Free Republic

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has declassified a shocking plan by former President Joe Biden’s administration for dealing with domestic terrorists. Last Wednesday, Gabbard released a June 2021 document titled “Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism” (henceforth “the Plan”). But despite the release receiving over 6.3 million views on X by Monday morning, the major media has ignored the document. While Americans are very familiar with many Biden era policies, the newly declassified document reveals that the actions were part of a coordinated action from early in the administration across a wide range of government agencies to target...

The FBI tracks active shooting cases-where individuals attempt to kill people in public places, excluding those tied to robberies or gang violence. This study is the first to systematically compare how uniformed police and civilians with concealed handgun permits perform in stopping these attacks. Civilians with permits stopped the attacks more frequently and faced a lower risk of being killed or injured than police. Officers who intervened during the attacks were far more likely to be killed or injured than those who apprehended the attackers later.

New research from the College of William and Mary and the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) shows armed civilians are more effective than police at stopping active shooting attacks on the public. Armed civilians are more likely to stop the attacks without being injured or killed. Armed civilians stop more attacks than do police. Police in the United States stop almost as many attacks as are stopped by armed civilians. For decades, Second Amendment advocates have considered it to be common sense that armed civilians would be more effective at stopping active shooter attacks on the public than police. To...

The data is in, and once again, the Second Amendment proves itself to be the best protection against undeserved violence. The Crime Prevention Research Center brought the receipts. According to the findings of a new study from the CPRC, armed civilians “do a better job” than law enforcement officers to stop active shooters, “with fewer mistakes” to boot. Here’s what John R. Lott, Jr., president of the the CPRC, explained of the findings: In non-gun-free zones, where civilians are legally able to carry guns, concealed carry permit holders stopped 51.5 percent of active shootings, compared to 44.6 percent stopped by...

President Biden’s and President Trump’s pardons have generated a lot of controversy. But there are considerable differences between the two sets of pardons, with a two-tiered system of justice unfairly biased against Jan. 6 defendants. Last month, Biden pardoned his son, Hunter. And then, on his last day in office, Biden pardoned five family members. That same day, Trump pardoned 1,500 people who were convicted or facing trial for the Jan. 6 riot. The media’s coverage of these pardons has been dramatically different. Take the New York Times, which describes Biden’s preemptive pardons as a way to “guard” from a...

Would you post a sign announcing that your home is a gun-free zone? Would you feel safer? Criminals don’t obey these signs. In fact, these signs are a magnet for criminals because disarmed victims are seen as easy targets. . . . A deputy in uniform has a difficult job in stopping these attacks,” said Sheriff Kurt Hoffman in Sarasota County, Florida. “These terrorists have strategic advantages in determining the time and place of attacks. They can wait for a deputy to leave the area or pick an undefended location. Even when police or deputies are in the right place...

The testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, American Immigration Council (AIC) estimates that there is an annual cost of $88 billion to deport one million illegal aliens each year. That breaks down to $7 billion for arrests, $66 billion for detentions, $12.6 billion to go through the legal process, and $2.1 billion to transport deportees out of the country. It works out to $88,000 per deportee, but the council claims this is a “highly conservative estimate.” They conclude there is “a total cost of $967.9 billion over the course of more than a decade.” But looking at the per...

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is right that Senate’s confirmation process is "a national disgrace." The damage done to Kavanaugh’s family is horrific. Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was clear: “What you want to do is destroy this guy's life, hold this seat open and hope you win in 2020.” The threats and vicious messages that his family and Christine Blasey Ford have received are a national embarrassment. Hopefully, everyone other than the most partisan Americans wants to fix this and stop it from ever happening again. But the question is how? What went wrong? The problem has been getting worse...

For the second year in a row, the Centers for Disease Control has been caught ignoring science and letting liberal interest groups set its policies. In 2021, the American Pediatric Academy and the Children’s Hospital Association tracked COVID-19 statistics in children and the data show no relationship between mask mandates and the rate at which children caught the disease. In the face of this evidence – and other data showing that masks harm children’s development, the CDC supported masking students after being pressured by the National Education Association (the nation’s largest teachers’ union). Now comes word that CDC is again...

A paper at the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), founded by researcher John Lott, shows how faith in the police, arrest rates, and crime reporting are all interrelated. The paper is titled ” The Collapse in Law Enforcement: As Arrest Rates Plummet, People Have Been Less Willing to Report Crime,” published on April 5, 2024. As faith in the police collapses, reporting of crime drops, and so do arrest rates and clearance rates for both violent crimes and property crimes. This has the classic look of a positive feedback loop. The consequences are far from positive. It is not a...

