Tag Archives: guns

Michigan Republicans Really, Really Want to Allow Concealed Guns in Schools

by hanhuogekennog Posted on February 11, 2013

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Damn the veto, full speed ahead for more guns in schools!

That may as well be the rallying cry for some Republican lawmakers in Michigan. GOP Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed legislation in mid-December that would have allowed concealed guns on the grounds of schools, churches, and daycare facilities. But State Rep. Greg MacMaster (R) is undeterred. He recently introduced the “Michigan School Protection Act,” which would allow licensed teachers and administrators to carry concealed pistols at school, the Associated Press reports. MacMaster, whose legislation has the support of numerous state GOP lawmakers, told the AP that his bill would let schools decide how to implement on-campus concealed carry policies. The speaker of the Michigan House, Republican Jase Bolger, has yet to embrace the new bill, saying lawmakers need to “take a breath” before moving ahead on the measure. But Bolger has also questioned the wisdom of making schools gun-free zones, suggesting he might be open to MacMaster’s legislation.

On December 13, the day before the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., the GOP-controlled Michigan legislature approved concealed-carry legislation for schools, churches, and daycare centers. Post-Newtown, citizens barraged Snyder’s office with emails and phone calls urging him to veto the bill, which he did. “While we must vigilantly protect the rights of law-abiding firearm owners, we also must ensure the right of designated public entities to exercise their best discretion in matters of safety and security,” Snyder said in a statement. “These public venues need clear legal authority to ban firearms on their premises if they see fit to do so.”

Snyder did sign two other gun-related measures at the time, one streamlining the background check process for handgun purchases and another easing the sale of rifles and shotguns between buyers and sellers in states bordering Michigan. During a recent visit to an elementary school, Snyder sounded bearish on the idea of more guns in schools. “I don’t view dwelling on guns as the big conversation we should be having,” he told MLive.com. “If you look at the tragedy at Sandy Hook and the issues there, one of the big things we need to look at is the issue of mental health, and the issues of how do we help kids that have needs and different challenges in their life.”

MacMaster’s isn’t the only divisive gun bill introduced by Michigan GOPers lately. In mid-January, 13 Republican state senators offered the “Michigan Firearms Freedom Act,” a measure that would exempt guns or ammunition made in Michigan from federal regulations. Michigan joined nearly three-dozen other states in introducing such legislation. The measure is, for now, a purely symbolic one: There are no gun or ammo makers in Michigan.

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Michigan Republicans Really, Really Want to Allow Concealed Guns in Schools

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WATCH: Skeet Truth Exposed Fiore Cartoon

by bvds34dfsg Posted on February 7, 2013

Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: Skeet Truth Exposed Fiore Cartoon

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Letters to Newtown

by ghd12australia Posted on February 7, 2013

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Editor’s note: This story was produced in partnership with Tumblr’s Storyboard. For more information about the Letters to Newtown project, and for additional images daily, follow our newly-launched Tumblr blog. What follows is an essay by Newtown resident Ross MacDonald.

Walk into the Newtown town hall and you see bin after bin of cards and lettersâ&#128;&#148;some 500,000 at least, more arriving every day. They line both sides of the long main hall, and fill up the branching halls and offices. Posters, paintings, quilts, and flags cover the walls. There are banners from students at Columbine and Virginia Tech; there are letters from school kids across America and from people as far away as France and Australia. And there are boxes of Kleenex on every table for those who read them.

We are overwhelmed. Residents like me, who were lucky enough to have our children come home that night; town leaders struggling to support the community and deal with the deluge of letters, toys, school supplies, and other donations sent to Newtown; and the volunteers who have been opening and sorting it all.

The spontaneous outdoor memorials that sprang up in Newtown after the shootingsâ&#128;&#148;the angels, teddy bears, Christmas trees, and other displaysâ&#128;&#148;became one of the symbols of this tragedy. But the many letters and cards and drawings that were mailed are less well known.

