Free Republic

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) said the United States is the “only advanced country” where public “mass violence” occurs, and more gun control is needed now to keep Charleston-like attacks from happening again. Reid’s announcement that public “mass violence” does not happen in other advanced countries echoed a similar claim by Obama in which he referenced Charleston by claiming “that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”

n response to a spate of deadly shootings across the United States in recent days, President Barack Obama noted that gun violence is a far more drastic problem in the US than Israel. On Saturday evening, Obama tweeted: "Here are the stats: Per population, we kill each other with guns at a rate 297x more than Japan, 49x more than France, 33x more than Israel." .....

Twelve people were killed and at least 43 -- including a 4-year-old girl -- were wounded in shootings across Chicago during Memorial Day weekend, reports CBS Chicago. The 4-year-old, identified by her family as Jacele Johnson, was shot around 8 p.m. Friday. She was inside an SUV with her 17-year-old cousin, Romare Wilson, when another vehicle pulled up and someone inside opened fire, according to their family and Chicago Police.

Police have released CCTV images of a white gunman who shot dead nine people in a cold-blooded race-hate crime at an African-American church in South Carolina on Wednesday night.

Anti-Semitic incidents in Canada skyrocketed over the last year and have now hit the highest levels “ever recorded” by human rights groups tracking the number of anti-Jewish episodes, according to a new study. Canadians across the country reported experiencing more anti-Semitism than in the past four years, with anti-Semitic incidents having risen a total of 28 percent from 2013 to 2014, according to the global Jewish advocacy group B’nai B’rith International (BBI). This made 2014 the “worst year” for anti-Semitism since advocacy groups began tracking incidents in 1982. The majority of those who reported an instance of anti-Semitism faced harassment,...

FLORENCE, Ala. (WHNT) – Police are investigating an assault that was reported during First Fridays in Florence.Investigators said 20 to 30 juveniles assaulted a Lauderdale County man and his 14-year-old son at Wilson Park on Friday, June 5.  According to the victim’s wife, who witnessed the attack, the group “was using slurs of race” while tasing her husband and beating him.“Randomly, they just him me in the back of the head,” said 14-year-old Brandon Dawes. “I didn’t think nothing of it at first because, well, I thought maybe somebody tripped or something.”Juli Dawes said her husband Kevin was trying to...

Islam "has begotten a bloodthirsty ideology that is determined to destroy the principles of liberty and humanity and basic decency," ex-Muslim and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali said June 3 at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Hirsi Ali knows what she's talking about. Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, she was raised Muslim. She spent her childhood and young adulthood in Africa and Saudi Arabia. She fled as a refugee to the Netherlands in 1992, where she earned a political science degree and was elected to the Dutch House of Representatives. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Hirsi...

Reuters recently published the results of a study about children involving "weapons violence", though the term was used just short of the broadest possible context.   What was telling was the quote from the author of the study.  From whbl.com: “Millions of children are being exposed to violence involving weapons, and many of them are victimized by guns and knives, with an elevated risk of trauma and serious injury,” said lead study author Kimberly Mitchell, a scientist at the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. The author is a highly educated woman.  It is hard...

On the 50th anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous report on the breakdown of the black family in urban ghettos, Baltimore has descended into the tragic violence and chaos he predicted. In a report titled, “The Negro Family: The Case for Action,” Assistant Secretary of Labor Moynihan, warned that the deterioration of the black family, would result in soaring crime rates if it continued unchecked. In the most famous passage of the 1965 report, Moynihan, who would later become a Democratic U.S. senator, wrote, “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los...

The manhunt for a third suspect in the shooting of an Oklahoma police officer ended Friday with the person’s capture. Police caught Alejandro Garcia shortly just past 7 a.m. in Liberty, Kansas, after several car chases, Fox23 reported. Earlier, Cesar Rios, 23, and Roxanna Mendoza 20, were taken into custody after Oologah police officer Charles Neil was shot in the head during a traffic pursuit late Thursday, police said. South Coffeyville Police Chief Wade Lamb told the Tulsa World that the incident began when a Talala officer tried to stop an SUV in Rogers County, Oklahoma, but the vehicle sped...

