As Andrew “Mr. Wick” Wickerham helps his customers at the 2nd Amendment Gun Shop in Las Vegas on Tuesday, he mentions how he’s getting a little annoyed at this “new buzzword” circulating among gun owners.

“All of the sudden we’re getting all these calls about these bump-fire stocks,” says Mr. Wickerham, a combat veteran who served 10 years with the Marines. “It’s getting ridiculous – these people never even knew what a bump-fire stock was until they saw it on the news. It’s the new hype. All of the sudden, people are saying, ‘I got to get one of these before they’re not available anymore.’ ”

Also called a slide-fire stock, the add-on can make a legal semi-automatic assault-style rifle mimic a machine gun, experts say. The weapon’s natural recoil is harnessed to “bump” back and forth on a sliding stock attached to the gun’s trigger, which allows it to fire as fast as an automatic weapon that would otherwise violate federal law.

The current buzz surrounding these add-ons for assault-style rifles is following a now-familiar pattern: Whenever the country experiences a mass shooting, sales of weapons often spike, as many worry that lawmakers may tighten gun control laws.

When it comes to bump-fire stocks, however, Wickerman and other gun experts are just not impressed.

Make no mistake, Wickerham is adamantly opposed to any further federal or state regulations. Also the owner of 3 Degrees Tactical, which trains and certifies police officers, armed security guards, and others on the use of firearms, he’s one of Nevada’s leading trainers in the use of deadly force. In the past, he’s been a contractor for the US State Department, he says, helping to train those on maritime missions to combat Somali piracy, among other US government special operations.

“But I’ve always thought these bump stocks were just a novelty,” he says. “They’re not that good, and they’re hard as hell to control.”

Paul Valone, the president of Grassroots North Carolina, a nationally influential gun rights organization, agrees.

Bump stocks, says Mr. Valone, “are an amusement, because they don’t under normal circumstances turn an AR-15 or another rifle into a killing machine, because you can’t hit anything with it. Only when you are presented 400 yards away with a field of uninterrupted humanity would something like that even be effective.”

Which was the case, of course, when Stephen Paddock, authorities say, rapidly fired a hail of bullets onto a crowd of 22,000 concertgoers on Sunday, killing at least 59 and injuring more than 520 in one of the worst mass shootings in United States history.

Twelve of the 23 guns found in Paddock’s hotel room were retrofitted with such bump stocks, said Jill Schneider, special agent in charge with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms at a press conference Tuesday.

But if gun rights advocates such as Mr. Valone, Wickerham and others remain unenthusiastic about such add-on modifications, Sunday’s deadly shooting had a profound effect on others.

“I’ve been a proponent of the 2nd amendment my entire life,” tweeted Caleb Keeter, lead guitarist of The Josh Abbott Band, which performed Sunday at the Route 91 Harvest Festival. “Until the events of last night. I cannot express how wrong I was,” he said, noting the band has members licensed to carry concealed weapons, and that there were firearms on the bus.

“They were useless,” he continued in the widely quoted post. “We couldn’t touch them for fear police might think we were part of the massacre and shoot us... Enough is enough...We need gun control RIGHT. NOW.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina, too, said he was now “open-minded to anything that would shed light on what happened and how to fix it without giving people false hope that we’re one law change from fixing things like this.”

Allen Breed/AP/File

An employee of North Raleigh Guns demonstrates how a 'bump' stock works at the Raleigh, N.C., shop on Feb. 1, 2013. The gunman who unleashed hundreds of rounds of gunfire on a crowd of concertgoers in Las Vegas on Oct. 2, 2017, attached what is called a 'bump-stock' to two of his weapons, in effect converting semiautomatic firearms into fully automatic ones.

‘I don't think it’s the same old story’

Some scholars see an opening in the long history of congressional inaction on the issue.

“It may be inaction at the federal level, but there’s a lot of activity at the state levels, both making laws more permissive and restrictive,” says Adam Winkler, author of “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.” “So I don’t think it’s the same old story. There is definitely going to be efforts to restrict access to these devices, if not at the federal level, at the state level.”

