Heard gunshots while I was outside the tucson mall... You serious?
— John Chang (@2_Changz_) December 22, 2012

No details yet, but word is that gunshots were heard in the Tucson Mall parking lot tonight. It appears initially that no one was hurt.

The stretch of Oracle from Grant up to the mall hasn't been terribly safe over the last few months, including a murder in the parking of the Eegee's a few blocks south in September. More details if and when we get them.

This week on Arizona Public Media's Political Roundtable: Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik, Tucson Tea Party founder Trent Humphries, Pima County Democratic Party chairman Jeff Rogers and GOP strategist Sam Stone looked back on the big federal and state stories of 2012, including Gabby Giffords' resignation, the two races Ron Barber won to take over her job, Sen. Jon Kyl's retirement, the Senate race to replace him and the ongoing issue of immigration reform. Next week: The Roundtable tackles the year in review for Tucson and Pima County.

Walking into Catalina Magnet High School last night, one thing was obvious at the special meeting to decide the fate of 14 Tucson Unified School District schools — and no, it wasn't a change of heart.

Noticeable was the smaller number of parents, teachers, community activists and children present at all past special meetings and public hearings to discuss school closures and consolidation. These were the meetings where we saw parents and teachers go before the board and beg that their schools remain open, or ask the board to hold off until after the first of the year when two new board members take their place on the dais, or start with the budget first to keep students and neighborhoods from dealing with this trauma.

Those who grumbled from their seats and at the podium in the Catalina Magnet High School auditorium said it didn't take rocket science to understand why there weren't the hundreds and hundreds of parents and children who filled the auditorium at the previous meetings. For TUSD students, yesterday was the final day of school before the start of winter break. In other words, perhaps the auditorium was only half-full because the special meeting, which decided the fate of 14 schools (11 will close and one will be turned into a district-run charter school), because the meeting was held five days before Christmas.

Here are the highlights:

Only forty-five minutes was provided for call to audience, so the public could address the board before the closure vote. Well-before the meeting, some critics and observers didn't think that was enough time. Although it conveniently could allow a representative from each school on the closure list to have 3.2 minutes. Those who spoke addressed school closures, as well as a resolution brought before board member Mark Stegeman that request TUSD staff to pull together a plan that would find a new home for University High School, as well as what Stegeman described during the meeting as a "high-performing" middle school on the same site. Brenda Limon reminded the board that an enrollment cap had been put on UHS by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights in order for the school to not pull high achieving schools from other schools. Or perhaps it was former TUSD board candidate Betts Putnam-Hidalgo who brought it further home when she yelled out from her seat, "Should all our middle schools be high-performing?" A remark that drew a special chiding from outgoing board president Miguel Cuevas.

Remember that weird vote at the Tuesday, Dec. 11 school board meeting? Well, TUSD parent Jana Happel took time during call to the audience to remind the board (and those seated in the auditorium) that what took place that evening was wrong and just another example as to why student enrollment is down in the district.

"The community sees the district dysfunction and board ... and it is killing our schools and harming our children," she said, adding that the district has embarrassed itself so many time that it's time to say enough. "... leave school closures to new board."

On the vote that took place Dec. 11, in which the district approved the desegregation plan going before U.S. District Court Judge David Bury, but there was also a lot of confusion on a vote the board took that resulted in a 3-2 vote against an objection to core curriculum, aka Mexican-American studies.

You can read our more detailed account here, or the dead-tree version here.

Anyway, here's more from Hapel: "... you betrayed the public trust ... Ms. Grijalva was deceived." Hapel described Stegeman's revote request as a decoy objection. "... you have breached our trust and lost any legitimacy to close our schools. Do not close our schools tonight."

Fisher's representative from the TUSD desegregation lawsuit and former school board member Gloria Copeland also showed up to chastise Stegeman UHS resolution. "You guys rolled the dice," she said. "...You have half the community up in arms over deseg and the other half over the closures and you decide to put another ... by being disrespectful ... add to the list and expand while closing Carson?" Copeland said. "It's cold, unfair and it is not right. You did not give this community the respect and time to recover from the two catastrophes that are already on the table ... please do not take action tonight."

Before the final vote took place to close 11 schools, staff presented more information on each school to explain why the schools was selected and why the receiving schools were selected, and explained how the changes met the school desegregation goal and orders.

• Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona

Slate's Phil Plait rounds up 21 stunning photos of the universe from 2012. The UA's space team has a connection to several of them, including the above image taken atop Mount Lemmon:

For sheer beauty, there is little in the sky to match a magnificent open-armed spiral galaxy. This is NGC 5033, which is located 50 million light years away from Earth. That’s relatively close by cosmic standards, allowing us to get a good peek at it even though we see it at a low angle. Accomplished astronomer Adam Block took this image using the 0.8-meter Schulman Telescope on Mount Lemmon in Arizona, and it’s a total exposure of 13 hours. You can see the combined glow of billions of older, redder stars in the center, and the blue light from younger stars being born in the arms—the pink blobs festooned on the arms are gigantic nebulae, clouds of gas and dust, where stars are being born and lit from within by those stars. The oddly distorted shape to the arms (together with some other unusual features) makes me think NGC 5033 recently had a close encounter with another galaxy, its gravity warping the shape of the spiral. That’s actually pretty common in the life of big galaxies like this. It’s a dangerous Universe out there.

