Protecting the Second Amendment – Why all Americans Should Be Concerned

[badshot]

Originally Posted by Broadsword2004

Well I said I wouldn't care as much, not that I wouldn't care. But I mean there's a difference between a small entity going anti-gun versus a large one. For example, the anti-gun policies of New York, Washington D.C., etc...although I despise them, I can live with them being confined to those cities. But expanded to the state levels, that would be very bad. Similarly, with states, a tiny state with a small population going very anti-gun is one thing, but a massive state, that is a much bigger concern.

All the "reasonable" gun laws are unconstitutional with the exceptions of mentally ill and felon restrictions without a constitutional amendment that states otherwise. No state or locality should be allowed to circumvent any right, small or large. It does affect all of us sooner or later.

[badshot]

powers to ban the further re-importation of surplus M1 Garands and M1 Carbines from South Korea

Seem to recall there was a gov program that encouraged the use of the Garland in competitive shooting...wanker order.

Signed it...Good link

[Peregrino]

Originally Posted by badshot

Seem to recall there was a gov program that encouraged the use of the Garland (????) in competitive shooting...wanker order.

Signed it...Good link

Fascinating. I'm familiar with traditions including bestowing a garland on the winner of a competitive event but I've never actually heard of competing with them.

(The reference you're searching for is www.odcmp.org.)

[badshot]

Originally Posted by Peregrino

Fascinating. I'm familiar with traditions including bestowing a garland on the winner of a competitive event but I've never actually heard of competing with them.

(The reference you're searching for is www.odcmp.org.)

Thanks for that, yes Garand...glad it's still going

[Team Sergeant]

Originally Posted by Broadsword2004

So in the wake of Newtown, Obama has used one of his Executive Order powers to ban the further re-importation of surplus M1 Garands and M1 Carbines from South Korea (because we all know how so many people are being shot by people using those each year). A real kicker to this though is that out of all the various guns Senator Feinstein sought to ban with her proposed Assault Weapons Ban, the M1 Garand and M1 Carbine were both exempted.

A petition has been filed at the White House website asking to rescind this EO. You can sign it here: LINK The White House has raised the number of signatures needed on a petition to garner an official response (up to 100,000). The petition has until September 28 to get about 95,000 additional signatures. Don't know if that is doable or not, but we should try! Spread this to all gun people.

This Executive Order could also possibly set a dangerous precedent. For example, if the President can just ban the import of guns because they are considered "military-style" guns, does this mean they could then ban the import of various other guns arbitrarily labeled as such? Some America gun manufacturers manufacture their guns overseas. Could the President ban the import of those? Plus whether the gun is military or not is irrelevant.

In light of the Teleprompter Reader of the United States giving this "order" I purchased x2 more AR-15 lowers. (And when I make a purchase in Arizona of a pistol or rifle it doesn't get called into NICS because I have an Arizona CCW permit. )

[badshot]

Originally Posted by Team Sergeant

Arizona of a pistol or rifle it doesn't get called into NICS because I have an Arizona CCW permit. )

Was pricing some high end 1911's at a place called C2 Tactical on Friday, have to wait until house closes though before I can enjoy the perk I've missed (DPS/DL change)

[tonyz]

Interesting opinion piece by Emily Miller...

Mayor Bloomberg is the best friend of 2nd Amendment advocates
Mayor Bloomberg is the best friend Second Amendment advocates could hope for — his billions have only strengthened gun rights and sales
By EMILY MILLER
Last Updated: 11:32 AM, September 1, 2013
Posted: 10:56 PM, August 31, 2013
NYPost

No one has done more for gun rights in the past two years than Mayor Bloomberg.

Oh, he didn’t mean to. Bloomberg has used his political clout and a significant amount of his fortune to try to chip away at the Second Amendment. He is never more self-righteous and condescending than when he talks about guns.

Yet at every step, he’s failed. But more than that, Bloomberg’s presence actively strengthens the NRA’s position. He’s sparked fundraising booms for politicians he disagrees with and may wound Democrats in 2014. Meanwhile, he’s pushed gun sales to record heights.

Bloomberg’s most high-profile campaign was spending $12 million to get the Senate to vote his way on expanding background checks for gun purchases. After Sen. Harry Reid was forced to pull the gun control bill, Bloomberg went ballistic. His shocking rhetoric indicated the type of attack ads he would be funding leading up to the 2014 election. “Children lost. They are going to die and the criminals won. I think that’s the only way to phrase it. This is a disgrace,” he told reporters on April 18.

