Free Republic

Back in late October, I wrote "Brady Campaign hypocrisy," chiding the Brady Campaign--specifially, their Vice President for Law and Policy, Dennis Henigan--for his accusation that the "gun lobby" tries to hide the truth. This accusation positively reeks of hypocrisy, on a couple levels. First, Henigan himself, in arguing on a video clip that the Second Amendment did nothing to protect the individual's right to keep and bear arms, recited the amendment in its entirety--except for the "of the people" part--the very part that poses the biggest problem for the now discredited "collective rights" interpretation of the Second Amendment. Second, when...

Four and a half years ago, three police organizations in the United States issued advisories to warn officers that a new handgun introduced into the U.S. market by a Belgium manufacturer of military firearms represented a unique threat to the safety of police officers.  It was a handgun that was designed to fire bullets through body armor.  A U.S. Senator and a U.S. Congressman urged a legal ban on civilian possession of the firearm, which began being referred to as the "cop killer gun."  The gun, manufactured by FN Herstal of Belgium, is lightweight and easily concealable, and was designed...

Sacramento, CA – Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law legislation that will help law enforcement officials track down and apprehend armed criminals and other prohibited persons. AB 962 by Assembly Member Kevin DeLeon (D-Los Angeles) had the support of law enforcement officials from across the state and was modeled after successful city ordinances, including the cities of Sacramento and Los Angeles. AB 962 was the Brady Campaign´s top priority bill in this year´s legislature. The law requires maintenance of purchaser records by handgun ammunition vendors. Local law enforcement can use these records to find illegal guns. "The purchase records will...

'CZAR' Sunstein Shoots Himself In The Foot Gun Hater Lautenberg Proposes "Extraordinary Powers" Be Given To the U.S. Attorney General To Limit Gun Sales. Obama and the White House are looking the other way as Lautenberg seeks to ban guns from 1,000,000 US citizens on a secret FBI terrorist watch list. Obama has deliberately and repeatedly lied to America's 90 million gun owners across the country when he insisted that he would not try to take away anyone's firearms. Now Obama's silence endorses Lautenberg's latest attempt at banning guns. Lautenberg has now introduced bill S. 1317 that would give the...

Many media outlets have misfired about guns. Countless newspapers and television networks -- from CBS to MSNBC -- have misreported that conservative protesters are threatening President Obama with guns at public events. It hasn't happened. In Portsmouth, N.H., a man carrying a gun, William Kostric, joined an Aug. 11 health care protest. This was blocks away and hours before Mr. Obama's town-hall meeting in that city. Mr. Kostric was given permission to be on church property where the protest occurred and was not at the place the president visited. What most of the coverage left out was that Mr. Kostric...

WASHINGTON – Militia groups with gripes against the government are regrouping across the country and could grow rapidly, according to an organization that tracks such trends. The stress of a poor economy and a liberal administration led by a black president are among the causes for the recent rise, the report from the Southern Poverty Law Center says. Conspiracy theories about a secret Mexican plan to reclaim the Southwest are also growing amid the public debate about illegal immigration. Bart McEntire, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told SPLC researchers that this is the...

Militia groups with gripes against the government are regrouping across the country and could grow rapidly, according to an organization that tracks such trends. The stress of a poor economy and a liberal administration led by a black president are among the causes for the recent rise, the report from the Southern Poverty Law Center says. Conspiracy theories about a secret Mexican plan to reclaim the Southwest are also growing amid the public debate about illegal immigration. Bart McEntire, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told SPLC researchers that this is the most growth...

The Senate confirmed Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court yesterday. Gun-control groups are crowing that the 68-31 vote was a major defeat for the National Rifle Association, which actively opposed the nomination. The gun controllers are reading too much into this vote. The NRA scored Judge Sotomayor's confirmation and ran ads to defeat her, but the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence counted eight NRA-endorsed senators who spurned the powerful gun-rights group to support her nomination. Some Democratic senators, such as Virginia's Mark R. Warner, even took to lecturing the NRA about being hijacked by extremists. The Sotomayor vote...

After years of losing, gun control advocates say this week's vote on confirming Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court will be their long-awaited win that shatters conventional wisdom and proves that the Second Amendment is no longer the unstoppable force of Washington politics. Proponents of gun control say the National Rifle Association (NRA) and similar groups have overreached. They point to a Senate vote last month blocking an effort to expand concealed-carry laws. "The lesson that's going to come out of this is you can vote against the NRA and still win, and win in gun-friendly areas," said Paul...

