title: Dollar General

text: On June 21, 2007, CEO David Perdue announced his resignation leaving David Bere as interim CEO. One month later, all shares of Dollar General stock were acquired by private equity investors for $22 per share. An investment group consisting of affiliates of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), GS Capital Partners (an affiliate of Goldman Sachs), Citigroup Private Equity and other co-investors completed an acquisition of Dollar General Corporation for $6.9 billion.


title: Dollar General

text: As a part of the transition to a privately held company, Dollar General assessed each location at the end of its lease against a model known as "EZ Stores". This assessment included evaluating whether the location had a loading dock, garbage dumpsters, adequate parking, and acceptable profitability. Stores that did not pass this evaluation were relocated or closed. Over 400 stores were closed as part of this initiative.


title: Dollar General

text: Dollar General filed on August 20, 2009, for an initial public offering of up to $750 Million turning the company once again into a publicly traded corporation. In 2013, Dollar General started selling cigarettes in response to its competitor Family Dollar selling cigarettes in 2012. Dollar General's 12th distribution center opened on May 31, 2014, in Bethel, Pennsylvania, to serve the northeast and midwest stores. On August 18, 2014, Dollar General lodged a competing bid of $9.7 billion against Dollar Tree for Family Dollar. The bid was rejected on August 20, 2014, by the Family Dollar board, which said it would proceed with the deal with Dollar Tree.


title: Dollar General

text: On June 3, 2015, Chief Operating Officer Todd Vasos replaced Rick Dreiling as chief executive. Dreiling remained as senior advisor and chairman until his retirement in January 2016. Dollar General's 13th distribution center opened in San Antonio, Texas, on June 6, 2016, with a local investment of $100 million and the creation of over 500 jobs. In September 2015, the Janesville City Council, in Wisconsin, approved an agreement to bring a Dollar General distribution center to the town. The center created more than 500 jobs in the area and became the 14th Dollar General distribution center.


title: Dollar General

text: On September 15, 2016, Dollar General announced plans to hire 10,000 new employees and open 900 new stores in fiscal 2016 and 1,000 in fiscal 2017. Dollar General had operated 13,000 stores as of August 2016.


title: Dollar General

text: In January 2017, Dollar General opened a concept store in Nashville called DGX. The DGX store concept focuses on urban shoppers and is geared toward instant consumption items such as a coffee station and a soda fountain. The following month another DGX store opened in Raleigh, North Carolina, and in September a third DGX opened in Philadelphia. As of May 2020, Dollar General operated 12 DGX locations in nine states


title: Dollar General

text: In Jackson, Georgia, Dollar General opened its 15th distribution center in fall 2017 to serve stores in Georgia and the surrounding states. In 2017, Dollar General began construction for its 16th distribution center in Amsterdam, New York. The distribution center was to cost $91 million and was expected to create 400 jobs in Montgomery County, New York. Dollar General planned to open 900 new stores in 2018. The distribution center became fully operation in 2019. Also in 2017, Dollar General acquired stores from Dollar Express, a spinoff from the Family Dollar-Dollar Tree deal, and converted the store.


title: Dollar General

text: In September 2019, Dollar General celebrated the grand opening of its 16,000th store in Panama City, Florida, following damage sustained from Hurricane Michael in October 2018. To commemorate the opening, Dollar General presented two $16,000 checks in partnership with Kellogg's to two local elementary schools displaced from the hurricane.


title: Dollar General

text: On December 5, 2019, Dollar General announced FY 2020 plans that include the opening of 1,000 new stores, remodeling of 1,500 mature stores and relocation of 80 stores. In February 2020, Dollar General announced plans to create 8,000 net new career opportunities in fiscal year 2020. Dollar General expanded to 46 states in 2020 with the addition of new stores in Wyoming in March and Washington in April.


title: Dollar General

text: In late May 2020, two Dollar General stores were destroyed by arson during the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis–Saint Paul and three others had property damage.


title: Dollar General

text: In Fall 2020, Dollar General opened its first pOpshelf in Nashville, Tennessee selling mostly items costing less than $5. By the end of 2021, the company planned 50 free-standing popshelf locations and 25 store-within-a-store locations.


title: Dollar General

text: In April 2021, the company said it is planning to hire 20,000 employees, which is less than the number of employees hired in 2020 (50,000).


title: Dollar General

text: For several years, Dollar General has had a connection with motorsports, particularly in NASCAR. The company has previously been a primary sponsor for Joe Gibbs Racing. Dollar General sponsored Brian Vickers in the Nationwide Series in 2013. Dollar General became a primary sponsor for Matt Kenseth in the Sprint Cup Series starting in 2013. Dollar General and Turner (formerly Braun Racing) have been partnered together since 2008, with the team previously sponsoring cars for Frank Cicci Racing and Kevin Harvick Incorporated. In 2010, Dollar General sponsored some races in the Camping World Truck Series for Kyle Busch Motorsports with Kyle Busch in the No. 18 Toyota Tundra and sponsored Kyle Busch's Motorsports No. 51 Toyota Tundra for four races in 2014 with Busch driving three and Erik Jones driving one. Dollar General was the title sponsor for Nationwide Series races held in Charlotte every fall, Chicagoland every summer, and Phoenix in the spring. On May 23, 2016, Dollar General announced they would withdraw its sponsorship from NASCAR at the end of the 2016 season.


title: Dollar General

text: Dollar General is also active in the IndyCar Series since 2008, serving as the primary sponsor for owner/driver Sarah Fisher's Sarah Fisher Racing team. In 2010, both Fisher and Graham Rahal drove part-time for the team finishing 9th at the Honda Grand Prix of St. Petersburg. Fisher also led the field at the Peak Antifreeze & Motor Oil Indy 300 at Chicagoland Speedway. In 2011, Dollar General continued to sponsor Sarah Fisher Racing, the team was still part-time but Ed Carpenter drove for nines races starting at the 2011 Indianapolis 500. Since 2012, Dollar General is no longer a sponsor for Sarah Fisher's Sarah Fisher Racing.


title: Dollar General

text: Dollar General became the sponsor of the Dollar General Bowl, formerly the GoDaddy Bowl, in Mobile, Alabama on August 17, 2016. In May 2019, Dollar General withdrew its title sponsorship of the Mobile bowl game.


title: Dollar General

text: Dollar General sells products from national name brands like Clorox, Energizer, Procter & Gamble, Hanes, Coca-Cola, Mars, Unilever, Nestlé, Kimberly-Clark, Kellogg's, General Mills, and PepsiCo.


title: Dollar General

text: In 2018, Dollar General expanded its product offerings to include the “Better for You” assortment that aim to offer healthier options from brands like Kashi, Annie's, Back to Nature and Kind.


title: Dollar General

text: By the end of its 2019 fiscal year, Dollar General offered its produce assortments in more than 650 stores, with plans to expand its produce offerings to an additional 400 stores in FY 2020.


title: Dollar General

text: Dollar General created its abbreviation, the letters "DG", as a store brand for "inexpensive" household products sold through the Dollar General stores; it is in the process of being phased out for most products as of the early 2020s. DG is also the company's NYSE ticker symbol.


title: Dollar General

text: Dollar General private brands include Clover Valley (groceries), Good & Smart (health foods), Smart & Simple (a low-end discount brand), Sweet Smiles (bulk candy), Ntense (Dollar General's in-house energy drink), Nature's Menu, Forever Pals and Heartland Farms (pet food and products, formerly EverPet), Gentle Steps (diapers, training pants and wipes), Studio Selection (beauty and skin care), Believe Beauty (beauty care and makeup), Root to End (hair care), TrueLiving (housewares and laundry), Comfort Bay (towels, blankets and pillows), Open Trails (men's apparel), Mission Ridge (blue jeans), Zone Pro (sportswear), Composure (adult diapers and incontinence pads), Breeze (feminine hygiene), ProEssentials (hardware), OfficeHub (office supplies) and Bobbie Brooks (women's apparel).


title: Dollar General

text: The brand name Rexall was first established in 1903 by Louis K. Liggett and gradually became a powerhouse as a pharmaceutical drug store chain. In March 2010, Dollar General became the exclusive retailer for Rexall products. Rexall vitamins and supplements began appearing at Dollar General stores in March and by fall 2010 a full line of Rexall products was available at Dollar General.


title: Dollar General

text: Dollar General Board of Directors as of June 2020 are: Michael M. Calbert (Chairman of the Board), Todd Vasos (CEO), Warren Bryant, Patricia Fili-Krushel, Timothy I. McGuire, William Rhodes III, Debra A Sandler and Ralph E. Santana.


title: Dollar General

text: Dollar General has more than 18,216 stores in 47 states, and approximately 158,000 employees. Dollar General also has 17 distribution centers in 16 states. Since 2017, DG has opened stores in North Dakota, Wyoming and Washington. As of early 2020, DG does not have stores in three states: Alaska, Hawaii, and Montana.


title: Dollar General

text: Dolgencorp is a wholly owned subsidiary of Dollar General Corporation. Dollar General brand products are manufactured under the Dolgencorp subsidiary.


title: Dollar General

text: In 2004, a Dollar General office was opened in Hong Kong to oversee the global sourcing operations through exporting and importing products of Dollar General related goods.


title: Dollar General

text: Since 1993, Dollar General has provided funding of literacy and education programs through its subsidiary Dollar General Literacy Foundation. Every year the Dollar General Literacy Foundation awards funds to nonprofit organizations, schools and libraries within a 15-mile radius of a Dollar General store or distribution center. It has awarded more than $182 million in grants to literacy organizations that have helped more than 11 million individuals learn to read, prepare for the high school equivalency, or learn English.


