced that, after campus-wide unrest, it would rename a residential college originally named after an alumnus who was a fierce slavery advocate.

And black parents are lockstep with their children including famous ones like Taraji P. Henson, who publicly announced she decided against sending her son, Marcell Johnson, to the University of Southern California after he said he was racially profiled on the USC campus. She chose Howard University, an HBCU and her alma mater.

"I'm not paying $50,000 so I can't sleep at night wondering is this the night my son is getting racially profiled on campus," Henson said about her decision.

Like her, black parents readily admit to sleeping better at night, too, knowing that their babies are reasonably protected from possible racial violence physically, emotionally, mentally on a campus where they can engage in political, social and creative movements, and still have some modicum of room for joy in an affirming environment amid the political and social upheaval unraveling across the country America.

For black families, the choice of where a child should attend college is every bit as much about self-care as it is about getting a solid education, and HBCUs are building on their reputations for offering both in spades.

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For Black College Prospects, Belonging And Safety Often Top Ivy Prestige - NPR

Jeff Lu Crunch Network Contributor

Jeff Lu is a vice president at Battery Ventures.

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Deepak Ravichandran Crunch Network Contributor

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Social networks may be the most valuable and durable types of businesses powered by network effects, the phenomenon of products or services becoming more powerful the more people use them. The social-networking companies in our recently launched Network Effect Index a group of current and formerly public consumer-Web companies valued at $1 billion or more outperformed the S&P by over 170 percentin the last five years, the most of any business category in the index.

This is one reason the imminent IPO of social/mobile app Snap, which thrives on network effects, is being so closely watched. Another is that Snap the parent of the ragingly popular Snapchat service, and a company expected to be valued at roughly $20 billion at its offering represents the first credible threat to the Facebook social-networking colossus. Interestingly, Snap has grown by following a path very different than Facebooks so much so that we believe Snap ultimately could be valued less like a traditional social network and more like a hardware-software company, like Apple, or a media business, like Comcast.

Still, whether Snap can continue to draw users away from Facebook and also compete with Facebook-owned Instagram, which just launched a photo and video story feature similar to Snaps, will be a key story line to watch.

Snap has seen blistering growth since its launch in 2011, racking up more than 160 million users. The chart on the left, below, shows quarterly growth in Snapchats daily active users (DAUs) over the last two-and-a-half years. Next to it, however, is another graphic showing how the launch of Instagrams Stories feature in the summer of 2016 appeared to slow down the number of Snapchats net, new daily active users.

So how did Snapchat take off so quickly, and chart such a different course than Facebook? Three main ways

Facebook (along with its Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger businesses) acts as the social system of record for your life. It stores your photos, keeps track of your relationships and the places you visit, monitors which products you like and your views on the latest news and so on. While this has created some value for consumers (and advertisers), theres also been an unintended consequence: If youre on Facebook, your life is now permanent for the world to search. Just ask recent college graduates looking for a job, or criminal suspects whose Facebook profiles are quickly ransacked by journalists.

This focus on permanence opened up an opportunity for a more whimsical, fun service (Snap) to promise not to document anything about you online. Through Snap, users take photos or videos with their phones and then send the Snaps to another user and the Snaps disappear in one to 10 seconds. Not surprisingly, 60 percent of Snaps users are 13-24 years old.

Having content disappear lowered the barriers to create content, which increased the amount of content for users to view on Snap. This drove engagement, and further accelerated the content-creation flywheel. Whats more, the fleeting nature of the service appealed to one of our basic emotions: the fear of missing out. FOMO drove people to check their Snaps at incredibly high rates, as nobody wanted to be the one to miss out on something cool.

It is interesting to note that while the ephemeral nature of Snaps service drove it early on, the company found that disappearing photos and videos had their limits. The company last year launched Memories, a personalized and permanent album of favorite Snaps and Stories to bridge this gap and create stronger network effects and stickiness among its users. It will be up to Snap to navigate this ephemeral/permanent balance.

Snap, by its nature, is extremely authentic. It encourages users to take photos and videos in-the-moment and post them without filters. The camera is the app, and capturing moments and sharing them quickly not taking 10 different shots to find the most flattering pose is the core action. Friends and family can see the real you without worry about judgement or consequence.

Will Kim Kardashian and DJ Khaled be the stars of tomorrow? They seem to have discovered the major to success on Snap.

Facebook and Instagram, by contrast, sometimes lack authenticity. The perfectly posed photos and airbrushed visages of celebrities can look contrived and fake. Even Instagram, which is very popular among millennials, acts more as a biography of your life, a permanent public record with decreasing authenticity.

On Snap, meanwhile especially after the launch of Stories new celebrities such as reality-TV star Kim Kardashian and DJ Khaled, a rapper and record producer, have recently gained mass followings. DJ Khaled uses Snap to communicate with his more than six million followers on topics ranging from leadership to oral hygiene to party planning all with no production costs. Fans love being able to peer into the real, unfiltered lives of these celebrities, and stars build stronger relationships with their fans.

The other reason for Snaps success is its singular focus on mobile video, an emerging content category that is drawing more and more viewers. Mobile video represented close to 50 percent of all online video views in 2015, up from less than 5 percent in 2011, according to the Ooyala Global Video Index. More users watched college football and the MTV VMAs on Snap than watched those events on TV.

