Banning Guns Quotes

In my world, you don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and be against common-sense gun control — like banning public access to the kind of semiautomatic assault rifle, designed for warfare, that was used recently in a Colorado theater. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and want to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, which ensures clean air and clean water, prevents childhood asthma, preserves biodiversity and combats climate change that could disrupt every life on the planet. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and oppose programs like Head Start that provide basic education, health and nutrition for the most disadvantaged children...The term “pro-life” should be a shorthand for respect for the sanctity of life. But I will not let that label apply to people for whom sanctity for life begins at conception and ends at birth. What about the rest of life? Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth.

Our love affair with guns has nothing to do with tyranny, or militias, or self-preservation. Just ask any NRA member the following: If Jesus Christ himself were to come down off the cross and grant you one wish, would you opt for a world without guns -- or the one we live in now? If every gun owner truly feared for their life and liberty, the answer would be obvious. But it's not about life and liberty. It's all about the sheer hard-on of owning a gun.

Why ban guns? Let's give everyone rocket launchers! What could possibly go wrong?

When has a civilian ever stopped a mass shooting with an AR-15? An AR-15 is a perfect weapon for mass murderers -- not so much for self-defense. Would you bring an AR-15 along on a date? To your place of work? To the movies? If not, how can owning an AR-15 save your life in the event of a mass shooting? Why does the NRA keep telling us we need semi-automatic rifles for self-defense? Whose side are they really on?

Forget 'pray the gay away.' I you're more turned on by an AR-15 than a pair of tits, time for some serious therapy. Time for all you gun-humpers to come out of the closet. Is this really about the 2nd Amendment and self-defense -- or just a pathetic fetish for guys with tiny pee-pees?

Given enough time, guns and ammunition will eventually become so costly and time consuming to purchase, maintain, and insure that a ban will no longer be necessary. And that's what this is really about: control. Not of guns, but of us.

New Rule: Gun-control people have to stop pressuring Starbucks to ban guns. I want my gun nuts overcaffeinated, twitchy, and accident-prone. That way, the problem will take care of itself. Plus, if just one gun nut kills just one pseudo-intellectual writing a screenplay-slash-graphic-novel on his iPad, natural selection is doing its job.

So let me get this straight—we ban guns, but encourage movies glorifying guns?

In a direct response to African Americans patrolling Oakland, California, and “copwatching,” Republicans in California passed the Mulford Act, which banned open carry of loaded firearms in California. Who signed that law? Republican patron saint and then governor of California Ronald Reagan. The absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment is new, but using gun rights or gun control, as necessary, to maintain racial dominance is old.

Unfortunately, many controllists suffer from magical thinking. They believe that banning guns will somehow make them safer, as though laws are all we need to stop criminals. But consider for a second that you feel threatened for some reason and then ask yourself this: 'would you feel safer with a sign on your front window saying 'This house is a gun-free zone' or with an armed guard on call whenever you were home? If you wouldn't put this sign on your home, why would anyone think it's okay to put them in places where young children gather nearly every day?

In 1996, Britain banned handguns. Prior to that time, over 54,000 Britons owned handguns.70 The ban was so tight that even shooters training for the Olympics were forced to travel to Switzerland or other countries to practice. Four years have elapsed since the ban was introduced, and gun crimes have risen by an astounding 40 percent.

Humans were the biggest hypocrites among all species, for they banned abortions for Aryan women and yet they had no qualms about throwing Jewish children into gas chambers. They talked about helping fellow men and yet turned entire ships full of refugees away from their shores, condemning them to death. They spoke at length of their Christian values, but when it came to offering shelter to the persecuted, they shut their doors and chased the invaders off their property with guns and curses. “Because

Once more a shot rang out and I turned, eyes wide, as the bullet from Andres’ gun made its way unerringly toward me.

In the end, this sort of ban can only be accomplished in one way, and that’s if gun advocates get behind it.

People had hoarded the lead bullets from the time before sprayguns, despite the ban on the pleebs having any kind of gun at all. Snowman

Why ban guns? Let's give everyone a rocket launcher! What could possibly go wrong?

The obvious point of Conrad’s cartoon is the weirdness of a world where guns are legal, despite the harm they can do, while VCRs (and circumvention technologies) are illegal. Flash: No one ever died from copyright circumvention. Yet the law bans circumvention technologies absolutely, despite the potential that they might do some good, but permits guns, despite the obvious and tragic harm they do.

We Should Ban the AR-15 (or Insert Scary Gun of the Week Here)!” They say that because the AR-15 is the only rifle they can name. When I was younger, they would have said AK-47 or Uzi instead, because those got mentioned on the news more. If they were arguing to ban handguns, they would say Glock, because it’s the most common brand and they’ve heard its name on TV a lot. Same principle. An AR-15 is just one

When the NSSF fights against legislation designed to prevent mass shootings because it “won’t work and is a violation of rights,” we understand that many people agree with that argument. But that’s not, at all, even a little bit why the organization lobbies so hard. It works hand in hand with the NRA and certain senators, and spends millions of dollars per year for one reason and one reason only: to make more money. And every time a shooting happens, it makes even more money. Yes. For real. When a mass shooting makes national headlines, the gun lobby purposefully stokes up fear and paranoia over proposed new gun laws so that scared citizens get out their checkbooks and buy a new AR-15 (or sporting rifle). So why would the NSSF have any interest in stopping mass shootings? Why would it engage politically and invest in compromise, a reform plan that attempts to make all Americans safer, or any sort of reckoning of the role guns play in gun violence? It won’t. However you feel about guns and their place in America—whether we’re talking about rifles for hunting or assault rifles, or anything in between—it’s undeniable that the gun lobby has refused to acknowledge or entertain any sort of regulation or reform aimed at making us a safer and saner nation. The reason why: because that does not make it more money. A customer base kept terrified at all times that this will be “the last chance before the government bans” whatever gun manufacturers are peddling is much more valuable. A customer base absolutely convinced that the just-about-anyone-can-buy culture we have is politically necessary without seeing that it serves those companies is what they’re after. They have achieved it.

criminals have ways of getting guns even when guns are banned. For example, drug gangs will get their guns to protect their drugs just as easily as they get their drugs to sell. Thus gun control primarily disarms the citizens who obey the laws.

Gun-free zones don't deter criminals-they help them by providing a guarantee that they will not face any armed resistance. But they do deter the law-abiding. A faculty member with a concealed-handgun permit who breaks the campus gun ban would be fired and likely find it impossible to get admitted to another school. Bringing a firearm into a gun-free zone can have serious adverse consequences for law-abiding people. But for someone like the Virginia Tech killer, the threat of expulsion is no deterrent at all.

Ban everything besides guns. Ban public space. Ban buildings. Ban trigger fingers. Ban anger. Ban flesh and organs and blood loss. Ban women and children who are easy targets and ban men who like to shoot at targets. Ban physics, and ban velocity. Ban human interaction.