title: Dollar General

text: In 2020, the Dollar General Literacy Foundation awarded $8.6 million to approximately 970 nonprofit organizations, schools and libraries, which marked its largest one-day grant announcement. The Dollar General Literacy Foundation also celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2018.


title: Dollar General

text: In April 2022, the Dollar General Literacy Foundation announced an approximately $9.2 million commitment to support literacy within the surrounding communities. $8.2 million has been earmarked for the spring grants to support family literacy programs across the country, while the other $1 million has been pledged to the DonorsChoose program.


title: Dollar General

text: Dollar General, along with other dollar store chains, while "sometimes [filling] a need in cash-strapped communities" where supermarkets have closed, are regarded not "merely a byproduct of economic distress. They’re a cause of it.” Dollar store chains, in "capitalizing on a series of powerful economic and social forces—white flight, the recent recession, the so-called “retail apocalypse”—all of which have opened up gaping holes in food access...might not be causing these inequalities per se, they appear to be perpetuating them". The rapid growth in dollar stores across the USA have created food deserts and a “dollar store belt”. Originally opened with local tax incentives, a number of municipalities have been adding zoning bylaws to discourage dollar stores. ) According to a study done by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, dollar stores tend to create fewer and lower wage jobs than independent grocery stores. The report claims that dollar stores stifle local competition, thereby hurting the communities they are serving.


title: Dollar General

text: In March 2020, the retailer announced plans to expand produce assortments to approximately 400 stores in addition to the 650 stores where it is already in place during its 2020 fiscal year. In February 2019, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas published a story, which found that the quality of fruits and vegetables at dollar stores is just as good as regular grocery store produce.


title: Dollar General

text: On April 30, 2001, Dollar General Corp was liable for making false statements or failing to disclose adverse facts about the company's financial results, and paid $162 million for settlement. The company also announced to restate its earnings for the past three fiscal years, due to accounting irregularities including allegations of fraudulent behavior.


title: Dollar General

text: On March 3, 2005, Dollar General announced to restate its results for 2000 through 2003, due to a clarification of lease-accounting matters issued by the SEC.


title: Dollar General

text: In November 2014, Dollar General was fined $51,700 by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) following an inspection of a Brooklyn, Mississippi, branch of the store. The statement from OSHA notes that Dollar General has had repeated health and safety violations: "Since 2009, OSHA has conducted 72 inspections of Dollar General nationwide. Of those inspections, 39 have resulted in citations." In April 2016, OSHA reported that further citations had been given to the store for exposing employees to the risk of electrical hazards due to missing face plates on electrical outlets. The store was fined $107,620. In December 2016, OSHA has noted that some Dollar General stores continued to block fire exits with merchandise disregarding safety violations resulting in several fines.


title: Dollar General

text: Inspections at Dollar General stores in 2022 in Pembroke in February, and Hogansville and Smyrna in March identified four willful and seven repeat violations. Specifically, OSHA cited the company for failing to keep receiving areas clean and orderly and for stacking materials in an unsafe manner. These hazards exposed workers to slips, trips and being struck by objects. OSHA also issued citations for exposing workers to fire and entrapment hazards by failing to keep exit routes and electrical panels clear and unobstructed.


title: Dollar General

text: Dollar General's pattern of disregarding worker safety was apparent at five other Southeast locations. In February 2022, OSHA proposed $1,048,309 in penalties after inspections at three locations in Mobile, Alabama, and one in Dalton, Georgia, found similar hazards. At another Mobile location, a December 2021 inspection led OSHA to propose $321,827 in penalties for exposing workers to slip and trip hazards and not keeping the main storeroom orderly to allow a safe exit during an emergency.


title: Dollar General

text: In 2019 Dollar General was fined $1.75 million by the state of Vermont over pricing irregularity by charging a higher price for products at the register than was advertised at the shelf.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Gun laws in Australia are predominantly within the jurisdiction of Australian states and territories, with the importation of guns regulated by the federal government. In the last two decades of the 20th century, following several high-profile killing sprees, the federal government coordinated more restrictive firearms legislation with all state governments. Gun laws were largely aligned in 1996 by the National Firearms Agreement. In two federally funded gun buybacks and voluntary surrenders and State Governments' gun amnesties before and after the Port Arthur Massacre, more than a million firearms were collected and destroyed, possibly a third of the national stock.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: A person must have a firearm licence to possess or use a firearm. Licence holders must demonstrate a "genuine reason" (which does not include self-defence) for holding a firearm licence and must not be a "prohibited person". All firearms must be registered by serial number to the owner, who must also hold a firearms licence.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Following the shooting incidents at Port Arthur in 1996 and Monash University in 2002 the Australian state and territory governments, through the then Australian Police Ministers' Council (APMC) and Council of Australian Governments (COAG), entered into three national agreements that were responsible for shaping contemporary Australian firearm laws. These agreements were the:


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: At the federal level, the importation of firearms is subject to the restrictions in Regulation 4F and Schedule 6 of the "Customs (Prohibited Imports) Regulations 1956" (Cth).


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: The National Firearm Agreement defines categories of firearms, with different levels of control for each, as follows:.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Certain antique firearms (generally muzzleloading black powder flintlock firearms manufactured before 1 January 1901) can in some states be legally held without a licence. In other states they are subject to the same requirements as modern firearms.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Certain states, firearms that "substantially duplicates military-style rifles in design, function or appearance" are subjected to harsher regulations. The implication of this, which is unofficially referred to as the "Appearance Law", is that any gun, regardless of the actual mechanical nature of its action, may be reclassified into Category D or R/E if it is deemed to cosmetically resemble an assault rifle.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: The states issue firearms licences for a legal reason, such as hunting, sport shooting, pest control, collecting and for farmers and farm workers. Licences must be renewed every 3 or 5 years (or 10 years in the Northern Territory, South Australia & Queensland). Full licence-holders must be at least 18 years of age.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Junior licences in Victoria and New South Wales are available from 12 years of age (Or 11 if in Queensland), this allows the use of firearms for the purpose of receiving instruction in the use of the firearm or engaging in sport or target shooting competitions.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In May 2018 Victoria introduced firearm prohibition orders to reduce firearm related-crime by targeting those who want to possess, use or carry firearms for unlawful purposes. The person served with an order must immediately surrender any firearm or firearm related item in their possession and the firearms licence is cancelled.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Persons or companies conducting a business involving the buying, selling or trading of firearms or ammunition must obtain a firearm dealers licence, and firearms repairers must hold a firearms repairer's licence. These must be renewed annually.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: A 2017 study commissioned by Gun Control Australia claimed that Australian states had significantly weakened gun laws since the National Firearms Agreement was first introduced, with no jurisdiction fully compliant with the Agreement. For example, many states now allow children to fire guns under strict supervision and the mandatory 28 day cooling-off period required for gun purchases has been relaxed, with no waiting period for purchasers who already own at least one gun. New South Wales also allows the limited use of moderators via a permit even though they are supposed to be a prohibited weapon. No state or territory has outlined a timeframe for achieving full compliance with the National Firearms Agreement.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Firearms were introduced to Australia with the arrival of the First Fleet in January of 1788, though other seafarers that visited Australia before settlement also carried firearms. The colony of New South Wales was initially a penal settlement, with the military garrison being armed. Firearms were also used for hunting, protection of persons and crops, in crime and fighting crime, and in many military engagements. From the landing of the First Fleet there was conflict with Aboriginal people over game, access to fenced land, and spearing of livestock. Firearms were used to by explorers and settlers to shoot Aboriginals, often without provocation. A number of punitive raids were carried out in a series of local conflicts.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: The firearms issued to convicts (for meat hunting) and settlers (for hunting and protection) were stolen and misused, resulting in more controls. In January 1796, Colonel David Collins wrote that "several attempts had been made to ascertain the number of arms in the possession of individuals, as many were feared to be in the hands of those who committed depredations; the crown recalled but of between two and three hundred arms which belonged to the crown, not more than 50 were accounted for".


