Free Republic

Idaho Senator Mike Crapo has introduced legislation to remove federal infringments on second amendment rights from lands controlled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps). From the press release: The bill seeks to make firearm regulations consistent across federal lands by allowing law-abiding citizens to carry firearms on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) property. Under current law, a person may carry a concealed weapon in a National Park or Refuge as long as individuals comply with the firearm laws of the park’s home state. However, the same rights are not extended to Americans who hunt, camp or...

Human rights groups and Venezuela’s opposition are criticizing the government’s new authorization for riot police to use firearms to control protests. […] Venezuela’s constitution bans the use of firearms and toxic substances to control demonstrations, although in practice such means have long been used, including during last year’s deadly street battles between police and anti-government demonstrators. …

Sable Nehme shows how she turned from the closet and pointed the revolver. In this case in Florida, a young woman stops a potential tragedy by quickly retrieving a gun that had been given to her by her father.  A second later would have been too late.  From wftv.com: ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — Channel 9 talked with a University of Central Florida student who pulled a gun on two violent intruders who attacked her boyfriend and threatened her life. The neighborhood, the Village of Alafaya Club, in Orlando, may be sketchy, as are many neighborhoods around universities.  Perhaps local...

Police armed with pistols in heavily gun-controlled European countries are realizing a hard lesson fast–jihadists with no respect for the law are side-stepping gun control and stockpiling weapons that will give them the upper hand in confrontations with officers. Europol chief of staff Brian Donald says there were two “large seizures” of firearms–particularly “assault weapons”–over the last two weeks and more seizures are expected as investigations and tracking continues.

A man was acting in self-defense when he shot a 24-year-old in the chest following a fight outside a Frenchmen Street nightclub Friday morning (Jan. 30), police said. The shooting occurred in the 500 block of Esplanade Avenue about 1:15 a.m., according to records. A 64-year-old man told detectives he was leaving a club in the 1400 block of Decatur Street when he was approached by a woman who complimented him on how he was dressed. Police said the woman's boyfriend, Nicholas Temper, 23, "became enraged," and started arguing with the man, threatening to hurt him and steal his guitar.

Washington, DC — Newly available data for 2013 reveals that states with weak gun violence prevention laws and higher rates of gun ownership have the highest overall gun death rates in the nation, according to a Violence Policy Center (VPC) analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. Meanwhile, states with the lowest overall gun death rates have lower rates of gun ownership and some of the strongest gun violence prevention laws in the nation. However, even in these states the human toll of gun violence is far above the...

Title only:"Obama Signs Executive Order Closing Congress" But that says enough

UNITED NATIONS – Giving President Obama fast-track authority to conclude an international trade agreement is like playing Russian roulette with six bullets in the chamber, says one of America’s leading gun rights organizations. Gun Owners of America is blasting a congressional proposal that empowers Obama to unilaterally negotiate international agreements as “a ‘bait and switch’ scheme that could seriously impact the Second Amendment.” House and Senate committees are currently preparing to hand Obama so-called “fast-track” trade promotion authority. It would enable the president to unilaterally negotiate the TransPacific Partnership, a trade and global governance agreement with the U.S. and 11...

More evidence has surfaced that California's Marin County Prosecutor, Ed Berberian, has a bias, perhaps even an obsession, against gun owners and self defense.  Six months ago Dr. James Simon defended himself and his wife of 38 years from an aggressive driver who followed him to his home, drove his Mercedes part way into the Simon's garage to prevent the door from closing, and persisted in invading the home after two warning shots were fired.   Doctor Simon shot the man and called the police. Berberian prosecuted anyway.  He has a history of aggressively prosecuting self defense cases, especially those...

In what seems to be a retreat from its Operation Choke Point initiative, the FDIC has announced new regulatory guidance that instructs banks to judge their relationships with their customers on a case-by-case basis, rather than refusing to provide banking services to entire categories of industries. From the Press Release: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) issued a Financial Institution Letter today encouraging supervised institutions to take a risk-based approach in assessing individual customer relationships, rather than declining to provide banking services to entire categories of customers without regard to the risks presented by an individual customer or the financial...

Gun Owners of America is blasting a congressional proposal that empowers Obama to unilaterally negotiate international agreements as “a ‘bait and switch’ scheme that could seriously impact the Second Amendment.” House and Senate committees are currently preparing to hand Obama so-called “fast-track” trade promotion authority. It would enable the president to unilaterally negotiate the TransPacific Partnership, a trade and global governance agreement with the U.S. and 11 other nations bordering the Pacific Ocean.