Facebook, on the other hand, was founded years before Snap as a service based on text and photos. The mass adoption of mobile phones obviously disrupted Facebooks traditional desktop interface. While Facebook eventually re-architected its core News Feed experience for the mobile world, Snap reimagined the use case of teens who grew up on mobile phones, and how they would use phones/cameras to document their lives. This, combined with the ever-low cost of mobile data, made mobile videos cheaper and easier for everyone to share; mobile video has almost become the default content type on social media.

For Snap, this strategy proved fruitful. Combined with the launch of Stories in 2013, network effects took over and propelled video views to rival that of Facebook (see chart above). Basically, Snap was hosting around 10 billion daily video views early last year, compared to eight billion for Facebook, despite a user base one-eighth the size of Facebooks.

Snap needs to out-innovate its competitors to stay cool and relevant after its offering. In keeping with its Los Angeles roots, Snap is currently the sizzling nightclub on the social-media circuit. The problem with hot nightclubs, though, is that they eventually fade in popularity.

Put another way, Snap needs to make sure its users parents dont get on the app which is what happened as Facebook matured and younger users shifted to services like Instagram. A full 30 percent of Snap usersspecifically cited their parents not being on the service as a reason to use the app over others.

Snaps Spectacles rival the fashion houses of Prada and Gucci in design and fashion. Famous designer Karl Lagerfeld of Chanel and Fendi shot this picture.

The other major innovation lever Snap could pull involves interaction with the real world and artificial reality. As users continue to pull out their phones, Snap can create experiences to interact with physical and virtual places and items. The trendy Pokmon GO game proved there is excitement around bridging the digital and physical worlds through mobile phones, the key medium for Snap users. Snap has already begun this work with its augmented reality Lenses feature, which lets users create whimsical faces based on existing videos.

One final new area of growth for Snap is a possible content marketplace and distribution channel. Already companies like Tastemade, ESPN, E!, CNN and others are distributing high-quality, mobile-first media through Snap. With the average user spending 20 hours a month in Snap, its not a stretch to see more millennials unbundling their cable services to consume more content on Snap, and spending less time with Comcast or Netflix.

Snap is one social network that definitely continues to innovate ephemerally, authentically one Snap at a time.

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Snap: Rewriting 'Art of War' for social networking by not documenting anything - TechCrunch

Washington Times

Parents need to get a grip on social networking - Washington Times Washington Times A chicken in every pot. A television in every home. A cellphone and computer in every child's hands. Parents, dear parents, please get a grip on social ... and more »

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Parents need to get a grip on social networking - Washington Times - Washington Times

The Supreme Court weighed a North Carolina law banning sex offenders from using social media. Matt Hoffman reports. Buzz60

The Supreme Court cast doubt Monday on a North Carolina law that bans sex offenders from social media websites.(Photo: J. Scott Applewhite, AP)

WASHINGTON The Supreme Court argued Monday that social networking websites have become such an important source of information, including President Trump's daily tweets, that evensex offenders should not be barred from social media.

Displaying their familiarity during oral arguments with such platforms as Facebook, Snapchat and LinkedIn, several justices said a North Carolina law that makes it a felony for sex offenders to access them appeared to violate the First Amendment.

It didn't help state officials that their case focused on Lester Packingham, whose sex crime in 2002 resulted only in two years of supervised probation, but who was arrested eight years later for celebrating the dismissal of a parking ticket with a Facebook post that began "Man God is Good!"

That appeared to go too far for at least five of the court's eight justices, who noted that social networking sites have become a major part of "the marketplace of ideas," in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's words.

"Increasingly, this is the way people get ... all information," Justice Elena Kagan said. "This is the way people structure their civic community life."

Although North Carolina's law goes further than most states, a victory for Packingham would represent a ringing defense of free speech rights for some of the nation's most reviledcitizens the estimated 850,000 registered sex offenders.

The state's senior deputy attorney general, Robert Montgomery, likened the law to a 1992 Supreme Court decision that forbids politicking within 100 feetof a polling place. He noted that social networking sites are used to gaininformation in more than 80% of online sex crimes against children.

"These are some of the worst criminals, who have abused children and others," he said.

Thirteen states defended the North Carolina law in legal papers as a weapon against the illicit use of social networking sites, which they said areused in one-third of Internet-related sex crimes resulting in arrest.

"There's a concern here for the safety of children," Ginsburg acknowledged, as some of her colleagues notably Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer searched for a more limited way in which states could protect victims without infringing on basic free speech rights.

But they found it difficult to defend North Carolina's law, passed in 2008 as a way to add "virtual" neighborhoods to the physical locations such as schools and playgrounds from which sex offenders are barred.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites offer a range of services beyond social networking. Kagan said they are an important channel for political information and conversation, including the president's proclivity for tweeting newsworthy musings.

Asthe youngest member of the court and one who spent time as dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan, 56, demonstrated the most intimate knowledge of social media -- at one point noting that the law's exceptions for chat rooms and photo-sharing sites created "a constitutional right to use Snapchat but not to use Twitter."

Only Justice Samuel Alito mounted much of a defense of the law, suggesting that it could be limited to core social networking sites rather than The New York Times or Betty Crocker. "There are still alternative channels," he said.

But David Goldberg of Stanford Law School's Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, who represented Packingham, said Twitter hosts about 500 million tweets a day, and Snapchat hosts 10 billion videos -- statistics that are not replicable elsewhere.

Alito acknowledged the addiction of many users. "There are people who think that life is not possible without Twitter andFacebook," he said.

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Supreme Court justices defend social media, even for sex offenders - USA TODAY