Free Republic

This is an estimate of the money that police departments spend to respond to and investigate gun-related crimes. It includes police salaries, benefits, and equipment, as well as overhead costs to the police department. Miller based this calculation on the amount of time police spent on initial response and follow-up (based on this sample survey) and the amount of money police departments spend on average per officer (including fringe benefits, equipment, supervision, etc.) using data from the 2006 Census of Governments

One of the wonders of modern times is that reality is often seen as a social construct and therefore optional. Thus, if one finds a particular reality offensive or inconvenient, he just "changes" it. Say that one is born a male or a female but believes that nature made an error. Some believe that nature's "error" can be corrected by calling oneself another sex. Possibly a medical procedure on one's genitalia can correct nature's error. However, Mother Nature is ruthless. Sex determination is strictly chromosomal. Females are XX, and males are XY. There is no medical procedure that can change...

ANALYSIS/OPINION: Something happens to men and women when they gain a proximity to power. Most in public service, one can only assume, begin with noble purpose: to serve, to change and improve the world — whether that be a small town or, literally, the world. Soon enough, many — not all, but many — want only to stay in that position of power, and will do what it takes, whatever it takes, to stay there. Where once they talked only of their dreams and ambitions, not for themselves, but for those they served, soon enough they spend their days tearing...

President Barack Obama will ask Americans to think of climate change as a threat not just to the environment, but also to their health. Obama on Tuesday was to announce a series of steps that private entities like Google and Microsoft are taking to better prepare the nation's health systems for the inevitable effects of a warmer, more erratic climate. He was to be joined at Howard University Medical School by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy.

Environmental activist and billionaire Tom Steyer served notice on Monday that he will use his wealth to try to bring climate change into the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, vowing to target Republican hopefuls who deny the connection between burning fossil fuels and rising global temperatures. Steyer’s NextGen Climate political action committee launched what it calls the Hot Seat campaign aimed at calling out Republican candidates for taking money from the billionaire Koch brothers. The group will target Senator Rand Paul, who is expected to launch his presidential campaign on Tuesday.

Throughout Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House he’s been accused of leading a lawless presidency and cheapening the rule of law through his Department of Justice. Many say these accusations are simply based in politics, but a closer look at the way the Department of Justice has handled multiple cases in federal court suggest misleading or lying to judges is a habit, not a mistake. Most recently, we’ve seen this happen in the case surrounding President Obama’s executive action on illegal immigration. Twenty-six states are suing against the action, and in February, U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen issued...

In the Bible, Esau sold his birthright for a mess of potage -- some red lentil soup, to be exact. Looking at the week’s events, it seems that this country has sold its glorious birthright of constitutional government by honest men and women for a mess of potage -- a false promise of hope and change delivered by a glib huckster and his shady friends. The deceit and lawlessness of Obama and those around him and the consequences have never been clearer than they were this week. Nothing shows better the unprincipled nature of the administration and the acquiescence of...

Discredited by reality, the U.N.'s prophecies go missing. In 2005, the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) published a color-coded map under the headline "Fifty million climate refugees by 2010." The primary source for the prediction was a 2005 paper by environmental scientist Norman Myers. Six years later, this flood of refugees is nowhere to be found, global average temperatures are about where they were when the prediction was made—and the U.N. has done a vanishing act of its own, wiping the inconvenient map from its servers. The map, which can still be found elsewhere on the Web, disappeared from the program's...

For those of us who do not live in the memory hole that shields this administration from any accountability, here are some relevant facts about Acting Director Brandon and his involvement in the Fast and Furious cover-up. According to outgoing Director Jones's sworn testimony of April 2, 2014 before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Mr. Brandon was the person who determined disciplinary punishments for all of the ATF personnel involved in Fast and Furious. Brandon was "the ultimate decision maker." Director Jones confirmed that Thomas Brandon did not fire a single person for participation in Fast and Furious.

Susan Rice, our national security advisor, is supposed to be a bona fide expert on Africa. And the credentials she brings to her job are impressive. Former ambassador to the United Nations, graduate of Stanford, Rhodes Scholar, and author of a prize-winning dissertation at Oxford on African affairs. Yet, yesterday, she sent out two tweets mourning the burial “today” of the most famous Nigerian of the last 50 years. But our sharp-as-a-tack expert on Africa didn’t realize that the man had died two years ago. Business Insider noted the beclowning, as the tweets were hastily deleted once the gaffe was...

