Free Republic

WASHINGTON — Few places have seen the National Rifle Association wield its might more effectively than Florida, where it has advanced a sweeping agenda that has made it easier to carry concealed weapons, given gun owners greater leeway to shoot in self-defense and even briefly barred doctors from asking patients about their firearms. To many of its opponents, that decades-long string of victories is proof that the N.R.A. has bought its political support. But the numbers tell a more complicated story: The organization’s political action committee over the last decade has not made a single direct contribution to any current...

Student David Hogg filmed this video while his Florida high school was on lockdown because of an active shooter on campus Feb. 14. "Thousands of people have died from gun violence and it's time to take a stand," Hogg said, citing the need for stronger gun control laws. Seventeen people were killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.

Liberal Fox News commentator Marie Harf insisted on Friday that supporters of the Second Amendment can also question if people need “high magazine clips.” ... “You can be a supporter of the Second Amendment and and also say, ‘maybe we shouldn’t have high magazine clips,’ for example,” she said, seemingly unaware that she just used a non-existent gun term.

But the attention to the Second Amendment is misplaced. What neither side in the gun debate seems to realize is that at the moment, when it comes to the sort of restrictions that lie within the zone of possibility, the Second Amendment is neither an obstacle nor a protection. It’s an irrelevance. Federal laws regulating guns have been around for a long time, including age requirements for gun owners, a prohibition on felons and a mandatory background check for purchases from a licensed dealer. These rules predated the Supreme Court’s momentous 2008 decision striking down the District of Columbia’s complete...

Guns and I go back a long way. My father was a champion skeet shooter. A picture of him aiming his favorite pump skyward has pride of place in our living room. He owned fine rifles and shotguns, and he valued them. My first experience with pulling a trigger came late, by family standards. I was already 7 or 8 when my dad and “Uncle” George took me out back of Old Lily’s house and handed me a sawed-off shotgun (illegal then and now) kept handy for woodchucks and rattlesnakes. The recoil didn’t knock me off my feet, but my...

From Geraldo this morning, it is certain that he is a mentally deranged anti-gun liberal on the subject of gun control, and should never again be taken seriously on this subject: Geraldo has spouted so many lies about the AR 15, an intrepid Freeper could easily make a compendium of his absurd claims made up of various video segments in the last few years.This morning was an absolute meltdown by Geraldo on the AR 15. Get this: An AR 15 "changes your personality when you pick it up" "makes you macho", "makes you fantasize about black helicopters", "is a weapon...

Laura Carno, executive director of FASTER Colorado, who helped organize the first statewide training class last summer in Weld County, for school personnel... 48 people have registered for two three-day classes scheduled to be held in Adams County in June. There were 17 people at the debut class last year. "Dozens of school districts in Colorado already have authorized school staff to carry concealed (weapons), she said. "All we're talking about is having more armed good guys and gals on campuses to deal with (shooting) situations." FASTER, (or Faculty/Administrator Safety Training & Emergency Response), .. provide weapons and medical training....

Since April 20, 1999, when 12 students and a teacher were gunned down at a high school in Colorado, I have covered most mass shootings in America in some capacity, and I have never seen anything like these Parkland kids. This one seems different—these young survivors are speaking out, and calling out the politicians who have done nothing for the last two decades. When Columbine struck, I remember spending all afternoon and most of the first evening outside the school with students, and policy was the last thing on anyone’s mind. I was with them every day that week, and...

What if the finance industry — credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America? Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker. And it wouldn’t be hard for them to take a stand. PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.

To understand the American gun-control debate, you have to understand the fundamentally different starting positions of the two sides. Among conservatives, there is the broad belief that the right to own a weapon for self-defense is every bit as inherent and unalienable as the right to speak freely or practice your religion. It’s a co-equal liberty in the Bill of Rights, grounded not just in the minds of the Founders but in natural law. Against this backdrop, most forms of gun control proposed after each mass killing represent a collective punishment. The rights of the law-abiding are restricted with no...

--Chapman occasionally gets it mostly right-- --from the article-- "A 2013 study of the 1994 law for the National Institute of Justice said, “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence.” It also said, “Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.” Even if the law had any positive effect then, it would be far less likely to help today because there are far more of these guns now. In 1994, Americans owned about 1.5 million...