In summary, people who reflexively shouted “Gun research doesn’t add up!” were often the same people who supported a ban on effective gun research. It was as if they reprimanded plants for not flowering during a drought while at the same time blocking the trucks that delivered water.

Ten years. No difference. Meanwhile, we had bad guys turning up all the time committing crimes, and guess what was marked on the mags found in their guns? MILITARY AND LAW ENFORCEMENT USE ONLY. Because once again, if you’re already breaking a bunch of laws, they can only hang you once. Criminals simply don’t care.

. . . why not ask your congressman or woman to support universal background checks? Ask him or her to renew the ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Offer a pink slip to any legislator who refuses to explain his or her lack of support for these common-sense measures. With rights come responsibilities. While we enjoy a right to bear arms, we have a societal obligation to do so responsibly and safely. We are, after all, responsible for each other. Our governing is done by the people and for the people.  It is in the best interest of the people, all the people, to apply common sense to the gun issue . . .

The Batman movie theater killer, James Holmes, initially considered attacking an airport. In his diary, which was released in 2015, he explained his decision against targeting the airport because of “substantial security.”23 He then selected the only theater within twenty minutes of his apartment that banned permitted concealed handguns.

My grandmother, perhaps the biggest Elvis fan on earth, loved going to Memphis and visiting Graceland with her sister, daughter, and nieces. She had photo albums full of their trips; they’d go and she would take photos of the exact same things trip after trip. It was her mecca. She had a photo of Elvis’s headstone in various seasons, and you could watch her daughter and nieces grow up in a series of photos in front the mansion’s driveway gate. It was routine. I’ve come to regard Dianne Feinstein’s “assault weapons” press conferences in the same way. Every few years or so, Senator Feinstein calls a press conference, the D.C. version of theater, and plays Vanna White with guns strapped to whiteboards. You can watch her age through the years at these pressers via Google Images. She begins with a youthful plump to her cheeks, standing tall, holding up a rifle to her chest and as the years go by she takes on the posture of a cocktail shrimp and simply motions to the boards. I give her credit for her dedication to never learning a single thing about the firearms she proposes to ban. It takes devotion to remain ignorant about a topic when you spend decades discussing it.

IT BEGAN WITH A GUN. On September 1, 1939, the German army invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. In the October 1939 issue of Detective Comics, Batman killed a vampire by shooting silver bullets into his heart. In the next issue, Batman fired a gun at two evil henchmen. When Whitney Ellsworth, DC’s editorial director, got a first look at a draft of the next installment, Batman was shooting again. Ellsworth shook his head and said, Take the gun out.1 Batman had debuted in Detective Com-ics in May 1939, the same month that the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in United States v. Miller, a landmark gun-control case. It concerned the constitutionality of the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which effectively banned machine guns through prohibitive taxation, and regulated handgun ownership by introducing licensing, waiting period, and permit requirements. The National Rifle Association supported the legislation (at the time, the NRA was a sportsman’s organization). But gun manufacturers challenged it on the grounds that federal control of gun ownership violated the Second Amendment. FDR’s solicitor general said the Second Amendment had nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun; it had to do with the common defense. The court agreed, unanimously.2

See, one of the better arguments is, “Well, if you take the guns away, then only the criminals will have guns.” Not true. When they banned the guns in Australia, it worked. When they banned them in Britain, it worked, okay? The Bushmaster gun that the kid was gonna use in Sandy Hook costs, like, $1,000 American and you can buy it in Walmart. It’ll be delivered to your house. That’s it, man. 1,000 bucks, right? That same gun in Australia on the black market costs $34,000. Now if you have $34,000, you don’t need to be a criminal. You’ve got $34,000. You’re a great little saver. Keep going. So that covers the criminals, but that doesn’t cover the people who wanna murder your family, that are coming after you and your family. It kind of does. The people who do the massacres, it covers them ’cause they go… The kid at Colorado who thought he was The Joker, let’s say that he had some social issues. The kid at Sandy Hook was Asperger’s as fuck. Right? I don’t know if you know a lot about the black market, but you can’t just rock up at the docks going, [Slurring speech] “Guns! Who wants to sell me a gun?

People Vs Supreme Court (The Sonnet) When the Supreme Court behaves prehistoric, Every human must become an activist. When the gatekeepers of law behave barbarian, Every civilian must come down to the street. When people are stripped off their basic rights, By some bigoted and shortsighted gargoyles. We the people must take back the reins, And put the politicians in their rightful place. We need no guns and grenades, we need no ammo, Unarmed and unbent we stand against savagery. Till every woman obtains their right to choice, None of us will sit quiet in compliant apathy. Every time the cradle of justice becomes criminal, It falls upon us civilians to be justice incorruptible.

If our democracy worked as it should, we would elect wise women and men who made laws for the good of the people and enforced those laws. That, though, is not the way things work. Greedy, power–mad billionaires spend money so that politicians such as George W. Bush can buy elections. Corrupt corporations such as Enron defraud old ladies and commit crimes. And they get away with it. They get away with it because most of us are so afraid of losing the security of our nice, normal lives that we are not willing to risk anything about those lives. We are either afraid to fight or we don’t know how. Or we believe that bad things won’t happen to us. And so, in the end, too many people lose their lives anyway. In Nazi Germany, millions of men who acquiesced to Hitler’s murderous rise to power wound up marching into Russia’s icy wasteland—into the Soviet Army’s machine guns and cannon—to themselves be murdered. In America after 9–11, trusting teenagers who had joined the National Guard found themselves sent to Iraq on extended and additional tours. Our enemy killed many of them because we, citizens of the richest country in the world, did not provide them with body armor. Grieving mothers protested the wasting of their sons’ lives. Nadia McCaffrey defied Bush’s shameful ban on the filming of U.S. soldiers’ coffins returning home from Iraq. She knew, as we all did, that this tyrannical dictum of Bush dishonored our soldiers’ sacrifice. And so she invited the press to the Sacramento International Airport to photograph her son’s flag–draped coffin. Again, I am not comparing George W. Bush to Adolph Hitler, nor America to Germany’s Third Reich. What I do believe is that each of us has the duty to keep the Bushes of the world from becoming anything like Hitler—and to keep America from invading other countries with no just cause. We will never, though, be able to stop corrupt politicians and corporations from doing criminal things until we stop surrendering our power to them. The more we fear to oppose them—the more we want to retreat into the supposed safety of our nice gated communities or downtown lofts—the more powerful people will conspire to ruin our prosperity and wreck our lives.

Still, it is possible to outlaw entire technologies. In 2006 Kevin Kelly, the former editor of Wired magazine, did a study of the effectiveness of technology prohibitions across the last thousand years, beginning in the year 1000. During this period governments had banned numerous technologies and inventions, including crossbows, guns, mines, nuclear bombs, electricity, automobiles, large sailing ships, bathtubs, blood transfusions, vaccines, television, computers, and the Internet. Kelly found that few technology prohibitions had any staying power and that in general, the more recent the prohibition, the shorter its duration. Figure Epilogue Kevin Kelly’s chart of the duration of a technology prohibition plotted against the year in which it was imposed.

