Gun Control

Throughout the history of the world there have been despots, tyrants, dictators and kings who have imposed their will over those they conquered. After defeating rival armies in battle, many of these rulers went on to lead cruel, ruthless and abusive regimes largely by keeping the subjugated powerless to resist.

Men like Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia; Genghis Khan, who founded and ruled the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his demise; the Caesars of the Roman empire; and the pharaohs of the Egyptian empire all conquered, then kept power, by ruling with iron fists over people who were powerless to resist because they did not have the means to do so. In feudal England, British subjects in Scotland, Ireland and elsewhere were forbidden to bear arms, and as such were forced to remain loyal to the crown (until they won their independence by force of arms).

In more recent times the invention and mass production of the firearm made conquering - and then controlling - entire populations much more difficult, which is why the most heinous despots in the last 150 years have moved to limit or ban access to guns. In our own country, prior to the Revolutionary War, some colonists did own firearms but in the months before, and directly after, the war began King George's generals implemented gun confiscation policies - a primary driver behind the adoption of the Second Amendment by our founding fathers.

As gun control once more becomes an issue, and as some lawmakers, academics, pundits and ordinary Americans call for outright gun bans and confiscation in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in mid-December, it is vital and appropriate to examine the history of gun control around the world, and the carnage visited upon the innocent by gun-grabbing tyrants.

Christopher Columbus
Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.

Columbus wrote:

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.

The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic-the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For, like other informed people of his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East.

President Andrew Jackson
My oldest daughter is in second grade and is currently working on a report on Andrew Jackson. The material provided her is incomplete, to put it mildly. It is horribly one-sided, patriotic and makes a slave-owning genocidal mass-murderer out to be a national hero. That he is on our twenty dollar bill is a testament to the injustice that lives on.

Her report relies on such a lack of information that it was basically provided for her (her infromation came from the White House's own page on the man). It is clear that what is expected of her is to just write the appropriate responses, get a good grade, and move on. She is required to say where he was born, something important about him, and three interesting facts. She has that he was born in Tennessee, was the first president from Tennessee (as an important fact), and three interesting facts like "he spoke for all the people," and favored election by popular vote.

Of course this doesn't fly with me. While I showed her that he was quite outspoken on the power and influence the rich and banks had over government (she did write "Andrew Jackson was opposed to the power and influence banks had over our government" in place of the "he speaks for all people" lie) I quickly showed her that he didn't speak for all people, at least not by their consent. I explained to her—much of this she already knew from previous lessons I gave her—the conditions that slaves, indigenous peoples, and women endured.

But she heard the most damaging information of all, which surely affected her view on this great American hero (sarcasm). It came from one of the most important historical books on the American genocide. The book, American holocaust: the conquest of the New World (Oxford University Press, USA; 1993) is by David Stannard and the passage I read to her was this:

From the precipice of non-existence, the Cherokee slowly struggled back. But as they did, more and more white settlers were moving into and onto their lands. Then, in 1828 Andrew Jackson was elected president. The same Andrew Jackson who once had written that "the whole Cherokee Nation ought to be scurged." The same Andrew Jackson who had troops against peaceful Indian encampments, calling the Indians "savage dogs," and boasting that "I have on all occasions preserved the scalps of my killed." The same Andrew Jackson who had supervised the mutilation of 800 or so Creek Indian corpses—the bodies of men, women, and children that he and his men had massacred—cutting of their noses to count and preserve a record of the dead, slicing long strips of flesh from their bodies to tan and turn into bridle reins. The same Andrew Jackson who—after his Presidency was over—still was recommending that American troops specifically seek out and systematically kill Indian women and children who were in hiding, in order to complete their extermination: to do otherwise, he wrote, was equivalent to pursuing "a wolf in the hammocks without knowing first where her den and whelps were." Take a moment to digest that. Imagine if Germany was teaching about Hitler in their schools but left out the death camps and genocide and "preventive wars." That would be greeted with considerable outrage. But we do it and it is not only acceptable but patriotic. When I asked if my daughter wanted to include the fact that he was a slave-owning genocidal mass-murderer in her report, she got real nervous and scared. She said no. I told her, "But, it's the truth," to which she replied, "But it might not be my teacher's truth." Her bending to pressure to not rock the boat troubled me. I told her that ultimately it is her call, but that she should never be afraid of standing up for what she feels is right. The report is due February 17, so we'll see.

United States' First Revolution
This Article reviews the British gun control program that precipitated the American Revolution: the 1774 import ban on firearms and gunpowder; the 1774-75 confiscations of firearms and gunpowder; and the use of violence to effectuate the confiscations. It was these events that changed a situation of political tension into a shooting war. Each of these British abuses provides insights into the scope of the modern Second Amendment.

Furious at the December 1773 Boston Tea Party, Parliament in 1774 passed the Coercive Acts. The particular provisions of the Coercive Acts were offensive to Americans, but it was the possibility that the British might deploy the army to enforce them that primed many colonists for armed resistance. The Patriots of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, resolved: “That in the event of Great Britain attempting to force unjust laws upon us by the strength of arms, our cause we leave to heaven and our rifles.” A South Carolina newspaper essay, reprinted in Virginia, urged that any law that had to be enforced by the military was necessarily illegitimate.

The Royal Governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage, had forbidden town meetings from taking place more than once a year. When he dispatched the Redcoats to break up an illegal town meeting in Salem, 3000 armed Americans appeared in response, and the British retreated. Gage’s aide John Andrews explained that everyone in the area aged 16 years or older owned a gun and plenty of gunpowder.

Military rule would be difficult to impose on an armed populace. Gage had only 2,000 troops in Boston. There were thousands of armed men in Boston alone, and more in the surrounding area. One response to the problem was to deprive the Americans of gunpowder.

Modern “smokeless” gunpowder is stable under most conditions. The “black powder” of the 18th Century was far more volatile. Accordingly, large quantities of black powder were often stored in a town’s “powder house,” typically a reinforced brick building. The powder house would hold merchants’ reserves, large quantities stored by individuals, as well as powder for use by the local militia. Although colonial laws generally required militiamen (and sometimes all householders, too) to have their own firearm and a minimum quantity of powder, not everyone could afford it. Consequently, the government sometimes supplied “public arms” and powder to individual militiamen. Policies varied on whether militiamen who had been given public arms would keep them at home. Public arms would often be stored in a special armory, which might also be the powder house.

Before dawn on September 1, 1774, 260 of Gage’s Redcoats sailed up the Mystic River and seized hundreds of barrels of powder from the Charlestown powder house.

The “Powder Alarm,” as it became known, was a serious provocation. By the end of the day, 20,000 militiamen had mobilized and started marching towards Boston. In Connecticut and Western Massachusetts, rumors quickly spread that the Powder Alarm had actually involved fighting in the streets of Boston. More accurate reports reached the militia companies before that militia reached Boston, and so the war did not begin in September. The message, though, was unmistakable: If the British used violence to seize arms or powder, the Americans would treat that violent seizure as an act of war, and would fight. And that is exactly what happened several months later, on April 19, 1775.

Five days after the Powder Alarm, on September 6, the militia of the towns of Worcester County assembled on the Worcester Common. Backed by the formidable array, the Worcester Convention took over the reins of government, and ordered the resignations of all militia officers, who had received their commissions from the Royal Governor. The officers promptly resigned and then received new commissions from the Worcester Convention.

That same day, the people of Suffolk County (which includes Boston) assembled and adopted the Suffolk Resolves. The 19-point Resolves complained about the Powder Alarm, and then took control of the local militia away from the Royal Governor (by replacing the Governor’s appointed officers with officers elected by the militia) and resolved to engage in group practice with arms at least weekly.

The First Continental Congress, which had just assembled in Philadelphia, unanimously endorsed the Suffolk Resolves and urged all the other colonies to send supplies to help the Bostonians.

Governor Gage directed the Redcoats to begin general, warrantless searches for arms and ammunition. According to the Boston Gazette, of all General Gage’s offenses, “what most irritated the People” was “seizing their Arms and Ammunition.”

When the Massachusetts Assembly convened, General Gage declared it illegal, so the representatives reassembled as the “Provincial Congress.” On October 26, 1774, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress adopted a resolution condemning military rule, and criticizing Gage for “unlawfully seizing and retaining large quantities of ammunition in the arsenal at Boston.” The Provincial Congress urged all militia companies to organize and elect their own officers. At least a quarter of the militia (the famous Minute Men) were directed to “equip and hold themselves in readiness to march at the shortest notice.” The Provincial Congress further declared that everyone who did not already have a gun should get one, and start practicing with it diligently.

In flagrant defiance of royal authority, the Provincial Congress appointed a Committee of Safety and vested it with the power to call forth the militia. The militia of Massachusetts was now the instrument of what was becoming an independent government of Massachusetts.

Lord Dartmouth, the Royal Secretary of State for America, sent Gage a letter on October 17, 1774, urging him to disarm New England. Gage replied that he would like to do so, but it was impossible without the use of force. After Gage’s letter was made public by a reading in the British House of Commons, it was publicized in America as proof of Britain’s malign intentions.

Two days after Lord Dartmouth dispatched his disarmament recommendation, King George III and his ministers blocked importation of arms and ammunition to America. Read literally, the order merely required a permit to export arms or ammunition from Great Britain to America. In practice, no permits were granted.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Franklin was masterminding the surreptitious import of arms and ammunition from the Netherlands, France, and Spain.

The patriotic Boston Committee of Correspondence learned of the arms embargo and promptly dispatched Paul Revere to New Hampshire, with the warning that two British ships were headed to Fort William and Mary, near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to seize firearms, cannons, and gunpowder. On December 14, 1774, 400 New Hampshire patriots preemptively captured all the material at the fort. A New Hampshire newspaper argued that the capture was prudent and proper, reminding readers that the ancient Carthaginians had consented to “deliver up all their Arms to the Romans” and were decimated by the Romans soon after.

In Parliament, a moderate minority favored conciliation with America. Among the moderates was the Duke of Manchester, who warned that America now had three million people, and most of them were trained to use arms. He was certain they could produce a stronger army than Great Britain.

The Massachusetts Provincial Congress offered to purchase as many arms and bayonets as could be delivered to the next session of the Congress. Massachusetts also urged American gunsmiths “diligently to apply themselves” to making guns for everyone who did not already have a gun. A few weeks earlier, the Congress had resolved: “That it be strongly recommended, to all the inhabitants of this colony, to be diligently attentive to learning the use of arms. . . .”

Derived from political and legal philosophers such as John Locke, Hugo Grotius, and Edward Coke, the ideology underlying all forms of American resistance was explicitly premised on the right of self-defense of all inalienable rights; from the self-defense foundation was constructed a political theory in which the people were the masters and government the servant, so that the people have the right to remove a disobedient servant.

The British government was not, in a purely formal sense, attempting to abolish the Americans’ common law right of self-defense. Yet in practice, that was precisely what the British were attempting. First, by disarming the Americans, the British were attempting to make the practical exercise of the right of personal self-defense much more difficult. Second, and more fundamentally, the Americans made no distinction between self-defense against a lone criminal or against a criminal government. To the Americans, and to their British Whig ancestors, the right of self-defense necessarily implied the right of armed self-defense against tyranny.

The troubles in New England inflamed the other colonies. Patrick Henry’s great speech to the Virginia legislature on March 23, 1775, argued that the British plainly meant to subjugate America by force. Because every attempt by the Americans at peaceful reconciliation had been rebuffed, the only remaining alternatives for the Americans were to accept slavery or to take up arms. If the Americans did not act soon, the British would soon disarm them, and all hope would be lost. “The millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us,” he promised.

The Convention formed a committee—including Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson—“to prepare a plan for the embodying, arming, and disciplining such a number of men as may be sufficient” to defend the commonwealth. The Convention urged “that every Man be provided with a good Rifle” and “that every Horseman be provided. . . with Pistols and Holsters, a Carbine, or other Firelock.” When the Virginia militiamen assembled a few weeks later, many wore canvas hunting shirts adorned with the motto “Liberty or Death.”

In South Carolina, patriots established a government, headed by the “General Committee.” The Committee described the British arms embargo as a plot to disarm the Americans in order to enslave them. Thus, the Committee recommended that “all persons” should “immediately” provide themselves with a large quantity of ammunition.

Without formal legal authorization, Americans began to form independent militia, outside the traditional chain of command of the royal governors. In Virginia, George Washington and George Mason organized the Fairfax Independent Militia Company. The Fairfax militiamen pledged that “we will, each of us, constantly keep by us” a firelock, six pounds of gunpowder, and twenty pounds of lead. Other independent militia embodied in Virginia along the same model. Independent militia also formed in Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maryland, and South Carolina, choosing their own officers.

John Adams praised the newly constituted Massachusetts militia, “commanded through the province, not by men who procured their commissions from a governor as a reward for making themselves pimps to his tools.”

The American War of Independence began on April 19, 1775, when 700 Redcoats under the command of Major John Pitcairn left Boston to seize American arms at Lexington and Concord.

The militia that assembled at the Lexington Green and the Concord Bridge consisted of able-bodied men aged 16 to 60. They supplied their own firearms, although a few poor men had to borrow a gun. Warned by Paul Revere and Samuel Dawes of the British advance, the young women of Lexington assembled cartridges late into the evening of April 18.

At dawn, the British confronted about 200 militiamen at Lexington. “Disperse you Rebels—Damn you, throw down your Arms and disperse!” ordered Major Pitcairn. The Americans were quickly routed.

