Alfonzo Rachel - Wake Up Obama. Drugs Are the Problem - Not Guns

President Obama traveled to Mexico and blamed American guns for drug violence. So why won't he blame drugs and the people who use them? Find out on this ZoNation as AlfonZo Rachel discusses drugs, immigration and the real causes of gun violence.

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Bob Just - Gun Control in America

This is a powerful and historic video. It was edited from various media sources after the tragic 1989 Stockton schoolyard shooting. It shows that after a quarter of a century, the "gun controllers" still use the same old method. They create an hysterical media atmosphere in order to affect polls and scare politicians into passing gun control laws that do nothing but give criminals a greater advantage while limiting the freedom of law-abiding citizens.

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Michael Barone - Obama and the Democrats Could Not Beat the NRA

Glenn Reynolds talks to Michael Barone about President Obama's failure to push gun control legislation through the Senate. Has Obama lost his persuasive abilities, or is he asking too much from congress and the American people? Could the real problem be that President Obama has never encountered true dissent in his political life? Find out.

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NRA News - Colion Noir - Responsibility

Colion Noir addresses Vice President Joe Biden's inability to give advice on gun safety and home protection.

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Massad Ayoob - The President Is A Sore Loser

When I heard the news that the Senate had failed to pass a Universal Background Check, I was at a police seminar on the topic of active shooters. The panelists had agreed that “active shooter” was a poor descriptor, one noting that some attackers use other weapons, such as the blade-wielder in the recent Texas case. (And, of course, the Boston Marathon bombing was fresh in everyone’s mind.) Another panelist, a retired SWAT lieutenant who has responded to such things for real, pointed out that an active SHOOTER is what it takes to stop an active MURDERER.

When a retired police chief on the panel announced that he’d just received a text that the UBC had failed to make it through the Senate, the police audience erupted into applause. So much for the idea that cops all want to restrict your gun ownership. The real cops know where the problems are, and that they ain’t coming from people like you.

Alas, the White House is out of tune with that reality.

A very angry Chief Executive declares that Senators who see reality and prevent what’s best described as “the tyranny of the (uninformed) majority” have somehow subverted the process. He then manages, with practically the same lungful of air, to spout bogus statistics and simultaneously accuse those who told the truth of willful deception.

My favorite part was watching Vice President Biden’s face, in the Senate chamber during the vote and at the President’s side during the above-mentioned press conference shortly thereafter. The man does one hell of a good Grumpy Cat impersonation, and one “safu” on the Internet has come to the same conclusion.

Massad Ayoob

Massad F. Ayoob is an internationally known firearms and self-defense instructor.

Massad Ayoob has authored several books and more than 1,000 articles on firearms, combat techniques, self-defense, and legal issues, and has served in an editorial capacity for Guns Magazine, American Handgunner, Gun Week, and Combat Handguns.

Massad Ayoob was former Vice Chairman of the Forensic Evidence Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), and is believed to be the only non-attorney ever to hold this position.

http://massadayoobgroup.com/

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Jeannie DeAngelis - Michelle Obama Supports Gun Control that Doesn’t Work

First Lady Michelle Obama recently headed home to the Southside of Chicago where she dipped her perfectly exercised toe into the gun violence debate.

Mrs. O arrived in the city that has enacted the most stringent gun-control laws in America to address local business leaders on the problem of gun violence. Oddly, Michelle forgot to consider the possibility that gun legislation is the reason for the high percentage of gun-related deaths in Chicago.

Richard A. Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association, believes that “The gun laws in Chicago only restrict the law-abiding citizens and they’ve essentially made the citizens prey.”

Yet the anti-gun Left keeps on keeping on in the push to make it even more dangerous for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves. The Left’s argument is that stricter gun laws outside of Chicago would ensure that fewer illegal guns make it into Chicago. It’s sort of like the liberal argument that freezing weather is proof of global warming.

David Spielfogel, senior adviser to Hizzoner Rahm Emanuel, agrees and argues that “Chicago is not an island. We’re only as strong as the weakest gun law in surrounding states.” So in other words, if nothing else works to convince Americans to willingly relinquish their Second Amendment rights, what might do the trick is having Michelle Obama stress that dead children in Chicago are only dead because of relaxed gun laws in other states.

That sort of rationale coincides with the bizarre legalistic belief that if you remove junk food from school cafeterias and vending machines, when the chubby kids leave school grounds, rather than mainlining Fluffernutter, raw string beans will become their after-school snack of choice.

And so it seems that the anti-gun lobby is firmly convinced that the cure for gun violence is to nationalize what has failed so miserably in Chicago. Which raises the question: What is it about the Obamas that if something isn’t working, they work on it even harder?

Even more stunning is that supporters of an administration that purposely funneled guns into Mexico are now blaming Chicago’s crime rate on guns making their way into the Windy City from outside the city limits.

That must be why Michelle gave up her fantasy of being Beyoncé for the day, and rather than equate herself with Brian Terry and Jamie Zapata and hundreds of dead Mexicans shot with Eric Holder-provided high-power weapons, said this: “Hadiya Pendleton was me, and I was her.”

