Free Republic

Recent events in New York have brought the grim realities of America’s gun violence problem into sharp relief. In both instances the perpetuators took advantage of the nation’s lax gun laws and legally purchased firearms whose lethality would have been unimaginable to the authors of the Second Amendment. The easily modified semi-automatic AR-15 used by the white supremacist shooter who killed ten people in Buffalo on Saturday was two hundred times more lethal than the revolutionary muskets that helped win the American Revolution. This attack came one month after a shooter with a Glock 9-millimeter handgun injured 23 people in...

    Timing is everything, and a new book from Joshua Horwitz and Casey Anderson ties in well with recent “reports” from the Department of Homeland Security on “rightwing extremists” and the one from the Missouri Information Analysis Center on the “modern militia movement.”    Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and Anderson, a Washington, D.C. attorney, call their book Guns, Democracy and the Insurrectionist Idea. So, in addition to being demonized as “rightwing extremists” and militia whackos, now gun rights activists – people who stand in defense of their fundamental civil right to keep and...

History lesson: Second Amendment requires regulation First, a calming caveat: Saul Cornell doesn't want to take away your guns. He's neither antigun nor progun. He really isn't a gun guy at all. His thing is history. Cornell, a professor at Ohio State University, passed through town the other day with much to say about regulating guns. Yet his aim isn't to take sides in the modern gun-control debate -- a squabble he thinks has strayed rather off-topic. It's far more interesting, he thinks, to look back to learn what this country's founders actually thought about gun regulation. They couldn't imagine...