Free Republic

The decision is Vesely v. Armslist, LLC (7th Cir. Aug. 12, 2014). Here’s the Brady Campaign’s theory: On April 13, 2011, Jitka Vesel, a 36-year-old immigrant from the Czech Republic was shot and killed by Demetry Smirnov, a Russian immigrant residing in Canada who had met Jitka online a few years earlier. Smirnov stalked her to her workplace parking lot where he shot her 11-12 times with a .40-caliber handgun…. The complaint alleges that [Smirnov] illegally purchased from a private seller whom he located through armslist.com, an online gun auction site owned by defendant Armslist, LLC. The complaint alleges that...

Though guns are not the most common method by which people attempt suicide, they are the most lethal. About 85 percent of suicide attempts with a firearm end in death. (Drug overdose, the most widely used method in suicide attempts, is fatal in less than 3 percent of cases.) Moreover, guns are an irreversible solution to what is often a passing crisis. Suicidal individuals who take pills or inhale car exhaust or use razors have time to reconsider their actions or summon help. With a firearm, once the trigger is pulled, there’s no turning back.

Writing at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum poses a great question. Actually, he has a couple of questions: Do anti-abortion activists really think abortion is murder? Or is their opposition merely an expression of their broad discomfort with modern sexual and gender mores? I appreciate Drum’s forthrightness. A lot of liberals wonder why pro-lifers rally and lobby and stand in the rain outside abortion clinics: can it really be that they care about babies? No, pro-lifers probably do these things because they have old-fashioned views about sex. They know that abortion has enabled modern women to lead a “sexually liberated”...

This past weekend, the United States began to intervene in the humanitarian crisis unfolding in northern Iraq. The Islamist group ISIS has made a lightning conquest of much of the region, persecuting religious minorities, and even some Sunni Muslims, everywhere it goes. In response, the U.S. has begun air drops of food and water to up to 40,000 Yazidi refugees stranded on Mt. Sinjar, where ISIS militants have them surrounded. And the U.S. undertook airstrikes against ISIS positions threatening the Kurdish city of Erbil, where hundreds of American advisers are stationed. Other Western nations are getting involved as well. The...

I was chagrined, but not entirely surprised, when I read Woody Allen’s recent ruminations on ultimate things. To state it bluntly, Woody could not be any bleaker in regard to the issue of meaning in the universe. We live, he said, in a godless and purposeless world. The earth came into existence through mere chance and one day it, along with every work of art and cultural accomplishment, will be incinerated. The universe as a whole will expand and cool until there is nothing left but the void. Every hundred years or so, he continued, a coterie of human beings...

The Limits of Variability by John D. Morris, Ph.D. * One of the “heroes” of evolutionists is Gregor Mendel, a European monk who experimented with plant breeding in the latter half of the 1800s. While his contemporary Charles Darwin specifically tried to replace belief in creation, Mendel claimed he was trying to understand God’s creation. Evolutionists like to quote Mendel’s findings as proof for their beliefs, but in reality he demonstrated the strict limitations of biological change. Mendel was a good experimentalist, working with plants in his monastery’s garden. He bred varieties of garden peas to enhance certain features and...

Back when Al Gore was running for president in 2000 he had a line about “fighting for the people against the powerful.” It's the standard line of the activist. No doubt it's what the marginalized and dependent classes are looking for in a president. But if you are a responsible individual like me you find that sort of thing insulting. People of the Responsible Self don't want some community organizer drilling them in a street protest; we just want a government that defends us from enemies foreign and domestic. Defending against enemies foreign and domestic is what governments are actually...

Earlier this year, the press was shocked to learn that President Barack Obama’s rhetorical opposition to divisive gender-based discrimination in the workplace was not matched by his administration’s actions. After months of pushing the misleading and inaccurate statistic that women are paid just 70 cents for every dollar a man makes in similar occupations, the political media learned that the same calculation implicates the White House in that very same discrimination. As recently as July, reporters noted that the administration has been slow to correct their own pay discrimination problem. “The average male White House employee currently earns about...

“Earnestness is stupidity sent to college,” quoth the wise and well-traveled wit P.J. O’Rourke. The line would seem to fit many adherents of the Effective Altruism movement, a trendy subset of the philanthropy world.... The movement’s intellectual guru, Peter Singer [is] best known for his support of infanticide, bestiality (and other forms of “animal liberation”), and necrophilia (as long as it’s consensual).... [There is a] near-perfect parallel between (1) a passage in Singer’s Practical Ethics that justifies killing a disabled infant in hopes of someday having another child “with better prospects of a happy life,” and (2) a historical account...