With a “huzzah” of victory, the Redcoats marched on to Concord, where one of Gage’s spies had told him that the largest Patriot reserve of gunpowder was stored. At Concord’s North Bridge, the town militia met with some of the British force, and after a battle of two or three minutes, drove off the British.

Notwithstanding the setback at the bridge, the Redcoats had sufficient force to search the town for arms and ammunition. But the main powder stores at Concord had been hauled to safety before the Redcoats arrived.

When the British began to withdraw back to Boston, things got much worse for them. Armed Americans were swarming in from nearby towns. They would soon outnumber the British 2:1. Although some of the Americans cohered in militia units, a great many fought on their own, taking sniper positions wherever opportunity presented itself. Only British reinforcements dispatched from Boston saved the British expedition from annihilation—and the fact that the Americans started running out of ammunition and gun powder.

One British officer reported: “These fellows were generally good marksmen, and many of them used long guns made for Duck-Shooting.” On a per-shot basis, the Americans inflicted higher casualties than had the British regulars.

That night, the American militiamen began laying siege to Boston, where General Gage’s standing army was located. At dawn, Boston had been the base from which the King’s army could project force into New England. Now, it was trapped in the city, surrounded by people in arms.

Two days later in Virginia, royal authorities confiscated 20 barrels of gunpowder from the public magazine in Williamsburg and destroyed the public firearms there by removing their firing mechanisms. In response to complaints, manifested most visibly by the mustering of a large independent militia led by Patrick Henry, Governor Dunmore delivered a legal note promising to pay restitution.

At Lexington and Concord, forcible disarmament had not worked out for the British. So back in Boston, Gage set out to disarm the Bostonians a different way.

On April 23, 1775, Gage offered the Bostonians the opportunity to leave town if they surrendered their arms. The Boston Selectmen voted to accept the offer, and within days, 2,674 guns were deposited, one gun for every two adult male Bostonians.

Gage thought that many Bostonians still had guns, and he refused to allow the Bostonians to leave. Indeed, a large proportion of the surrendered guns were “training arms”—large muskets with bayonets, that would be difficult to hide. After several months, food shortages in Boston convinced Gage to allow easier emigration from the city.

Gage’s disarmament program incited other Americans to take up arms. Benjamin Franklin, returning to Philadelphia after an unsuccessful diplomatic trip to London, “was highly pleased to find the Americans arming and preparing for the worst events.”

The government in London dispatched more troops and three more generals to America: William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne. The generals arrived on May 25, 1775, with orders from Lord Dartmouth to seize all arms in public armories, or which had been “secretly collected together for the purpose of aiding Rebellions.”

The war underway, the Americans captured Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York. At the June 17 Battle of Bunker Hill, the militia held its ground against the British regulars and inflicted heavy casualties, until they ran out of gunpowder and were finally driven back. (Had Gage not confiscated the gunpowder from the Charleston Powder House the previous September, the Battle of Bunker Hill probably would have resulted in an outright defeat of the British.)

On June 19, Gage renewed his demand that the Bostonians surrender their arms, and he declared that anyone found in possession of arms would be deemed guilty of treason.

Meanwhile, the Continental Congress had voted to send ten companies of riflemen from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to aid the Massachusetts militia.

On July 6, 1775, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, written by Thomas Jefferson and the great Pennsylvania lawyer John Dickinson. Among the grievances were General Gage’s efforts to disarm the people of Lexington, Concord, and Boston.

Two days later, the Continental Congress sent an open letter to the people of Great Britain warning that “men trained to arms from their Infancy, and animated by the Love of Liberty, will afford neither a cheap or easy conquest.”

The Swiss immigrant John Zubly, who was serving as a Georgia delegate to the Continental Congress, wrote a pamphlet entitled Great Britain’s Right to Tax. . . By a Swiss, which was published in London and Philadelphia. He warned that “in a strong sense of liberty, and the use of fire-arms almost from the cradle, the Americans have vastly the advantage over men of their rank almost every where else.” Indeed, children were “shouldering the resemblance of a gun before they are well able to walk.” “The Americans will fight like men, who have everything at stake,” and their motto was “DEATH OR FREEDOM.” The town of Gorham, Massachusetts (now part of the State of Maine), sent the British government a warning that even “many of our Women have been used to handle the Cartridge and load the Musquet.”

It was feared that the Massachusetts gun confiscation was the prototype for the rest of America. For example, a newspaper article published in three colonies reported that when the new British generals arrived, they would order everyone in America “to deliver up their arms by a certain stipulated day.”

The events of April 19 convinced many more Americans to arm themselves and to embody independent militia. A report from New York City observed that “the inhabitants there are arming themselves. . . forming companies, and taking every method to defend our rights. The like spirit prevails in the province of New Jersey, where a large and well disciplined militia are now fit for action.”

In Virginia, Lord Dunmore observed: “Every County is now Arming a Company of men whom they call an independent Company for the avowed purpose of protecting their Committee, and to be employed against Government if occasion require.” North Carolina’s Royal Governor Josiah Martin issued a proclamation outlawing independent militia, but it had little effect.

A Virginia gentleman wrote a letter to a Scottish friend explaining in America:

We are all in arms, exercising and training old and young to the use of the gun. No person goes abroad without his sword, or gun, or pistols. . . . Every plain is full of armed men, who all wear a hunting shirt, on the left breast of which are sewed, in very legible letters, “Liberty or Death.”

The British escalated the war. Royal Admiral Samuel Graves ordered that all seaports north of Boston be burned.

When the British navy showed up at what was then known as Falmouth, Massachusetts (today’s Portland, Maine), the town attempted to negotiate. The townspeople gave up eight muskets, which was hardly sufficient, and so Falmouth was destroyed by naval bombardment.

The next year, the 13 Colonies would adopt the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration listed the tyrannical acts of King George III, including his methods for carrying out gun control: “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our people.”

As the war went on, the British always remembered that without gun control, they could never control America. In 1777, with British victory seeming likely, Colonial Undersecretary William Knox drafted a plan entitled “What Is Fit to Be Done with America?” To ensure that there would be no future rebellions, “[t]he Militia Laws should be repealed and none suffered to be re-enacted, & the Arms of all the People should be taken away,. . . nor should any Foundery or manufactuary of Arms, Gunpowder, or Warlike Stores, be ever suffered in America, nor should any Gunpowder, Lead, Arms or Ordnance be imported into it without Licence. . . .”

To the Americans of the Revolution and the Founding Era, the theory of some late-20th Century courts that the Second Amendment is a “collective right” and not an “individual right” might have seemed incomprehensible. The Americans owned guns individually, in their homes. They owned guns collectively, in their town armories and powder houses. They would not allow the British to confiscate their individual arms, nor their collective arms; and when the British tried to do both, the Revolution began. The Americans used their individual arms and their collective arms to fight against the confiscation of any arms. Americans fought to provide themselves a government that would never perpetrate the abuses that had provoked the Revolution.

What are modern versions of such abuses? The reaction against the 1774 import ban for firearms and gunpowder (via a discretionary licensing law) indicates that import restrictions are unconstitutional if their purpose is to make it more difficult for Americans to possess guns. The federal Gun Control Act of 1968 prohibits the import of any firearm that is not deemed “sporting” by federal regulators. That import ban seems difficult to justify based on the historical record of 1774-76.

Laws disarming people who have proven themselves to be a particular threat to public safety are not implicated by the 1774-76 experience. In contrast, laws that aim to disarm the public at large are precisely what turned a political argument into the American Revolution.

The most important lesson for today from the Revolution is about militaristic or violent search and seizure in the name of disarmament. As Hurricane Katrina bore down on Louisiana, police officers in St. Charles Parish confiscated firearms from people who were attempting to flee. After the hurricane passed, officers went house to house in New Orleans, breaking into homes and confiscating firearms at gunpoint. The firearms seizures were flagrantly illegal under existing state law. A federal district judge soon issued an order against the confiscation, ordering the return of the seized guns.

When there is genuine evidence of potential danger—such as evidence that guns are in the possession of a violent gang—then the Fourth Amendment properly allows no-knock raids, flash-bang grenades, and similar violent tactics to carry out a search. Conversely, if there is no real evidence of danger—for example, if it is believed that a person who has no record of violence owns guns but has not registered them properly—then militaristically violent enforcement of a search warrant should never be allowed. Gun ownership simpliciter ought never to be a pretext for government violence. The Americans in 1775 fought a war because the king did not agree.

Soviet Union - 1929
Soviet Russia was established following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when ruling Czar Nicholas II tossed 11 million Russian peasants into World War I. Frustrated and angered by the loss of life, scores of armed Russians - many current or former Russian soldiers who were led by Marxist Vladimir Lenin - rebelled against a ruling regime that was already teetering on the edge of collapse.

Firearms were allowed to remain in the hands of Soviet citizens until 1929, when private gun ownership was abolished - a time which saw the rise of one of the world's most repressive regimes, that was led by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin (he ruled from 1941-1953 but was entrenched in the country's leadership by 1928).

From 1929 to the year Stalin died, tens of millions of Soviet dissidents or anyone the country's leadership believed were a threat, were rounded up and either murdered or placed in labor camp/prisons and forced to work, sometimes to their deaths. Early in Stalin's political career, he launched two national collectivization campaigns in order to transform the country into an industrial power. Both campaigns, however, were rife with murder on a massive scale.

"In 1932-33, Stalin engineered a famine (by massively raising the grain quota that the peasantry had to turn over to the state); this killed between six and seven million people and broke the back of Ukrainian resistance," says a history of his political career at Gendercide.org. "The Five-Year Plans for industry, too, were implemented in an extraordinarily brutal fashion, leading to the deaths of millions of convict laborers, overwhelmingly men.

His "callous disregard for life" was matched only by his paranoia; later, he purged the Communist Party itself of anyone and everyone he believed was a threat - all under the auspices of a total gun ban.

"If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves," he once said.

The Ottoman Empire - 1911
The Ottoman Empire, the origins of which were in Turkey, implemented full gun control in 1911. A few years later, beginning in 1915 and lasting until 1917, some 1.5 million Armenians (out of a total of 2.5 million) living within the empire were rounded up and murdered by the "Young Turks" of the ruling class. In what has since been called the Armenian Holocaust, "Armenians all over the world commemorate this great tragedy on April 24, because it was on that day in 1915 when 300 Armenian leaders, writers, thinkers and professionals in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) were rounded up, deported and killed," says a short history of the slaughter by the University of Michigan. "Also on that day in Constantinople, 5,000 of the poorest Armenians were butchered in the streets and in their homes."

The Ottoman government established "butcher battalions" which consisted primarily of violent criminals who had been released from prison just to kill ethnic Armenians. Those who were members of the army (which was currently fighting the Allies in World War I) "were disarmed, placed into labor battalions, and then killed," said the university history.

Germany - 1938
Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany established gun control in 1938, just prior to the implementation of his horrendous, murderous campaign to exterminate the Jews. In the end, 13 million Jews and other perceived lesser races were killed by Hitler and his Nazi Party.

In 1942, at the height of the Second World War and German advances, Hitler said:

The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong-points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country.

China - 1935
The Nationalist Chinese government established gun control in 1935, just two years before Japan invaded in 1937. In the period from 1935 to 1952, some 20 million citizens and political dissidents were murdered. The Chinese Cultural Revolution, which was launched by the country's supreme ruler, Mao Zedong, took place from 1966-1976, and "claimed the lives of several million people and inflicted cruel and inhuman treatments on hundreds of million people," says MassViolence.org. "However, 40 years after it ended, the total number of victims of the Cultural Revolution and especially the death toll of mass killings still remain a mystery both in China and overseas." The actual figures remain a highly-classified state secret.

Regarding gun control, Mao once said: "War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.".

Cambodia - 1956
The year this Asian nation issued its total gun control edict was in 1956, but the real carnage did not begin until several years later, during the regime of the demonic Pol Pot. Between 1975 and 1977, his regime murdered as many as 1 million "educated" people whom he believed represented a threat to his power in "killing fields" that were later depicted in a movie by the same name.

In all, more than 56 million people around the world have been murdered as a result of gun control laws imposed by rulers and despots who knew that the only way they could continue to brutalize their own people and stay in power was by disarming them.

And now left-wing pols, politicians, academics and pundits want our leaders to have the same ability to rule unopposed and unafraid of reprisal.

"Our forefathers did not arm the American people for the purpose of hunting, but rather to protect themselves from those who were doing the hunting, namely the tyrant King George," writes Bradlee Dean for WorldNetDaily.

Anyone truly interested in preventing mass murder should not be a supporter of gun control.

Gun Control And The Ku Klux Klan
If you believe everything that Michael Moore says in Bowling for Columbine and his books, then you would think that "pro-gun" people are white racists, and that "gun control" would be a wonderful way to help minorities. But a look at America's past reveals what historian Clayton Cramer has accurately called "The Racist Roots of Gun Control." After the Civil War, the defeated Southern states aimed to preserve slavery in fact if not in law. The states enacted Black Codes which barred the black freedmen from exercising basic civil rights, including the right to bear arms. Mississippi's provision was typical: No freedman "shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition."

Under the Mississippi law, a person informing the government about illegal arms possession by a freedman was entitled to receive the forfeited firearm. Whites were forbidden to give or lend freedman firearms or knives.

The Special Report of the Anti-Slavery Conference of 1867 complained that freedmen were "forbidden to own or bear firearms and thus.rendered defenseless against assaults" by whites. Or as a letter printed in the Jan. 13, 1866 edition of Harper's Weekly observed: "The militia of this county have seized every gun found in the hands of so-called freedmen in this section of the county. They claim that the Statute Laws of Mississippi do not recognize the Negro as having any right to carry arms."