Mitch McConnellÂ’s surrender on immigration reform last week could have major consequences for Second Amendment rights. Deportation amnesty is one of the biggest threats to gun rights because it will add millions of anti-gun voters to the electorate in one fell swoop. The vast majority of illegal aliens are Hispanics, and Hispanics are one of the most anti-gun demographics in the United States. According to the Pew Research Center, 62% of Hispanics prefer expanding gun control to percent gun rights, compared to 39% of white voters. Gun Owners of America estimates that amnesty could add more than 8 million anti-gun...

On Jan. 29, 1945, First Sgt. Leonard Funk, Jr. faced a determined German army officer ready to kill him with a pistol. Armed with a Thompson M1A1 submachine gun, the U.S. Army paratrooper had just led an assault against 15 houses occupied by German troops in Holzheim, Belgium. It was part of an operation by the 82nd Airborne Division to clear German soldiers from the area following the Battle of the Bulge. Leading a makeshift headquarters platoon of clerks, Funk and his unit captured 30 prisoners. He left them with several dozen more prisoners—under guard—and returned to the fight. While...

An internal ruling made by the Venezuelan Ministry of Defense, published on Tuesday, January 27, in state newsletter Gaceta Oficial, legalizes the use of lethal weapons by the national armed forces (FANB) against protesters. [snip] Under Venezuelan law, the Defense Ministry does not have the authority to override or ignore the Constitution and the norms contained therein. María Esperanza Hermida, coordinator for enforcement in Venezuelan NGO (Provea) argued that the measure violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), as well as transferring competencies to the military which are the...

I can’t imagine the terror that must have been running through the mind of the 74-year-old Southgate, Michigan homeowner just before 5:00 AM this morning as a home invader broke in. The homeowner armed himself and stepped outside the bedroom to protect his cancer-stricken wife as she called 911. The homeowner ran into the armed home invader. According to investigators, the home invader raised his weapon, and the homeowner was forced to fire to save his life.

Open carry activists at the State Capitol in Austin. The movement to restore open carry to Texas has heated up in the last year and a half.  It arguably accelerated with  C.J. Grisham being accosted by a police officer in rural Bell County.  An army veteran whose family owns thousands of acres in Bell county,  Grisham was eventually convicted of "interfering with police duties" after a second jury trial.  He is paying a $2,000 fine.  On the installment plan.  In nickles.   The results are still under appeal.  Many who have watched the video of the event think the police...

At least 15,000 gun owners will get cheap shots at the upcoming Pacific Northwest Sportsmen’s Show, opening Wednesday at the Portland Expo Center. That’s how many permits will be issued on a first-come basis to show attendees – exhibitors included – allowing them to buy inexpensive short “bricks” of .22 caliber long rifle ammunition. 22 rimfire ammo, the most popular recreational shooting caliber, has been in short supply for years. So short, in fact, it flies from the shelves of most sporting goods stores as fast as it is stocked, and usually for high prices. Few major sources in the...

Nearly a year after three of her family members were murdered during a domestic dispute, a Virginia woman is fighting for more gun control. Barbara Harrington’s sister, nephew and mother were shot by her brother in law before he turned the gun on himself. “She was just so much fun to be around and she was just, she was my heart,” Harrington told 8News reporter Mark Tenia. In a desperate plea to change Virginia’s law, Harrington is sharing her story this week in hopes that violent criminals will not be able to get their hands on guns. Her brother-in-law, Kevin...

Congressman Matt Salmon from Arizona has filed the Knife Owners Protection Act (KOPA) in the 2015 session of Congress.   KOPA would extend to knives the protections afforded to firearm owners in the Firearms Owners Protection Act (FOPA) of 1986.   If a person may legally own a knife where he started his travel, and may legally own it where at the end point, he would be protected in possessing it at points in between.  From H.R. 419(pdf): (a) IN GENERAL.—Notwithstanding any provision of8   any law or any rule or regulation of the United States,9   or of a State...

NORTH LITTLE ROCK (KATV) - *Warning: this video may be graphic as it does show the suspect shooting the victim. Police are still looking for two suspects after a store clerk is shot, and the thieves run-off with $100, according to North Little Rock Police. Police released photos and video to Channel 7, as they continue to try and identify these two suspects. According to the police report, the incident happened on Saturday at around 9:40 p.m. at the Main Street Shell, 1400 North Main Street. Suspect one is described as a young black male in his late teens to...