The Grassley-Cruz bill addressed each of these failings, directing law enforcement resources to stop violent criminals from using guns to harm others. It created a gun crime task force, to prosecute violent gun criminals and also felons and fugitives trying to illegally buy guns. It directed resources to helping states report mental health records to the federal background check system. And it enhanced school safety funding, to protect vulnerable children. As a result, it garnered more bipartisan support than any other comprehensive piece of gun legislation—and far more support than the 40 votes Dianne Feinstein’s so-called assault weapons ban received. With votes from 52 senators—9 Democrats and 43 Republicans—Grassley-Cruz could have become the law of the land—if Harry Reid and his Democratic allies had not filibustered it.

Barrel shrouds were listed. Barrel shrouds are just pieces of metal that go over the barrel so you don’t accidentally touch the hot part. They became an instantaneous felony too. Collapsible stocks make it so you can adjust your rifle to different-size shooters, that way a tall guy and his short wife can shoot the same gun. Nope. EVIL FEATURE! Pistol grip sounds scary, but it’s just a handle. It’s simply how you hold it. Having your wrist straight or at an angle doesn’t make the weapon any more dangerous. This nonsense has been a running joke in the gun community ever since the ban passed. When U.S. Representative Carolyn McCarthy was asked by a reporter what a barrel shroud was, she replied, “I think, I believe it’s a shoulder thing that goes up.”5 Oh good. I’m glad that thousands of law-abiding Americans unwittingly committed felonies because they had a cosmetic piece of sheet metal on their barrel, which has no bearing whatsoever on crime,

If we continue on this path, there is no doubt where it will end. If the government has the responsibility of protecting us from dangerous substances, the logic surely calls for prohibiting alcohol and tobacco. If it is appropriate for the government to protect us from using dangerous bicycles and cap guns, the logic calls for prohibiting still more dangerous activities such as hang-gliding, motorcycling, and skiing. Even the people who administer the regulatory agencies are appalled at this prospect and withdraw from it. As for the rest of us, the reaction of the public to the more extreme attempts to control our behavior—to the requirement of an interlock system on automobiles or the proposed ban of saccharin—is ample evidence that we want no part of it. Insofar as the government has information not generally available about the merits or demerits of the items we ingest or the activities we engage in, let it give us the information. But let it leave us free to choose what chances we want to take with our own lives.

Liquor, guns, motorcycle helmets (legislation had gone back and forth on that)—mainly white masculine pursuits—are fairly unregulated. But for women and black men, regulation is greater. Within given parameters, federal law gives women the right to decide whether or not to abort a fetus. But the state of Louisiana has imposed restrictions on clinics offering the procedure, which, if upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court, would prevent all but one clinic, in New Orleans, from offering women access to it. Any adult in the state can also be jailed for transporting a teenager out of state for the purposes of an abortion if the teen has not informed her parents. Young black males are regulated too. Jefferson Davis Parish passed a bill banning the wearing of pants in public that revealed "skin beneath their waists or their underwear" and newspaper accounts featured images, taken from the back, of two black teenage boys exposing large portions of their undershorts. The parish imposed a $50 fine for a first offense and $100 for a second.

When the pandemic shut down global travel and the world’s business economy, and when the secular media, including social media giants, rejoiced with Joe Biden being in the White House, a new phrase was being written and reported publicly, “The New Global Reset.” In the past, the same concepts presented in the Great Global Reset Manifesto were called “The New World Order” or “The Globalist Agenda.” However, among knowledgeable conservatives, these older phrases were code words indicating the eventual loss of numerous freedoms that America has enjoyed, leading the nation like sheep to the slaughterhouse, causing Americans to submit to global rules and pay global taxes, allowing self-appointed rich elitists to rule over them. There is a movement to limit religious freedom by banning certain content in minister’s messages, opposing any opinions that are opposite to the manifest of this new system. Progressives have learned that confiscating guns will lead to a revolt. Their plan is to control the sale and distribution of ammo. Without ammunition, a gun is useless.

So once we have the supersonic fart gun and everybody in the world is doing what I tell them, it will be time to make some changes. Here’s my list of changes (it’s only a rough draft at this stage): Make cabbage illegal (anyone caught growing, cooking, or eating cabbage will be sent straight to prison). Make ice-cream free (duh!) Make it the law that bread must be baked without crusts. Ban school. (This could be going too far. I might decide that school can be taught on Wednesdays. Wednesday mornings. I’ll think about it.) Make the 25th of every month Christmas Day (or just Lots of Presents for Kids Day if you don’t do Christmas). Make it the law that parents have to take kids to Disneyland at least twice a year, (more if they want to). Order all the scientists to work out why you can’t tickle yourself and what the purpose of snot is. Make showering optional. For me. If I decide that you stink, then you must shower. Change dinner time around so that dessert has to be eaten first. Ban all lumps from yoghurt. Actually, ban lumps from everything. Lumps are unnecessary. Nothing was ever made better with lumps. Ban the word ‘lump’. That’s all I’ve got so far.

The world recoiled in horror in 2012 when 20 Connecticut schoolchildren and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. . . . The weapon was a Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle adapted from its original role as a battlefield weapon. The AR-15, which is designed to inflict maximum casualties with rapid bursts, should never have been available for purchase by civilians (emphasis added).1 —New York Times editorial, March 4, 2016 Assault weapons were banned for 10 years until Congress, in bipartisan obeisance to the gun lobby, let the law lapse in 2004. As a result, gun manufacturers have been allowed to sell all manner of war weaponry to civilians, including the super destructive .50-caliber sniper rifle. . . .(emphasis added)2 —New York Times editorial, December 11, 2015 [James Holmes the Aurora, Colorado Batman Movie Theater Shooter] also bought bulletproof vests and other tactical gear” (emphasis added).3 —New York Times, July 22, 2012 It is hard to debate guns if you don’t know much about the subject. But it is probably not too surprising that gun control advocates who live in New York City know very little about guns. Semi-automatic guns don’t fire “rapid bursts” of bullets. The New York Times might be fearful of .50-caliber sniper rifles, but these bolt-action .50-caliber rifles were never covered by the federal assault weapons ban. “Urban assault vests” may sound like they are bulletproof, but they are made of nylon. These are just a few of the many errors that the New York Times made.4 If it really believes that it has a strong case, it wouldn’t feel the need to constantly hype its claims. What distinguishes the New York Times is that it doesn’t bother running corrections for these errors.