Speaking to concerned business leaders, Mama Obama compared herself to “a walking angel” who, soon after attending Obama’s Second Inauguration, was tragically cut down while talking with friends in Vivian Gordon Harsh Park.

After Hadiya’s murder, Michelle rushed to Chicago to attend the teen’s funeral and invited her parents Nate and Cleo to sit beside her in the State of the Union sky box. Excelling at the liberal practice of exploiting death for political purposes, Mrs. Obama reminded her audience that in Chicago burying a child is not unusual and that young people are killed after “wandering onto the wrong street… [or]… standing on their own porch.”

About Hadiya’s funeral, Michelle said:

"Let me tell you, it is hard to know what to say to a room full of teenagers who are about to bury their best friend…I told them that there is a reason that we’re here on this earth, that each of us has a mission in this world, and I urged them to use their lives to give meaning to Hadiya’s life."

Clearly, Mrs. Obama believes she has a “mission in this world,” and that that self-appointed mission involves assisting her husband in mitigating the Constitutional rights of law-abiding Americans. So to accomplish that goal, posing as an anti-gun raconteur Michelle relayed the heart-wrenching story of Hadiya’s untimely death.

According to Shelley O, “Hadiya’s family did everything right, but she still didn’t have a chance.” And so, because Cleo and Nate couldn’t keep their child safe, liberals like Michelle Obama who hold the collective view that our children are their children plan to step in to implement legislation they mistakenly believe saves lives.

Hey somebody, please tell Michelle Obama that while she was in Chicago speaking to business leaders about eliminating gun violence, an unarmed lunatic in Texas stabbed 14 people with a knife.

In Chicago, the first lady’s work was to get business leaders to agree that in the long run the survival of a future little Michelle Obama far outweighs the preservation of the tenets and freedoms that have abided for two centuries in the US Constitution.

The first lady’s purpose in going to Chicago was not to discuss reality, nor was it to reveal intriguing autobiographical insights about how she and Hadiya Pendleton are a lot alike. Instead, the true purpose of the trip was to prod America further along the road toward a society whose power-hungry government claims it’s attempting to eradicate gun violence by disarming its people.

Jeannie DeAngelis

Jeannie DeAngelis writes almost exclusively for American Thinker and has been published on the conservative website Pajamas Media, as well as hosting a blog. See Jeannie's Blog

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Massad Ayoob - From the CNN - Giffords Perspective

Late last January, a Fox commentator noted that CNN had turned into a 24/7 “gun control” telethon. And now, on the evening of April 9, I sit here watching what CNN has called a two-day special devoted to exactly that topic.

It is focusing on background checks. No surprise: the gun prohibition movement nationwide has lasered in on the exact same thing. They’ve been doing it for a while, ever since they realized that both the “assault weapon ban” and the “high capacity magazine ban” are being increasingly recognized as illogical and meaningless…as, indeed, they were proven to be the last time they were enacted.

The “opening shot” of the “two-day blast” (puns intended) centered on Gabby Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly. Before she was shot by psycho Jared Loughner, Rep. Giffords was a conservative Democrat who staunchly supported gun owners’ civil rights. She owned a Glock 19 pistol exactly like the one Loughner used, and to their credit, her husband admitted that. He also admitted that he and his wife owned a slightly larger capacity version of the same gun, the Glock 17, which he fired obligingly at a backyard plinking range for the CNN cameras.

The Glock 19 pistol holds 15 rounds in its standard magazine, and the Glock 17 contains 17 rounds when its standard magazine is full. Each will take one more round in the firing chamber when fully loaded. Kelly made a big point of the fact that Loughner had used extended 33-round magazines in the weapon he used in the massacre.

Interesting, that, though Giffords and Kelly have now become icons in the “gun control” movement that wants to limit everyone to 10-round magazines (and New Yorkers to only 7), neither seems to have even symbolically given up their standard capacity magazines “evil high capacity assault magazine clips.”

“Sean AZ” commented in the last blog entry below this one that it looked to him as if the backstop Kelly was shooting at on CNN was unsafe. And in a previous entry here I commented on the disingenuous hypocrisy Kelly demonstrated recently in his purchase of a “high capacity assault rifle,” to wit the SIG version of an AR15. (The gun shop where he bought it refused to complete the transfer. When I am next in Tucson, I want to shake the hand of the gun shop owner who made that decision.)

So far in this particular stage of the “we gotta have universal background checks” CNN marathon, it appears that folks think we gun people want it to be legal for criminals to buy guns on the street, or have their girlfriends buy guns for them. Nothing could be further from the truth. That’s already against the law, and has been for a very long time, and it’s us gun people who rage against the Obama/Holder Justice Department’s failure to prosecute more than a token number of criminals who do so. So far, even Anderson Cooper, the point man on this particular CNN blitz, doesn’t seem to be aware of the quicksand of creating felons out of a husband who leaves a gun at home with his wife, or parents who bequeaths a family heirloom gun to heirs, which lies in some of the currently suggested “background check” legislation passes. (Please see the blog entry below this one.)