Congress' "Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction" set forth the factual case for the need for a 14th Amendment to protect the liberties enumerated in the federal Bill of Rights. At the Committee's hearings, General Rufus Saxon testified that all over the South, whites were "seizing all fire-arms found in the hands of the freedmen. Such conduct is in clear and direct violation of their personal rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, which declares that 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.'"

Despite the statutes, and at the suggestion of Reconstruction governors and other leaders, blacks often formed militias to resist white terrorism. For example, in June 1867 in Greensboro, Alabama, the police let the murderer of a black voting registrar escape; in response, a freedman who would later serve in the Alabama State Legislature urged his fellow freedmen to create a permanent militia. "Union League" militias were formed all over central Alabama.

The freedmen slipped from white control. One planter protested that his workers were "turbulent and disorderly," coming and going when they wished, as if they had a choice whether or not to work. The Union League, protested another ex-master, was advising freedmen "to ignore the Southern white man as much as possible...to set up for themselves."

The next spring, the Ku Klux Klan came to central Alabama. The Klansmen, unlike the freedmen, had horses, and thus the tactical advantages of mobility. In a few months, the Klan triumph was complete. One freedman recalled that the night riders, after reasserting white control, "took the weapons from might near all the colored people in the neighborhood."

The same dynamic existed throughout the South. Sometimes militias consisting of freedmen or Unionists were able to resist the Klan or other white forces. In places like the South Carolina back-country, where the blacks were a numerical majority, the black militias kept white terrorists at bay for long periods.

While many blacks participated in informal, local militias, most of the reconstruction governors set up official state militias that were racially integrated. Like many other facets of the reconstruction governments (and the racist governments which followed them), the integrated "black" state militias were corrupt. The state militias, which sought to protect the state governments and the election process, were frequently in conflict with informal white militias. Arms shipments from the federal government to arm the militias were often intercepted and seized by white militias.

Official or unofficial, the black militias were the primary target of the white racist resistance. "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, the U.S. Senate advocate of racism for many decades, joined a "Sweetwater Sabre Club" whose members seized control of South Carolina's Edgefield Country from a black militia in 1874-75, and attacked a black militia at Hamburg, South Carolina in 1876.

In areas where the black militias lost and the Klan or other white groups took control, "almost universally the first thing done was to disarm the negroes and leave them defenseless," wrote Albion Tourgeé in his 1880 book The Invisible Empire. (An attorney and civil rights worker from the north, Tourgeé would later represent the civil rights plaintiff in Plessy v. Ferguson.)

The Klan's objective in disarming the blacks was to leave them unable to defend their rights, a Congressional hearing found. Afraid of race war and retribution, whites were terrified at the mere sight of a black with a gun. As legal historian Kermit Hall notes, "From the southern white's point of view, a well-armed Negro militia was precisely what John Brown had sought to achieve at Harpers Ferry in 1859."

The Vicksburg white riot of 1874 typified the problem. According to a Congressional investigation, the whites conducted, "Unauthorized searches by self-constituted authority into private homes, searches for arms converted, as is unusual, into robbery and thieving...." The Congressional Report detailed one arms roundup:

One poor old man, half crazed, but harmless, sitting quietly in a neighbor's house, is brutally shot to death in the presence of terrified women and shrieking children. He gained his wretched living by hunting and fishing, and had a shot-gun. No one pretended that Tom Bidderman had anything to do with the fight, but he was black, and had a gun in his house, and so they murdered him for amusement as they were going from the city to restore order in the country.

The Radical Republican Congress observed the South with dismay. The Republicans intended to use federal power to force freedom on the South. One of the Radical Republicans' most important tools was the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which required states to respect basic human rights. While the vague language of the amendment has produced disagreement about exactly what is covered, the Congressional backers of the amendment seem to have intended, at the least, protecting the core freedoms listed in the national Bill of Rights. Announced Representative Clarke of Kansas: "I find in the Constitution an article which declared 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.' For myself, I shall insist that the reconstructed rebels of Mississippi respect the Constitution in their local laws." The earlier Freedman's Bureau Bill had also been squarely aimed at protecting the right to bear arms. The bill guaranteed federal protection of "the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and estate, including the constitutional right of bearing arms."

The Amendment was quickly emasculated by the United States Supreme Court in The Slaughter-House Cases and United States v. Cruikshank, The Supreme Court understood the social realities of the South. The Cruikshank decision gave the green light to the Klan, unofficial white militias, and other racist groups to forcibly disarm the freedmen and impose white supremacy.

One state at a time, white racists took control of government by using armed violence and the threat of violence to control balloting on election day. Freedmen and their white allies also resorted to arms. But white Republican governors were usually afraid that employing the black militias fully would set off an even broader race war.

The white South, while defeated on the battlefield in 1865, had continued armed resistance to Northern control for over a decade. When the North, an occupying power, grew weary of the struggle and abandoned its black and Republican allies in the South, the white South was again the master of its destiny.

In deference to the Fourteenth Amendment, some states did cloak their laws in neutral, non-racial terms. For example, the Tennessee legislature barred the sale of any handguns except the "Army and Navy model." The ex-Confederate soldiers already had their high quality "Army and Navy" guns. But cash-poor freedmen could barely afford lower-cost, simpler firearms not of the "Army and Navy" quality. Arkansas enacted a nearly identical law in 1881, and other Southern states followed suit, including Alabama (1893), Texas (1907), and Virginia (1925).

As Jim Crow intensified, other Southern states enacted gun registration and handgun permit laws. Registration came to Mississippi (1906), Georgia (1913), and North Carolina (1917). Handgun permits were passed in North Carolina (1917), Missouri (1919), and Arkansas (1923).

As one Florida judge explained, the licensing laws were "passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers... [and] never intended to be applied to the white population."

That gun control has a very unsavory past does not, in itself, prove that all modern gun control proposals are a bad idea. But it does offer reasons to be especially cautious about the dangers of disarming people who cannot necessarily count on their local government to protect them.

Gun Control Does Violate The Second Amendment Of The United States Constitution
The debate on gun control lately has been going like this: Liberals propose various restrictions on allowable firearms, acceptable owners and approved ammunition. Conservatives exclaim, "Second Amendment!" And the debate, at least in the mind of the latter group, is over.

The Second Amendment, they believe, is not just one important provision of our basic government document. It's the first and last word on the subject of firearms.

Viewing the proposals offered since the Sandy Hook massacre, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., concludes the supporters intend "to completely GUT our Second Amendment rights." The Utah Sheriffs Association warned President Barack Obama, "No federal official will be permitted to descend upon our constituents and take from them what the Bill of Rights — in particular Amendment II — has given them."

The logic is simple: The Second Amendment protects the rights of gun owners. Gun control laws violate those rights. Therefore, any such measure is unconstitutional.

But that's not quite how constitutional liberties work. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech — but the government may require permits for a political protest, outlaw child pornography, forbid incitement to violence, allow libel suits and more.

The First Amendment does not protect your right to tell an airport security screener you're fond of bombs. Yet some Second Amendment champions see no limit to the scope of their favorite freedom.

It's odd that they regard it as so vulnerable to abuse. For a long time, this provision was treated as an irrelevant antique. Until 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court had never interpreted it to protect an individual right to own or use guns for self-defense. Now that the "right to keep and bear arms" has gained full recognition, however, its admirers treat it as perpetually in peril.

Many of the old fears, though, are no longer warranted. Limits on "assault weapons" will lead to bans on handguns? No way. Registration of guns will end in house-to-house confiscation? Not in a million years. The Supreme Court has established firm limits on how far gun control can go — and it's not terribly far.

But there's another side to it. The Second Amendment does not preclude general regulation of firearms. And it doesn't disqualify some of the favorite ideas of gun control advocates.

That's not simply the view of liberal academics and anti-gun groups. It's also the view of many distinguished conservative legal experts. I called two, Eugene Kontorovich, of Northwestern University law school, and Eugene Volokh, of UCLA law school. Though they do not concur on all particulars, they agree that many common ideas would likely pass constitutional muster.

The most popular idea at the moment is expanding federal background checks to include all private sales. "I think the courts will say it's permissible," Volokh told me. "No problem, assuming the criteria are legitimate," Kontorovich said. The reason: It's a minimal obligation that does not substantially interfere with a person's right to obtain a gun for self-defense.

An assault weapons ban? Volokh suspects this law would be upheld mainly because it's so ineffectual. Outlawing certain guns that might be used for self-defense is probably OK because many other virtually identical weapons would remain legal.

Kontorovich thinks a limit on the size of magazines would be struck down because it could inhibit an individual's ability to stop multiple attackers. "Limiting magazine capacity is like saying a print magazine could be only 32 pages," he says. What would not be allowed in the context of press freedom should not be allowed in the context of gun rights, he says.

Surprisingly, both think the Second Amendment would allow some laws that are far more ambitious. A law mandating the mere registration of all guns, says Volokh, would probably be seen as no more objectionable than an ordinance requiring a permit for a parade.

Requiring a license to buy a gun or ammunition (as Illinois does), Kontorovich believes, would be "relatively unproblematic" as long as the goal is not to discourage such purchases. Neither regulation would deprive ordinary people of their right to obtain guns for protection, which is the core of the Second Amendment.

In practice, the Second Amendment allows many things — and many of the things it forbids could never be passed anyway. So gun rights supporters, a group that includes me, had better focus on explaining why the great majority of gun control ideas won't work. The Constitution won't save us from all bad ideas. It's not supposed to.

Harvard Study
A Harvard Study titled "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?" looks at figures for "intentional deaths" throughout continental Europe and juxtaposes them with the U.S. to show that more gun control does not necessarily lead to lower death rates or violent crime.

Because the findings so clearly demonstrate that more gun laws may in fact increase death rates, the study says that "the mantra that more guns mean more deaths and that fewer guns, therefore, mean fewer deaths" is wrong.

For example, when the study shows numbers for Eastern European gun ownership and corresponding murder rates, it is readily apparent that less guns to do not mean less death. In Russia, where the rate of gun ownership is 4,000 per 100,000 inhabitants, the murder rate was 20.52 per 100,000 in 2002. That same year in Finland, where the rater of gun ownership is exceedingly higher--39,000 per 100,000--the murder rate was almost nill, at 1.98 per 100,000.

Looking at Western Europe, the study shows that Norway "has far and away Western Europe's highest household gun ownership rate (32%), but also its lowest murder rate."

And when the study focuses on intentional deaths by looking at the U.S. vs Continental Europe, the findings are no less revealing. The U.S., which is so often labeled as the most violent nation in the world by gun control proponents, comes in 7th--behind Russia, Estonia, Lativa, Lithuania, Belarus, and the Ukraine--in murders. America also only ranks 22nd in suicides.

The murder rate in Russia, where handguns are banned, is 30.6; the rate in the U.S. is 7.8.

The authors of the study conclude that the burden of proof rests on those who claim more guns equal more death and violent crime; such proponents should "at the very least [be able] to show a large number of nations with more guns have more death and that nations that impose stringent gun controls have achieved substantial reductions in criminal violence (or suicide)." But after intense study the authors conclude "those correlations are not observed when a large number of nations are compared around the world."

In fact, the numbers presented in the Harvard study support the contention that among the nations studied, those with more gun control tend toward higher death rates.



Gun Free Zones Never Will Work At All
“Just before 5:30 a.m. Monday, employees of the Starbucks in the 1800 block of W. Broad St. called police about a suspicious man outside the store. According to police, the suspect then ran into the business, and attacked the two employees,” nbc12.com reports. “Both baristas sustained facial injuries, with the suspect kicking an officer who arrived on scene. A 65-year-old employee is now facing a difficult recovery from serious injuries, and remains at VCU Medical Center in intensive care. Police reported that the suspect. ..

stole no items or money during the incident, with the Starbucks reopening a short time later.”

Assuming customers waiting for the store to open were observing Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz’ request to leave their legally carried guns at home (thank you, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America), knowing that the coffee company doesn’t allow its employees to exercise their natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms, we must conclude that this is what happens to a disarmed populace.

Because this is hardly the first time store employees have been attacked by armed robbers. (Hint: Google “armed robbery starbucks.”) While the company might like to sweep it under the rug, the brutal murder of three D.C. area Starbucks’ employees in 1997 hangs like a shadow over the enterprise’s current “no guns” zeal. Anyway, the store responded to yesterday’s attack:

“Our thoughts and prayers are with both of our employees who were hurt, and their family members during this difficult time,” said Starbucks spokesperson Laurel Harper in a phone interview Tuesday. “Safety is always our highest priority, and we are hoping for both of their speedy recoveries.”

If safety is your highest priority, welcoming legally-armed customers and yes, barristas, is your best bet against criminal predation. As it is for all of us. [h/t CR]

51-year-old Michigan woman
A 51-year-old Michigan woman shot herself in the face after pulling a shotgun to “make a point” during an argument.

According to Michigan Live, police in Fremont Township responded to reports of a gunshot victim around 10:00 a.m. on Monday.

The Tuscola County Sheriff’s Department said that in the midst of a family dispute, the woman pounded the butt of the shotgun against the floor, causing it to discharge, striking her in the face.

The woman informed officers she had pulled the gun to “make a point.”

She was airlifted to St. Mary’s of Michigan Hospital in Saginaw and is expected to recover from her injuries. Police are investigating the incident, but no charges have been filed.

