Free Republic

The gun debate is also a gender war. In all my years in journalism — coming up on 30 (thanks) — I have never received so much angry mail as I did after yesterday's story, "What is it like to fire an AR-15? It's horrifying, menacing and very very loud." I don't mind spirited debate, but many correspondents told me that even expressing an opinion about today's high-powered weaponry is off-limits to those of us who don't own such guns. To reiterate, the goal of the story was simply to share with readers my experience of firing an AR-15, which...

Despite the theatrics of Massachusetts Democrats in Congress, these people can't even get the guns out of the streets of Boston, let alone out of the hands of terrorists. Hardly a day, or a night, goes by without a report of killings or gun violence in Boston or in other cities of the commonwealth. This has been going on nonstop for years, and there is no end in sight.

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court has rejected challenges to assault weapons bans in Connecticut and New York, in the aftermath of the shooting attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that left 50 people dead. ADVERTISEMENT The justices on Monday left in place a lower court ruling that upheld laws that were passed in response to another mass shooting involving a semi-automatic weapon, the elementary school attack in Newtown, Connecticut. The Supreme Court has repeatedly turned away challenges to gun restrictions since two landmark decisions that spelled out the right to a handgun to defend one's own home.

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) -- The Latest on the Orlando gay nightclub massacre (all times local): 12:20 p.m. Vice President Joe Biden is calling for banning civilian ownership of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines following the mass shooting in Orlando.

Neolithic group found in silo appeared to have suffered violent deaths, with multiple injuries to legs, hands and skulls. Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 6,000-year-old massacre that took place in Alsace, in north-eastern France. The corpses of 10 individuals were found in one of 300 ancient silos, used to store grain and other food... The Neolithic group appeared to have had violent deaths, with multiple injuries to their legs, hands and skulls. The way in which the bodies were piled on top of each other suggested they had been killed together and dumped in the silo. “They were...

Advocates of overturning the right to keep and bear arms have spent years deliberately turning innocents into victims of slaughter, all for the purpose of eventually disarming the American people. “Do as I say, not as I do,” gun-control zealots were predictably out in force after the Sandy Hook killings. After all, in the perverted mind of confiscation advocates like Michael Bloomberg and Barack Obama, the murder of 20 kindergarten students represented a longed-awaited opportunity to embarrass the more weak-kneed defenders of the 2nd Amendment into relenting to a nationwide assault against the foremost liberty of the American people. In...

Over a hundred universities and colleges have embraced the concept of having "assault weapons" on campus.  It is worth noting, that when the university administrations buy the weapons for their own use, the menacing nomenclature of "assault weapon" is magically transformed into "semi-automatic rifles". Campus administrations all over the country who have been claiming that allowing adults who have concealed carry permits on their campus will chill free speech and academic freedom, have no such concerns with having "assualt weapons" on campus, as long as the weapons are in the hands of the people they command.  From abcnews.go.com: Once...

Image from ABC News The above chart, created by ABC News, illustrates the trajectory of support and opposition for policies promoted by media elites that have no actual basis in fact or logic.  New media allows a significant, underdog, method to distribute facts about the policy.  The chart is a little misleading.  It starts in the middle of 1994, when the elite media control was near its height, and at the end of a blitz of media efforts to push the "Assault Weapon Ban" policy. These sort of policies, that rely on emotion, have to be enacted quickly, before...

Published a year ago on “Coach is Right,” this is a story which bears repeating The left will do anything to abolish the private ownership of firearms. And the emphasis is on anything. After all, politicians cannot safely exercise absolute, uncontested authority over an armed public. And the majority of our nation’s ruling class--yes, Republicans included--yearn for such power; in part because it will bring an end to those annoying constitutional rights which prevent lawmakers implementing what they “know to be best,” but mostly because these self-infatuated mirror-gazers believe dictatorial authority to be their due. The question is, how can...

An energized John Kasich heads into South Carolina's Republican presidential primary hoping to build on a strong showing in New Hampshire, but he's refusing to tailor or shift his message to fit the state's more conservative electorate. "People told me: 'They're really conservative down there,'" Kasich joked to a crowd Wednesday in Mount Pleasant, his first campaign stop in the state since a debate in mid-January. "And I'm like, 'wait a minute, people are people - we all have the same concerns.'" [...] ... From the Carolinas west to Oklahoma and Texas, none of the GOP-run states has embraced Medicaid...