To Cooper’s credit, while he’s obviously not “pro-gun,” he’s trying to show both sides like a professional journalist, in stark contrast to his fellow CNN denizen, Piers Morgan. Having been forced out of his journalism career in England by a hoax he perpetrated as a journalist, and a phone-tapping scandal, Morgan gets about half the ratings Anderson does. Anderson has already, honestly, brought out the fact that Loughner PASSED a background check when he bought the gun he later used that terrible day in Tucson.

My heart goes out to Gabby Giffords. It pains me to see what the brain damage inflicted on her by a monster has done. I can only wish she’d been carrying her own Glock 19 on that day, and seen the evil little monster in time to stop him.

In recent days, we’ve seen a senior proponent of the full capacity magazine ban reveal that she didn’t have a clue how either magazines or stripper clips worked, and neither apparently did her research assistants.

It was a moment of absolutely monumental cluelessness. It’s as if a denizen of Capitol Hill was pushing legislation to limit how much fuel you could have in your vehicle’s tank, and to limit your family car to low speed…and you discovered that the legislator had never driven an automobile and didn’t know a steering wheel from a spare tire. Not long before that gaffe, we saw Governor Cuomo push through the SAFE Act in New York State, not only limiting the public to seven cartridges in the magazine but crafting the legislation so sloppily that he and his minions didn’t realize they had written it to apply to police as well. This sort of thing reflects a level of ignorance on a par with the politician who, last year, made it clear he thought an island would tip over if too many people were located on one side of it,

or the candidate last year who declared that women’s bodies had some magic mechanism that kept them from getting pregnant if they were raped.

Such things should be taught in civics classes, as a warning to the electorate.

In the wake of it all, thankfully, more middle-of-the-road citizens are re-examining the whole “assault weapons/high capacity magazines” propaganda blitz, and seeing the mendacity and futility hidden therein. Yet pundits still tell us that the shining hope of the gun prohibitionists is “reasonable, common sense universal background checks.” Here, stalwart gun owners’ civil rights activist David Kopel explains all the bad stuff that hides in the proposed legislation: National Review.

Massad Ayoob

Massad F. Ayoob is an internationally known firearms and self-defense instructor.

Massad Ayoob has authored several books and more than 1,000 articles on firearms, combat techniques, self-defense, and legal issues, and has served in an editorial capacity for Guns Magazine, American Handgunner, Gun Week, and Combat Handguns.

Massad Ayoob was former Vice Chairman of the Forensic Evidence Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), and is believed to be the only non-attorney ever to hold this position.

http://massadayoobgroup.com/

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Dana Loesch - Left's Assault on Ammo

States take unprecedented steps to curb Second Amendment rights.

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Frederick Su - On gun rights and the Second Amendment

First published by Northwest Asian Weekly, Seattle, March 23, 2013

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Following the Sandy Hook shootings, gun control is back on the books, with Obama and like-minded people pushing for an “assault weapons” ban. They decry such weapons as high-capacity, high-powered arms designed to specifically kill people, implying the 2nd Amendment is for hunting.

Yes, weapons kill. That is their purpose. For good, they kill other animals for meat and kill criminals, enemies, terrorists, or tyrants and their soldiers. America was born and remains free through force of arms. Realize, too, pacifists live by the grace of warriors.

Think “assault weapons” (semiautomatic rifles) don’t have a defensive purpose for civilians? Think again. In April 1992, Korean business owners armed themselves with AR-15s and AK-47s in South Central Los Angeles when riots occurred following the acquittal of four white policemen in the Rodney King beating. Businesses were being burned to the ground and police were nowhere to be found. As Richard Rhee said, “Burn this down after 33 years? This is my market and I’m going to protect it.”

The 2nd Amendment is not about hunting. It was framed because the colonists had fought a war against tyranny. Tyrants confiscate weapons. General Gage, Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces in North America, had confiscated weapons from citizens in Boston and then later tried to confiscate arms and ammunition in Concord and Lexington in April 1775. That ignited the Revolutionary War. If hunting is implied at all, then the implication is to hunt tyrants and their minions.

Another specious claim by liberals is that the Founders would never have allowed semiautomatic rifles to be owned by private citizens. Well, consider this. King George’s redcoats are coming down the road intent on pillaging and killing colonists in an attempt at subjugation. Wow! Should the colonist go get his bow and arrow or should he get the most up-to-date weapon he can so as to repulse this attack and, hopefully, survive?

The founding generation spent blood and lives fighting tyranny. They wanted to ensure that the progeny of their genes would remain a free people and that their ideas would become a beacon of freedom to the world.

Hence, the Constitution was born, the greatest document ever conceived by man. The Founders were touched by God. The 2nd Amendment provides teeth for all the other rights in the Bill of Rights.

A recent New York law, pushed by Governor Andrew Cuomo (D), requires registration of assault weapons.

Cuomo favors gun confiscation. If that occurs, many liberals, like Cuomo, mistakenly expect American gun owners to relinquish their guns, as the citizens of the U.K. and Australia did. The liberals will be abetted by the news media, who will show Joe Gunowner turning in his weapons, making America a safer place.

