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On Wednesday, Australia was having a normal day — a day of no mass killings. As one waggish online headline put it: “Australia Enjoys Another Peaceful Day Under Oppressive Gun Control Regime.” America was having a normal day, too. Two gun-wielding assailants in San Bernardino sprayed as many as 75 rounds at a social service center for the disabled, killing 14 people and wounding 21. The United States averages more than one mass shooting every day — an attack in which four or more people are shot. No other advanced nation comes close.

I recognize the personal nature of the Sikh Temple tragedy for Oak Creek Mayor Stephen Scaffidi and the emotional response that the San Bernardino mass murders evoke. In his commentary on Thursday, Scaffidi offered: "I am a gun owner. But I have to believe that one of the popular responses to mass shootings — arm everyone and encourage individual and aggressive action against a mass shooter — is at best naive, and at worst, dangerous. Law enforcement professionals are highly trained and understand through direct experience that carrying a gun is a powerful responsibility and doesn't guarantee that a shooter...

Since 2000, hunting participation by females has risen dramatically in the U.S. In the first year of the new millennium, 5,264 females passed the mandatory hunter education course. The course is required of every hunter born on or after Sept. 2, 1971. By 2010, 8,500 females, 20.3 percent of all students, passed hunter education. In 2014, 16,534 females took the course. Females represented 23 percent of last year's 72,015 hunter ed students. "We've been encouraging women to try hunting and shooting sports through our outreach programs," said Nancy Herron, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's outreach and education director. "There's...

The blood of the innocents wasn't even dry in San Bernardino before politics began filling the air. One cable news network had an expert who suggested the attacks could have been committed by right wing conservative terrorists. Another wondered if the violence had anything to do with America's revolutionary roots. And a few worried that something bad might have happened at a Planned Parenthood office. All that was before America learned that a young couple, Syed Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, had dropped their baby off at a relative's house and then, dressed in what they must have thought...

Yet again, innocent people lost their lives in a hail of bullets, and yet again, we have many questions and few answers. We don't know how much the horrific act in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday has in common with other acts of gun violence from Colorado Springs to Sandy Hook to Oak Creek. It may have been terrorism this time, and if it was, the response must be different from the response to shootings that are the awful result of a mental illness. But whatever the motives of these particular killers, all of these tragedies raise fundamental questions that...

Does she kiss her mother with that mouth?

"Chatting" with a FB friend and discussing the 2nd. Send me to wikipedia for a quick view and noticed the following: "There are actually two different versions: As passed by the Congress and preserved in the National Archives, with the rest of the original hand-written copy of the Bill of Rights prepared by scribe William Lambert:[29] (p) A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. As ratified by the States and authenticated by Thomas Jefferson, then-Secretary of State:[30] A well regulated...

The National Gun Victims Action Council (NGVAC) is calling on President Barack Obama to declare a “state of emergency” over fictional events, and then use that fictitious excuse to scrap the Constitution and impose his will under martial law. Gun control supporters really are apparently just this crazy (hat tip: AWR Hawkins): Americans are in the midst of a gun violence epidemic. The National Emergencies Act gives the president the power and responsibility to declare a state of emergency when the government lacks the procedures and capacity to address an unchecked natural or man-made public health epidemic. How much more...

Civil disobedience with guns. (Please read entire post before commenting.) Preppers unite! Stand alone preppers will be easily neutralized by fascist or violent forces. For example, look at this prep list from CheaperThanDirt.com. Can you see what's missing?A: Strength in numbers. This strategy of remaining underground in your own country will be fatal. If you wait until they come before you organize, you're dead. The success of the Bundy Ranch standoff (the Federal Government backing off without one shot fired) is proof of concept - the power of a community armed and unwavering will succeed against overreaching powers. United We...

When media outlets from the National Journal to Rolling Stone cover the bipartisan push for criminal justice reform — an effort that includes everyone from Rand Paul to Cory Booker, the Koch brothers to even the ACLU — their go-to phrase to characterize the movement is "unlikely coalition." Actually, there's nothing particularly surprising about the fact that civil libertarians come in more than one flavor or political party. Disagreement on, say, taxation doesn't necessitate disagreement on mass incarceration. Meanwhile, the media have treated the budding partnership between the ascendant Black Lives Matter and the perennially frustrated gun control movement as...

