Free Republic

Guns don’t kill people, the Constitution kills people, at least according to Karl Rove, Republican strategist and architect of George W. Bush’s election and reelection as president. Rove, speaking on Fox News Sunday, and in the wake of the South Carolina church massacre, embraced the liberal mantra that there are too many guns on the street and went a step further and a step too far, saying the way to avoid more such tragedies is to repeal the Second Amendment and its guarantee of our right to keep and bear arms: Now maybe there’s some magic law that will keep...

You can’t have an event like the Charleston shooting take place during election season without all of the candidates being asked to weigh in on gun control. (Once again pretending that any of the currently proposed gun control laws might have prevented that attack.) And since he’s still being discussed as a serious contender for some reason, Bernie Sanders was no exception. But when reporters asked the Vermont Senator to offer his thoughts on gun control, he took a pass. Bernie Sanders says he wants to talk — at length — about guns.Just not now.Two days after a white man...

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:

Every time an American community suffers a tragedy involving a firearm, the anti-gun crowd unveils itself in full tribal dress. Wednesday night, a 21-year-old sandy blonde-haired white man with blue jeans and Timberland boots walked into a historically black church in Charleston, S.C. and killed 9 people.  That’s a horrible, murderous act, made worse by the fact that the man is still at large. The New York Times reported S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley’s statement about the tragedy. "While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one...

One would think that Catholic priests like Chicago’s Rev. Michael Pfleger, an early supporter of Barack Obama and his push for gun control, would not be bearing false witness against one of his neighbors. Yet there he was standing in front of Chuck’s Gun Shop in suburban Riverdale, Illinois, to blame it, and other legal businesses like it, along with the National Rifle Association, for the murder spree in the gun-controlled progressive worker’s paradise of Chicago. Standing with the camera-shy Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence president Dan Gross in front of the gun shop,...

Steffon Josie-Davis is a responsible gun owner who wanted to be a police officer. He used to work as an armored guard for armed service company Loomis. When his little sister was playing in the garage where his gun was accessible, Josey-Davis put it inside the glove box of a locked vehicle. Josey-Davis then drove that car before accidentally failing to take the firearm out of the vehicle. His handgun is legally registered in the state of New Jersey. Hello, My name is Steffon Josey-Davis I'm a 24 year old from New Jersey who became a convicted felon for a...

On May 31 Breitbart News reported the DOJ’s plans to circumvent Congress with ‘more than a dozen’ new gun control regulations. These include new limitations on who can buy or possess guns, new reporting requirements for gun dealers, and new controls on certain types of firearms. The controls also add a whole new category of persons who have to undergo background checks when estates hold National Firearm Act guns in trust. But House Republicans are planning to stop the backdoor gun control push via riders attached to funding legislation now under consideration. According to The Hill, the GOP-attached riders mean...

Meet your newest most favorite celebrity, Vince Vaughn. An interviewer for the British version of GQ decided to ask about the European Left’s favorite tongue-clucking topic of American culture, gun ownership. Rather than pander to the groupthink, Vaughn gave them the rhetorical double-barrel, and even offered a thinly veiled slam at the governing elite across the pond (via LoganSix on Twitter): On the American right to own a gun: “I support people having a gun in public full stop, not just in your home. We don’t have the right to bear arms because of burglars; we have the right to...

As your new president, I am grateful to serve with you to preserve America’s unique freedoms. I first encountered the National Rifle Association as an 11-year-old growing up in Ohio. Mentored by the NRA in the 1950s by men who had a passion for owning firearms and shooting, I learned the true meaning of our Second Amendment. Recently, an old friend and I were remembering those remarkably free times: when “gun control” was not even in the lexicon; when a kid could take a shotgun or rifle to school and stow it in the cloakroom for after-school target practice...

From the Sixth Circuit federal court of appeals decision today in Northrup v. Toledo Police Dept.: On a midsummer evening, Shawn and Denise Northrup went for a neighborhood walk with their daughter, grandson, and dog. Apparently in a happy-go-lucky mood, Shawn wore a t-shirt reading, “This Is The Shirt I Wear When I Don’t Care.” Shawn carried a cell phone, which he holstered on his hip — next to a black semiautomatic handgun. A passing motorcyclist stopped to complain about Shawn’s visible firearm. The stranger, Alan Rose, yelled, “[Y]ou can’t walk around with a gun like that!” But “[O]pen carry...