Not so. Many American gun owners hold the 2nd Amendment near and dear to their hearts, a principle they will fight and die for. If gun confiscation becomes law, three things can happen. One, nothing changes because the law cannot be enforced. Two, if enforcement begins, civil strife will ensue, perhaps with martial law. (Think Prohibition—and alcohol wasn’t even guaranteed by the Bill of Rights — with its black market and widespread lawlessness.) America will now have become a more dangerous place, not only for gun owners, but also for the general population at large, as well as for law enforcement personnel, the National Guard, and the military—the latter three who will be tasked with enforcement. Though all of the latter three have sworn an oath to the Constitution, including the 2nd Amendment, there will always be myrmidons. Third, in the worst case scenario, civil war will erupt. Last time, 600,000 Americans died.

As Larry Correia wrote in his WordPress gun-rights blog, “How many of your fellow Americans are you willing to have killed in order to bring about your utopian vision of the future?”

We can work to reduce gun violence by imprisoning criminals, executing convicted murderers, institutionalizing violently unstable people, and arming teachers. We don’t need to make more gun laws, thus making the uber-majority of gun owners criminals.

Gun control advocates had best tread carefully. Many New York gun owners have blogged that they will not register their assault weapons under Cuomo’s new law. So, the ball is in Cuomo’s court.

America, overall, is a safe, peaceful place. The idealistic vision of registering, banning, and confiscating weapons to make America safer may, instead, slide us down a slippery slope toward civil strife and, perhaps, civil war.

Please. Let’s step back from the abyss.

Frederick Su

Frederick Su is an ex-Marine of the Vietnam era, holds a Ph.D. in physics, and is the author of An American Sin, a novel about an Asian American and Vietnam. He is also an NRA member, characterizing the NRA as “The greatest civil rights organization in the world.”

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NRA News Commentary Colion Noir

Colion Noir as many of you know from YouTube, has been swooped up by NRA News to be a weekly contributor. Noir’s first NRA News video was released this morning, and it is a good one.

Titled “Politics and Ignorance,” the video goes after Washington politicians and those in America who use the ‘inner city’ as a pawn in their gun control agenda. Noir points out the hypocrisy of the gun control crowd who uses inner city crime data to disarm the rest of America. Noir says these people never care about the inner city until their privileged communities are hit by a mass shooting.

“Before that violence came knocking on your front door, you didn’t care what happened in the inner cities. So don’t start caring now because you think it advances your agenda.”

Noir’s hiring by the NRA has set off a firestorm of media meltdowns labeling the NRA as racist for trying to appeal to Black youth’s in America via Noir’s image. Not fitting a traditional mold, Noir presentation and perspective perplexes gun control advocates who are intimidated by his dynamic delivery.

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NRA - Biden Control

"...to keep someone away from your house, just fire through the dood."
VP Joe Biden
Interview with Field and Stream 2/25/2013

Taking Joe Biden's advice will get people hurt or killed and land you in jail.

Female Advice from Joe Biden

NRA - We Are America

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Star Parker - Preserve Gun Rights - Save Black Lives

This past Friday [2-15-2013] my organization, CURE, sponsored a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, to bring attention to the importance of rigorously defending the right of all Americans, guaranteed under the 2nd Amendment of our Constitution, to own a gun.

Our event provided a forum for black leaders from the world of politics and public policy in Washington, from the business community, from academia, and from the clergy to express their deep concern about efforts currently underway to limit our God-given and constitutional individual right of self-defense.

Why would an organization like CURE, whose mission focuses on the relevance of American values of faith and freedom to minorities, be so concerned about guns?

Because, as conservative black Americans, we know that the soul of America is kept alive with the free flow of the oxygen of freedom. And we know that when that flow is interrupted in any way, the group that suffers first and most are blacks.

New gun control initiatives coming from our President and from Democrats in congress to respond to a highly publicized tragedy by wanting to expand the power of government and limit the freedom of citizens comes as no surprise.

There is no problem facing America today that liberals do not believe should be solved by more government and less freedom. And liberals are consistent and predictable in their indifference to facts and experience that show whenever they do succeed in growing government and limiting freedom, they make matters worse, not better.

A substantial body of research already shows that gun controls empower criminals and weaken law-abiding citizens.

As John Lott, former chief economist of the US Sentencing Commission, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “With just a single exception, the attack in Tucson last year, every public shooting in the U.S. in which three or more people have been killed since at least 1950 have occurred in a place where people are not allowed to carry their own firearms.”

Regarding black reality, blacks are the least armed, least protected and defended, and the most assaulted citizens in our country.

According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 42 percent of whites and 16 percent of blacks say that they have a pistol or rifle at home.

And, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, for the period 1980 to 2008, “Blacks were six times more likely than whites to be homicide victims and eight times more likely to commit a homicide.”

Law abiding black citizens live under siege in crime ridden urban centers. Somehow they are supposed to buy the logic that giving more power to those in law enforcement already charged with maintaining order but don’t, while stripping down the freedoms of those that do obey the law, will make them better off?

In a Pew Research Center survey in 2009, 46 percent of whites compared to 24 percent of blacks said they have a “great deal” of confidence in the local police to enforce the law.

Can anyone whom God has blessed with a brain actually think that universal background checks will keep guns out of the hands of gang thugs? Or that these same checks, in which some past legal infraction might nullify a gun application, will not result in even fewer urban law abiding blacks obtaining a weapon for protection?

