Free Republic

Oregon voters will decide this fall on a proposal that would require a permit for gun purchases and ban magazines higher than 10 rounds, except for current owners, law enforcement and the military. Initiative 17, the Reduction of Gun Violence Act, has surpassed the minimum number of signatures required, 112,080, Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan's elections division said Monday, Fox News reported. If approved, an applicant for a gun permit would be required to complete an approved firearm safety course, pay a fee, provide personal information, submit to fingerprinting and photographing and pass a criminal background check. The National...

The farmer fired twice at a group of four burglars who broke into his home, killing one of them. Emmanuel Macron believes that the farmer should have called the police instead. French President Emmanuel Macron has said that he is “opposed to self-defence” after a farmer was charged with murder for shooting four burglars who broke into his home. “According to the initial investigation, the farmer fired twice with a large calibre rifle at a group of four burglars, killing one of them. The self-defence shooting took place last Friday, between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m., and the man was...

More videos from WFAA on the Uvalde incident. Uvalde school massacre could have been stopped in 3 minutes, DPS says at Senate hearing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhiS-VsXscYKey takeaways from Tuesday's Uvalde school shooting hearing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPlSwA8DeQkAccording to the testimony given, Arredondo deliberately held back multiple SWAT teams. One Uvalde officer actually did press forward against orders to assault in, because it was his wife in the room. Other Uvalde officers detained him, took his gun away and kicked him out.

UVALDE, Texas — On Monday, KVUE and its news partners at the Austin American-Statesman exclusively obtained surveillance footage from inside Robb Elementary School on the day of the May 24 shooting. The footage shows that multiple officers were inside the building with rifles and at least one ballistic shield, 19 minutes after the gunman arrived. They didn't enter the classroom the shooter was inside for nearly another hour. Investigators believe this will prove to be a significant development as it indicates they had more than enough firepower and protection to enter that classroom before they actually did. Authorities have since...

Multiple officers were inside Robb Elementary School with rifles and at least one ballistic shield at 11:52 a.m. the day of the shooting, new video and other evidence shows. They didn’t enter the classroom for another 58 minutes. More soon via @statesman and @KVUE . 1/2

In another world, she could have been in the White House on Friday 3 June, heading into the final third of a two-term presidency. Instead she was in Colmans, a chippy in South Shields on Ocean’s Road, a weathered North Sea boulevard half an hour east of Newcastle. Hillary Clinton – the first female senator for New York, and a former first lady, US secretary of state, and Democratic presidential nominee – is now a private citizen, but she keeps a retinue fit for the powerful: four bodyguards perched nearby as I approached her, seated for supper and surrounded by...

An Alabama man who planted flowers on the gravesite of his fiancee and was arrested at the direction of the woman’s disapproving father was found guilty of littering this week. About a month after Winston “Winchester” Hagans got engaged, his fiancee, Hannah Ford, was killed in a three-car crash in January 2021 that shattered what was supposed to be the happiest time of their lives. To honor the 27-year-old, Hagans placed a planter box full of fresh flowers and photos of the two of them on her grave in Auburn, Ala. But earlier this year, Hagans was arrested on a...

The terms of the gun debate have been set so firmly and for so long that any attempt to venture past the slogans employed by the respective sides is typically met with derision. I suspect that, for many, there is very little thinking about this topic anymore; what is called argument is really just posturing or strategizing. Where there are no genuine questions being asked, there is no thinking. The participants in the debate come largely from two camps: on one side there are the gun enthusiasts for whom guns are an expression of identity and who therefore regard any...

The House passed a sweeping gun package on Wednesday in response to last month’s mass shootings in Buffalo, N.Y. and Uvalde, Texas, which killed more than 30 people and reignited the push for firearm legislation on Capitol Hill. The package, dubbed the Protecting Our Kids Act, passed in a 223-204 vote. One Republican did not vote. Two Democrats, Reps. Jared Golden (Maine) and Kurt Schrader (Ore.), bucked the party in opposing the measure. Five Republicans — Reps. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), Anthony Gonzalez (Ohio), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Chris Jacobs (N.Y.) and Fred Upton (Mich.) — supported it.