By the weekend, Bloomberg’s group Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG), had organized protests with the theme “Shame on You” at the congressional offices of the senators it determined to be vulnerable for voting against the expanded background checks amendment.

Typical was his campaign against Republican Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. He spent more than $2 million on TV ads in New Hampshire and neighboring Boston. Ayotte, who voted to improve the National Instant Criminal Background Check System instead of the flawed background-check bill, refused to bow to the pressure.

Bloomberg’s deliberate misleading of the public was obvious from the content of the ads. In one, a police chief named Scott Knight, says that Ayotte is “making us less safe.” Unmentioned is the fact that he’s actually the police chief of Chaska, Minn., far from New Hampshire.

While Ayotte’s poll numbers dipped in the immediate aftermath of the ads airing, they rose back up soon after. “I don’t see any effect on Kelly,” GOP party chairman, Reince Priebus, told me in mid-June. “What is the state motto? ‘Live free or die.’ ”

Bloomberg also goes after Democrats, much to the consternation of Sen. Chuck Schumer. His attacks on Republicans don’t stick, but he could get enough liberals to vote against moderate Dems to flip their races — and the Senate itself in 2014.

Unlike most elected officials, Bloomberg doesn’t even pretend that there’s a wall between his official and political activities. City Hall employees have been caught lobbying for gun control in other states.

Before the bodies are buried or the families have grieved, Bloomberg pounces to exploit the tragic murders of innocent people to advance his political agenda. One of the job duties of the mayor’s taxpayer-funded staff is to jump all over a shooting anywhere in the country as a publicity hook to call for more restrictions on Second Amendment rights.

Jesse Hathaway of Media Trackers Ohio uncovered e-mails between Bloomberg’s mayoral staff and gun-control organizations seemingly trying to exploit the deaths of three high school students in Chardon, Ohio, in February 2012.

One hour after that shooting, MAIG director Mark Glaze e-mailed a CNN story about it to the official government e-mail addresses of three city staffers and other anti-gun activists. An hour later, Lance Orchid, national organizing director of Gun Violence Prevention, e-mailed, “Perhaps this is the perfect time to push out the new micro-site petition around guns on campus.”

That afternoon, Janey Rountree, whose official New York City government title is Firearms Policy Coordinator, asked the group to find out how shooter T.J. Lane got his gun and asked, “Are reporters working on this or planning to push the question?” She later wrote, “It may still make sense to talk about guns on college campus in the wake of this shooting.”

Despite the ghoulish PR response, all the rhetoric from Bloomberg and Obama simply has spurred more people to buy guns.

Forty-seven percent of Americans self-report having a gun in the home, according to a Gallup poll released in October 2011. That number was up from 41% a year earlier and the highest Gallup has recorded since 1993.

The firearms industry is one of the few that has been growing and investing during the Obama economic malaise. The companies in the US that manufacture, distribute and sell firearms, ammunition and hunting equipment had a direct economic impact of $14 billion in 2012.

When you take into account the supplier and ancillary industries, the total economic activity was a whopping $33 billion.

“I’ve been trying to figure out the power of the NRA,” Schumer told Time magazine in June. “It’s not the money they give out: they give out $3 million, $4 million a year. There are many groups that give much more. It’s not even their membership. They say 5 million — let’s say it is. There are tons of groups with more than 5 million members. It’s that they have a core group of active members who translate what’s going on to the average person — who are sympathetic to them because they’re part of their milieu.”

What Schumer and Bloomberg don’t understand is citizens believe strongly in the right to bear arms, as enshrined in our Constitution. And all the money in the world won’t change that.

“We’ll never match Bloomberg dollar for dollar, but we don’t have to,” said the NRA’s Chris Cox. “The hearts and minds of the American people certainly aren’t for sale to a billionaire mayor from New York City.”

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion...SChn6PsnFmkFxI

Emily Miller is a senior opinion editor at the Washington Times. Excerpted with permission from her new book, “Emily Gets Her Gun . . . But Obama Wants to Take Yours” (Regnery Publishing), out this week.

[Team Sergeant]

This is for those that don't think there's a link between children's behavior and violent video games. Time to ban violent video games from the children of democrats......


'Training simulation:' Mass killers often share obsession with violent video games

By Mike Jaccarino
Published September 12, 2013
FoxNews.com


A decade after Evan Ramsey sneaked a 12-gauge shotgun into his Alaska high school, where he gunned down a fellow student and the principal and wounded two others, he described how playing video games had warped his sense of reality.

