Free Republic

A former police officer, Assam, 42, was on security duty Sunday morning at New Life Church here. Hours earlier, a 24-year-old who had been rejected from a missionary school in a Denver suburb had shot and killed two staffers there. Now he was spraying New Life's parking lot with gunfire and pushing through the doors to the sanctuary.

If access to firearms were as easy as President Obama insisted in the aftermath of the South Carolina church massacre, Carol Bowne would be alive today. The 39-year-old New Jersey woman with a restraining order against an ex-boyfriend was murdered by that boyfriend while she waited for her application for a gun permit to wind its way through a process that takes at least two months to complete. But it wasn’t completed soon enough: The Berlin Township woman got a restraining order against a former boyfriend, installed security cameras and an alarm system to her home and began the...

The senator from Kentucky continues to takes the road less traveled through the GOP primaries.Sen. Rand Paul took a risk Thursday. Speaking to an audience of religious conservatives in the wake of a racially charged shooting in South Carolina, Paul delicately suggested that Republicans might want to start focusing on other parts of the Bill of Rights than the Second Amendment. "Everybody is for the Second Amendment. All 55 candidates running for president are for the Second Amendment—on our side," Paul told the crowd. "But the thing is that a lot of young people, that might not be their primary...

Please pray for those who have lost their lives in Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, for their families and friends, and for their entire community. Our brothers and sisters in Christ are suffering, and need our prayers and support. Let’s start by spreading love rather than division. With that said, if I had to give one piece of advice to any politician, it would be that any argument starting off with “We don’t have all the facts” is one that should probably remain unspoken. Another piece of advice would be that gathering the relevant facts before speaking will avoid embarrassments like...

Todd Rutherford, a South Carolina state legislator and a friend of one of the victims, spoke out on CNN this afternoon about how “the rhetoric in South Carolina, the rhetoric nationwide, has led people to believe… that it’s okay to walk into a church and take nine lives.” Rutherford spoke to Jake Tapper about the Charleston church shooting and the death of his friend Reverend Clementa Pinckney.

A federal law enforcement source has identified the man suspected of killing nine people inside a historic black church on Wednesday evening as 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof. He was captured Thursday morning in Shelby, N.C. ....Since January, Roof has been arrested twice, both at the Columbiana Mall in Columbia, S.C. According to arrest records obtained CBS News investigative producer Laura Strickler, on February 28, Roof went into a Bath and Body Works store wearing all black and asked "out of the ordinary questions," including how many associates were working, when they closed and what time they leave. Mall employees complained...

According to a 2013 Pew Research study, 37 percent of households had an adult who owned a gun — 24 percent said they owned a gun, and 13 percent said someone else in their household did. There are about 319 million people in the United States, so that means there are about 118 milion gun owners in this nation. Mother Jones reports there have been 69 mass shootings in the last 30 years. The Washington Post says, a Congressional Research Service report published in 2013 counted 78 incidents over roughly the same period, in which 547 were killed.

Four people, including two police officers, were killed in a shooting in China's northern Hebei province on Tuesday, state television reported on its official microblog, a rare "mass shooting" in which five people were wounded. The four killed in Suning county included at least one suspect, China Central Television said, giving few other details. The case was still under investigation, it said.

Thursday while making a statement about the Charleston church shooting, President Barack Obama raised the issue of dealing with guns and gun violence. Transcript as follows: This morning, I spoke with Vice President Biden and with Mayor Joe Riley and other leaders of Charleston to express our deep sorrow over the senseless murders that took place last night. Michelle and I know several members of Emanuel AME church.

President Barack Obama on Thursday expressed profound “sadness and anger” at the Charleston church shooting as well as deeply personal frustration that America’s political climate makes it virtually impossible for now to tighten restrictions on who can buy firearms. “We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” Obama said in the White House briefing room, Vice President Joe Biden standing at his side.

Why is it that those who demand tolerance for every sexual perversion and every abomination inspired by a “religion” have an hysterical reaction to firearms? I would bet most individuals hyper-critical of guns have never fired one and wouldn’t wish to if given the chance. Their aversion to even rationally discussing the subject of firearms borders on the pathological. A true standout of the hoplophobe community is sfgate blogger, Mark Morford. Mr. Morford has gun owners all figured out and is eager to share his insights with the rest of the world. I laughed loudly after reading what this smug,...

Here we go. The perfect incident just took place last night for creating chaos, conflict, and division when Dylann Storm Root decided to channel his inner Satan to slaughter innocent people praying at a church. Unlike the predecessors in the Soviet Union, China, and various fascist regimes during the past century, our leftists usually don't concoct phony incidents to propel their agenda. They wait, patiently, sometimes for years, waiting for an incident which can be used to promote their agenda. The agenda right now is fundamental transformation, and transformation is a revolutionary action that requires angry, focused masses gathered to...

President Obama on National News now, mourning the Charleston killings and then immediately turning it into a gun control moment.Shameless but typical!

(Ammoland.com)- On June 16 2015 the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals begins hearing an appeal of their own decision against the “good cause” requirement in California’s concealed carry process. The 3-judge panel of the 9th Circuit ruled against the requirement in February 2014, saying, “The right to bear arms includes the right to carry an operable arm outside the home for the lawful purpose of self-defense.” Moreover, they ruled that because the right extends outside the home, there is no need to show “good cause”– the right to do so is cause enough.

Still, SCOPE stands behind its decision, which they said was in the best interest of the children and the result of “poor judgement” on Kearns’ part. But even a parent of one of the misbehaving children, Aya Blarney, felt SCOPE mistreated Kearns and jumped the gun without conducting a thorough investigation.

At issue is the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which details regulations to implement the provisions of the Arms Export Control Act of 1976, intended to control the import and export of defense articles and services, from guns and ammunition to fighter jets, ballistic missiles, spacecraft and biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Under the State Department’s revisions, numerous definitions and provisions would be (perhaps intentionally) vague and broad.

On June 16, North Carolina’s GOP-controlled house sided with Gabby Giffords and voted 78-37 to keep handgun purchasing restrictions in place for law-abiding North Carolinians. As recently as June 7—just four days after New Jersey’s Carol Bowne was stabbed to death while waiting for state permission to own a gun for self-defense—Breitbart News reported that Giffords & Co. were pushing to make sure North Carolinians had to continue seeking state permission for handgun purchases via a permit-to-purchase requirement which is very similar to the one in New Jersey.

Gun control is something that did not start recently although it has become stricter. When did gun control even start in the United States? Aside from when America started as a country and the British trying to disarm us, we go back to when we passed laws in our own states to control certain weapons distribution. We are going back to the 1920s. The Federal government started its gun control policies in response to the waging wars of the gangs in 1934 with the National Firearms Act of 1934. This enacted a long series of measures trying to stop the...

A legal team investigating the Obama administration’s order that certain American military veterans deemed “incompetent” give up their weapons says the problem is worse than expected. People who live with veterans now are being ordered not to possess a gun, and some veterans are told they can “buy back” their Second Amendment rights by giving up their veterans’ benefits. “This is simply unbelievable, On the one hand the [Veterans Administration] and the FBI have found veterans to be mentally ill and too dangerous to be allowed to own firearms, while on the other hand allowing these allegedly dangerous people to...

A new study in the American Journal of Public Health claims that the state of Connecticut’s 1995 gun licensing law has reduced firearm homicide rates by 40 percent. But this just released study gives academics a bad name. Not surprisingly, anti-gun activist and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the left-wing Joyce Foundation funded the research. The study cherry picks which states with gun licensing laws are examined, which years are looked at, and the type of crime to study. Any normal researcher would look at all the states in the country that have passed a similar law...