Free Republic

While authorities investigate and Americans seek answers in the wake of Sunday’s massacre in Las Vegas, Australia is offering to help the U.S. reshape its gun laws. Following a mass shooting in Port Arthur in 1996 that left 35 people dead, Australian officials enacted major gun control legislation. Now officials are offering to help America do the same, according to a cable news station based in Singapore. “What we can offer is our experience,” said Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, talking about her country’s gun buyback program and subsequent ban on semi-automatic and automatic weapons. “But at the end of...

A Baltimore City Council member introduced a replica gun ban Monday criminalizing the possession of any toy or imitation weapon “that can reasonably be perceived to be a real firearm.” Councilman James Kraft told The Baltimore Sun he sponsored the legislation “to protect the city’s youth.” In April, city police officers shot 14-year-old Dedric Colvin in the shoulder and leg on a street in East Baltimore. Colvin was carrying a BB gun officers said resembled a semiautomatic pistol. Similar incidents have unfolded across the country. Last week police officers in Columbus, Ohio, shot and killed 13-year-old Tyree King after...

Dear Michael, I was alarmed at the recent opinion brief you posted on your website advocating the outlawing of so-called “assault rifles”. ( Back up copy here on JPFO ) I doubt that I’m the only American who was perturbed by your point of view. While loudly decrying and condemning the political trickery of the insidious socialists and authoritarians in our midst, you have now written and published an influential piece to further their agenda.

What an election: The one-time mayor of Ellis Island, grandson of Italian immigrants, has to make nice with the modern-day Know Nothings if he wants a shot at his party's nomination for the presidency. Mayor Giuliani gets immigrants. He's lived their dreams. He's governed their city. He's won their hearts and their minds and their votes. But now he must walk a razor's edge between advocating sensible immigration reforms on one side and demonizing immigrants as criminals and invaders on the other. Having transgressed from conservative orthodoxy irreparably on one issue, abortion, Mr. Giuliani has been pursuing a strategy of...