Free Republic

by John HillStand With Arizona Three weeks after the shooting in Sandy Hook, CT, when politicians were using the murders as an excuse to grab the guns of law-abiding Americans, one lawman was calling instead for school kids to be defended. Maricopa Country, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio denounced efforts to ban guns, saying "bad guys will always get their guns", and that gun control "never solves the problem". So on January 9th the Sheriff announced he would deploy 500 armed volunteers to patrol outside 59 schools in metropolitan Phoenix.  Joe's 3,000-strong “Posse”  has participated in the many “immigration sweeps” the Sheriff...

Well, get a load of this. On Sunday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein appeared on Fox News to discuss last week’s attack in Boston and terrorism in general, and Chris Wallace wondered whether the people in locked-down Boston last week, with concerns that “this fellow might be on the loose, might break into their house, might take hostages — would people like to have had guns?” “Oh, some may have, yes,” replied Feinstein. (VIDEO-AT-LINK) But it isn’t just “some” Americans who would be partial to having the means to defend themselves from violent criminals on the loose in their neighborhood; as it...

Overreach: The gun control bill lets doctors put your name in the national criminal background check system without telling you. Can the government say you're crazy and take your guns? It's already happening. The road to deeper gun control seems like another road paved with good intentions. Since many recent mass shootings have involved shooters with varying degrees of mental impairment, the desire to keep guns out of the genuinely mentally ill seems to be a worthy goal. Yet it is being exploited with definitions so vague and undefined, and with controls so lax, as to become not a means...

Bat Man: A Chicago store owner beats off two armed thugs with a baseball bat as Missouri illegally shares concealed carry records with feds and New York matches private health records with gun permits to take firearms. President Obama, who campaigns for gun control between concerts at the White House and golf outings with Tiger Woods, once famously used the metaphor that in politics if they bring a knife to a fight, you bring a gun. On Tuesday, in the gun-controlled murder capital of Chicago, the president's hometown, store owner Luis Quizhpe, an Ecuadorean immigrant, had no gun, but he...

Global Gun Control: Despite a prior Senate rebuff, President Obama will likely sign and push a treaty embraced by the world's oppressors and thugs who fear armed citizens. The treaty's prior rejection by the Senate 53-46 in a nonbinding test vote as part of the budget debate in a body where a two-thirds vote to ratify is required would seem to doom the United Nations pact endorsed by the Obama administration. However, the president will likely sign it and, as is his custom these days, try to enforce key provisions by stealth, executive order and by "common-sense" regulations and restrictions....

Justice: A murdered Chicago teen's mother attends the president's speech on gun control, not knowing federal gun-crime prosecutions have in fact dropped on his watch — with the Windy City bringing up the rear. Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, the mother of murdered 15-year-old Chicago teen Hadiya Pendleton, was one of 20 mothers who lost children to criminal violence who were at the White House last Thursday to hear President Obama speak once again on the need for gun control. Obama met with her and some of the others in a small group before his formal remarks and told them "how serious this...

Has the moment passed for tighter gun restrictions? President Obama himself raised that question Thursday at a White House event aimed at revitalizing the prospects for legislation, 100 days after a Connecticut elementary school massacre that shocked the nation. Flanked by families affected by gun violence, the president made an emotional plea for action and insisted it’s not too late. “The notion that two months or three months after something as horrific as what happened at Newtown happens, and we’ve moved on to other things?” he said. “That’s not who we are.” Next Wednesday, Obama will travel to Colorado to...

SACRAMENTO — One of the most controversial gun-control bills introduced in California this year — a move to seize the 166,000 registered assault weapons grandfathered in under the state's ban — is dead, its author said Thursday. When Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Oakland, introduced AB174 in January, it was designed to declare the Legislature's intent to end all "grandfather clauses" allowing ownership of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. But on Tuesday, he gutted and amended the bill to address public-school health centers instead. Coincidentally, it was the same day that U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he won't include Sen....

<p>HELENA, Mont. - A bill that would allow concealed carry without a permit is shooting toward passage after receiving the Senate's initial endorsement.</p> <p>House Bill 304 would allow people carry concealed weapons within city limits without obtaining a concealed-carry permit. The measure is one of the many pro-gun measures on the docket this session.</p>

U.S. Rights: As the world body meets this week to hammer out an agreement to restrict international arms trade, our Secretary of State commits us to pushing a treaty that may also restrict our Second Amendment rights. Last Friday, the day of the week when unpopular or controversial announcements are traditionally made, Secretary of State John Kerry announced U.S. support for the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), a final version of which is being hammered out in New York beginning this week. Certainly the ATT is controversial. Touted as a means of getting a handle on an international arms...