“I did not understand that if I…pull out a gun and shoot you, there’s a good chance you’re not getting back up,” Ramsey said in a 2007 interview from Spring Creek Correctional Center, in Seward, Alaska. “You shoot a guy in ‘Doom’ and he gets back up. You have got to shoot the things in ‘Doom’ eight or nine times before it dies.”

Since Ramsey’s 1997 rampage, several other mass killers, including Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, have been linked to violent video games. And some experts worry that as the games get more violent and more realistic, so does their power to blur the line between fantasy and reality in alienated gamers.

"Doom," the computer video game Ramsey described, was all the rage in the 1990s, but primitive by today’s standards, where gamers can play first-person shooters with movie-like graphics on high definition televisions.

“More than any other media, these video games encourage active participation in violence,” said Bruce Bartholow, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, who has studied the issue. “From a psychological perspective, video games are excellent teaching tools because they reward players for engaging in certain types of behavior. Unfortunately, in many popular video games, the behavior is violence.”

Harris and Klebold, who killed 12 fellow students and a teacher in 1999, were reportedly obsessed with “Doom.” Seung-Hui Cho, the 23-year-old who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University in 2007, was, according to the Washington Post, a big fan of violent video games, specifically “Counterstrike.”

Three more recent killers, Aurora, Colo., movie theater gunman James Holmes, Jared Lee Loughner, who killed six and injured 13, including Rep. Gabby Giffords, in a 2011 Arizona shooting, and Breivik, who killed 77 people in Oslo, all were active video game players.

Adam Lanza, the troubled 20-year-old behind last December’s school shooting in Connecticut which left 20 children and six adults dead, was an avid player of violent video games.
In some cases, murderers appear to have been reenacting specific video game episodes when they killed in real life.

“Anders Breivik said he actually used his video game ‘Call of Duty’ to train for mass murder,” Dr. Paul Weigle, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Joshua Center, in Enfield, Conn., told FoxNews.com. “He called it training simulation. And certainly there were some reports Adam Lanza saw Breivik as a rival, and he was also engaged in shooting games and even the same one.”

Wiegel also cited the case of Devin Moore, an Alabama teen with no history of violence when he was brought in by police on a minor traffic violation. Once inside the police station, he took a gun from a police officer and shot three officers, then stole a police cruiser to make his escape.

"Life is a video game,” Moore, who said he was inspired by the game ‘Grand Theft Auto,’" told police later. “Everybody's got to die sometime."

“It’s quite possible that playing this script out numerous times in the game influenced his decision-making, and that is, in fact, what he said,” Wiegel said.

Advocates of victims of mass shootings have taken aim at the companies turning profits in the multibillion-dollar gaming industry. The parents of the victims killed or injured by Michael Carneal, a 14-year-old who fired upon a group of classmates at Heath High School in West Paducah, Ky., in 1997, filed suit against a host of video game manufacturers in relation to Carneal’s obsession with violent games including “Doom” and “Mortal Kombat.”

Cont:

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/09/12...#ixzz2ehEFVBCD

[tonyz]

RUSSIA HAS FEWER GUNS, MORE HOMICIDES THAN THE U.S.
The Blaze
Sep. 23, 2013 9:43am Meredith Jessup

If the number of firearms in society is directly correlated to the number of gun deaths each year as gun control advocates would like us to believe, how do you explain this?

According to Gunpolicy.org, Russians have far fewer guns than Americans — and far more homicides.

There are fewer than 13 million firearms in circulation in Russia, compared with an estimated 300 million in the United States. That works out to about 9 guns per 100 people in Russia and closed to 100 guns per 100 people in America.

The most recent homicide statistics for Russia show that there were 21,603 killings in 2009.

According to the FBI, the United States had 13,636 homicides in 2009 with a population that is more than twice as large. More than 80 percent of those killings were gun-related.

And oddly enough, Russia’s gun laws look a lot like those being proposed in the U.S. these days…

Russia has tough gun laws on the books.

<snip>

http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2013/09...-than-the-u-s/

[tonyz]

Are Guns the Problem?

Walter E. Williams
10/02/2013
TownHall

Every time there's a shooting tragedy, there are more calls for gun control. Let's examine a few historical facts. By 1910, the National Rifle Association had succeeded in establishing 73 NRA-affiliated high-school rifle clubs. The 1911 second edition of the Boy Scout Handbook made qualification in NRA's junior marksmanship program a prerequisite for obtaining a BSA merit badge in marksmanship. In 1918, the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. established its own Winchester Junior Rifle Corps. The program grew to 135,000 members by 1925. In New York City, gun clubs were started at Boys, Curtis, Commercial, Manual Training and Stuyvesant high schools. With so many guns in the hands of youngsters, did we see today's level of youth violence?

