What no politician wants to admit about gun control – Fortunately, no one wants to take away your guns.
But let’s be clear about precisely what kind of decision is letting events like this recur. Congress’s decision not to pass background checks is not what’s keeping the US from European gun violence levels. The expiration of the assault weapons ban is not behind the gap. What’s behind the gap, plenty of research indicates, is that Americans have more guns. The statistics are mind-blowing: America has 4.4 percent of the world’s population but almost half of its civilian-owned guns.
Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.
Obama DOJ Forced FBI To Delete 500,000 Fugitives From Background Check Database – But remember, gun violence is the NRA’s fault . . .
The Justice Department under Barack Obama directed the FBI to drop more than 500,000 names of fugitives with outstanding arrest warrants from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, acting FBI deputy director David Bowdich testified Wednesday.
Fugitives from justice are barred from buying a firearm under federal law. But what is a fugitive from justice? That definition has been under debate by the FBI and the ATF.
According to The Washington Post, the FBI considered any person with an outstanding arrest warrant to be a fugitive. On the other hand, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives defined a fugitive as someone who has an outstanding arrest warrant and has crossed state lines.
Here’s Why We Didn’t Walk Out of School Yesterday – A couple of skulls with less mush than the their peers . . .
“What happened in Florida is terrible,” says Clayton, a 16-year-old Garnet Valley sophomore and a highly decorated Eagle Scout. “If this were about that, I would have participated, but that’s not what this is about. This was entirely political. In the original email from the school, it said this was being planned by the Women’s March, which protested Trump’s inauguration. I realized this was political and all about gun control.”
Clayton says that his peers who marched claimed that the event was nonpolitical — and that was certainly the party line being held by the national organizers — but Clayton rejects that idea.
“Just because they say it’s nonpolitical doesn’t mean it is,” he says. “What if Trump says he wanted to host a walkout in honor of all the babies aborted, the millions of them? A completely optional walkout. You wouldn’t be forced to do it. The reaction to that would be completely different than to this walkout.”
Ohio-Based Kroger to Remove Magazines with “Assault” Weapons from Stores Nationwide – Now the (dead tree) magazines are going, too . . .
Distributors for the stores have been given a two-week timeline to accomplish the removal.
Specifically, the announcement calls for:
— Removal of magazines with Assault Weapons content
— Placement of Non Assault gun titles to the Top Tier of mainline
— Verify placement of Non Assault gun titles are next to Teen titles or Kids books
Your Right To Free Speech, Like My Right To Self-Defense, Isn’t Open To Debate – There are at least 325 million guns out there . . .
Where this lands us is that even if today’s protesters get their way and legislators vote to impose restrictions on gun ownership and self-defense, that doesn’t mean that those of us who value those rights will change our conduct. Statutes aren’t like the law of gravity—we get to choose whether we’re going to abide by them, or else actively oppose them and sabotage their enforcement. The laws will mostly be obeyed by people who agree with them and disobeyed by people who are either specifically committed to self-defense rights or who more broadly believe that their liberty isn’t open to challenge. I’ve argued elsewhere, only slightly jokingly, that tighter gun laws will leave libertarians better-armed than everybody else—because we’re not very likely to pay them much attention.
The track record on disobeying such laws is very clear. Residents of Connecticut and New York defied requirements that they register their so-called “assault weapons.” Gun owners in Colorado ignored mandates that they pass all their person-to-person sales through the background check system. Even the French and Germans flip the bird to laws that gun-haters can only dream of imposing in the United States, owning millions of illegal firearms that supporters of restrictions wish they didn’t have.
Bay Area coffee shop won’t serve police for ‘safety of customers’ – What kind of response time do you think they should expect for a 911 call?
A coffee shop in Oakland is refusing to serve law enforcement officers for the “physical and emotional safety of our customers and ourselves,” according to the shop’s social media.
Hasta Muerte Coffee, an employee-owned co-op, will not serve officers in uniform and turned away an officer a few weeks ago, as reported by NBC Bay Area.
The sergeant who was turned away from the shop a few weeks ago said he was surprised by employees refusing to serve him, but walked out without any incident or any coffee.
Coffee shop workers did not respond to requests for comment on the policy, but a post on their Instagram account showed a photo with writing in Spanish that says, “Talk to your neighbors, not the police.”
Shaquille O’Neal’s solution for safer schools is more cops; says gun ban not the answer – He’s roughly the equivalent of two Colin Kaepernicks . . .
“The government should give law enforcement more money,” he said on WABC Radio on Wednesday, via ESPN. “Give more money, you recruit more people, and the guys that are not ready to go on the streets, you put them in front of the schools. You put ’em in front of the schools, you put ’em behind the schools, you put ’em inside the schools, and we need to pass information. … I would like to see police officers in schools, inner cities, private schools.”
O’Neal points out that the prevalence of weapons already on the street would make a ban counterproductive, and allow the black market to thrive.
“There’s a lot of those weapons already on the streets,” O’Neal said. “So it’s not like, if you say, ‘OK, these weapons are banned,’ people are gonna go, ‘Oh man, let me turn it in.’ That’s definitely not going to happen. [Because] once you ban ’em, now they’re going to become a collector’s item and you’re going to have people underground, and they were $2,000. … I’ll give you $9,000 for that gun. So, you know, we just need to keep our eyes open.”
Poconos gunmaker’s vision: an AR-15 for every American – Is Kahr Arms getting into the AR business? . . .
“I’m going to make a standard AR-15 with my brand on it,” he said. “The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in America. It’s the most common rifle in America.”
The NRA estimates that eight million Americans own an AR-15. It has also been used in five of the six deadliest mass shootings in the nation in the last six years, most recently in the Parkland, Fla., massacre.
Moon said he follows state and federal firearms laws but does not support age restrictions, limitations on specific guns, or even bans on the bump stock, an attachment that uses a semiautomatic rifle’s recoil to fire even faster — the reason why Stephen Paddock was able to kill so many people in Las Vegas last year. In fact, Moon believes the Founding Fathers intended the Second Amendment to evolve with the times, that citizens should be allowed to own any firearms they can literally carry in order to match the government’s firepower.
After Parkland, Companies Are Selling Uncertified Bulletproof Backpacks – Caveat emptor . . .
BackPack Armor claims its bulletproof insert is “level IIIA certified” and “makes every book bag bulletproof.” Level IIIA–certified products protect against most handgun threats: .357 SIG FMJ flat nose bullets at a velocity of 1,470 feet per second or less, and 44 magnum semi-jacketed hollow-point bullets at a velocity of 1,430 feet per second or less, according to the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the Justice Department agency that oversees body armor used by law enforcement.
But BackPack Armor’s backpack inserts are not NIJ certified — none are. The agency has never certified such products; it hasn’t even tested them. “Marketing that claims NIJ testing or certification for such products is false,” it said in a Feb. 28 statement. And level IIIA-certified products do not not protect against assault rifle fire, like the kind unleashed in Parkland. (A previous statement on BackPack Armor’s site that said it does not guarantee protection against an AR-15 round has since been removed.)