Earlier in July, the Violence Policy Center’s Josh Sugarmann – writing on the Huffington Post website – made what had to be one of the more bone-headed attempts in recent memory to drive a wedge between people in the firearms community when he critiqued remarks written by Jan Libourel, editor of Gun World magazine. Libourel is an extraordinarily bright guy, well-read in every sense, and – as is common among gun writers – unabashedly opinionated. As a recognized firearms authority, he’s supposed to be opinionated. That’s his job, and he is very good at it. Gun owners enjoy those opinions,...

There was a single case in the VPC report from Minnesota. The VPC, apparently relying solely upon a Star Tribune article, reported the incident as: "Iheme, who had a concealed handgun permit, was found guilty of second degree murder." But actual court records which would have been easily researchable, reveal that Mr. Iheme did not have a permit.

When I was leading Handgun Control, Jim and Sarah Brady's national gun control organization, in the 1990s, we studied everything the NRA did. We wanted to know exactly how they thought, what their tactics were to sneak through legislation, and who their go-to people were when they needed something done. After a while, we were almost able to predict what their next move would be -- which helped us out-fox them and pass the Brady Bill, assault weapons ban, and ban on large clips...........

Remember CANDIDATE Barack Obama? The guy who “wasn’t going to take away our guns”? Well, guess what? Less than 100 days into his administration, he’s never met a gun he didn’t hate. A week ago, Obama went to Mexico, whined about the United States, and bemoaned (before the whole world) the fact that he didn’t have the political power to take away our semi-automatics. Nevertheless, that didn’t keep him from pushing additional restrictions on American gun owners. It’s called the Inter-American Convention Against Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives, and Other Related Materials. To be sure, this...

U.S. Marshals were sent to guard abortion clinics across America today amid fears the murder of a controversial doctor could spark a new wave of violence. The move by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder came hours after George Tiller, one of only three American doctors carrying out late-term abortions, was gunned down in the church where he was working as an usher and his wife was in the choir.

Obama's newly nominated "drug czar" is Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske. And just like a real czar, the drug czar, whose formal title is director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, can destroy rights instantly, and he can set the stage for additional harm. Before the dark days of the Clinton administration, few federal government officials had done more to damage Second Amendment rights than William Bennett, the so-called "drug czar" under President George H.W. Bush. In March 1989, Bennett set off a national panic by pushing the first Bush administration to ban the import of so-called "assault...

An April 7 report from the Department of Homeland Security branding some conservative groups as “rightwing extremists” is enough reason to revive former President Bill Clinton’s idea of an assault-weapons ban, according to an executive of a gun-control group--the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. "I think it certainly helps to make that case because what that report suggests is that there is a rise in the kind of paramilitary activity that we saw actually in years before the Oklahoma City bombing,” Dennis Henigan, the vice president for law and policy at the Brady Center, told CNSNews.com Wednesday Henigan talked...

Anti gun groups such as the Freedom States Alliance and the Bradys are enraged over Barack Obama's apparent backing off repealing the Tihart Amendment, which would allow invasive Federal tracking of Firearms. The Bradys and FSA want to use the data to file new anti gun lawsuits against gun dealers and other nefarious purposes. The FAS is especially mad about Obama's deletion of his and Biden's stated desire to repeal the Tihart Amendment from Obama's official White House Web Site. The following quote is from the Freedom States Alliance press release that bitterly stated, "Perhaps most galling is that on...

They can kill from more than four football fields away, shred police officers' vests, fire up to 75 bullets at a time - and they're increasingly showing up in criminals' hands. Last year, Fort Wayne Police seized 31 semiautomatic rifles, compared with two in 2003, the last year of the federal assault weapons ban that limited the sale of the rifles. The seizure increase and more reports of criminals using the rifles concerns Fort Wayne Police Chief Rusty York. “The fact that we have these relatively cheap, assault weapon-type firearms out there, it's not only a hazard to the public,...

·11250 Waples Mill Road ·   Fairfax, Virginia 22030    ·800-392-8683   H.R. 2324--Aiming At Registering Gun Owners And Putting Gun Shows Out Of Business   Friday, May 08, 2009   On May 6, at a press conference with Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign, U.S. Representatives Michael Castle (R-Del.) and Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) introduced H.R. 2324--the "Gun Show Loophole Closing Act."  Masquerading as reform, H.R. 2324 would impose severe bureaucratic restrictions aimed at shutting down gun shows. The bill is essentially a re-introduction of the failed H.R. 96, introduced in the 110th Congress.  Despite changes from the Lautenberg juvenile justice amendment of...