The number of Germans who have acquired weapons permits has risen considerably over the past two years. Having the requisite documentation allows people in the country to carry things like non-lethal gas pistols in public. In January 2016, just under 301,000 people had such a permit; in December 2017 there were over 557,000. Weapons retailers say that defensive blinding flashlights, stun guns and gas spray are selling so well they are having trouble keeping shelves stocked. Self-defense courses are also increasingly popular. Classes at Taekwondo clubs, fitness studios, and even municipal community centers are attracting more and more participants. A...

One late afternoon over Labor Day weekend in 2016, near the arches welcoming truck drivers into the old stockyards south of Bridgeport, a gunman in a red minivan leveled a rifle and fired at a motorcyclist. The gunman hit the bike but not the driver. An officer found .223-caliber casings, the kind used in rifles modeled after the AR-15. The rounds leave large, jagged wounds. If used by someone trained to shoot, they can hit a target from 650 yards. A city block is 220 yards. Two gangs — the Saints and La Razas — had been sporadically using rifles...

GATE CITY — As construction on the Route 23 bridges in Weber City continues, one small business owner has voiced concerns about the effect it’s having on her profits. Mary Murphy, owner of Gold & Guns in Weber City, told the Scott County Board of Supervisors on Wednesday that her business has declined noticeably over the past year or so. Though she attributes some of that decline to the lingering effects of the last recession, she believes the construction — and its estimated completion time of summer 2019 — is the main problem. “I do believe that summer of 2019...

The House of Representatives will vote on national gun-carry reciprocity and gun background check fix bills this week. The Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017 and the Fix NICS Act will be combined and likely voted on Wednesday, a GOP aide told the Washington Free Beacon Monday. "It is my understanding they may be combined," the aide said. "Rules is meeting at 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday. They have both. Floor vote should be Wednesday." The House Committee on Rules website shows the texts of the two bills combined as well as an amendment filed by Rep. Dina Titus (D., Nev.)...

--(snip) "There is even more to the story: CDC data also show that within our nation’s cities, black Americans are, on average, eight times more likely to be killed by firearms than those who are white. The rate of death by gun homicide for black people exceeds those among whites in all 50 states, but there is tremendous variation in the magnitude of this disparity. In 2015, a black person living in Wisconsin was 26 times more likely to be fatally shot than a white person in Wisconsin. At the same time, a black person in Arizona was “only” 3.2...

Timothy Ward was a convicted felon barred from possessing a firearm on the night he fatally shot a man during an argument on Chicago’s West Side. Minutes after the July 2015 slaying, police stopped a light-colored van and found the suspected murder weapon — a black revolver — under the front passenger seat where Ward had been sitting. The gun had been sold just four months earlier at Suburban Sporting Goods in Melrose Park, a cramped strip mall store about 10 miles from the gritty block where 25-year-old Charzelle Hayes was killed, according to Chicago police. Ballistics matched the Nagant...

For a few days after the Las Vegas sniper attack, it seemed as if Congress might actually move to ban the device known as the “bump stock,” which the gunman used to convert his semiautomatic rifles into, essentially, machine guns that could fire 90 shots in 10 seconds into a crowded music festival. That moment — like so many before it — seems to have passed. So what gun policy measure are lawmakers discussing in Congress these days? An absurd yet dangerous proposal that would drastically undercut states’ abilities to set reasonable rules about who gets to carry a weapon....

The National Rifle Association is reportedly being investigated by New York regulators. No, it’s not that the state has finally figured out a way to undermine the organization’s strong Second Amendment stance or its effectiveness throughout the nation in blocking infringements on our right to keep and bear arms. No, it’s something far more insidious. They’re concerned the NRA is selling their Carry Guard insurance without a license. New York regulators launched an investigation into the National Rifle Association’s role in the self-defense insurance program that bears its name. The probe by the state’s Department of Financial Services will focus...

SPRINGFIELD — Downstate Democrats joined with Republicans Thursday to thwart a ban on devices that make a semi-automatic rifle shoot about as fast as a fully automatic weapon — arguing the bill would have outlawed too many types of weapons. State Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Smithton, said about 40 percent of the “50 to 60″ guns he owns would be banned under the bill.