Free Republic

What in the world? During her weekly press conference on Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that she would support a lowering of the federal voting age to 16. “Squad” Rep. Ayanna Pressley has also caused a lowering of the voting age to 16 and for the age to buy firearms to be raised to 21. Pressley, a progressive House Democrat, is only one of the many members who have been calling for the voting age to be lowered. When Fox News Digital asked why she believed 16-year-olds were equipped to vote but not mature enough to purchase a firearm...

(Translation) The bill that would amend Gun Law 168-2019 to, among other things, add flexibility to certain aspects of the statute, and that caused a stir because it would allow citizens to carry two firearms at the same time, will not be reviewed during this Ordinary Session which will end on June 30. The information was confirmed to EL VOCERO by House Speaker Rafael “Tatito” Hernández who recognized that it does not look prudent to review the bill during this session, although he indicated that the legislative piece – which has several provisions that have been amended – has the...

HARRISON, MI — Shortly before dawn one May morning, a mentally ill man walked into a Clare County home, proclaiming himself as Satan to its residents. The tense and frightening situation turned tragic when the homeowner fatally shot the intruder. A month on, prosecutors have ruled the shooting a justifiable case of self-defense and are declining to issue charges against the shooter. Clare County Prosecutor Michelle J. Ambrozaitis announced on Wednesday, June 15, that she was not charging the homeowner who fatally shot 48-year-old Kevin M. Lighthall on May 5. In her statement, Ambrozaitis provided additional details of the incident...

Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) said in an interview broadcast on Sunday that Texas needs to find “common ground” on gun control by respecting the Second Amendment while also requiring safety measures on firearms. O’Rourke, the 2022 Democratic candidate for governor of Texas, slammed current Gov. Greg Abbott (R) for what he described as “extreme” gun policies in the interview with KXAN-TV in Austin, Texas, citing a Quinnipiac poll that found only 6 percent of Texans agree with Abbott’s policy of no background checks.

Stephen Hunter retired as the Pulitzer Prize-winning chief film critic of The Washington Post in 2008 and is the author of the Bob Lee Swagger novels. His most recent is Targeted, published earlier this year. Inspired by recent events, he sent us this column. * * * * * Possibly you’re old enough to remember the great massacre spree of 1964? Classrooms shot up, strip malls decimated, scout troops blown away, fast food restaurants turned into mortuaries. And all because, in its infinite stupidity, the U.S. government dumped 240,000 high-capacity .30 caliber assault rifles into an otherwise innocent America. The...

Days after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, staffers at Men as Peacemakers, a Minnesota group that works with students to break down gender stereotypes and reduce violence, checked in with participants to see how they were feeling. The students, who were mostly white, mirroring the state’s demographics, talked about lockdown drills they had practiced in school, but their responses were not very emotional, said Serrano Robinson, the group's youth restorative program coordinator. The mass shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 24 that left 19 children and two teachers dead “sadly seemed kind of normal” to them, he said....

Possibly you’re old enough to remember the great massacre spree of 1964? Classrooms shot up, strip malls decimated, scout troops blown away, fast food restaurants turned into mortuaries. And all because, in its infinite stupidity, the U.S. government dumped 240,000 high-capacity .30 caliber assault rifles into an otherwise innocent America. The weapons clearly had a demon-spirit to them. Compared to anything else in the market, they had that murder-most-easy look. One glance at the sinister gleam of the walnut stock which caressed the military-gray receiver and barrel of the weapon, its magazine wickedly boasting of many cartridges ready and waiting,...

Last night, news broke that the Biden Administration is taking behind-the-scenes steps to further strangle the already constricted market for ammunition in the United States. The move could result in a reduction of the commercial production of 5.56 caliber ammunition by over thirty percent. *snip* Supplies would undoubtedly plummet and prices would undoubtedly skyrocket, putting the availability of ammunition for self-defense, training, and competition out of reach to many Americans. *snip* Keane on Wednesday night published a tweet, which stated: “The U.S. Military is actively considering shutting down the sale [of] M855/SS109 ammo from Lake City to the commercial market.”...

A black man with an AR-15 and ammunition threatened to blow up the Hilton Atlanta Airport Hotel tuesday evening, June 14, 2022 in Atlanta, GA. An eyewitness related to me watching a SWAT team blow by him on the way in to the hotel and watched them bring the suspect out (black guy) with the AR-15 in their possession. The media apparently did not see fit to report this story. Anyone with more information please post it on this thread. We are being played for fools.