In their shock and grief, people were compelled to make these intensely raw, personal expressions, and send them to a town they probably hadn’t heard of before, not knowing if they would even reach us. They offered help, love, condolences, prayers. They came from children, parents, families, school classes, church groups, soldiers, mayors, survivors, inmates, and entire towns. The letters on display at town hall form a massive tapestry of a world’s sorrow.

When my wife and I visited them in early January, we ended up taking hundreds of photos, returning again and again. Others have been moved to do the same.

The town very respectfully cleared away most of the outdoor public memorials after a couple of weeks for incineration, the ash to be incorporated into a future permanent memorial site. When it announced that it would be doing the same with the cards and letters, we knew we had to try to save them. The town is emotionally overtaxed and lacks the funds and space to preserve them. But they are important to saveâ&#128;&#148;as an ongoing reminder of what happened and as a record of the world’s response.

So I reached out to the editors of Mother Jones, who’d published my account of the day of the shooting. They in turn reached out to Tumblr, and together we launched this project. We already have thousands of images, we’re gathering more, and we’ll be publishing batches every day until we run out. We have approached town officials about creating an extensive digital archive; it is my hope that we might also find a physical home for all these letters. Because the wisdom they express should not be lost to history. Take the words of one little girl named Brynn:

“Dear students and staff. I am sorry about your friends. I hope your school is safe from now on. I feel so bad for you. I don’t like to see people go. I am so sad. I wish people would stop being so mean.”

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Letters to Newtown

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Texas Police Chief Talking Gun Control When Officer Is Shot

by irj972ys Posted on February 4, 2013

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When Fort Worth Police Chief Jeffrey Halstead visited Capitol Hill last week to push for tighter gun control measures, he had some unwanted help from a felon back in Texas, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports:

At 5 p.m. Tuesday, Halstead was meeting with Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, in Washington, D.C., to discuss gun control concerns of the Major Cities Chiefs Associationâ&#128;¦

At that time, his concerns were being played out at a Haltom City auto shop, where one of his officers and personal friendâ&#128;&#148;21-year veteran John Bellâ&#128;&#148;was shot in the head by a convicted felon being pursued by Haltom City police.

This should serve as a compelling illustration of why our country needs tighter gun control laws. But then, so should the murder of 20 elementary schoolers by a maniac with an assault rifleâ&#128;&#148;and we all know how far that has gone to sway people like Cornyn.

If anybody can change the minds of Republican senators, however, it’s probably somebody like Halstead, who represents a “cowboy town” in what’s arguably the most pro-gun state in America. “We almost see every week where we have officers being ambushed by people who have no right to possess those weapons,” Halstead told the Star-Telegram.

Halstead’s Major City Chiefs Association is part of a coalition of nine national police organizations that supports a ban on semiautomatic assault rifles and high-capacity magazines and advocates expanded background checks.

For more on what police officers think about gun control, read my story on how the NRA recruits cops with freebies paid for by gun companies.

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Texas Police Chief Talking Gun Control When Officer Is Shot

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The 12 Most Threatening People on the NRA’s Enemies List

by ghd12australia Posted on February 1, 2013

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Back in September, in an effort to prove…we’re not exactly sure what, the National Rifle Association published a list of some several-hundred non-profits, celebrities, companies, and news organizations that “have lent monetary, grassroots or some other type of direct support to anti-gun organizations.” Daily Kos, which drew attention to the list Friday morning, calls it “nuts,” which is certainly one way of looking at it.

The NRA doesn’t offer any explanation of its selection process, or why they think it’s a compelling argument to call attention to the fact that the Civil Rights organization founded by Martin Luther King Jr. opposes what the NRA does. But maybe they’re on to something.

Here are 12 of the most terrifying people and groups on the NRA’s list:

Carrie Fisher. Daughter of a Jedi.

Henry Winkler. Literally jumped a shark one time.

Mennonite Central Committee. You know who else had a central committee?

Barry Manilow. Is Barry Manilow.

The Temptations. Deliver us from them.

Motorcycle Cruiser Magazine. Basically what it sounds like.

Central Conference of American Rabbis. Ditto.

Mary Lou Retton. Her medal may be gold, but her bullets are lead.

Tara Lipinski. Actually wears knives on the bottom of her shoes.