The scope of Trump’s commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular intellectual disbelief in it. We are now being told that support for Trump’s “Muslim ban,” his scapegoating of immigrants, his defenses of police brutality are somehow the natural outgrowth of the cultural and economic gap between Lena Dunham’s America and Jeff Foxworthy’s. The collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned commonsense everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. The indictment continues: To their neoliberal economics, Democrats, and liberals at large, have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks white men as history’s greatest monster and prime time television’s biggest doofus. In this rendition, Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working people. “We so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them,” Charles Murray, a conservative social scientist who co-wrote The Bell Curve, recently told The New Yorker’s George Packer. “The only slur you can use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a redneck—that won’t give you any problems in Manhattan.” “The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes,” charged Anthony Bourdain, “is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.” That black people who’ve lived under centuries of such derision and condescension have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not trouble these theoreticians. After all, in this analysis Trump’s racism and the racism of his supporters are incidental to his rise. Indeed, the alleged glee with which liberals call out Trump’s bigotry is assigned even more power than the bigotry itself. Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by theories of intersectionality, throttled by bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.

And yet we have an never-ending series of politicians and political leaders who believe that they can not only make choices for their population, but override the will of the population whenever they see fit.  The justifications will vary – guns will be banned on grounds of public safety, for example, while drugs will be banned on grounds of personal health – yet the underlying motive will remain the same.  -Professor Leo Caesius, Authority, Power and the Post-Imperial Era

I think about Sunshine and the signs in the window. Somehow the public became convinced that victims with guns don’t prevent involuntary handouts to criminals. Could the public be made to believe that crosses don’t prevent involuntary blood donations to vampires? To get crosses banned, all I’d need to do is convince some politicians that crosses exist only to offend members of other religions. I could even be magnanimous and allow police to carry crosses. With typical response times of minutes, I’d be able to finish my meal before the 911 operators could finish answering the calls.

In a list of ‘moves designed to piss lots of people off’, banning coffee in Turkey probably ranks somewhere alongside banning cheese in France, banning guns in America and … well, banning national stereotyping in Britain.

It seems intuitive that if you simply take away everyone's guns, the killing will stop. The problem is that it doesn't. In Britain and Australia, gun crimes actually took a break from a long steady decline and went up for a while after the ban went into effect.

Following 9/11 there was the creation by the FBI of a Terrorist Screening Centre. It is a single database used by all government agencies to keep tabs on those who might reasonably be suspected of having links to extremist groups. If you are on the terror watch list, there are serious restrictions placed on your ability to move around. For example, you will be banned from all internal and international flights. But, astonishingly, you are still able to wander down to the local firearms dealer and buy yourself a gun. Being on the FBI list is not in itself sufficient grounds for being banned from buying a rifle. The renewed fears about the terror threat within

On Assault Weapons.... Democratic Countries that ban the sale military style weapons suffer millions fewer gun deaths to their population. Also; there is NO WAY that such guns (automatic machines) are approved under the Second Amendment. It was not the intent of Thomas Jefferson or the other Founding Fathers that automatic machine guns could be widely available for use in the slaughter of fellow citizens (such as children, women, babies, grand folks and everyone in between). The Founders language in the Second Amendment instead described "a well regulated militia" which the general public is not.

once the Republicans won control of North Carolina’s general assembly. In a matter of months, they enacted conservative policies that private think tanks had been incubating for years. The legislature slashed taxes on corporations and the wealthy while cutting benefits and services for the middle class and the poor. It also gutted environmental programs, sharply limited women’s access to abortion, backed a constitutional ban on gay marriage, and legalized concealed guns in bars and on playgrounds and school campuses. It also erected cumbersome new bureaucratic barriers to voting.

2,794 news stories about the incident. However, not one mentioned that the shooting had occurred in a “gun-free zone.” “Surely, with all the reporters who appear at these crime scenes and seemingly interview virtually everyone there, why didn’t one simply mention the signs that ban guns from the premises?” Lott wrote. He said the same thing happened in reporting by the media on the Trolley Square Mall shooting. The concealed-carry law went into effect in Nebraska on January 3, 2007, so it is possible that some of the shoppers or employees might have been armed and able to cut short the gunman’s rampage. It does appear the news media have a deliberate policy of suppressing that very relevant part of the story. Major media folk generally don’t own firearms, don’t like anyone who carries a firearm, and hate to give any credit to an armed citizen for doing anything. The idea that gun-free zones and the people who create them might be partly responsible for many deaths is anathema to them.

Americans have seen this before. In June 2008, then Senator Barack Obama assured everyone, “I have said consistently that I believe that the Second Amendment is an individual right, and that was the essential decision that the Supreme Court came down on.”7 But just months earlier, in February 2008, Obama came out in support of D.C.’s handgun ban.8 And in April of that year, Obama said of Americans, “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.

To do just that, Bill Landes (University of Chicago Law School) and I collected data on all multiple victim public shootings in all the United States from 1977 to 1999.7 We examined thirteen different gun control policies including: waiting periods, registration, background checks, bans on assault weapons and other guns, the death penalty, and harsher penalties for committing a crime with a firearm. But only one policy reduced the number and severity of mass public shootings: allowing victims to defend themselves with permitted concealed handguns.

But it is probably not too surprising that gun control advocates who live in New York City know very little about guns. Semi-automatic guns don’t fire “rapid bursts” of bullets. The New York Times might be fearful of .50-caliber sniper rifles, but these bolt-action .50-caliber rifles were never covered by the federal assault weapons ban. “Urban assault vests” may sound like they are bulletproof, but they are made of nylon. These are just a few of the many errors that the New York Times made.

But the fact is that it’s virtually impossible to stop criminals from obtaining the magazines they want. Magazines, large or small, are trivially easy to make. They are just boxes with springs, and can be made with the most simple tools. The advent of 3D printers has made them even easier to make. There’s no evidence that crime rates were affected by the 1994 federal ban on magazines holding more than ten bullets. Even the left-leaning Urban Institute, with funding from the Bill Clinton administration, was unable to find any such evidence.

In a 2013 interview with academics who do research on gun control and gun-free zones, Jake Berry, a reporter with the Nashua Telegraph (New Hampshire) found: “On the whole, Lott’s colleagues—both in the media and academia—don’t dispute his findings.”31 The dispute is over why these attacks keep occurring where guns are banned: •​David Hemenway, a public health researcher at Harvard, explained: “I suspect that most places that mass public shootings could logically occur are ‘gun-free zones’ either determined by the government (schools) or by private businesses and institutions.” •​Similarly, Dan Webster, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins, said: “Schools might be a likely target because that is where a mass of people congregate and those people involve a lot of troubled adolescents who may harbor bad feelings toward the people there who bullied them, were unfair to them, etc. The shooters in these instances didn’t say, ‘Hey, I’ll find a gun-free zone where I can shoot a lot of people.’ No, they went to a place for reasons wholly unrelated to gun-free zones.

More recently, progressives have fought for abortion rights, universal health care, strong environmental laws to combat climate change, equal rights for gay and transgender Americans, gun safety laws, consumer protections, and a ban on political contributions from corporations.

Through out the 1850s and 1860s, Maryland lawmakers passed resolutions that barred Black people from assembling for religious events, owning dogs or guns, or being educated, and that limited job opportunities. It was a ban from self-protection, growth, and hope.

