Free Republic

It’s started. As promised, President Obama is using executive actions to impose gun control on the nation, targeting the top-selling rifle in the country, the AR-15 style semi-automatic, with a ban on one of the most-used AR bullets by sportsmen and target shooters. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives this month revealed that it is putting the ban on 5.56mm ammo on a fast track, immediately driving up the price of the bullets and prompting retailers, including the huge outdoors company Cabela’s, to urge sportsmen to urge Congress to stop the president.

California's gun laws are among the nation's strictest, but a looming decision in a federal lawsuit could effectively ban handguns altogether in the Golden State, according to plaintiffs who want a judge to toss out a state law requiring all new handguns to be equipped with technology that "stamps" each shell casing with a traceable mark. The problem with the “microstamping” law, which was signed into law by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007 but only took effect in 2013, is that it relies on an unworkable technology, according to gun manufacturers and attorneys for the Second Amendment Foundation and Calguns...

Looks like we have yet another actor who can’t help but alienate a large portion of their audience. Australian actor Hugh Jackman has thrown his hat in with the anti-gun crowd and made a post on his Facebook page and Twitter account pushing the “Not One More” campaign (a Bloomberg production).

"..... the National Rifle Association is facing off not against big national gun-control groups, but against many of the state’s towns and cities, in a brazen push to get them to repeal their gun-related laws."

FULL TITLE: Clarke D Forsythe describes at length why legal abortion deaths do not make it into CDC and other statistics Clarke D Forsythe, in his excellent book Abuse of Discretion: the inside Story of Roe Versus Wade (buy the book on Amazon here) explains at length why legal abortion deaths and injuries do not make it into the published statistics. “Abortion injuries and deaths are washed out of the US public health system through a series of filters. The first filter is the clinics. Clinics do not take responsibility for injuries if they can avoid it. Standard procedure for...

Bill was able to get a screen capture before Shannon came to her senses and deleted the Tweet. Florida is truly hated by the Antis. We got the Concealed Carry avalanche started and we did not make any friends by re-instituting Stand Your ground and a slew of other Pro-Second Amendment bills. If we could be erased from the map while keeping DisneyWorld, they would have done so already.

On January 16, The Washington Post (WaPo) reported that guns may serve a defensive purpose—that defensive gun uses may be slightly higher than 3 million each year—but we will not know until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) begin their research into guns as a public health issue. WaPo quoted a New American Magazine article which said, “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year.”

This weekend, you can see Sly lay waste to hundreds of fools in The Expendables 3. But the man formerly known as John Rambo is, surprisingly, one of the NRA’s most reviled stars. On Friday, The Expendables 3 hits theaters. It’s the third installment in the star-studded, old-school, bullet-riddled action series spearheaded by Sylvester Stallone—of the Rambo franchise or, for the less-discerning filmgoer, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. The latest Expendables flick was never destined to garner much love from film critics. “You need The Expendables 3 like you need a kick in the crotch,” wrote Variety’s Justin Chang....

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- The California State Senate held an "ethics refresher course" for its members after federal indictments were issued against two senators and a third was convicted. Senate leaders are hoping to regain the public's trust. The purpose of the course is to teach members and their staffs to avoid potentially compromising situations. It's the latest in a series of moves by senate leaders aimed at putting political distance between them and their colleagues facing criminal charges. The leader of California's state senate stopped all regular business on Wednesday so everyone could go "back to school" in a...

Prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed at a federal court hearing Thursday that the unwieldy criminal case against suspended state Sen. Leland Yee, Chinatown association leader Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow and 27 others should be split up before trial. **SNIP** The hearing before U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer came two weeks after the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California filed a new indictment in the case, adding violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act against Yee and his former fundraiser, Keith Jackson. Yee is accused of conducting a criminal enterprise with Jackson, who allegedly solicited bribes and...

**SNIP** The San Francisco Democrat was a fairly high-profile member of the California Legislature, but not a flamboyant one or one who was the subject of gossip and rumor. And that’s probably why the news in March landed with such a bombshell, when the 66-year old former psychologist was arrested and charged with not only corruption, but also with allegedly participating in a scheme to smuggle illegal weapons into the United States. The irony was impossible to miss: gun trafficking charges against a Democrat who made a name for himself as a fierce advocate of gun control, a politician who...

