Free Republic

Attorney General Bill Barr will announce a new Department of Justice initiative tomorrow called Project Guardian. Project Guardian, which will be implemented through ATF and overseen by DOJ, will focus on preventing "gun violence" in cities across the country. Barr will make the announcement and detail the project Wednesday from downtown Memphis. He will be joined by ATF Acting Director Regina Lombardo, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee D. Michael Dunavant and ATF Special Agent in Charge of the Nashville Field Division Marcus Watson. In the meantime, President Trump's DOJ has been setting records for prosecutions against felony...

Citing “gun violence,” the University of Virginia has canceled the 21-gun salute portion of its Veterans Day ceremony, an annual tradition that dates back at least a decade. In a statement posted to social media on Saturday, university President James Ryan stated the reason was two-fold: “to minimize disruptions to classes, given that this event is located at the juncture of four primary academic buildings and is held at a time that classes are in session; and second, recognizing concerns related to firing weapons on the Grounds in light of gun violence that has happened across our nation, especially on...

MEXICO CITY—Last week, hundreds of gunmen from the Sinaloa cartel overpowered military forces in fighting that killed at least a dozen people, blocked the airport and major roads, and terrorized the city of Culiacán for hours until the Mexican government capitulated and freed the son of legendary drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán. There doesn’t seem to be an end to the bloodshed. But authorities have finally figured out a way to end all the senseless violence that has plagued the country. In a statement, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has announced that the Mexican government has hired Robert “Beto”...

Vox recently published an article by German Lopez that makes a logical error. The article conflates an increase in “gun deaths” with a decrease in public safety. The jump is made from an article published last year, in 2018, where the Rand Corporation published a chart based on a number of different and dubious studies on “gun deaths”. From the previous article: But there were some things that could be gleaned from the available evidence. While RAND as a nonpartisan group avoided any sweeping policy conclusions in its analysis, its review does seem to point in a direction, based on...

Executive Order No. GA-07 relating to the prevention of mass attacks

For the second time since classes resumed at public schools in St. Louis this month, grief counselors will be on hand at an elementary school on Monday to comfort friends of 8-year-old Jurnee Thompson, a third-grader gunned down while standing in front of a restaurant with relatives following a football game. Since April, nine children under the age of 17 have been killed by gun violence in the city of St. Louis, and authorities say no one has been charged in any of the slayings. "We are all at risk," a frustrated St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson said at a...

All Trump's hateful rhetoric and NRA's fault, but I da'sn't say so explicitly just yet, 'cause that would be politicizing. So I'll just hint.

Another summer in the City of Chicago starts with a bang. No pun intended as 52 people were shot, 10 fatally in street violence. On Memorial Day it was 30 shot with five killed. That’s right. You read that correctly: 82  people shot leaving 15 dead—not in the first five months of the year—not in the last 30 days— not even in the previous week! Two weekends is all it took. Several weeks ago a madman went on a rampage and killed 12 people in a Virginia municipal building. We were horrified hearing this. Everybody asked the same questions, such as:...

A campaign volunteer for a Chicago City Council hopeful was shot while recording himself canvassing on Facebook Live, police and the candidate said. The victim — identified by the candidate as Maxwell Little — was shot in the leg by a man wearing a red mask at about 1:46 p.m in the West Englewood neighborhood on the city's south side, Chicago police said Monday. Little, 32, was recording himself on Facebook Live talking about his support for candidate Joseph Williams when gunfire erupted, according to Williams. The alleged shooter then ran away, police said, and there was no immediate arrest....

After another weekend of record-setting gun violence in the nation’s third largest city of Chicago, where 59 people were shot, leaving 6 of them dead and 53 wounded, local officials are still blaming societal symptoms for their ridiculous homicide rate while totally missing the disease - leftism. If Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and other community leaders are serious about reducing homicide rates in the Windy city, they must first admit that what they’re doing isn’t working. Since police can’t be everywhere and criminals don’t care about obeying laws, increased police presence won’t solve Chicago’s gun violence problem. Adding more cops...