In what has to be viewed as a major victory for gun owners, the United States Court of Appeals for 4th Circuit ruled that lower court judge in Kolbe V. Maryland must apply the standard of strict scrutiny in reviewing the case about Maryland’s “assault weapon” ban, duplicitously called the Firearms Safety Act (FSA). Laws banning “assault weapons” in Maryland and in other states with “anti-gun” legislatures have typically been upheld when lower court judges—almost universally gun-hating activist liberals—have cheated We, The People by applying the much lower standard of intermediate scrutiny. ... Chris W. Cox, the executive director of...

Colorado Springs police responded this afternoon to reports of an active shooter at a Planned Parenthood facility:

Gun-control advocates are always talking about a ban on so-called “assault” weapons – but doing so would have no impact on gun violence. As Charles C.W. Cooke wrote yesterday: It is difficult to overstate just how absurd this is. Even if we were to swallow whole the novel set of definitions that the advocates of “assault”-weapons legislation have imposed upon our national deliberations, the case in favor of their coveted laws would remain all but nonexistent. Between 1994 and 2004, Americans were flatly barred from purchasing or transferring 660 arbitrarily selected semi-automatic firearms and from obtaining any magazine that...

The Pro Rights Guide to the Gun Control Terminology Part 1 Firearms definitions A much wiser man than me said if you can get them to ask the wrong question then you don’t need to worry about the answers. The pro rights movement has been making great strides toward freedom in recent years but the antis are still controlling the dialog. As long as they are allowed to dictate the terminology they can phrase and frame the debate to their advantage. If we truly wish to win this fight we have to stop letting the liberal media provide the definitions...

(...) Following the on-air shooting of two television reporters in Roanoke, Virginia, she declared: “I feel just great heartache at what happened. I want to reiterate how important it is [that] we not let yet another terrible instance go by without trying to do something more to prevent this terrible killing that is stalking our country.” She added: "We have got to do something about gun violence in America — and I will take it on." She said the same thing back in July, in an obvious shift away from avoiding Second Amendment issues during the presidential campaign to avoid...

Gun control advocates introduced a bill in April that only gun control supporters could love. Connecticut Democrat Rep. Rosa DeLauro is so serious about getting so-called assault weapons off the street that she is offering $2,000 tax credits for each gun that people turning in limit one per year. According to her, assault weapons are not about hunting, or even self-defense. There is no reason on earth, other than to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible, that anyone needs a gun designed for a battlefield. She believes that offering $2,000 a gun will...

 Representative Rosa DeLauro Democrats in the House of representatives are expected to reintroduce legislation that would grant a federal $2,000 tax credit for turning in a gun to a local, state, or federal government authority.   The guns listed normally sell for far less than $2,000.  There are many millions of them legally possessed by individuals.  Admittedly, even if the bill were passed, it is unlikely that more than a few million people would take advantage of it, so the drain on the Treasury wold be less than 20 billion dollars.  That is hardly noticeable in our runaway, trillion...

Gun owners would receive tax breaks for voluntarily turning in high-powered assault rifles under new legislation proposed Monday. The Support Assault Firearm Elimination and Education of our (SAFER) Streets Act expected to be reintroduced next week by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) would provide gun owners with an incentive to turn in their firearms to local police departments. “Assault weapons are not about hunting, or even self-defense,” DeLauro said . “There is no reason on earth, other than to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible, that anyone needs a gun designed for a battlefield.”...

un Control: Fifty-two senators, 238 House members and 80,000 public comments have forced the ATF to pull back for "more study" its proposed ban on ammo for the AR-15, the leading gun for hunting and self-defense. The Second Amendment, written in the era of muskets, does not mention what arms we have the right to keep and bear. But we have an idea, based on how they were used: to protect their owners' homes, businesses, farms and families, and to resist the tyranny of government, which during the American Revolution was the British crown.

The 16 members of Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy’s Sandy Hook Advisory Commission have completed their report on the December, 2012 murder of 26 children and adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. And as might be expected from a hand-picked group of “healthcare professionals, public safety professionals and academics” their recommendations—offered in a 250 page anti-gun rights treatise—will have little to no effect preventing the next lunatic killing at will in one of Connecticut’s widely publicized Gun Free Zones. “We support the concept of firearm registration,” writes the editorial board of the CT Post, “though that would not...