Free Republic

Botswana, home to the world's largest elephant population, may lift a ban on hunting for sport in the face of what the government says is growing conflict between humans and wildlife, a move sure to provoke protest from animal welfare groups. Conservationists estimate the land-locked southern African country to have around 130,000 elephants, close to a third of the continent's population, but the government says the number is closer to 230,000, causing problems for small-scale farmers. "Communities have become very hostile and negative towards wildlife," said Konstantinos Markus, a member of parliament from the wildlife-rich northwestern part of Botswana. He...

“Celebrities” will do the darnedest things to virtue signal for a little love from their low-information fanbases (and get their names mentioned again). Retired porn star Mia Khalifa sought fifteen more minutes of fame yesterday with the help of the Austin, Texas Police Department. Following the Santa Fe High School shooting, she very publicly surrendered her shotgun to a police officer for destruction. “They couldn’t have made it easier,” she wrote on Instagram. Yes, the now-retired porn star with the tattoo of a Derringer under her right arm (we’ll let you verify that yourself) used the dead kids in...

The teenager who allegedly used a shotgun and a revolver to kill 10 people and wound 10 others at a Texas high school Friday admitted he didn't shoot people he liked and meant to kill the ones he did target, a probable cause affidavit says. Suspect Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, has cooperated with police, said Galveston County Magistrate Mark Henry said. Henry denied bail for the student, who is accused of capital murder of multiple people and aggravated assault on a public servant. Students at Santa Fe High School, not far from Houston in southeastern Texas, scrambled for safety after they...

STABBED burglar Henry Vincent's funeral will not pass the home of the hero who killed him, police have revealed. Burglar Vincent, 37, died after being knifed as he broke into OAP Richard Osborn-Brooks' home in Hither Green, South East London, on April 3. (Henry Vincent was a career criminal and was killed during a botched robbery) Hundreds of family and friends of the notorious Vincent family are due to gather for the funeral tomorrow. Travellers plan to lay on the "funeral of all funerals" for the career criminals. Residents feared Vincent’s friends could clash with the community when the horse-drawn...

“Otto Van Bismarck once said: ‘Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.’ For those who are looking for the repeal of the Second Amendment, I would urge them to abandon that hope and look to the ‘the next best:’ the imposition of a national ban on assault weapons.” – Sol Wachtler in Keep assault weapons in the military [via timesunion.com]

(Shown above are firearms collected at a previous Osceola County Sheriff’s Office gun buyback event.) Local leaders and law enforcement officials are teaming up Friday for a gun buyback program with a special focus on semi-automatic rifles. Gift Cards for Guns is the latest effort by the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office and County Commissioner Viviana Janer to get pistols, shotguns and rifles off the street by offering residents a $50 gift card for gas or Walmart when they turn in those weapons. “I am proud to do my part in making our community safer, by providing a safe, no-questions-asked...

Jon Stokes has a post up at Politico this morning, A Gun Nut’s Guide to Gun Control That Works. He’s noted the post-Parkland climate that’s seen states like Vermont and Florida put new restrictions on firearms purchasing and ownership, as well as proposals to repeal the Second Amendment or outlaw all semi-auto firearms and is proposing a fix. A grand bargain that’s designed to satisfy both gun owners and gun controllers by getting each side to give up something. His big idea: create a federal gun owner’s license that would enable anyone who goes through the process to possess semi-automatic...

As gun owners, we can always count on the editors at Rolling Stone magazine to keep us in compliance with the myriad laws pertaining to firearms. So with the news that Dick’s Sporting Goods will be destroying their inventory of AR-pattern rifles that they’re now too responsible and virtuous to sell, the Rolling Stoners did a little research to find out how to do it legally. It’s no small question. As you may remember, a few days after the Parkland shooting, one know-nothing educator who’s running for Congress in Virginia displayed her lack of knowledge for all the world...

A 14-year-old boy in rural Wyoming who was building a small cannon using instructions from YouTube videos died after the contraption exploded, a local newspaper reported on Friday. The cannon misfired late on Thursday as Archie Pearce was assembling its components, in an abandoned lot in the northern Wyoming community of Recluse, the Gillette News Record reported. A 12-year-old child who was with Pearce was later treated at a hospital for minor flash burns. They were building the device as an experiment, with no intent to cause harm, Campbell County Sheriff Scott Matheny told the newspaper. "They were in over...

The Boulder City Council on Thursday night unanimously passed on first reading an ordinance that bans the sale and possession of certain firearms defined as assault weapons. The council adjourned following a more than five-hour-long meeting where nearly 150 people spoke for and against the proposed ordinance, which would also prohibit high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, a device that allows a semi-automatic weapon to be fired more like a fully automatic rifle. Council members will deliberate the measure at a future meeting and possibly pass it twice more before it becomes an enshrined Boulder ordinance. The proposed ban comes in...