Perhaps even worse than another make-pretend big government “answer” that will not only not solve a problem, but will make it worse, gun control initiatives mask over the issues that really need attention.

A culture that devalues personal responsibility, that fosters government dependence, that trashes traditional understanding of sex, marriage, and family, and that bans these traditional values from our public schools and our public life.

Americans of all backgrounds must fight yet another misguided liberal attempt to undermine our personal freedom and sap the vitality of our nation.

Star Parker

Black conservative leaders discuss how the NRA was created to protect freed slaves and how important the 2nd Amendment is to ALL Americans.

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Wayne LaPierre - the Real Consequences of Universal Background Checks

In addressing a crowd at the 2013 Western Hunting and Conservation Expo in Salt Lake City, Utah, NRA CEO and EVP Wayne LaPierre says that universal background checks are at the heart of the Obama administration's anti-gun agenda. While that may sound reasonable, background checks are aimed at one thing — registering your guns. "When another tragic 'opportunity' presents itself," says LaPierre, "that registry will be used to confiscate your guns."

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William Sullivan - Weighing the Gun Control Argument

Originally posted at American Thinker.

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It is a bit misleading to call our current national discussion about gun control a "debate." Simply put, politicians and the media directing the discussion aren't interested in evidence or conclusions contrary to those that they have a vested interest in disseminating. They are interested merely in silencing any opposition, and they rely on their devoted acolytes to continue empowering them to do so.

It's about belief for these acolytes, not proof. Because they believe in the moral imperative, whether or not facts support their beliefs is unimportant. They just blindly accept that what they've been told is true, and they look upon those who believe otherwise as dangerous heretics.

Yet in a somewhat intellectually quixotic self-perception, these gun-control zealots declare themselves the rational thinkers on the subject and believe their conclusions infallible, despite the fact that the hypotheses to which they are so devoted are rarely measured in the crucible of evidence.

Consider the most basic of their arguments -- that access to guns needs to be restricted by the government, because access to guns is the most convincing variable that determines murder rates in our society. Let's just briefly weigh that assertion in the balance, and see how well it holds up to scrutiny.

In 1960, data suggests that there were roughly 77.5 million guns owned by a population of just over 179 million, meaning that there was somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.3 guns per 10 Americans. In that year, the murder rate in America was roughly 5.1 per 100,000 Americans.

Fast-forward to 2009. According to a Congressional Research Service report by William J. Krouse, 310 million guns were owned by Americans in that year by a population estimated to be 307 million, meaning there were probably more guns in America than there were Americans.

Now pause a moment, and remember that gun-control advocates contend that there exists a positive correlation between the number of readily accessible guns and the number of murders. If true, we might expect such a surge in gun ownership (and guns that are owned are as readily accessible as guns get) to yield a much higher murder rate. But in fact, the murder rate was lower in 2009 than in 1960 -- at 5.0 per 100,000 Americans.

Such inconsistency and an obviously flawed hypothesis might send a reasonable person back to the drawing board. But gun control zealots just double down and get more specific. Currently, the fashionable tactic is to appear a bit centrist by suggesting that it's not all guns or the Second Amendment that they oppose, but rather just those scary looking semi-automatic guns people call "assault weapons" and high-capacity magazines. No one needs that kind of gun, and no one needs to fire that many bullets, they argue.

In terms of the practical purpose of the Second Amendment -- that is, the preservation of individual liberty -- it should be obvious, as I have argued before, why such weapons and such payloads are essential, and explicit in the verbiage of the Second Amendment is unquestionable proof that the federal government has no legal right to infringe upon a law-abiding American's right to own them. But since it is a common objection among the left that supporters of gun rights cling to their archaic Constitution (or that "little book," as Piers Morgan calls it), rather than just accepting the idea that a new assault weapons ban would curtail violence, let's examine a bit of data surrounding their claim.

That data can tell a pretty simple story to those willing to hear it. The 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004, and in that year, the murder rate was 5.5 per 100,000 Americans. In 2011, that murder rate had declined to 4.7 per 100,000 Americans, which, incidentally, is the lowest murder rate in nearly four decades. If the laws banning "assault weapons" were so incredibly effective, why have murder rates significantly fallen since it expired? Not only did the federal government lift laws restricting "assault weapons," but since then, many states expanded "concealed carry" rights, meaning that guns were all the more prevalent in public life during these years, with both criminals and the law-abiding being totally aware of that fact -- and the result was a lower murder rate.

This is not to say the data shows a constant trend opposite of the one that gun control advocates suggest. Murder rates have vacillated in big swings throughout the years, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, despite the fact that gun ownership has steadily increased. Therefore, we must accept that more guns don't always result in less murder, either, in terms of the data. The point, however, is that the primary hypotheses that are the foundation of current gun control arguments are fatally flawed. Neither the presence of guns (whether semi-automatic or outfitted with a large payload) nor the laws restricting them (which lawless murderers invariably ignore) are the most convincing variable that determines rates of murder in this country.