Gang violence and crime in the Windy City have not gone away under Rahm Emanuel’s leadership, though some progress has been made in specific categories of crime. Still, the endemic problems are enough to have altered the lives of many of Chicago’s residents, seemingly in a permanent fashion. The local CBS outlet looked at the effect this has had on some families and discovered some truly heartbreaking stories. In Lawndale, on the City’s west side, some parents report that they’ve become so desperate that they’ve taken to “hiding their children” rather than risking their being injured or killed in the...

When you have over 400 million guns in a country with a population of over 330 million, one-in-a-million odds do not look too bad. In this case in New Jersey, a teacher ended up in school with a loaded gun in her bag – by accident. In December of 2017, Karen Horen was 70 years old and teaching at a New Jersey school. It is understandable when you consider her annual salary, as a home economics teacher, is $70,339. She came to work at the school and briefly left her bag outside in the hallway, unattended, for a few...

The Evanston, Illinois Police Department held a gun turn-in on Saturday, offering $100 for any gun dropped off, no questions asked. People turning in guns had to identify themselves as being from a limited geographical area. They had to be residents of Skokie, Evanston, or the North side of Chicago. [ED: We have no idea why Evanston would make that a requirement] It’s interesting to note that ID has to be used to turn in guns to the police, but is forbidden as a requirement to cast a vote. The requirement for I.D. was no doubt due to Second...

The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a Washington-based think tank, on Friday released their Action Plan to Reduce Gun Violence following a Thursday meeting with the nation’s big-city police chiefs."The recommendations recognize that solving the gun violence problem is not the responsibility of one entity or one level of government," the recommendation guide said. "There is a role for everyone on the gun issue: individuals (legal gun owners and non-gun owners alike); law enforcement personnel; prosecutors; judges; state governments; the federal government; family and friends of people who may be in crisis; researchers; the philanthropic community; and the community at...

A man has shot dead two police officers and civilian in the eastern Belgian city of Liege. The gunman took a female cleaner hostage at a school before being killed by police. Two other police officers were also injured. The man's motive is not yet clear but the incident is being treated as terrorism. Police sources quoted in local media said the man was heard shouting "Allahu Akhbar"........

<p>The number of unarmed citizens (262,000,000*) slaughtered by tyrannical (mostly leftist, Marxist, fascist) governments during the 20th century would come pretty close to wiping out the entire U.S. population.</p> <p>Our founders understood the danger of runaway government power and tyranny, thus the constitution guaranteeing our God-given liberty and severely restricting the powers of government. And they included the 2nd amendment for good reason. An armed citizenry guarantees it stays that way.</p>

....Teenage survivors of the Parkland shooting helped organize the nationwide marches, which came the same week Congress voted to lift a restriction on federal research into gun violence — a rule that's been in effect for about 22 years. It remains to be seen if lawmakers will fund such research by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after President Donald Trump signed a bill containing the measure into law. Below is some of the core data we do have on gun violence in the US (highlighted in red; suicides and accidents excluded), and how it compares to other...

“About 1,400 students wearing orange shirts gathered on a hill at East Chapel Hill High School in North Carolina to listen as student organizers read the names of each of the Parkland victims…students gathered in discussion circles to talk about gun violence in America. [...]”It’s really scary to me how in America we seem to have this constant, or this prevailing, notion that we should fight violence with violence,” said senior Frances O’Grady, 18, “and that’s never, ever the solution…I think that’s just a very dangerous idea.”"On the classroom wall behind O’Grady hung a banner with the image of Che...

Some politicians in the past have recommended deploying the National Guard to help Chicago quell gun violence, but Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin went even further on Thursday, suggesting the United Nations perhaps send in peacekeepers in the face of what he called a "quiet genocide." Boykin was traveling to New York to meet with Oscar Fernandez-Taranco of Argentina, the U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Support, to seek international help with "horrific levels of shootings" and other violent crime in West Side and South Side communities. "I'm hoping to appeal to the U.N. to actually come to Chicago and meet...

Once again, Democrats are screaming that the ones who must pay the price for a lunatic’s evil are those who had nothing to do with that evil. Knowing that almost all the guns in this country are owned by their political opposition, they see every mass shooting as an opportunity, a gift, if you will, by which they can achieve something truly immoral and unjust: the forcible eradication of the right of self-defense against enemies, foreign and domestic, though mostly domestic. They still haven’t forgotten that they will never fully overthrow this country if its citizens are armed and can...