Buying a Gun Is Not Suicidal: Americans often buy guns for self-defense,
a purpose that now has Supreme Court validation. But according to
advocates of gun control, those purchasers overlook the people who pose
the greatest threat: themselves. Anyone who acquires a firearm, we are
told, is inviting a bloody death by suicide...As it turns out, the
claims about guns and suicide don't stand up well to scrutiny. A 2004
report by the National Academy of Sciences was doubtful, noting that the
alleged association is small and may be illusory. Florida State
University criminologist Gary Kleck says there are at least 13 published
studies finding no meaningful connection between the rate of firearms
and the rate of suicides. The consensus of experts, he says, is that an
increase in gun ownership doesn't raise the number of people who kill
themselves - only the number who do it with a gun...
http://reason.com/news/show/127531.html
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Nevada ACLU Gains Fame for RKBA Stance: ...Nevada's pistol-packing Gov.
Jim Gibbons, a Republican, welcomed the American Civil Liberties Union
of Nevada to his posse in the gun debate after the group broke with the
national ACLU to champion the Second Amendment guarantee for an
individual right to keep and bear arms...The Nevada ACLU decided to
change its gun stance - it appears to be the first state chapter to do
so - in light of the Supreme Court's ruling last month that struck down
the handgun ban in the District and for the first time interpreted the
Second Amendment as an individual right, breaking with the national
group. "The ACLU of Nevada will defend this right as it defends other
constitutional rights," the group said in a statement posted on its Web
site...Unlike the Nevada chapter, the national ACLU does not view gun
control as a civil liberties issue. It disagreed with the Supreme Court
ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which D.C. security guard
Richard Heller successfully challenged the city's 1976 law that banned
handgun possession by making it a crime to carry an unregistered firearm
and prohibiting the registration of handguns...
http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/jul/14/gunfight-at-the-aclu-corral/
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Heller - What Does "in the home" Mean?: ...The court recognized the
power of a state or local jurisdiction to prohibit the concealed carry
of handguns; other states and local jurisdictions have authorized
concealed carry. How will that power be balanced with the now affirmed
constitutional right of an individual to possess a handgun for
self-defense in the home? For starters, to what does "in the home"
apply? It is clear that it applies to a person's residence, whether a
single family house or apartment. Would it apply to a room rented by a
boarder in a dwelling occupied by other boarders and/or an owner and
family? While "home" presumably, applies to a second residence such as a
vacation house; would it apply to a hotel or motel room? What about a
cabin at a campsite; or a tent or sleeping bag at such site? Would it
matter if the camp site were on federal, state, or private land?
http://www.fredericknewspost.com/sections/opinion/display_columnist.htm?StoryID=77456
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Texans Seek Open Carry: An online petition for residents to carry
handguns in plain sight in Texas had obtained more than 20,000
signatures last week. The petition will be submitted to Gov. Rick Perry
and the Texas Legislature sometime in the future. According to the
petition, Texas is one of only six states in the U.S. that ban the use
of publicly displayed handguns - also known as "open-carry" handguns.
Ten states - Arizona, Alaska, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, New Mexico,
South Dakota, Virginia, Vermont and Wyoming - allow residents to openly
carry a handgun without a license, the petition stated, including those
states as one reason why Texas should adopt an open-carry law...
http://www.kdhnews.com/news/story.aspx?s=26536
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Does The Boston Globe Now Support CCW?: ...Now an "open carry" movement
encourages gun owners to wear their weapons ostentatiously on their
belts, "to make a firearm," in the words of a Los Angeles Times story
last week, "as common an accessory as an iPod." Or, as one open carrier
said, "Hey, we're normal people who carry guns." Get used to it. In most
states, there is no law against license-holders cradling a rifle on the
street, or holstering a firearm on a hip, like Wyatt Earp. But since the
close of the last frontier, gun display, except in movies, has been
culturally taboo. The power of that prohibition is what stirred me at my
father's dresser. "Open carry" aims to remove such visceral negativity,
though the taboo amounts, in fact, to last ditch gun control. The
"normalizing" of guns will inevitably normalize their use. From movies
to legislation to political rhetoric - and now to "accessory" fashion:
guns galore. And who, pray tell, will bear, not the arms, but the
consequences?