It would certainly be valuable to have a discussion about how we can best reduce incidents of murder in America. But it should be a discussion based upon reason, not emotional agendas to rob Americans of their fundamental liberties based upon specious and unsubstantiated arguments. There are far more convincing variables to explain high rates of murder, whether we're talking about large quantities of unheralded murders or isolated and sensationalized killing sprees. And regarding the latter, considering that it has recently surfaced that Adam Lanza's likely motivation for the massacre in Newtown was to surpass Oslo spree-killer Anders Breivik in notoriety, it might make sense that we examine the practical impact of the self-centered nature of our culture that values celebrity above all things. And maybe it is a good idea to address the media's sensationalism of the actions of demented spree-killers like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Seung-Hui Cho, Jared Loughner, Anders Breivik, and Aurora shooter James Holmes, all of whom were granted larger-than-life notoriety by the media for their actions.

But at these suggestions, gun control advocates generally return full circle to that flawed argument with which we began -- that fewer guns and more gun control are the answer to curtail murder in America. It's as if the above-mentioned data roundly disproving the claim never existed, and they go on arguing their hypothesis in other ways, like comparing this place that has gun control to that place that doesn't.

For example, gun-control advocates are very quick to point out that England has a lower murder rate than America and extremely restrictive gun control laws. Notably absent from these keen observations, however, is the multitude of comparisons where the opposite is true, such as a comparison between America and, say, Russia, which has extremely strict gun control laws and few guns, but a murder rate that eclipses our own.

Of course, they generally neglect to use domestic examples, too, and with good reason -- the opposite of their contention is almost invariably true in domestic comparisons. Urban areas, for example, typically have stricter gun control laws and lower rates of gun ownership than rural areas, yet they have much higher murder rates. And then there is the glaring example of Obama's hometown, Chicago, which proudly touts its extremely progressive gun control laws while owning the highest murder rate in the nation. But that doesn't stop the devout masses from cheering in passionate agreement when the president suggests, with a repetitive cadence that would make Goebbels proud, that Chicago-style gun regulation be applied federally.

The implication of such ignorance is too grave to find any humor in that sad irony.

The hypothesis we should be discussing is that cultural factors are much more convincing variables correlating to murder rates. Take the consideration that widespread poverty and unemployment could have potentially contributed to the spike in murder rates in the late seventies, or that the proliferation of a culture of gang violence likely contributed to the sustained high murder rates in the early nineties, or the possibility that our current culture of celebrity and sensationalized violence is perhaps now leading to isolated spree-killing endeavors, if one is to take Adam Lanza's supposed motive into consideration.

If there is to be any progress in the gun control "debate," America must forego the commonly held fallacy that gun regulations upon the law-abiding will regulate the lawless. Until then, we may be doomed to have reasonable arguments against gun control fall on deaf ears.

William Sullivan

Political Palaver is a blog created by William Sullivan and Calvin Parker and is intended to be an outlet for thoughts and ideas about current events and politics.

William Sullivan blogs at http://politicalpalaverblog.blogspot.com/ and can be followed on Twitter.

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Why is Gun Control An Important Issue?

Gun Control is Genocide. Why? Because throughout history, citizen disarmament has always been a precursor of mass genocide carried out by government gone bad. The term for it is "democide."
In the last century, governments have murdered 262 million people -- far more than have died on the battlefield in all the wars combined. Government becomes extremely dangerous when it controls all the firepower while the citizenry controls none. This imbalance of power leads to genocide.

The Second Amendment is the one right that defends all other rights.

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Women and Guns Discussed on The Five

Rep. Joe Salazar, D-Thornton, was criticized for comments he made Monday in defense of a bill to prevent concealed weapon carry on college campuses. From a published video:
“There are some gender inequities on college campuses. This is true. And universities have been faced with that situation for a long time. That’s why we have call boxes. That’s why we have safe zones. That’s why we have the whistles. Because you just don’t know who you’re going to be shooting at. And you don’t know, if you feel like you’re going to be raped, or if you feel like someone’s been following you around, or if you feel like you’re in trouble and when you may actually not be, that you pop out that gun and you pop, pop around at somebody.”

Michelle Malkin - Colorado Resident:

Malkin said she has seen similar passive defense recommendations on other colleges’ websites, such as Oregon State University, State University of New York and University of Wisconsin. But advising women to arm themselves is a self-defense tip Malkin said is missing.

“It’s this nanny-state paternalism that I think is extremely dangerous to women,” Malkin said. “The idea that women can’t be trusted to make their own self-defense choices, that was the message that Joe Salazar sent, and it’s the message that a lot of these anti-gun college administrators send.”

Malkin said she supports concealed carry on campuses and wants to make sure her own daughter is comfortable protecting herself with a gun.

“I support freedom of choice when it comes to self-defense methods,” she said. “Unlike a lot of these democratic men, I don’t think women should only have whistles, call boxes and ball-point pens to defend themselves against violent sexual predators.”

Aired February 2013

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Katie Pavlich versus Leslie Marshall Debate: Disarming Women

Condescending Democratic Rep. Joe Salazar of Colorado asserted that young women can't be trusted to assess threatening situations at their colleges or universities: "It's why we have call boxes, it's why we have safe zones, it's why we have the whistles," Salazar said during floor debate. "Because you just don't know who you're gonna be shooting at. And you don't know if you feel like you're gonna be raped, or if you feel like someone's been following you around, or if you feel like you're in trouble when you may actually not be..."