Two teens have been arrested after a New Jersey man was beaten to death on the street by eight people in a seemingly random attack. Police said the other suspects in the deadly attack on Sebastian Aguilar, 36, are still being sought after the vicious onslaught on 70th Street between Broadway and Hudson Avenue in Guttenberg on Wednesday night. The two who have been arrested, a 14-year-old and a 15-year-old, have been charged with aggravated assault and endangering an injured victim, but additional charges are expected to be filed against them. A person living in the small town said it's...

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, says that now is the time for he and his colleagues on Capitol Hill to "change our positions and re-examine" bans on high-capacity magazines and assault weapons. He told CBS News' "Face the Nation" on Sunday that there needs to be a debate about restrictions in the wake of the Parkland school shooting. "I think it's time for us to have a legitimate debate about restrictions on gun magazines and assault weapons. You get into definitions, but the basic notion of these weaponized, militarized weapons need to be off our streets. And even the Trump administration...

I’m stunned by the image above. If the grammatically-challenged protester really wanted to know why someone owns an AR-15 — someone who has no plans to murder anyone — why doesn’t she ask an AR15 owner? Preferably before revealing her ignorance on the subject. Before calling for a ban on AR ownership. Hang on . . . The protest went down in New York, where AR-15s are banned. So she’d have to, I dunno, go online? https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=Gl5bj1T3vQE Clearly, the youth’s history teacher didn’t teach her thing one about the Second Amendment. ‘Cause if he knew that, he’d know the...

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., this week met with Dick’s Sporting Goods CEO Ed Stack and came away impressed with his moves to change store policy on gun sales. The former San Francisco mayor and author of the long-expired federal assault weapon ban visited with Stack in the aftermath of the big box retailer’s adoption of a controversial policy banning gun sales to those under age 21 across their 700 locations nationwide, including 26 Field & Stream stores. “I was delighted to meet Ed Stack, who I think is a great American,” Feinstein said. “He’s a supporter of the...

A Virginia Democrat vying for a seat in Congress wanted to take a public stand against guns, and got a lot of attention, though she may have inadvertently broken the law. Karen Mallard, one of a crowded field of challengers competing for Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District — a seat currently held by a Republican — posted a video to social media Wednesday in which she takes a grinder to her husband’s AR-15 rifle and slices away the front part of the handguard and barrel. Mallard prefaced the act by saying she did not want the gun in her house and,...

Family and friends of a 15-year-old Springfield boy who was killed in November protested Wednesday a grand jury’s decision to not indict the man who shot him. A Clark County grand jury voted unanimously this week to not indict Timothy Reed on any charges in connection with the death of William Allen “B.J.” Beverly Jr., according to the Clark County Prosecutor’s Office. Beverly was shot by Reed about 12:45 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 5, at the Speedway gas station in the 1300 block of East Main Street, according to a grand jury findings document dated Monday, Feb. 26, and obtained by...

The White House is weighing a plan to use "red flag laws" to confiscate guns from people deemed too dangerous to possess them, according to a Bloomberg report. The laws — extreme risk protection orders — allow authorities to temporarily take firearms away from people that judges have determined to be a danger to themselves and others. Five states already have such laws in place. According to Bloomberg, the White House has been looking at an Indiana version of the law. The Trump administration is considering a plan to encourage other states to enact the laws. One way the administration...

Delta Air Lines and United Airlines said they will scrap group airfare discounts for members of the National Rifle Association, joining a growing list of companies to end perks for the gun-rights group following the deadly mass shooting at a South Florida high school last week. Delta and United were offering discounts of 2 percent and 10 percent off online fares for flights to the NRA's meeting in Dallas in June, according to the NRA's website. Delta said that it will inform the NRA of its decision and will request that it remove the airline's information from its website. The...

As usual, it seemed to come out of nowhere. And, as usual, it didn’t. The murderer who took the lives of 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Fla., was on everybody’s radar, from the school authorities to the local police to the FBI, which failed to follow its own protocols when a person close to the future killer called to warn the bureau that he was contemplating a school massacre. Everybody knew, nobody did anything. What should be done? Gun control, the Left says, always, offering ideas that range from the trivial to the patently unconstitutional. Whatever the...

Lawmakers in the nation’s smallest state are planning a large package of bills in conjunction with gun control activists that could see bans on certain types of semi-automatics and their magazines. Allied with the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence, Sen. Joshua Miller, D-Cranston, and Rep. Jason Knight, D-Barrington, are introducing proposals in both chambers of the legislature that would add the same types of firearms restrictions seen in neighboring Connecticut and Massachusetts. Knight argued the move is needed to protect public safety in the aftermath of a high-profile school shooting in Florida this week. “It will take a multi-pronged...