May 6, 2013
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) has invited Vice President Biden to debate him on gun control.The invitation came during Cruz's speech Friday in Houston at the annual National Rifle Association convention."I would like to issue an invitation to the vice president," Cruz told the crowd. "I would like to invite the vice president to engage in an hour long conversation and debate: 'How do we stop crime?'
FULL STORY
May 6, 2013
The gun control debate is one of the most dishonest arguments we have in American politics. It is dishonest in its particulars, of course, but it is in an important sense dishonest in general: The United States does not suffer from an inflated rate of homicides perpetrated with guns; it suffers from an inflated rate of homicides. The argument about gun control is at its root a way to put conservatives on the defensive about liberal failures, from schools that do not teach to police departments that do not police and criminal justice systems that do not bring criminals to justice. The gun control debate is an exercise in changing the subject.
FULL STORY
May 6, 2013
President Barack Obama and national media are demonizing law abiding gun owners in the wake of recent violent acts, National Rifle Association leaders and political allies said on Friday at its first convention since the Connecticut school massacre."Our freedom is under attack like never before," Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, said during a leadership forum. "When a deranged criminal murders innocent children, they blame us."
FULL STORY
May 6, 2013
In speech after speech at the National Rifle Association's annual convention here this weekend, its top leaders and political allies blasted President Obama and other gun control advocates, warned against "all out, historic attacks" on the constitutional right to possess firearms, and issued a rallying cry to members to become a political force in next year's midterm elections and the 2016 presidential race.
FULL STORY
May 3, 2013
By close votes Thursday, a legislative committee supported expanding mandatory background checks on gun show purchases and rejected a proposal to allow Mainers to carry a concealed weapon without a permit.
FULL STORY
May 3, 2013
The Delaware Senate narrowly passed amended legislation Thursday that would require gun owners to call police if they lost or had their weapon stolen.
FULL STORY
May 3, 2013
Vice President Joe Biden is planning a new gun control offensive -- one he told a group of law enforcement officials he hasn't informed President Barack Obama about yet.
FULL STORY
May 3, 2013
President Obama vowed Thursday during a press conference in Mexico City that the White House would continue pushing for an expansion of background checks to cover firearms purchases online and at gun shows.
FULL STORY
May 3, 2013
Fresh off a huge victory over President Barack Obama on gun control, the message from the National Rifle Association is clear: The fight has just begun.
FULL STORY
May 3, 2013
The Alabama House has approved a bill that allows gun owners to carry a pistol in their vehicle. The House voted 74-27 to pass the legislation. It now goes back to the Senate to approve changes made to the legislation in the House.
FULL STORY
May 2, 2013
The National Rifle Association opens its annual convention Friday in gun friendly Houston, fresh off its success last month in blocking a congressional bid to expand background checks for firearms purchases.For the NRA's leadership, however, the three days of meetings, banquets and exhibits at the George R. Brown Convention Center will be anything but a victory celebration.
FULL STORY
May 2, 2013
Young people have helped push the gay marriage issue to the forefront, with so many voters 30 and under supporting marriage equality that Republicans have been forced to accept -- or at least re examine -- the matter. Sticking to an anti gay rights agenda could cost the GOP votes down the road, and many Republicans are wisely seeing that on a purely political basis, things need to change.The same trend, however, is not mirrored on the matter of gun control. According to a recent study by Harvard University's Institute of Politics, voters aged 18 29 are not clamoring for more gun control, even after the tragedies in Colorado and at Sandy Hook elementary school.
FULL STORY
May 2, 2013
Gun control legislation that would ban the sale of high capacity ammunition magazines is headed to the full House for consideration following a 3 2 House committee vote Wednesday.
FULL STORY
May 2, 2013
House Speaker Paul Thissen decided Wednesday that the Minnesota House won't vote on any gun control bills this year, a major priority for many Democrats coming into the legislative session but one that got stymied by divisions in the party over access to guns.
FULL STORY
May 2, 2013
The sweeping gun control measure signed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and hailed by Democratic leaders has a surprising critic: Hollywood.Officials in the movie and television industry say the new laws could prevent them from using the lifelike assault weapons and high capacity magazines that they have employed in shows like "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" and films like "The Dark Knight Rises."