“And the fact is, it may be easier to ban modifications that are not very popular among gun owners,” continues Dr. Winkler, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. “Unlike assault weapons, these bump-stocks are not popular at all, because they make guns highly inaccurate and shooters like to be accurate. The Las Vegas shooter didn’t care much about accuracy.”

Republican lawmakers on Tuesday said Congress would not be taking action on gun legislation after the massacre in Las Vegas. Their effort to ease access to gun silencers was put on hold, and they made clear that they would take no action on Democratic calls for expanded background checks and tighter restrictions on semi-automatic weapons.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R) of Louisiana, who was seriously wounded after a gunman opened fire on GOP lawmakers during a baseball practice this summer, told Fox News that both his experience and the Las Vegas shooting has only “fortified” his opposition to gun control legislation.

Like many Republicans, Congressman Scalise rejected discussions of new gun regulations “because first of all you’ve got to recognize that when there’s a tragedy like this, the first thing we should be thinking about is praying for the people who were injured and doing whatever we can to help them, to help law enforcement. We shouldn’t first be thinking of promoting our political agenda.”

Valone, an airline pilot who hosts a radio show called “Guns, Politics and Freedom” in Wilmington, N.C., says the issue of rapid-fire automatic weapons has in some ways been settled. 

The first attempt to regulate automatic weapons came in response to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, a 1929 Chicago gangland killing where seven people were killed by four rivals, two of whom were using Thompson submachine guns.  

Instead of banning the weapons – which Congress did not feel it was enumerated to do – Washington taxed such weapons in 1934 to the tune of $200 and, four years later, instituted the first background checks for standard weapons. 

In 1986, Congress made it a crime to possess machine guns, with some exceptions. The US banned the purchase of semi-automatic assault-style rifles in 1994; that law sunsetted 10 years later. Today, the AR-15 – a classic assault-style rifle used by some mass killers – is referred to by many gun enthusiasts as “America’s rifle.”

Guns part of Nevada culture

Nevada is one of the least restrictive states for those possessing guns. And Wickerham, who was born and raised in Las Vegas, says it’s woven into the state’s culture. He still has Polaroid pictures of himself as a five-year-old, his father helping him hold a Colt Python, a 357 Magnum pistol.

Indeed, gun shops and gun ranges are woven throughout Las Vegas’s bright-blinking casinos.

The Strip Gun Club, just a few minutes' drive away from the scene of Sunday’s massacre, advertises, “You’ll forget all about the slots and tables the moment you pull the rifle handles on our double doors” and engage in “pulse-pounding missions.”

Battlefield Vegas, also a few blocks away from the scene, allows visitors to shoot their favorite guns from the popular video game, “Call of Duty.” The Range 702 bills itself as the “ultimate shooting experience.” Staff at five Las Vegas gun clubs said Tuesday they had “no comment” on Sunday's shooting, either because it was “too soon” or out of respect for the victims’ families.

Larry Pratt, emeritus director of Gun Owners of America in Springfield, Va., notes that the Las Vegas mass shooting “is a very unusual situation in many ways, because the bump-stock, this is the first time anybody has ever heard of it being used this way, so to say [banning the device] will solve our crime problems is a bit much.”

In his view, such a push would fit into what he sees as a familiar pattern, where gun control advocates ask for small concessions and then increase their demands – a slippery slope toward more regulations. “I’m not interested in the details about, ‘Oh, this is a particularly vulnerable point and we ought to address it’; no, what they are looking for is any way they can get momentum,” says Mr. Pratt.

“This whole thing with bump-fire stocks, I think it’s funny,” says Wickerham, because they are not a quality add-on. 

“But if this place turns into California [with its strict gun control laws],” he says, “I’m not going to complain; I’ll just leave.”

Planet Application Program Interface: In Space For Life on Earth. San Francisco/https://api.planet.com/CC-BY-SA

Puerto Rico is seen in a satellite image taken before hurricane Maria through Planet Team, 2017.

As President Trump paid his visit to hurricane-wracked Puerto Rico on Tuesday a small army of individuals, sitting at their desks far from the spotlight and scattered around the globe, were doing their anonymous bit to put the ravaged island back together again.