Nineteen-year-old Katherine Beatham cannot wait to buy a gun. The mother of two from Maquoketa, Iowa, already started saving up. She was browsing the selection of firearms at the Big Bore Enterprise Gun Show in Maquoketa last weekend. As soon as she turns 21 and takes a safety course, she plans to buy one. "I'm just not going to be walking around, some poor old defenseless lady with two kids. Not in today's society," she said. Beatham comes from a military family and started shooting at about age 5. She said she is a pretty good shot with a handgun...

Washington (AFP) - US President Barack Obama denounced the country's epidemic of gun violence on Saturday and renewed a call for tougher controls on military-style weapons after yet another deadly shooting, saying "enough is enough." The latest bloodshed came on Friday when a man entered a family planning clinic in the state of Colorado and allegedly opened fire, killing three people, including a police officer, and wounding nine others. The motive of the suspect now under arrest was not yet known and police were to interrogate him Saturday.

See the video at https://youtu.be/qrhSf8CEgC8

Imagine if the first bullet in a cop's chamber were a blank bullet. Would this approach save lives? What if a police department adopted this approach as standard procedure. Or, better yet, if legislation mandated this requirement for state and local police departments. Would it help save lives? Police in Britain, Ireland, Norway, Iceland and New Zealand typically do not carry weapons at all when they are patrolling the streets. Surely, crimes in those countries are no less threatening than what we experience in the U.S. The idea is not to ban guns from the police departments here. Rather, it...

--(snip)--State legislators and aldermen shouldn't move on. Yet they always do: •In the weeks since someone killed Tyshawn, how many Chicago state senators and representatives have you heard pledging to toughen Illinois' light sentences for gun offenders? Two years ago, the legislators' power play blocked a mildly stronger gun-sentences bill that united Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the National Rifle Association as odd-couple supporters. We don't know if that legislation would have protected Tyshawn. We do know that by keeping shooters off the streets longer, and maybe deterring some gun crimes, it would make Chicago safer. Yet Chicago's lawmakers, legislative leaders...

Impressive, in a way, wasn't it? Not even a full six days after the horrors of the Islamic State terrorist attacks in Paris, and the U.S. House of Representatives acted to combat the threat on our shores. By a vote of 289-137 the lawmakers passed the American Security Against Foreign Enemies (SAFE) Act, a measure calling for enhanced scrutiny of refugees from Iraq and Syria. In a statement, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, explained that "the bill requires the nation's top security officials — the secretary of homeland security, the director of the FBI and the director...

Police were called to a central Pennsylvania office building after someone mistakenly thought a photographer's tripod was a gun. LNP reports the incident happened about 11 a.m. Wednesday at the Griest Building in Lancaster. The caller thought a machine gun was carried into the building, so police conducted a floor-by-floor search only to find the photographer and her tripod.

Thousands of people with mental illnesses have been barred from owning guns in Illinois in recent years under measures put in place amid a wave of deadly mass shootings across the country. But the laws have done little to take guns out of their hands, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found. The laws led to an explosion in the number of people deemed psychologically unfit to own a gun in Illinois.

In the past, I have criticized President Barack Obama for not saying enough about urban gun violence, and mostly mentioning it in a tacked-on, ornamental way after there had been a mass killing on a college campus or in a small-town movie theater. But earlier this week, the president had words for Chicago about its violence problem. And, although it wasn't him speaking directly to us, the message was poignant and came through loud and clear from the chairman of the Barack Obama Foundation leading the development of the Obama presidential library. Whether the library will wind up in Jackson...

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun violence is set to present Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with the inaugural Governor Mario M. Cuomo Leadership award at the Bear Awards on Nov. 19, The Washington Free Beacon reports. The awards, named after Jim "Bear" Brady, President Reagan's secretary who was shot during an assassination attempt, will be held at Cipriani on Broadway in New York City with tickets to the event priced at $1,000 each.