Boys II Men. sic

Bob Barker. QED:

Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We don’t actually have a joke here. How can you put the SCLC on your enemies list?

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The 12 Most Threatening People on the NRA’s Enemies List

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Want to Buy a Gun Without a Background Check? Armlist Can Help

by vserko45 Posted on February 1, 2013

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In 2007, US Air Force Academy graduate Jon Gibbon saw a television interview about Craigslist that got him thinking. The online classifieds site had decided to reject ads for firearms, and Gibbon thought he had spotted an opportunity. “When I heard them say that they decided to ban all gun-related ads because a few users cried out for it, it inspired me to create a place for law-abiding gun owners to buy and sell online without all of the hassles of auctions and shipping,” he told Human Events in 2010.

So Gibbon hooked up with his academy buddy Brian Mancini, and two years later the pair launched a website they thought was destined to fill a natural void in the online marketplace: Armslist, a website devoted specifically to the private sales of guns and related gear. The site allows private sellers to offer guns for sale to other private purchasers. Buyers can contact sellers via phone or email to set up the sale, and avoid going through a federal background check or even leaving a paper trail. Such transactions are more anonymous than purchasing a weapon at a gun show, where people who canâ&#128;&#153;t pass a background check can buy large quantities of guns.


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See our full special report on gun laws and the rise of mass shootings in America.

Armslist quickly took off. By 2011, it was one of the largest online gun sites in the country, with more than 13,000 active listings for firearms. The site also had another, more dubious distinction: Weapons obtained through the site have been tied to the murders of four people and one suicide. An undercover New York City investigation (PDF) found that the site likely was a major conduit for illegal gun sales. Investigators discovered that 54 percent of the sellers they contacted through the site were openly willing to sell firearms to people who admitted they couldn’t pass a background check (which is a felony, incidentally).

Armslist isn’t the only online gun site in the country, but it’s by far the biggest, especially after KSL.com, a news site owned by the Mormon church, stopped taking gun ads after the Newtown shooting. These sorts of online operations are a primary target of proposals from President Obama that would require background checks for every gun sale, even private ones. When New York City took a look at the online gun marketplace in 2011, it found more than 25,000 weapons for sale on just 10 websites, making the internet a significant component of gun industry. The report suggested that the internet sales were likely tied to a fair amount of crime.

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Want to Buy a Gun Without a Background Check? Armlist Can Help

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Gun Enthusiasts’ Hot New Idea: You Can’t Regulate Guns We Make In-State

by 9ji7g4x Posted on February 1, 2013

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Gary Marbut has a dream: a single shot, bolt-action, made-in-Missoula, .22 caliber rifle called the Montana Buckaroo. For the time being, the Buckaroo, adapted from an expired 1899 patent and intended for use by small children, exists only on paper. “Our attorneys have insisted that I NOT complete EVEN ONE Buckaroo,” Marbut told me in an email on Monday.

That’s because Marbut’s real target isn’t the five to ten-year-old skeet-shooting demographicâ&#128;&#148;it’s the United States Supreme Court. His goal is to effectively nullify decades of federal gun law, and he thinks he’s found a trick no one else has tried. In 2009, Marbut pushed a law through the Montana legislature asserting the state’s partial immunity from federal gun regulations, and then sued the Department of Justice for the right to follow through. Under his scheme, the federal government would be helpless to regulate firearm production or distributionâ&#128;&#148;so long as the guns in question never cross state lines.

Lawmakers in 34 states have introduced copycat versions of Marbut’s Firearms Freedom Act, six of them in the five weeks since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. All told, 9 state attorneys general have signed onto an amicus brief supporting him; 8 governors have signed it into law. The National Rifle Association supports Marbut’s law; so does Cato Institute.

A gun safety instructor who manufactures shooting targets for use by police departments, Marbut moonlights as an unpaid lobbyist in Helenaâ&#128;&#148;an incredibly successful unpaid lobbyist. As president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, he has personally written 58 pieces of legislation that have been signed into law dating back to 1987, ranging from a measure removing wolves from the state’s protected species list to a law guaranteeing the “immunity of certain firearms safety instructors” from liability. But the Montana Firearms Freedom Act is by far his most ambitious project.