A bill to reduce defenseless victim zones on establishments of higher learning has been introduced in the Texas legislature.  It is commonly known as a "campus carry" bill, SB11. SB11 has 19 of 20 Republican senators as authors. They are; Birdwell | Bettencourt | Burton | Campbell | Creighton | Eltife | Estes | Fraser | Hall | Hancock | Huffines | Kolkhorst | Nelson | Nichols | Perry | Schwertner | Seliger | Taylor, Larry | Taylor, Van. There are only 31 senators in the Texas senate, so a majority of senators already agree with the bill. The...

In the five months since Hot Springs, Arkansas, gun range owner Jan Morgan banned Muslims from her facilities, she has seen business quadruple. She has also faced threats and the prospect of lawsuits, which so far, have not materialized. Morgan owns Gun Cave Indoor Firing Range. According to Fox News, Morgan decided to ban Muslims after “two customers she deemed suspicious” showed up in September. Since that time, she has excluded those “she believes to be Muslim based upon their names.” Morgan sees it as a safety issue. She said, “We are dealing in lethal firearms. I am not going...

California’s new Firearm Safety Certificate (FSC) Program laws went into effect on January 1, 2015. On January 6, 2015, a lawsuit, Belemjian v. Harris, was filed in California Superior Court on behalf of the California Rifle and Pistol Association (http://www.crpa.org), FFLGuard (http://www.fflguard.com), and several individual gun owners and firearm instructors against the California Department of Justice (DOJ) to stop any enforcement of “underground regulations” that the DOJ illegally adopted when it tried to implement the FSC laws. The lawsuit also seeks to stop California’s new long-gun safe handling demonstration law from being enforced until the DOJ adopts implementing regulations through...

He menaced cops with a machete — and the city paid him for it. A Brooklyn thug who was shot by officers while waving an 18-inch blade at them and later sued the department for $3 million got a $5,000 settlement from the city — even though his own attorney said the shooting was probably justified. Ruhim Ullah, 24, had pleaded guilty to menacing a police officer after the 2010 confrontation, in which he was shot once in the leg by a cop trying to stop him from attacking ­officers with the machete, according to his lawyer. Despite his admission...

We’re all too familiar with the pattern by now: His exultancy, the maximum Dear leader Obama the second, ruler of all and master of no responsibility will decree some outrageous and illegal act. This will be followed by the surrender monkeys of the GOPe almost getting into fist fights in a mad dash to be first to solemnly announce that once again, Impeachment is ‘off the table’. And just as with any other rule breaking, the psychological science of operant conditioning applies. The result is an increase of a behavior that is rewarded and less for which is punished. Were...

Are you starting to forget just how creepy government agencies can be when they decide to spy on average (law abiding) citizens? Well, this should help refocus your distrust of big government. According to AP News:The Drug Enforcement Administration abandoned an internal proposal to use surveillance cameras for photographing vehicle license plates near gun shows in the United States to investigate gun-trafficking, the agency's chief said Wednesday.Um, good… Also: “What the heck?”So the DEA was planning on tracking everyone that went to a gun show? Wow… Nothing like being innocent until proven guilty, right? It might be time to start borrowing...

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has acknowledged its role in Operation Choke Point and is taking dramatic steps to reverse its policies in targeting legal and legitimate industries that are disfavored by the Obama administration. “We’re very pleased they’ve acknowledged their wrongdoing and they’ve accepted our suggestions to put in place measures to stop this activity,” Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-Mo., told The Daily Signal in a phone call this morning. Luetkemeyer, a member of the House Financial Services Committee and leader in the fight to end Operation Choke Point, met with FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenbery and Vice Chairman Thomas Hoenig...

Miami Gardens police said they have few leads in the brazen murder of James Hall, shot in the head late Sunday night in his driveway as his girlfriend's two children looked on. Hall, 42, had returned home just before midnight when the children said four men surrounded the car and fired through the front windshield. "They killed him in front of my kids," Hall’s girlfriend, Ashley Walden, told Herald news partner CBS4.

Thomas Greer gained fame in July of this year by making some imprudent statements to reporters.   He had shot one of a pair of burglars that had assaulted him in his home.   He said that the woman that he killed, Andrea Miller, had told him that she was pregnant as a ruse to gain advantage and prevent him from shooting her.   Greer is 80 years old, and had his collar bone broken in the assault.  From the dailymail.co.uk: ‘Thomas Greer is presumed to have held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily injury,’ according to...

In fact, Moscow’s latest diplomatic offensive to get a treaty banning weapons in space may be shot down by one of the proposed pact's little-noticed provisions: Nobody else should get to put weapons in space, but Russia gets to keep the ones it already has. Cosmonauts regularly carry handguns on their Soyuz spacecraft — and actually, that's not unreasonable. There are practical and historical justifications.