The old adage that the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree seems to be playing out with a vengeance in the family of legendary left-wing academic Noam Chomsky. We’ve devoted considerable ink to the sage of MIT over the years and his affection for movements revolutionary and governments totalitarian. His daughter Aviva, an historian, is following in his footsteps at Salem State University. “My recent work has been in three main areas: the Cuban revolution, northern Colombia’s coal industry, and immigration and undocumentedness in the United States,” her university page proclaims. “Thematically, I incorporate the issues of economic...

Solar System Geysers—Each a Fountain of Youth by Brian Thomas, M.S. * A sticky problem for nature-only origins just got 100 times worse. When discovered about ten years ago, a remarkable plume of water ice ejected from Enceladus, an icy moon in Saturn’s E ring, left secular notions of the moon’s origin up in the air. Detailed inspection of Enceladus now shows not just one, but 101 geysers shooting ice particles into space through four fissures that cut across a basin in its south-pole region.1 If these geysers formed billions of years ago as secular origins models insist, then small...

Black leftwing writer Chris L Robinson over at the Daily Kos recently took me to task for my article "Why Black Americans Should Vote Republican" published here at American Thinker. He began his article by first disparaging the American Thinker and Honorable Colonel Allen West. Recently, I responded to a tweet from disgraced LTC Allen West asking who benefitted more under President Obama, blacks or gays? The tweet contained a link to an article on right-wing dumpster fire, American Thinker, by Patricia L. Dickson, a black Republican.  After reading his article, I noticed that he had not included a link...

The American Left used to be patriotic. In its heyday, Eugene V. Debs never attacked America, and the socialist vision he advocated was in his eyes a way to realize the promise of America. As for the American Communist Party, in reality the tool of Stalin’s USSR, it pretended in the 1940s to be pro-American, and its chairman, Earl Browder, coined the slogan “Communism is 20th century Americanism.” This pretense came to an end during the Cold War, when the Left supported the Soviet bloc and all of its policies, and argued that America was in the process of becoming...

The Ninth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC9) was held on July 7th to July 9th, 2014, at the Mandalay Bay hotel and conference center in Las Vegas. Of the nine conferences, I’ve been to eight, in various locations, missing only the one held in London. I live in Las Vegas so I didn’t have to go far this time. The International Climate Conferences are sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank headquartered in Chicago. The conferences are a place for global warming skeptics to gather and exchange ideas.

The always provocative Ann Coulter raised a lot of eyebrows this week with her Wednesday column calling a Christian missionary who contracted ebola in Liberia “idiotic.” Headlines making the rounds on social media do a fair job of highlighting her pointed rhetoric without addressing her thesis. Coulter wrote: Whatever good Dr. Kent Brantly did in Liberia has now been overwhelmed by the more than $2 million already paid by the Christian charities Samaritan’s Purse and SIM USA just to fly him and his nurse home in separate Gulfstream jets, specially equipped with medical tents, and to care for them...

In a statement, Francis appealed to the international community to "put an end to the humanitarian drama underway, adopt measures to protect those who are threatened by violence and assure them necessary aid, especially urgent for those who are homeless and depend on the solidarity of others."

A geography professor at Florida State University has co-authored a new study claiming to show that climate change is likely causing more severe tornadoes in the United States even though there are far fewer actual tornadoes.

Sometime this summer, Obama is expected to violate federal statutes, usurp congressional authority, and grant some form of legal residency to millions of illegal aliens. As our once republic holds its breath waiting for Obama to assume more despotic power, I thought a short read from June 5th, 1788 might be of interest to fellow patriots. At the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Patrick Henry expressed concern with a new office of the proposed constitution, that of executive powers in a President of the United States. The purpose of this post is not to revisit the worn out Federalist/Anti-Federalist debate at FR....

Children at St. Lucy’s School in the Bronx attended a summer program in July. St. Lucy’s will offer six publicly funded pre-k classes in the fall. Credit Ángel Franco/The New York Times The biblical story of Noah’s Ark will be taught, without mention of who told Noah to build it. Challah, the Jewish bread eaten on the Sabbath, will be baked, but no blessings said over it. Some crucifixes will be removed, but others left hanging.These are the kinds of church-state gymnastics that New York City and some religious schools are performing as Mayor Bill de Blasio expands government-funded prekindergarten....

New history curriculum standards proposed for top high school students leave out such American icons as Benjamin Franklin and Martin Luther King, Jr., paint colonists as bigots and gloss over the Greatest Generation's fight to save the world from Nazi Germany, according to conservative education activists who want the framework delayed — and perhaps scrapped altogether. “And you’re not going to find Thomas Jefferson and the House of Burgesses and the cradle of democracy either,” said Larry Krieger, who retired in 2005 after more than three decades in the classroom. “And finally, you’re not going to find Benjamin Franklin and...