They are a new breed of “digital humanitarians.” Crowdsourcing the raw data of hurricane Maria’s trail of destruction, they are helping artificial intelligence experts create maps that will point relief workers to where they are needed most. The project enables individuals who may not have a lot of time or money to make a meaningful contribution to rescue and relief efforts from practically anywhere in the world.

“This is authentic,” says Brooke Simmons of Zooniverse, the citizen-science web platform that has rallied the volunteers to pore over their computers and classify satellite images of storm damage by their severity. “They are really contributing to something that does make a difference.”

This is how it works: Zooniverse takes satellite images of Puerto Rico and posts tens of thousands of “before” and “after” shots of the island on its website. (They have done the same thing for other Caribbean islands hit by hurricanes Irma and Maria, using satellite imagery made freely available for humanitarian use by satellite companies.)

Volunteers – about 10,000 of them have been working on Caribbean imagery since Irma struck the region in early September – then study those images and note features in the “after” shots, such as flooding, blocked roads, damaged buildings, or temporary structures indicating homeless people, that were not there in the “before” photos.

Each set of photos is reviewed by 50 different people; their judgments are sent to an artificial intelligence (AI) team at Oxford University in Britain for aggregation and closer study.

Humans are better than computers at understanding unstructured data, such as satellite photos, because that requires context, says Steven Reece, a machine learning expert at Oxford. But volunteers are not experts and they are “variably reliable,” he points out.

So he uses computer algorithms to determine which amateur analysts are most accurate. He can detect a tendency in one to exaggerate damage reports, for example, or a habit that another may have of always mistaking tarmac for flooded areas.

The computer “can remove biases, fold in other information, and come up with a 95 percent reliable best guess” at the real situation on the ground, Dr. Reece explains. That information is then expressed in a “heat map” that goes to disaster relief teams so that they can set their priorities.

Two years' work in a fortnight

Some volunteers spend a few minutes on Zooniverse.org classifying images and never come back; others classify thousands of pictures each. But between them, says Professor Simmons, an astronomer, “they did two years’ worth of one person’s work in just two weeks” when Irma, and then Maria, struck.

The data that such volunteers gather and computers collate “helps fill a crucial time gap in information,” says Hannah Pathak, interim chief executive officer of Rescue Global, the Britain-based non-governmental disaster relief agency.

It is especially valuable, she adds, when a hurricane, or an earthquake, has knocked out communications. Though local inhabitants know best what has happened in their districts, they often cannot tell anyone else about it, nor do they know what the next town over looks like.

The heat maps “give us a broad brush but indicative assessment ... of where the most acute needs are likely to be,” says Ms. Pathak. “Then our teams on the ground can check it out,” knowing which bridges are down, which roads are flooded, and other critical logistical data.

But sometimes even all the high technology in the world does you no good. For nine days after Maria struck Puerto Rico, Simmons had no pictures of the island to feed to volunteer analysts because storm clouds blocked the satellites’ view for over a week. “It was very frustrating,” she says.

Wanted – Haitian Creole translators

Digital humanitarianism first surfaced during the catastrophic earthquake that rocked Haiti in 2010, killing nearly a quarter of a million people. For the first time, volunteers created post-disaster maps of stricken areas, as Zooniverse is helping to do now in the Caribbean.

At the same time, Haiti’s mobile phone network was flooded with more than 80,000 text messages to 4636, an emergency number, asking for help – but which were in Haitian Creole, a language most international rescue workers could not understand.

“Mission 4636” was set up to forward these messages to a website where Haitian volunteers around the world, including Haiti, picked them up, translated them, and sent them on to rescue workers.

Information technologies “were a key means through which individuals could make a tangible difference in the work of relief and aid agencies without actually being physically present in Haiti,” an academic study published soon after in the journal World Medical and Health Policy found.

Zooniverse, the AI team at Oxford, and Rescue Global have teamed up as The Planetary Response Network; they honed their skills in the Philippines after typhoon Haiyan in 2013, in Nepal after the 2015 earthquake, and in Ecuador last year after the earthquake there.

This year’s hurricane season in the Caribbean, though, has provided them their biggest challenge yet, and Rescue Gobal’s Pathak says the network is proving its worth. As her emergency teams on the ground try to work out where they should start saving lives and providing shelter, she says, the heat maps pinpointing crisis situations offer “a layer of information that speeds up decision making.”

