Free Republic

On July 26th, 2015, there was a shooting in Milwaukee, outside a bar.  One man attacked another.  The man who was attacked defended himself by shooting the attacker, who died at the scene.  We know that the story is close to that because the Milwaukee prosecutor has ruled that the shooting was in self defense.  What is worth thinking about is that the shooter was carrying the gun he used to defend himself illegally. As a convicted felon, Augusta Walton, 34, has been charged with one count of possession of a firearm by a felon. From Fox6now.com: MILWAUKEE -...

When Texas passed the shall issue concealed carry law in 1995, part of the deal concerned how people would be notified that a business did not allow concealed carry on the premises.  A compromise was worked out that an entity that chose not to allow concealed carry on its premises was required to post a sign on all entrances, clearly showing people entering, that concealed carry was not allowed.  The sign had to be large and highly visible, in both English and Spanish.  The letters had to be at least one inch tall.   An example of the "30.06" sign...

Three men break into a home in Trotwood, Ohio.  They are all armed.  It is before 6 am, just three days after Christmas, on 28 December, 2015.  One of the men is armed with a Tec-9 pistol.  The other two hold what appear to be conventional semi-auto pistols.  They bypass two sleeping children to find the mother.  The surveillance video shows the three following the mother after they pistol whipped her in the laundry room.  Link to video The man directly behind her has the  Tec-9.  Not shown, he presumably holds her at gunpoint while the other two attempt...

Total private guns in the United States,  390 million Murder rate in the U.S.  2015  4.5 per 100,000  FBI Murder rate in the U.S.  1993  9.5 per 100,000  FBI Murder rate in Brazil (latest) 25.2 per 100,000  Wikipedia Murder rate in Mexico  2012 21.5 per 100,000  Wikipedia Number of people with Concealed Carry permits in the United States: 12.8 million  CrimeResearch.org study Number of States where no permit is required to carry concealed or openly:  10CrimeResearch.org study Number of states who issue carry permits - 49 Number of states where open carry of firearms is legal: 44 in 2015,...

At the end of 2014, there were 12,881,223 people who were legally prohibited from possessing modern firearms on the NICS list of prohibited persons(pdf).  As can be seen from the chart below, obtained from the FBI, nearly half of those prohibited, 49.2%, are illegal aliens.  The next largest number are those who have been adjudicated with a mental health problem.  177,000 of the recent numbers are veterans  added by the veteran administration.  The total "mental defectives" is over 29% of the prohibited possessors in the NICS data base.  In 2007, only 10.15% of prohibited possessors were listed as mental...

Congressman Donald M. Payne Jr. (D-N.J.-10), has recently reintroduced "The Safer Neighborhoods Gun Buyback Act" (pdf).  Academics have routinely labeled such measures as ineffective at fighting crime.  Perhaps the most famous of these is Alan Binder of Freakonomics fame: When it comes to gun buybacks, both the theory and the data could not be clearer in showing that they don’t work. The only guns that get turned in are ones that people put little value on anyway. There is no impact on crime. On the positive side, the “cash for clunkers” program is more attractive than the gun buyback...

Reform of Kansas gun laws are paying off.  In 2014, Kansas passed a law requiring government entities to sell or use firearms that came into their possession rather than to destroy these valuable assets in a modern version of the Medieval Deodand law. In Deodand law, items were tried and sentences passed.  They were destroyed or forfeited to the Church for Godly purposes.  The legal precedent is continued in modern forfeiture laws. Kansas stopped that superstitious practice with the reform of the gun law.  From the dailycaller.com: This bill will prohibit seized firearms not used in the commission of...

  Officers feloniously killed in U.S. (red)  Killed with own gun (green) When people talk about open carry, a common comment is that the open carrier will have their gun taken from them and used against them.  I have yet to find a case in the United States where that happened to someone who was not a law officer.  Law officers almost all open carry, and some have their guns taken from them and used against them, but the numbers are vanishingly small.   Here is a link to the data sources used to construct the graphic above. In the...

The Luzern County, Pennsylvania Sheriff’s Department has decided to auction off about 175 firearms, some air guns, knives and other items.  The items have been collected under a number of different administrations over 17 years, from 1993 to 2010.  Most of the items are from Prevention From Abuse (PFA) orders, temporary and permanent.  The Sheriffs office published (on their website, in a pdf file) a list of 154 cases that had expired, and told people who wanted their property returned to let them know that they wanted their property back.  That was done on 5 November of last year.  ...

Abstract: As part of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports system, the FBI gathers and reports both civilian and police officer justifiable homicide statistics. The methods by which these numbers are gathered make them gross undercounts of the actual legal, defensive homicides by citizens. Furthermore, comparing the civilian justifiable homicide numbers to criminal homicides for public policy cost/benefit analysis understates the crime reducing effects of civilian gun ownership.