Marbut’s basic argument is that the federal government cannot regulate firearms manufactured and retained in a single state, because there is no “interstate” commerce involved. Therefore, under the 10th Amendment, only Montanaâ&#128;&#148;not Washington, DCâ&#128;&#148;has the power to regulate these guns. (His argument doesn’t hold for sales across state lines.) That in itself is extraordinarily literal, andâ&#128;&#148;as Marbut readily acknowledges, quite radical; even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia thinks the federal government can regulate the plants you grow in your backyard.

Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the power to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes”â&#128;&#148;a clause that has been used by the federal government over the last century as a means to regulate everything from medical marijuana to health insurance to, yes, guns. To win his case, Marbut has to convince the courts to ignore all that.

Shortly after his law passed in 2009, Marbut informed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives of his desire to begin manufacturing the Montana Buckaroo. After the BATF told him he couldn’t move forward without a federal license, he filed suit against Attorney General Eric Holder, arguing that BATF was breaking the law by preventing him from making the Buckaroo. He lost in district court, but immediately appealed.

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, joined by a coalition of law enforcement groups, argued against Marbut’s law on appeal, calling it a “dangerous threat to public safety and national security.” If the law held, they contended, it would allow Montanans to skirt the federal background check system, thereby making it easier for prohibited persons to obtain firearms. It would also allow in-state manufacturers to make and sell armor-piecing bullets, because Montana doesn’t have a law of its own prohibiting them.

The odds of a court coming over to Marbut’s side are daunting, for sure. Although he was heartened by Chief Justice John Roberts’ narrow reading of the Commerce Clause in validating the Affordable Care Act (for which Marbut submitted his own amicus brief), he concedes that upholding his law would entail a reversal of eight decades of established precedent.

In January, as state legislatures pushed ahead on Marbut-like draft legislation, Marbut got some good news: The 9th Circuit will hear oral arguments on his appeal in March. He doesn’t think the appeals court will accept his argument, but it doesn’t matter. It brings him one step closer to his ultimate goalâ&#128;&#148;the Supreme Court.

In the meantime, he’s fast at work on a pair of new projectsâ&#128;&#148;two bills that would prohibit state and local law enforcement officials from enforcing any new executive orders on guns, and legislation to ban federal officers from seizing guns in Montana without permission from a county sheriff. He also recently developed a type of non-lethal “pillow” ammunition (comprised of bean-bags filled with lead shot) that he says is ideal for fighting off bears. But after a wildlife biologist inquired about purchasing the pillow ammo, Marbut turned him down. “I said ‘No, I can’t because I don’t have a federal license for making and selling ammunition,'” he recalls.

There’s nothing legally preventing him from obtaining such a license. It’s just a matter of principle.

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Gun Enthusiasts’ Hot New Idea: You Can’t Regulate Guns We Make In-State

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Ken Cuccinelli’s Messy Relationship With Mental Health

by LeannqOsborn Posted on January 31, 2013

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Pressed at Saturday’s National Review Institute Summit on how best to fight back against President Obama’s gun control campaign, Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli didn’t blink. While he was quick to criticize the President’s approach, there was “an awful lot we can do to make Virginia Techs and Sandy Hooks less likely.” Then Cuccinelli—who recently declared his candidacy for governor—pivoted to mental health. “I’m as frugal a participant in government as you can find,” Cuccinelli said. “But I believe government has a role in helping people who through no fault of their own” suffer from mental illness.

So what did Cuccinelli, who described himself in his remarks (and on his gubernatorial campaign website) as a leader on mental health isssues, think of President Obama’s own post-Newtown proposals to improve mental health treatment? “I haven’t seen them,” he told me after the panel. (They’re here.)

That’s surprising, given his stated commitment to the issue. It’s also a bummer, because—as with many of his conservative colleagues, including the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre—Cuccinelli’s warnings about gun-grabbing mask the fact that he broadly shares Obama’s priorities on a key aspect of the gun-control package.

