Free Republic

Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto on Thursday said he is looking forward to a promised legal battle over the city’s proposed gun ban and plans to immediately sign the regulations into law once City Council approves them. Addressing the legislation for the first time in weeks, the mayor repeated a promise that the legal defense would cost taxpayers nothing. He said he has received commitments from a “team of attorneys both locally and nationally” to help the city fend off lawsuits and criminal complaints that Second Amendment advocates have vowed to file following passage of the bills. “Once council makes that...

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro isn’t ruling out direct payments to African-Americans for the legacy of slavery – a stand separating him from his 2020 rivals. “If under the Constitution we compensate people because we take their property, why wouldn’t you compensate people who actually were property,” the former Obama-era housing secretary and ex-San Antonio mayor said on Sunday. Castro was among the last of a pack of 2020 candidates to speak at the South by Southwest Festival in Texas, in what amounted to one of the biggest gatherings of the Democratic field yet.

Wicomico County Sheriff Mike Lewis says he and his deputies “will not comply” if Maryland lawmakers follow through with a long gun licensing and confiscation law. Lewis told Delmarva Now that he believes lawmakers are punishing residents throughout the state for the out-of-control crime in Baltimore. He said, “Law-abiding citizens are repeatedly being penalized because of Baltimore City’s inability to control their crime. And I’m sorry — I’m not someone’s puppet. I’m going to stand up for what I think is unjust and unconstitutional to the American people, including those living in the state in Maryland.” He added, “We’re gonna...

Idaho – -(AmmoLand.com)- The Idaho State Senate stunned the citizens of Idaho yesterday by opening the possibility of Idaho implementing Gun Confiscation Orders, better known as “Red Flag” laws. Despite repeated warnings from the Idaho Second Amendment Alliance and gun owners across Idaho, the Idaho State Senate moved forward with their ill-advised resolution known as SJR101 or Marsy's Law. We'll get to who voted for and against Marsy's Law in just a moment. States across the country continue to push through Red Flag Gun Confiscation Orders. Bloomberg and his cronies with Moms Demand Action are dumping millions of dollars in...

The law of civil forfeiture allows police and prosecutors to seize and keep cash, cars, homes, businesses and property of all kinds without ever criminally charging or convicting the owners. As originally conceived, it was to be a deterrent by which law enforcement would transfer the ill-gotten gains of crime to the public treasury. But, as so often happens with governmental power, it has transmuted over the years into a semi-criminal operation in and of itself. In 2014, Chris Sourovelis’ son was arrested for selling $40 worth of drugs. Three weeks later, the Philadelphia police forcibly evicted the entire Sourovelis...

Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Chief of Staff Saikat Chakrabarti has praised his boss’s use of social media and communication, pointing out that she “changed the entire debate on tax in this country in a matter of days.” “She’s good at communicating and she’s good at taking a message and actually educating people and getting people to realize how these very complex policies work,” Saikat told CNN’s Reliable Sources on Sunday. The progressive 29-year-old representative from New York, who refers to herself as a Democratic Socialist, has pushed for a significant increase on income tax for the wealthiest Americans. Under her...

Remember this list whenever progressives want more in the way of background checks or registration. Remember this list whenever they deny that they want to confiscate guns. They used to conceal their intentions behind a mask of lies and deceptions, but now they are being open and honest about what they want. The progressives have made over 70 plus demands for some form of gun confiscation – meaning repeal of the 2nd amendment, mandatory “buy backs” – of something they never owned - or outright bans. They are no longer for gun safety but for total disarmament. These 70 cases...

Senator Warren apparently has found her guiding spirit and has announced along with her presidential campaign a campaign of economic terror based on force, not law. Specifically, she has proposed to begin seizing a portion of the assets of some wealthy Americans, a course of action that the federal government has no constitutional power to undertake. The seizure of assets is a fundamentally different thing from the taxation of income, which itself took a constitutional amendment to implement. What Warren is proposing is essentially a federal version of the hated asset-forfeiture programs that have been so much abused by law-enforcement...

More gun confiscations... This time in Vermont, based on Vermont's new "Red Flag" law, which allows authorities to seize someone's guns if something about the person, his guns, his beliefs, or perhaps his dog's affiliations (who knows with these jackals?) raises a red flag in the eyes of law enforcement. Click to watch the 5m26s YouTube video that explains what happened.

OpinionOver one million New Jersey Gun owners defy Governor Murphy's gun magazine ban & turn in demands of what some estimate is easily more than ten million now illegal standard capacity gun mags. New Jersey –-(Ammoland.com)- New Jersey's standard capacity magazine ban is now in effect making New Jersey's one million gun owners criminals in the eyes of the state. But in an act of mass definace, New Jersey residents refuse to comply. Any magazine holding more than ten rounds is now illegal in the Garden State. The standard magazine for an AR-15 holds 30 rounds. Glock 19s, which is...