You Need An Entire Country To Agree With You First Before Moving on to Gun Control
The Minimum Required to Pass Gun Control is 90% out of 100% of the Country of Agreeing The Minimum Required To Reject Passing Gun Control is 85% out of 100% of The Country Agreeing. The 2 lines Above Really do  Requires  Everyone's Say in this, the Highest Percentage Wins Always.

Pro Forcing Gun Control Activists
If you’re wondering why the gun control community favors civilian disarmament, it’s all about personal responsibility. They don’t believe that Americans are responsible enough to own a gun. Why? I’ve got a simple list. But before I trot-out the terrible troika of gun grabbing gibberish, I want to highlight an important point: contrary to their public protestations about “good” vs. “bad” gun owners, gun control advocates do want to grab your guns. But they know they can’t. And not just because the Supreme Court says they can’t.

Gun control advocates know there are several million Ted Nugent-types ready to do the cold dead hands thing. So they focus their efforts on preventing newbies from tooling up. By discouraging new firearms owners (to say the least), they can grab the guns before they’re sold. They’re gun abortionists, as it were.

In this they have been ridiculously successful. Although gun rights are on a roll, let’s not forget that we’re only now emerging from a period where gun control advocates ruled the day. You still can’t carry a concealed weapon in Illinois. New York? New Jersey? Fuhgeddaboutit. My City of Providence Conceal Carry Permit reads number 20. As in twenty ever.

To stop American citizens from exercising their right to keep and bear arms, gun control activists have a simple message: guns are dangerous. Dangerous for unarmed civilians. Dangerous for armed civilians. Dangerous for children. Dangerous for police. Dangerous for society. Too dangerous for you!

Here’s the problem: guns are dangerous. If they weren’t dangerous they wouldn’t exist. What’s more, people get shot. By guns. What’s worse, dangerous people use them. Criminal, mentally deranged and stupid people. There’s no denying this fact. But there is a little matter of context.

It’s your job as a gun owner to provide that context for people who don’t own guns, or own them and support gun control anyway. To do that, you have to counter the three big lies that gun control advocates use to make their case that guns are too dangerous for civilians. Lies that are absorbed by people who’ve never really thought about it. The fibs are as follows. ..

1. People are too stupid to own a gun

It’s certainly true that some people are too stupid to own firearms. TTAG has a whole category’s worth of Irresponsible Gun Owner of the Day posts to prove the point. In general, nothing could be further from the truth.

At the risk of insulting the intelligence of the people who insult the intelligence of existing and potential gun owners, shooting a firearm is a relative simple business. You put the bullets in (the hard part), you aim the gun and pull the trigger. If you don’t pull the trigger. . . nothing happens.

Statistics show that firearms are no more dangerous than swimming pools, automobiles and (in the case of children) plastic bags. That’s before you exclude firearms-related suicides and gun crimes committed by gang bangers. My local gun range—open to the public—pays less than a thousand dollars a month for insurance coverage.

The fact that there are tens of millions of gun owners walking around who’ve never shot themselves or another human being also attests to the simplicity and inherent safety of firearms ownership. The general public may not shoot well, but they get it: be careful with guns. Not because they’re smart. Because they’re smart enough.

If you’re fighting this “people are too dumb to own a gun” meme, keep in mind that gun control advocates are, like gun rights advocates, a highly educated group of people. The key difference: gun grabbers are elitists. [This is the main reasons gun control found so much favor over the last century. Elitists controlled the media.]

The easiest way to counter the argument: ask a simple series of questions. Do you think the average person is intelligent enough to handle poisonous cleaning chemicals? Can they cut their food with a sharp knife—and not use it to stab themselves or others? Can most people operate a car safely? The last one may be a bit of a stretch, but they’ll know what you mean.

2. People are too mentally unstable to own a gun

Remember Emotional Intelligence? Gun control advocates have extrapolated a general principle from the book’s core proposition: most people are emotionally retarded. In the gun grabbers’ world view, the average person is prone to flipping out, grabbing a gun and shooting someone. Or a bunch of someones.

Yes, it happens. But tens of thousands of mentally disturbed people aren’t shooting people on a regular basis (or at all, for that matter). Even if there were tens of thousands of mentally challenged murderers, that would still represent a fraction of the total U.S. population. Aas for spree killings, they’re so rare that the President of the United States felt obliged to fly our 747 to Arizona to personally praise the survivors of a recent massacre.

Some gun control advocates reckon that anyone who shoots anyone is mentally challenged. Ipso facto. The average American may not know Latin, but they know that most people who shoot people are not mentally ill individuals off their meds struggling with inner demons. They’re criminals. Bad guys.

Again it does happen. But whacko, serial and spree killings don’t lead to new gun control measures because Americans know a bald-headed aberration like Jared Lee Loughner when they see one. The fundamental flaw in the gun grabbers’ “We’re All One Step From Madness” argument is that few people have had any direct contact with someone who’s gone off the rails and shot someone. And that’s because, statistically speaking, it doesn’t happen.

Ultimately, thankfully, personal experience trumps media. Equally important, the fear of psycho killers is greater than the fear of someone becoming one. Besides, how do you counter a madman? With criminals you can call the cops or negotiate. (At least in theory.) With a nut-job you need. . . a gun. Hence Arizona’s determination not to do a damn thing about gun control after the Loughner killings.

The best way to counter the Gun Control as Anti-Flip Out meme: make it personal. Force gun control advocates to confront their elitism. I own a gun. If I got really angry or really sad, do you think I’d shoot (name family members)? So why am I so different from other gun owners? I don’t think I am, and I don’t think you can devise a law that stop the crazies without stopping the rest of us. Do you?

By this point, a gun control advocate may start parroting the “If One Life is Saved” argument. Basically, they’re asking you to jettison the very thing that they claim to promote: common sense. Common sense says life is about balancing risk with reward. A fraction of a fraction of the total population of American children may shoot themselves with Daddy’s gun, but society is generally safer from criminals when its law-abiding citizens are armed.

Or is it? The final argument. ..

3. Gun owners are trigger-happy

Gun control advocates (like our very own MikeB30200) see gun owners as wanna-be or proto-vigilantes. They’re just itching to take the law into their own hands at the right end of a gun. And if you “let” average people own guns, they’ll forgo their reliance on civility and the criminal justice system and use their firearms to execute rough justice. Call it The Return of the Wild West (ROTWW).

Admittedly, armed aggression against perceived slight and threats is not an unknown occurrence—especially where it overlaps with the aforementioned mental instability or somehow involves gang signs. Real “trigger happiness”—an average Joe engaging in a road rage revenge shooting or some neighbor-on-neighbor gunfighting—is exciting stuff. But it’s statistically meaningless.

UNLESS you redefine legitimate armed self-defense as trigger happy behavior. As many gun advocates do. So let’s drill down a bit. ..

Nobody knows how many defensive gun uses (DGUs) go down in the US of A. Some say it’s millions per year. It could be less. Or more. Many if not most gun owners never tell the police when they brandish their weapon to successfully thwart a bad guy—given that doing so runs the very real risk of firearms confiscation and banning.

It’s also true that civilians wound and kill more bad guys than cops. But very few of the gun owners who do so go to jail for so doing. Either the court system is cutting gun owners too much slack (a complaint that gun control advocates make on a regular basis), or the shooters weren’t “trigger happy.” Anyone with an ounce of faith in our legal system—the same system that gun grabbers ask citizens to trust instead of a self-defense firearm—will go with the latter.

Distilling this [non]issue to its basics is simple enough: what’s the danger of a gun owner killing the wrong person? Despite the fact that most people are lousy shots, you can round down the odds of a “trigger happy” non-criminal civilian killing an innocent bystander down to zero. It’s not the last thing an unarmed civilian needs to worry about, but I’d buy a lightning rod before I’d don a bullet-resistant vest.

All that’s without considering the benefits of an armed, law-abiding population (i.e. deterrence). Anyway, countering this feeble supposition is child’s play. Do you think that the average person wants to shoot someone? If I gave you a gun, would you want to shoot someone?

Gun control advocates view the common man as stupid, emotionally unstable and aggressive. In this they are wrong. They understand that they must hide this elitism (perhaps even from themselves) to protect their cause. For once it’s exposed, it’s reviled. And their argument with it. Which is how it should be. But don’t expect them to reveal/confront their true colors without your help.

It all starts with a simple question. Do you believe the average American is responsible enough to own a gun?