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: European-Australian colonists also used firearms in conflict with bushrangers and armed rebellions such as the 1804 Castle Hill convict rebellion and the 1854 Eureka Stockade.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Gun laws were the responsibility of each colony and, since Federation in 1901, of each state. The Commonwealth does not have constitutional authority over firearms, but it has jurisdiction over customs and defence matters. Federally the external affairs powers can be used to enforce internal control over matters agreed in external treaties.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In New South Wales, handguns were effectively banned after World War II but the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games sparked a new interest in the sport of pistol shooting and laws were changed to allow the sport to develop.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In some jurisdictions, individuals may also be subject to firearm prohibition orders (FPOs), which give police additional powers to search and question the individual for firearms or ammunition without a warrant. FPOs have been available in New South Wales since 1973, and are also used in Victoria.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In October 2016, it was estimated that there were 260,000 unregistered guns in Australia, 250,000 long arms and 10,000 handguns, most of them in the hands of organised crime groups and other criminals. There are 3 million registered firearms in Australia.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In March 2017, there were 915,000 registered firearms in New South Wales, 18,967 in the ACT, 298,851 in South Australia, and 126,910 in Tasmania. The other jurisdictions did not make the information public.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In 2015, there were more private firearms in Australia than there were before the Port Arthur massacre, when 1 million firearms were destroyed. Since 1988, the proportion of households with a firearm has fallen by 75%. Some of the increase may be associated with increased wild harvest of kangaroo meat.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: There has been an incremental move since the 1970s for police forces in the eight jurisdictions in Australia to routinely carry exposed firearms while on duty. In the 1970s the norm was for police to carry a baton, with only NSW police carrying firearms. Since then, police have been authorised to carry a covered firearm, and more recently to carry an exposed firearm. The shift has taken place without public debate or a proper assessment of the vulnerability of police officers, but has taken place with public acquiescence.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: From 1984 to 1996, multiple killings aroused public concern. The 1984 Milperra massacre was a major incident in a series of conflicts between various "outlaw motorcycle gangs". In 1987, the Hoddle Street massacre and the Queen Street massacre took place in Melbourne. In response, several states required the registration of all guns, and restricted the availability of self-loading rifles and shotguns. In the Strathfield massacre in New South Wales, 1991, two were killed with a knife, and five more with a firearm. Tasmania passed a law in 1991 for firearm purchasers to obtain a licence, though enforcement was light. Firearm laws in Tasmania and Queensland remained relatively relaxed for longarms.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: The Port Arthur massacre took place in 1996 when the gunman opened fire on shop owners and tourists with two semi-automatic rifles that left 35 people dead and 23 wounded. This mass killing horrified the Australian public and transformed gun control legislation in Australia.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Prime Minister John Howard pressured the states to adopt the gun law proposals made in a report of the 1988 National Committee on Violence as the National Firearms Agreement, resulting in the non-binding National Firearms Agreement (NFA) between the Commonwealth and the States & Territories as the Constitution of Australia does not give the Commonwealth direct power to enact gun laws. In the face of some state resistance, Howard threatened to hold a nationwide referendum to alter the Constitution of Australia to give the Commonwealth constitutional power over guns. The National Firearms Agreement included a ban on all semi-automatic rifles and all semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns, and a system of licensing and ownership controls.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: The Howard Government held a series of public meetings to explain the proposed changes. At the first meeting, Howard wore a bullet-resistant vest, which was visible under his jacket. Many shooters were critical of this. Some firearm owners applied to join the Liberal Party in an attempt to influence the government, but the party barred them from membership. A court action by 500 shooters seeking admission to membership eventually failed in the Supreme Court of South Australia.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Section 51(xxxi) of the Constitution of Australia requires 'just terms' (financial compensation) for property that is compulsorily acquired, so the federal government introduced the "Medicare Levy Amendment Act 1996" to raise the predicted cost of A$500 million through a one-off increase in the Medicare levy. The 'gun buy back scheme' started on 1 October 1996 and concluded on 30 September 1997. The Australian National Audit Office reported that the scheme compulsorily acquired more than 640,000 firearms, many of which were semi-automatic rifles and shotguns (restricted as a result of the 1996 legislative changes) or old, antique and dysfunctional firearms.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In October 2002, a commerce student killed two fellow students at Monash University in Victoria with pistols he had acquired as a member of a shooting club. The gunman, Huan Yun Xiang, was acquitted of crimes related to the shootings due to mental impairment but ordered to be detained in Thomas Embling Hospital, a high-security hospital for up to 25 years.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: As in 1996, the Commonwealth Government, States and Territories agreed on a series of legislative changes known as the National Handgun Control Agreement (2002), resulting in the National Handgun Buyback Bill 2003, which provided Commonwealth funding for compulsory acquisition of handguns not meeting certain technical criteria. These changes were passed by State and Territory parliaments during 2003. Changes included a 10-round magazine capacity limit, a calibre limit of not more than .38 inches (9.65 mm) (since expanded under certain criteria), a barrel length limit of not less than 120 mm (4.72 inches) for semi-automatic pistols and 100 mm (3.94 inches) for revolvers, and new shooter probation and attendance requirements for handgun target shooters. Whilst handguns for sporting shooters are nominally restricted to .38 inches as a maximum calibre, it is possible to obtain an endorsement or special permit allowing the purchase and use of pistols with calibre up to .45 inches (11.43 mm) to be used for Metallic silhouette shooting or Single Action Shooting matches.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: The 2003 changes contained an option for licensed handgun target shooters to have all handguns (including those not prohibited by the 2003 changes) to be compulsorily acquired in exchange for the voluntary surrender of their Category H (Handgun) licence for a period of five years.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: On 15–16 December 2014, gunman Man Haron Monis, held hostage 17 customers and employees of a Lindt chocolate café located at Martin Place in Sydney, Australia. The perpetrator was on bail at the time and had previously been convicted of a range of offences. Two of the hostages and the perpetrator died.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In August 2015, NSW Premier Mike Baird and Police Minister Troy Grant announced a tightening of laws on bail and illegal firearms, creating a new offence for the possession of a stolen firearm, with a maximum of 14 years imprisonment and establishing an Illegal Firearms Investigation and Reward Scheme. This legislative change also introduced measures to reduce illegal firearms in NSW including a ban on the possession of digital blueprints that enable firearms to be manufactured using 3D printers and milling machines for anyone without an appropriate licence.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In 2015, the importation of the Adler A110 lever-action shotgun into Australia generated controversy. The firearm itself could hold up to 7+1 rounds (possible 10+1) in its magazine, a relatively high capacity for a shotgun, and its ability to deliver relatively fast follow-up shots as a lever-action firearm. However, the issue regarding the Adler A110 which generated most of the controversy was that it was a Category A firearm, making it accessible to nearly all licensed shooters. This resulted in an importation ban on A110 shotguns with a capacity over 5 rounds (up to 5 rounds was still permitted for importation). Lever-action shotguns with a magazine capacity over 5 rounds were later reclassified as Category D firearms.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: There have been 28 state and territory-based amnesties since Port Arthur. The 1996 national amnesty and ‘buyback’ scheme ran for 12 months from October 1996 to September 1997 as part of the National Firearms Agreement which resulted in the removal of almost 650,000 firearms. There was also a six-month national handgun buyback in 2003 as part of the National Handgun Control Agreement (2002) resulting in the surrender of 68,727 handguns nationally


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In New South Wales there have been three gun amnesties: in 2001, 2003 and 2009. 63,000 handguns were handed in during the first two amnesties and over 4,323 handguns were handed in during the third amnesty. During the third amnesty 21,615 firearm registrations were received by the Firearms Registry. The surrendered firearms were all destroyed.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Between 1 July and 30 September 2017, there was a national firearms amnesty to hand in unregistered or unwanted firearms. The amnesty had been approved in March 2017 by the Firearms and Weapons Policy Working Group (FWPWG) to reduce the number of unregistered firearms in Australia following the Lindt Cafe siege in 2014, and the 2015 shooting of an unarmed police civilian finance worker outside the New South Wales Police Force headquarters in Parramatta, Sydney.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: The firearms amnesty was the first national amnesty since the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. In October 2017 Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said that 51,000 unregistered firearms were surrendered during the three-month amnesty, of the previous estimate of 260,000 unregistered guns.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: It has been estimated that, as at 2017, there were 3,158,795 firearms in private hands in Australia, of which 414,205 were unregistered. This represents 14.5 firearms per 100 people.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Some studies on the effects of Australia's gun laws have suggested that Australia's gun laws have been effective in reducing mass shootings, gun suicides and armed crime, while other studies suggest that the laws have had little effect. Polling shows strong support for gun legislation in Australia with around 85 to 90% of people wanting the same or greater level of restrictions. Nevertheless, conservative estimates are that there may be about 260,000 unregistered or prohibited firearms in the community, including assault rifles.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Between 1991 and 2001, the number of firearm-related deaths in Australia declined by 47%. Suicides committed with firearms accounted for 77% of these deaths, followed by firearms homicide (15%), firearms accidents (5%), firearms deaths resulting from legal intervention and undetermined deaths (2%). The number of firearms suicides was in decline consistently from 1991 to 1998, two years after the introduction of firearm regulation in 1996.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Suicide deaths using firearms more than halved in ten years, from 389 deaths in 1995, to 147 deaths in 2005. This is equal to 7% of all suicides in 2005. Over the same period, suicides by hanging increased by over 52% from 699 in 1995 to 1068 in 2005.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: The number of guns stolen fell from an average 4,195 per year from 1994 to 2000 to 1,526 in 2006–2007. Long guns are more often stolen opportunistically in home burglaries, but few homes have handguns and a substantial proportion of stolen handguns are taken from security firms and other businesses; only a small proportion, 0.06% of licensed firearms, are stolen in a given year. A small proportion of those firearms are reported to be recovered. About 3% of these stolen weapons are later connected to an actual crime or found in the possession of a person charged with a serious offence. As of 2011 and 2012, pistols and semi-automatic pistols were traded on the black market for ten to twenty thousand dollars.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In 1981, Richard Harding, after reviewing Australian and other data at that time, said that "whatever arguments might be made for the limitation or regulation of the private ownership of firearms, suicide patterns do not constitute one of them. " He quoted a 1968 international analysis of twenty developed countries "cultural factors appear to affect suicide rates far more than the availability and use of firearms. Thus, suicide rates would not seem to be readily affected by making firearms less available." however, in 1985 Harding later supported laws to restrict gun ownership in New South Wales, saying laws contributing to slowing down in the growth of the Australian gun inventory are to be welcomed.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In 1997, the Prime Minister, John Howard appointed the Australian Institute of Criminology to monitor the effects of the gun buyback. The institute has published a number of papers reporting trends and statistics around gun ownership and gun crime.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In 2002, Jenny Mouzos from the Australian Institute of Criminology examined the rate of firearm theft in Australian states in territories following the firearm regulation. She found that "the NFA... is having the desired effect: securely stored firearms are proving less vulnerable to theft."