The author of a new book tries to reconcile his personal politics with his fondness for firearms. (Italics in original.) Dan Baum is not your typical gun guy. He has a lifelong love of firearms he can trace back to the age of five. But he's also a Jewish Democrat and a former staff writer for The New Yorker and feels like a misfit next to most gun owners, who identify overwhelmingly on the conservative side of the spectrum. In order to bridge this gap, Baum set off on a cross-country journey, chatting with everyone from a gun store owner...

Guns: An Illinois court has ruled that the Second Amendment means what it says and has ordered the state legislature to adopt a law by June that lets citizens bear arms in self-defense, not just keep them. On Feb. 22, a 5-4 majority of the 10-member U.S. Seventh Court of Appeals upheld the Dec. 11 decision, which had been rendered by a three-member panel, to address absurdity and inconsistency of Illinois gun laws that allowed ownership of a firearm, but not the right to carry it outside the home. In other words, the "right to keep but not to bear...

Many in America think that we are so heavily armed as a population that we could never be disarmed. But consider Russia. They were free under the Tsar and one of the most heavily armed societies. That all changed when Stalin and the communists took control. Stalin was able to control, starve, punish and imprison a defenseless people… after he took their guns. Now an internal Department of Justice memo is out which indicates that Barack Obama and company are talking gun confiscation with a forerunner of federal gun registration, says Tim Brown on thedailysheeple.com. He goes on to say...

Gun Control: On his way to a play date with the world's most famous golfer, President Obama stops in America's most violent city to push universal background checks that Chicago's violent street gangs will totally ignore. Janay McFarlane, 18, was killed late Friday just hours after her younger sister joined a group of teens onstage for President Obama's speech in Chicago on gun violence. McFarlane was shot to death hours after her little sister, Destini, 14, sat just feet away as Obama spoke in the aftermath of the similar murder of Hadiya Pendleton. The 15-year-old Pendleton was gunned down in...

A 25-year-old Iraq war veteran charged with murdering former Navy SEAL and "American Sniper" author Chris Kyle and his friend turned a gun onto the pair while they were at a Texas shooting range, authorities said Sunday. [No more pasted due to AP restrictions. Please read entire article.]

It's about time for some bipartisan...skeet shooting? Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tennessee, joined a chorus of skeptics who questioned President Barack Obama's recent comments about his hobby of skeet shooting, a sport where participants fire shotguns to break airborne clay disks. "If he is a skeet shooter, why have we not heard of this? Why have we not seen photos? Why hasn't he referenced this at any point in time?" Blackburn said Monday on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront." "I tell you what I do think," she later added. "I think he should invite me to Camp David, and I'll go skeet...

The current debate over the constitutionally guaranteed “right of the people to keep and bear arms” has shed more heat than light, despite a Supreme Court ruling that individuals, and not simply “well-regulated militias,” possess this right. For both liberals and conservatives have sold this right short. Liberals have been gnashing their teeth over the Court ruling, and are seeking to circumvent it by “regulating” firearms. Thus, President Obama now proposes that certain dangerous-looking rifles be banned and ammunition be strictly controlled. That this proposal has more to do with leftist ideology than public safety is demonstrated by the fact...

FAIRFIELD — Connecticut Against Gun Violence has proposed a tough legislative agenda that would expand the definition of an assault weapon and ban them from the state, including all such existing firearms. CAGV also in its proposal would not grandfather in all large capacity magazines of more than seven rounds that, along with the assault weapons, would have to be destroyed, turned over to police or taken out of Connecticut. New York just adopted a law that reduces the largest capacity magazine from 10 bullets to seven bullets. Connecticut Against Gun Violence is a nonprofit formed in 1993 to advocate...

Amid the media swirl surrounding possible gun control measures after the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre just last month, many pro-gun advocates are speaking out. Musicians are no different. Zoltan Bathory, guitarist of Five Finger Death Punch, used his Facebook page to discuss his annoyance at the media and the concern that his guns will be confiscated by the government, despite the fact there is no evidence to back up that fear. Bathory writes: "Let's talk about 'assault' rifles for a second. Anti-gun advocates in the media placing all the emphasis on the word 'ASSAULT' for a reason. It sounds menacing...

To the editor: A recent editorial called for unlimited gun ownership to defend against the government. I hear this argument a lot, but what good is your AR-15 when you're fighting the full force of the United States military? All they have to do is drop a smart bomb on your house from high above and you're done. You wouldn't even see it coming. Alternatively, they could simply run over your house with a Kevlar-plated M1 Abrams tank, or shell your dwelling from cannons positioned far away. I support the right to bear arms to protect your home and family...