At least 46 Oregonians have been ordered to surrender their guns under a new type of court order intended to stop suicides and mass shootings, law enforcement and court officials testified to state lawmakers Wednesday. Ten of the cases affect people in Multnomah County, where authorities have seized more than 50 guns from people found to pose a danger to themselves or others, Mike Reese, the county sheriff, told a joint meeting of the Senate and House judiciary committees. Washington County follows with at least eight cases, then Josephine County, with at least seven, according to documents submitted to the...

Police in the Democrat haven of Maryland shot and killed a man in his home on Monday while serving a “protective order” under a new law which allows them to seize people’s guns without due process. Since the new gun confiscation law went into effect on October 1st, police have carried out 114 such confiscation orders, which comes out to over 3 such seizures every day.

Multnomah County “sheriff” Mike Reese is now taking heat for failing to notify I.C.E. when he had an illegal alien in custody up on assault charges. Those charges were dropped, of course, and the illegal alien was set free, only for said illegal alien to go on to murder his wife by stabbing her to death and dumping her body in a ditch. Multnomah County is home to Portland, Oregon. ... A man accused of murdering his wife and leaving her body in a ditch is at the center of a firestorm between ICE and the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office....

Full title: "South Africa 'unexpectedly' slides into recession as agricultural production plummets in wake of plans to seize white-owned farmland." Gee, who could have possibly anticipated that threatening to steal (that is, expropriate without compensation) land from farmers who have worked it for generations would cause farmers to cut back on planting? Thus, we have Bloomberg telling us, "South Africa's economy unexpectedly shrank for the second consecutive quarter in the three months through June." The recession, based on a second-quarter decline in GDP of 0.8%, is entirely due to a steep decline in agricultural production: "the agriculture market fell back...

Is it any surprise that, because Donald Trump criticized the new land reform policy of South Africa, he’s being called a racist? It’s just another example of the fact that Trump can do no right in the eyes of the left – even when, in this case, he is speaking out against a policy that essentially calls for the eradication/killing of white farmers in that beleaguered country, as well as the state confiscating their land. When Trump learned of the proposed plan endorsed by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, he tweeted that he has directed Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State,...

President Trump has inspired the Deep State Media (DSM) to create another firestorm.  This time, his racism is supposedly being revealed because he asked his secretary of state to "closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers."  The president apparently was moved to ask his secretary of state to study the issue as a result of a Fox News program that dealt with the subject.  State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters that secretary of state Mike Pompeo and Trump had discussed the issue and Pompeo would "take a look at it."  The president has not drawn...

"Strongman politics are ascendant," Barack Obama warned in South Africa. He spoke passionately about "the politics of fear and resentment" at the Mandela Lecture. He worried that we were entering a world, “where might makes right and politics is a hostile competition between tribes and races and religions.” While the media used the remarks to attack Trump's meeting with Putin, Obama had shared a stage with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa who had come to power promising to seize land from white farmers. Ramaphosa was the latest in a series of ANC strongmen, including his predecessor, an alleged rapist, beginning...

Image from southafricatoday  On June 7th, 2018, the Constitutional Court in South Africa, overruled a lower court's decision that parts of South Africa's gun laws were unconstitutional. The laws were absolute, and did not allow for appeal or legitimate reasons for delay, such as hospitalization or death. From citizen.co.za: Section 24 of the Act requires that any person who seeks to renew a licence must do so 90 days before its expiry date. Section 28 stipulates that if a firearm licence has been cancelled‚ the firearm must be disposed of or forfeited to the state. A 60-day timeframe was...

Police in New Jersey have officially crossed the [thin blue] line and literally attempted to confiscate guns from an army veteran without a warrant. But it didn’t go as planned, because Leonard Cottrell Jr. refused to comply with the orders of the cops. Eventually, all gun confiscation will be carried out by the police; who of “don’t make the laws, they just enforce them,” and Cottrell found this out the hard way. After serving two tours in Operation Iraqi Freedom overseas, Cottrell found himself at end of the state’s tyrannical oppression and gun elimination scheme.

In a surprise, but lawful move, Lake County Circuit Court blocked an unconstitutional ban on alleged "assault weapons" and high capacity magazines with a temporary injunction in the small town of Deerfield, Illinois just hours before the ban was to go into effect. The 19th Judicial Circuit Court in Lake County, Illinois rendered the decision on Tuesday after gun owner rights activists sued the city after a ban that was unanimously passed by all six of the town's board members on April 2. Vice News reports: Gun groups, including the National Rifle Association of Illinois, requested a temporary restraining order...