Gun Control Always Leads To Genocides
Here’s why the NRA is dead wrong about gun control causing genocide. But at least they agree with human rights groups about the horrors of the military dictatorship in Guatemala. What does America’s gun lobby have to do with the question of genocide in Guatemala? Plenty, although not for anything they did. But for the particular ideology they bring to this and almost every other case of genocide or similar violence in the twentieth century. Today, in the United States, the gun lobby and gun manufacturers have a joint interest in both fighting gun control and encouraging Americans to buy more guns. At the same time, gun manufacturing executives play a greater, hidden role inside the National Rifle Association that NRA leaders like to admit, as I helped established in a piece in January on this website. The gun lobby also shares ideological ground with a small, but vocal group of gun rights activists who, like most NRA leaders and many gun industry executives, take an absolutist view of the American Second Amendment. Their ideology has two articles of faith, and each one reinforces the other. First, even the slightest form of control is likely, if not certain to result in government seizure of all firearms. And, second, gun control itself invariably leads to government tyranny, if not genocide. That’s another reason why the gun lobby along with many gun rights activists oppose even modest gun control legislation. And it’s also why the NRA is vehemently opposed to a U.N. Arms Trade Treaty that human rights groups like Amnesty International strongly support. Two seemingly unconnected events recently unfolded in March more than 2,500 miles apart. On March 18, Guatemala began an historic trial against a former military dictator on charges of genocide. On March 20, Colorado governor John Hickenlooper signed landmark gun control measures in that state into law. What does one have to do with the other? For Second Amendment absolutists, gun control and genocide, or at least the specter of government violence, are always tightly intertwined. “This is how it starts. ==> Landmark gun bills signed in Colorado,” @Bobacheck tweeted in Wisconsin just hours after thy became Colorado law, adding hashtags including, “#NRA #2ndAmendment.” Colorado’s new gun control laws require background checks on private gun sales, and limit magazines for semi-automatic weapons to a maximum of 15 rounds. (New York recently passed a law limiting magazines for semi-automatic weapons to seven rounds, although it may now modify the law to allow use of industry-standard 10-round magazines as long as they are not loaded with more than seven rounds; the District of Columbia limits magazines to 10 rounds.) The Colorado legislature passed the law three months after this past December’s Newtown, Connecticut grade school tragedy, and in the wake of two more of America’s worst gun massacres over the past 13 years in the Denver suburbs at Columbine High School in 1999 and in an Aurora movie theater last summer. Many Colorado residents along with most Americans, as recent polls suggest, see such measures like background checks as an important step forward for public safety. But for the gun lobby along with Second Amendment absolutists, the signing of Colorado’s new gun laws –which came only hours after the state’s Corrections director was shot and killed standing in the front door of his own home—is just the first sinister step toward government repression. “#COLORADO How are they getting away with this crap? It’s coming to a town near you. We better stand, and fight this people,” tweeted @SanddraggerTees on the West Coast, one of countless gun rights absolutists who also rang the alarm just hours after the legislation became law, using the hashtags #2A for Second Amendment and #NRA. YOUTUBE and the blogosphere have long been full of material alleging historical connections between gun control and genocide. The videos often use dramatic music, images and language, while the website prefer elaborate chart presentations to illustrate correlations and, thereby suggest causations between gun restrictions and genocidal violence. A small group of legal scholars have also written essays, often for journals at small, accredited law schools, making similar but more substantive arguments. Two such scholars, David Hardy and David Kopel, each testified early this year before the Senate Judiciary Committee, not on genocide, but on guns and gun violence in America; the nationally televised audience watching them was not informed that some of their research has been funded by the National Rifle Association’s Civil Rights Defense Fund, as I recently reported on MSNBC.com. Another pair of scholars, who, back in the 1990s, were among the first to assert a connection between gun control and genocide, began one of their first law review articles on the matter in a defensive tone. The language perhaps indicates how some of their peers view their arguments. "This essay seeks to reclaim a serious argument from the lunatic fringe,” begin Daniel D. Polsby and Don B. Kates, Jr. in “Of Holocausts and Gun Control” in the Fall 1997 issue of Washington University Law Quarterly published by the law school of the same name in St. Louis. “We argue a connection exists between the restrictiveness of a country’s civilian weapons policy and its liability to commit genocide.” One of the NRA-funded scholars who recently testified in the Senate, Kopel, teaches Advanced Constitutional Law as an adjunct professor at Denver University law school. Kopel lists a number of specific cases in his review of a book, "Lethal Laws", by Jay Simkin, Alan M. Rice and Aaron S. Zelman of the small but voluble gun rights organization, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. Cases where gun control led to genocide, according to the group, allegedly include Armenia under Turkish occupation, Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union, the Holocaust led by Nazi Germany, the Cultural Revolution in China, the genocide carried out by the U.S.-backed military in Guatemala, atrocities in Uganda under Idi Amin, and the Killing Fields in Cambodia. The same group along with the NRA’s longest-standing African-American board member, Roy Innis, of the Congress for Racial Equality, also put the more recent genocide in Rwanda on the list. In the case of Guatemala, the authors of Lethal Laws focus mainly on a time several decades before its genocidal acts occurred. Even Kopel takes issue with the authors’ claim whether repealing gun control laws in the early 1950’s might have made a difference, as most Guatemalans, he points out, were too poor to afford firearms anyway. The main thing the Lethal Laws authors seem to say about Guatemala’s genocidal acts in the early 1980s is that human rights advocacy groups like Amnesty International should have advocated for the arming of victimized populations. Such an argument would of course violate Amnesty International’s mandate. More importantly, anyone who has ever been to, or spent any time even just reading up on Guatemala would know such an argument is patently absurd. It would have only put the nation’s surviving highlands civilians at risk of even more military reprisals. The bloody history of Guatemala includes grotesque human-rights abuses—in spite of the fact that there were significant numbers of armed rebels. The insurgents had military weapons, but they were still not strong enough as a force to defend civilians including women and children from brigade-level and other large-unit attacks by the Army. THE TRIAL of the former military dictator, retired General Efraín Ríos Montt, for genocide is underway in Guatemala City. A U.N. Truth Commission previously documented the wholesale annihilation of men, women and children in hundreds of ethnic Mayan villages while he led the country, calling them “acts of genocide.” The abuses were carried out with CIA assistance, as was established in 1995 by journalist and author Tim Weiner in The New York Times. In late 1990, in The Progressive, I reported how villagers in Santiago de Atitán finally broke through their own fear of military reprisals to place the photos of hundreds of loved ones who had disappeared over the previous decade on the windows and walls of the village’s town hall. It all began with one family’s photo, and soon became a silent, collective act of defiance of military authority. Another five years passed before Guatemala’s civil war finally ended. By then, Guatemala’s civil war had been bloodier than all the other wars in Central America combined. More than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or disappeared. Leftist guerrillas committed some abuses, but the U.N. Truth Commission found the Guatemalan military responsible for 93 percent of the nation’s wartime abuses. Gun control had nothing to do with it. Instead it was the state’s concentration of power by the military as an institutional that facilitated the abuses. Even as the massacres were still being carried out, military authorities began organizing civilians in villages whom they deemed as being less tainted by rebel ideology into military-controlled “strategic hamlets” or population centers. In other villages, where surviving residents were not forcibly relocated, the Army organized the males into the civil defense patrols and armed them with M1 carbine rifles. Unlike the claims of Second Amendment scholars and activists, the same phenomenon of military power being the primary factor leading to genocide or similar acts is characteristic of state violence committed by other governments in previous eras. “The history of gun control in Germany from the post-World War I period to the inception of World War II seems to be a history of declining, rather than increasing, gun control,” wrote Bernard E. Harcourt in the Fordham Law Review in 2004. Debunking the arguments made explicitly by NRA activists and Second Amendment scholars point by point, Harcourt concludes their claims “are not about history, nor are they about truth. These are cultural arguments.” Other scholars looking at the Holocaust and other genocidal acts seem to agree. “Perhaps the greatest source of power in an oppressive society in times of war is the military establishment that is identified with the authorities in charge,” wrote scholar Vahakn N. Dadrian in “The Comparative Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide: A Sociohistorical Perspective,” in the 2008 edited volume, Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide. Now in Guatemala prosecutors are alleging that General Montt presided over military counterinsurgency efforts that targeted not armed leftist guerrillas trying to overthrow the government, but explicitly unarmed civilians suspected of supporting or even being sympathetic to the rebel cause. “A woman was found hiding in a ditch and realizing her presence, the point man fired, killing her and two ‘chocolates,’” according to one platoon report from mid-1982 called "Operation Sofia” and obtained by the National Security Archive of George Washington University. The “chocolates” referred to two children she was protecting. One former Army sergeant operating in the Quiché region, where many abuses were concentrated, told me during the war how his commanders justified such brutality. “The innocent pay for the sins of the guilty,” he explained, saying the innocents referred to unarmed civilians and the guilty referred to the armed guerrillas. When the military confronted unarmed civilians, there was “a clear indifference to their status as a non-combatant civilian population,” later concluded the U.N. Truth Commission. The level of carnage in Guatemala was extreme even when compared to other bloodied nations in the region like El Salvador. “In the majority of massacres there is evidence of multiple acts of savagery, which preceded, accompanied or occurred after the deaths of victims,” concluded the U.N. Truth Commission. “Acts such as the killing of defenseless children, often by beating them against walls or throwing them alive into pits where the corpses of adults were later thrown; the amputation of limbs; the impaling of victims; the killing of persons by covering them in petrol and burning them alive; the extraction, in the presence of others, of the viscera of victims who were still alive; the confinement of people who had been mortally tortured, in agony for days; the opening of the wombs of pregnant women, and other similarly atrocious acts.” BUT WHEN it comes to one thing, Second Amendments scholars are closer to human rights advocates than to many American conservatives about Guatemala. Back in late 1982, President Ronald Reagan, whom many conservative Republicans still revere, met General Montt and afterward told reporters that he thought the Guatemalan dictator was getting “a bum rap” over his alleged human rights abuses. Today’s gun lobby scholars disagree. They and other gun rights absolutists fault President Reagan for supporting gun control measures including the Brady Bill mandating background checks after his press secretary, Jim Brady, was shot and Reagan was wounded, and for later speaking out against non-sporting, high-powered weapons. But some of the same leading Second Amendment scholars also reject Reagan’s apologies for Guatemala’s human rights record under General Rios Montt. “Perhaps the most overlooked genocide of the twentieth century has been the Guatemalan government’s campaign against its Indian population,” wrote Kopel in 1995. One reason “may be that the Guatemalan government has been friendly to the United States.” He’s right about that. Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist and MSNBC Contributor. He has been covering the gun lobby since the mid-1990s, writing for publications including The Village Voice, The Washington Post and Mother Jones. He’s been covering Guatemala since the late-1980s, writing for outlets including The Progressive, The Wall Street Journal and The Texas Observer. Smyth is the author of the 1994 Human Rights Watch report released on the eve of genocide, Arming Rwanda, and of the 2010 study, "Painting the Maya Red: Military Doctrine and Speech in Guatemala’s Genocidal Acts", published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. His clips are posted at www.franksmyth.com, and his Twitter handle is @SmythFrank.

Gun Control Effects on Gun Shows
Thousands of gun shows take place in the U.S. each year. Gun control advocates argue that because sales at gun shows are much less regulated than other sales, such shows make it easier for potential criminals to obtain a gun. Similarly, one might be concerned that gun shows would exacerbate suicide rates by providing individuals considering suicide with a more lethal means of ending their lives. On the other hand, proponents argue that gun shows are innocuous since potential criminals can acquire guns quite easily through other black market sales or theft. In this paper, we use data from Gun and Knife Show Calendar combined with vital statistics data to examine the effect of gun shows. We find no evidence that gun shows lead to substantial increases in either gun homicides or suicides. In addition, tighter regulation of gun shows does not appear to reduce the number of firearms-related deaths.

Gun Control Effects Gun Owners
Since the unspeakably tragic Newtown school shooting of Dec. 14, there has been an outpouring of media attention focusing on the problem of gun violence in the United States.

Many politicians, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, have called for a renewal of the so-called assault weapons ban, while others have advocated banning semiautomatic weapons entirely. In their haste to apply their chosen solution, gun control advocates too often fail to consider whether that solution would actually be effective. If, as the evidence overwhelmingly indicates, banning guns would fail to solve that problem, it should not be entertained as a solution.

Most of the gun control legislation currently being considered in Congress in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre has focused on reinstating an “assault weapons” ban. While the intentions of such policies are certainly noble, we must rationally consider whether the proposed legislation will truly have the desired outcome.

The major assumption behind the proposed bans is that they would prevent criminals from obtaining the weapons needed to commit mass murders. It is difficult to see how this could be the case, as around 300 million guns are already in circulation in the United States.

Therefore, even if we banned the sale and manufacture of all new guns, determined criminals would likely still have very little difficulty obtaining guns illegally in secondary markets. Already, the vast majority of gun crimes are committed using illegally acquired firearms, indicating that laws restricting access have little effect on criminals.

Because no law can truly prevent criminals and psychopaths from obtaining and using guns, attempting to prohibit law-abiding citizens from having the ability to defend themselves from these criminals is not only morally incomprehensible but will likely only worsen the problem of gun violence.

Given the impracticality (not to mention unconstitutionality) of removing all privately owned guns from American society, what can we say about the possibility of banning people from possessing guns in certain areas? Many have argued for designating areas with a high risk for mass shootings — schools, movie theaters and so on — as gun-free zones. In fact, such gun-free zones already exist, and it is no coincidence that these very places have been the setting for every mass shooting in recent memory, with the exception of the attack in Tucson.

Preventing trained, law- abiding citizens from carrying guns in such places only ensures that they remain entirely vulnerable to any psychopath with a gun. The minutes it takes for police to arrive at a crime scene are often the difference between life and death. While the idea that a citizen with a gun can stop a shooter in his tracks is indeed a common pro-gun trope, that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. There is little doubt that had the shooters at Newtown, Virginia Tech or Aurora been confronted by another person with a gun, fewer innocent lives would have been lost.

Attempts to ban guns are simply dangerous distractions from the real social problems that drive people to commit violent crimes. This moment of heightened awareness will be wasted if energy is directed toward a renewal of the ineffective Assault Weapons Ban (violent crime is down since 2000, when the ban was in full effect).

Guns may make it easier to kill more people, but the real problem is that there are people in our society who want to commit such acts at all. Maybe someday that won’t be the case, but in the meantime, people must be allowed to defend themselves. Requiring background checks in order to prevent the wrong people from legally buying guns is certainly a good idea, but criminals are already able to easily obtain guns illegally.

Increased attentiveness to mental health would probably help as well, but we should be wary of simply allocating funding for some new program and then forgetting about the problem until the next massacre. Mass killings are a symptom of social illness, and we must work toward a world in which they occur with less frequency. As long as there is evil in the world, there will be guns and people who misuse them. The only sane policy is to protect the right of law-abiding citizens to defend themselves and their families, even if that means using a gun.

Gun Control Effects Gun Collectors
Gun collectors have to be savvy when it comes to gun laws because there are so many to follow. There are federal laws, state laws, licenses to get, and loopholes to consider. As a collector, there are several federal acts, laws, and policies that will affect you on a regular basis. National Firearms Act of 1934(NFA) The National Firearms Act regulates the transfer of a particular class of weapons known as Title II weapons. Title II weapons include machine guns, certain parts of machine guns, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, silencers, and destructive devices such as grenades or mortars. Title II weapons also include a category called, "Any Other Weapon." This is a generic term used to describe a concealable weapon that can shoot, but doesn't quite fit into any other category. An example of an "any other weapon" would be a cane gun or pen gun. The transfer of an NFA gun requires an application to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, a fingerprint card, a photo of the applicant, and a tax of $5 for an "Any Other Weapon" or $200 for other Title II weapons. Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA) The Gun Control Act has the broadest reach of any federal gun control law as it pertains to the sale or transfer of any firearm and ammunition. This act established the Federal Firearms License (FFL) system which requires gun dealers to be licensed and prohibits interstate gun sales by anyone other than a licensed dealer. The GCA also made it unlawful for certain people to purchase firearms. These "prohibited persons" include: •Anyone currently under indictment for a crime punishable by more than a year in prison •Anyone who has been previously convicted of such a crime •Fugitives •Users of any controlled substance •Anyone who has been committed to a mental institution or deemed mentally defective •Illegal aliens •Anyone who has been dishonorably discharged from the military •Anyone who has renounced his or her U.S. citizenship •Anyone who currently has a restraining order against him or her from an intimate partner or child of said partner •Anyone who has been convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor

Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 (FOPA) The Firearm Owners Protection Act was enacted to make changes to the Gun Control Act of 1968. One of the most notable changes banned civilian ownership of machine guns that were manufactured and registered after May 19, 1986. The act also introduced the “Safe Passage” provision. This provision protects gun owners who are traveling through a state from being prosecuted for breaking that state’s gun laws—under certain conditions. The gun owner must not spend any extended time in the state and must have his or her firearms unloaded and stored in a separate compartment such as a trunk or a lockbox. For collectors, though, the most important change to the GCA was the one in which the definition of a gun dealer was revised. Before, a dealer was defined simply as someone “engaged in the business” of selling firearms. Under FOPA, the definition was expanded to specify that a dealer must be selling firearms for profit or livelihood. This allows unlicensed individuals to sell firearms from their private collection without performing a background check on the buyer. This change created what has become known as the “Gun Show Loophole.” Gun Show Loophole Since individuals are allowed, under FOPA, to sell from their personal collection, some collectors have begun selling their firearms at gun shows. As unlicensed collectors, they are able to make sales without performing background checks. The GCA still requires that guns not be sold to a “prohibited person” but without a background check, it may be impossible to determine if a buyer is prohibited. For this reason, there is a great deal of controversy surrounding the Gun Show Loophole.

Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act went into effect in 1994. It requires that Federally Licensed Dealers conduct background checks on any individual who purchases a weapon from them. The background check is to determine if the individual is a “prohibited person” (see above). The act does not require individuals to perform a background check before selling a firearm to another individual, provided the seller is not in the business of selling guns. In addition, federally licensed collectors of Curio and Relic (C&R) firearms do not have to undergo a background check when purchasing a C&R gun.

Gun Control Leads To High Crime Rates
Since the Sandy Hook shootings, we frequently hear that we need more and stricter gun legislation. Surely, stricter gun laws will help to lower gun violence in America. Right?

Nonsense. The incident in Connecticut was devastating, of course, but stricter gun laws are not the magic solution to preventing future tragedies. Emotion must be put aside to objectively assess the effectiveness of strict gun laws. The data overwhelmingly demonstrates that stricter gun control does not yield lower crime.