ACTION: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Orrin Hatch may soon give the President authority to write gun control restrictions into a “trade agreement.” So click here to contact your Senators –- whether they are liberal or conservative. Urge them to vote against the anti-gun “fast track” bill (S. 995). Will UN-style gun control be rammed down our throats? Gun import bans ... Microstamping of firearms ... Ammunition bans ... The full implementation of the anti-gun UN Arms Trade Treaty ... Illegal amnesty which locks in millions of new, anti-gun voters.This anti-gun wish list could be part of the...

Ever since the 2012 massacre at the Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Conn., gun-control advocates have worked hard to close so-called “loopholes” in background-check laws. Not all the efforts have been successful; gun-rights advocates say such measures are needlessly burdensome and do little to stop violent crime. But last year, Washington state residents voted to toughen the state’s background-check laws. And now the Oregon legislature has done the same. On Monday, the Oregon House voted 32-28 in support of Senate Bill 941, which requires background checks for all purchasers of guns through private sales. Currently, background checks in Oregon are...

On April 22, a customer at a Kroger in Little Rock, Arkansas, saw an elderly man surrounded by “seven people,” so he drew his gun and intervened to protect the gentleman. The group surrounding the elderly man then turned their attention toward the armed customer and implored him to look the way. ” According to Fox 16, the group kept yelling, “[This] isn’t your fight, you need to walk away and you need to put the gun down.” The armed citizen refused to comply, and instead kept his gun trained on the group as they fled the scene. The armed...

SSI Exclusive: Negotiating Rights Away. Cynical Secret "Deal With The Devil" Confirmed. NRA, ATF& bi-partisan group of politicians agree to save ATF from itself and widen the definition of "sporting purposes." "A hole big enough to drive Diane Feinstein's limousine through." From the press room of the NRA National Meeting, Nashville, TN: Sipsey Street Irregulars can now confirm the broad outlines of a story first disclosed two days ago by National Gun Rights Examiner columnist David Codrea. Last week, a secret deal involving the National Rifle Association lobbying arm and brokered by politicians of both national political parties was struck...

Washington, D.C., will drop its appeal of a federal court ruling that overturned the city’s ban on carrying handguns in public, Attorney General Karl Racine announced Wednesday. City attorneys will instead focus on defending concealed-carry laws adopted by legislators in the months after U.S. District Court Judge Frederick J. Scullin Jr. declared the ban was unconstitutional. “We need to focus our energies not on litigating old laws, but defending new ones that our leaders enacted in good faith to comply with court rulings while still protecting public safety,” Mr. Racine said. Up until Judge Scullin’s ruling in July, D.C. residents...

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…...

Gun rights groups are making a vigorous push to stop the Senate from confirming Loretta Lynch as President Obama’s next attorney general. Advocates are organizing petitions, drawing up letters and hitting the phones to urge Senate Republicans to oppose Lynch in a floor vote that could take place as early as next week. The National Rifle Association (NRA) has sent an alert to its members warning that Obama’s nominee would put gun rights at risk. "As the nation's top law enforcement officer, Lynch would almost certainly have an impact on our Second Amendment rights,” the NRA’s lobbying arm said in...

un Control: Fifty-two senators, 238 House members and 80,000 public comments have forced the ATF to pull back for "more study" its proposed ban on ammo for the AR-15, the leading gun for hunting and self-defense. The Second Amendment, written in the era of muskets, does not mention what arms we have the right to keep and bear. But we have an idea, based on how they were used: to protect their owners' homes, businesses, farms and families, and to resist the tyranny of government, which during the American Revolution was the British crown.

Mayor Danny Jones of Charleston, WV makes lewd comments in front of children about gun rights groups on election night. video only on link

I was in Brussels last week at a meeting of European fieldsports body, The European Federation of Associations for Hunting & Conservation (FACE), of which the Countryside Alliance is an active member. I am honoured to be FACE’s UK Chairman and to represent British sporting interests at the highest level and I can feed back some interesting points from the meeting.