What about gun availability? Catalogs and magazines from the 1940s, '50s and '60s were full of gun advertisements directed to children and parents. For example, "What Every Parent Should Know When a Boy or Girl Wants a Gun" was published by the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The 1902 Sears mail-order catalog had 35 pages of firearm advertisements. People just sent in their money, and a firearm was shipped. For most of our history, a person could simply walk into a hardware store, virtually anywhere in our country, and buy a gun. Few states bothered to have even age restrictions on buying guns.

Those and other historical facts should force us to ask ourselves: Why -- at a time in our history when guns were readily available, when a person could just walk into a store or order a gun through the mail, when there were no FBI background checks, no waiting periods, no licensing requirements -- was there not the frequency and kind of gun violence that we sometimes see today, when access to guns is more restricted? Guns are guns. If they were capable of behavior, as some people seem to suggest, they should have been doing then what they're doing now.

Customs, traditions, moral values and rules of etiquette, not just laws and government regulations, are what make for a civilized society, not restraints on inanimate objects. These behavioral norms -- transmitted by example, word of mouth and religious teachings -- represent a body of wisdom distilled through ages of experience, trial and error, and looking at what works. The benefit of having customs, traditions and moral values as a means of regulating behavior is that people behave themselves even if nobody's watching. In other words, it's morality that is society's first line of defense against uncivilized behavior.

Moral standards of conduct, as well as strict and swift punishment for criminal behaviors, have been under siege in our country for more than a half-century. Moral absolutes have been abandoned as a guiding principle. We've been taught not to be judgmental, that one lifestyle or value is just as good as another. More often than not, the attack on moral standards has been orchestrated by the education establishment and progressives. Police and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct so as to produce a civilized society. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. The more uncivilized we become the more laws are needed to regulate behavior.

What's worse is that instead of trying to return to what worked, progressives want to replace what worked with what sounds good or what seems plausible, such as more gun locks, longer waiting periods and stricter gun possession laws. Then there's progressive mindlessness "cures," such as "zero tolerance" for schoolyard recess games such as cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians, shouting "bang bang," drawing a picture of a pistol, making a gun out of Lego pieces, and biting the shape of a gun out of a Pop-Tart. This kind of unadulterated lunacy -- which focuses on an inanimate object such as a gun instead of on morality, self-discipline and character -- will continue to produce disappointing results.

<snip>

http://townhall.com/columnists/walte...3220/page/full

[Dusty]

http://tampa.cbslocal.com/2013/10/03...or-gun-rights/

[Badger52]

“The man in this painting can be any American who is patriotic, responsible, well-trained, and won’t back down to any kind of aggressor,” McNaughton noted.

Given his previous work I'll take the implied "...foreign or domestic."

[ddoering]

Works for me. That is the oath.

[mojaveman]

Today was an important day for California gun owners.

Bills signed by Governor Brown:

AB48 Bans all high capacity magazines, even the ones you bought 20 years ago.

AB170 Expands assualt weapons restrictions.

AB231 Requires home defense firearms to be properly secured.

AB500 More requirements on firearm storage.

AB711 Bans the use of lead ammunition in California.

SB683 Safety certificate required for any firearm purchase.

Bills vetoed by Governor Brown:

SB374 Assualt weapons ban.

SB474 Bans gun shows at the Bay Area Cow Palace.

SB567 Revises definition of a shotgun.

SB755 Expands list of misdeameanors banning purchase of firearms.

AB169 Bans private party purchase or transfer of handguns.

AB 180 Allows the city of Oakland to make Constitution independant firearm laws.

[badshot]

Originally Posted by mojaveman

Today was an important day for California gun owners.

Bills signed by Governor Brown:

AB48 Bans all high capacity magazines, even the ones you bought 20 years ago.

AB170 Expands assualt weapons restrictions.

AB231 Requires home defense firearms to be properly secured.

AB500 More requirements on firearm storage.

AB711 Bans the use of lead ammunition in California.

SB683 Safety certificate required for any firearm purchase.

Bills vetoed by Governor Brown:

SB374 Assualt weapons ban.

SB474 Bans gun shows at the Bay Area Cow Palace.

SB567 Revises definition of shotgun.

SB755 Expands list of misdeameanors banning purchase of firearms.

AB169 Bans private party purchase transfer of handguns.

AB 180 Allows the city of Oakland to make Constitution independant firearm laws.

Your State's politicians are assholes