“The huge value we have in disasters is the rapid response that the full crowd can mobilize,” adds Simmons. “That would not be possible even with a team of experts.”

Taylor Luck

Sahara Forest Project site manager Frank Utsola picks cucumbers at the Sahara Forest Project greenhouse, the first of many planned crops in the Jordanian desert.

Hope in Jordan is taking the form of a cucumber in the desert.

It is not a mirage. Some say it is the future.

In the arid southern desert of Wadi Araba, where scorching temperatures and dust devils leave scant signs of life, a team of environmental engineers is working on a solution for countries on the front lines of climate change, facing drought and rising temperatures.

The engineers say they are designing a sustainable farm that uses solar power to desalinate seawater to grow crops in regions that have been arid for centuries, then uses the irrigation runoff to afforest barren lands and fend off desertification.

Similar ventures have had success in neighboring Israel, but it remains to be seen whether a fully sustainable farm can breathe life into the Jordanian desert and offer a model to a country that cannot spare a drop of its dwindling water resources.

Jordan has struggled for decades with water resources over-stressed by dramatic sudden population growth. Driven by waves of refugees, the population nearly doubled, from 5 million in 2004 to 9.5 million in 2015.

Jordan is currently ranked by the United Nations as the second-water-poorest country on the planet, behind only Bahrain, while increasing desertification due to over-grazing and improper irrigation techniques has reduced its grazable lands by 70 percent in the past three decades.

With the creeping effects of climate change, bringing ever-hotter summers and shorter rainy seasons in the winter, the future for Jordan’s environment is bleak.

In the increasingly drought-prone country, the enhanced evaporation of near-surface water due to decreased rainfall and hotter temperatures in recent years has rapidly increased the salinity of the soil, literally salting the earth. Jordan now has less than 1 percent forest cover and is more than 90 percent desert.

And the changes to come may prove to be even more dramatic.

According to a study published in August by leading researchers in the peer-review journal Science Advances, as soon as 2071 the average temperatures in Jordan could rise by as much as 4.5 Celsius or 8 degrees F. Droughts, the study suggests, could become twice as frequent and twice as long, and rainfall – a major source for Jordan’s dams and water resources – will likely decrease by 30 percent.

“Our results suggest that by the end of the century there will be a substantial increase in concurrent higher temperatures and lower rainfall,” Steven Gorelick, head of Stanford University’s Jordan Water Project and co-author of the Science Advances paper, says by email.

Sahara Forest Project

One potential solution lies in a patch of Jordanian desert that has not yielded crops for hundreds of years.

Originally conceived by environmentalists on the sidelines of the failed 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen, the Sahara Forest Project was devised as a way to roll back the rapid desertification across Africa and the Middle East while addressing food and energy shortages.

“The food-energy-water nexus is very connected to climate change, and in order to address them, we believe you need to take an integrated approach to address all three,” says Joakim Hauge, Sahara Forest Project chief executive officer.

“This all came from a simple perception: we want to use what we have enough of.”

Supported by USAID, the European Union, and the Norwegian government, the commercial project combines solar power, seawater desalination, natural wind power, and computer-monitored controls to get the most out of each drop of water and to revitalize the barren soil.

Neighboring Israel has long worked to farm the arid lands of its Arava (Wadi Araba) and Negev deserts. Although in possession of more fresh water and energy resources than Jordan, it was facing a severe drought in the early and mid-2000s. After heavy investment in desalination, Israel’s production grew in a few short years to more than 130 billion gallons of potable water per year.

Jordan and Israel have pledged to jointly build a desalination plant on the shores of the Red Sea as part of a controversial $900-million project to lay a pipeline from the Red Sea to the contracting Dead Sea, which is below sea-level. But there has been little coordination between the countries’ researchers on the twin effects of climate change that both are fighting: drought and desertification. The Red Sea-Dead Sea project is years away, while timelines for the project on both the Jordanian and Israeli sides remain hazy.

The Sahara project aims to be a “synergy project” to the initiative, linking to the Red-Dead pipeline and using the excess brine and water released by the planned desalination plant for irrigation. While the 60-member international team who had input on the Sahara project did not include Israeli experts, project members say they are open to learn from the Israeli experience as they move forward with their own unique model: a farm that incorporates several technologies to run completely independently.

