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You ranked them: 10 top stories in America in 2013

Here are 10 top stories Americans followed in 2013, ranked by respondents to a Monitor/TIPP poll according to the percentage who said they followed the story very closely.

4. Gun control fails in the Senate (47 percent)

Matt McClain/ Reuters
People attend a National Vigil for Victims of Gun Violence, held two days before the first anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, at Washington National Cathedral in Washington, Dec. 12, 2013.

  • By CSM Staff

Many Americans thought 2013 would be the Year of Gun Control.

After the Sandy Hook massacre last December, a majority of the public favored tougher gun laws. But on April 17, efforts to expand background checks, ban assault weapons, and limit ammunition magazines failed in the Senate.

Within a week, two gunmen had killed nine people – in Federal Way, Wash., and Manchester, Ill. – and 2013 has seen gunmen commit six mass murders (in which at least four died), including the Sept. 16 killing of 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard.

More than 345 incidents have involved the shooting of at least four people. Headlines have ranged from a fatal Nevada school shooting, allegedly by a 12-year-old, to the accidental shootings of children as young as 2.

Obama has taken executive action on a host of issues related to gun violence, including flaws in mental-health policies. But the spike in demand for stricter national gun laws may have passed. Polls this fall showed support hovering just below 50 percent.

– Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, Staff writer   

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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