FULL STORY
May 2, 2013
You can tell the conservatives liberals fear most because they start being automatically referred to as "discredited." Ask Sen. Ted Cruz. But no one is called "discredited" by liberals more often than the inestimable economist John Lott, author of the groundbreaking book "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws."Lott's economic analysis of the effect of concealed carry laws on violent crime is the most thoroughly vetted study in the history of economics, perhaps in the history of the world.
FULL STORY
May 1, 2013
When it comes to tracking crime guns, California is immune to scientific infection.Knowledge should precede policy. Yet California gun policy is often made in engineered ignorance. Despite pleas from law enforcement and assistance from the National Rifle Association, California's most basic crime gun research processes wouldn't receive a passing grade for a Research Methodologies 101 class.
FULL STORY
May 1, 2013
The Missouri House has passed a bill that would allow county sheriffs to issue concealed weapons permits instead of the Revenue Department.Missouri sheriffs already have the responsibility of receiving concealed carry applications, reviewing applicants' backgrounds and issuing paper permits. But under current law, recipients take the paper permits to a local licensing office overseen by the Department of Revenue to receive a photo ID card noting their concealed carry status.
FULL STORY
May 1, 2013
Texas senators on Tuesday advanced modest changes to state gun laws, trading incremental progress across the political aisle as they approved new penalties for those who seek to buy guns for criminals and voted in favor of allowing college students to keep guns in their cars on campus.
FULL STORY
May 1, 2013
Gun owners are planning to rally at the Rhode Island Statehouse as lawmakers review gun control measures including a proposed ban on semi automatic assault weapons.
FULL STORY
May 1, 2013
Family members of four Newtown shooting victims are coming to Trenton today in an attempt to break an impasse between the Senate and Assembly over a bill that would toughen the limit on ammunition magazines, gun control advocates said Monday.
FULL STORY
May 1, 2013
Magpul Industries, the Erie based ammunition magazine maker that pledged to leave Colorado after gun control legislation was signed into law in March, is for the first time manufacturing its weapons accessories out of the state.
FULL STORY
April 30, 2013
As gun owners across the South prepare to gather in Houston for the 142nd NRA Annual Meetings and Exhibits next weekend, I want to thank the 5 million members of the NRA for all they do to make America safe and free.If you're an NRA member, you deserve to be proud.Because today, yet again, it's NRA members and the millions who agree with us - not the press or some in the political ranks - who are doing the thankless and heroic work of standing up for freedom. And it's NRA members who are demanding proven solutions - instead of empty soundbites and slogans - that will make Americans safer.
FULL STORY
April 30, 2013
Bill Clinton, burned badly in 1994 on the issue of gun control, warned President Obama earlier this year that he was setting himself up for a fall. But Obama did not listen. "A lot of these people live in a world very different from the world lived in by the people proposing these things," Clinton counseled Democratic donors in January. "I know because I come from this world." The current president most definitely does not.
FULL STORY
April 30, 2013
In 1863 President Lincoln signed a congressional charter creating the National Academy of Sciences. Now, 150 years later, President Obama is enlisting NAS to implement an item in his January 16 plan to change the lives of America's 100 million gun owners. He has directed the Centers for Disease Control to resume research on gun injuries and deaths, and the NAS's Institute of Medicine (IOM) convened a public workshop last week specifically tasked with shaping the direction of the CDC's firearm research.Government funded gun research was openly biased in the 1990s. CDC officials unabashedly supported gun bans, used CDC funds to advocate strict gun control, and poured millions of taxpayer dollars into funding "research" that was in fact advocacy -- thinly disguised medical journal hit pieces against gun ownership. Congress investigated and in 1997 forbade the use of CDC funds "to advocate or promote gun control."
FULL STORY
April 30, 2013
Accidental shooting deaths have declined since 1981, with just 609 nationwide in 2010, the last year of available data. To say it another way, accidental deaths from guns have fallen nearly 70 percent in the last 30 years.This incredible success story has not received much attention because it is attributable, in large measure, to efforts of the NRA's education and training division, which has led the way in providing firearm training to millions of men, women and children.