Taylor Luck

The Sahara Forest Project greenhouse, which yielded its first crop of cucumbers last month and aims to produce 130,000 kilograms of vegetables from the Jordanian desert each year.

Self-sufficiency

Self-sufficiency is key for Jordan, which imports 96 percent of its energy needs and cannot afford the electricity or investments needed for large-scale projects.

In its initial test project in Qatar, the Sahara initiative yielded positive results, producing crops at the level of European commercial greenhouses with half the amount of water used in farming in Qatar. But project staff quickly zeroed in on Jordan due to its vulnerability to climate change and its location at the heart of the region’s water and environmental crises.

In a once-barren plot the size of four football fields near the Israeli-Jordanian border, 10 kilometers inland from the port of Aqaba, the Sahara project uses saltwater-cooled greenhouses and an advanced desalination system to produce crops without using a single drop of Jordan’s freshwater resources.

Using photovoltaic solar panels, the project takes in seawater and pushes it through a 6-inch-thick cardboard filter system at the greenhouse’s walls. Freshwater droplets form and evaporate on the other side, increasing humidity in the greenhouse and reducing water requirements for the crops.

Due to the site’s location in a valley surrounded on either side by mountains and hills, it receives constant wind, which is funneled into the greenhouse. The wind and humidity combined drop the temperature in the greenhouse by nearly 15 degrees C, from a baking 40 C (104 F.) to a cool 25 C (77 F.).

Such a drop can make or break a crop in Aqaba and the surrounding Wadi Araba desert, where temperatures reach 45 C in the summer.

Freshwater from the solar-powered, reverse-osmosis desalination system is then used to irrigate the crops. A computer-controlled system provides the crops with just the right amount of water and nutrients at timed intervals.

The second pillar of the project is in outdoor fields adjacent to the greenhouse. Here, run-off from the irrigation, up to 25 percent of the irrigated water, is used to grow crops and plants specifically suited to the Jordanian desert, such as vibrant pink Bougainvillea flower bushes, known locally as majnouna, and towering palm trees.

Over time, these fields return nutrients and moisture to the soil and act as a barrier against the increasing creep of desertification – stopping dust and sand in their tracks. Once the soil improves – within a couple years – Sahara researchers believe they can start cultivating outdoor crops.

Already, flowers and saplings are sprouting from what was once “pure, clean desert.”

Rows of deep green cucumber vines hang in the greenhouse, their fruits a few inches long and sweet and crisp – like the Mediterranean varieties that grow elsewhere in Jordan.

The launch site is projected to produce 130,000 kilograms (140 tons) of vegetables per year and more than 10,000 liters (2,600 gallons) of fresh water per day. Although the project has started with cucumbers as a test crop, it is exploring other potential produce such as tomatoes, eggplants, strawberries, or rhubarb.

Yet the Sahara project claims it has additional, secondary benefits other than crop yields and stopping desertification. The electricity produced by the solar panels, currently at 40 kilowatts competitive with commercial prices, could be sold back to the grid. Future larger farms would create more electricity for the grid.

No ‘silver bullet’

Project organizers admit that while the Sahara Forest Project could become a lifeline for countries such as Jordan and Tunisia, it cannot be a sole provider of food or be applied in all regions. Sahara requires a coastline nearby and sufficient sunshine to power its system.

“This is not a silver bullet that works in all arid areas,” says Mr. Hauge, “but it can work in low-lying arid areas” that can be provided seawater using minimum pumping or energy.

The project has started out small. Only weeks old, despite boasting bountiful cucumber crops, it has yet to be proven to be commercially viable year-round.

Currently, seawater is being trucked into the site, but project directors hope to build their own pipeline, or connect to the planned Red-Dead project in order to expand. The need for security coordination and permits in the Jordan-Israel border area is a sign that even the best-designed project may run into the limits of Middle East politics.

But Jordan itself has made the project a priority, with King Abdullah inaugurating the project personally last month, and his government endorsing the initiative. Sahara and its backers are looking to expand the Jordan site fivefold to 50 acres, with the potential to produce nearly 5,300 tons of crops per year.