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In 2003, researchers from the Monash University Accident Research Centre examined firearm deaths and mortality in the years before and after firearm regulation. They concluded that there was "dramatic" reduction in firearm deaths and especially suicides due to "the implementation of strong regulatory reform".


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In 2005, Don Weatherburn of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research stated that the 1996 legislation had little to no effect on violence saying the "laws did not result in any acceleration of the downward trend in gun homicide."


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Multiple studies have been conducted by Jeanine Baker and Samara McPhedran, researchers with the International Coalition for Women in Shooting and Hunting (WiSH). In 2006 their paper on the 1996 firearms legislation in the "British Journal of Criminology" used an ARIMA analysis and found little evidence for an impact of the laws on homicide, but did for suicide. Don Weatherburn described the article as "reputable" and "well-conducted" but also stated that "it would be wrong to infer from the study that it does not matter how many guns there are in the community." Simon Chapman stated the article ignored the Mass Shootings issue such as the Port Arthur Massacre. In 2012, McPhedran and Baker found there was little evidence for any impacts of the gun laws on firearm suicide among people under 35 years of age, and suggested that the significant financial expenditure associated with Australia's firearms method restriction measures may not have had any impact on youth suicide. In 2008 McPhedran compared the incidence of mass shootings in Australia and New Zealand. The authors' conclude that "if civilian access to certain types of firearms explained the occurrence of mass shootings in Australia then New Zealand would have continued to experience mass shooting events".


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In 2006, Weatherburn noted the importance of actively policing illegal firearm trafficking and argued that there was little evidence that the new laws had helped in this regard.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: A 2006 study coauthored by Simon Chapman concluded: "Australia's 1996 gun law reforms were followed by more than a decade free of fatal mass shootings, and accelerated declines in firearm deaths, particularly suicides. Total homicide rates followed the same pattern. Removing large numbers of rapid-firing firearms from civilians may be an effective way of reducing mass shootings, firearm homicides and firearm suicides."


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In 2007, a meta-analysis published in the Australian Medical Association's "The Medical Journal of Australia" researched nationwide firearm suicides. They said that the analysis was consistent with the hypothesis that "measures to control the availability of firearms... have resulted in a decline in total suicide rates" and recommended further reduction in the availability of lethal means.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: A 2008 study on the effects of the firearm buybacks by Wang-Sheng Lee and Sandy Suardi of University of Melbourne and La Trobe University studied the data and concluded "the NFA did not have any large effects on reducing firearm homicide or suicide rates."


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In 2009, a study published in the "Journal of Sociology" examined the rate of firearm suicide in Queensland. They found that "gun suicides are continuing to decrease in Queensland" and that this is "most likely as a function of ongoing gun controls".


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In 2009, another paper from the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention at Griffith University also studied suicide in Queensland only, concluding, "No significant difference was found in the rate pre/post the introduction of the NFA in Queensland; however, a significant difference was found for Australian data, the quality of which is noticeably less satisfactory."


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: A 2010 study by Christine Neill and Andrew Leigh found the 1997 gun buyback scheme reduced firearm suicides by 74% while having no effect on non-firearm suicides or substitution of method.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In 2011, many studies have followed, providing varying results stemming from different methodologies and areas of focus. David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis of Harvard University, funded by the Joyce Foundation, summarised the research in 2011 and concluded: “it would have been difficult to imagine more compelling future evidence of a beneficial effect.” They said that a complication in evaluating the effect of the NFA was that gun deaths were falling in the early 1990s. They added that everyone should be pleased with the "immediate, and continuing, reduction" in firearm suicide and firearm homicide following the NFA.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In a 2013 report from the Australian Institute of Criminology, Samantha Bricknell, Frederic Lemieux and Tim Prenzler compared mass shootings between America and Australia and found the "1996 NFA coincided within the cessation of mass shooting events" in Australia, and that there were reductions in America that were evident during the 1994–2004 US Federal Assault Weapons Ban.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: A 2014 report stated that approximately "260,000 guns are on the Australian 'grey' or black markets", and discussed the potential problem of people using 3D printers to create guns. NSW and Victorian police obtained plans to create 3D printed guns and tested to see if they could fire, but the guns exploded during testing.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: A 2015 journal article in the "International Review of Law and Economics" evaluated the effect of the National Firearms Agreement on overall crime, rather than just firearm deaths like other studies. Using the difference in differences identification approach, they found that after the NFA, "there were significant decreases in armed robbery and attempted murder relative to sexual assault".


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In 2016, four researchers evaluated the National Firearms Agreement after 20 years in relation to mental health. They said that the "NFA exemplifies how firearms regulation can prevent firearm mortality and injuries."


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In 2016, a study by Adam Lankford, associate professor of criminal justice, examined the links between public mass shootings and gun availability in various countries. He found that the restrictions in Australia were effective, concluding that "in the wake of these policies, Australia has yet to experience another public mass shooting."


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: A 2017 oral presentation published in "Injury Prevention" examined the effect of the NFA on overall firearm mortality. They found that the NFA decreased firearm deaths by 61% and concluded that "Australian firearm regulations indeed contributed to a decline in firearm mortality." After this study, these researchers were reported in the Journal of Experimental Criminology in connection with another study with Charles Branas at Columbia University which concluded; "Current evidence showing decreases in firearm mortality after the 1996 Australian national firearm law relies on an empirical model that may have limited ability to identify the true effects of the law."


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Until 1996, the Australian federal government had little role in firearms law. Following the Port Arthur massacre, the Howard Government (1996–2007), with strong media and public support, introduced uniform gun laws with the cooperation of all the states, brought about through threats to Commonwealth funding arrangements. Then Prime Minister John Howard frequently referred to the United States to explain his opposition to civilian firearms ownership and usage in Australia, stating that he did not want Australia to go "down the American path". In one interview on Sydney radio station 2GB, Howard said, "We will find any means we can to further restrict them because I hate guns... ordinary citizens should not have weapons. We do not want the American disease imported into Australia." In 1995 Howard, as opposition leader, had expressed a desire to introduce restrictive gun laws.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In his autobiography "", Howard expressed his support for the anti-gun cause and his desire to introduce restrictive gun laws long before he became prime minister. In a television interview shortly before the 10th anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre, he reaffirmed his stance, "I did not want Australia to go down the American path. There are some things about America I admire and there are some things I don't. And one of the things I don't admire about America is their... slavish love of guns. They're evil." During the same television interview, Howard also stated that he saw the outpouring of grief in the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre as "an opportunity to grab the moment and think about a fundamental change to gun laws in this country".


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: The National Firearms Agreement has had continuing support from both Labor and Coalition governments.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In March 2018, Victorian Police were set to be armed with military-style semi-automatic rifles to combat terrorism and the increase in gun-related crime.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party is a political party that started in New South Wales claims to be "the voice of hunters, shooters, fishers, rural and regional Australia and independent thinking Australians everywhere. Advocating for the politically incorrect, a voice of reason, science and conservation". Its founder, John Tingle, served as an elected member of the New South Wales Legislative Council from 1995 until he retired in late 2006. , the party holds two seats in the NSW Legislative Council and three seats in the Legislative Assembly. The party holds one seat in the Western Australian Legislative Council, having won the seat at the 2013 Western Australian state election. The party also holds one seat in the Victorian Legislative Council, having won the seat at the 2018 Victorian state election.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: A number of minor political parties such as the Liberal Democratic Party of Australia, Outdoor Recreation Party, Country Alliance and Katter's Australian Party (represented in the House of Representatives by Bob Katter, who is the father-in-law of Robert Nioa, the CEO of Australia's largest private firearm supplier NIOA) have platforms advocating lawful civilian ownership of firearms.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: The One Nation Party in 1997–98 briefly gained national prominence and had strong support from shooters. In March 2019, One Nation was the subject of a two-part Al Jazeera documentary series alleging that the party was soliciting financial assistance from the National Rifle Association of America and Koch Industries in order to change Australian gun control laws. Al Jazeera used an undercover reporter posing as a gun rights advocate. In response, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson condemned the documentary as a Qatar hit piece and announced that she had filed a complaint with the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. Similar sentiments were echoed by the One Nation officials, James Ashby and Steve Dickson, who were featured in the documentary. In response to the documentary, the Australian Electoral Commission said that none of the activities shown in the documentary violated section 326 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 since they occurred overseas.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Shooting clubs have existed in Australia since the mid-19th century. They are mainly concerned with protecting the viability of hunting, collecting and target shooting sports. Australian shooters regard their sport as under permanent threat from increasingly restrictive legislation. They argue that they have been made scapegoats by politicians, the media, and anti-gun activists for the acts of criminals who generally use illegal firearms. Their researchers have found scant evidence that increasing restrictions have improved public safety, despite the high costs and severe regulatory barriers imposed on shooters in Australia.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: The largest organisation of firearms owners is the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (SSAA) which was established in 1948, and as at 2015 had 175,000 members. SSAA state branches lobby on local issues, while SSAA National addresses federal legislation and international issues. SSAA National has non-government organisation (NGO) status at the United Nations and is a founding member of The World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting Activities (WFSA), which also has NGO status. SSAA National has a number of people working in research and lobbying roles. In 2008, they appointed journalist and media manager Tim Bannister as federal parliamentary lobbyist.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: SSAA argues that there is no evidence that gun control restrictions in 1987, 1996 and 2002 had any impact on the already established trends. Also, responding to Neill and Leigh, SSAA said that 93% of people replaced their seized firearms with at least one, to replace their surrendered firearms.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: The Shooting Industry Foundation of Australia (SIFA) was established in 2014 as the "peak body in research, advocacy, education and safety for one of our country’s oldest and most innovative industries" serving to "represent more effectively the social, cultural, economic and environmental impact of the many thousands of Australians who work in the industry and aligned industries like agriculture, tourism, conservation and ethical harvest". Its board members are directors from Australia's five largest firearm importers/suppliers — NIOA, Raytrade, Outdoor Sporting Agencies (OSA), Winchester Australia and Beretta Australia. During 2017 Queensland state election, SIFA contributed to a political campaign called "Flick 'em", aimed at diverting the votes of major parties and electing a hung government more in favour of relaxing the gun law. SIFA also contributed significantly in the "Not.Happy.Dan" campaign against incumbent Victorian state premier Daniel Andrews during the 2018 Victorian state election.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: For handguns, one major organisation in Australia is Pistol Australia. There are several other national bodies, such as Field and Game Australia, the National Rifle Association of Australia, IPSC Australia Inc, the Australian Clay Target Association and Target Rifle Australia. These national bodies with their state counterparts concentrate on a range of sporting and political issues ranging from Olympic-type competition through to conservation activities.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: The National Coalition for Gun Control (NCGC) had a high profile in the public debate up to and immediately after the Port Arthur massacre. Rebecca Peters, Roland Browne, Simon Chapman and Reverend Tim Costello appeared in media reports and authored articles to support their aims. In 1996, the NCGC had received the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's Community Human Rights award.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In 2003, Samantha Lee as chair of the NCGC was financed by a Churchill Fellowship to publish a paper arguing that current handgun legislation is too loose, that police officers who are shooters have a conflict of interest, and that licensed private firearm ownership "per se" presents a threat to women and children.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In a late 2005 press release, Roland Browne as co-chair of the NCGC, advocated further restrictions on handguns.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: On 26 August 2013, NCGC was incorporated into Gun Control Australia (GCA) in New South Wales as an association advocating for stronger gun laws, run by volunteer lawyers, public health academics and social media experts. The organisation is funded by community donations and is not affiliated with any political party. Its Chair is Samantha Lee and Vice President Roland Browne. Both Samantha Lee and Roland Browne are lawyers who have volunteered in the area of gun control for over ten years.