If gun control were effective, Chicago would be the safest city in the country. Prior to 2013, Illinois was the only state where carrying a concealed weapon was illegal. In December, federal judges struck down the ban, ruling it unconstitutional. But now Illinois lawmakers are working to pass other gun regulations, like an assault weapons ban. Despite a history of strict gun policies, Chicago is one of the nation’s most violent and deadly cities. In 2012, there were over 500 gun-related deaths in Chicago. That is up over 10 percent from the rate in 2005. Gun control is clearly not working in the Windy City.

Houston is similar to Chicago in socioeconomic factors like population, density, and racial segregation. Both cities are plagued with drugs and human trafficking. Chicago and Houston are America’s third and fourth most populous cities, respectively, each with between 2 and 3 million residents. Non-whites make up 50-60 percent of the population in both places, and the poverty levels in each city are almost identical at just under 30 percent. Yet in 2012, there were only 217 murders in Houston — less than half of Chicago’s death toll. A major difference between the two cities: Houston has very few gun laws. Criminals there know that many citizens are well armed for self-protection.

Gun control advocates have good intentions, But good intentions do not always yield positive results. Strict gun laws do not work because they take guns out of the hands of only law-abiding citizens. These civilians are then left with few ways to defend themselves against armed criminals, who do not follow laws. It is absurd to think that banning guns would stop a criminal from possessing them. If that argument worked, no one in America would posses or use illegal drugs. Banning something does not make it go away.

Despite the obvious evidence that goes against their appeals for gun laws, politicians frequently exploit the gun issue to enact more government regulations and control. Many politicians use emotional appeals to push aggressive laws. During his State of the Union address, President Obama used the massacre in Newtown to vehemently demand stricter gun control.

Obama proposed background checks, magazine limits, and banning assault weapons (which he inaccurately refers to as “weapons of war”). “Assault weapons” are defined by cosmetic features only, like folding stocks and barrel shrouds. Assault rifles, on the other hand, are produced for military purposes.

The propositions made by the President would not have prevented the Newtown shootings. Adam Lanza might not have passed a background check, but this is irrelevant since he stole the gun from his mother. A magazine limit would have likely been ineffective as well, since reload time takes a mere 3-5 seconds. Similarly, a ban on semiautomatic rifles would have been a moot point. Connecticut already had such a law, and it did not stop Lanza from gunning down over twenty innocent schoolchildren.

The president’s emotion-based rhetoric uses the Sandy Hook victims to try and convince people to support policies that would not have prevented this event in the first place.

If Obama and other gun control advocates were serious about “protecting our children,” they would discuss public swimming pool safety (drowning is the number one cause of death among young children). Gun related murders are far down on the list of causes of child mortality. Even the National Public Radio, hardly a fan of the National Rifle Association, acknowledges that school violence has decreased considerably in the last two decades. In fact, the violent crime rate in general has dropped significantly over the past 20 years, while firearms sales have risen.

Since the incident in Connecticut, gun control has been a hot topic and many states have moved to create stricter gun legislation.

Advocates of gun control need to start thinking with their heads, not just their hearts. Such horrific violence and its causes should be studied intelligently to discover effective solutions. Having an honest discussion about violence in our society is healthy. But enacting new, kneejerk laws after each tragedy is not the answer.

Anti Gun Confiscation TaskForce
Maryland is set to target 110,000 citizens with gun confiscation under a new law that would link the state’s gun registry with its criminal database – and they have new troopers set to be hired to enforce door to door visits of these gun owners.

Confiscate guns from felons one day with their new ‘confiscation task force’, who’s it going to be the next?

Authorities in Maryland are set to target 110,000 citizens with gun confiscation under a new law that would link the state’s gun registry with its criminal database, with new troopers set to be hired to enforce door to door visits of illegal gun owners.

Maryland State Police complain that there is no way for them to identify gun owners who have been convicted of felonies, meaning they can’t check if weapons have been relinquished in accordance with state law.

New legislation being considered by the Maryland House of Delegates would allow police to run checks of the state’s gun registry against its criminal database at least twice a year at a cost of $300,000 dollars to create the new system.

“State Police estimate that if they linked the databases, they would find 10 percent of registered gun owners — about 110,000 people — would be disqualified. They estimate a rate of 1 percent each year thereafter,” reports the Associated Press, adding that “seven new full-time troopers to investigate findings from the new database,” would be hired, “with a cost of more than $1 million a year for salaries and equipment.”

In other words, more armed police would be needed to conduct dangerous door to door gun confiscations of the thousands of people that would be snagged under the new law.

“This smacks of a police state mentality,” said Maryland resident Ronald Smith in written testimony before a hearing on Tuesday.

While the law is ostensibly aimed at disarming criminals, we have seen a steady expansion of reasons that are being applied to bar Americans from owning firearms. The law also creates a chilling effect on the second amendment by implying that gun owners are all guilty until proven innocent.

Last year we reported on how US Navy Veteran David A Schmecker had his guns confiscated by police after a forced “psychiatric evaluation” despite him having no criminal or psychiatric history.

In August 2012, we reported on how a veteran in Ohio had his guns taken because he was adjudged to be mentally incompetent, despite the fact that his previous VA psychiatric evaluations were all clear, he was not on medication, and he had no criminal record.

In February 2012, David Sarti, one of the stars of National Geographic’s Doomsday Preppers show, visited his doctor complaining of chest pains, only to have the doctor later commit him to a psychiatric ward and alert authorities, before Sarti was declared “mentally defective” and put on an FBI list that stripped him of his second amendment rights.

Maryland’s preparations for gun confiscation arrive on the back of a similar showdown in Connecticut, where a vast majority of residents refused to register their assault rifles and high capacity magazines in accordance with a new law that took effect on January 1. Gun groups are now challenging authorities to either proceed with mass gun confiscation or repeal the law in full.

Piers Morgan Failed Gun Control Debate
CNN’s Piers Morgan confirmed Ben Shapiro’s skepticism about whether tonight’s “debate” on gun control would be “balanced.” The Breitbart Editor-at-Large accepted an invitation to appear on Morgan’s show for a rematch, then turned down the offer when it became clear Morgan planned to turn his “town hall” into a propaganda rally. Morgan then offered Shapiro two one-on-one segments, and the debate back on was on.

As fate would have it, Shapiro’s flight from Los Angeles to New York was grounded in Denver due to an unruly passenger (without a gun). Ben arrived at the CNN studio too late to participate in the debate--but all he missed was the spectacle of Piers Morgan browbeating a black conservative and a woman from the Tea Party in front of his anti-gun guests and to the enthusiastic cheers of the hopelessly stacked studio audience.

This is “debate” in the same way that communist dictatorships practice “democracy.” There’s an opposition present, of course, but the better they are--and the Tea Party's Scottie N. Hughes was particularly good--the more it proves their guilt. At the end, Piers turned to family members of murder victims for their verdict. They choked back tears as they accosted the two Second Amendment defenders: how dare they fail to capitulate!

Every time he lost a point, Morgan would cut off his conservative guests or insist that he had to cut to a commercial. After returning from one break in particular, he turned abruptly to Hughes and “corrected” her on some minor points of fact--fed to him in the interim, no doubt, by a helpful producer. When she attempted to respond, he simply cut her off in mid-sentence and picked out a more sympathetic guest to vent more outrage.

At one rather humorous point, Morgan’s attempt to control the conversation nearly failed when an anti-gun professor, speaking via remote link, corrected him on the topic of whether, in fact, assault rifles were used most often in mass shootings (semiautomatic handguns are the weapon of choice). That nearly took the discussion back to where Shapiro had taken it last week--i.e. highlighting Morgan’s true desire to remove all guns.

The most telling moment of all came at the beginning of the program, when Morgan openly admitted that the Obama administration’s new proposals for gun regulations, which he supports and for which he proudly campaigned, are “not gonna stop mass shootings.” They are worth enacting anyway, Morgan explained, because they are an appropriate response to the Sandy Hook shootings, even if merely a symbolic one.

Morgan immediately proved the point that Second Amendment defenders have been making for weeks--that none of the gun control proposals of the left would have made any difference in preventing the Sandy Hook atrocity. But what is important is not, in fact, whether we save the life of even one child. Rather, the aim is to humble Americans, particularly conservative ones, into accepting limits on our constitutional rights.

When Hughes challenged Morgan to explain why the Second Amendment ought to be limited to the technologies of the eighteenth century, but the First Amendment should not, he failed to produce a coherent answer. Never mind--the debate is settled, and the verdict is that Morgan is a small, small man. Viewers looking forward to the Shapiro rematch tomorrow will be disappointed--Ben has a prior, and more useful, engagement.

Hospitals Kill More than guns
The Third Leading Cause of Death in the U.S. Heart disease and cancer are the two leading causes of death in the United States. People are often surprised to learn that as many as 400,000 people die each year, however, from preventable medical errors in hospitals. That makes medical mistakes in hospitals the third leading cause of death in this country. “This is a crisis situation which must be dealt with,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging. The subcommittee has scheduled a hearing at 10 a.m. Thursday to discuss this enormously important issue with some of the leading experts in the country.

Obamacare Kills More Than Guns
Everyone agrees the Sandy Hook shooting was a tragedy. Lots of people subsequently exploited the deaths of those children to push a political agenda of disarming Americans by claiming "guns kill people."

But compared to what? Swimming pools kill people. Horseback riding kills people. And yes, even childbirth kills people. (Does that mean we should criminalize getting pregnant?)

To make any sense of death statistics, we have to ask, "Compared to what?" Because if we compare deaths by firearms to other causes of death, the picture is very, very different from the doomsday fear mongering scenarios CNN and other gun control pushers have whipped up into a nationwide frenzy. In fact, as the following infographic shows, doctors kill 2,450% more Americans than all gun-related deaths combined.

Your doctor is FAR more likely to kill you than an armed criminal It's true: You are 64 times more likely to be killed by your doctor than by someone else wielding a gun. That's because 19,766 of the total 31,940 gun deaths in the USA (in the year 2011) were suicides. So the actual number of deaths from other people shooting you is only 12,174.

Doctors, comparatively, kill 783,936 people each year, which is 64 times higher than 12,174. Doctors shoot you not with bullets, but with vaccines, chemotherapy and pharmaceuticals... all of which turn out to be FAR more deadly than guns.

This is especially amazing, given that there are just under 700,000 doctors in America, while there are roughly about 80 million gun owners in America.

How do 700,000 doctors manage to kill 783,936 people each year (that's over one death per doctor), while 80 million gun owners kill only 31,940? Because owning a gun is orders of magnitude safer than "practicing" medicine!

Abortion Kills More Than Guns
Obama wants gun control to save the children…How about the government stop paying for abortions in Obamacare that will save more children than gun control.

Drunk Driving Kills More Than Guns
To the Editor: After the tragic shooting in Aurora, Colo., an outcry has emanated from many calling for tougher gun laws. While I agree that this shooting was a true tragedy, a much larger tragedy plays out daily: innocent people killed by drunken drivers. In 2010, drunken drivers killed 13,000 people. According to the CDC there were 10,400 firearm homicides in our country. Reviewing the statistics, we find that the majority of these gun-related deaths were criminal on criminal violence or justified police shootings, not innocent people killed as is the case of a death by a DUI. You and I have a far, far greater chance of being killed by a drunken driver than we do have of being killed by a person like James Holmes, the Aurora shooter. There appears to be very little correlation between "looser" gun laws and gun deaths. Washington, DC has one of the tightest gun laws in the country, and yet the highest rate of violent crime. Vermont, with no gun control laws has a very low rate of violent crime. Statistics show that violent crime is somewhat lower in states which allow concealed carry of weapons. However, DUI related deaths are a much different thing. One third of DUI killers are repeat offenders. Seventy-five percent of drivers who lose their license due to a DUI continue to drive anyway. We need stronger laws to keep these people away from us and our families. When I lived in Norway, I found that drunken driving was a far less common offense. Why? They had a very effective education program coupled with very stiff penalties for DUI. A first offense brought a month in jail and loss of license for a year, any further offense brought a much longer sentence. In any case a large fine was also assessed. Interestingly, Mexico prohibits entry to anyone with a DUI in the past 10 years. I ask our legislators to stiffen the penalties for DUI and mandate an ignition interlock for anyone convicted of a drunken driving. This device would immobilize the car of anyone who "blew positive." We probably can't control crazies with guns but we can surely can reduce the risk of a death at the hand of a drunken driver. WILLIAM J. DAHMS Avalon

Deadliest City in the United States
The recent bloody headlines out of Chicago relayed the sad tale of the city's deadly weekend, where seven people were killed in shootings and more than 50 were victims of gunfire. Thanks in part to news coverage, America's third largest city has become synonymous with runaway gun violence, and especially deadly weekend shootouts.

Sadly, that type of shooting spree isn't restricted to Chicago. Just this month in New York City, which has experienced an historic reduction in crime in recent years, 25 people were shot over a single weekend; six of the victims died.

Nonetheless, the Chicago news triggered the usual response from conservative gun advocates, who love to mock the city's homicide rate. In recent years Chicago gun victims have served as a macabre punch line for NRA fans as they scoff at the alleged futility of the city's gun safety laws. (Chicago banned handguns decades ago, and has retained strong gun laws following the 2010 overturning of that ban by the Supreme Court.)

Conservative conspiracists such as Rush Limbaugh even claim Democratic politicians, including Chicago's mayor Rahm Emanuel, want the city's murder rate to remain high so they can use the killings to advocate for stronger gun laws.

But mostly, firearm defenders simply ridicule Chicago's murder count. "Slaughter in Gun Control Chicago," blogged Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich in the wake of last weekend's gun attacks, while a Breitbart writer on Monday insisted city officials had "little to show" for their efforts to curb violence.