The Sahara project is also pursuing similar sites in southern Tunisia and Australia.

While the outlook for vulnerable countries such as Jordan may seem bleak, experts hope to prove that the solution may already be at hand.

“Light, seawater, and land can produce food, water, and renewable energy,” says Hauge.

“All we have to do is integrate the technologies.”

Dominique Soguel

Iraqi Christian Louis Yousif points out the damage done to his three-story commercial building in Qaraqosh. US-backed forces evicted the Islamic State group from the town in October 2016 during the broader offensive to retake Mosul.

Armed with a tiny bit of capital and lots of courage, businessmen are slowly returning to the decimated town of Qaraqosh, home to Iraq’s largest Christian community before it was taken over by the Islamic State group in 2014.

The risk of doing business in Qaraqosh, also known as Al-Hamdaniya or Bakhdida, remains high even now that the jihadists have been driven out of the area.

But the prospect of Christians returning to Qaraqosh is better than for other mixed areas or disputed territories, says Lawrence Janan, an off-duty police officer, because this is the largest Christian city in Iraq, located in the historic heartland of the Assyrian community.

“It’s hard for Christians to go back to Mosul City, but here, at least, we were always a clear majority,” he says, standing across from a bombed church. “We have to come to our areas. This is our land. If we don’t watch over it, who will?”

That’s the same logic that motivates a cluster of businessmen who banded together to rebuild commercial areas one cinder block at the time. The magnitude of the task ahead would make an average man fold in despair.

Businessman Louis Yousif surveys the remains of his three-story corner complex with an acute sense of loss, but also a knack for nailing down opportunities.

Restoring venues for marketing material, passport photos, and decorations for special occasions such as weddings? Not a priority.

A bakery? A no-brainer. That was the first order of business. The oven stands ready to roll behind new window-paned walls. A barber shop and fish grill are next. He knows people won’t come back unless a normal daily life is viable.

“We need help to create the conditions for people to come back,” he says, surging up the broken slabs of concrete stairs to the rooftop of his complex, where you can see the church and the full extent of the damage done to his building by eight different projectiles.

He says the original construction of the complex, which was inaugurated in 2012, had cost $3 million, and he estimates repairs will be to the tune of $1 million.

“The international community must stand with Iraqi Christians,” Mr. Yousif says, increasingly agitated. “We don’t want money for our pockets. We need help to rebuild.”

Rebuilding safety

Liquor store owner Khudr Baham Anab restored his business in a flash, replacing layers of soot with bright speckled tiles, and shattered shelves with a sturdy, well-stocked display.

“This is the most dangerous business as we are always targeted,” says Mr. Anab. “If people see that I am here, that I came back and opened a liquor store, regular citizens will be reassured. They will think it is safe, although in reality it is not safe.”

Government-endorsed Shiite Arab forces guard the checkpoints leading into the Christian haven. They have replaced the white-scripted ebony banner of the Sunni militants with the red-scripted black standard saluting the imam revered by Shiite Muslims, Hussein.

Kurdish forces man the adjacent checkpoint on the road leading from Mosul to Erbil. And Christian militias police the streets of Qaraqosh marking out their turf with graffiti.

Qaraqosh is clearly at the center of the broader Baghdad-versus-Kurdish dispute for territory and the corresponding race to alter the demographic make-up of the Nineveh Plains.

Those tensions have reached a combustible high in the wake of a referendum for independence held last month by Iraqi Kurds despite sharp opposition from the central government, regional neighbors, and the broader international community.

A region of their own

Iraqi Christians would like a region of their own in their historic heartland.

“We are stuck between the Kurdish Regional Government [KRG] and the central government in Baghdad unable to make our own decisions,” says Yousif, a lawyer by training. “They call us a disputed area, but in reality there are no Kurdish families here. That’s why we were abandoned in the hands of ISIS without a single shot being fired.”

Iraqi Christians and other religious minorities fault the Kurdish Peshmerga forces for retreating to their ethnic strongholds and abandoning the mixed villages of the Nineveh Plains as ISIS made its genocidal advance in 2014. That criticism is tempered by the acknowledgement that they found relative safety in Kurdish cities like Erbil over the two years that ISIS laid waste to their town and its Christian monuments. The majority of those who could leave the country altogether did so.

