Free Republic

The terms firearms and guns are used interchangeably in this article. The article is updated from an earlier article published in 2016. The graphic adds data from 2015-2020, six more years. The number of firearms in private hands has been rising for at least 75 years. During the last 25 years, the number of murders, murders with guns, and violent crimes with guns dropped sharply, then leveled. It has risen a fraction of the drop in the last three years.The per capita rate of firearms ownership has increased significantly.It has become very difficult to uncritically believe more guns equals more...

French gun owners were handing over their weapons at police collection points across the country this week as part of a campaign to round up unlicensed firearms, often heirlooms lying in attics or forgotten at the back of cupboards. Gun ownership in France is nowhere near as prevalent as in the United States, for instance, and gun crimes are relatively rare, but France is keen to limit the number of illegally owned firearms - as many as six million, authorities estimate. "They were my dad's and I didn't know what do with them," Lionel said at a police station in...

California’s Department of Justice mistakenly posted the names, addresses and birthdays of nearly 200,000 gun owners on the internet because officials didn’t follow policies or understand how to operate their website, according to an investigation released Wednesday. The investigation, conducted by an outside law firm hired by the California Department of Justice, found that personal information for 192,000 people was downloaded 2,734 times by 507 unique IP addresses during a roughly 12-hour period in late June. All of those people had applied for a permit to carry a concealed gun. The data was exposed just days after the U.S. Supreme...

The term “gun violence” has been deliberately inculcated into the public debate over the last 20 years. It is common in news articles. It has been used in numerous court briefs. It appears in court decisions at the appellate level and in amicus briefs to the Supreme Court. George Orwell, in the novel 1984, explained how language can be structured to eliminate and curtail thought.“Gun violence” is an Orwellian term designed to structure and limit debate to pre-determined solutions. It is designed to hamper the ability to think about reality in certain ways. The purpose of Orwellian structuring of language...

French gun owners are surrendering their weapons in record numbers at police collection points across the country as a round up of unlicensed firearms winds down. France is keen to limit the number of illegally owned firearms – as many as six million, authorities estimate – and the Macron government is offering an amnesty in an effort to limit their distribution. Rifles, handguns, ammunition, even knives and grenades, have been handed in at 300 collection points across the country since the start of the Ministry of Interior’s campaign on Nov. 25.

...David Scott, a U of I freshman, lives in an apartment off campus. He told the Statesman he’s been looking into various self-defense options since the stabbings. Scott said it takes him about 30 minutes to walk to campus, which he usually does early in the morning before the sun rises. After attending classes and working a part-time job at the university, he heads back home, often when it’s already dark outside. In November, the sun sets at around 4 p.m. in Moscow. “I’ve always wanted to get a handgun,” Scott said. “But I haven’t really had a reason to...

Gun crime offenders and our court system’s anemic response As the “gun control” debate heats up again, it’s important to stay focused on what the real issue should be — holding gun crime offenders accountable. Conservatives know and should not waiver on the fact that legal gun owners are overwhelmingly responsible and law-abiding. If we are serious, our focus should be on issues that negatively impact our public safety. We should be able to agree that gun crime offenders belong at the top of our public safety concerns. Unfortunately, our liberal state criminal justice system has failed to hold gun...

Following Uvalde, a small group of Republican senators broke with the rest of the party and negotiated a bipartisan gun control deal. It wasn’t the broad, sweeping anti-gun measures that many wanted, but it was gun control. Now, following a series of mass shootings, there’s a renewed push for anti-gun legislation, this time in the form of an assault weapon ban. Unfortunately for those pushing it, the Republicans behind the last bill aren’t interested in a repeat performance.

Supervisors in San Francisco voted Tuesday to give city police the ability to use potentially lethal, remote-controlled robots in emergency situations — following an emotionally charged debate that reflected divisions on the politically liberal board over support for law enforcement. The vote was 8-3, with the majority agreeing to grant police the option despite strong objections from civil liberties and other police oversight groups. Opponents said the authority would lead to the further militarization of a police force already too aggressive with poor and minority communities. Supervisor Connie Chan, a member of the committee that forwarded the proposal to the...

San Francisco leaders voted to allow the city’s police department to use potentially lethal robots in emergency situations. "Under this policy, SFPD is authorized to use these robots to carry out deadly force in extremely limited situations when risk to loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available," City Supervisor Rafael Mandelman wrote on Twitter.

“The idea we still allow semi-automatic weapons to be purchased is sick,” President Biden claimed on Thanksgiving Day. “It has no socially redeeming value. Zero. None. Not a single solitary rationale for it except profit for the gun manufacturers.” With mass public shootings in just the last week in Colorado and Virginia, people naturally want to do something to stop these attacks. But semi-automatic guns provide critical self-defense benefits. After each shot, a semi-automatic gun reloads itself. A single-shot gun, by contrast, requires manual reloading. This can prove a liability, especially against multiple attackers.