But note what these commentators are careful not to mention while using the killings to make a political point: They didn't mention that homicides in "Gun Control Chicago" are down dramatically this year; a trend that undermines the attack that the Second City stands as the ultimate symbol of gun enforcement failure.

In early May, the Chicago Police Department released figures indicating the city marked a 43 percent decline in the number of murders over the first four months of this year, as compared to the same period last year. For the first quarter of this year, Chicago registered 93 murders, its lowest January-to-April tally since 1963.

Then this month came news that Chicago experienced a 31 percent decrease in shootings for the month of May, which meant that through May of this year the city's murder count had declined 34 percent from last year. Chicago homicides still outnumber those in larger cities, such as New York and Los Angeles; it suffers from weaker gun laws in both its home state and surrounding states than those two cities, allowing criminals easier access to guns purchased elsewhere.

It's true that Chicago's crime is certain to spike in the coming summer months, and with it will come more heartbreaking headlines about tragic gun murders; killings that will inevitably involve young victims. But statistically, violent crime almost always goes up in warm weather months. So the question is, will Chicago's murder rate go up more this year than during last year's summer months? Or will the city be able to maintain its pattern of reduced gun violence throughout 2013?

Skeptics say no, and point to the amount of overtime Chicago has already paid police officers this year to flood the city's most dangerous neighborhoods with more personnel. When that overtime budget dries up homicides numbers will rebound, predicted Justin Peters at Slate this month.

Time will tell. In the meantime though, there's been surprisingly little media discussion about whether Chicago's strict gun laws, routinely ridiculed by the right-wing, might actually be working. And as police continue to take thousands and thousands of guns off the streets (nearly 3,000 already this year), whether that policy has directly led to fewer killings. President Obama's "conservative critics" insist gun control efforts don't affect the crime rate.

Note the press coverage: On January 29, a New York Times headline read, "Strict Gun Laws in Chicago Can't Stem Fatal Shots." The article detailed the city's gun laws, which make it illegal to sell firearms or to possess assault weapons, and contrasted that with Chicago's murder count in 2012.

Then on June 11, The New York Times reported on Chicago's sharply declining number of homicides through the first five months of this year. But the article never addressed the issue of gun confiscations or gun laws. So in January, the Times claimed gun laws weren't curbing violence in the Windy City. Then in June, when statistics indicated Chicago's homicides had declined precipitously, the Times ignored the possibility that gun safety efforts might be one reason why.

It is notoriously difficult to determine why crime rises and falls. But to effectively blame a policy when rates rise and ignore it when they drop doesn't make sense.

Meanwhile, much was made in the media last year about the fact that more than 500 people were killed in Chicago, with the "shocking" mark treated as a stunning demarcation line. (Of the 500-plus homicides, 443 were gun-related killings.) And for gun advocates, the number served as proof gun laws are bound to fail. Missing from the 500 coverage however, was some important context.

Fact: In 1992, nearly 950 people were killed in Chicago. Ten years later that number had fallen, but the homicide count still stood at 656.

Note that the 433 homicides in Chicago in 2011 were the fewest in two decades, although you certainly wouldn't know that from the media's coverage of Chicago crime in recent years, or the right-wing media's constant attacks on Chicago's gun policies.

And now comes news that it's possible (possible) Chicago will register the fewest hometown homicides since John F. Kennedy was president. How does that square with the media's portrayal of Chicago as a lawless city, and the far-right claims that gun laws do no good?

Zionist Liberals That Are Willing to do anything for Forcing Gun Control
Liberalism is an ideology that believes in control, not freedom. That's why liberals love the federal government so much while they detest states' rights. It allows them to bend hundreds of millions of people to their will with one imperial edict. It's also why liberal judges don't believe in the Constitution like conservative justices do. Sticking to one set of rules means people have freedom to do what they want as long as they adhere to the basic rules our society was formed around. A "living constitution" means you can put the force of law behind the whims of liberal judges. Why is Barack Obama so insistent on listening in on your phone calls via NSA? Because if the government can't watch you, it can't tell you what to do...for your own good, of course.

Granted, conservatives aren't perfect in these areas, but at least we believe in free speech, free markets, and states' rights. The all-encompassing, all-smothering liberal nanny state has no use for freedom. The only freedom liberals want to give people is the "freedom" to do as they're told.

1) Liberals want to control you with government regulations: There are 174,545 pages of federal regulations. Let me repeat that: there are 174,545 pages of federal regulations and the numbers are only increasing. As a practical matter, what that means is that we've long since passed the point where any one human being could have an understanding of all our regulations and we've moved on to the "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it" era. In fact, you probably did five illegal things before breakfast without having a clue about it, which you'll find out about the moment some liberal decides you have to be put in your place and looks for a way to do it. Liberals control what you eat, what clothes you wear, what TV you watch, what kind of car you drive, what size soda you can drink, and even what toilet or light bulb you can use in your house. Complain about it and you're accused of wanting to end restaurant inspections and safety standards that prevent cars from exploding. So, what would be wrong with permanently fixing the number of regulations at 1/10 the current number and dropping one every time a new one needs to be added? The only thing wrong with it would be that it wouldn't allow liberals to micromanage your life.

2) Liberals want to control your major life decisions: Liberals aren't just picking at the margins; they're now making some of the central choices in your life. They oppose vouchers and charter schools because they want to make sure your child is exposed to the right kind of liberal propaganda courtesy of the teachersí unions. Creepily, Melissa Harris Perry took it even further when she said, "We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities." They don't want to own your children's education; they want to own your children. They control when you can retire by refusing to let people have even safe, limited investment opportunities in Social Security. Obamacare is an attempt to take over the health care system, which will literally give a liberal death panel the ability to decide whether you live or die. Given that Barack Obama himself once famously suggested, "Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller," that's not a comforting thought. Shouldn't you be making those decisions about your life instead of disconnected bureaucrats in D.C. who pay no price for being wrong when they make bad choices that hurt you?

3) They want to control your speech: Why do liberals push speech code designed to kill talk radio like the fairness doctrine and "localism?" Because talk radio is conservative and it gets an alternative viewpoint out. It's the same reason that they futilely try to discredit Fox News and why conservative speakers on college campuses are often attacked and shouted down. It's also why liberals embrace speech codes on college campuses and political correctness. Liberals typically don't even argue an issue in any sort of meaningful fashion so much as they shout "racism," "sexism," and "extremism" in an attempt to define all differing opinions as illegitimate by default. Since liberalism works about as well as Communism in practice, the only way it can be implemented is either by force or by preventing the arguments against it from getting a fair hearing.

4) Liberals want to control minorities: If you're not a straight white male, liberals think they own you like a slave. They're not allowed to whip you like a slave any more, but if you leave the liberal plantation by thinking for yourself, they will try to destroy you as a human being. Why do liberals hate men like Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson so much? Because they're successful, intelligent, well-liked black men who don't see themselves as victims, complain incessantly about racism, or believe that they need liberals to succeed. If you're a "feminist," why wouldn't you be celebrating strong, successful, much-admired women like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Dana Loesch or Michelle Malkin? Because they don't hate men, look at themselves as victims, or believe in aborting as many children as possible. Therefore, they must be demeaned, smeared, and hurt in any way possible. What if you're gay and don't see yourself as a victim or believe the central focus of your entire life should be gay marriage? They want you destroyed. What if you're a strong Hispanic man or woman who doesn't see unlimited illegal immigration as good for the country? They hate you with the passion of a thousand suns. Liberals believe you are free to be anything you want to be, as you long as you stick to the extremely narrow, well-defined roles they've created that allow you to say, speak, and think whatever they tell you.

5) Liberals want to control your money: Liberals are happy to hand out food stamps, welfare, and school lunch programs. They love extending unemployment insurance benefits as long as possible. They're big fans of people quitting their jobs and going on disability. Why? Because once you're financially dependent on them, you're like a dog on a leash. You'll sleep in the doghouse, eat the Alpo, and roll over when your master says so in hopes that he'll give you another treat. They take tax money from the states and demand those same states jump through hoops to get it back. They take money from productive Americans, use it for programs those people don't want or need, and then take credit for spending the money while accusing the people who actually paid of being greedy for not wanting to "give" even more. You're paying the salaries of the IRS workers who audit you for being conservative, the EPA goons who declare your land is a protected wetland when it rains, and the politicians who declare you're a horrible racist for disagreeing with them. Liberals believe we should have a populace that is controlled by the government, not a government that is controlled by the populace.

World's Safest Country
Switzerland is Europe's gun capital. It has more firepower per person than any other country in the world yet it is said to be one of the safest places on Earth. Despite the prevalence of lethal hardware, the country has virtually no violent crime, there are only minimal controls at public buildings, and politicians rarely have police protection, although yesterday's events are bound to bring about a review of that situation. Year after year, Switzerland has one of the world's lowest murder rates while sending machine guns to every member of their citizen army. All males between 20 and 42 are required to keep rifles and pistols at home for the purposes of national defence and they are not kept in safes or with trigger locks. They are kept at the ready. It was the Swiss passion for guns matched by their determination to keep their liberty that kept the Nazi war machine at bay. When the Swiss government thought an invasion was imminent, it ordered every able-bodied man to stand by his post and defend it to the last round. Their determination, shooting skills, and the sheer quantity of weapons at their disposal persuaded Hitler that an invasion of Switzerland was not worth the cost and he should concentrate his efforts on conquering countries with strict gun control laws. The nation's militia system requires males over 18 to be ready for a call to service. Every Monday and Friday, men wearing uniforms and carrying weapons can be seen on commuter trains travelling to and from military camp for compulsory training. Other countries have tennis courts and golf courses, the Swiss have shooting ranges. Almost every town has one, where reservists have to fire a set number of rounds each year to keep their weapons. In restaurants and coffee shops, tourists sometimes find themselves competing with guns for places to hang their coats. However, Switzerland is facing pressures for gun control. Neighbouring countries are clamouring for tougher restrictions and the state parliament building shootings are likely to accelerate the demands.

Israel Has Armed School Teachers
In response to the NRA’s proposal to put armed guards in schools, gun grabbers have been shouting that armed security guards at Columbine High School weren’t effective in stopping the carnage there. Click here for an account of the day's events. It’s become one of the staples of their argument against allowing trained personnel with firearms in schools. But the effectiveness of “school security” comes down to two factors. ..

Response time and competence. The response time of “school security” on a campus isn’t much different that the response time of a police officer in a town setting. It takes a spree shooter just one second to retrieve a hidden firearm and start shooting. But, depending on the size of the campus and the location of the security officer, it can take several minutes for security to be notified, get to the scene and react. When seconds count, school security may still be minutes away.

The second issue is competence with a firearm — the ability to hit what you’re aiming at. A school security officer at Columbine took several shots at one of the killers from 60 yards and missed. This means the officer either wasn’t trained to shoot at such distances, was incompetent at shooting at that distance, never trained under stress or some a combination of all of the above.

The only answer to the problem of reaction time is to have armed personal at the scene, not a radio call away. And that means teachers. Trained teachers with guns. The answer to the shooting skills problem is to provide better training than the NYC police officers who shot 11 innocent bystanders. That should be the easy part.

Barrack Obama
“The Justice Department has requested $382.1 million in increased spending for its fiscal year 2014 budget for ‘gun safety,’” freebeacon.com reports. “Included in the proposal is $2 million for ‘Gun Safety Technology’ grants, which would award prizes for technologies that are ‘proven to be reliable and effective.’ President Barack Obama’s budget proposal also calls for $1.1 billion to ‘protect Americans from gun violence—including $182 million to support the president’s ‘Now is the Time’ gun safety initiative.’” Smart guns? Stupid idea. And God knows what evil lurks inside the Now Is The Time misegos. Here’s an alternative. ..

Imagine what $1.1b could do for crime prevention if we gave law-abiding low-income Americans a voucher for a gun and firearms training. What’d that run? Let’s say it would cost $500 for decent revolver, a cable lock and a couple of hours of training. That would be enough cash to tool-up 2.2m Americans. Think of the lives saved! The jobs created!

On the other hand, why are we spending money we don’t have? How about we “save” our hard-earned tax money, remove those laws that infringe on Americans’ natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms and call it good. If you like your gun, you can keep you gun. And buy another! One for a friend? Why not? Now that’s change I can believe in!

Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney has at times had an awkward relationship with firearms, as when he said during the 2008 Republican presidential primary that his hunting experience generally involved "small varmints."

But has he flip-flopped on gun policy?

We’ll start by noting that the Flip-O-Meter rates politicians' consistency on particular topics from No Flip to Full Flop. The meter is not intended to pass judgment on their decisions to change their minds. It’s simply gauging whether they did.

Romney’s statements on gun restrictions before he became governor

In 1994, Romney challenged Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and lost. In 2002, he ran successfully for governor of Massachusetts. During his campaign against Kennedy, Romney supported two gun control measures -- the Brady Bill, which required background checks for gun purchases, and a ban on certain types of assault weapons. Both were strongly opposed by most gun-rights advocates. In a July 1994 question-and-answer session with voters arranged by the Boston Herald, Romney "reaffirmed" his support for both measures. "I don't think (the waiting period) will have a massive effect on crime, but I think it will have a positive effect," Romney said. In a subsequent interview published on Sept. 23, 1994, Romney said, "I don't want special-interest groups making this their campaign. I don't want their money. I don't want their help. This is my race." In the interview, Romney specifically mentioned gun-rights advocates, acknowledging that his stands on the two gun-control measures would put him at odds with such groups. "That's not going to make me the hero of the NRA," he said, referring to the National Rifle Association. "I don't line up with a lot of special interest groups."

