Free Republic

There are fears Melbourne's gun crime could be spiralling out of control with police data showing a 300 percent rise in firearm offences in the past five years. Mr Iddles said the streets were more dangerous than he had ever seen. "The homicide rate's not up but if you have ice and you have the threat of terrorism, it's more dangerous now on the street as a police officer (than) in all my time of 37 years," he said. Data shows police find an illegal firearm in Victoria every 48 hours. Mr Iddles said Melbourne's northwest suburbs were a particular...

In a podcast with far left comedian Marc Maron, President Obama put forward a typical "first step" toward further infringement of Second Amendment rights.  Building on the existing, ineffective background check system, President Obama posited these "standards".  From the patriotpost.us: “The question is just, is there a way of accommodating that legitimate set of [hunting and sporting] traditions with some common-sense stuff that prevents a 21-year-old who’s angry about something — or confused about something, or is racist, or is deranged — from going into a gun store, and suddenly he’s packing and can do enormous harm?” There is...

In Oklahoma, Judge Thad Balkman ruled in favor of second amendment supporters when he issued a tempory restraining order to prevent the City of Norman from enforcing a ban on the carry of weapons during the Norman Music Festival.   The city argued that it was not banning weapons; only that the private organization that it had given control of city streets and sidewalks was banning arms.   From newsok.com: Bateman and Assistant City Attorney Rick Knighton argued that the festival operators essentially lease a three- or four-block area from the city for the special event. By doing so, they...

The self-proclaimed champions of women’s rights, the political left, is once again insisting that a woman’s right to protect herself from sexual attackers should be regulated, restricted, and in some cases banned. After all, only American Liberals would believe that a woman being raped is morally superior to a rapist being shot. Arguing that concealed carry on college campuses would actually “reinforce rape culture” on campus, an editorial in the University of North Carolina’s student’s newspaper argued against arming young (law abiding) women.Concealed weapons would not significantly reduce sexual assault and would create inadvertent risks within other forms of interpersonal violence…...

Arizona state Senator, Dr. Kelli Ward, added an amendment to a bill on restoration of civil rights.  The amendment would remove several obsolete and arcane weapons bans.  The bill, SB 1460, would add second amendment rights to civil rights that are restored when a person who had been convicted of a felony petitions a court for restoration of their rights.  From havasunews.com: Her amendment to SB 1460 legalizes devices "made or adapted to muzzle the report of a firearm.'' Also gone would be prohibitions against any rifle or shotgun with an overall length of less than 26 inches, with...

Minnesota state Rep. Tony Cornish says the al-Shabaab threat against the Mall of America should be enough to motivate mall owners to drop their “no guns” policy so citizens can protect themselves. Mr. Cornish, a Republican who also chairs the House Public Safety Committee, said the Mall of America has interpreted state concealed carry laws incorrectly, and he’s intent on challenging them for it, a local CBS affiliate reported. “This is completely ridiculous. The complete opposite of what they should be doing,” he said. “If we’re threatened with an attack, the last thing you want to do is disarm...

dis·arm·ist   (ds-ärmst)    alt.  dis·arm·en·ter (ds-ärmn-tr) n. 1. A political operative who works to disarm political opposition through the use of irrational and/or emotional arguments. 2. A person who believes that disarming citizens will reduce crime or unjustified violence, in spite of contrary evidence or facts. 3. A person who wishes to disarm others because they do not trust themselves to bear arms responsibly. Disarmists often claim that armed citizens are afraid, fearmongers, or cowardly.   All of these accusations are projections of the disarmists' own fears.   Most armed Americans are less fearful than those who wish to disarm them, but...

On December 18, a three-judge panel of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a ban on gun purchases for anyone who has been “adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to a mental institution” violated the Second Amendment rights of a Michigan man who was denied a gun purchase because of a mental institution commitment in 1986. According to The Wall Street Journal, 73-year-old Clifford Charles Taylor “recently attempted to buy a gun but was denied on the grounds that he had been committed by a court to a mental institution in 1986 after emotional...

"Long depicted as the rootin'-tootin' capital of American gun culture, Texas is one of the few states with an outright ban on the open carry of handguns. That could change in 2015, with the Republican-dominated Legislature and Gov.-elect Greg Abbott expected to push for expanded gun rights. 'If open carry is good enough for Massachusetts, it's good enough for the state of Texas' Abbott said the day after his election last month."