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: In 2015, Essential Research performed a poll regarding the support for Australia's gun laws. The demographic-normalised poll found that 6% of Australians thought the laws were "too strong", 40% thought "about right" and 45% thought "not strong enough".


title: Gun laws of Australia

text: Essential Research repeated the poll a year later and found 6% thought the laws were too strong, 44% thought "about right" and 45% thought the laws were "not strong enough". It also found these views were consistent regardless of political party voting tendency for Labor, Coalition or Greens voters.


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: In programming language theory and type theory, polymorphism is the provision of a single interface to entities of different types or the use of a single symbol to represent multiple different types. The concept is borrowed from a principle in biology where an organism or species can have many different forms or stages.


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: Interest in polymorphic type systems developed significantly in the 1960s, with practical implementations beginning to appear by the end of the decade. "Ad hoc polymorphism" and "parametric polymorphism" were originally described in Christopher Strachey's "Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages", where they are listed as "the two main classes" of polymorphism. Ad hoc polymorphism was a feature of Algol 68, while parametric polymorphism was the core feature of ML's type system.


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: In a 1985 paper, Peter Wegner and Luca Cardelli introduced the term "inclusion polymorphism" to model subtypes and inheritance, citing Simula as the first programming language to implement it.


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: Christopher Strachey chose the term "ad hoc polymorphism" to refer to polymorphic functions that can be applied to arguments of different types, but that behave differently depending on the type of the argument to which they are applied (also known as function overloading or operator overloading). The term "ad hoc" in this context is not intended to be pejorative; it refers simply to the fact that this type of polymorphism is not a fundamental feature of the type system. In the Pascal / Delphi example below, the codice_1 functions seem to work generically over various types when looking at the invocations, but are considered to be two entirely distinct functions by the compiler for all intents and purposes:


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: In dynamically typed languages the situation can be more complex as the correct function that needs to be invoked might only be determinable at run time.


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: Implicit type conversion has also been defined as a form of polymorphism, referred to as "coercion polymorphism".


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: "Parametric polymorphism" allows a function or a data type to be written generically, so that it can handle values "uniformly" without depending on their type. Parametric polymorphism is a way to make a language more expressive while still maintaining full static type-safety.


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: The concept of parametric polymorphism applies to both data types and functions. A function that can evaluate to or be applied to values of different types is known as a "polymorphic function." A data type that can appear to be of a generalized type (e.g. a list with elements of arbitrary type) is designated "polymorphic data type" like the generalized type from which such specializations are made.


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: Parametric polymorphism is ubiquitous in functional programming, where it is often simply referred to as "polymorphism". The following example in Haskell shows a parameterized list data type and two parametrically polymorphic functions on them:


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: Parametric polymorphism is also available in several object-oriented languages. For instance, templates in C++ and D, or under the name generics in C#, Delphi, Java and Go:


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: John C. Reynolds (and later Jean-Yves Girard) formally developed this notion of polymorphism as an extension to lambda calculus (called the polymorphic lambda calculus or System F). Any parametrically polymorphic function is necessarily restricted in what it can do, working on the shape of the data instead of its value, leading to the concept of parametricity.


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: Some languages employ the idea of "subtyping" (also called "subtype polymorphism" or "inclusion polymorphism") to restrict the range of types that can be used in a particular case of polymorphism. In these languages, subtyping allows a function to be written to take an object of a certain type "T", but also work correctly, if passed an object that belongs to a type "S" that is a subtype of "T" (according to the Liskov substitution principle). This type relation is sometimes written "S" <: "T". Conversely, "T" is said to be a "supertype" of "S"—written "T" :> "S". Subtype polymorphism is usually resolved dynamically (see below).


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: In the following Java example we make cats and dogs subtypes of animals. The procedure codice_2 accepts an animal, but will also work correctly if a subtype is passed to it:


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: In another example, if "Number", "Rational", and "Integer" are types such that "Number" :> "Rational" and "Number" :> "Integer", a function written to take a "Number" will work equally well when passed an "Integer" or "Rational" as when passed a "Number". The actual type of the object can be hidden from clients into a black box, and accessed via object identity.


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: In fact, if the "Number" type is "abstract", it may not even be possible to get your hands on an object whose "most-derived" type is "Number" (see abstract data type, abstract class). This particular kind of type hierarchy is known—especially in the context of the Scheme programming language—as a "numerical tower", and usually contains many more types.


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: Object-oriented programming languages offer subtype polymorphism using "subclassing" (also known as "inheritance"). In typical implementations, each class contains what is called a "virtual table"—a table of functions that implement the polymorphic part of the class interface—and each object contains a pointer to the "vtable" of its class, which is then consulted whenever a polymorphic method is called. This mechanism is an example of:


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: The same goes for most other popular object systems. Some, however, such as Common Lisp Object System, provide "multiple dispatch", under which method calls are polymorphic in "all" arguments.


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: The interaction between parametric polymorphism and subtyping leads to the concepts of variance and bounded quantification.


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: Row polymorphism is a similar, but distinct concept from subtyping. It deals with structural types. It allows the usage of all values whose types have certain properties, without losing the remaining type information.


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: A related concept is "polytypism" (or "data type genericity"). A polytypic function is more general than polymorphic, and in such a function, "though one can provide fixed ad hoc cases for specific data types, an ad hoc combinator is absent".


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: Polymorphism can be distinguished by when the implementation is selected: statically (at compile time) or dynamically (at run time, typically via a virtual function). This is known respectively as "static dispatch" and "dynamic dispatch," and the corresponding forms of polymorphism are accordingly called "static polymorphism" and "dynamic polymorphism".


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: Static polymorphism executes faster, because there is no dynamic dispatch overhead, but requires additional compiler support. Further, static polymorphism allows greater static analysis by compilers (notably for optimization), source code analysis tools, and human readers (programmers). Dynamic polymorphism is more flexible but slower—for example, dynamic polymorphism allows duck typing, and a dynamically linked library may operate on objects without knowing their full type.


