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?
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.
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?
CSM Asks Whether Guns Really Protect Us From Tyranny
In a surprisingly well-researched sidebar to the gun rights debate raging in the Supreme Court, Warren Richey of The Christian Science Monitor looked at whether firearm ownership actually keeps a nation free from tyranny. And while the paper is usually fairly biased against guns, this piece presented key facts that would suggest past tyrants succeeded because they first disarmed the population.
It is a shame more stories in the mainstream media aren’t so unbiased, and actually try to present facts for readers instead of opinion.
It Can’t Happen Here: R.J. Rummel’s Documentation of Democide
Scholar R.J. Rummel has engaged in extensive work on the murder of civilians, by agents of their own government. During the twentieth century he has documented well over two hundred million civilians killed by their own government. This number is far greater than the number of soldiers killed during the same time.
One of the problems of dealing with such large numbers is that it is impossible to really imagine such quantities. Stalin was fond of saying that “twelve deaths was a tragedy, one million is a statistic.” Also, our media is very leftist in its world view. Therefore you are likely to see dozens of movies portraying the Nazis for the murdering thugs they were, but rarely do they show anything which casts a negative light on the communists. This is an indisputable fact. Read more
Owner of Seized Airsoft Guns Responds
As we’ve been reporting, Airsoft Outlet Northwest had 30 Airsoft guns seized last fall at the port of Tacoma with the ATF responding that the items looked too much like real guns, and that these could be somehow converted to live machineguns. To get some insight on 
the story, we interviewed Ben Martin, owner of Airsoft Outlet Northwest, LLC and here is what he had to say:
FirearmsTruth: What was the exact model Airsoft gun that was seized? This was a replica of an M-4, but the body is mostly plastic, so what “internal” parts did ATF tell you that could be changed?
Ben Martin: They have 16 WE TTI M4A1’s and 14 WE TTI CQBR’s. The externals are pretty much exact to the weight and feel of a real firearm.
As for what the ATF has told us, well, it’s not much other than these can are readily convertible to machine guns. We’ve asked for the proof in which they retreated behind the Freedom of Information Act and haven’t given us any evidence that they’ve been able to convert one of these to shoot a round. We’ve had a gunsmith take a look at the compatibility and we’ve posted our findings.
