Free Republic

In the near future, Americans who own or want guns likely will be subject to rafts of new questions from social scientists, medical researchers and law enforcement officials intent to discover just what guns they own, why they own them and what they intend to use them for — not to mention where and how they keep them. They will also likely have more researchers poring over such issues as whether childhood education programs against gun violence actually work; whether there actually is any relationship between violence in the media and in real life; and whether the safety plans that...

The Affordable Care Act is So Unaffordable, Members of Congress and Their Aides are Quitting Because They Can't Afford It! BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, this is truly outrageous. There's a headline in The Politico today: "Obamacare? We Were Just Leaving..." And when I saw the headline, I thought it was gonna be an article about how Democrats are afraid of losing their seats because of all the skyrocketing costs of health premiums and all the other negatives associated with Obamacare. But that's not what this story is about. What this story's about is congressmen worried about themselves. In...

Submitted by Brannon LeBouefExecutive Summary: Yes, some guns were confiscated in New Orleans, LA (NOLA) following hurricane Katrina, but it was nowhere near as widespread as some would have you believe. They were isolated incidents and the majority of those were done by out of town LEO and MIL.What you are about to read are my personal experiences and recollection of events as I saw them. While not all-inclusive, I think they lend a fiar account of what really happened on the ground. Realities:While it has been nearly 8 years since the events of Hurricane Katrina, which in my opinion...

The White House signaled Monday that President Obama will delay signing a controversial arms trade treaty until after Congress leaves for summer recess. White House spokesman Jay Carney said the president aims to sign the pact “before the end of August.” Obama could have signed it as early as Monday. The National Rifle Association (NRA) opposes the treaty, and the delay would allow Obama to sign the pact during the August doldrums, with Congress out of town. That time frame appears to validate the concerns of treaty advocates who had worried the administration would wait until the cover of darkness...

. . . In the meantime, there are a number of actions President Barack Obama can take that do not require approval by Congress. We urge the administration to take additional actions using its existing authority both to improve the federal government’s ability to prevent dangerous individuals from acquiring or possessing guns and to enhance law-enforcement investigations of gun-related crime. . . . .

Oxfam America has long served as a reliable cheerleader for nearly all misguided United Nations policy. However, Oxfam America President Raymond Offenheiser’s Friday op-ed (“President should ignore fear mongering and sign arms treaty”) is an exceptional illustration of this blind allegiance. Offenheiser wants us to simultaneously believe the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty is both the single most important tool to cracking down on war crimes and that the treaty has absolutely no teeth whatsoever. That’s twisted logic for sure. Here’s the truth. The Arms Trade Treaty directly threatens the Second Amendment rights and privacy of American gun owners. Article 12...

Albany, N.Y. — After the passage in January of tougher gun restrictions in New York, sheriffs across the state have joined a federal lawsuit challenging the legislation “to reinforce the sheriffs’ position that portions of the (legislation) need to be changed and have a potentially negative impact on law-abiding citizens,” said Ontario County Sheriff Philip Povero. The New York State Sheriffs' Association and five individual sheriffs have added their position to the record in the lawsuit filed by the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association regarding the New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement (SAFE) Act of 2013. The...

The United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is scheduled to be signed by Barack Obama on June 4, this Monday. He has already said he will sign it. However, the United States Senate passed a resolution that they will not ratify the document. Now a letter has been sent to Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry by 130 members of the House of Representatives opposing the ATT. On May 30 the 130 congressmen wrote to remind both Obama and Kerry that they are supposed to be “defenders of the sovereignty of the United States and as such the...

Obama punts on signing UN arms trade pact opposed by NRA By Julian Pecquet - 06/03/13 12:00 PM ET President Obama will not immediately sign a United Nations arms trade treaty opposed by the National Rifle Association (NRA) but is committed to doing so shortly, Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday. Advocates for the pact had hoped the president would sign the treaty as soon as it became open for signatures on Monday, arguing that such a public display of support would create pressure on major arms dealers, such as Russia and China, to get on board. Kerry, however,...

Secretary of State John Kerry welcomed the opening of Arms Trade Treaty for signature today. The Obama administration plans on signing the treaty “as soon as the process of conforming the official translations is completed satisfactorily.” The United Nations passed sweeping legislation in April that will regulate the international arms trade and could lead to a national gun registry in the United States. No wonder Democrats love it! There’s more… In March the pro-Second Amendment Senate Bill 139 passed 53-46. 46 Democratic Senators voted against the bill which would: “Uphold Second Amendment rights and prevent the United States from entering...