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: Static polymorphism typically occurs in ad hoc polymorphism and parametric polymorphism, whereas dynamic polymorphism is usual for subtype polymorphism. However, it is possible to achieve static polymorphism with subtyping through more sophisticated use of template metaprogramming, namely the curiously recurring template pattern.


title: Polymorphism (computer science)

text: When polymorphism is exposed via a library, static polymorphism becomes impossible for dynamic libraries as there is no way of knowing what types the parameters are when the shared object is built. While languages like C++ and Rust use monomorphized templates, the Swift programming language makes extensive use of dynamic dispatch to build the application binary interface for these libraries by default. As a result, more code can be shared for a reduced system size at the cost of runtime overhead.


title: Blue Dog Coalition

text: The Blue Dog Coalition (commonly known as the Blue Dogs or Blue Dog Democrats) is a caucus in the United States House of Representatives comprising centrist members from the Democratic Party. The caucus was founded as a group of conservative Democrats in 1995 in response to defeats in the 1994 elections. Historically, Blue Dog Coalition has been fiscally and socially conservative, representing the center-right in the Democratic Party. The modern Blue Dog Coalition remains the most conservative grouping of Democrats in the House, broadly adopting socially liberal and fiscally conservative policies and promoting fiscal restraint.


title: Blue Dog Coalition

text: The caucus has 19 members. The co-chairs of the Blue Dog Coalition for the 117th Congress are U.S. representatives Ed Case, Stephanie Murphy, and Tom O'Halleran. The chair of the Blue Dog PAC, the Coalition's political organization, is U.S. representative Kurt Schrader, who lost renomination in 2022.


title: Blue Dog Coalition

text: The Blue Dog Coalition was formed in 1995 during the 104th Congress to give members from the Democratic Party representing conservative-leaning districts a unified voice after the Democrats' loss of Congress in the 1994 Republican Revolution.


title: Blue Dog Coalition

text: The term "Blue Dog Democrat" is credited to Texas Democratic Representative Pete Geren (who later joined the George W. Bush administration). Geren opined that the members had been "choked blue" by Democrats on the left. It is related to the political term "Yellow Dog Democrat", a reference to Southern Democrats said to be "'so loyal they would even vote for a yellow dog before they would vote for any Republican"'. The term also refers to the "Blue Dog" paintings of Cajun artist George Rodrigue of Lafayette, Louisiana as the original members of the coalition would regularly meet in the offices of Louisiana representatives Billy Tauzin and Jimmy Hayes, both of whom later joined the Republican Party – both also had Rodrigue's paintings on their walls. An additional explanation for the term cited by members is "when dogs are not let into the house, they stay outside in the cold and turn blue", a reference to the Blue Dogs' belief they had been left out of a party that they believed had shifted to the political left. At one time, first-term Blue Dogs were nicknamed 'Blue Pups'. Starting in the twenty-first century, the caucus began shifting its ideology and began adopting more socially liberal stances in order align more closely with mainstream Democratic Party political values.


title: Blue Dog Coalition

text: In 2007, 15 Blue Dogs in safe seats rebelled, and refused to contribute party dues to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. An additional 16 Blue Dogs did not pay any money to the DCCC, but were exempt from party-mandated contributions because they were top GOP targets for defeat in 2008. One reason for the party-dues boycott was contained in remarks made by Rep. Lynn Woolsey of California, encouraging leaders of anti-war groups to field primary challenges to any Democrat who did not vote to end the war in Iraq. Woolsey later stated that she was misunderstood, but the Blue Dogs continued the boycott. Donations to party congressional committees are an important source of funding for the party committees, permitting millions of dollars to be funneled back into close races.


title: Blue Dog Coalition

text: In the summer of 2009, "The Economist" newspaper said the following regarding the Blue Dog Coalition: "The debate over health care ... may be the pinnacle of the group's power so far." "The Economist" quoted Charlie Stenholm, a founding Blue Dog, as stating that "This is the first year for the new kennel in which their votes are really going to make a difference." In July 2009, Blue Dog members who were committee members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee successfully delayed the House vote on the Health Insurance Reform Bill (HR3200) until after the Summer Recess. It was during this recess that the term 'Obamacare' was first derisively adopted by Republicans on Capitol Hill It is widely proposed that Blue Dog opposition to the "public option" and this recess, with that summer's contentious Town Hall meetings, provided the healthcare law's Republican opponents the opportunity to attack and subsequently get the public option dropped from the original, pre-recess bill.


title: Blue Dog Coalition

text: The Washington Post noted the most influential U.S. House of Representatives voting bloc was the conservative Democrat Blue Dog Coalition, having over 50 members.


title: Blue Dog Coalition

text: The Blue Dog Coalition suffered serious losses in the 2010 midterm elections, losing over half of its seats to Republican challengers. Its members, who were roughly one quarter of the Democratic Party's caucus in the 111th Congress, accounted for half of the party's midterm election losses. Including retirements, Blue Dog numbers in the House were reduced from 59 members in 2009 to 26 members in 2011. Two of the Coalition's four leaders (Stephanie Herseth Sandlin and Baron Hill) failed to secure re-election.


title: Blue Dog Coalition

text: The caucus shrank even more in the 2012 House of Representatives elections, decreasing in size from 27 to 14 members. Speculation ensued that the centrist New Democrat Coalition would fill the power vacuum created by the Blue Dog Coalition's decline. Opposition to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and climate change legislation are believed to have contributed to the defeat of two conservative Democrats in the 2012 House elections in Pennsylvania by more liberal opponents.


title: Blue Dog Coalition

text: In the 2016 elections, future Blue Dogs accounted for over half of the Democrats' gains in the House. In 2018, for the first time since 2006, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee partnered with the Blue Dog PAC (the Blue Dog Coalition's political organization) to recruit candidates in competitive districts across the country. After the 2018 House of Representatives elections, the caucus grew from 18 members to 24. All incumbents were re-elected and Rep. Kyrsten Sinema was elected to the U.S. Senate from Arizona. The caucus also added 11 new members who defeated Republican incumbents in the 2018 election in districts that had voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Congressional Democrats gained more seats than in any single election since the post-Watergate congressional elections.


title: Blue Dog Coalition

text: The Blue Dog Coalition is the most conservative grouping of Democrats in the house. It "advocates for fiscal responsibility, a strong national defense and bipartisan consensus rather than conflict with Republicans". It acts as a check on legislation that its members perceive to be too far to the right or to the left on the political spectrum. It broadly supports socially liberal and fiscally conservative policies and promoting fiscal restraint. The caucus has shifted left in recent years, adopting more liberal stances on social issues and aligning more closely with Democratic Party policies.


title: Blue Dog Coalition

text: The Blue Dog Coalition is nonetheless often involved in searching for a compromise between liberal and conservative positions. Though its members have evolved on social issues over time, the group has never taken a position on social issues as a caucus. There is no mention of social issues in the official Blue Dog materials.


title: Blue Dog Coalition

text: In the early years of the caucus, the Blue Dogs were viewed by some as the political successors to a Southern Democratic group known as the Boll Weevils. The Boll Weevils may, in turn, be considered the descendants of the Dixiecrats and the "states' rights" Democrats of the 1940s through the 1960s, and even the Bourbon Democrats of the late 19th century.


title: Blue Dog Coalition

text: The founding members of the Blue Dog Coalition were: Glen Browder and Bud Cramer of Alabama; Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas; Gary Condit of California; Nathan Deal of Georgia; William Lipinski of Illinois; Scotty Baesler of Kentucky; Billy Tauzin and Jimmy Hayes of Louisiana; Collin Peterson and David Minge of Minnesota; Michael Parker and Gene Taylor of Mississippi; Pat Danner of Missouri; William K. Brewster of Oklahoma; John S. Tanner of Tennessee; Ralph Hall, Charles Stenholm, Pete Geren and Greg Laughlin of Texas, Bill Orton of Utah; and Lewis F. Payne, Jr. and Owen Pickett of Virginia. Condit (Administration), Peterson (Policy) and Tanner (Communications) were co-chairs (Deal was initially the chair for Policy before he switched parties shortly after the caucus's founding). Browder headed the group's budget task force.


title: Blue Dog Coalition

text: In January 2019, McClatchy reported that the Blue Dogs had changed from a coalition of "southern white men" to "a multi-regional, multicultural group"; at that time, two Blue Dogs were African-American, one was Vietnamese-American, one was Mexican-American, and only five came from Southern states.


title: Blue Dog Coalition

text: The co-chairs of the Blue Dog Coalition for the 117th Congress are U.S. Representatives Ed Case, Stephanie Murphy, and Tom O'Halleran. The chair of the Blue Dog PAC, the Coalition's political organization, is U.S. Representative Kurt Schrader. Rep. Murphy, a Vietnamese American, is the first woman of color to lead the Blue Dog Coalition in its history.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The statue of Laocoön and His Sons, also called the Laocoön Group (), has been one of the most famous ancient sculptures ever since it was excavated in Rome in 1506 and placed on public display in the Vatican Museums, where it remains. It is very likely the same statue that was praised in the highest terms by the main Roman writer on art, Pliny the Elder. The figures are near life-size and the group is a little over in height, showing the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being attacked by sea serpents.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The group has been called "the prototypical icon of human agony" in Western art, and unlike the agony often depicted in Christian art showing the Passion of Jesus and martyrs, this suffering has no redemptive power or reward. The suffering is shown through the contorted expressions of the faces (Dr. Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne pointed out to Charles Darwin that Laocoön's bulging eyebrows are physiologically impossible), which are matched by the struggling bodies, especially that of Laocoön himself, with every part of his body straining.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: Pliny attributes the work, then in the palace of Emperor Titus, to three Greek sculptors from the island of Rhodes: Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus, but does not give a date or patron. In style it is considered "one of the finest examples of the Hellenistic baroque" and certainly in the Greek tradition, but it is not known whether it is an original work or a copy of an earlier sculpture, probably in bronze, or made for a Greek or Roman commission. The view that it is an original work of the 2nd century BC now has few if any supporters, although many still see it as a copy of such a work made in the early Imperial period, probably of a bronze original. Others see it as probably an original work of the later period, continuing to use the Pergamene style of some two centuries earlier. In either case, it was probably commissioned for the home of a wealthy Roman, possibly of the Imperial family. Various dates have been suggested for the statue, ranging from about 200 BC to the 70s AD, though "a Julio-Claudian date [between 27 BC and 68 AD] ... is now preferred".