FULL STORY
April 30, 2013
Arizona cities and counties that hold community gun buyback events will have to sell the surrendered weapons instead of destroying them under a bill Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law Monday.
FULL STORY
April 30, 2013
One of the top pro gun bills before Texas lawmakers this session was green lighted Monday for a House floor vote this weekend, and a top backer predicted approval there for the plan to allow concealed weapons permit holders to carry their handguns into college classrooms.
FULL STORY
April 30, 2013
A debate over gun control prompted by the Newtown school massacre in Connecticut is heating up in Rhode Island, where gun rights supporters plan to rally this week in opposition to a proposed ban on the sale of semi automatic assault weapons and change in the way handgun permits are awarded.
FULL STORY
April 30, 2013
Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane and a group of Democratic state lawmakers have called for a House vote on a bill that would expand background checks to include all gun sales in the Keystone State.
FULL STORY
April 29, 2013
"My own view is very simple: The Senate has had its vote. We've seen the outcome of that vote. I am not aware of any reason to believe that if we had the vote again that we'd have a different outcome," Toomey said on a conference call.He was responding to a question about a New York Times report that Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.) was working on tweaking the bill the two cosponsored with an eye toward another vote.
FULL STORY
April 29, 2013
Utah lawmakers say two gun rights measures will be reintroduced during the 2014 session after failing to become law this year.Sen. Allen Christensen, R North Ogden, and Rep. Brian Green, R Pleasant Grove, said bills to allow Utah adults to carry a hidden, unloaded gun without a permit and to declare Utah's authority to regulate firearms in the state will return next year.
FULL STORY
April 29, 2013
One of the architects of failed gun control legislation says he's bringing it back.
FULL STORY
April 26, 2013
Talks to revive gun control legislation are quietly under way on Capitol Hill as a bipartisan group of senators seeks a way to bridge the differences that led to last week's collapse of the most serious effort to overhaul the country's gun laws in 20 years.Drawing on the lessons from battles in the 1980s and '90s over the Brady Bill, which failed in Congress several times before ultimately passing, gun control supporters believe they can prevail by working on a two pronged strategy. First, they are identifying senators who might be willing to change their votes and support a background check system with fewer loopholes.
FULL STORY
April 26, 2013
Vice President Joe Biden reassured leading gun control groups Thursday that the administration remains committed to pushing an expansion of background checks for gun purchases through Congress, according to one of the event's attendees.Biden, who has led the administration's efforts on gun control in the wake of the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, told the meeting of about 15 participants that despite last week's defeat of a bi partisan measure in the Senate to expand checks at gun shows and online sales, that this was just the beginning.
FULL STORY
April 26, 2013
Connecticut's two U.S. senators are expected to discuss plans to push for gun control legislation following its recent Senate defeat.Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy have scheduled a meeting Friday with members of the media at the Legislative Office Building to talk about "the path forward for federal gun violence legislation."
FULL STORY
April 26, 2013
The recent defeat of gun control legislation in the U.S. Senate is just the latest round in cultural wars that attempted to reinterpret the Constitution, especially the 2nd Amendment, according to the president of the National Rifle Association.It won't be the last, David Keene told a packed room of NRA supporters at the Iowa Capitol Thursday."We've managed to stave off the current threat in Congress," Keene said at a Polk County Republican Party sack lunch fundraiser. "But the war has not ended. The enemy has gone behind a hill to regroup."
FULL STORY
April 26, 2013
Gun owners in Louisiana would be able to carry concealed weapons into restaurants that sell alcohol under a bill passed by the House on Thursday morning. The Legislature's lower chamber also passed a bill that would require public schools and law enforcement to jointly plan for live shooter scenarios. Both now head to the Senate for more debate.
FULL STORY
April 26, 2013
Missouri business owners could not restrict people from having firearms in motor vehicles on their property under a bill passed by the state House.
FULL STORY
April 26, 2013
A House Committee approved a compromise version of a bill that allows gun owners to carry a pistol in their vehicle. The bill has already passed the Senate, but it will have to go back to the Senate because of changes made as part of the compromise.
FULL STORY