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/06/16/open_carry_guns_at_our_childrens_risk/
Wayne LaPierre Responds:
http://www.nranews.com/blogarticle.aspx?blogPostId=419
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Oops, Wrong Off-Duty Cops: Two armed men were shot by off-duty law
enforcement officers, one fatally, early Sunday morning in separate
incidents in the Bronx and Queens, the police said...In one of the
Sunday shootings, a man approached an off-duty city correction officer
who was buying gasoline at a station at 1657 Jerome Avenue in the Mount
Eden section of the Bronx about 2:18 a.m. The man asked the officer, who
was out of his vehicle, for directions, the police said. The officer,
who was not identified by the authorities on Sunday, gave the
directions, but the man suddenly entered the passenger side of the
officer's car, pulled a gun and demanded that the officer drive them
away, the police said...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/nyregion/14shootings.html?ref=nyregion
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Oops, Wrong House: A man who is suspected of shooting and injuring a
policeman along Portmore Drive in St Catherine, on Wednesday night, was
hours later shot and killed after he and a crony attacked a licensed
firearm holder...According to the police, the licensed firearm holder
was at his home when he was attacked by the two armed men. The firearm
holder, said the police, shot at the men who ran and returned the fire.
The police were called and on their arrival one of the men was found
suffering from gunshot wounds nearby. He was taken to hospital where he
was pronounced dead. Police said the man was later identified as the
gunman who shot and injured the policeman. He was dressed in a red and
white striped polo shirt, jeans pants and black and brown sneakers.
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/html/20080710T230000-0500_137735_OBS_LICENSED_FIREARM_HOLDER_KILLS_MAN_WHO_SHOT_COP.asp
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What Can You Learn from IDPA?: ...Now, let me get this part out of the
way right here. Any time you set something up as a competition, keeping
time and keeping score, there will be people who try to find the
slickest way to win. Sometimes you have to compromise for the sake of
the game and some of the IDPA rules and practices reflect that. Not
everything at a match will be strictly "real world." However, on the
whole, IDPA does a pretty good job of encouraging the skills that are
useful in a gunfight which is why I think it's worth your time, money
and effort... (My own opinion is that any competition, other than a
simple skill test, that uses a timer tends to encourage poor tactics. If
you use competition of this sort for training, concentrate on your
tactics and your hits, not your times.)
http://www.officer.com/web/online/On-the-Street/IDPA--Training-or-Just-a-Game/21$42272
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Tangentially Related: ...We gave judges their robes and gavels so that
they might resolve specific disputes between specific plaintiffs and
defendants. We never gave them authority to issue commands to our
elected lawmakers, forcing us down roads which we have not chosen to
travel. Judges have no constitutional authority to make laws or to amend
our national and state constitutions. They have no authority to redefine
words and concepts in our laws to mean what they and their ideological
partisans wish for them to mean. To Americans of previous generations
this was obvious and fundamental. But for many in America today, this is
meaningless, a mere technicality: judges are supreme because, well,
because they just are...
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/PaulWeyrich/2008/07/12/history_and_the_judiciary?page=full&comments=true
..If anyone needed more convincing about the importance of the next
presidential election, one need go no further than the decision of the
U.S. Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller where a Washington,
D.C. ban on hand guns was declared unconstitutional because a majority
of justices properly interpreted the Second Amendment. The 5-4 decision
in this case required the assent by one man, Justice Anthony Kennedy, to
join with four other justices, which is bad enough inasmuch the court's
opinion should have been unanimous; but worse still is the thinking
process about the constitution as expressed by some justices in the
minority opinions...
http://www.postchronicle.com/commentary/article_212157971.shtml
---
From AzCDL:
The Department of the Interior (DOI) has extended the comment period on
allowing lawful carry of firearms in National Parks until August 8,
2008. It was supposed to end on June 30, 2008. However pro-rights
comments dwarfed the anti-liberty crowd and there are some, including
some Congressmen, who don't like that. Here's a link to the letter from
Arizona Representative Raul Grijalva and Senator Kahikana Akaka (Hawaii)
that generated the delay:
http://www.npca.org/keep_parks_safe/pdf/Akaka-Grijalva-Extension_Letter-6_27_08.pdf