Anti–Second Amendment advocates profess to love science while demonizing people of faith, but you’d never know this by their arguments. Bloomberg PR exec/mom Shannon Watts-Troughton once told me via Twitter that “an assault weapon enables humans to shoot 10 rounds in one minute. @blueelephant69: @shannonrwatts @DLoesch.” What in flat-earthing hell is this? I can throw ten bowling balls a minute, I have assault arms, ban them. By her estimation, “assault weapons” are any firearms that can shoot ten rounds per minute, which is every firearm. Even a bolt action rifle can shoot ten rounds per minute. That

Many gun control academics use language that is hardly scholarly, attacking academics they disagree with as being paid off by the “execrable NRA.” They claim that “gun sellers call the shots at the NRA.”5 They accuse others of having “blood on [their] hands” or being a “blight on democracy.” Apparently, finding evidence of defensive gun uses brings “harm to the democratic process.”6 There are other less obvious claims that are just as outrageous. No, the United States isn’t unique in terms of mass public shootings or homicides. No, gun bans don’t make people safer. Background checks on private transfers haven’t stopped mass public shootings or any other type of crime in the U.S. or other countries. Background checks are racist. And there are real problems with background checks that harm the most vulnerable. Gun control advocates have it backwards when they claim that gun makers have something to learn about how to reduce accidents from looking at government regulation of cars.

I ran into similar, though less dramatic events after moving to Yale Law School, where I spent two years as a Senior Research Scholar. Hawaii’s two Democratic U.S. Senators once contacted the law school to complain about testimony that I gave before the Hawaii state legislature. They blamed me for somehow single-handedly scuttling the new gun registration laws that were being considered. The associate dean of the law school called me up about the complaints and grilled me about my testimony. I am certain that neither of these incidents would have occurred if I had been on the other side the gun debate. Over the years, many academics have told me that they would have studied gun control if not for fear of damage to their careers. They didn’t want to run the risk of coming out on the wrong side of the debate. From my experience, that is understandable. Eventually, I was forced out of academia. There is only an abundance of funding for those researchers who support gun control. There is a war on guns. Just like with any war there are real casualties. Police are probably the single most important factor in reducing crime, but police themselves understand that they almost always show up at the crime scene after the crime has been committed. When the police can’t be there, guns are by far the most effective way for people to protect themselves from criminals. And the most vulnerable people are the ones who benefit the most from being able to protect themselves: women and the elderly, people who are relatively weaker physically, as well as poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas—the most likely victims of violent crime. When gun control advocates can’t simply ban guns outright, they impose high fees and taxes on guns. When the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory, had their handgun ban struck down as unconstitutional by a federal judge in March 2016, they passed a $1,000 excise tax on guns—a tax they hoped would serve as a model for the rest of the U.S.8 I hope that this book provides the ammunition people need for some of the major battles ahead. We must fight to keep people safe.

Obama has a perfect record in undermining and seeking to eliminate our Second Amendment rights. Obama has:     Voted to ban common ammunition     Supported lawsuits against gun makers if one of their guns is used by a criminal     Supported increased federal taxes on guns and ammunition     Stated he wants to force every gun owner to get a license     Stated he wants to force every gun owner to register their guns     Stated he wants to outlaw concealed carry laws     Voted for the government to keep secret records on gun owners

Obama has a perfect record in undermining and seeking to eliminate our Second Amendment rights. Obama has:     Voted to ban common ammunition     Supported lawsuits against gun makers if one of their guns is used by a criminal     Supported increased federal taxes on guns and ammunition     Stated he wants to force every gun owner to get a license     Stated he wants to force every gun owner to register their guns     Stated he wants to outlaw concealed carry laws     Voted for the government to keep secret records on gun owners164

The Brotherhood grew as a populist movement over the next two decades, encompassing not only religion and education, but also politics, through the establishment of the Party of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Hizb Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimoon. It blamed the Western-leaning Egyptian government for doing nothing against Zionists flooding into the land on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean in the wake of the war and Hitler’s Holocaust in Europe. Naturally, the Brotherhood joined the Palestinian side in the war against Israel. It also started organizing and executing attacks inside Egypt, which led to an official ban on membership. It is believed a member of the Brotherhood assassinated the prime minister, Mahmud Fahmi Nokrashi, in 1948. Al-Banna himself was gunned down by Egypt’s security services in Cairo a year later.

position an exploding seashell near where Fidel Castro snorkeled in Cuba. The iconic image of the hearings came when committee members passed around a pistol that the CIA had built to shoot poison darts and Senator Barry Goldwater pointed the gun into the air as he looked through its sights. CIA director William Colby tried to make clear that the weapon had never been used, but the image endured. Before the committee had even wrapped up its work, President Ford signed an executive order banning the government from carrying out assassinations of foreign heads of state or other foreign politicians.

Another inconvenient fact frequently ignored by gun control advocates is that many countries with very high homicide rates have either complete or virtually complete gun bans. Major countries such as Russia and Brazil have homicide rates several times that of the U.S. After decades of severe restrictions on gun ownership, Brazil temporarily tried to ban guns, but its supreme court eventually threw out the law. Other countries such as Colombia and Venezuela have even much higher homicide rates, but there are other obvious explanations (such as the drug trade).

Australia also passed severe gun restrictions in 1996, banning most guns and making it a crime to use a gun defensively. In the next four years, armed robberies there rose by 51 percent, unarmed robberies by 37 percent, assaults by 24 percent, and kidnappings by 43 percent.76 While murders fell by 3 percent, manslaughter rose by 16 percent.

Ironically, Democrats such as President Obama would be quite upset if a literacy or intelligence test was required of voters. The right to self-defense is no less fundamental than the right to vote. Disarming veterans and the elderly is just a step in Obama’s efforts to ban gun ownership.

The left’s arguments are chock full of inconsistencies. Internal inconsistencies – inconsistencies that are inherent to the left’s general worldview. That’s because very few people on the left will acknowledge their actual agenda, which is quite extreme. Leftists prefer to argue half-measures in which they don’t truly believe. For example, they say they want to ban assault weapons to stop gun murders. But that argument is silly, because handguns are used to kill far more people than so-called assault weapons. And yet the left won’t argue in favor of a blanket gun ban, because they know they will lose.

Funny, it seems as if everything Ron once loved is against the law. Guns, whiskey, cigars, fast cars, making money, and probably half the books in our library. I don’t suppose there’s a black market in banned books, is there?” “Don’t even think about it,” Werner answered. “Burn them.

According to a 2013 survey of PoliceOne’s 450,000 members (380,000 active duty and 70,000 retired), 91 percent of law enforcement officers support concealed carry laws.20 Eighty percent believed that concealed carry permit holders could have prevented casualties in tragedies such as those in Newtown and Aurora. Ninety-two percent think that Obama’s proposed assault weapon ban would either increase or have no effect on violent crime.

In fact, as discussed in more detail in the next chapter, after the UK’s 1997 nationwide handgun ban, their homicide rate actually increased by 50 percent over the next eight years.