Merry Christmas: UN Declares Arms Trade Treaty to Go Into Effect Dec. 24 The New American 08 November On its official website, the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (yes, that’s really a thing and yes, it is housed right here in the United States) announced that the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) “will enter into force on 24 December 2014.” Merry Christmas! It is ironical that on the day before the world’s 2.18 billion Christians commemorate the coming of Jesus Christ to the Earth, the United Nations will officially put into motion a plan to deny them of a...

No doubt it was merely a mental slip, but it is hard to make a gun law tougher than an outright ban, which is the current state of the law in the Northern Mariana Islands.   From radionz.co.nz: Lawmakers in the Northern Marianas are looking at enacting legislation that will make it tougher for individuals to own handguns, in the event a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Weapons Control Act prevails. The current law in the Northern Mariana Islands is a complete ban on the ownership of handguns.   The ban is being challenged, in part, because of the...

Bank Robber in a Kroeger's On freerepublic.com, a discussion about the Moms Demand Action push for a gun ban following an armed robbery of a bank inside of a Kroeger's, brought this commonly expressed question.  This one was from rktman: "Uh, how would this have stopped the robbery again? Please 'splain that to us." I will explain it.  MDA is playing a very long game.   In order to be effective, they have to reduce the number of guns in society by large, large, amounts.  They have to avoid considering any benefits gained from gun ownership.  Here is how I...

It’s really very, very simple for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. New Jersey’s absurd citizen control fetish doesn’t play well in New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, Utah, Nevada, South Carolina, North Carolina, Arizona, or Michigan. These state comprise the first two months of the 2016 Presidential primary season, and the majority of Republican voters in these states are either very pro-gun to begin with, or are trending towards passing much more Second Amendment-friendly laws. Any candidate that doesn’t do well in these early primaries can kiss their Presidential aspirations goodbye, and one of the fastest ways to sink...

John R. Lott Jr. is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and the author of "More Guns, Less Crime" The new year has brought yet more gun-control regulations. President Obama announced new executive orders on background checks. Connecticut citizens stood in long lines to register their guns, and, next door in New York City, registration lists are used to confiscate them. While the research by criminologists and economists keeps showing that gun control doesn't work, technological advances and practical problems mean the laws are increasingly likely only to disarm the law-abiding. In the era of 3D printing, you won't...

The Blaze carried a story devoted to Mayor Bloomberg's intermingling of his private passion for infringing on the second amendment with his use of public funds to do so.  Among the comments was this insightful reply from nzkiwi: While we all believed that there were underhanded machinations afoot, it is never-the-less surprising to see clear proof. American gun owners should take considerable satisfaction that the law of unintended consequences came to their aid, however. Determined efforts to increase gun control by President Obama, supported by Mayor Bloomberg and others, caused such alarm in your nation that there are now...

<p>A federal district court judge in Chicago ruled Monday that the city’s ban on gun sales is unconstitutional.</p> <p>In a 35-page opinion, Judge Edmond E. Chang from the Northern District of Illinois wrote that the city’s law “goes too far.” Chang was appointed by President Obama in 2010.</p>

Small workshop pistol in Danao, Philippines In 1972, Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator in the Philippines, instituted a nationwide gun ban.   Police went house to house confiscating firearms.  Firearms that were confiscated were never returned.    While the current gun ban is not so draconian, it amounts to a ban on carrying guns outside of the home for most of the year during election years, which occur every three years.  In 2013, the ban started on January 13, and lasted until June 12. It then started up again on September 28 and ended on November 12. That is 225 days...

Even after the Newtown, Conn., massacre, Republican opponents of reasonable firearms restrictions in Congress blocked proposals for strengthened background checks and other steps to make future gun tragedies less likely. Now the question is whether anti-gun-control extremists will allow a federal ban on the manufacture, sale, import or possession of guns that are undetectable by metal detectors and X-ray machines to expire on Dec. 9. When Congress first approved the Undetectable Firearms Act in 1988, and renewed it in 1998 and 2003, the possibility of undetectable plastic guns being taken onto planes and into government buildings where guns are prohibited...

NY State banned many firearms some time ago and even required they be turned in (as I recall). Haven't heard a word about that since. What's going on there?

Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) of Maryland signed into law on May 16 a measure intended to control the sale of so-called assault weapons, which have been involved in incidents such as the mass killing at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown CT in December in 2012. The measure casts a broad net over a variety of weapons, both pistols and long guns, that have at least two of three characteristics – folding stock, grenade launcher or flash suppressor. Firearms having any two of these characteristics, therefore, qualify as an “assault weapon” under provisions of the law. Specific pistols, rifles...