Free Republic

Overreach: The gun control bill lets doctors put your name in the national criminal background check system without telling you. Can the government say you're crazy and take your guns? It's already happening. The road to deeper gun control seems like another road paved with good intentions. Since many recent mass shootings have involved shooters with varying degrees of mental impairment, the desire to keep guns out of the genuinely mentally ill seems to be a worthy goal. Yet it is being exploited with definitions so vague and undefined, and with controls so lax, as to become not a means...

Bat Man: A Chicago store owner beats off two armed thugs with a baseball bat as Missouri illegally shares concealed carry records with feds and New York matches private health records with gun permits to take firearms. President Obama, who campaigns for gun control between concerts at the White House and golf outings with Tiger Woods, once famously used the metaphor that in politics if they bring a knife to a fight, you bring a gun. On Tuesday, in the gun-controlled murder capital of Chicago, the president's hometown, store owner Luis Quizhpe, an Ecuadorean immigrant, had no gun, but he...

Bullet Buys: Fifteen members of Congress have written a letter to the Department of Homeland Security demanding to know why the federal agency is buying so many rounds of ammunition. We'd like to know too. Fifteen members of Congress have sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security demanding to know why the federal agency is buying so many rounds of ammunition. We'd like to know too. Freshman California Republican Doug LaMalfa and 14 of his House colleagues, who signed on to his March 5 letter, are asking the Department of Homeland Security to explain why it is buying...

U.S. Rights: As the world body meets this week to hammer out an agreement to restrict international arms trade, our Secretary of State commits us to pushing a treaty that may also restrict our Second Amendment rights. Last Friday, the day of the week when unpopular or controversial announcements are traditionally made, Secretary of State John Kerry announced U.S. support for the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), a final version of which is being hammered out in New York beginning this week. Certainly the ATT is controversial. Touted as a means of getting a handle on an international arms...

Gun Control: As the Colorado legislature considers a ban on campus concealed carry, a woman testifying how she was raped in a "safe zone" 50 feet from a police station is told that armed defense is useless. It didn't receive quite as much media coverage as Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke's plea for free contraceptives before Congress but on Monday a young woman named Amanda Collins mustered the courage to testify before a Colorado legislative committee on that state's proposed gun ban legislation. Collins was raped at gunpoint in a University of Nevada-Reno parking garage in October 2007. Nevada law...

Guns: An Illinois court has ruled that the Second Amendment means what it says and has ordered the state legislature to adopt a law by June that lets citizens bear arms in self-defense, not just keep them. On Feb. 22, a 5-4 majority of the 10-member U.S. Seventh Court of Appeals upheld the Dec. 11 decision, which had been rendered by a three-member panel, to address absurdity and inconsistency of Illinois gun laws that allowed ownership of a firearm, but not the right to carry it outside the home. In other words, the "right to keep but not to bear...

Gun Control: Our future president in 2008 called for "a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the military. Should the "bitter-clingers" be worried? As Andrew Malcolm has noted on these pages, the Department of Homeland Security has been buying lots of ammo, enough by one calculation to fight the equivalent of a 24-year Iraqi War. Some have speculated about a link between the stockpiling between candidate Obama's off-prompter campaign remarks about a national security force and the stockpiling by DHS of more than 1.6 billion (with a 'b') bullets. DHS has...

Guns: While DHS seeks 7,000 semiautomatic guns with 30-round clips for self-defense, it makes a video saying you should use scissors to overpower armed predators. Luckily, a school guard in Atlanta thought differently. Vice President Joe Biden criticized, on Jan. 23 during a Google+ Hangout, the suggestion by NRA chief Wayne LaPierre to put armed guards in every school in the nation. "We are not calling for armed guards in schools . .. we think that would be a terrible mistake," the vice president said during the PBS "Fireside Hangout." On Thursday afternoon, a student opened fire at Price Middle...

Guns: A 15-year-old girl who performed at the president's inauguration is gunned down by gangs less than a mile from Barack Obama's home. What does Chicago's mayor do? He blames banks who lend gun makers money. Hadiya Pendleton, who just days before had performed with her high school band at President Obama's inauguration, was gunned down Tuesday afternoon in Chicago's Kenwood neighborhood, just blocks from the high school she attended. The park where she was killed is a little less than a mile from President Obama's Kenwood home. In addition to Hadiya, two men were killed and eight other people...

Gun Control: A different set of gun laws applies to network anchors, but even stranger is a newspaper publishing a map showing not only who has a firearm but also telling predators who doesn't. It should have been sufficient for the Gannett-owned Journal News, headquartered in White Plains, N.Y., reporting on increased calls for stricter gun control in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre in nearby Newtown, Conn., to have noted that about 44,000 people in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties in the Lower Hudson Valley — one of every 23 adults — was licensed to own a handgun....