Every place that has banned guns (either all guns or all handguns) has seen murder rates go up. You cannot point to one place where murder rates have fallen, whether Chicago or D.C. or even island nations such as England, Jamaica, and Ireland, or obscure places such as the Solomon Islands.

hunny here, they'll ban guns soon as the person holding one looks like us. hm, what would you do if you had the money you needed? I ate. ate till hunger forgot me. I'd been so long away from full it hurt. we wanted to be satisfied, that's what people hunt for, not blood. something that feels right.

ban in 2004 also has had a trifling effect. Polls show consistently that even most people who support stricter gun control do not believe such laws reduce violent crime. “At some basic level,” Henigan writes with palpable regret, “the public is convinced that ‘When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.’ This belief cannot help but diminish the intensity of public support for further gun restrictions.

Our main agenda is to have ALL guns banned. We must use whatever means possible. It doesn’t matter if you have to distort facts or even lie. Our task of creating a socialist America can only succeed when those who would resist us have been totally disarmed.” ~ Sarah Brady, formerly of Handgun Control, Inc. renamed the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence

Yet if the empirical pattern clashes with your ideology, math prowess is no longer an asset; it actually becomes a liability. The better you are at crunching numbers, the more spectacularly you fail at analyzing patterns that contradict your views. If they were liberals, math geniuses did worse than their peers at evaluating evidence that gun bans failed. If they were conservatives, they did worse at assessing evidence that gun bans worked.

In 2012, psychologists Richard West, Russell Meserve, and Keith Stanovich tested the blind-spot bias—an irrationality where people are better at recognizing biased reasoning in others but are blind to bias in themselves. Overall, their work supported, across a variety of cognitive biases, that, yes, we all have a blind spot about recognizing our biases. The surprise is that blind-spot bias is greater the smarter you are. The researchers tested subjects for seven cognitive biases and found that cognitive ability did not attenuate the blind spot. “Furthermore, people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” In fact, in six of the seven biases tested, “more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” (Emphasis added.) They have since replicated this result. Dan Kahan’s work on motivated reasoning also indicates that smart people are not better equipped to combat bias—and may even be more susceptible. He and several colleagues looked at whether conclusions from objective data were driven by subjective pre-existing beliefs on a topic. When subjects were asked to analyze complex data on an experimental skin treatment (a “neutral” topic), their ability to interpret the data and reach a conclusion depended, as expected, on their numeracy (mathematical aptitude) rather than their opinions on skin cream (since they really had no opinions on the topic). More numerate subjects did a better job at figuring out whether the data showed that the skin treatment increased or decreased the incidence of rashes. (The data were made up, and for half the subjects, the results were reversed, so the correct or incorrect answer depended on using the data, not the actual effectiveness of a particular skin treatment.) When the researchers kept the data the same but substituted “concealed-weapons bans” for “skin treatment” and “crime” for “rashes,” now the subjects’ opinions on those topics drove how subjects analyzed the exact same data. Subjects who identified as “Democrat” or “liberal” interpreted the data in a way supporting their political belief (gun control reduces crime). The “Republican” or “conservative” subjects interpreted the same data to support their opposing belief (gun control increases crime). That generally fits what we understand about motivated reasoning. The surprise, though, was Kahan’s finding about subjects with differing math skills and the same political beliefs. He discovered that the more numerate people (whether pro- or anti-gun) made more mistakes interpreting the data on the emotionally charged topic than the less numerate subjects sharing those same beliefs. “This pattern of polarization . . . does not abate among high-Numeracy subjects. Indeed, it increases.” (Emphasis in original.) It turns out the better you are with numbers, the better you are at spinning those numbers to conform to and support your beliefs.

Leftists prefer to argue half-measures in which they don’t truly believe. For example, they say they want to ban assault weapons to stop gun murders. But that argument is silly, because handguns are used to kill far more people than so-called assault weapons. And yet the left won’t argue in favor of a blanket gun ban, because they know they will lose.

The men leading the assault on D Yard would themselves be armed with pistols and shotguns, which utilized unjacketed bullets, a kind of ammunition that causes such enormous damage to human flesh that it was banned by the Geneva Conventions.19 Many of the other troopers and COs preparing to go in were also carrying other weapons that would have a particularly brutal effect, such as shotguns filled with deadly buckshot pellets that sprayed out in a wide arc. As all state officials knew, although there were some gas guns in the yard that could fire tear gas, no prisoner in the yard was carrying a firearm.20

Gun control advocates such as Vox never mention that every single time that guns are banned — either all guns or all handguns — homicide/murder rates rise.

Between 1950 and June 2019, 94 percent of mass public shootings in the United States occurred in places where general citizens were banned from carrying.

CNN reported: “An agent working for the FBI’s background check system, who was performing the review on Roof, failed to contact the Columbia, South Carolina, police department which arrested Roof — in part because of a clerical error in records, listing the wrong agency.”11 Most people know that any felony conviction, even a non-violent one, precludes you from ever legally owning a gun. Even a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction will ban you from having a gun. Just being charged with a state offense that could result in a prison term of two years is sufficient for you to lose your right to buy a gun.

Bans on large-capacity magazines are more or less exclusively obeyed by law-abiding citizens, and will prevent concealed handgun permit holders from carrying many bullets in their guns.15 Concealed handgun permit holders usually don’t carry multiple guns or magazines, whereas attackers often arm themselves to the teeth. Magazine limits mean that criminals are more likely to out-gun law-abiding citizens.

Always expect the unexpected. Never get too when things are going well, because otherwise the fall will be a lot harder. dinosaurs: triceratops and stegosaurus. Weather forecasters are like prison visitors. Nice people but usually misguided. The answer was yes, no, and maybe all rolled in one. She added that she hoped she might see him again. Not if I catch sight of you first, he thought. But like anything in life, you can never quite tell. People you know always have the ability to shock you. The label said it was "just like the mama used to cook" but if that was the case mama had obviously long since been banned from the kitchen. He wasn't work-shy. He was work-allergic. The problem these days is that gangsters, whether they be small time drug dealers with guns and attitude or wannabe urban godfathers like Nicholas Tyndall, have no qualms about using serious violence and the treat of it to get what they want, because they know that neither the judicial system nor the police service have the wherewithal or the powers to protect those who speak out against them. English prisons are roughly on a par with English traffic, English weather and English hospitals. In other words, fucking terrible. The striation marks on a bullet are the microscopic scratches caused by imperfections on the surface of the interior of a gun's barrel that are unique to each individual firearm, and act as its calling card.The same striation marks will appear on a bullet every time a particular gun is fired. 'The last time I spent quality time with you was Heathrow last week and five people ended up shot' The thing with me is that I am pessimist who's constantly trying to be optimistic, but can't quite manage it. Experience gained through years of policework doesn't allow for that sort of naivety. They say its a grand life if you don't weaken and for so long I've tried to live my life like that, but at that moment in time, weakness felt so tempting that I almost open my arms to greet it. 'And the whole time I couldn't wait to leave. And you know what, thy were the best years of my life.

Kids over cash, Women over semen.

