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There was what appears to be a shooting accident on Saturday at a gun show in Bloomington, Indiana. A rifle went off as a person attending the show put it down on a vendor’s table. The bullet hit wood and two persons were hit by flying wood. One person had small wounds from the flying wood and refused medical treatment. But, another man was hit by the flying wood and what is believed to be a .223 round. The bullet went through his arm and then struck another person. One of the victims was reported to be in critical condition...

When New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to get tough on crime in the Big Apple, where does he turn? Naturally, he goes to Arizona. We learn this from an ABC News report about an undercover investigation at an Arizona gun show. This report ominously states that "despite the mass murder" in Tucson in January, people "who likely wouldn't pass a background check can still easily purchase similar weapons." You can take ABC's text or on-air report's word for this since they show none of the undercover footage mentioned. They do link to two videos of an undercover...

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg may prefer "No Labels" but in his case, I think "gun grabber" is a pretty fitting one. As part of his misguided crusade to tighten up gun laws nationally, The New York Times reports that Hizzoner sent undercover cops to gun shows in Arizona and found they were violating the law: In two instances, the New York undercover officers specifically said before buying a gun, “I probably couldn’t pass a background check,” but were still sold guns, city officials said. In a third case, an investigator bought a Glock pistol and two high-capacity magazines...

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. -- A gun fair organizer was acquitted of manslaughter and other charges Friday in the 2008 death of an 8-year-old boy who accidentally shot himself in the head with an Uzi at a machine gun expo in western Massachusetts. A Hampden Superior Court jury found former Pelham, Mass., Police Chief Edward Fleury not guilty of involuntary manslaughter and three counts of furnishing machine guns to minors in the death of Christopher Bizilj of Ashford, Conn. The charges carry up to 50 years in prison. Fleury's firearms training company co-sponsored the annual Machine Gun Shoot and Firearms Expo at...

TUCSON, Ariz. -- Thousands of weapons enthusiasts, many openly packing heat, crammed into an Arizona gun show chock full of high-powered rifles and semiautomatic pistols yesterday -- a mere 13 miles away from last weekend's rampage. Despite the 4,500 who filed into the Crossroads of the West Gun Show at the Pima County Fairgrounds throughout the day, a donation box at the entrance for the six dead and 13 wounded, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, sat nearly empty. The audacious showing came as Giffords continued her miraculous recovery, with doctors removing her ventilator by inserting a tube in her windpipe to...

The place was loaded. The Tanner Gun Show, the oldest and largest of its kind in the state, opened Saturday at the Colorado State Fairgrounds. The Agricultural Palace was wall-to-wall with every weapon imaginable — handguns, rifles, military surplus, knives, ammunition — all which will be on display again today. The Tanner Gun Show in Denver features 700 tables of weapons and normally draws about 7,500 people. In Pueblo, with 500 tables of weapons on display, show co-owner Jeff Brown said they expect to see a crowd of about 5,000 this weekend. "We have everything from Civil War rifles to...

From Virginia to Arizona, federal and state gun laws are loosening everywhere from national parks to Amtrak trains. But in St. Paul, a proposal that would send Minnesota in the opposite direction is headed toward its first hearing Friday -- a bill requiring background checks on the purchaser of any firearm sold at a gun show. The proposal pits its DFL sponsor, St. Paul Rep. Michael Paymar, against the mighty arsenal of gun rights advocates and lobbyists who have managed to turn back nearly every effort to tighten Minnesota's gun laws in the past. In a session dominated by pressing...

When we last discussed the Texas Gun Shows situation, attorney Jerri Lynn Ward had been temporarily stalled in her Open Records Request to the Austin Police Department for "any and all documents, notes correspondence, summaries, worksheets, memoranda, and/or assignment sheets e-mails and video or audio recordings," when they instead sent her this notice: [T]he department wishes to withhold some of the requested information and has asked for a decision from the Attorney General about whether the information is within an exception to public disclosure. That's ostensibly been resolved and they've coughed up some docs. I'll present them here, ask you...

Alice Tripp, Legislative Director of The Texas State Rifle Association, has given us "The Story Behind the Gun Show Crisis in Austin." Her first main conclusion? Darwin Boedeker of Texas Gun Shows was not the focus of the Thursday, Jan. 14th, meeting. He was not threatened, coerced or intimidated by BATF or the APD. I guess the question that comes to my mind is, what would have happened had Boedecker refused to cooperate with the "suggestions"? Darwin Boedeker did not take a lawyer, did not stop the meeting or ask for advice, and did not ever contact TSRA. What would...

