Free Republic

Security: After letting Mexico's president trash Arizona's immigration law and his immigration enforcement chief say he won't enforce it, the president wants to send a token National Guard contingent to the border. There's something disingenuous about the president's plan to deploy 1,200 National Guard troops to the Arizona border to help the Border Patrol catch illegal aliens. His director of immigration and customs enforcement, John Morton, has said he might not enforce immigration crimes reported by Arizona officials, though the state's new law merely copies federal law. Morton is director of ICE, not chief justice of the Supreme Court. He...

Days before Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon arrogantly addressed a joint session of Congress on how we ought to run this country, members of the National Rifle Association gathered in Charlotte, N.C., to celebrate their victories in Congress and the courts, discuss their passion for guns, hunting, the shooting sports and plan for the future. The largest turnout for an NRA Annual Meeting since the association’s founding in 1871, the more than 72,000 members in attendance served as a boisterous reminder to politicians of both parties that the nation’s gun owners remain a potent political force that no one should take...

Gun Rights: Not happy with interfering in our internal affairs by savaging Arizona's new immigration law, the president of Mexico wants to shred our Second Amendment too. And the mayor of Chicago wants to help. There stood Mexican President Felipe Calderon before Congress, blaming America for the violence on his side of the border and, among other things, the guns that fuel the Mexican drug war that has claimed more than 23,000 Mexican lives since he took office in 2006. Rather than taking responsibility himself, he shoved the blame on America. It would all stop, he implied, if America would...

Kenneth Melson, acting director of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives, was in San Antonio, Texas, on August 12 for the signing of a new agreement with ranking Mexican counterparts to more effectively interdict gun smugglers moving weapons into the hands of Mexico’s drug cartels. The pact, which is designed to allow for a far greater number of serial number traces of captured weapons long kept off limits in Mexican military vaults, is part of President Barack Obama’s new push to address the problem. Controversy has erupted between Second Amendment rights advocates and gun ban advocates...

President Obama's call for the Senate to ratify a hemispheric small-firearms treaty dominated his last visit to Mexico, but in the four months since, both the treaty pledge and the drug violence that prompted it have dropped off the radar - a victim of Congress' full schedule and gun politics. That means on Sunday Mr. Obama will go with an empty hand to Mexico, which blames the U.S. for many of the weapons used by drug cartels that have violently thwarted a crackdown by Mexican authorities. Both Mexican and Canadian officials bring to the meeting concerns that the U.S. is...

Weapons: Reporting on President Obama's visit to Mexico, the Washington Post parrots both governments' line that 90% of guns confiscated from the drug lords originate in the U.S. They're all shooting blanks.We've all heard the cliche about lies, damned lied and statistics. In political discourse, numbers put forth, such as of the homeless and uninsured, take on a life of their own, unquestioned and devoid of analysis or true meaning. In the liberal circles of the mainstream media and the current administration, not to be redundant, the example du jour was in the Post's coverage Thursday of President Obama's visit...