Free Republic

Over the course of the last half-century, the media has botched its coverage of numerous high profile crimes. Sometimes, the reporting is intentionally inaccurate because the reporter is interested in advancing a certain worldview, rather than simply reporting the news. Among the worst examples of this is the now 51-year-old story of the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese. You’ve probably heard the story before. Genovese was returning from her job as a bartender in the middle of a March night in Queens, New York, in 1964. A man named Winston Moseley who had raped and killed other women attacked...

Gun-control advocates are learning the downside of getting their way. Recently, a federal judge struck down the District of Columbia's ban on the carrying of concealed handguns. Anti-gun forces have been losing in legislatures for a long time. Now they are finding that even where they win, they lose. Washington used to have the strictest gun laws in America. Besides the prohibition of concealed guns, all firearms had to be registered and handgun ownership was forbidden. The restrictions had no evident effect on crime: In the 1990s, the nation's capital was known as the murder capital. But they invited...

You and I avoid visiting the doctor by eating well. Doctors like Lee Silverman carry concealed in order to care for us when we do need them. Doctors and medical professionals should be allowed to carry concealed. Last week, a psychiatrist named Dr. Lee Silverman technically broke the letter of the law by carrying concealed at work. He courageously saved innocent lives by pulling his trigger on a mad gunman before anyone else scarcely had time to dial 911. On July 24, a 49-year-old patient of Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital smuggled a loaded firearm into the Darby, Pennsylvania medical complex. Richard...

Politics is dominated by sound bites meant to generate emotion, not rational discourse. One of the most dominant sound bites in recent North Carolina politics is that the law now allows people to carry "guns in bars." Upon hearing those three words, "guns in bars," people recoil in horror. The very idea that North Carolina is full of bars where people are packing heat is enough to make tourists avoid the state altogether. However, when one compares the old gun law with the new one, things make perfect sense. On October 1st, North Carolina's absolute ban on handguns in...

In a nation that already has more than 200 million guns, gun control does little other than make the work of rapists, robbers, murderers and nuts like Adam Lanza easier. When faced with gun control laws, the law abiding citizen has no choice other than to disarm or become an outlaw, but people with bad intentions are faced with no such moral dilemma. That's why the best friend of a rapist or a potential Adam Lanza is the gun control advocate who's working tirelessly to insure that his targets can't adequately defend themselves. On some level, even diehard advocates...