Others include the image of the earliest galaxies yet glimpsed by man (which I wrote about this week in TW's print edition) and the astounding dust devil on Mars that we featured on The Range back in March.

All 21 photos are magnificent. Go check them out right now.

The Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity challenges the NRA in a full-page ad in The New York Times that ran today today to bring attention to its campaign to ban lead in bullets.

The National Rifle Association held their press conference in response to last week's shooting at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary school today, where NRA vice president and CEO Wayne LaPierre voiced his organization's desire to put guns in every school in the country.

Really.

I won't touch on about his complaints about movies and video games (mostly because that's the subject of next week's "Weekly Wide Web,") so let's focus on this sticky matter of arming every school campus in our great, big ol' country.

First, from Mr. LaPierre's speech, with emphasis added:

Now, the National Rifle Association knows there are millions of qualified and active retired police, active, Reserve, and retired military, security professionals, certified firefighters, security professionals, rescue personnel, an extraordinary corps of patriotic, trained, qualified citizens to join with local school officials and police in devising a protection plan for every single school.

We could deploy them to protect our kids now. We can immediately make America’s schools safer, relying on the brave men and women in America’s police forces. The budgets — and you all know this, everyone in the country knows this — of our local police departments are strained, and the resources are severely limited, but their dedication and courage is second to none. And, they can be deployed right now.

I call on Congress today, to act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation. And, to do it now to make sure that blanket safety is in place when our kids return to school in January.

Are you kidding? These are people who can't figure out how to keep our country from "falling off" of a terrible metaphor for austerity measures—people unwilling to compromise on tax reform for citizens who earn more than $1 million a year. You want them to pass sweeping legislation that would impose an armed guard on every single school campus in the nation, when the federal government (as many on the right like to point out) constitutionally delegated education-related issues to the states? Sure, why not?

Where are you going to get the money to pay these people? Dedicated and courageous they may be, but you've got to pay security guards—which is, in all honesty, just what these people will be.

His suggestion for paying for it comes from the supposed cash-cow that is the foreign aid budget, because screw foreigners, right? But when it comes down to it, foreign aid spending is a drop in the bucket (just over 1 percent of our federal budget) compared to defense spending (which accounts for more than 15% of our federal budget). Why not reallocate part of the money dedicated to national defense to, uh, defend citizens?

There's a fine line here. Government, whether it's federal, state, or municipal, will want to be involved in these services that will, by some estimates, cost $5.5 billion to implement nationally. That money will have to come from somewhere—not all of these guards will want to volunteer. After all, few things are more patriotic in this country than fighting for adequate compensation.

So, there we are. The NRA wants us to have people with guns in every school (or at least to tear down the signs that read "gun-free zone") to protect our kids; wants legislators to quickly pass a law to put guards on campuses across the country; and is volunteering to pay for training (but not for the guards).

That's all well and good. Just don't forget that even having an armed guard on campus didn't prevent the Columbine massacre.

Why yes, that is Tom DeLonge, of Blink 182 and Angels & Airwaves fame, talking about UFOs. No, I don't understand it.

This video is from Spacing Out, a space-focused web series that has roots in Tempe, and is part of the OpenMinds.tv video collective (whose website appears to be down as of this writing, unfortunately).

If aliens and space are your thing (and more power to you, if they are), check out Spacing Out's Facebook page.

Provided the world is still around this evening, be sure to tune into Arizona Public Media's Political Roundtable. The usual gang of suspects—Pima County Democratic Party chairman Jeff Rogers, Tucson Tea Party founder Trent Humphries, Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik and political strategist Sam Stone—run through the big federal and state stories of 2012 and a look ahead at 2013. We talk about Gabby's resignation, Ron Barber's two congressional elections to take over her job, Sen. Jon Kyl's retirement, Jeff Flake's future, immigration politics and a whole bunch more.

Tune in at 6:30 p.m. on KUAT-TV's Channel 6 or watch it online later at azpm.org or here.

Next week, we'll talk about the big stories of 2012 here in Pima County.

As the fiscal cliff nears, Andrew Sullivan unloads on the modern GOP:

Between the humiliating and chaotic collapse of Speaker Boehner's already ludicrously extreme Plan B and Wayne La Pierre's deranged proposal to put government agents in schools with guns, the Republican slide into total epistemic closure and political marginalization has now become a free-fall. This party, not to mince words, is unfit for government. There is no conservative party in the West - except for minor anti-immigrant neo-fascist ones in Europe - anywhere close to this level of far right extremism. And now the damage these fanatics can do is not just to their own country - was the debt ceiling debacle of 2011 not enough for them? - but to the entire world.

• Automatic wildlife cameras snapped this photo of a male jaguar on a nightly walk in the Santa Rita Mountains on Oct 25.

That photo of a jaguar released yesterday creates trouble for Rosemont Copper, which is pushing to build a massive open-pit mine in the Santa Rita Mountains, where the big cat was sighted.

Under court order, the U.S. Forest Service has been developing a plan to designate critical habitat for the jaguar in Arizona and New Mexico. You can see the Center for Biological Diversity's analysis of those efforts here.

The Range asked Center for Biological Diversity Executive Director Kieron Suckling via email what he thought about the photographs yesterday.

Suckling tells us: "It should be the last nail in Rosemont's highly leveraged coffin. The company has been betting on being able to nullify the Fish and Wildlife Service's jaguar habitat proposal with political pressure. That avenue is impossible now."

More jaguar and ocelot images here.