I have made no secret of my disdain for the fabricated concept of the so-called "gun show loophole," but a pair of Washington state lawmakers have managed to come up with a new approach to this "problem" (fewer than 1% of guns used in crimes purchased at gun shows) that has to win the prize for "Most Incomprehensibly Foolish Proposed Gun Show Restriction." Unlike other attempts to close the "loophole," HB 2477 (pdf file) would not require private sellers (as opposed to licensed dealers) to perform a criminal background check on prospective buyers, or to go through a licensed dealer...

Hundreds of people from Craven and nearby counties came to the Craven County Fairgrounds this weekend for one of five annual gun and knife shows sponsored by a Pamlico County businessman. They are among 25 shows Sherwood Caraway of Merritt has been holding east of Raleigh for two decades because “people in Eastern North Carolina hunt and are taught gun safety as a way of life.” Sheriff Jerry Monette said he had issued between 80 and 100 permits to purchase guns by early afternoon Sunday. “They find a gun looking and go ahead and buy it that day,” Monette said....

Walking the talk of valuing diversity can lead to some unusual places. Brian, a regular at monthly meetings of a diversity coalition in Overland Park, talked me out of going to church one Sunday in June and into riding with him to a gun show at the KCI Expo Center in the Northland. I grew up with guns, and this place was very familiar to me. Dad still has the six-shooters his father carried every day to work as a railroad brakeman, beginning in the late 1800s. I shot guns when I was a Boy Scout. As an adult, I...

An Austin police effort to curtail the illegal sales of firearms at a weekend gun show sparked an angry response from the event's organizer and raised concerns about whether the department overstepped its authority. Several police recommendations about the operation of the show were intended to curtail crime there and should not have been viewed as requirements, authorities said Tuesday. But the show organizer said he thought that law enforcement officials were instructing him to adopt rules that violated state and federal law, including a requirement that only licensed gun dealers be allowed to sell firearms. He said he begrudgingly...

Reports were coming in from forums and elsewhere that the Austin PD and the BATFE have mandated no private sales will be allowed. Thing is, there is no federal or state law giving them this authority. So I asked them if the reports were true and how they could do this:

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) -- The family of an 8-year-old boy who fatally shot himself at a gun show in western Massachusetts say the Uzi submachine gun jammed twice before he lost control of the weapon and fired into his head. The family of Christopher Bizilj (bah-SEEL') of Ashford, Conn., says in a civil lawsuit filed Friday that a 15-year-old instructor who cleared the gun and handed it back to the victim failed to provide proper guidance.....

UNLV REBEL YELL 2009 click image to enlarge To capture the essence of a classic Socratic quandary, imagine this scenario: You know that the right thing to do is to return your friend’s gun to him or her if you have taken it. But should you return it if you know that person is mentally unstable and would use it against others? I’m betting that most people would say no, and with good reason. Even though the Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms, in reality, not everyone has the right to gun ownership – the background check is...

On October 20, 2009, Buckeye Firearms Chairman Jim Irvine appeared as a guest on WCPN's (Clevland Public Radio) "The Sound of Ideas," hosted by Dan Moulthrop. In a typical display of your tax dollars at work on the "impartial" forum of National Public Radio (NPR), the opening half of the show was given solely to one of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's cronies - John Feinblatt, the city's Criminal Justice Coordinator. The first words out of Feinblatt's mouth during that segment were provably false: "Everybody, at every level of law enforcement, federal, state and local has always known that the...

A 58-year-old Luling man will be keeping his nose clean for the next few years. Thursday Alfred Dwight Watkins was sentenced to ten months in federal prison for dealing firearms without a license. After his prison sentence he will be under supervised release for three additional years. The judge also ordered him to pay a $11,232 fine. Last August Watkins admitted to selling firearms at Austin and San Antonio gun shows even though his license had expired in 2003. According to authorities, Watkins admitted that in order to 'flip' more firearms he mislead customers by telling them they didn't need...

Sometimes the National Rifle Association needs to know when it’s time to lighten up. It pains us to say that, because the NRA has fought hard to keep the state and federal governments from denying responsible, law-abiding Americans from possessing and enjoying guns. But the organization jerked the trigger recently when it targeted Easthampton Mayor Michael A. Tautznik and other Western Massachusetts mayors because they had the temerity to join Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a national organization that works to deny irresponsible and criminal citizens from getting their hands on guns. It would take the logical skills of Aristotle to...

SAN FRANCISCO — With the close of this year’s legislative session fast approaching, a bill that would ban gun shows at the Cow Palace in Daly City is expected to go before the state Assembly by Sept. 11. SB 585, authored by Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, was approved in a 21-18 vote by the state Senate in June. The local community — the Cow Palace sits on the border of San Mateo County and San Francisco — doesn’t like the gun shows because they encourage illegal gun sales and violence, Leno told The Examiner. The location is near Sunnydale...