Free Republic

Gun ownership increased sixfold under former Brazilian President Bolosonaro, homicides dropped 34% A gun expert is asking academics to put their money where their mouths are and bet $1,000 on Brazil as a case study that stricter gun laws won't mean less crime. No one has taken him up on the bet yet, but some have hit back by calling the challenge a "stunt" and saying they will put cash up if the terms meet their requirements. Brazil took a hard turn away from gun ownership with a new left-wing presidential administration this year, sparking a debate on whether Brazil’s...

Mercedes Perez crashed her car into another car on a San Antonio street in 2021 and then jumped out with a gun and blazed away at neighbors who came out of their homes to see what happened. She killed one man, the car’s owner, and wounded his wife and son before another neighbor heard the shooting. He grabbed his gun and ran to the scene, where he killed Perez with a shot to the neck. John Lott, founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center, said it’s a case of a good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy with...

President Biden traveled to Monterey Park, California, the site of a mass public shooting that left 11 dead in January, to announce new executive actions on gun control. He touts the proposals as necessary “to reduce gun violence and make our communities safer.” But California already has all the gun control laws that Biden put forward, and yet it has a higher per capita rate of mass public shootings than the rest of the country. Measures already in place include background checks on all transfers of firearms, “red flag” gun confiscation laws, and an assault weapon ban. Even if Biden’s...

frequent talking point in the gun control debate is that Americans overwhelmingly support "common sense" gun control measures, such as universal background checks and red flag laws. The Biden administration referenced these surveys last month, when it announced that $231 million will go to states that enact "red flag" laws and push gun control policies. These surveys are constantly invoked in legislative hearings and in the media. But surveys often compress complicated bills down to one-sentence summaries, and the results are often unreliable. Gun control advocates claim that over 90% of Americans support universal background checks, which would require checks...

Relying on a new report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), news headlines claim: “All 25 U.S. extremism-related murders last year were linked to right-wing extremists.” The report received wide, uncritical coverage from outlets in the U.S. such as the Associated Press and worldwide in Canada, the United Kingdom, and India. But the ADL’s report is fatally flawed. It assumes that every racist is automatically a “right-winger.” For example, 10 of the 25 extremist murders last year were by Payton Gendron in Buffalo. But he was anything but a “right-winger.” The Buffalo killer was yet another mass murderer motivated by environmentalism.

If a person is really a danger to himself or others, confiscating guns isn’t much of a solution. There are so many other ways for disturbed people to cause harm. But advocates of “red flag” laws want people to believe that simply taking away someone’s legally-owned guns means the problem is solved. Last week, the Biden administration announced it was using part of the $1.8 trillion massive spending bill passed after last year’s election to give $231 million to states that enact red-flag laws and push other gun-control policies. After last week’s mass public shooting at Michigan State University, gun-control...

If you believe tweets from Michael Bloomberg’s The Trace and its employees, I am “one major factor” why the U.S. hasn’t passed stronger gun control laws and thus, they claim, responsible for mass shootings in the United States. These are becoming regular tweets after each mass public shooting. They are upset that I have quoted mass murderers on their decisions to target gun-free zones. Yet, statements such as, “Areas where CCW are outlawed or prohibited may be good areas of attack” are common among mass murderers. That doesn’t make sense to gun control supporters. Immediately after this week’s shooting at...

If you only read the New York Times editorials, you’d believe that political violence in America is a “right-wing” problem. The Times has been warning of violence from the right for years, but on Nov. 19 and 26, they wrote two long editorials making these claims. The violence stems from the lies “enthusiastically spread” by Republican politicians. Democrats’ only complicity was their $53 million in spending on “far-right fringe candidates in the primaries.” The fringe candidates, it was hoped, would be easier to beat in the general election. Both editorials mention the mass murderer in Buffalo, New York, as a...

“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.

Watching the news, you’d be led to believe that vote fraud doesn’t exist in the United States. Since the election on November 8, news article after news article has simply dismissed any claims of vote fraud as “baseless” (New York Times and CNN) and “without evidence” (NPR, New York Times, and Washington Post). Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is lambasted for “stoking fears on mail-in ballots.” And the news coverage was no different after the 2020 election. But American voters aren’t convinced. A Rasmussen Reports survey from late September found that 84% of likely voters were concerned about election integrity...

