Free Republic

President Obama wants tighter gun control laws, but he does appreciate that armed Secret Service agents protect his daughters every day on their way to school. "It might come in handy to have these super locks," Obama joked at Master Lock in Wisconsin, noting that he will soon have two teenage daughters. "For now, I'm just counting on the fact that when they go to school there are men with guns with them." The U.S. Secret Service has protected the presidential family since 1917.

As debates over firearms simmer and President Obama mulls sweeping firearm restrictions via executive orders, media personalities like Piers Morgan dismiss guests defending gun rights with contempt. You’d think resistance to disarmament amounts to culpability for the Sandy Hook slaughter. Yet, as John Lott’s bestseller, More Guns, Less Crime, highlights crime rates have tumbled while gun ownership has soared, including permits to carry concealed weapons. America has more murder than many similarly advanced countries, but overall violent crime, save inner-cities plagued by family breakdown, remains below peer nations. The streets in Mr. Morgan’s England are far more dangerous.

With the anniversary of the massacre in Newtown hitting a one-month anniversary and as Washington mulls gun control legislation, Second Amendment advocates are buying weapons in droves – including Latinos. With Vice President Joseph Biden set to deliver his recommendations for gun control legislation to President Obama, people in states with large populations of gun rights advocates are taking action. “There’s an image floating around the Internet naming Barack Obama firearms salesman of the year,” said Raúl Mas Canosa, a conservative political commentator. “No one has done more for the sales of firearms and magazines than Barack Obama.” He added:...

The National Rifle Association released a new video on its Web site Tuesday calling President Obama an “elitist hypocrite” for having Secret Service protection of his daughters at school but saying he was “skeptical” about installing armed guards in all schools. The NRA’s provocative, 35-second video is as harsh as any attack ad in a political campaign and illustrates how emotionally charged and personal the debate over gun control is becoming. “Are the president’s kids more important than yours?” a deep-voiced narrator asks. “Then why is he skeptical about putting armed security in our schools when his kids are protected...

Sources close to Binyamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that the Prime Minister would remain solid in his policies, especially regarding Israel's determination not to return to the 1948 armistice lines, despite the comments President Barack H. Obama reputedly made. The comments, published Tuesday by The Atlantic magazine, have Obama slamming Israeli decisions to build in Judea and Samaria. “Israel doesn't know what its own best interests are,” Obama is quoted as saying by author Jeff Goldberg. “With each new settlement announcement, in Obama's view, Netanyahu is moving his country down a path toward near-total isolation,” Goldberg writes. According to Goldberg, Obama...

One month after the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., President Obama attributed the recent surge of weapons sales to efforts by gun control foes to arouse fears that the federal government would seize firearms. Obama said he would unveil details of his "sensible, common-sense" program for tighter gun controls later this week. The president, responding to questions at a White House news conference Monday, said those steps would include "an assault weapons ban that is meaningful," stronger background checks and measures to keep high-capacity magazine clips "out of the hands of folks who shouldn't have them." Asked at his news...

The DC Council wants him to -- specifically one that says "Taxation without Representation." Two members of the council are headed to the White House to meet with administration officials Friday, and they are bringing the new plate with hopes that President Obama will agree to put it on his limousine. If not permanently, then at least during the Inaugural parade. "If the president would put the plates on, I think it would lift our spirits," Councilmember Mary M. Cheh told POLITICO. "It's important that people know the situation we're in." The council unanimously passed a resolution earlier this week...

The Obama administration will let no political opportunity go to waste. Tomorrow, the President will unveil his gun control agenda surrounded by children who wrote him letters in the aftermath of the Newtown tragedy. Not surprisingly, children from around the country have been frightened by the mass murder at Sandy Hook elementary. They have been influenced by the non-stop media coverage of the horrible incident and are worried about safety in their own schools.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: The media are just salivating today. Politico, the Washington Post, the New York Times. Folks, they can barely keep their pants up, they are so excited. (interruption) Yeah. (sigh) They might not laugh at that, either. Yeah, some of them are wearing pants. They're all excited over Biden's proposals. Nineteen proposals to try to limit the availability of guns. Nineteen proposals to get around the Second Amendment. Many of these 19 proposals will come via executive order -- and if they do, they will be illegal. Executive orders are not intended to be used this way. Executive...