US-backed Iraqi forces and their proxies retook Qaraqosh in 2016, but it wasn’t until they liberated Mosul City, 20 miles west-northwest, that residents began to return in larger numbers. Even so, many men opt to keep their families in Ainkawa, a pre-dominantly Assyrian Christian suburb of Erbil. That decision reflects ongoing security concerns in their contested hometown and the scale of the damage done by jihadists on a looting and burning spree.

By most counts, fewer than half of the residents of Qaraqosh, which had a pre-war population of 50,000, have ventured back, but the numbers are growing every day.

“We are Iraqi citizens, but the state has not granted us protection,” says Falah Baqus, a resident of Qaraqosh who decided to move back a few weeks ago but almost regrets the decision, given the general lack of services and uncleared debris on both major and minor roads. “It breaks my heart to see my town littered like this, but if I do not come back, things will never be restored.”

Caught in the middle

Downstairs from Yousif’s rooftop perch, a handful of workers, including a Muslim laborer, take a break to share lunch and talk shop in the shadows of the gutted building.

Assyrian Christian Amir Toma is gearing up to open a fruit stand, a modest venture reflecting his limited means after two years of displacement. The interior is ready, but the shop is still missing a front wall. “If I had more capital, I would take on a bigger venture,” he says, standing under a pristine red sign advertising his business.

Mr. Toma used to be the manager of a marketing materials print shop. He started selling fruits and vegetables in Erbil’s Ainkawa to support his family. Although he has decided to bring his new trade back to his old neighborhood to contribute to the town’s revival, the rest of the family has stayed back because their home in Qaraqosh is charcoal and local rent prices run high, reflecting the dearth of supply.

Houses that are in good condition tend to be remote and in isolated areas. When might makes right, he says, that’s a risk he is not willing to take.

“Security here is a mixed salad,” he says with a sigh. “Some forces support the KRG. Others Baghdad. Us poor people are in the middle.”

I look through the sheer curtains of my hotel room window onto the three cuspidate globes of a street lantern below. Their milky glow sheds a dim light on a garland of begonias that arches over the roadway. It is a gray, early fall morning in Moscow.

I am here on a layover, flying from Hamburg, Germany, to New York, and have a couple of hours to take in a few sights. Red Square is only a short walk, but I decide to call a taxi rather than brave a labyrinth of streets marked with Cyrillic signs. My flight leaves at 3:24 p.m.

A midsize Hyundai seems to have answered my call. It is 8:23 a.m. He’s early. I quickly grab my suitcase, my purse containing my notebook computer and tablet, my crossbody bag, and my camera.

A compact personable man in his mid-50s greets me with a heavy Russian accent and an engaging smile: “You called taxi!” He wears a quilted jacket, gray denim trousers, and polished leather boots. He pulls his wool cap over his ears and introduces himself as “Devid.” As he hauls my suitcase into the trunk I explain the purpose of my call, relieved by his command of English. He nods and indicates the front passenger seat. Though this puzzles me, I am quickly reassured by his joviality. Besides, I am in a foreign country and unfamiliar with its customs. 

He jumps into the driver’s seat, slams the door shut, throws me a convivial glance, and deftly sets the GPS. Then he starts the car and enters a wide, heavily trafficked highway.

“This is new road. Old road too small,” he says as we slither past rows and rows of modern high-rises.

He speaks of Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Tchaikovsky, then interrupts himself: “Look: Lubyanka … KGB building.” He points at a massive yellow block of concrete and stops. “Hurry, Russian government likes to give tickets,” he says. I jump out, take my photo, and hop back in. “Red Square next,” he says.

He drives through an elegant alley and finds a parking spot. “Very good here, very safe.” I grab my camera and rush after Devid, passing through the lofty arcs of an upscale shopping mall, past mannequins in white sable and Sochi hats.

We exit into a crowd of tourists. Devid labors his way out of the mob; I struggle not to lose him. The crowd clears and I’m in a staggering wonderland: Moorish minarets, the famous St. Basil’s Cathedral, with its ice-cream cone cupolas and its mighty, intricately colored steeple that culminates in a bulbous golden flame. 