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NRA - We Are America - We're Free Already and We Allow Politicians to Be In Power

Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and all other elite politicians trying to marginalize the law-abiding, average American must never forget that they work for us.

Click HERE to join the NRA.

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Daniel Greenfield - Guns Guns Guns

Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog

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If you're the biblically minded sort, then the trouble began when a jealous Cain clubbed Abel to death, but if you're evolutionarily minded, then it's a 'chicken and egg' question. Violence had no beginning, except perhaps in the Big Bang, it was always here, coded into the DNA. If people are just grown-up animals, more articulate versions of the creatures who eat each other's young, and sometimes their own young, there is as much use in wondering about the nature of evil as there is in trying to understand why a killer whale kills.

But debating how many devils can dance on the head of a pinhead is largely useless. We are not a particularly violent society. We are a society sheltered from violence. No one in Rwanda spends a great deal of time wondering what kind of man would murder children. They probably live next door to him. For that matter, if your neighborhood is diverse enough, you might be unfortunate enough to live next door to any number of war criminals, all the way from Eastern Europe to Asia to Africa.

The issue isn't really guns. Guns are how we misspell evil. Guns are how we avoid talking about the ugly realities of human nature while building sandcastles on the shores of utopia.

The obsession with guns, rather than machetes, stone clubs, crossbows or that impressive weapon of mass death, the longbow (just ask anyone on the French side of the Battle of Agincourt) is really the obsession with human agency. It's not about the fear of what one motivated maniac can do in a crowded place, but about the precariousness of social control that the killing sprees imply.

Mass death isn't the issue. After September 11, the same righteous folks calling for the immediate necessity of gun control were not talking about banning planes or Saudis, they were quoting statistics about how many more people die of car accidents each year than are killed by terrorists. As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy; three thousand deaths can always be minimized by comparing them to some even larger statistic.

The gun issue is the narrative. It's not about death or children; it's about control. It's about confusing object and subject. It's about guns that shoot people and people that are irrevocably tugged into pulling the trigger because society failed them, corporations programmed them and not enough kindly souls told them that they loved them.

Mostly it's about people who are sheltered from the realities of human nature trying to build a shelter big enough for everyone. A Gun Free Zone where everyone is a target and tries to live under the illusion that they aren't. A society where everyone is drawing unicorns on colored notepaper while waiting under their desks for the bomb to fall.

After every shooting there are more zero tolerance policies in schools that crack down on everything from eight-year olds making POW POW gestures with their fingers to honor students bringing Tylenol and pocket knives to school. And then another shooting happens and then another one and they wouldn't happen if we just had more zero tolerance policies for everyone and everything.

But evil just can't be controlled. Not with the sort of zero tolerance policies that confuse object with subject, which ban pocket knives and finger shootings to prevent real shootings. That brand of control isn't authority, it's authority in panic mode believing that if it imposes total zero tolerance control then there will be no more school shootings. And every time the dumb paradigm is blown to bits with another shotgun, then the rush is on to reinforce it with more total zero control tolerance.

Zero tolerance for the Second Amendment makes sense. If you ban all guns, except for those in the hands of the 708,000 police officers, the 1.5 million members of the armed forces, the countless numbers of security guards, including those who protect banks and armored cars, the bodyguards of celebrities who call for gun control, not to mention park rangers, ambulance drivers in the ghetto and any of the other people who need a gun to do their job, then you're sure to stop all shootings.

So long as none of those millions of people, or their tens of millions of kids, spouses, parents, grandchildren, girlfriends, boyfriends, roommates and anyone else who has access to them and their living spaces, carries out one of those shootings.

But this isn't really about stopping shootings; it's about controlling when they happen. It's about making sure that everyone who has a gun is in some kind of chain of command. It's about the belief that the problem isn't evil, but agency, that if we make sure that everyone who has guns is following orders, then control will be asserted and the problem will stop. Or if it doesn't stop, then at least there will be someone higher up in the chain of command to blame. Either way authority is sanctified, control or the illusion of it, maintained.

We'll never know the full number of people who were killed by Fast and Furious. We'll never know how many were killed by Obama's regime change operation in Libya, with repercussions in Mali and Syria. But everyone involved in that was following orders. There was no individual agency, just agencies. No lone gunman who just decided to go up to a school and shoot kids. There were orders to run guns to Mexico and the cartel gunmen who killed people with those guns had orders to shoot. There was nothing random or unpredictable about it. Or as the Joker put it, "Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying."

Gun control is the assertion that the problem is not the guns; it's the lack of a controlling authority for all those guns. It's the individual. A few million people with little sleep, taut nerves and PTSD are not a problem so long as there is someone to give them orders. A hundred million people with guns and no orders is a major problem. Historically though it's millions of people with guns who follow orders who have been more of a problem than millions of people with guns who do not.

Moral agency is individual. You can't outsource it to a government and you wouldn't want to. The bundle of impulses, the codes of character, the concepts of right and wrong, take place at the level of the individual. Organizations do not sanctify this process. They do not lift it above its fallacies, nor do they even do a very good job of keeping sociopaths and murderers from rising high enough to give orders. Organizations are the biggest guns of all, and some men and women who make Lanza look like a man of modestly murderous ambitions have had their fingers on their triggers and still do.