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) is threatening to file articles of impeachment against President Barack Obama if he institutes gun control measures via executive order. “I will seek to thwart this action by any means necessary, including but not limited to eliminating funding for implementation, defunding the White House, and even filing articles of impeachment,” Stockman said in a statement Monday, according to the Daily Caller. The Weekly Standard reported that Obama used the final press conference of his first term in office Monday to offer some details on Vice President Joe Biden’s expected gun control recommendations: “My understanding is the...

This is a guest post by the Very Honorable Ima Librul, Senator from the State of Confusion Utopia. He recently explained some of his difficulties in growing pineapples and focuses here on other major problems and opportunities facing modern American society. We are privileged to have a post of this caliber by a quintessential Librul such as the Senator, a charter member of President Obama's Go For It Team. Restrictions on firearm use and ownership will stimulate individual initiative, redistribute wealth and end welfare as we know it.BackgroundMany conservatives have written harshly of President Obama's splendid modernization of our welfare...

Eldon Bell, a retired Air Force officer and physician, is making no plans to see Barack Obama’s second inauguration, in part because Bell considers the president arrogant and dishonest, but more so because Bell is not yet persuaded that the swearing-in will occur at all. “Whether I watch depends on who’s being inaugurated,” says Bell, 78. “If it’s this guy, probably not, because I don’t pay much attention to illegitimate things.”

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States. Now, we were told last week that Biden was heading up a commission made up of administration officials and cabinet officials on what to do about guns and the increasing proliferation of guns. One of the things that Biden suggested was they're looking at legislation, executive orders, so forth and so on. The Politico, a joyous Politico, I should say, has a story today: "The White House has identified 19 executive actions for President Barack Obama to move unilaterally on gun control." This is what Biden told a...

If President Obama and congressional Democrats are going to make headway on the gun violence proposals Vice President Joe Biden is set to deliver to the president on Tuesday, their strategy will probably look a lot like gun-owning Rep. Mike Thompson – and move with the energy and purpose of political cage fighter Rahm Emanuel. Representative Thompson (D) of California remembers where he was on Dec. 14, the day of the Newtown, Conn., school shooting. He was in a duck blind, back home in his Napa Valley district. “Federal law prohibits me from having more than three shells in my...

Since the Affordable Care Act was implemented, there have been many “complications” to implementing the law. One of the most recent was the majority of states choosing to not run a state-based health care exchange. On December 18, however, Cato’s Michael Cannon picked out another one: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act imposes a $2,000-per-worker charge on employers only if one of their employees receives a “premium assistance tax credit,” and the act authorizes those credits only if states create their own exchanges. If a state opts instead for a federal exchange, as more than 30 states have, the...

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announced this afternoon that President Obama will unveil a “concrete package” of gun control proposals including assault weapons bans, high capacity ammunition magazine bans, and closing loopholes on background checks. Carney said that the president will be joined by Vice President Joe Biden as well as children who wrote to the president after the Newtown shootings. “They will be joined by children around the country expressing their concerns about gun violence and school safety, along with their parents,” Carney confirmed. (See video of Carney's remarks here.) President Obama specifically mentioned children during his December...

"In a sour footnote to President Barack Obama's sweeping electoral victory last November, many of his campaign staffers have been shut out of the inaugural festivities, more than a dozen of them complained to BuzzFeed Monday."

If(snip)you still doubt that Big Guy is this generation’s “great communicator” you still don’t get it.   “I hear you. With my left ear.” You must still be hung up on last century’s model of a “great communicator” – someone whose convictions were based on the solid values that made America great and who spoke his mind and convictions simply, directly and honestly.     You really need to get with the program: this is the 21st century! The new “great COMmunicator” model also speaks his mind and convictions simply, directly, albeit a bit dishonestly.   (snip)you can’t win hearts...

The United States might just as well send Jared Lee Loughner or, if he was still alive, Adam Lanza, to represent it in the world community, and this is no exaggeration. John Kerry is, per his own admission, a mass murderer just like Loughner and Lanza or, to use his own words, Genghis Khan. John Kerry: Admitted Felon, Liar, or Both There is a huge legal difference between an admitted felon and a convicted felon. Neither John Kerry nor Barack Obama's friend William Ayers was ever convicted of a felony, but both said they committed felonies. Ayers said he was...