A gargantuan red edifice with countless white and golden spires reaches high over curious heads. I am dizzy. “Behind Kremlin Wall is Lenin Square,” Devid says. “Building over there is where Putin holds meetings, and before him Gorbachev, back to Stalin, Lenin, and czars.”

This is intriguing, but we have to hurry. Devid halts. He seems uneasy. 

“I must check car,” he mumbles. “I come back.” With that, he rushes off. “Sure, I’ll wait,” I answer in soliloquy, still under the spell of Red Square’s wonder – that is, until fear and doubt gush into my mind. Who is Devid? Is it a coincidence that he speaks English so well? What if he’s an impostor, an agent? He’d arrived early, enough time to preempt the real driver. And he’s gone. My suitcase and purse are in his car, with my visa and ticket. How could I have been so trusting? 

The KGB building’s bright yellow walls seem to pull me toward a tribunal: I’m standing in front of stone-faced uniformed officials, one of whom bellows, “You come here to corrupt young people! You bring books Soviet and Russian government forbid!” True, but I belong to a book club, and we discussed Orwell and Solzhenitsyn, and those e-books are on my tablet. And yes, there is also some rap music. “You are smuggling banned materials!” Two stern female agents step forward to take me away ... 

“I thought you like pistachio,” Devid says, gently tapping my arm. He hands me an ice-cream cone. “I had to check car, almost got ticket,” he says. “Oh, no problem at all,” I say. “Thanks.” The cold ice cream restores me to reality.

I follow him to the car and embrace my purse as we head to the airport. I close my eyes.

“Last stop,” Devid calls out. He unloads my bags. “Maybe we meet again in America,” he says. He opens his arms and gives me a hug.

I thank him for being the best taxi driver and tour guide ever, hand him my remaining rubles and a good amount of dollars. Grateful for a good outcome, I enter the airport.

Reuters

A sign advertising a gun show is seen on the Las Vegas Strip in front of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino near the Route 91 music festival mass shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada, Oct. 3.

The mass shooting in Las Vegas, like similar ones before it, has led to an inevitable rise in calls for more restrictive gun laws. Yet even as gun control advocates hope for modest changes in the law, such as a ban on devices that convert rifles into automatic weapons, many admit this latest debate could go nowhere, swallowed up again by a deep cultural chasm between Americans.

The politics over guns does indeed reflect a divide over other issues, such as personal rights, rural versus urban, and the relationship between individuals and their government. Each side relies on logic, studies, slogans, court rulings, and lobbies in trying to influence lawmakers. While a few gun-restricting laws have been passed in recent decades – and some loosened – the politics seems as entrenched as ever.

Breaking this impasse does not need more political armament over the proper ownership of personal arms. It instead requires a new understanding about underlying fears, especially shared ones. Both sides share a common fear of being harmed by violence. They just differ on what is the most probable source of violence.

Gun control advocates often cite mass shootings, including those by gang members, as the main reason for new laws. (Gun deaths by suicide or accidents are also cited.) Many gun owners, especially women, agree. But how much is really known about the fears of the majority of gun owners?

A poll, conducted last spring by the Pew Research Center, may help clarify those fears, and perhaps create some empathy for that side.

Two-thirds of gun owners say they possess a gun for personal protection, the poll finds. They do not want to be defenseless, either against a criminal or possibly their own government. More than half of gun owners say there would be less crime if more people owned guns. In fact, 43 percent of men who own guns and 29 percent of female gun owners say they keep a loaded gun at the ready.

And to show how deep such feelings go, nearly three-quarters say they could not ever see themselves not owning a gun.

And for many, the threats seem very real. About 14 percent of gun owners have fired or threatened to fire a gun to defend themselves, their family, or their possessions.

But the best insight may be that 41 percent of people who own a handgun say their local community is unsafe. Until gun control advocates can speak to these fears – at the local level and one-on-one – the national debate may remain in a stalemate.

The starting point for discussion must be that both sides want to end gun violence. This is the common ground of hope that can then open the door for compromise on the difficult issues of guns. The mutual desire for safe communities is the bonding agent, one based on shared affection for wider society. Tragedies like the Vegas shooting bring out hard emotions. But it is the quieter, softer, and more universal ones that can save lives.