Several of my colleagues are today observing the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado. As we look back on that terrible day, many Americans try to sort out what led to the event, and what might be done in the future to prevent another such tragedy. The answer is alarmingly simple, and nobody is going to like it. We cannot prevent more Columbines. There it is. If we could, there would have been no Virginia Tech. The shooting at Red Lake High School in Minnesota would not have happened. We would never have read about...

Dear 1LT Bryan: I'm sitting here in my wheelchair today, mad as hell, trying to control my anger, but without much success. And please understand-I'm not angry with folks like you...or angry about my own personal situation.Many years ago, with the help of my wife Sarah, I was able to cope with the initial bitterness and depression that come with the knowledge that I'm going to spend the rest of my life confined to a wheelchair.Instead, I'm angry at the gun lobby led by the National Rifle Association (NRA), and the dangerous state of "gun politics" in Washington D.C. But...

How do you hit the broad side of a barn in a news report when you can't see the core issues? How did we know the report would be misleading and terribly lacking? As you know, I write for non-gun owners. I furnish analysis and facts more on the issue of liberty and citizen authority than guns themselves. Guns, liberty, and our sovereign authority over officials in this country are inextricable, and I have shown why over the years. The armed citizen is not an opinion concept, it is and always has been a safeguard of our way of life....

An insidious new meme is being propagated following the Pittsburgh slayings--that rhetoric from conservatives, gun rights activists, the "right wing"-- is responsible for Richard Poplawski's alleged fear that Obama was going to take away guns. The first thing we need acknowledge is this is but one more case of the media rushing to judgment before the facts are in. There's a whole lotta speculation going on. As we've noted before, Obama's own words taken from the official White House website reveal his goal of banning an entire class of semiautomatic firearms. His attorney general has revived the call. And he's...

Proof positive that Olby’s not the only MSNBCer who takes his cues from Kos and co-starring NYT JV pundit Charles Blow, last seen wringing his hands over violent rhetoric after calling for GM execs to be flogged a few days before. I can’t decide which part is my favorite, Shuster accusing Glenn Beck of spreading the FEMA camp conspiracy theory when Beck was busy debunking it right around the time this was airing or Shuster feigning outrage at the thought of someone using Nazi comparisons to demonize his political opponents on a network that airs Keith “Captain Fascist” Olbermann at...

A wise old Uncle told me when I was a kid that gun rights were in danger. But being proverbially young and stupid, I ignored him until the Clinton Administration. We all know that the Brady's goal is absolutely no guns in America. Period. That is, except for the criminals. Although this may be attempted by law, we all know that gun carrying criminals will never give up the tools of their trade. Getting caught with a gun is just a cost of doing business with them. In reality, a thug's carrying a gun just enhances their street reputation. It...

Attorney General Eric Holder is using the drug violence in Mexico to "confuse and mislead" Americans in an attempt to reinstate the expired federal assault weapons ban, gun advocates say. Get ready for a gunfight. Holder revealed his intention to reinstate the ban last month while announcing more than 700 arrests in connection with a crackdown on Mexican drug cartels operating in the United States. "As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to re-institute the ban on the sale of assault weapons,"...

Some of the strictest gun control laws are in Germany There is a move to further attempt to crack down on private gun ownership there. This could be hard to do because of the long hunting tradition in the more conservative southern part of the country. Other countries are tightening laws to prevent people from killing each other, but there aren't enough laws yet. Strict gun laws began after WWII, when the police couldn't even carry guns. There are a few ways today to get a permit to own guns in Germany. Just see how easy gun ownership is there....

At a press conference today announcing the drug cartel arrests (in which he had little to no involvement), US AG Holder also suggested that re-instituting a U.S. ban on the sale of assault weapons would help reduce the bloodshed in Mexico, where last year 6,000 people were killed in drug-related violence.

There’s more than one way to take your guns. Besides making them illegal, the president can make them unaffordable. That appears to be the plan. But first, let’s establish the fact that, despite his campaign promises (nearly all of which are proving to be dubious) that he supports the 2nd Amendment, Obama is quite clearly against private, legal ownership of guns. Everyone knows this. When the alien black African Communist was appointed president by the Oedipal WASP liberal Democrats, the level of gun sales surged more than 49%. This is the FBI report on the requested background checks sent in...