Watching the celebration at the NRA convention over the defeat of background checks was the most nauseating experience of the day. I am not a New York gun control liberal, either. I support a shotgun for home defense, a handgun for limited conceal/carry, and an assortment of hunting rifles to balance West Virginia's exploding deer population (as evidenced by hourly collisions with cars). So, I am hardly out of the mainstream. But, the gun safety debate is B.S. This foaming at the mouth, Obamar is coming for the guns, Nanny Bloomberg is a bad billionaire, and most despicable of all,...

Obama To Sign International Gun Control Treaty On June 3rd On June 3, President Barack Obama will sign the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). The ATT passed in the U.N. General Assembly by a vote of 153-4 on April 2. This treaty is ostensibly aimed at putting an end to gun trafficking across international boundaries, and both Breitbart News and the NRA have argued that it will eventually require an international gun registry in order to be enforceable. The ATT also provides the executive branch of our government with broad powers for controlling which guns do and don't come into...

The Internal Revenue Service, charged with implementing the biggest change in tax laws in 20 years due to Obamacare, has created eight offices and special "teams" to handle the chore, way more than initially revealed. Besides the top office headed by the woman in the middle of the IRS-Tea Party scandal, there are seven others and a special enforcement team that make up an organization chart that mirrors the organization of the IRS itself, according to a Treasury Inspector General's report. The June report focused on concerns that the IRS, which is filling the Obamacare offices with 2,137 agents and...

The woman who ran the Internal Revenue Service's tax-exempt organizations division has been promoted, and now heads the agency's health-care office, ABC News reported. Sarah Hall Ingram was commissioner of the embattled IRS office from 2009 to 2012, roughly the period that the agency is accused of singling out Tea Party and conservative groups for extra scrutiny, based on nothing but their political bent. As a firestorm grows around the IRS, Ms. Ingram quietly left the tax-exempt office and was made director of IRS Affordable Care Act Division...

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation. Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today. Her successor, Joseph Grant, is taking the fall for misdeeds at the scandal-plagued unit between 2010 and 2012. During at least part...

So, we have learned that the IRS orchestrated systematic prejudice against Americans whose political views this administration's mobsters found distasteful. It order to decide upon whom to bestow what the law fully permits certain entities, regardless of their politics, some clever Brownshirts working for the most coercive governmental agency there is, decided that before these Americans would be denied their legal rights, they'd be made to dance for the enjoyment of liberal/progressive/Socialist bureaucrats. What sport! Equal treatment under the law has been made secondary to overt political intimidation by these fine administrators. No news here. Our Department of Justice is...

The public face of the National Rifle Association is imploring members to never surrender their weapons in the wake of recent gun control efforts in Congress that he said will "destroy us and every ounce of our freedom." Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre spoke in Houston during the organization's annual member meeting, which is part of the yearly convention. LaPierre told several thousand people that the "political and media elites" have tried to use December's shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school and other recent mass shootings "to blame us, to shame us, to compromise our freedom for their agenda."...

A new law in Kansas that criminalizes the enforcement of federal gun controls in the state is unconstitutional, Attorney General Eric H. Holder said. “In purporting to override federal law and to criminalize the official acts of federal officers, [the law] directly conflicts with federal law and is therefore unconstitutional,” Mr. Holder wrote to Gov. Sam Brownback in a letter dated April 26. “Federal officers who are responsible for enforcing federal laws and regulations in order to maintain public safety cannot be forced to choose between the risk of a criminal prosecution by a state and the continued performance of...

I have to wonder sometimes how some people reach the conclusions that they do. To be specific, let’s look at those who would say that we’d all have a safer society if only the government had guns. Right now it seems farfetched that anyone would agree to that. But the issue today is comprehensive gun owner registration and smaller clips. That nose under the tent now will easily lead to stricter rules when it is discovered, after another mass murder using legal arms, more restrictions will be necessary. Eventually only the government will have guns – much to the joy...

The Newtown killings had anti-gunners licking their chops from CNN to Capitol Hill. Years of working to undermine the right to keep and bear arms had come virtually to naught for gun confiscationists, but they knew the deaths of 20 children could be manipulated any way they liked, allowing them to make the most asinine and unsupportable claims imaginable about the evils of gun ownership. Call it a benefit of owning the national media. So Barack and friends spent months dancing on the graves of 20 sons and daughters while cooking up senate bills and executive “actions” advocating every conceivable...