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In a year when the Chicago Police Department, mayor and the city itself dominated national headlines and received widespread attention over the fatal shooting of teenager Laquan McDonald by a police officer, the city also saw an increase in violence. Four hundred sixty-eight homicides were reported in 2015, making it the most violent year since 2012, when 500 people were killed, the Chicago Tribune reported. The number, however, still was well below the level of homicides in the 1970s. Chicago's violent streak was much worse than those of other major cities. Los Angeles saw 280 killings through Dec. 26, and...

Two people were injured on Saturday in a shooting at East Towne Mall that sent a panic through shoppers closed the mall six days before Christmas. Police spokesman Joel DeSpain said one person was transported to the hospital with a leg wound after a dispute between two groups of teenage males at the mall turned violent. "We don't believe this is related to terrorism. This was obviously not a mass shooting. This is not an active shooter," DeSpain said. "This is an incident where we had young people as we have seen in many areas of the city who were...

I'm not one to make light of mass shootings, and I shouldn't have to say that I deplore violence. But that's undoubtedly the charge that will be hurled at me when I say that I can't stand the latest PSA from Everytown for Gun Safety. Stop me if you've heard this before -- some advocacy group rounds up a bunch of celebrities and does a quick-cut video of them all repeating the same mantra. In this case, it's "WE. CAN. END. GUN. VIOLENCE." Now forget for a moment the utter hypocrisy of Hollywood-types who make their living glorifying violence having...

I’m sure you’re all familiar with the tale by now and it’s depressing. A mass shooting in one of the country’s great cities. Cable news legal experts would refer to it as “highly unusual” because it involved more than one shooter. It was a crowded area with many innocent people in the potential line of fire. Ambulances lined up to tend to the casualties. So we all know what I’m talking about, right? No… it’s not the San Bernardino shooting. It was the shooting in Bunny Friend Park in New Orleans and it happened on November 22nd. The description from...

The recent mass shooting in Oregon has brought the seemingly endless debate on gun control back into the national spotlight. Are we, as some insist, in the midst of a gun violence crisis? Gun control advocates would certainly have you think so. [...] A quick look into the facts reveals an entirely different picture. According to the FBI, in the past two decades, violent crime has been falling almost continuously. In 2013, the number of violent crimes perpetrated was 37 percent lower than it was just two decades earlier. ...

NYPD Officer Randolph Holder was killed in the line of duty earlier this week, and the life story of the career criminal who murdered him was all too predictable. The police had gone looking for Tyrone Howard at least 10 times since Sept. 1, when, investigators believe, he rode up to a rival just after midnight and shot him. But 10 times he eluded them.

Video at link below, pulls a lot of info together.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSR5dmtlCIg Picture is getting clearer.. God Bless...

The short blog for today...How much "Gun Violence" will Obama, Hillary and other Liberals be willing to inflict to prevent "Gun Violence" in America. If a law is passed that outlaws all firearms for the common populace and effectively repeals the 2nd Amendment, how shall it be enforced? (root word FORCE). Will armed police and/or military go house to house searching for the now illegal guns (using guns and even heavier weapons I presume)? This will by default, result in the complete destruction of entire The Constitution, not just the 2nd Amendment! Will “deadly force” be an option against those...

Well Obama, what do you have to say now? It was on Church Street at Parramatta just after 4pm yesterday. Exclusive footage obtained by 7 News shows 15-year-old Farhad Jabar Khalil Mohammed walking along, dressed in black, waving a gun and shouting at police. The video shows the final moments of this radicalised teenagers. As it all unfolds, just metres away behind a wall, young children play at the Good Start day care centre. Farhad Jabar Khalil Mohammed must have known it was a suicide missions, but what he was doing was worth dying for, was worth killing Curtis Cheng...

(...) Following the on-air shooting of two television reporters in Roanoke, Virginia, she declared: “I feel just great heartache at what happened. I want to reiterate how important it is [that] we not let yet another terrible instance go by without trying to do something more to prevent this terrible killing that is stalking our country.” She added: "We have got to do something about gun violence in America — and I will take it on." She said the same thing back in July, in an obvious shift away from avoiding Second Amendment issues during the presidential campaign to avoid...