I wrote recently about the forcible citizen disarmament lobby's desire to ban .50 caliber rifles. In that piece, I pointed out that if such a ban were ever implemented, the gun prohibitionists would soon discover that a sniper limited to a .499 caliber rifle would not be seriously hampered by the loss of 1/1000th of an inch of bullet diameter, leading, no doubt, to calls for the banning of that caliber as well. Of course, a .498 caliber rifle would not really be noticeably less capable . . . etc. The disarmament lobby considers it bad form for gun rights...

I think we all realize that our open southern border is a real problem. Illegal aliens are raping, murdering, stealing our identities and assaulting our citizenry, not to mention sucking up welfare dollars by the billions and devastating our medical facilities and our economy in general. What do we hear from the media? We need the illegal aliens here, the Mexicans are doing the jobs that Americans won’t do. Well, for once, the media is right. But it’s not picking cabbage or washing dishes that Americans won’t do, Americans have always done that. So what job won’t Americans do? There...

Friday, January 16, 2009 No one, including the Brady Campaign, seriously believes that Barack Obama was elected president because of his support for gun control. But Brady is pretending that it provided Obama the margin of victory in November, and has provided him with a very long list of gun bans and other restrictions that it expects from him in return. If for no other reason, Obama might want to tell Brady "no," because if he were to do their bidding, they would be sure to demand that he do even more. That's demonstrated by Brady's statement that their current...

Almost 10 years after city officials filed a lawsuit against gun makers and local dealerships, a new ruling by the Indiana Supreme Court will allow the case to proceed to trial in Lake County. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence announced Monday the Supreme Court rejected an argument that the gun industry is shielded from liability under federal law for gun sales that are used in criminal activity. The court's ruling allows an appellate court ruling to stand. The case dates back to August 1999, when then Mayor Scott King announced results of an undercover police operation at several...

HR 45, gun licensing act, 1/6/09 To provide for the implementation of a system of licensing for purchasers of certain firearms and for a record of sale system for those firearms, and for other purposes. Sponsor: Rep Rush, Bobby L. [IL-1] (introduced 1/6/2009) Cosponsors (None) Latest Major Action: 1/6/2009 Referred to House committee. Status: Referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary. Blair Holt's Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009 - Amends the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act to prohibit a person from possessing a firearm unless that person has been issued a firearm license under this...

Storm Warning! Obama Will Attack... Apparently I was wrong in my thinking that the Dems had been burned enough times on the gun issue that they'd wait until at least after the 2010 midterm elections before sticking their toe back into the parana pool. Sources from Washington are telling me that President-Elect Obama may move forward on an Assault Weapons/Magazine Capacity Ban ASAP — maybe as soon as later this January. Jim Shepherd at the SHOOTING WIRE is this morning also reporting similar rumors. This from Jim: Despite the new administration's insistence that jobs and the economy will be the...

Pick up the morning newspaper or turn on the evening newscast and the story that you’re bound to see is that America is facing an economic recession of historic proportions. Consumer spending is down and unemployment is up, but there is one item that Americans are rushing to buy -- guns. Why? Well, as NRA-certified instructor Joel Rosenberg told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “It’s the Obama effect.” Gun sales have skyrocketed ever since it became clear that Barack Obama was going to win the White House and be able to govern with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. The...

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has sued the Interior Department to stop it from eliminating a 25-year-old federal rule restricting loaded guns in national parks. AP WASHINGTON -- An anti-gun group is suing to stop a last-second Bush administration change that would allow Americans to carry concealed, loaded guns in most national parks and wildlife refuges. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence sued the Interior Department in federal court on Tuesday. They want a federal judge to stop the elimination of a 25-year-old federal rule severely restricting loaded guns in national parks...

A week before Minnesota’s firearm deer season I visited my 86-year-old father. He regaled me with an entertaining stream of tales from his 70 years as a deer hunter in the north woods. He lamented his failing eyesight and then rose from his ancient recliner and went to the closet where he keeps his guns. He took out a battered old case and handed it me. “I want you to have this.” I knew what was inside. A Savage model 219 single-shot 30-30 rifle. My father bought it in 1944 for $12. It’s well worn after more than 60 years...

Advocacy group would help Lebanon County fight gun-toting mom LEBANON (PA)- The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence has offered free legal representation to Lebanon County to defend against a $1 million lawsuit brought by Meleanie Hain. Hain is the Lebanon woman who wore a loaded gun on her hip to her 5-year-old daughter's soccer game in September, raising concerns of other parents. Lebanon County Sheriff Michael DeLeo revoked her license to carry a concealed weapon, but his decision was reversed by Lebanon County Court Judge Robert Eby. The case has drawn national attention. Hain sued DeLeo, the sheriff's office...