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Ken Cuccinelli’s Messy Relationship With Mental Health

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10 Pro-Gun Myths, Shot Down

by MayeskiLatouf679 Posted on January 31, 2013

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By cutting off federal funding for research and stymieing data collection and sharing, the National Rifle Association has tried to do to the study of gun violence what climate deniers have done to the science of global warming. No wonder: When it comes to hard numbers, some of the gun lobby’s favorite arguments are full of holes.

Myth #1: They’re coming for your guns.
Fact-check: No one knows the exact number of guns in America, but it’s clear there’s no practical way to round them all up (never mind that no one in Washington is proposing this). Yet if you fantasize about rifle-toting citizens facing down the government, you’ll rest easy knowing that America’s roughly 80 million gun owners already have the feds and cops outgunned by a factor of around 79 to 1.

Sources: Congressional Research Service (PDF), Small Arms Survey

Myth #2: Guns don’t kill people—people kill people.
Fact-check: People with more guns tend to kill more people—with guns. The states with the highest gun ownership rates have a gun murder rate 114% higher than those with the lowest gun ownership rates. Also, gun death rates tend to be higher in states with higher rates of gun ownership.

Sources: Pediatrics, Centers for Disease Control

Myth #3: An armed society is a polite society.
Fact-check: Drivers who carry guns are 44% more likely than unarmed drivers to make obscene gestures at other motorists, and 77% more likely to follow them aggressively.
• Among Texans convicted of serious crimes, those with concealed-handgun licenses were sentenced for threatening someone with a firearm 4.8 times more than those without.
• In states with Stand Your Ground and other laws making it easier to shoot in self-defense, those policies have been linked to a 7 to 10% increase in homicides.

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10 Pro-Gun Myths, Shot Down

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"A Killing Machine": Half of All Mass Shooters Used High-Capacity Magazines

by Unacoomt Posted on January 30, 2013

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As lawmakers across the country and in the nation’s capital debate possible restrictions on high-capacity magazines, one question emerges: Are these ammunition feeding devices, which allow a shooter to fire many times without reloading, in fact commonly used by mass killers? We examined the data from Mother Jones‘ continuing investigation into mass shootings and found that high-capacity magazines have been used in at least 31 of the 62 cases we analyzed. A half-dozen of these crimes occurred in the last two years alone. (With some of the cases we studied, it remains unclear whether high capacity magazines were used; for more details, jump to our data set below.)

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See our full special report on gun laws and the rise of mass shootings in America.

In the shooting that injured Rep. Gabby Giffords in Tucson, Jared Loughner emptied a 33-round magazine in 30 seconds, killing 6 and injuring 13. Inside a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, James Holmes used 40- and 100-round magazines to injure and kill an unprecedented 70 victims. At Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Adam Lanza used high-capacity magazines to fire upwards of 150 bullets as he slaughtered 20 kids and 6 adults.

“It turns a killer into a killing machine,” says David Chipman, who served for 25 years as a special agent in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Outlawing high capacity magazines won’t prevent gun crimes from happening, Chipman notes, but might well reduce the carnage: “Maybe three kids get killed instead of 20.”

With Congress undertaking a highly charged debate over firearms restrictions, many observers are skeptical that Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s proposal to ban assault weapons will garner enough votes on Capitol Hill. But there may be momentum for mandating universal background checks on gun purchasers, and for outlawing the sale of magazines containing more than 10 rounds. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that a majority of Americans support stricter regulation of firearms sales, and 59 percent believe that high-capacity magazines were significantly to blame in the recent spate of mass shootings.

The problem dates back to long before Newtown. In 1984, the assailant who massacred 21 at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California, unleashed more than two hundred rounds. School and workplace shootings in Stockton and San Francisco in the late ’80s and early ’90s also involved large magazines, with an estimated 100 shots fired in each case. In 1997, a gunman in Orange, California, fired nearly 150 shots, wielding an AK-47 with a 30-round magazine three years after a federal law banned such assault weapons.

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"A Killing Machine": Half of All Mass Shooters Used High-Capacity Magazines

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