SYDNEY – A hostage who died during a siege in a downtown Sydney cafe was killed when she was struck by fragments of a bullet fired from a police officer's gun as authorities stormed in to end the 16-hour standoff, a lawyer told an inquest on Thursday. Katrina Dawson, a 38-year-old lawyer who was among 18 people taken hostage last month by a gunman, died after being hit by six fragments of a police bullet that had ricocheted off a hard surface, Jeremy Gormly, a lawyer assisting the coroner, told the Glebe Coroner's Court. One fragment struck a major blood...

Craig ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — Channel 9 talked with a University of Central Florida student who pulled a gun on two violent intruders who attacked her boyfriend and threatened her life. The incident happened midafternoon at the Village of Alafaya Club, which sits down the street from the university. The couple, who are both students at UCF, said they got a knock at the door and when they opened it, two men barged in. Victim Nour Skargee said he answered the door and was immediately forced to the ground as one of the men pointed a gun at his head....

Properly installed arm brace at Sig Sauer booth at the Shot show. On 16 January, just before the Shot Show, the BATF published an open letter on the subject of "The Redesign of "Stabilizing Braces". The letter was supposed to "clarify" the increasingly muddy, irrational, and stupid law. A combination of the thwarted original intent of the legislation, combined with continued bureaucratic desires to "grow the rice bowl*" and the irrational belief of disarmists that any additional regulation is good, not matter what, has resulted in our arrival at this point. The National Firearms act regulation of short barreled...

AN ACT RELATING TO ANIMALS; PROHIBITING COYOTE-KILLING CONTESTS; DEFINING "COYOTE-KILLING CONTEST"; PROVIDING PENALTIES. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF NEW MEXICO: SECTION 1. A new section of Chapter 30, Article 18 NMSA 1978 is enacted to read: "[NEW MATERIAL] LEGISLATIVE FINDINGS.--The legislature finds that it would benefit the state to retain its tradition of nonfrivolous hunting by eliminating the practice of coyote-killing contests in concert with long-standing conservation guidelines for hunters and anglers."

In the five months since Jan Morgan banned Muslims from her gun range in Hot Springs, Ark., business has boomed and predictions of a lawsuit brought by federal civil rights enforcers have so far proved inaccurate. Morgan, who claims keeping Muslims out of her Gun Cave Indoor Firing Range is a matter of public safety and not a constitutional issue, says she made the decision in September after two customers she deemed suspicious visited. She said their furtive behavior and cellphone ringtones of “Allahu Akhbar” prompted her to revise her range’s policies. “We are dealing in lethal firearms,” Morgan told...

In the dramatic video from inside the New Hope, Minnesota city council chambers, one of the council members reacts to the sound of gunfire outside of the doors by drawing his own weapon and preparing to defend his colleagues.  Link to video: It is clear that the council member on the left of the screen has considered this sort of scenario, and is mentally prepared.   Immediately after the shots are fired, you hear a voice saying, "Get down!, Get down!".  As the video progresses, and shows the councilman with the handgun on the left, it is clear that he...

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, is circulating a petition to have Emily Miller fired, for what they allege is an ethics problem because she’s involved in the gun rights movement. They didn’t like her speech to the Virginia Defense league.

But despite their formidable powers of self-defense, members of the industry are a nervous lot — and not without reason. Two years ago, after Newtown and the 2012 election, the show anxiously awaited President Obama’s executive actions on gun control. A year ago, the (ATT),.. promised nothing but trouble. This year, executive actions were back on the agenda: with the midterm elections now past, the industry fears there’s nothing to stop the president from indulging his anti-firearms instincts. [..] But gun-control supporters aren’t merely relying on fooling people with new language. From import bans to action through the Centers for...

An omnibus gun law reform bill has been introduced in North Dakota by Representative Roscoe Streyle, from Minot.  The bill, HB 1241(pdf), would bring into law many reforms that have proven popular in other states.   Among the reforms in the bill: 1. The restrictions on the use of legal gun mufflers and short barreled rifles for hunting would be removed.  These restrictions never made any sense, and are being eliminated all over the country.  35 states do not prevent the use of gun mufflers for hunting; no legislative purpose for the heavy handed restrictions on gun mufflers has been...