COOS BAY, Ore.- The shelves at the Coos Bay Bi-Mart looked pretty bare Monday, with the main ammo for hunting practically sold out. And Bi-Mart's not the only retailer in town seeing this trend, it's happening across the board. Employee Dan West says it's not that more people are going out to purchase ammo, it's the same people who already buy ammunition purchasing more than usual. He says people have been buying $200- $600 worth at a time. West says the only thing left is guns, with nothing to fill them. He says customers have been telling him they are...

The strong Election Day showing for Democrats signals stronger support for “sensible gun laws” in this country and a “significant setback” for the National Rifle Association, a gun control group said Tuesday night. The Brady Campaign issued a statement even before Sen. Barack Obama was declared the winner, saying the political environment is better than it’s been in years for “progress on gun violence prevention.” The NRA spent millions on ads during the campaign, warning that Sen. Barack Obama would be the most anti-gun president in American history. But according to the Brady Campaign, the NRA failed to deliver its...

Associated Press WASHINGTON - Barack Obama and Joe Biden won the endorsement Monday of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. The group is named after Jim Brady, the press secretary to former President Reagan, who was gravely wounded by a gunman who tried to assassinate Reagan in 1981. Paul Helmke, the organization's president, said Obama and Biden would strengthen background checks on gun purchasers, get assault weapons off the streets and give law enforcement more tools to stop illegal gun trafficking. "The Obama-Biden ticket will work with law enforcement, gun violence victims and ordinary citizens who want to do...

The Brady Bunch calls-out the NRA

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- A gun-control activist who championed the cause for more than a decade and served on the boards of two anti-violence groups is suspected of working as a paid spy for the National Rifle Association, and now those organizations are expelling her and sweeping their offices for bugs. The suggestion that Mary Lou McFate was a double agent is contained in a deposition filed as part of a contract dispute involving a security firm. The muckraking magazine Mother Jones, in a story last week, was the first to report on McFate's alleged dual identity. The NRA refused to...

The first convention of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus (SCCC) featured at least one speaker who said college students bearing arms on campus would not make anyone safer. Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign, a gun control advocacy group, said studies show that college students are more likely to engage in risky behavior than the general population. “When I look back on my college days, maybe it was a different era in the late ‘60s, but most of my fraternity brothers didn’t have criminal records – not yet, most of them, even those who were in ROTC and...

National, and even international, coverage of the shootings at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church turned late this week into a discussion into whether it's safe in America to be a liberal.

For the Brady Campaign, Violence Policy Center, Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Schumer, U.N. gun-ban extremist Rebecca Peters and her globalist billionaire sugar-daddy George Soros, for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his horde of big-city politicians—in fact, for all those individuals and organizations who would harm or destroy our Second Amendment rights—Barack Obama’s mantra of “change” means their agenda will be harnessed to the total power of an aggressive, activist and radical federal government. “Change” means gun owners will be under siege like never before. Especially for NRA members who fought through the never-ending threats of the Clinton-Gore administration, the...

TRENTON, N.J. — New Jersey's Assembly has twice-approved legislation limiting people to buying one handgun per month, but the Senate has never followed suit. Now a state senator and urban mayors are vowing to push hard to get final approval for the legislation. "Handgun violence is on the rise, but taking guns off the streets will help to stop the senseless slaughter of our citizens," said Sen. Sandra Bolden Cunningham, D-Hudson. "It's common sense." New Jersey would join Virginia, Maryland and California as states that restrict people to buying one handgun per month. California was the last state to adopt...

Dangerous Brady States July 19, 2008 at 3:14 am · The lamestream media told you: The Brady Center gun-control group has issued its list of the states with the best gun laws, and we give them prominent coverage of this each year without checking for accuracy, the net effect of their custom ratings, or what they consider the “best” gun laws to be. We’re just “finding truth and reporting it,” since the Bradys did say what we said they said. The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that: Barre Bollinger, a GeorgiaCarry.Org member, looked into the Brady Center’s state ratings. (A score...

Statement Of Brady President Paul Helmke On Supreme Court Second Amendment Ruling Washington, D.C. - Paul Helmke, President of the Brady Center and Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, issued the following statement: “Our fight to enact sensible gun laws will be undiminished by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Heller case. While we disagree with the Supreme Court’s ruling, which strips the citizens of the District of Columbia of a law they strongly support, the decision clearly suggests that other gun laws are entirely consistent with the Constitution. “For years, the gun lobby has used fear of government gun...