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: Although mostly in excellent condition for an excavated sculpture, the group is missing several parts, and analysis suggests that it was remodelled in ancient times and has undergone a number of restorations since it was excavated. It is on display in the Museo Pio-Clementino, a part of the Vatican Museums.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The story of Laocoön, a Trojan priest, came from the Greek Epic Cycle on the Trojan Wars, though it is not mentioned by Homer. It had been the subject of a tragedy, now lost, by Sophocles and was mentioned by other Greek writers, though the events around the attack by the serpents vary considerably. The most famous account of these is now in Virgil's "Aeneid" (see the "Aeneid" quotation at the entry Laocoön), but this dates from between 29 and 19 BC, which is possibly later than the sculpture. However, some scholars see the group as a depiction of the scene as described by Virgil.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: In Virgil, Laocoön was a priest of Poseidon who was killed with both his sons after attempting to expose the ruse of the Trojan Horse by striking it with a spear. In Sophocles, on the other hand, he was a priest of Apollo, who should have been celibate but had married. The serpents killed only the two sons, leaving Laocoön himself alive to suffer. In other versions he was killed for having had sex with his wife in the temple of Poseidon, or simply making a sacrifice in the temple with his wife present. In this second group of versions, the snakes were sent by Poseidon and in the first by Poseidon and Athena, or Apollo, and the deaths were interpreted by the Trojans as proof that the horse was a sacred object. The two versions have rather different morals: Laocoön was either punished for doing wrong, or for being right.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The snakes are depicted as both biting and constricting, and are probably intended as venomous, as in Virgil. Pietro Aretino thought so, praising the group in 1537:


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: ...the two serpents, in attacking the three figures, produce the most striking semblances of fear, suffering and death. The youth embraced in the coils is fearful; the old man struck by the fangs is in torment; the child who has received the poison, dies.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: In at least one Greek telling of the story the older son is able to escape, and the composition seems to allow for that possibility.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The style of the work is agreed to be that of the Hellenistic "Pergamene baroque" which arose in Greek Asia Minor around 200 BC, and whose best known undoubtedly original work is the Pergamon Altar, dated c. 180–160 BC, and now in Berlin. Here the figure of Alcyoneus is shown in a pose and situation (including serpents) which is very similar to those of Laocoön, though the style is "looser and wilder in its principles" than the altar.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The execution of the Laocoön is extremely fine throughout, and the composition very carefully calculated, even though it appears that the group underwent adjustments in ancient times. The two sons are rather small in scale compared to their father, but this adds to the impact of the central figure. The fine white marble used is often thought to be Greek, but has not been identified by analysis.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: In Pliny's survey of Greek and Roman stone sculpture in his encyclopedic "Natural History" (XXXVI, 37), he says:


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: ...in the case of several works of very great excellence, the number of artists that have been engaged upon them has proved a considerable obstacle to the fame of each, no individual being able to engross the whole of the credit, and it being impossible to award it in due proportion to the names of the several artists combined. Such is the case with the Laocoön, for example, in the palace of the Emperor Titus, a work that may be looked upon as preferable to any other production of the art of painting or of [bronze] statuary. It is sculptured from a single block, both the main figure as well as the children, and the serpents with their marvellous folds. This group was made in concert by three most eminent artists, Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, natives of Rhodes.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: It is generally accepted that this is the same work as is now in the Vatican. It is now very often thought that the three Rhodians were copyists, perhaps of a bronze sculpture from Pergamon, created around 200 BC. It is noteworthy that Pliny does not address this issue explicitly, in a way that suggests "he regards it as an original". Pliny states that it was located in the palace of the emperor Titus, and it is possible that it remained in the same place until 1506 (see "Findspot" section below). He also asserts that it was carved from a single piece of marble, though the Vatican work comprises at least seven interlocking pieces. The phrase translated above as "in concert" ("de consilii sententia") is regarded by some as referring to their commission rather than the artists' method of working, giving in Nigel Spivey's translation: " [the artists] at the behest of council designed a group...", which Spivey takes to mean that the commission was by Titus, possibly even advised by Pliny among other "savants".


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The same three artists' names, though in a different order (Athenodoros, Agesander, and Polydorus), with the names of their fathers, are inscribed on one of the sculptures at Tiberius's villa at Sperlonga (though they may predate his ownership), but it seems likely that not all the three masters were the same individuals. Though broadly similar in style, many aspects of the execution of the two groups are drastically different, with the Laocoon group of much higher quality and finish.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: Some scholars used to think that honorific inscriptions found at Lindos in Rhodes dated Agesander and Athenodoros, recorded as priests, to a period after 42 BC, making the years 42 to 20 BC the most likely date for the Laocoön group's creation. However the Sperlonga inscription, which also gives the fathers of the artists, makes it clear that at least Agesander is a different individual from the priest of the same name recorded at Lindos, though very possibly related. The names may have recurred across generations, a Rhodian habit, within the context of a family workshop (which might well have included the adoption of promising young sculptors). Altogether eight "signatures" (or labels) of an Athenodoros are found on sculptures or bases for them, five of these from Italy. Some, including that from Sperlonga, record his father as Agesander. The whole question remains the subject of academic debate.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The group was unearthed in February 1506 in the vineyard of Felice De Fredis; informed of the fact, Pope Julius II, an enthusiastic classicist, sent for his court artists. Michelangelo was called to the site of the unearthing of the statue immediately after its discovery, along with the Florentine architect Giuliano da Sangallo and his eleven-year-old son Francesco da Sangallo, later a sculptor, who wrote an account over sixty years later:


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The first time I was in Rome when I was very young, the pope was told about the discovery of some very beautiful statues in a vineyard near Santa Maria Maggiore. The pope ordered one of his officers to run and tell Giuliano da Sangallo to go and see them. So he set off immediately. Since Michelangelo Buonarroti was always to be found at our house, my father having summoned him and having assigned him the commission of the pope’s tomb, my father wanted him to come along, too. I joined up with my father and off we went. I climbed down to where the statues were when immediately my father said, "That is the Laocoön, which Pliny mentions". Then they dug the hole wider so that they could pull the statue out. As soon as it was visible everyone started to draw (or "started to have lunch"), all the while discoursing on ancient things, chatting as well about the ones in Florence.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: Julius acquired the group on March 23, giving De Fredis a job as a scribe as well as the customs revenues from one of the gates of Rome. By August the group was placed for public viewing in a niche in the wall of the brand new Belvedere Garden at the Vatican, now part of the Vatican Museums, which regard this as the start of their history. As yet it had no base, which was not added until 1511, and from various prints and drawings from the time the older son appears to have been completely detached from the rest of the group.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: In July 1798 the statue was taken to France in the wake of the French conquest of Italy, though the replacement parts were left in Rome. It was on display when the new Musée Central des Arts, later the Musée Napoléon, opened at the Louvre in November 1800. A competition was announced for new parts to complete the composition, but there were no entries. Some plaster sections by François Girardon, over 150 years old, were used instead. After Napoleon's final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 most (but certainly not all) of the artworks plundered by the French were returned, and the Laocoön reached Rome in January 1816.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: When the statue was discovered, Laocoön's right arm was missing, along with part of the hand of one child and the right arm of the other, and various sections of the snake. The older son, on the right, was detached from the other two figures. The age of the altar used as a seat by Laocoön remains uncertain. Artists and connoisseurs debated how the missing parts should be interpreted. Michelangelo suggested that the missing right arms were originally bent back over the shoulder. Others, however, believed it was more appropriate to show the right arms extended outwards in a heroic gesture.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: According to Vasari, in about 1510 Bramante, the Pope's architect, held an informal contest among sculptors to make replacement right arms, which was judged by Raphael, and won by Jacopo Sansovino. The winner, in the outstretched position, was used in copies but not attached to the original group, which remained as it was until 1532, when Giovanni Antonio Montorsoli, a pupil of Michelangelo, added his even more straight version of Laocoön's outstretched arm, which remained in place until modern times. In 1725–1727 Agostino Cornacchini added a section to the younger son's arm, and after 1816 Antonio Canova tidied up the group after their return from Paris, without being convinced by the correctness of the additions but wishing to avoid a controversy.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: In 1906 Ludwig Pollak, archaeologist, art dealer and director of the Museo Barracco, discovered a fragment of a marble arm in a builder's yard in Rome, close to where the group was found. Noting a stylistic similarity to the Laocoön group he presented it to the Vatican Museums: it remained in their storerooms for half a century. In 1957 the museum decided that this armbent, as Michelangelo had suggestedhad originally belonged to this Laocoön, and replaced it. According to Paolo Liverani: "Remarkably, despite the lack of a critical section, the join between the torso and the arm was guaranteed by a drill hole on one piece which aligned perfectly with a corresponding hole on the other."


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: In the 1980s the statue was dismantled and reassembled, again with the Pollak arm incorporated. The restored portions of the children's arms and hands were removed. In the course of disassembly, it was possible to observe breaks, cuttings, metal tenons, and dowel holes which suggested that in antiquity, a more compact, three-dimensional pyramidal grouping of the three figures had been used or at least contemplated. According to Seymour Howard, both the Vatican group and the Sperlonga sculptures "show a similar taste for open and flexible pictorial organization that called for pyrotechnic piercing and lent itself to changes at the site, and in new situations".


