Second Amendment
January 10, 2016 — Scott Johnson
I had forgotten about Father “Mike Pfleger,” as President Obama called him at CNN’s “gun violence” forum last week. Obama and Pfleger are old Chicago buddies. I was unaware of Pfleger’s interest in snuffing out Second Amendment rights. “It wasn’t that many years ago,” John Boch writes, “that the man of the cloth called on the owner of Chuck’s Guns, John Riggio, to be ‘snuffed out’ – using the lingo
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December 3, 2015 — Steven Hayward
Last week the left attacked Republican leaders who stayed silent about the shooting at the Planned Parenthood abattoir in Colorado Springs, but yesterday, as Scott notes below, the left attacked Republicans who expressed condolences and prayers for the victims of the San Bernardino shooting. But the indecency of the left is only exceeded by their hypocrisy and insincerity. Hillary called for “action” on guns in her tweet yesterday. Okay: what
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November 2, 2015 — John Hinderaker
At the Daily Beast, James Kirchick offers a candid take on the seemingly endless and unprofitable debate about guns: “Yes, They Want to Take Your Guns Away.” Barack Obama says, “We know there are ways to prevent it”–gun violence–but he won’t say, out loud, what those ways are. Instead, politicians like Obama talk in code: “When Australia had a mass killing—I think it was in Tasmania—about 25 years ago, it
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October 24, 2015 — John Hinderaker
Hillary lies…it’s not exactly a news flash. On the contrary, based on the liberal media’s reaction to her Benghazi testimony, her willingness to lie, brazenly, is a positive virtue. So I wasn’t surprised to see this, when I got home from shooting my AR-15 at a local range: Let’s take that apart: The NRA basically represents manufactures and the sellers. No, the NRA represents firearm owners and others who want
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October 11, 2015 — John Hinderaker
Bernie Sanders represents Vermont, the freest state in the union where firearms are concerned. So it shouldn’t be surprising that his record on guns is not as liberal as most national Democrats’. At the same time, some have exaggerated his support for the Second Amendment. While it is true that the NRA supported Sanders in his 1990 House race, his record since entering Congress has been mixed. But one of
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October 8, 2015 — John Hinderaker
The New York Times has editorialized hysterically in favor of more gun control measures for years. Operating in an antiseptically-sealed liberal milieu, the Times editorialists seem not to understand why their position keeps losing at the polls. So maybe a couple of their reporters were trying to give them a clue with this story: “Common Response After Killings in Oregon: ‘I Want to Have a Gun.’” A week has passed
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October 7, 2015 — John Hinderaker
On firearms, Democrats, including President Obama, have started to come out of the closet. What they really want is to ban the private ownership of guns. The Reason video below explains how that can be done, in five easy steps. The video’s real point is that the Democrats’ “common sense reforms” have nothing to do with achieving any practical policy goal. Rather, like so much of our politics, they are
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October 5, 2015 — John Hinderaker
White House spokesman Josh Earnest was asked several questions about gun control during his press briefing today. Breitbart summarizes his responses, which were more of the same: endless references to “common sense” reforms which are never specified. Earnest wants to keep firearms out of the hands of “criminals and others who shouldn’t have them”; so do we all, but how? To state the blindingly obvious, mass murder is, and always
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October 3, 2015 — John Hinderaker
Yesterday the Democrats, always eager to find distractions from their failed domestic and foreign policies, seized on the Oregon shootings as an excuse to change the subject. In particular, they used that terrible crime to smear Jeb Bush. According to the Democrats, Bush blew off the Oregon shootings by saying “stuff happens.” The Democrats, as one, picked up on the meme. This tweet came from Debbie Wasserman-Schultz: A message for
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October 1, 2015 — John Hinderaker
Earlier today, a 26-year-old man named Chris Mercer murdered 10 people at a community college in Oregon. At this moment, little is known about Mercer or his motives. (No doubt he had grievances.) Three handguns and a rifle reportedly were recovered at the site, but we don’t know whether he obtained those firearms legally or illegally. At this point, it is hard to say anything intelligent about the shootings except
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September 7, 2015 — John Hinderaker
Via InstaPundit, an interesting study published in Preventive Medicine that confirms something I have written repeatedly: criminals do not acquire their guns legally. This is important because, in response to high-profile shootings, gun control advocates always recur to a few longstanding proposals–none of which have anything to do with actually reducing the rate of gun violence. A favorite liberal chestnut is “universal background checks.” Background checks already must be run
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August 28, 2015 — John Hinderaker
That’s what Democratic Senator Chris Murphy says: I think change is going to happen. I just don’t think that democracy can work with when you have 90 percent of the American public that want changes in our gun laws and Congress not responding. This is sheer fantasy. In fact, only a minority of Americans want stricter gun laws. A majority want either to keep gun laws as they are, or
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August 26, 2015 — John Hinderaker
The White House didn’t wait an hour before using the murders committed by Vester Flanagan in Virginia as an excuse to push for gun control. Josh Earnest began his press conference with this soliloquy: The precise details of that incident continue to be under investigation. At the time Earnest was speaking, little was known about the murderer, and nothing about how he acquired the firearm used to commit the murders.
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July 17, 2015 — John Hinderaker
Over the years, Glenn Reynolds has come up with many themes and catch phrases that have helped to define the contemporary conservative/libertarian movement. Tonight he hails armed citizens who have turned out to defend disarmed (by law) military recruiting centers, as reported by MyFoxDC: The morning after a deadly attack on two military centers in Chattanooga, residents in Hiram are standing watch outside the local recruiting office with their personal
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June 21, 2015 — John Hinderaker
Democratic presidential contender Martin O’Malley is pissed about the Charleston shootings. That is what he said in an email to supporters. So, is he pissed at the murderer, Dylann Roof? Don’t be silly! He’s pissed at Republicans. When you’re a Democrat, it’s all politics, all the time: “It’s time we called this what it is: a national crisis,” O’Malley said in the e-mail, which carried the subject header “I’m pissed”
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June 20, 2015 — John Hinderaker
The Washington Post carried one of the dumber op-eds within memory yesterday. It was written by Baynard Woods and titled “Only white people can save themselves from racism and white supremacism.” Its thesis is that Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage proves that all whites are white supremacists. Or all Southerners. Or something: [I]t is up to white people to rescue white people from our own worst selves, from the distorted monsters
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June 18, 2015 — John Hinderaker
I haven’t written anything about the murders in Charleston, mostly because I haven’t had time. I expect to talk about the murders tomorrow on the Laura Ingraham show, where I will be guest hosting. I would encourage you to tune in for that. In the meantime, one obvious point can be made: Barack Obama has disgraced himself, once again, by trying to make political hay out of the murders: “I
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