Gun control will not really control guns, but it will give the illusion of controlling people, and even when it fails those in authority will be able to say that they did everything that they could short of giving people the ability to defend themselves.

We live under the rule of organizers, community and otherwise, whose great faith is that the power to control men and their environment will allow them to shape their perfect state into being, and the violent acts of lone madmen are a reminder that such control is fleeting, that utopia has its tigers, and that attempting to control a problem often makes it worse by removing the natural human crowdsourced responses that would otherwise come into play.

The clamor for gun control is the cry of sheltered utopians believing that evil is a substance as finite as guns, and that getting rid of one will also get rid of the other. But evil isn't finite and guns are as finite as drugs or moonshine whiskey, which is to say that they are as finite as the human interest in having them is. And unlike whiskey or heroin, the only way to stop a man with a gun is with a gun.

People do kill people and the only way to stop people from killing people is by killing them first. To a utopian this is a moral paradox that invalidates everything, but to everyone else, it's just life in a world where evil is a reality, not just a word.

Anyone who really hankers after a world without guns would do well to try the 14th Century, the 1400 years ago or the 3400 years ago variety, which was not a nicer place for lack of guns, and the same firepower that makes it possible for one homicidal maniac to kill a dozen unarmed people, also makes it that much harder to recreate a world where one man in armor can terrify hundreds of peasants in boiled leather armed with sharp sticks.

The longbow was the first weapon to truly begin to level the playing field, putting serious firepower in the hands of a single man. In the Battle of Crecy, a few thousand English and Welsh peasants with longbows slew thousands of French knights and defeated an army of 30,000. Or as the French side described it, "It is a shame that so many French noblemen fell to men of no value." Crecy, incidentally, also saw one of the first uses of cannon.

Putting miniature cannons in the hands of every peasant made the American Revolution possible. The ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution would have meant very little without an army of ordinary men armed with weapons that made them a match for the superior organization and numbers of a world power.

At the Battle of Bunker Hill, 2,400 American rebels faced down superior numbers and lost the hill, but inflicted over a 1,000 casualties, including 100 British commissioned officers killed or wounded, leading to General Clinton's observation, "A few more such victories would have shortly put an end to British dominion in America."

This was done with muskets, the weapon that gun control advocates assure us was responsible for the Second Amendment because the Founders couldn't imagine all the "truly dangerous" weapons that we have today.

And yet would Thomas Jefferson, the abiding figurehead of the Democratic Party, who famously wrote, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants", really have shuddered at the idea of peasants with assault rifles, or would he have grinned at the playing field being leveled some more?

The question is the old elemental one about government control and individual agency. And tragedies like the one that just happened take us back to the equally old question of whether individual liberty is a better defense against human evil than the entrenched organizations of government.

Do we want a society run by the flower of chivalry, who commit atrocities according to a plan for a better society, or by peasants with machine guns? The flower of chivalry can promise us a utopian world without evil, but the peasant with a machine gun promises us that we can protect ourselves from evil when it comes calling.

It isn't really guns that the gun controllers are afraid of, it's a country where individual agency is still superior to organized control, where things are unpredictable because the trains don't run on time and orders don't mean anything. But chivalry is dead. The longbow and the cannon killed it and no charge of the light brigade can bring it back. And we're better for it.

Evil may find heavy firepower appealing, but the firepower works both ways. A world where the peasants have assault rifles is a world where peasant no longer means a man without any rights. And while it may also mean the occasional brutal shooting spree, those sprees tend to happen in the outposts of utopia, the gun-free zones with zero tolerance for firearms. An occasional peasant may go on a killing spree, but a society where the peasants are all armed is also far more able to stop such a thing without waiting for the men-at-arms to be dispatched from the castle.

An armed society spends more time stopping evil than contemplating it. It is the disarmed society that is always contemplating it as a thing beyond its control. Helpless people must find something to think about while waiting for their lords to do something about the killing. Instead of doing something about it themselves, they blame the agency of the killer in being free to kill, rather than their own lack of agency for being unable to stop him.

Daniel Greenfield

Visit Daniel's Blog Sultan Knish by clicking HERE

Daniel Greenfield is a blogger and columnist born in Israel and living in New York City. Daniel is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a contributing editor at Family Security Matters.

Daniel's original biweekly column appears at Front Page Magazine and his blog articles regularly appear at Family Security Matters, the Jewish Press, Times of Israel, Act for America and Right Side News, as well as daily at the Canada Free Press and a number of other outlets. Daniel has a column titled Western Front at Israel National News and his op eds have also appeared in the New York Sun, the Jewish Press and at FOX Nation.

Daniel was named one of the Jewish Press' Most Worthwhile Blogs from 2006-2011 and his writing has been cited by Rush Limbaugh, Melanie Philips, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Judith Klinghoffer, John Podhoretz, Jeff Jacoby and Michelle Malkin, among others.

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NRA - Stand and Fight: Media Ignorance

Missing in the mainstream media's coordinated outrage over so-called "assault weapons" was a demonstration of their performance characteristics — until the NRA opened up its shooting range and showed Americans the truth.

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