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The more open, planographic composition along a plane, used in the restoration of the Laocoön group, has been interpreted as "apparently the result of serial reworkings by Roman Imperial as well as Renaissance and modern craftsmen". A different reconstruction was proposed by Seymour Howard, to give "a more cohesive, baroque-looking and diagonally-set pyramidal composition", by turning the older son as much as 90°, with his back to the side of the altar, and looking towards the frontal viewer rather than at his father. The findings Seymour Howard documented do not change his belief about the organization of the original. But dating the reworked coil ends by measuring the depth of the surface crust and comparing the metal dowels in the original and reworked portions allows one to determine the provenance of the parts and the sequence of the repairs. Other suggestions have been made.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The discovery of the "Laocoön" made a great impression on Italian artists and continued to influence Italian art into the Baroque period. Michelangelo is known to have been particularly impressed by the massive scale of the work and its sensuous Hellenistic aesthetic, particularly its depiction of the male figures. The influence of the "Laocoön", as well as the Belvedere Torso, is evidenced in many of Michelangelo's later sculptures, such as the "Rebellious Slave" and the "Dying Slave", created for the tomb of Pope Julius II. Several of the "ignudi" and the figure of Haman in the Sistine Chapel ceiling draw on the figures. Raphael used the face of Laocoön for his Homer in his "Parnassus" in the Raphael Rooms, expressing blindness rather than pain.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The Florentine sculptor Baccio Bandinelli was commissioned to make a copy by the Medici Pope Leo X. Bandinelli's version, which was often copied and distributed in small bronzes, is in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, the Pope having decided it was too good to send to François I of France as originally intended. A bronze casting, made for François I at Fontainebleau from a mold taken from the original under the supervision of Primaticcio, is at the Musée du Louvre. There are many copies of the statue, including a well-known one in the Grand Palace of the Knights of St. John in Rhodes. Many still show the arm in the outstretched position, but the copy in Rhodes has been corrected.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The group was rapidly depicted in prints as well as small models, and became known all over Europe. Titian appears to have had access to a good cast or reproduction from about 1520, and echoes of the figures begin to appear in his works, two of them in the "Averoldi Altarpiece" of 1520–1522. A woodcut, probably after a drawing by Titian, parodied the sculpture by portraying three apes instead of humans. It has often been interpreted as a satire on the clumsiness of Bandinelli's copy, or as a commentary on debates of the time around the similarities between human and ape anatomy. It has also been suggested that this woodcut was one of a number of Renaissance images that were made to reflect contemporary doubts as to the authenticity of the "Laocoön Group", the 'aping' of the statue referring to the incorrect pose of the Trojan priest who was depicted in ancient art in the traditional sacrificial pose, with his leg raised to subdue the bull. Over 15 drawings of the group made by Rubens in Rome have survived, and the influence of the figures can be seen in many of his major works, including his "Descent from the Cross" in Antwerp Cathedral.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The original was seized and taken to Paris by Napoleon Bonaparte after his conquest of Italy in 1799, and installed in a place of honour in the Musée Napoléon at the Louvre. Following the fall of Napoleon, it was returned by the Allies to the Vatican in 1816.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: Pliny's description of "Laocoön" as "a work to be preferred to all that the arts of painting and sculpture have produced" has led to a tradition which debates this claim that the sculpture is the greatest of all artworks. Johann Joachim Winkelmann (1717–1768) wrote about the paradox of admiring beauty while seeing a scene of death and failure. The most influential contribution to the debate, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's essay "Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry", examines the differences between visual and literary art by comparing the sculpture with Virgil's verse. He argues that the artists could not realistically depict the physical suffering of the victims, as this would be too painful. Instead, they had to express suffering while retaining beauty.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: Johann Goethe said the following in his essay, "Upon the Laocoon" "A true work of art, like a work of nature, never ceases to open boundlessly before the mind. We examine,we are impressed with it,it produces its effect; but it can never be all comprehended, still less can its essence, its value, be expressed in words.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The most unusual intervention in the debate, William Blake's annotated print "Laocoön", surrounds the image with graffiti-like commentary in several languages, written in multiple directions. Blake presents the sculpture as a mediocre copy of a lost Israelite original, describing it as "Jehovah & his two Sons Satan & Adam as they were copied from the Cherubim Of Solomons Temple by three Rhodians & applied to Natural Fact or History of Ilium". This reflects Blake's theory that the imitation of ancient Greek and Roman art was destructive to the creative imagination, and that Classical sculpture represented a banal naturalism in contrast to Judeo-Christian spiritual art.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The central figure of "Laocoön" served as loose inspiration for the Indian in Horatio Greenough's "The Rescue" (1837–1850) which stood before the east facade of the United States Capitol for over 100 years.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: Near the end of Charles Dickens' 1843 novella, "A Christmas Carol", Ebenezer Scrooge self-describes "making a perfect Laocoön of himself with his stockings" in his hurry to dress on Christmas morning.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: John Ruskin disliked the sculpture and compared its "disgusting convulsions" unfavourably with work by Michelangelo, whose fresco of "The Brazen Serpent," on a corner pendentive of the Sistine Chapel, also involves figures struggling with snakesthe fiery serpents of the Book of Numbers. He invited contrast between the "meagre lines and contemptible tortures of the Laocoon" and the "awfulness and quietness" of Michelangelo, saying "the slaughter of the Dardan priest" was "entirely wanting" in sublimity. Furthermore, he attacked the composition on naturalistic grounds, contrasting the carefully studied human anatomy of the restored figures with the unconvincing portrayal of the snakes:


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: In 1910 the critic Irving Babbit used the title "The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts" for an essay on contemporary culture at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1940 Clement Greenberg adapted the concept for his own essay entitled "Towards a Newer Laocoön" in which he argued that abstract art now provided an ideal for artists to measure their work against. A 2007 exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in turn copied this title while exhibiting work by modern artists influenced by the sculpture.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The location where the buried statue was found in 1506 was always known to be "in the vineyard of Felice De Fredis" on the Oppian Hill (the southern spur of the Esquiline Hill), as noted in the document recording the sale of the group to the Pope. But over time, knowledge of the site's precise location was lost, beyond "vague" statements such as Sangallo's "near Santa Maria Maggiore" (see above) or it being "near the site of the Domus Aurea" (the palace of the Emperor Nero); in modern terms near the Colosseum. An inscribed plaque of 1529 in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli records the burial of De Fredis and his son there, covering his finding of the group but giving no occupation. Research published in 2010 has recovered two documents in the municipal archives (badly indexed, and so missed by earlier researchers), which have established a much more precise location for the find: slightly to the east of the southern end of the Sette Sale, the ruined cistern for the successive imperial baths at the base of the hill by the Colosseum.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The first document records De Fredis' purchase of a vineyard of about 1.5 hectares from a convent for 135 ducats on 14 November 1504, exactly 14 months before the finding of the statue. The second document, from 1527, makes it clear that there is now a house on the property, and clarifies the location; by then De Fredis was dead and his widow rented out the house. The house appears on a map of 1748, and still survives as a substantial building of three storeys, in the courtyard of a convent. The area remained mainly agricultural until the 19th century, but is now entirely built up. It is speculated that De Fredis began building the house soon after his purchase, and as the group was reported to have been found some four metres below ground, at a depth unlikely to be reached by normal vineyard-digging operations, it seems likely that it was discovered when digging the foundations for the house, or possibly a well for it.


title: Laocoön and His Sons

text: The findspot was inside and very close to the Servian Wall, which was still maintained in the 1st century AD (possibly converted to an aqueduct), though no longer the city boundary, as building had spread well beyond it. The spot was within the Gardens of Maecenas, founded by Gaius Maecenas the ally of Augustus and patron of the arts. He bequeathed the gardens to Augustus in 8 BC, and Tiberius lived there after he returned to Rome as heir to Augustus in 2 AD. Pliny said the "Laocoön" was in his time at the palace of Titus ("qui est in Titi imperatoris domo"), then heir to his father Vespasian, but the location of Titus's residence remains unknown; the imperial estate of the Gardens of Maecenas may be a plausible candidate. If the "Laocoön" group was already in the location of the later findspot by the time Pliny saw it, it might have arrived there under Maecenas or any of the emperors. The extent of the grounds of Nero's Domus Aurea is now unclear, but they do not appear to have extended so far north or east, though the newly rediscovered findspot-location is not very far beyond them.


title: The Screwtape Letters

text: The Screwtape Letters is a Christian apologetic novel by C. S. Lewis and dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien. It is written in a satirical, epistolary style and while it is fictional in format, the plot and characters are used to address Christian theological issues, primarily those to do with temptation and resistance to it.


title: The Screwtape Letters

text: First published in February 1942, the story takes the form of a series of letters from a senior demon Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter. The uncle's mentorship pertains to the nephew's responsibility in securing the damnation of a British man known only as "the Patient."


title: The Screwtape Letters

text: In "The Screwtape Letters", Lewis imagines a series of lessons in the importance of taking a deliberate role in Christian faith by portraying a typical human life, with all its temptations and failings, seen from devils' viewpoints. Screwtape holds an administrative post in the bureaucracy ("Lowerarchy") of Hell, and acts as a mentor to his nephew Wormwood, an inexperienced and incompetent tempter.


title: The Screwtape Letters

text: In the 31 letters which comprise the book, Screwtape gives Wormwood detailed advice on various methods of undermining God's words and of promoting abandonment of God in "the Patient" (whom Wormwood is tempting), interspersed with observations on human nature and on the Bible. In Screwtape's advice, selfish gain and power are seen as the only good, and neither demon can comprehend God's love for man or acknowledge human virtue.


title: The Screwtape Letters

text: Versions of the letters were originally published weekly in the Anglican periodical "The Guardian" during wartime, from May to November 1941. The book adds an introduction explaining how the author chose to write his story.


title: The Screwtape Letters

text: Lewis wrote a sequel, "Screwtape Proposes a Toast," in 1959. The satirical essay criticizes trends in British society, education, and public attitudes. (Although Britain calls its major private schools "public schools," Lewis is referring to state schools when he criticizes "public education.") The essay was included, with a new preface by Lewis, in editions of "The Screwtape Letters" published by Bles in 1961 and by Macmillan in 1962.