1689: King William of Orange guarantees his subjects (except Catholics) the right to bear arms for self-defense in a new Bill of Rights. 1819: In response to civil unrest, a temporary Seizure of Arms Act is passed; it allows constables to search for, and confiscate, arms from people who are “dangerous to the public peace.” This expired after two years. 1870: A license is needed only if you want to carry a firearm outside of your home. 1903: The Pistols Act is introduced and seems to be full of common sense. No guns for drunks or the mentally insane, and licenses are required for handgun purchases. 1920: The Firearms Act ushers in the first registration system and gives police the power to deny a license to anyone “unfitted to be trusted with a firearm.” According to historian Clayton Cramer, this is the first true pivot point for the United Kingdom, as “the ownership of firearms ceased to be a right of Englishmen, and instead became a privilege.” 1937: An update to the Firearm Act is passed that raises the minimum age to buy a gun, gives police more power to regulate licenses, and bans most fully automatic weapons. The home secretary also rules that self-defense is no longer a valid reason to be granted a gun certificate. 1967: The Criminal Justice Act expands licensing to shotguns. 1968: Existing gun laws are placed into a single statute. Applicants have to show good reason for carrying ammunition and guns. The Home Office is also given the power to set fees for shotgun licenses. 1988: After the Hungerford Massacre, in which a crazy person uses two semi-automatic rifles to kill fifteen people, an amendment to the Firearms Act is passed. According to the BBC, this amendment “banned semi-automatic and pump-action rifles; weapons which fire explosive ammunition; short shotguns with magazines; and elevated pump-action and self-loading rifles. Registration was also made mandatory for shotguns, which were required to be kept in secure storage.” 1997: After the Dunblane massacre results in the deaths of sixteen children and a teacher (the killer uses two pistols and two revolvers), another Firearms Act amendment is passed, this one essentially banning all handguns. 2006: After a series of gun-related homicides get national attention, the Violent Crime Reduction Act is passed, making it a crime to make or sell imitation guns and further restricting the use of “air weapons.

Statement on Generative AI Just like Artificial Intelligence as a whole, on the matter of Generative AI, the world is divided into two camps - one side is the ardent advocate, the other is the outspoken opposition. As for me, I am neither. I don't have a problem with AI generated content, I have a problem when it's rooted in fraud and deception. In fact, AI generated content could open up new horizons of human creativity - but only if practiced with conscience. For example, we could set up a whole new genre of AI generated material in every field of human endeavor. We could have AI generated movies, alongside human movies - we could have AI generated music, alongside human music - we could have AI generated poetry and literature, alongside human poetry and literature - and so on. The possibilities are endless - and all above board. This way we make AI a positive part of human existence, rather than facilitating the obliteration of everything human about human life. This of course brings up a rather existential question - how do we distinguish between AI generated content and human created material? Well, you can't - any more than you can tell the photoshop alterations on billboard models or good CGI effects in sci-fi movies. Therefore, that responsibility must be carried by experts, just like medical problems are handled by healthcare practitioners. Here I have two particular expertise in mind - one precautionary, the other counteractive. Let's talk about the counteractive measure first - this duty falls upon the shoulders of journalists. Every viral content must be source-checked by responsible journalists, and declared publicly as fake, i.e. AI generated, unless recognized otherwise. Littlest of fake content can do great damage to society - therefore - journalists, stand guard! Now comes the precautionary part. Precaution against AI generated content must be borne by the makers of AI, i.e. the developers. No AI model must produce any material without some form of digital signature embedded in them, that effectively makes the distinction between AI generated content and human material mainstream. If developers fail to stand accountable out of their own free will, they must be held accountable legally. On this point, to the nations of the world I say, you can't expect backward governments like our United States to take the first step - where guns get priority over children - therefore, my brave and civilized nations of the world - you gotta set the precedent on holding tech giants accountable - without depending on morally bankrupt democratic imperialists. And remember, the idea is not to ban innovation, but to adapt it with human welfare. All said and done, the final responsibility falls upon just one person, and one person alone - the everyday ordinary consumer. Your mind has no reason to not believe the things you find on the internet, unless you make it a habit to actively question everything - or at least, not accept anything at face value. Remember this. Just because it's viral, doesn't make it true. Just because it's popular, doesn't make it right.

it's much easier to slit a man's throat while he's fucking you than when he has a gun pointed at your head.

To recap, here’s what we all can do to stop the mass shooting epidemic: As Individuals: Trauma: Build relationships and mentor young people Crisis: Develop strong skills in crisis intervention and suicide prevention Social proof: Monitor our own media consumption Opportunity: Safe storage of firearms; if you see or hear something, say something. As Institutions: Trauma: Create warm environments; trauma-informed practices; universal trauma screening Crisis: Build care teams and referral processes; train staff Social proof: Teach media literacy; limit active shooter drills for children Opportunity: Situational crime prevention; anonymous reporting systems As a Society: Trauma: Teach social emotional learning in schools. Build a strong social safety net with adequate jobs, childcare, maternity leave, health insurance, and access to higher education Crisis: Reduce stigma and increase knowledge of mental health; open access to high quality mental health treatment; fund counselors in schools Social proof: No Notoriety protocol; hold media and social media companies accountable for their content Opportunity: Universal background checks, red flag laws, permit-to-purchase, magazine limits, wait periods, assault rifle ban

Handguns are the suicide method of choice in the US... Handguns are uniquely deadly. Handguns are America's town gas. What would happen if the US did with the British did and somehow eradicated its leading cause of suicide? It's not hard to imagine. It would uncouple the suicidal from their chosen method and those few who were determined to try again would be forced to choose from far less deadly options such as overdosing on pills which is 55 times less likely to result in death than using a gun. A very conservative estimate is that banning handguns would save 10,000 lives a year just from thwarted suicides. That's a lot of people.

We don't need civilian disarmament, We need absolute universal disarmament. Only a worldwide ban on firearms production, Can facilitate a paradigm of peaceful coexistence.

Military is Legal Terrorism (Ceasefire Sonnet) Any planet that confuses guns with gallantry is a planet of apes. Prioritizing military over education, we only build a world full of terrorists. Military is just legal terrorism, To fathom this you gotta be human. What do monkeys know of peace and love, When guns are their emblem of patriotism! We don't need civilian disarmament, We need absolute universal disarmament. Only a worldwide ban on firearms production, Can facilitate a paradigm of peaceful coexistence. Let's see which nation has the heart and backbone, To legislate absolute ban on firearms manufacture! Let's see who are the first civilized people, Let's see which nation is the first peacemaker! What's the point of one ceasefire, Let's pull the plug on all war. Let's disband all military, and siphon those funds to housing, education and healthcare.