A car drove into a crowd of people in a busy shopping district in western Berlin on Wednesday, killing at least one woman and leaving six others with life-threatening injuries, authorities said. More than a dozen people in total were injured when the driver ploughed into people on Kurfuerstendamm avenue, near the landmark Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, at around 10:30 a.m. local time, according to the German capital's police and fire department. After slamming into the crowd, the small silver Renault careened toward Tauentzienstrasse, a tree-lined street popular with tourists, before crashing through a glass shop window.

Isabella County (MICHIGAN) Sheriff’s Office is feeling the pain at the pump as well. We have exhausted what funds were budgeted for fuel with several months to go before the budget reset. I have instructed the deputies to attempt to manage whatever calls are acceptable over the phone. This would be non-in-progress calls, non-life-threatening calls, calls that do not require evidence collection or documentation. Deputies will continue to provide patrols to all areas of the county, they will respond to those calls that need to be managed in person. Any call that is in progress with active suspects will involve...

"I feel guilty man, 'cause I couldn’t stop" Ramos, Briseno told NBC. "He was shooting at the windows, and I didn’t have my gun on me." He said the memory was refreshed with every grave he dug for a victim -- one of them for his own cousin. "It always plays in my head," he told NBC

Gov. Ron DeSantis red-lined the $35 million budget item approved by the House and Senate to build a youth sports complex in Pasco County. The Rays clearly hoped to move their spring training headquarters there from Port Charlotte. DeSantis gave two reasons for the veto. The first: the Governor said he doesn’t “support giving taxpayer dollars to professional sports stadiums, period.” He’s not wrong there. But the other reason was more in line with his “think like I do, or else” agenda. After the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, the Rays donated $50,000 to Everytown for Gun Safety. They tweeted: “We...

We never seem to get enough information in the hours and days immediately following a horrific crime, but after a few days or weeks have gone by, usually after the story has faded from the front page, the necessary backstory finally comes out. First, an “All Points Bulletin” on May 12 alerted the state of Texas that Gonzalo Lopez, a convicted murderer serving a life sentence, had just escaped from custody during a transfer, by breaking out of his transportation cage and stabbing the driver of the prison bus. He remained on the run for three weeks, using up precious...

Sen. Joe Manchin is open to discussing a federal ban on military-style semiautomatic rifles — commonly labeled assault weapons — as Congress debates how to respond to a recent wave of mass shootings. Mr. Manchin, West Virginia Democrat, said all ideas had to be on the table in discussions on combating violence.

Actor Matthew McConaughey used an Austin American-Stateman op-ed to push for more gun control as an “acceptable sacrfice” in the wake of high-profile, firearm-based shootings the U.S. His first recommended gun control is an expansion of background checks. The Magic Mike star wrote, “All gun purchases should require a background check.”

At today's House Judiciary Committee hearing, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) slammed Democrats' gun control legislation. Video... [5 mins 30 sec]

Left-wing HBO host John Oliver has dismissed calls for sending more police into schools following the deadly school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, saying that the solution is more gun control. In Sunday’s episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver launched an anti-police rant and cited a study claiming that a police presence in schools could even motivate shooters to come more heavily armed.

More than 250 Republican donors and self-described gun rights supporters penned an open letter this weekend calling for Congress to move on limited gun reform after an elementary school shooting in Uvalde left 19 children and two teachers dead. “Most law enforcement experts believe these measures would make a difference,” said the letter, according to The Texas Tribune. “And recent polls of fellow conservatives suggest that there is strong support for such gun-safety measures.” The letter, which ran as a full-page advertisement in The Dallas Morning News on Sunday, also expressed support for the work of Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas),...

In his Thursday night address to the nation, President Joe Biden laid the groundwork for a nationwide gun grab. During his remarks, he repeated his now-familiar argument that no amendment is absolute. Because disarming Americans is a subject dear to most liberals’ hearts, MSNBC’s far-left host Chris Hayes felt compelled to weigh in on the debate. Hayes on Twitter declared the conservative understanding of the Second Amendment as “an *obviously* deranged reading of it.” Hayes continued writing that “In fact, under a certain (once fringe, now common) reading, that’s the whole *point* of the second amendment. People should be sufficiently...