The Obama administration is using the International Traffic in Arms Regulations to censor publication of information on the Internet.   The department ordered Defense Distributed to take down files for 3D printing of a simple single shot handgun on a website  owned by Defense Distributed.   Cody Wilson is widely considered to have been the inventor of the 3D printed pistol. Defense Distributed joined with the Second Amendment Foundation to file a lawsuit against the Obama administration State Department for violation of their First, Second, and Fifth Amendment rights.    The case is Defense Distributed v. U.S. Department of State.  The...

There have been a number of promotions over the years where shotguns have been given away with the purchase of a car or truck.  This Florida stores, which combine jewelry and guns, are offering a free shotgun with the purchase of select Jewelry.  And the jewelry is not as expensive as a car.In Deland, Florida, the Downtown Goldsmith & Engraving and 2nd Amendment  Firearms are two stores with the same ownership and under the same roof.  They are owned by a husband and wife team who started the business three years ago.  They have been offering the promotion for...

The 11th Circuit has struck a resounding blow against the medicalization of gun control and in favor of the Second Amendment.As criminological research has shown that infringements on Second Amendment rights either increase violent crime and murder rates, or have no effect, those that push for a disarmed public got creative in finding a way to justify their desire.  They settled on the medicalization of guns, or as they say, framing the debate as a public health concern.   The purpose is simple.  Define "gun violence" as a disease, and guns become something that the government can regulate without worrying...

HOUSTON — A Texas father has been released from jail after police say he brought a gun to a hospital to stop the staff from taking his son off of life support. George Pickering II’s son was declared "brain-dead" after he suffered a massive stroke in January. The hospital ordered a "terminal wean" which is a process that slowly ends a person’s life by removing life support. The staff had even notified an organ donation organization that Pickering’s son was a donor. Pickering, however, wasn’t ready to let go — now, his son, George Pickering III, is still alive and...

Both people in the picture above are open carrying.A correspondent reports on open carry at a church in Northern Wisconsin.  There is a sign near the entrance that says that legal carry of guns is welcome. Here is the pro-carry sign.  It is a simple 8 1/2 by 11 sheet: Wisconsin is underrated as a pro-Second Amendment state. The state never outlawed open carry, even if the urban areas routinely violated Second Amendment rights of citizens before 2010. Wisconsin passed a strong amendment to the State Constitution in 1998, affirming the right to keep and bear arms for all...

Republican members of Congress have taken aim at the Obama administration with their latest move involving a highly-contentious fight between gun rights advocates and the State Department. Filing an amicus brief on behalf of Defense Distributed Thursday, congressional Republicans came to the defense of a non-profit firearms manufacturing company currently entangled in a legal battle with the State Department. In Defense Distributed v. U.S. Department of State, the Obama administration is citing the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) in an effort to curb Defense Distributed’s effort to publicly post online blueprints of 3D printable firearms. Noting that "it could...

More samizdat art illustrating the type of coverage that the Pearl Harbor attack would have received if the media had treated it as they do Islamic terrorists attacks today. To fully appreciate the satire, you have to know that Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor by surprise.  You have to know that this was the historical event that drew the United States into World War Two.  You have to know that the attack was by aircraft launched from aircraft carriers.  You have to know that the United States response was swift and decisive. You have to know that Republicans were...

I have always liked peep sights for iron sights.  There are many advantages to them.  They only require focusing on the front sight, the eye automatically centers the front sight in the hole of the rear sight, making sighting faster and more accurate.  They allow you to see more of the target.  This is why the U.S. military transitioned to peep sights with the 03A3 Springfield rifle.  I shot my second deer with one of those and the issue peep sights when I was 14.  My father was deadly on running deer in the North Wisconsin woods.  He used...

(CNSNews.com) - The White House objects to a few Republican provisions in the omnibus $1.1-trillion spending bill, but overall, "We succeeded," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters on Wednesday. "So we walked into these negotiations focused on making sure that Republicans would not succeed in advancing their ideological agenda through the budgetary process, and I think, based on all of the solid reporting work that you have done over the last several weeks, there were a variety of attempts that Republicans undertook to try to do exactly that, and we did succeed in fighting off those efforts. What is...

Those who push for more restrictions on gun ownership and use like to compare the United States with Europe.  They claim that Europe has low homicide rates because Europe has extreme restrictions on gun ownership and the carry of guns.  They ignore that the laws restricting gun ownership and carry came between World War One and World War Two.  The chart above is from a European academic paper(pdf) comparing homicide in Finland, the Netherlands, and Sweden.   The study was financed by the European Union. European gun laws restriction ownership and carry were instituted after WWI.  Germany had no laws...