On March 11, 2024, Dr. John Lott debated the eminent law professor Sanford Levinson on the subject: Was the Second Amendment a Mistake? The debate lasted about an hour. It was held at the University of Wisconsin and started at 6:30 p.m. The debate was sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). The moderator was Professor Ryan Owens.Unlike much of what we see in politics, the debate was cordial and civilized. There was no student protest to prevent Dr. Lott from being able to debate Professor Levinson. Dr. Lott is an eminent scholar on gun control issues. Dr. Levison is...

Data from the Department of Justice (DOJ) reportedly suggests that crimes committed by illegal immigrants cost U.S. taxpayers at least $166.5 billion and the severity of those crimes greatly exceeds that of typical American norms. The report was written by Dr. John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center and is based on data from the U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice (NIJ). In September, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) revealed in a letter to U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) that as of July 21, 2024, there are 662,566 illegal immigrants with criminal histories on the...

"Those spared include child killers and mass murderers. . . .The Trump administration executed 13 people, but the federal government has not executed anyone under Biden. . . . Like quickly selling border wall parts for pennies on the dollar, commuting these murderers' sentences may be another way for Biden to hinder Trump’s agenda. , , ,The death penalty saves lives and can also be used to save tax dollars."

Around midmorning on Thursday, parents across Montana started receiving texts from their children that schools were in lockdown.... Fortunately, there was no such gunman.... Many schools in Montana have armed School Resource Officers, but these uniformed, easily identifiable individuals find themselves at a serious disadvantage in an attack.... There’s a good reason air marshals on planes don’t wear uniforms. If you have an armed officer in a school, don’t make him readily identifiable. Give him a staff position in the school so it won’t be obvious that he is the one person with a gun. But designated officers shouldn’t be...

Around midmorning on Thursday, parents across Montana started receiving texts from their children that schools were in lockdown. Schools quickly confiscated students’ phones, and parents panicked as they couldn’t find out anything more about what was happening. Schools statewide received threats of a suicidal person with a gun. Billings, Bozeman, Butte, Great Falls, and Kalispell all received threats. Fortunately, there was no such gunman. The threatening phone calls originated from a foreign country, with schools receiving the same message. But the incident raises the question of what Montanans can do to keep schools safe . . . Instead of using...

In June, Victor Martinez-Hernandez was charged with the murder of Rachel Morin, a mother of five in Maryland. Police in Oklahoma tracked the accused repeat offender down with a sample of his DNA recovered from a Los Angeles home invasion in which a nine-year-old girl and her mother were assaulted. Police say he came to the U.S. illegally to escape prosecution for at least one other murder in his native El Salvador in December 2022.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats claim they are the party of freedom. In Harris’ interview on Club Shay Shay on Monday, she argued that people need to vote for her to preserve the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments, that Trump “wants to terminate the Constitution.” Yet, on the First Amendment, Harris previously called for government “oversight or regulation” of social media to stop what she calls misinformation. In 2022, her vice-presidential nominee, Gov. Tim Walz, claimed: “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” On gun ownership, Harris went so far as claiming: “I am in...

The FBI has a big transparency problem. For a year, the media has been using the FBI’s estimates of reported crime to claim that crime has been falling. When the FBI released its numbers for 2023 in September 2024, it hid that it had revised its earlier crime data for 2021 and 2022, hiding the increase in 2022 and that there had been a net increase in crime over 2022 and 2023. Just days before an election in which crime has been a major issue, the FBI continues to hide the revisions. On Thursday, House Oversight and Reform Committee Chair...

When the FBI originally released the “final” crime data for 2022 in September 2023, it reported that the nation’s violent crime rate fell by 2.1%. This quickly became, and remains, a Democratic Party talking point to counter Donald Trump’s claims of soaring crime. But the FBI has quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults. The Bureau – which has been at the center of partisan storms – made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release....

Two constitutional initiatives to change how Montanans vote will be on the ballot in November, and both are deceptive. Two of them will help Democrats and ensure, ironically, despite supporters’ claims, that election winners are not likely to have a majority of the total votes cast. Supporters sell CI-126 as giving voters more choices in primary elections. Montana is already an “open” primary state where voters can choose whether they want a Republican or Democrat ballot, but this initiative would allow people to vote for a Democrat in one race and then a Republican in another one. These are called...