It took four years and nine months before Nicolas Cruz was finally sentenced for the murder of seventeen people in the horrific Parkland massacre. So much of the legal system focuses on fairness to the criminal; but the damage to the victims and their families as they wait for trial is tremendous. Those who have to testify or give victim impact statements must continually think about what they will say at trial. There is also uncertainty about the verdict and whether the murderer will be punished. In the Parkland case, the victims were denied the closure of Cruz receiving the...

After the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade leaked on May 3rd, news reports blamed abortion-related violence over the summer on pro-life supporters. “[W]e have seen a steady rise in violence and harassment against providers from anti-abortion extremists who continue to be emboldened by the Supreme Court’s decision,” claimed Melissa Fowler, Chief Program Officer of the National Abortion Federation (NAF). "People want me dead’: abortion providers fear violence after Roe overturned,” a headline in The Guardian read. Other news outlets, such as NBC News, also focused on the increased threat of violence against abortion providers. But national news...

Red flag laws are the top priority of Democrats and gun control advocates. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly support these measures – by margins ranging between 2-1 and 3-1. Congress recently passed legislation providing funding for states that adopted these laws. But the polling doesn’t really gauge whether Americans understand how these laws operate. The surveys generally just ask people if they support laws that “allow guns to be temporarily confiscated by a judge from people considered by a judge to be a danger to themselves or others.” Respondents might reasonably assume that a normal legal process is being followed,...

A new report from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) argues that the FBI's data contains "massive errors" when tracking active shooting incidents, undercounting how often armed citizens have thwarted active-shooting situations over the last eight years. "Although collecting such data is fraught with challenges, some see a pattern of distortion in the FBI numbers because the errors almost exclusively go one way, minimizing the life-saving actions of armed citizens," the report, which was provided to Fox News Digital this week by Crime Prevention Research Center founder and president John Lott, states.

Unfortunately, election officials across the country are not keeping the most basic data to monitor election outcomes. Even when they say they do, the numbers do not come close to matching up. It was a simple goal: match the number of voters with the number of ballots cast. After the last general election there were concerns that ballots were counted multiple times (so that there could be more ballots cast than voters who voted) and that ballots were destroyed (so that there could be more voters who voted than ballots cast). But, through our examination, we learned that it cannot...

In celebration of New York’s new gun control law taking effect on September 1, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul claimed: “This whole concept that a good guy with a gun will stop the bad guys with a gun, it doesn’t hold up. And the data bears this out, so that theory is over.” . At the same press conference, New York City Mayor Eric Adams warned that more concealed carry permits might lead to an increase in violence at Times Square, even though Times Square remains a gun-free zone for permit holders. . This is a typical response from Democrats. After...

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden traveled to Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania to attempt to "flip the script" on Republicans with a law-and-order campaign message. The theme of Biden's speech was that "the answer is not to defund our police departments—it's to fund our police." Biden's speech certainly involved a lot of flipping. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden was asked whether he supported "redirect[ing] some of the funding for police into social services." At the time, he responded, "Yes, I proposed that kind of reform." In Biden's three previous speeches on violent crime, his focus has almost exclusively been...

In his Buffalo, New York speech last week following a mass shooting, President Biden showed he still has only two things on his mind regarding crime: guns and white supremacists. No one can defend white supremacists. But with violent crime soaring and this latest attack in Buffalo, people want something done. Yet Biden’s agenda won’t make people safer. “Look, we’ve seen the mass shootings in Charleston, South Carolina; El Paso, Texas; in Pittsburgh. Last year in Atlanta. This week in Dallas, Texas, and now in Buffalo. In Buffalo, New York,” Biden said. “White supremacy is a poison. It’s a poison....

If you believe the Los Angeles Times, the Buffalo shooter who left 10 dead emerged from “a far-right ecosystem.” A Rolling Stone headline echoed the claim: “The Buffalo Shooter Isn’t a ‘Lone Wolf.’ He’s a Mainstream Republican.” The New York Times links the mass murderer to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik. Not to be left out, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) blames Republicans for the attack, claiming: “The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism.”

To President Biden, public health researchers, and the media, violent crime is all about guns. But a new survey finds that people are badly misinformed about how much violent crime involves guns. The average likely American voter is way off, thinking that over 46% of violent crimes involve guns. In fact, the true figure is less than 8%. Not surprisingly, those who believe that most violent crime involves guns are more likely to view gun control as the solution.