Free Republic

Just a week ago, we noted the hard-working US government was drawing up plans for "knife regulations." Well, in The UK it appears to have already begun... As SHTFPlan.com's Mac Slavo warns, don't try to think this one through - the logica fail and sheer volume of absurdity might just make you sick if you do...For the UK – whose laws and policies all-too-often influence those of the U.S. – gun control isn’t enough. Probably nothing will ever be enough.Now a call to surrender knives, ongoing for years, is in full swing. Via Citizen Action: The right to bear arms...

David Barden, 7, loved to ride waves at the beach and make s’mores around a bonfire with his cousins. Jessica Rekos, 6, loved orca whales, playing with her two brothers and everything about horses. Both were killed by automatic weapons at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012 along with 18 other students and six adult staff members.

WASHINGTON -- Advocates of a saner approach to guns need a new strategy. We cannot go on like this, wringing our hands in frustration after every tragedy involving firearms. We said "Enough" after Sandy Hook. We thought the moment for action had come. Yet nothing happened. We are saying "Enough" after Charleston. But this time, we don't even expect anything to happen. What's needed is a long-term national effort to change popular attitudes toward handgun ownership. And we need to insist on protecting the rights of Americans who do not want to be anywhere near guns. None of this should...

Witnesses say the white gunman who killed nine people at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., was quite vocal about his motives: He wanted to kill black people. Sylvia Johnson, whose cousin the Rev. Clementa Pinckney was one of three ministers killed in the church, said a survivor of the horror told her the shooter muttered, "I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go." In Charleston, a slaughter in the sanctuary In Charleston, a slaughter in the sanctuary Facebook photos and other evidence suggest...

I am a lifelong hunter and gun owner. Until my father gave his shotgun to my oldest son at age 92, three generations of my family would hunt together. Like in so many Wisconsin families, the importance of gun safety and responsibility was a lesson I learned from my father and passed on to my children. Four decades ago, an important gun safety law was placed on the books in Wisconsin. On March 10, 1976, Gov. Patrick Lucey signed into law a bill, passed overwhelmingly by the Legislature, mandating that a buyer wait 48 hours after passing a background check...

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: The Berlin Township woman got a restraining order against a former boyfriend, installed security cameras and an alarm system to her home and began the...

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:

The senator from Kentucky continues to takes the road less traveled through the GOP primaries.Sen. Rand Paul took a risk Thursday. Speaking to an audience of religious conservatives in the wake of a racially charged shooting in South Carolina, Paul delicately suggested that Republicans might want to start focusing on other parts of the Bill of Rights than the Second Amendment. "Everybody is for the Second Amendment. All 55 candidates running for president are for the Second Amendment—on our side," Paul told the crowd. "But the thing is that a lot of young people, that might not be their primary...

President Barack Obama on Thursday expressed profound “sadness and anger” at the Charleston church shooting as well as deeply personal frustration that America’s political climate makes it virtually impossible for now to tighten restrictions on who can buy firearms. “We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” Obama said in the White House briefing room, Vice President Joe Biden standing at his side.

Security Expert: Feds Involved In Day-To-Day Busts Isn't Something Seen Every Day. Bullet-riddled windows, yellow crime scene tape, and evidence markers denoting where shell casings fell on the sidewalk are becoming all-too-familiar sights on New York City streets. Now in an unprecedented move, a federal agency is joining the effort to get gun crimes under control, CBS2’s Marcia Kramer reported Monday. Kramer is told it was a collective decision made by the federal government, the NYPD, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Those agencies are mounting a...

"The most wanted gun in America" is what The New York Times dubbed the AR-15-style semiautomatic in February 2013. Even though assault weapons — guns originally designed for combat use and rapid fire — constitute only about 1% of all 300 million firearms in America, lately they've been flying off the shelves. Demand has outpaced production. Weapons like the AR-15 represent the leading edge of the gun debate. Successfully enacted on a limited basis at the national level in 1994, the assault weapons ban lapsed in 2004. After the Sandy Hook school shooting, a new ban was introduced in Congress,...

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,...

Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn has made no secret that he thinks criminals can and will obtain permits to carry hidden guns. Supporters of concealed carry say he's overreacting, and the vast majority of permit holders are law-abiding citizens. In between are permit holders like Darrail Smith, who has no prior criminal convictions but who police say has a habit of turning up at shooting and homicide scenes, serving as a human holster. It took months of police work before prosecutors had enough evidence to issue an unusual gun-related charge against him. How many more cases like Darrail Smith are...

Terrified residents of a small upstate New York town grabbed their shotguns Tuesday after the two killers who staged a dramatic escape from a nearby state prison were tracked to their burg. They armed themselves even as legions of cops and corrections officers descended on tiny Willsboro, N.Y. in hot pursuit of escaped convicts Richard Matt and David Sweat. “My husband I both have conceal carry (licenses) and we have our guns loaded and they’re here in the house,” said Teresa Sayward, a former Republican Assemblywoman whose farm is located near where the wanted men were spotted. “Hopefully we won’t...

Congressional Democrats are pushing legislation that would ban the production of guns made entirely of plastic, The Hill reported. The Undetectable Firearms Modernization Act, proposed in response to recent airport security lapses, would require firearms to contain enough metal to be detected.

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...

Gun control advocates, in their never-ending quest to take firearms from those who are licensed and trained to legally carry them, are trying to advance a bill in the House of Representatives introduced by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. But the bill itself stomps on constitutional rights, and Rep. Maloney’s arguments for it can be shot so full of holes that the legislation would look like a target at a shooting range. As reported by The Hill’s Lydia Wheeler, the Firearm Risk Protection Act, unveiled May 29, would require gun buyers to have liability insurance coverage before being allowed to purchase...

Chicago Mayor and former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is famous for saying that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste since it allows you to do things you might not be able to get done except for the emotions of the moment spurring calls to action. Chicago’s bloody Memorial Day weekend, which saw a dozen people killed -- including a four-year-old-girl -- certainly proved no exception to Rahm’s Rule as he called for, wait for it, stricter gun control as he spoke at a luncheon honoring police officers for valor and service. “It’s not just about...

On my way to the NRA annual meeting, I passed through Lordburg, New Mexico on I-10. It is a convenient place to fuel the truck and myself, so I pulled into a truck stop to grab a sandwich. Open carry is protected by the New Mexico Constitution. I was carrying a Glock 17 (9mm for those who have not kept up with Glock nomenclature). The young woman behind the counter had a streak of purple hair, multiple piercings, a sizable tattoo on her right forearm, and was friendly, courteous, helpful, efficient and pleasant to speak with. I could not ask...

As the toll from shootings continues to increase in Milwaukee — including 11 people injured in seven separate shootings over the weekend — state Sen. Nikiya Harris Dodd is asking the community to not forget about the grass-roots efforts in the neighborhoods most affected by the violence. And she's right. Those efforts are critical; if neighbors don't work together to take back their neighborhoods block by block those neighborhoods have little chance of becoming safer places. That work is happening in many city neighborhoods; Harris Dodd pointed to several such efforts in a meeting with the Editorial Board on Monday,...