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...