All gun control bills proposed by Democrats that went before the Virginia Senate Courts of Justice Committee yesterday were defeated. Among the legislation struck down was a bill from Sen. Adam Ebbin (D) that would have made it illegal for parents to allow a child 4 years old or younger to use a firearm. Another bill, from Sen. Barbara Favola (D), would have prevented those convicted of stalking or sexual battery from carrying a firearm. More than a dozen bills that would restrict everything from who can purchase guns, which convicted criminals can carry guns and how many guns one...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - Marissa Alexander, a woman whose case helped bring national attention to Florida's stand your ground and minimum sentencing laws, was allowed to leave jail late Tuesday afternoon to spend the rest of her sentence on house arrest. Applause broke out in the courtroom when Judge James Daniel announced he would reject the prosecutors' request for an additional two-year sentence and was releasing Alexander to community control. As she left the courthouse, Alexander read a prepared statement: "Today, after the sentence given by Judge Daniel, my family and I will be able to move on with our lives....

For a long time, I have believed that the gun culture of the United States is dangerous and frankly stupid. So many people are killed by firearms going off accidentally or because they fall into the hands of children or madmen. Their easy availability is not just because they are a transportable and smugglable commodity, but also because there is a myth in American culture that claims that only by possessing guns were the American rebels able to defeat the British and gain independence. Even if that were so, and it is not, what might have been true 300 years...

Terrorists can strike anywhere and at any time, giving them a huge strategic advantage.Unfortunately, too many politicians around the world are refusing to admit this. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris earlier this month, France placed 10,000 uniformed soldiers in front of Jewish sites across the country. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be very effective. Israel learned this lesson the hard way. For several decades after its founding, Israel responded by putting more soldiers and armed police on the streets. Unfortunately, a mass killer can wait for officers to leave the scene or to kill the uniformed officers first....

An 8-year-old St. Louis boy went to school and told an office worker he had been shot, after his mother exchanged gunfire with a man who tried to force his way into a home, police said Tuesday. Both mother and child were hospitalized in stable condition as police searched for a suspect in the shooting, the latest of several that have plagued St. Louis over the past 13 months. …

<p>If you have not yet seen Bill Whittle's video "Number One With a Gun," you should. It is as succinct a rebuttal to anything the gun-control freaks can come up with as you will find.</p>

Over a year ago we brought you the story of Mr. Filippidis and his family, a Florida Driver who was pulled over by law enforcement in Maryland. The traffic stop would have been typical except for the fact the responding officer demanded, at random, Mr. Filippidis’s firearm. Mr. Filippidis did not have his legally owned -CCW permitted- hand gun, it was home in Florida. Nor did Mr. Filippidis ever say he had a firearm – yet the officer was insistent Mr. Filippidis owned one, handcuffed Mr. Filippidis, and strip searched his vehicle on the side of the road. Numerous Maryland...

... Tragically, a record number of Americans subscribe to some version of this mythology, with 63 percent (67 percent of men polled and 58 percent of women) believing that guns truly do make them safer. The public’s confidence in firearms, however, is woefully misguided: The evidence overwhelmingly shows that guns leave everybody less safe, including their owners. ... That is, in the absence of guns, would-be criminals are not switching to knives or some other weapons to carry out homicide. These results are supported by a host of previous studies that illustrate that guns increase the rate of homicides. The...

Two bills filed in the Mississippi House and Senate would make it an express duty of the state government to protect the gun rights of Mississippians against federal gun control measures. House Bill 1297 (HB1297) was filed by Rep. Staples last week. It declares “All federal acts, laws, orders, rules or regulations regarding firearms are a violation of the Second Amendment.” In other words, as the Founders understood, the federal government has no authority over firearms, period. The bill goes on to declare that all such federal acts are “invalid in this state, shall not be recognized by this state,...

Congressmember Lois Capps thought President Barack Obama had lingered longer than usual on the House floor after his sixth State of the Union address Tuesday night. She said she felt like a “groupie.” “I had an opportunity to shake his hand and tell him how proud of him I was,” she said. “Then I turned around, and he was still there.” Most importantly, Capps had the opportunity to give Obama a photograph of Christopher Michaels-Martinez as a young boy. Michaels-Martinez was a bright UCSB student gunned down last May in the Isla Vista massacre perpetrated by a mentally ill City...

TAMPA — At first, Dawn Bryan blamed the goat on the back porch. She figured the repeated “thunks” she heard was the animal hopping onto and off the picnic table. The noise continued and she went outside to investigate. Just then, she said, a window next to her shattered. That, she thought, was not the goat. Rather, according to Bryan and a Hillsborough County sheriff’s report, it was a neighbor and a buddy of his firing an AK 47 rifle in a back yard that abuts Bryan’s property on Porter Road in Lithia. The neighbor, Scott Radford, is a Hillsborough...