Sessions: Bump fire stocks can be banned through regulation – The U.S AG reckons he can make it so . . . “Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Tuesday that he believes bump fire stocks can be effectively banned through regulation, teasing that an announcement from the Justice Department would be coming soon . . .
“We’ve had to deal with previous (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) legal opinions but our top people in the Department of Justice have believed for some time that we can, through the regulatory process, not allow the bump stock to convert a weapon from semi automatic to fully automatic,” Sessions said at a gathering of state attorneys general in Washington.
Dems introduce bill banning assault weapons – This is how Democrats lose elections . . .
Reps. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) and Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) formally introduced a bill to ban assault weapons.
The legislation, called the Assault Weapons Ban of 2018, was introduced less than two weeks after the mass shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school that left 17 people dead. The gunman used an AR-15 assault weapon during the shooting, one of the many firearms that would be banned under the bill.
The legislation would make it “unlawful for a person to import, sell, manufacture, transfer, or possess, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, a semiautomatic assault weapon.”
However, the ban wouldn’t apply to semi-automatic weapons that were “lawfully possessed” when the measure went into effect.
An AR-15 “Blessing” Event In Pennsylvania Is Basically Forcing A Nearby School To Close – Forcing? Basically? Journalism? . . .
The Wallenpaupack Area School District in Pennsylvania recently announced it will be closing one of its elementary schools due to a nearby, church-led semi-automatic rifle blessing event on Wednesday. While the superintendent of the school district, Michael Silsby, told parents that there is “no direct threat” to students from the event, he cited traffic issues and the “nature of the event” as reasons for the closure.
Why Dozens Of Mass Shootings Didn’t Change Americans’ Minds On Guns – Not one word about the Second Amendment . . .
Habituation to terrorism can actually have something of a useful function — by defusing the sense of vulnerability that acts of terror are designed to cause, habituation can prevent terrorism from being effective — but becoming acclimated to repeated violence also creates the sense that these are uncontrollable events for which there’s no clear solution, according to Dov Waxman, a professor of political science at Northeastern University who has studied terrorism and mass violence in Israel. As a result, he said, the public may not exert much pressure in favor of any particular course of action.
Breaking down the NRA-backed theory that a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun – ABC ain’t got time for armed self-defense and a LOT of time for any study “proving” it’s a bad idea.
[Stanford University Law Professor John] Donohue told ABC News that the research “concluded that allowing citizens to carry handguns seems to increase violent crime 13 to 15 percent by the 10th year” of the laws being enacted in the state.
Another takeaway from the NBER report is that the presence of the gun could turn a would-be good guy into an intentional or unintentional bad guy.
Donohue and his co-authors cited the infamous 2012 case of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer who got into a deadly confrontation with teenager Trayvon Martin.
“Presumably, George Zimmerman would not have hassled Trayvon Martin if Zimmerman had not had a gun, so the gun encouraged a hostile confrontation, regardless of who ultimately becomes violent,” the report stated.
Donohue said the Zimmerman case was one of several that he found where “these guys are likely to be more aggressive.”
“The presence of the gun actually stimulates more provocative action and ends up getting people killed,” he said.
CNN Analyst Insults all Women with “Carrying Guns Is Not Practical” Comment – And they say NRA members are stuck in the 50’s . . .
“For a woman, where are you going to hide that gun during the day?” He continued with another question, “If you wear a dress, if you wear a skirt, are you going to have to wear a jacket everyday with a belt and a holster the way a detective on duty would do?”
When the likes of Delta Airlines and Hertz turn against the NRA there is finally hope for change – It may make SJWs feel all warm and fuzzy but I’d bet dollars to donuts (or Starbucks’ egg bites) that the anti-NRA corporate jihad is driving people to the gun rights group . . .
The annual meeting of the National Rifle Association this May in Dallas, Texas, will be a bit different. Gun aficionados from across the land will have to get there by foot and wagon, because no airline or bus line will give them carriage. Forget renting a car. The Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Centre will be bereft of outside food services. They’ll need tents too.
Not quite, of course. They are going to Texas, not Boston or Santa Monica. . . .
This shift in corporate calculation is about the bottom line. They are reading consumer sentiment. The downside from alienating the NRA and its supporters is now outweighed by the greater risk that being seen to support them will result in a loss of customers and public prestige. . . .
That so many companies are putting their heads over the parapet now should give us hope, however, that finally something meaningful will happen to tackle America’s gun violence scourge. They are acknowledging what the country’s political leaders – so many of whom still suckle at the NRA teat –continue willfully to ignore.
But politics is a customer-based business too, and eventually its practitioners in America, even Republicans, will have to catch up.
Our Childish Gun Debate – Useful or useless depending on your perspective, Parkland Florida’s teenage gun control advocates are idiots.
The public debate about how Congress ought to respond to this latest mass shooting is guided by two broad principles. Dubious on their own, they are even more witless when combined. The first is the idea that the most important thing is to “do something.” The second is that we ought to look to high-schoolers for the answer.
As goes CNN so goes the nation. The high-schoolers who survived Mr. Cruz’s Valentine’s Day massacre are taking to Twitter , TV and Tallahassee statehouse rallies to pressure politicians to “do something.” In response, some on the right, entirely missing the point, have accused them of being “actors” or “scripted” by the news media.
These teens do not need to be scripted. Their youth and earnestness makes it all but impossible for any adult to advance a counterargument without looking indifferent to the horror these kids have been through. If you don’t agree with what they want, they seem to suggest, you’re OK with mass shootings—as Mr. Rubio and Ms. Loesch found out the hard way.
Quick show of hands for those with children: How many of you look to your teens for political wisdom, whether it’s the daughter obsessing over her Snapchat streaks or the son who would spend his day eating Doritos and binge-gaming “Grand Theft Auto” if you let him?