•A number of state Supreme Court rulings have also taken the position that public safety takes precedence over rights enshrined in the Constitution. In 1874 in the case of Hill v. State, the Georgia Supreme Court held that the state’s ban on carrying guns in churches, polling places, and courts was constitutional because the right to bear arms does not override safety considerations. That Court would have characterized today’s “guns everywhere” laws in states like Georgia as barbaric and as a sign of failure of institutions to protect the public:

Take the Solomon Islands, for example. Despite the islands' 1999 ban on handguns and virtually all rifles, 21 people died in three mass public shootings from 2000 to 2002. There may have been other mass public shootings, but the islands have only issued a police report that briefly provides details on the years 1998 to 2003. I have asked the Royal Soloman Islands Police Force for information on other years, but has proven fruitless. After talking to the police, it was pretty clear that since their nation gets most of its revenue from tourism, they saw little benefit to providing this information. Even if these were the Solomon Island' only mass public shootings from 1998 to 2012, the annual death rate from these events would come to 2.98 per million people (given an average population of 470,000 over those 15 years). This is 46 times higher than the US rate

Adolph Lyons’s attempt to ban the use of lethal chokeholds by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is a good example. Lyons, a twenty-four-year-old black man, was driving his car in Los Angeles one morning when he was pulled over by four police officers for a burned-out taillight. With guns drawn, police ordered Lyons out of his car. He obeyed. The officers told him to face the car, spread his legs, and put his hands on his head. Again, Lyons did as he was told. After the officers completed a pat-down, Lyons dropped his hands, prompting an officer to slam Lyons’s hands back on his head. When Lyons complained that the car keys he was holding were causing him pain, the officer forced Lyons into a chokehold. He lost consciousness and collapsed. When he awoke, “he was spitting up blood and dirt, had urinated and defecated, and had suffered permanent damage to his larynx.”91 The officers issued a traffic ticket for the burned-out taillight and released him. Lyons sued the City of Los Angeles for violation of his constitutional rights and sought, as a remedy, a ban against future use of the chokeholds. By the time his case reached the Supreme Court, sixteen people had been killed by police use of the chokehold, twelve of them black men. The Supreme Court dismissed the case, however, ruling that Lyons lacked “standing” to seek an injunction against the deadly practice. In order to have standing, the Court reasoned, Lyons would have to show that he was highly likely to be subject to a chokehold again.

RBG’s image as a moderate was clinched in March 1993, in a speech she gave at New York University known as the Madison Lecture. Sweeping judicial opinions, she told the audience, packed with many of her old New York friends, were counterproductive. Popular movements and legislatures had to first spur social change, or else there would be a backlash to the courts stepping in. As case in point, RBG chose an opinion that was very personal to plenty of people listening: Roe v. Wade. The right had been aiming to overturn Roe for decades, and they’d gotten very close only months before the speech with Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, and Sandra Day O’Connor had instead brokered a compromise, allowing states to put restrictions on abortion as long as they didn’t pose an “undue burden” on women—or ban it before viability. Neither side was thrilled, but Roe was safe, at least for the moment. Just as feminists had caught their breath, RBG declared that Roe itself was the problem. If only the court had acted more slowly, RBG said, and cut down one state law at a time the way she had gotten them to do with the jury and benefit cases. The justices could have been persuaded to build an architecture of women’s equality that could house reproductive freedom. She said the very boldness of Roe, striking down all abortion bans until viability, had “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.” This analysis remains controversial among historians, who say the political process of abortion access had stalled before Roe. Meanwhile, the record shows that there was no overnight eruption after Roe. In 1975, two years after the decision, no senator asked Supreme Court nominee John Paul Stevens about abortion. But Republicans, some of whom had been pro-choice, soon learned that being the anti-abortion party promised gains. And even if the court had taken another path, women’s sexual liberation and autonomy might have still been profoundly unsettling. Still, RBG stuck to her guns, in the firm belief that lasting change is incremental. For the feminists and lawyers listening to her Madison Lecture, RBG’s argument felt like a betrayal. At dinner after the lecture, Burt Neuborne remembers, other feminists tore into their old friend. “They felt that Roe was so precarious, they were worried such an expression from Ruth would lead to it being overturned,” he recalls. Not long afterward, when New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested to Clinton that RBG be elevated to the Supreme Court, the president responded, “The women are against her.” Ultimately, Erwin Griswold’s speech, with its comparison to Thurgood Marshall, helped convince Clinton otherwise. It was almost enough for RBG to forgive Griswold for everything else.

Many countries today already totally ban private gun ownership, with Rwanda and Sierra Leone as two notable examples. With more than a million people hacked to death with knives and cleavers over the last seven years, were the citizens of Rwanda and Sierra Leone better off without guns to defend themselves?

Even in free countries, with little risk of a totalitarian regime, gun bans all but invariably result in higher crime. In the U.S., the states with the highest gun ownership rates also have by far the lowest violent crime rates. And similarly, over time, states with the largest increases in gun ownership have experienced the biggest drops in violent crime.

The Donald Trump of 2018 is not the same man he was in 2003. When I met him, many of our beliefs were aligned. He identified with Democrats and supported commonsense gun control, like banning assault weapons; legalizing marijuana; universal health care; and even a tax hike on the wealthy. He thought Hillary Clinton was a “great” senator and donated money to her campaigns and at least $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

Gun control proponents point to Australia’s 1996 gun ban as evidence that gun control does reduce firearm homicides. In Australia’s case, an initial look at the data appears compelling. Gun homicides fell from an average of 71 per year in the 7 years prior to the ban to 55 per year in the 7 years after the ban. That’s a 22 percent decline! But a closer look reveals two concerning things. First, knife homicides in Australia appear to move in the opposite direction to gun homicides. This suggests that, at least in a portion of the cases, the gun ban didn’t reduce homicides but rather caused the perpetrators to switch weapons. In Australia, knife homicides outnumbered gun homicides by more than 2 to 1 prior to the gun ban, and more than 3 to 1 after. In Australia, knife and gun homicides, combined, fell only 8 percent in the seven-year period following the gun ban compared to the seven-year period preceding the ban. This is a much less impressive story than the reported 22 percent decline in gun homicides. Second, if we compare the same two seven-year periods in the United States, we find that annual U.S. gun homicides fell from an average of 18,577 to an average of 12,780. That’s a 31 percent decline. The U.S., without a gun ban, experienced a larger relative decline in gun homicides than did Australia with the ban!

Your Authentic Self is your ego’s worst nightmare, and the ego will do everything in its power to eliminate her rival’s influence from your daily round. The ego’s heavy guns: fear and intimidation.

After the murder of my daughter and sixteen others, there should have been a deep look into what went wrong like there was after Columbine. There should have been a constructive debate about how to keep schools safe. And there should have been a lot of soul-searching. Instead, the media exploited this tragedy as an opportunity to pit Americans against one another for higher ratings. They made it all into a Twitter showdown between a few teenagers and the Republican Party over a policy issue that didn’t have anything to do with what happened. Short of banning guns altogether, nothing in the gun control agenda would have prevented 18–1958 from getting a gun because he looked totally clean on paper. But rather than try to figure out why a student who everyone was saying had committed plenty of crimes had nothing on his record, the media treated the question as a threat to their agenda and marginalized it as a “right-wing” thing.