Then, in his 2002 race for governor, Romney said during a debate against against Democrat Shannon O'Brien, "We have tough gun laws in Massachusetts; I support them."

In both cases, Romney expressed views favorable to certain kinds of gun-control laws. This is not too surprising, since he was running for statewide office in Massachusetts, which tends to be more favorable toward those laws than more rural parts of the country.

Romney’s views on an assault-weapons ban as governor

In 2004, in the middle of his single four-year term as governor, Romney signed a permanent ban on assault weapons -- reportedly the first such state law in the country. "These guns are not made for recreation or self-defense," the Globe quoted Romney as saying. "They are instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing people." Despite that provision -- usually a deal-breaker for gun-rights groups -- the measure received support from pro-gun groups because other provisions lengthened the terms of firearm ID cards and licenses to carry firearms. The Globe reported that during the 2008 campaign, Romney described the bill as a "consensus measure" and a "positive step."

Not long after Romney signed the bill, Romney appeared on the Aug. 4, 2004, edition of the Fox News program Hannity and Colmes. Guest co-host Pat Halpin asked Romney about the existing federal assault weapons ban, which was then on a path to expiring due to intentional Republican inaction. "So are you in favor of that ban being extended or do you want to see it lapse?" Romney responded, "I believe the people should have the right to bear arms, but I don't believe that we have to have assault weapons as part of our personal arsenal. … In my state I just signed a piece of legislation extending the ban on certain assault weapons in our state." Halpin continued to prod. "Governor, would you like to see that extended again on the federal level, as well?" she asked. Romney replied, "It very well may be. In our state what we did is we got both sides of this issue to come together, because we relaxed a number of things, allowing people who hadn't been able to get weapons in the past to be able to purchase those. … There are hunters in the NRA and the gun owners' action league (who) backed the legislation that said, ‘Look, let's protect our citizens from dangerous assault weapons, but let's also make … regular weapons more available to our citizens.’ And we made a compromise that works." Romney, at that moment, appears to be straddling the issue, arguing that ordinary Americans have the right to bear some types of arms but not assault weapons. He said it "very well may be necessary" to extend the federal assault-weapons ban, while adding that he acted on the state ban because it was a compromise that included expansions of other types of gun ownership rules.

Romney’s statements during the 2008 presidential campaign

Romney’s rhetoric on gun control began to shift as he made his first bid for the White House in 2008.

•Addressing a National Rifle Association members by video on Sept. 10, 2007, Romney said, "I support the Second Amendment as one of the most basic and fundamental rights of every American. It's essential to our functioning as a free society, as are all the liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights." He repeated that message later that month at a meeting of the National Shooting Sports Foundation. •On the Oct. 21, 2007, edition of CBS’ Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer challenged Romney on the evolution of his gun-control position. Schieffer said, "You once said, ‘We do have tough gun laws in Massachusetts, I support them, I won't chip away at them. I believe they protect us.’ Now you say you are a gun owner. You have joined the National Rifle Association, after saying at one point, ‘I don't line up with the National Rifle Association.’ Why would you join that group?" Romney responded, "I support the NRA. I support Second Amendment rights, but I don't line up 100 percent with the NRA. They take some positions that are different than mine. But my positions are the same as my positions have been with regards to guns for a long, long time, and that is that I respect the right of people to bear arms, and whether that's for hunting or personal protection. ..."

•During a Republican presidential debate on Jan. 24, 2008, in Boca Raton, Fla., fellow Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee challenged Romney on his views about gun control. Romney responded, "I do support the Second Amendment. And I believe that this is an individual right of citizens and not a right of government. And I hope the Supreme Court reaches that same conclusion." He continued, "I also, like the president, would have signed the assault weapon ban that came to his desk. I said I would have supported that and signed a similar bill in our state. It was a bill worked out, by the way, between pro-gun lobby and anti-gun lobby individuals. Both sides of the issue came together and found a way to provide relaxation in licensing requirements and allow more people to have guns for their own legal purposes. And so we signed that in Massachusetts, and I said I would support that at the federal level, just as the president said he would. It did not pass at the federal level. I do not believe we need new legislation. "I do not support any new legislation of an assault weapon ban nature, including that against semiautomatic weapons. I instead believe that we have laws in place that if they're implemented and enforced, will provide the protection and the safety of the American people. But I do not support any new legislation, and I do support the right of individuals to bear arms, whether for hunting purposes or for protection purposes or any other reason. That's the right that people have." •In a candidate questionnaire during the 2008 primary campaign, the Washington Post asked Romney, "Do you think tighter restrictions should be in place for those buying a firearm?" Romney answered, "No. I believe we need to focus on enforcing our current laws rather than creating new laws that burden lawful gun owners. ... I do not believe in a one-size-fits-all federal approach to gun ownership because people keep and use firearms for different reasons. ..." Collectively, Romney’s comments from the 2008 campaign suggest that he heightened his rhetorical support for gun rights, while maintaining some distance from NRA orthodoxy. On actual policies, though, Romney doesn’t appear to have changed his position.

Romney’s statements during the 2012 presidential campaign

Whatever lingering tolerance Romney expressed for gun control in 2008 disappeared in the heat of a contentious 2012 Republican primary.

The issues section of Romney’s website offers a clear endorsement of gun rights:

"The Second Amendment is essential to the functioning of our free society. Mitt strongly supports the right of all law-abiding Americans to exercise their constitutionally protected right to own firearms and to use them for lawful purposes, including hunting, recreational shooting, self-defense, and the protection of family and property. Like the majority of Americans, Mitt does not believe that the United States needs additional laws that restrict the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms."

The website even touts the bill Romney signed as governor but ignores the assault-weapons portion. "As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt was proud to support legislation that expanded the rights of gun owners. He worked hard to advance the ability of law-abiding citizens to purchase and own firearms, while opposing liberal desires to create bureaucracy intended to burden gun owners and sportsmen."

Romney offered a similar message in an address to the national convention of the NRA in St. Louis on April 13, 2012:

"We need a president who will enforce current laws, not create new ones that only serve to burden lawful gun owners. President Obama has not; I will. We need a president who will stand up for the rights of hunters, sportsmen, and those seeking to protect their homes and their families. President Obama has not; I will. And if we are going to safeguard our Second Amendment, it is time to elect a president who will defend the rights President Obama ignores or minimizes. I will."

Our ruling

During his campaigns for statewide Massachusetts office, Romney openly spoke of his support for -- to use his words from 2002 -- "tough gun laws." As recently as the 2008 Republican primary, Romney said "I don't line up 100 percent with the NRA." But since then, his pro-gun rhetoric has become sharper and virtually all nuance was erased. He even touted the bill he signed in Massachusetts by scrubbing any reference to the provisions banning assault weapons.

Still, while Romney’s rhetoric has moved distinctly in the NRA’s direction, it’s not clear that his policy positions have changed. This is partly because Romney, even in the 1994 campaign didn’t take a full-blown, pro-gun-control stand. And even now, as his rhetoric has become more pro-gun, Romney has never gone so far as to specifically renounce his prior positions, such as his signing of the 2004 Massachusetts law, which at the time was billed as a compromise measure. So Romney’s shift has been more on the rhetorical level than substantive. He earns the rating of Half Flip.

Gandhi Was For Guns Not Control
In a major reality blast to those who tote gun bans in the name of Mahatma Gandhi and other famous leaders, it is actually a little-known fact that Gandhi himself was openly opposed to gun bans. In fact, he proclaimed a nationwide gun disarmament to be the ‘blackest’ deed of the entire British ruling period in India.

If you haven’t heard about this information, I am not surprised. In the past, merely posting Gandhi’s exact quote on this subject without any additional information has led to major Facebook accounts with hundreds of thousands of fans to be swiftly banned. The first of which was the Facebook page of Mike Adam’s NaturalNews, who shared an image of Gandhi’s quote verbatim only to receive the ban hammer from Facebook administrators. So watch out, this information might get you clubbed from the largest social media network in the world for even sharing it.

gandhi gun banBut what is this quote exactly and did Gandhi really write it? Well, the quote comes from an autobiography by Gandhi, entitled “Mohandas Gandhi, an Autobiography.” On page 446, you will find this very serious quote regarding the way in which British rulers disarmed the entire population that Gandhi had crusaded for. Ultimately, this action led to the governmental ability to control this populace due to their inability to defend

Yes, this is really Gandhi saying this. He actually studied the history on this issue and knew that disarming the people is not the right way to deal with crime, or military enemies — both foreign and domestic.

And it’s important to understand why Gandhi is saying this. It’s not because he is some warmonger who felt the need to incite unnecessary violence. In fact Gandhi is most well known for being an activist for peaceful and intellectual revolution. So why would an individual who many would consider a prominent symbol of peace say that the absolute blackest, most nefarious deed of the very British rule that he fought against was to disarm the public? Or how about how he talks about the bravery of self-defense?

It’s a matter of examining history and even modern day statistics.

Gandhi Knew Guns in the Hands of Citizens Made the Nation Safer

Gandhi knew something that has been lost in modern day society due to what’s known as normalcy bias, which is prevalent in most first world nations. Normalcy bias is, essentially, the assumption that nothing drastically bad will ever happen — a mindset brought upon thanks to a cushy lifestyle. Commonly seen in places like the United States, living circumstances condition an individual into assuming that everything will continue to be just fine. Gandhi knew about the effects of widespread normalcy bias.

Gandhi also knew that when law-abiding citizens are stripped of their right to carry a weapon that they become defenseless, and ruthless tyrants can take over. Sound familiar? That’s right, Gandhi’s principals here echo the very principals in which the Constitution was constructed on. Gandhi had highlighted the British ban on firearms an absolute tragedy and warned against its implications just as the founding fathers of the United States escaped such regulation and formulated a plan to prevent it here in the distant future.

Not the same Gandhi you know? Gandhi has actually advocated the use of firearms in defense time and time again. Here we see it once more:

But is history really all we have to go on? A major argument that, despite ignoring the history and pretending that we live in a perfect world thanks once again to overarching normalcy bias, is that our modern society is no longer applicable to these rules once held as the supreme law of the land by the creators of the Constitution.

As it turns out, Gandhi was way ahead of his time on the subject as well, even when it pertains to self defense and the relationship between guns and crime levels.

It’s all detailed heavily in an article I believe to be one of the most information on the issue entitled A Brief and Bloody History of Gun Control, but as it turns full-scale gun bans actually do not seem to prevent crime but enhance it. We’ve even seen many mass shootings occur specifically inside ‘gun free’ zones, with Batman shooter James Holmes even travelling to the one movie theater in the area that did not allow for law abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons while viewing the film.

In cities like Chicago, where extreme gun bans went into effect with the written goal of ‘stopping crime’, we actually see a dramatic spike in crimes committed with the very banned guns themselves. We can actually examine data from law enforcement and utilize a visual example to analyze the statistics. Written into law back in 1982, Chicago’s murder rate via handgun absolutely went haywire following the ban. Meanwhile, the United States as a whole actually saw a considerable and steady decline in murder rates as the sale of guns increased.

After the handgun ban took place in the city, we see crime spike by 40%. What’s even more concerning, is that 96% of the firearm murders in the city were from handguns. You know, the banned handguns that the city declared as illegal years ago. If this surprises you, it shouldn’t. Who do you think is going to follow the gun ban legislation, hardened criminals who intend to commit serious crimes? No. Those who follow the ruling are law-abiding citizens who would usually be using the handguns for self defense through concealed carry licenses that require not only proven credentials but training.

But as it turns out, criminals were getting a hold of the handguns illegally and firing on citizens who could not defend themselves. Sure, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says to defend yourself with scissors from an armed gunmen, but in the real world when criminals know you don’t have a firearm then you don’t stand a chance. On the flip side, however, we know that studies reveal around 40% of criminals reported not committing a crime due to the fear that the victim had a firearm.

Take that same street-level criminal from the study, change the label to ‘runaway government’, and you have Gandhi’s situation. Throughout history a well-armed public has been essential to maintaining order on all levels, just as Gandhi understands. Just because normalcy bias clouds the judgement of modern day Twinkie eaters who literally don’t know what the Fourth of July means doesn’t make history any different, nor does it change what Gandhi wrote in his autobiography many years ago.

Poll On Gun Control
Do You Support Gun Control? Yes No Are You Against Gun Control Yes No

Right to Bear Arms Links

 * 1) Gun Control Lesson On Imagur
 * 2) Gun Control Kills Facebook Page
 * 3) Gun Rights Facebook
 * 4) AR-15 Gun Owners of America Facebook
 * 5) Hypocrisy and Stupidity of Gun Control Advocates Facebook
 * 6) Left Wing Gun Nuts Facebook
 * 7) Attention Right Wing Gun Nuts Facebook
 * 8) Democrats Against Gun Control Facebook
 * 9) 1 Million Moms Against Gun Control, INC Facebook
 * 10) Michigan Moms Against Gun Control - 1mmagc.org Facebook

Pro Forcing Gun Control to Disarm Everyone and Turn Them in to Slaves Links

 * 1) New Yorkers Against Gun Violence Facebook
 * 2) STAND UP: United Against Racism, Gun Violence & Inequalities:Trayvon Martin Facebook
 * 3) Coalition to Stop Gun Violence Facebook
 * 4) Parents Against Gun Violence facebook
 * 5) Mayors Against Illegal Guns
 * 6) Democrats for Gun control Facebook
 * 7) Republicans for Gun Control Facebook