For the second consecutive year, the Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press. The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn't find documents, and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.

Highlights: "Having aligned with everyone from Castro to the Supreme Leader of Iran (a country which rapes teenage girls so that they don’t die as virgins, and stones teenage rape victims), Obama has to make it seem as if it’s the Republicans who are the traitors." "During his original campaign, Obama said, “We cannot allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon." Bill Clinton said during his first term in office, 'North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb.' North Korea could and did. Bill Clinton knew all along that it could and would." "Clinton and Obama didn’t accidentally...

The world is accustomed to stock plays and players. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is but a take on a play written in Rome by Plautus a couple of thousand years ago, and all the key players are stereotypes of characters we see over and again in theatrical comedies. Is there after all much space between Pseudolus, the hero of that hoary work, and Sergeant Bilko? In much the same way, the Clintons tend to be characters in a stock play that we’ve seen over and again for decades. The only question this time around...

<p>After PolitiFact rated as “mostly false” a joke made by Republican Senator Ted Cruz, using all the known and provable qualities associated with PolitiFact, Breitbart News engaged in an exhaustive, science and fact-based investigation in order to find a way to perfectly describe the people who run the fact-checking site. We went where the facts led us, and the facts led us to the objective conclusion that PolitiFact is run by gigantic assholes.</p>

The American College of Physicians, combined with the American Bar Association and eight other professional organizations, has issued a call for action to stem the national crisis in firearm deaths and injuries. In a white paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, they point out that more than 32,000 deaths a year are the result of gun violence. The United States has the most gun deaths of any industrialized nation. In addition, the number of injuries caused by guns is more than double the death number. The Children's Safety Network estimated that in 2010, gun violence cost $174 billion....

Even the father of deep ecology, Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) complained of America’s ‘Abrahamic’ use of the land in his famous book called The Sand County Almanac written in 1947. Unbeknownst to many, Nazi Germany gave Leopold an all-expense-paid trip to the fatherland in 1935 so he that could observe the new environmental direction the Third Reich was implementing. Leopold was generally impressed with what the Nazis were doing. Not only did Leopold drag home the “Never Cry Wolf” cult from Nazi Germany, he also wrote the Germans, unlike the Americans, were actually doing something about environmental problems, not just talking...

The House Select Committee on Benghazi is planning to subpoena Clintonmail.com for all correspondence related to the 2012 Benghazi embassy attack. According to The Washington Post, the State Department can expect to receive subpoenas sometime Wednesday afternoon. It was the same House investigative committee that discovered, through its investigation of the Benghazi attack, Hillary Clinton had used a personal email account for diplomatic business while serving as Secretary of State. "Without access to the relevant electronic information and stored data on the server—which was reportedly registered to her home—there is no way the Committee, or anyone else, can fully explain...

The White House claim that the ammunition for the popular AR-15 rifle should be banned as part of a “common sense” effort to protect police officers’ lives is being derided by police officers themselves as a shameful lie. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said this week that the .223-caliber M855 ball should be banned because it can penetrate an officer’s soft armor and can be fired not just from sporting rifles but “easily concealable weapons.”

BUSTED: We Have Axelrod’s Father’s Communist Party Membership #ObamaLovesAmerica Gotnews.com has exclusively discovered David Axelrod’s father’s Communist Party membership. David Axelrod’s book, “Believer: My Forty Years in Politics,” details his very close relationship with his father, Joseph. He repeatedly told Charlie Rose that his father believed in the American dream. In fact, Axelrod’s father, Joseph, was a card-carrying communist. He’s listed as a member of the Communist Party for the 1936 general election. Axelrod briefly mentions his father’s Communist views in his book but only in passing and in a section about how he got to visit the former Soviet Union. Axelrod...

Forget the roses and chocolate for Valentines Day. Giving new meaning to the concept of romance, just four weeks after returning from 17 days in Oahu the president headed to California for a weekend of golf and his wife and two daughters, for the fourth year in a row, headed to Aspen for a ski weekend. Recently, shortly after Americans witnessed a Jordanian pilot burned alive by ISIS, Obama flew to Rancho Mirage, but all was quiet on the Michelle ski-trip front. Judging from the lack of press, one would think that for the first time while hubby duffs around...