HAYDEN, Idaho (AP) — A 2-year-old boy accidentally shot and killed his mother after he reached into her purse at a northern Idaho Wal-Mart and her concealed gun fired, authorities said Tuesday. The 29-year-old woman was shopping with her son and three other children, Kootenai County sheriff's spokesman Stu Miller told The Associated Press. Her family had come to the area to visit relatives, he said. The woman, whose identity was not released, had a concealed weapons permit. Miller said the young boy was left in a shopping cart, reached into the victim's purse and grabbed a small-caliber handgun, which...

No development in U.S. healthcare over the last three decades has imperiled us more than the idea that we benefit from physician oversight of life events and circumstances that are not inherently medical. At its most intrusive, this process, called medicalization, creates a clinical conundrum out of the mere act of living and posits medical solutions for things (such as how to live a healthier lifestyle) that frequently benefit more from individual concentration and perseverance than professional intervention. We are thus bearing witness to tortuous reformation of what it means to be a physician in America: a formerly independent and...

Just as Second Amendment civil rights activists feared, federal government bureaucrats were supplying illegal firearms to Mexican drug cartels in the expectation that it would led to pressure for more regulation. Analyzing a 60 page document release in response to a FOIA action by Judicial Watch Attkisson writes:

Colorado's governor, intensely criticized over death-row reprieve, says he'd do it again. ... Part of Hickenlooper's problem has been the ambitous liberal agenda, from gays to guns, he signed into law in 2013 after a Democratic legislative spree. Part has been his habit of thinking out loud and his seeming eagerness to please all sides of an issue; a meeting this summer with hostile sheriffs turned into a political disaster when the governor equivocated about the gun-control laws he backed, upsetting both sides. But Hickenlooper will also have someone else to blame: Nathan Dunlap. In 1993, as a 19-year-old, Dunlap...

The top deputy to Attorney General Eric Holder announced his resignation on Thursday amid revelations that Operation Fast and Furious scandal guns were used to harm Americans in Phoenix in 2013, a development top congressional Republicans say President Obama’s administration sought to cover up. ... Holder, the attorney general, has failed to cooperate with the Fast and Furious congressional investigation led by Issa and Grassley. Holder was voted, on a bipartisan basis, into both criminal and civil contempt of Congress—a first in the history of the United States for a Cabinet-level official—after he failed to provide documents to Issa’s committee...

Beyond Colorado's headline-grabbing races for Senate and governor, the election for House District 59 is starting to generate its own news for being the most expensive race for state house in Colorado — all thanks to tough new gun control laws passed in 2013. The contest is between Democratic incumbent Mike McLachlan and Republican challenger J. Paul Brown for a small district centered on the rural city of Durango. According to the Durango Herald, the race has attracted "a waterfall of money" from outside groups, to the tune of at least $718,000 in a market where media and advertising are...

Gun control in Britain passed in stages, beginning just after World War I and continuing in a reactionary fashion with increasing strictness through the 1990s. When the final stage arrived in 1997, and virtually all handguns were banned via the Firearms Act, the promise was a reduction in crime and greater safety for the British people. But the result was the emergence of Britain as the "most violent country in Europe." Britain began placing restrictions on gun ownership after World War I with the Firearms Act of 1920. .... The Firearms Act of 1920 did not ban guns. Rather, it...

The Rabbinical Council of America released this resolution two months ago: In response to the terrible proliferation of fatal shootings in the United States that result in part from Americans’ easy access to lethal weapons, a brief yet comprehensive 2014 resolution of the 1000+ members of Rabbinical Council of America addresses gun usage and ownership in the United States from personal, legal, cultural, and religious perspectives. Asserting the Torah’s perspective that war, weaponry, and violence are “necessary evils in our unredeemed world” as well as the Torah’s view that, contrary to some strains of American culture, such matters must be...

An upstate New York lawmaker said the loss of manufacturing jobs in the state last month is due to an anti-gun administration that has ignored pleas from local officials to be involved in the negotiating process. “Remington talks have come to a halt,” said Assemblyman Marc W. Butler (R.-Newport), whose district includes the Village of Ilion, where the Remington Outdoor Company has been located for almost 200 years. “We are losing 105 jobs at the Ilion primary plant,” said Butler. In February he predicted long-term consequences of Remington’s decision to expand to Huntsville, Ala., instead of Ilion, N.Y. The small...