Chicago’s Daley Looks for New Gun Bans
Even as the Supreme Court hears the case of McDonald v. Chicago, the anti-gun zealot mayor is working over time in an effort to create a prohibition of guns. The Chicago Sun Times reported:
“Daley backed changes to state law that would require background checks for those buying a gun in a private sale, ban assault weapons, require that gun dealers be licensed and limit the number of handgun purchases to one per person per month. Those were all ideas that failed in previous legislative sessions.”
We’d like to ask Daley, or anyone in favor of limits, why they think this would work? Criminals clearly aren’t following the complete ban on handguns in Chicago, so if the Supreme Court overturns the ban, why would criminals suddenly listen to a new law on the limits of guns one can buy? This only hurts the law-abiding citizens.
On a positive note, the paper adds:
“The mayor also is asking the General Assembly to make it a Class 1 felony to knowingly sell a gun to a known gang member.”
Now that is a gun law that actually makes sense. So why should good men like Mr. McDonald have to be treated almost as bad as the gang members?
Rachel Maddow Brings Expert Who Doesn’t Know Guns
Don’t you love it when liberal talking heads get all worked up about firearms with so-called experts, who then just randomly start making up terms, which just proves that they’re not really all that experienced in the topic. Case in point, on the Rachel Maddow Show, Frank Shaeffer, author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back and a Huffington Post blogger offered this insight:
“I don’t take kindly to looking at a bunch of old white guys about my age with pot bellies grabbing 50-millimeter machine guns and putting them on pickup trucks .”
Maybe this was an off the cuff slip up, but he never corrected himself. There is a big difference between a .50 caliber machinegun and a 50mm gun. Big difference!
Video is available from our friends at Newsbusters.org.
Arkansas Times Offers Insulting Blog Post on Open Carry Debate
Is it fair to label those in support of open carry rights to be “nuts?” The author of the Arkansas Times Arkansas Blog thinks so in a post titled “Annals of gun nuttery,” which provides this colorful take:
“Concealed weapon laws are no longer enough for the gun zealots. Open carry is the new rage (and I do mean rage) and the threats of angry gun packers have spooked, among others, Starbucks, into not adopting the law-allowed private property rules against guns on premises.”
Poor choice of words maybe, but this is yet another attempt to paint all gun owners as “angry” and filled with “mean rage.”
NY Times News Story Offers Opinion – Anti-Gun Opinion at That
In a piece looking at both sides of the “open carry” debate that is raging around the country, The New York Times threw in just a tad about of anti-gun rhetoric:
“Newer, more driven by grass-roots and the Internet than the N.R.A., open-carry groups are also less centralized, less predictable and often more confrontational in their push for gun rights.”
The author goes on to suggest to the reader the dangers of such a move:
“Gun control advocates have raised particular concerns about open-carry laws because under these laws in many states, gun owners are not required to have a permit or any sort of training or testing.”
What is the point of stressing the issue of permits for example? On the one hand the new groups are described as “less predictable” and “confrontational,” wording that could imply these to be “dangerous” to some New York readers. Likewise, it is practically implied that it would create a wild west situation without any permits where novices carry guns. This news piece reads like an editorial at times, but should we expect anything less from the “old gray lady?”
Chicago Columnist Offers Insight in Gun Crime in Chicago
In discussing how a legally purchased handgun was used in a grisly and tragic murder in the suburbs of Chicago, Daily Herald columnist Chuck Groudie offers a unique look at the gun debate. While he doesn’t exactly take sides, he does stress that this was also not a random case of violence. This was a case of pre-mediated murder, and one point Groudie doesn’t offer is that if the Kramer family had a gun they could have fought back.
Give his piece a read, and you decide whether a second legally purchased gun wouldn’t have meant a very different outcome.
Six-Year Old Suspended From School for Make Believe Gun
Now it seems even a pretend gun can land a child in trouble. We’re not talking a realistic toy gun, or even a picture of a toy gun; we’re talking about a child using his fingers while playing! The Grand Rapids Press in Michigan noted:
“Mason Jammer, a kindergarten student at Jefferson Elementary in Ionia, curled his fist into the shape of a gun Wednesday and pointed it at another student, school officials said it was no laughing matter.”
For the record we have no problem with the reporting on this one, but we must question Ionia’s school board on this judgment. The child just turned six-years old, and some other form of discipline should have been used.
Who Guards the Guards: Sheriff’s Office Sells Tommy Gun for $20,000
The Citizen’s Voice of Luzerne County in Pennsylvania is reporting that the acting sheriff has come under fire for “keeping poor records of gun possessed” by the department. This comes after it was found that the former sheriff had agreed to sell a Thompson submachine gun in 2009 for $20,000. The paper didn’t say whether the buyer could legally own a fully automatic weapon or whether it was a semi-automatic version, although it was described as being an “antique” suggesting it was fully automatic.
Let’s see if the mainstream media picks up on this story.
Philly Inquirer Thinks Legal Guns Will Mean Illegal Gun Trafficking
The debate in the Supreme Court this week (McDonald v. Chicago) is one being editorialized in numerous papers, and we must take note of some of the weak arguments made by The Philadelphia Inquirer including:
“A gun-rights decision by the Supreme Court two years ago threatened to make it more dangerous to walk the streets of Washington.”
Is there even any evidence that the streets of Washington are any more dangerous? Worse still, somehow the editors of the Inquirer seem to think that allowing citizens to legally obtain firearms will lead to more illegal guns:
“That will lead to a greater proliferation of handguns – with the inevitable increase in illegal gun trafficking.”
We must ask why criminals will wait for legal handguns, and further ask if anyone really thinks someone would suddenly just buy guns legally, only to sell them illegally?
San Fran Chronicle Editorial Suggests Supreme Court Decision Could Increase Crime
Well, not every newspaper gets it. As we mentioned, The Detroit News (see below) offered a reasonable take on the issue of firearms being debated in the Supreme Court (McDonald v. Chicago). We shouldn’t (nor did) expect as much from The San Francisco Chronicle, which offered this opinion in an editorial:
“For the past generation, voters and elected officials in various states have adopted a wide array of gun-control measures. But the ability of state and local governments to respond to the proliferation of weapons on their streets could be severely curtailed if the court continues down this path.”
We’ll respond by asking, why would any law aimed at allowing law-abiding citizens to legally own a gun mean more weapons on the streets? Are the writers so naïve as to suggest that criminals are avoiding buying guns because the law says so?
Detroit News Offers Reasonable Editorial on Guns
Could it be that not everyone in the mainstream media hates guns? That’s the feeling we’re getting as we read more editorials supporting reasonable gun laws. The latest example is an editorial in The Detroit News, a city that has more than its fair share of crime. The piece ends with this very well put consideration:
“Guns should be subject to reasonable regulations, including requirements that their sale be subject to waiting periods and background checks.
“But personal gun ownership in America has a tradition pre-dating our existence as an independent country and the Second Amendment should be recognized throughout the nation.”
Well said.