When we talk about growing violence in America’s larger cities we frequently focus on New York and Baltimore. (And for good reason, to be honest.) But the nation’s capital has been experiencing its own problems along those lines lately. A rather chilling recounting of some of these “local stories” provides the backdrop for a recent op-ed column in the WaPo by Colbert I. King. I’ll confess that some of the stories of violence and mayhem King is talking about were completely unknown to me, leading the author to compare Washington to “the wild west.” One example is the case where...

The media enthusiastically remind us that it's the first anniversary of the death of Ferguson's Michael Brown, a death that spawned the so-called Black Lives Matter movement. In a September speech at the United Nations, President Barack Obama said, "The world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri -- where a young man was killed, and a community was divided." Never mind that both a grand jury and the federal Department of Justice exonerated the officer who shot and killed Brown. Never mind that neither the physical evidence nor eyewitness testimony corroborated the assertions that Brown...

My town, New York City, enforces rigid gun laws. Police refused to assign me a gun permit. The law doesn't even let me hold a fake gun on TV to demonstrate something. But New York politicians are so eager to vilify gun ownership that they granted an exception to the anti-gun group States United to Prevent Gun Violence. New York allowed States United to set up a fake gun store, where cameras filmed potential gun customers being spoofed by an actor pretending to be a gun-seller. "This a nine-millimeter semi-automatic. It's a very handy gun. It's easy to use," he...

NEW YORK (MYFOXNY) -NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton is warning that a new, disturbing trend of increased violence must be put in check before it’s too late.

BEIJING (AP) -- Often the target of U.S. human rights accusations, China wasted little time returning such charges following the shooting at a historic black church in South Carolina that left nine people dead. Elsewhere around the world, the attack renewed perceptions that Americans have too many guns and have yet to overcome racial tensions. Some said the attack reinforced their reservations about personal security in the U.S. - particularly as a non-white foreigner - while others said they'd still feel safe if they were to visit.

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,...

Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation to authorize $60 million in taxpayer money to go to the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) for research on gun violence prevention. The measure, introduced last week, would give $10 million a year “for each of fiscal years 2016 through 2021 for the purpose of conducting or supporting research on firearms safety or gun violence prevention under the Public Health Service Act.” “The epidemic of gun violence in America is not preordained, it is preventable,” Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) says in a press release. “In the 21st century, we should use research and advances in...

The Dart Center in Phoenix is holding a "workshop for journalists on covering guns and gun violence".  It is funded from a grant by the Michael Bloomber organization, "Everytown for Gun Safety", a gun control front group.  I sent a two emails to the Dart Center contact about the workshop.  I was ignored, so I started digging for myself. One of the things that I found was a draft list of speakers for the workshop.  It was clear that the list is a work in progress, so I decided to assist the Dart Center with some obvious suggestions.   The...

In the debate over the right to keep and bear arms and the secondary question of the utility of being armed, some social scientists have attempted to show that the presence of guns makes people more aggressive.  This claimed "weapons effect" has been discredited.  The best summation of the failure to show such an effect, in my opinion, was this article published in The Volokh Conspiracy in 2011.  Here is a small excerpt: Thus, EMA v. Brown rejects the “violent video game effect” studies for failing to demonstrate a compelling state interest. Indeed, EMA suggests that the studies do...

I was shocked to read the news that Nathaniel Sam Shapiro’s play “The Erlkings,” written from the perspective of the two Columbine HS killers, is set to open off Broadway at the Beckett Theatre this month. I heard he’d written the play several years ago, but thought it was too appalling to ever make it to the stage, let alone to the nation’s leading theater district. On April 20, 1999, the Columbine killers shot and killed my father, Dave, and 12 innocent students. I acknowledge — and would even go so far as to say admire — the playwright’s aim...