Changing your idea of what robots can do – that’s the slogan of Boston Dynamics. Founded in 1992 by Marc Raibert as a spin-off company from MIT, its early days were spent making training videos for the navy. Only later did the company begin delving into the world of robots – amassing a level of expertise unsurpassed throughout the industry.In fact, Boston Dynamics’s achievements look like the opening montage from a science fiction movie. Starting with the cumbersome BigDog – a quadruped robot designed for the military – the company has seen each new generation of robots surpass the last...

Matthew McConaughey released a dramatic, black-and-white video clip Friday calling for a bipartisan approach to gun control after he met with over 30 elected officials in Washington, DC to push for stronger legislation. The Uvalde, Texas native is shown in the video meeting with officials from both sides of the aisle, including Sens. Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, Lindsey Graham, Cory Booker, Rep. Jerry Nadler, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Biden. “This is and was about gun responsibility,” the clip, posted to Twitter, states in typed letters. “This is about mental health, safer schools … and...

Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow used a Tuesday press conference to urge Congress to make it harder for people to buy “those crazy guns.” Fox News quotes Burrow saying, “With everything that’s going on, if you’re not going to outlaw everything, you’ve gotta at least make it harder to get those crazy guns that everybody is using.”

EXCLUSIVE — Hunter Biden berated his sister-in-law Hallie Biden and accused her of ruining his life after he learned she had thrown his gun in the trash near a Delaware high school in October 2018, newly revealed texts from a copy of his abandoned laptop show. Hunter lamented that Hallie, the widow of his brother Beau, had given the impression he's “an abusive pedophile with homicidal tendencies” and said that “that’s now in the hands of the FBI.” He said police and the bureau opened an investigation into him over the incident. The Secret Service also inserted itself into the...

Shop assistants pose with various handgu Shop assistants pose with various handguns at the Defense and Sporting Arms show at a shopping mall in Manila on July 16, 2009. Credit - TED ALJIBE/AFP via Getty Images Mass shootings are a result of a confluence of factors, but at the heart of the problem are guns—of which the Philippines has plenty. Firearms are sold openly in malls, and almost anyone can carry them, even priests and accountants.For now, though, powerful social factors continue to have a restraining effect on indiscriminate violence. Philippine academic Raymund Narag, a criminology associate professor at Southern...

Welcome to the world of guns. It’s a world that can be complicated, intimidating, and on occasion, frustrating. It’s also a world of self-reliance, confidence, and, well, fun. Guns are fun, but you have quite a few steps before you get to the fun part. Buying a gun isn’t just a one-click purchase as it should be and requires visiting a gun store or Federal Firearms Licensee holder. That in and of itself can be intimidating. Guns and gun stores are somewhat niche, and if you’re not lucky enough to be born into them, then you might have zero experience...

Modern school shootings are an exceptionally abhorrent phenomenon that we got along just fine without for the first couple of centuries of U.S. history. So, it’s wholly reasonable to want them gone. It’s not like America was suffering from any lack of the beneficial side effects of school shootings before the man with the brain tumor climbed the U. of Texas clock tower in 1966 and the “I Don’t Like Mondays” girl opened fire at the San Diego elementary school in 1979. School shootings and other heavily publicized mass killings are an intensely grotesque problem, often engineered by obsessive notoriety-seekers...

The use of red flag laws when it comes to firearms has been brought back to the forefront of the national conversation in the aftermath of the mass shootings in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas. Both shooters had histories of law enforcement being known to them for disturbing or criminal acts, though the Buffalo shooter was able to avoid New York red flag laws. Criticisms of such laws is that it is ripe for abuse since due process goes to the wayside and language of laws can often be too broad. PolitiFact attempted to debunk gun owners concerns about...

The negotiations for bipartisan gun control ended with an agreement on Sunday, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is making clear he wants a floor vote as soon as possible. Politico reports that Schumer has already said he will “put this bill on the floor as soon as possible.”

A group of Senators have announced that they’ve reached a bipartisan deal on a framework for legislation they say will do something about “gun violence.” According to The Hill, “The framework includes funding for school safety measures and mental health, a requirement to review juvenile records for firearm buyers under 21 years old and incentives for states to implement ‘red flag’ laws.”

Abstract After the Columbine school shooting 20 years ago, one of the more significant changes in how we protect students has been the advance of legislation that allows teachers to carry guns at schools. There are two obvious questions: Does letting teachers carry create dangers? Might they deter attackers? Twenty states currently allow teachers and staff to carry guns to varying degrees on school property, so we don’t need to guess how the policy would work. There has yet to be a single case of someone being wounded or killed from a shooting, let alone a mass public shooting, between...