A woman is in the hospital after being shot several times inside her own home, according to Flowery Branch police. Officers say they were called to a home on Chattahoochee St. just after 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning where they found a woman with multiple gunshot wounds in the street. They were able to apply a tourniquet to the woman and send her to the hospital. She is currently listed as stable. Investigators quickly identified Fonda Spratt, 56, as the shooter and took her into custody. Detectives learned that Spratt walked into the victim’s home and confronted her about barking...

On November 15, 2022, the United States Attorney in the Western District of Texas, Ashley C. Hoff, filed a Notice of Appeal to the United States District Court fro the Western District of Texas, Pecos Division in the case of USA v. Perez-Gallan. Previously, on November 10, 2022, Judge David Counts had issued a Memorandum Opinion dismissing the indictment to Litsson Antonio Perez-Gallan as invalid because it was unconstitutional under the United States Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association (NYSR&PA) v. Bruen decision, which restored the Second Amendment as a full-fledged member of the Bill...

“The idea we still allow semi-automatic weapons to be purchased is sick,” Joe Biden argued on Thanksgiving. “It has no socially redeeming value. Zero. None. Not a single solitary rationale for it except profit for the gun manufacturers.”s the not-so-small chance that Biden has confused the real-world mechanical designation of “semi-automatic” with the political concoction of “assault weapons.” I’m skeptical. Anyone who’s involved in the gun debate knows that “semi-automatic” guns, often purposely conflated with the more dangerous “automatic” weapons, are the target of restrictionists. A few years back during that shameful post-Parkland CNN gun “town hall,” the crowd loudly...

CHESAPEAKE, Va. (WAVY) — An employee who survived the mass shooting at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia, last week has filed a $50 million lawsuit against the company. The lawsuit, filed by Donya Prioleau, claims she submitted a complaint about the gunman two months prior to the shooting that took the lives of six Walmart employees. Store supervisor Andre Bing, 31, fatally shot six employees and wounded several others before he died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot, police said.

On Monday White House press secretary Karin Jean-Pierre said President Biden’s Thanksgiving Day criticism of semiautomatic firearms was actually meant to be directed toward “assault weapons.” Real Clear Politics noted that their reporter, Philip Wegmann, asked Jean-Pierre about Biden’s comment: The president has said repeatedly that he wants to ban assault weapons, but on Thanksgiving when he was in Nantucket, he said: “The idea that we still allow the purchase of semi-automatic weapons in this country today is sick.” Obviously, that is a huge category of guns from rifles to pistols to shotguns that are not assault weapons. Did the...

The news ahead is so dire, we had to cram it into a single article. #1. Statewide gun sales stop. The newly passed Measure 114 requires a new complicated process to obtain a firearm that goes way beyond the two different processes of current backgroudn checks and Concealed License Permits. The Democrat Herald’s Hasso Herring explains, “Unless a court intervenes before Measure 114 takes effect on Dec. 8, it looks like after that date private citizens will no longer be allowed to buy a firearm in Oregon for a good long while. But the promoters of the initiative didn’t mention...

Police: Handcuffed suspect shot officer while being removed from car at Denver jail by: Phil Rankin Nov 29, 2022 DENVER (KDVR) — A suspect being removed from a police car at the downtown Denver jail Monday night shot an officer in the neck, the Denver Police Department said, before at least one other officer shot the suspect multiple times. Police believe the suspect, arrested earlier in the evening, had a concealed weapon on him while handcuffed inside the back of the police car. The suspect was taken to the hospital in critical condition, according to DPD. The department did not...

On September 13, 2022, Brett Christian, the Firearms Policy Coalition, the Second Amendment Foundation, and others filed suit against the “emergency” measure pushed through the New York State legislature by Governor Hochul, in defiance of the long-awaited decision in NYSR&PA v Bruen. The Bruen decision clarified the Heller and McDonald decisions, partially restoring the right to bear arms. The right has been incrementally infringed on for more than a hundred years, primarily under the “Progressive” political philosophy, along with its ideological brethren, the “Jim Crow” laws and Black Codes.The Christian v. Nigrelli case, as it came to be known, pointed...

by Jim Clayborn | RNNTwo men attempted a broad-daylight theft from an Alabama Tractor Supply store on Black Friday, but some customers weren't having a bit of it — including one who pulled out his gun and blew out at least one tire on the getaway vehicle. What are the details?Witnesses said the two men were trying to steal merchandise from a Tractor Supply Co. location in Theodore on Friday morning, WPMI-TV reported. Theodore is about 15 minutes southwest of Mobile. Ryan Maxie and his fiancée, Katie Clark, were in the store's parking lot when they heard shots after two...