School Safety: Critics of the National Rifle Association's call for armed security guards at our schools respond that one famous school did have a sheriff's deputy on scene. But without him, the toll would have been much worse. After remaining silent on the mass shooting at Sandy Hook, the NRA's Wayne LaPierre held a press conference Friday to condemn another tragedy in a gun-free zone and to advocate the placement of armed security guards at our schools as is done at airports, banks and other public venues. "It's now time for us to assume responsibility for our schools," he said....

Gun Laws: Before the tragedy in Connecticut, a shooter at an Oregon shopping mall was stopped by an armed citizen with a concealed carry permit who refused to be a victim, preventing another mass tragedy. In the target-rich environment of the Clackamas Town Center two weeks before Christmas, the shooter managed to kill only two people before killing himself. A far worse tragedy was prevented when he was confronted by a hero named Nick Meli. As the shooter was having difficulty with his weapon, Meli pulled his and took aim, reluctant to fire lest an innocent bystander be hit. But...

Gun Control: If the girlfriend of the football linebacker killed in a murder-suicide had a gun to defend herself, she might be alive today to explain how guns save lives and more of them means less crime. Let us start with the proposition that Jovan Belcher, the 6-foot-2-inch, 228-pound Kansas City Chiefs linebacker, did not need his legally obtained and registered gun to kill his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins. He could have used his bare hands to dispatch his partner, or even, say, a knife, as was used in another murder case involving a famous football player that NBC Sports announcer...

Second Amendment: A House resolution, as futile as it may be, represents growing opposition to another administration bow to the U.N. encroachment on U.S. sovereignty at the expense of its laws and even our Constitution. Treaties are ratified by a two-thirds majority of the Senate, and the final version of the U.N.'s Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) may likely be signed by this president and ratified by this Senate, especially if presented as a "sensible restriction" on international arms trafficking with no impact on our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. But some House members are not going to...

Second Amendment: Within hours of re-election, the administration fast-tracked a treaty in the United Nations that transcends borders and tramples our constitutional right to keep and bear arms. It was no coincidence. Less than 24 hours after President Obama's re-election, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations helped move the U.N.'s Arms Control Treaty a step closer to enactment. America joined 157 other nations in voting Wednesday to finalize the treaty in March. None was opposed and there were 18 abstentions. U.N. delegates and gun-control activists had complained that talks collapsed in July largely because Obama feared attacks from Republican...

Second Amendment: The United Nations is putting the finishing touches on an Arms Trade Treaty that transcends borders and may even trample our Constitutional right to bear arms. Every indication is that the president will sign it. Like the New Start and Law of the Sea treaties before it, as well as the Kyoto Protocol and Agenda 21, the Arms Trade Treaty being finalized at the U.N. this month is one of those feel-good, can't-we-all-get-along pieces of parchment whose net effect is to accomplish little except to eat away at American sovereignty and freedom. Just as the world's worst human...

Second Amendment: The United Nations is putting the finishing touches on an Arms Trade Treaty that transcends borders and may even trample our Constitutional right to bear arms. Every indication is that the president will sign it. Like the New Start and Law of the Sea treaties before it, as well as the Kyoto Protocol and Agenda 21, the Arms Trade Treaty being finalized at the U.N. this month is one of those feel-good, can't-we-all-get-along pieces of parchment whose net effect is to accomplish little except to eat away at American sovereignty and freedom. Just as the world's worst human...

Scandal: A Univision special documents how weapons provided by the administration to Mexican drug cartels repeatedly have taken a deadly toll as families on both sides of the border wait for true answers and accountability. We may never know how many deaths, kidnappings and other criminal activities were facilitated by more than 2,000 weapons that were allowed to "walk" into Mexico under the Obama administration's Fast and Furious program, but a Univision special aired Sunday exposes more of the carnage. The special, put together by Univision's investigative unit and aired as a special edition of Univision's "Aqui y Ahora" ("Here...

Gun Control: The gun-controlled Windy City is on a pace to have 450 murders this year, an Aurora every 10 days. Meanwhile, the mayor of New York ignores his own body count to say the police should go on strike. I don't understand why the police officers across this country don't stand up collectively and say we're going to go on strike," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told CNN's Piers Morgan. "We're not going to protect you unless you, the public, through the legislature, do what's required to make us safe." He was speaking about the massacre in Aurora, Colo.,...

Gun Control: Colorado is a concealed-carry state, as a noted film critic points out, but so was Virginia when a college campus there was racked by violence. Like the school, the theater chain was also "gun-free." In December 2007, two church members were shot to death and three others injured after a gunman opened fire outside the New Life Church in Colorado Springs as Sunday services were wrapping up. That tragedy could have been much worse, but the gunman was shot by a church security officer and was found dead when police arrived at the scene. On April 22 of...