HUTCHINSON, Kan. – Two of five teenagers accused of conspiring to carry out a shooting at Hutchinson High School were back in court Tuesday morning where one entered a “not guilty” plea to the charges, that being 16-year-old Takota Bowman (shown above). Later, 16-year-old Dominic Collins was before Juvenile Judge Patty Macke Dick where his attorney asked that he be released from custody, arguing that his client had no history with the court or history of violence. Attorney Mike Robinson also argued that he has done well in detention. But Assistant District Attorney Cheryl Allen argued against it citing things...

In the wake of Freddie Gray’s death in police custody, arrests in Baltimore have dropped significantly. Police are no longer “arresting everybody for every little thing,” according to Baltimore City Councilman Brandon Scott, which he says “led to the underlying issues that we have been dealing with in the city.” In other words: distrust of police. But more than that, officers are “fearful at doing their jobs,” according to Wicomico County Sheriff Mike Lewis. And that has meant they are no longer being proactive. And now, of course, we’re seeing a big spike in violence, which has some residents wishing the police...

Two gunmen who traded shots at a Bronx basketball tournament​, with one of the bullets killing a 4-year-old boy​, ​were sentenced to lengthy jail terms ​Tuesday ​on what would have been the victim’s seventh birthday. Rondell Pinkerton,​ ​20, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter in April, was sentenced to 20 years in prison plus five years of supervised release.

CHICAGO (CBS) — Nine people were killed and at least 31 others—including a 4-year-old girl—have been wounded in shootings across Chicago this Memorial Day weekend, police said. The 4-year-old, identified by her family as Jacele Johnson, was shot about 8 p.m. Friday in the West Englewood neighborhood.

Leaders of the “Black Lives Matter” movement are obliquely endorsing killing cops and rioting as legitimate forms of political activism as the radical community organizers of the so-called Black Spring ramp up political violence and civil unrest. For example, on-the-record statements by Twitter stars DeRay Mckesson, 29 and Johnetta Elzie, 26, are all over the Internet. Mckesson and Elzie are influential activists who have become legacy-media darlings by using social media to push their racial-grievance agenda. A very long, fawning profile of the duo by writer Jay Caspian Kang, who in his day job is an editor at The New...

State's Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby's decision last week to charge the officers has stoked strong opinions across the country ... Lt. Victor Gearhart, a 33-year veteran who works in the Southern District, said residents with complaints about police "are going to get the police force they want, and God help them."

Saaliha Khan scrolled through her Facebook feed and pored over posts expressing sadness, dismay and disapproval, the kind of messages that always appear after an attack carried out in the name of Islam. It was just past midnight on Monday, and two Muslim gunmen had been killed about six hours earlier in a shootout outside a controversial cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, which featured images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. “If you want to defend the honor of the Prophet, do so in a way that is consistent with prophetic manners and ethics, not violence,” Omid Safi, director Duke University’s...

Spokesmen for the New Black Panther Party called for actions designed to "put the hurt on white people" as a means for "addressing centuries of oppression of Black folks." Former national chairman of the New Black Panther Party and current national president of Black Lawyers for Justice, Malik Zulu Shabazz, urged Baltimore rioters to "strike back in self-defense against the police. The Mayor invited the victims of oppression to take revenge and reparations against the society that has harmed them. Those who stand in the way have no one to blame but themselves if they get hurt." New Black Panther...

Once again, Muslim religious fanatics are striking out against our values of freedom of speech and open expression. And again, they claim that somehow they have been so deeply offended by cartoons depicting Muhammad that murder and mayhem are somehow justified. At the root of this insane rage against Western civilization is Muslim dignitude. “Dignitude” is dignity’s shabby imitation, the unfortunate tendency of some people to have an exaggerated sense of their own dignity and to be ready at any moment to be deeply offended at the slightest perceived affront. And among Muslims it is accompanied by a hypocritical...

There is a brand new ranking of the world's most violent cities from Mexico's Citizens' Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice. A full one-third of global homicides occur in Latin America even though the region has just 8% of the world's population, according to United Nations data.