Category Archives: Constitution

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, February 14, 2019: 

More than 17 million Americans have obtained their concealed-carry permits, and about four out of every 10 of them carry a firearm with them at least some of the time.

This has been the cause of much angst among the anti-gun crowd, which still believes that more guns will equal more crime. Exactly the opposite has been proven to be the case.

It was Guy Smith, writing in his Gun Facts blog, who first alerted his readers to a study showing that “people with concealed carry licenses are 5.7 times less likely to be arrested for violent offences than the general public and 13.5 times less likely to be arrested for non-violent offenses than the general public.” Referring to another study, Smith noted that “the four-year violent crime arrest rate of CCW holders is 128 per 100,000 [but] for the general population it is 710 per 100,000. In other words, CCW holders are 5.5 times less likely to commit a violent crime [than the general public].”

But it was John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, who went one step further:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, February 11, 2019: 

For years the Giffords Law Center (GLC) has released its annual scorecard on how well states’ gun laws match its bias toward more infringement of the Second Amendment. It then “proves” that those infringements of law-abiding citizens’ rights reduce “gun deaths” in those states. Its latest release illustrates the point.

Consider its ranking of Wyoming, a state that historically has allowed its citizens maximum freedom in exercising their Second Amendment rights:

In 2018, Wyoming legislators put their constituents at risk by enacting a dangerous Stand Your Ground law and passing legislation allowing people with concealed carry permits to bring guns into places of worship.

 

The state has very weak gun laws and a remarkably high gun suicide rate. Wyoming could save lives by, among other things, passing universal background checks and imposing waiting periods on gun purchases.

On the other hand it ranks California as its “best state” in its survey:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, January 2019: 

The day before signing South Dakota’s “constitutional carry” bill into law, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem tweeted:

 Our Founding Fathers believed so firmly in our right to bear arms that they enshrined it into the Constitution. Tomorrow [Thursday] I will sign SB47 into law. This constitutional carry legislation will further protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding South Dakotans.

This echoed the sentiments of the bill’s sponsor, Senate President Pro Tempore Brock Greenfield: “We’re simply trying to create a situation in which we recognize that the Second Amendment is paramount and will not be infringed.”

SB47 does much more than that.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, January 14, 2019:  

The Department of Justice just updated its decades-old study asking criminals where they got the guns they used in committing the crime for which they were currently incarcerated. After asking 287,000 prisoners in 2016 where they got the gun they used, 90 percent of them “did not obtain it from a retail source” and less than one percent obtained it from a gun show.

Half of them obtained their firearm from the “underground” market, while just six percent said they stole it. The survey reported that “most of the remainder had obtained it from a family member or a friend, or as a gift. Seven percent had purchased it under their own name from a licensed firearm dealer.”

In other words, current or pending laws banning “assault weapons” (usually variants of the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle) almost totally miss the mark,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, January 7, 2019:

Not happy with the progress being made by banks and credit-card companies in their move to restrict lending to gun manufacturers, Andrew Sorkin published his thinly veiled support for more surveillance of and restrictions on individual gun buyers in the New York Times in late December.

In his piece entitled “How Banks Unwittingly Finance Mass Shootings,” Sorkin made clear his anti-gun worldview in the opening paragraph of the results of his Dealbook Investigation: “Omar Mateen used six credit cards to buy two guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition before he opened fire inside the Pulse nightclub [in June 2016].”

Sorkin rounded up evidence that other “mass shooters” had used credit cards to purchase firearms and accessories and concluded that “Many of the killers built their stockpiles of high-powered weapons with the convenience of credit. No one was watching.”

Now they should, said Sorkin. He took his “evidence” and called on the heads of a number of national banks who, he said, were horrified at what he had found. But they backed away from implementing any sort of tech wizardry that would target individuals buying too many firearms and too much ammunition in too short a period of time:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, January 2, 2019:  

Brazil has the highest rate of violent crime in Latin America and the eighth highest in the world. In Sao Paulo, a city of 12 million people, one in four reports that they have been held up at gunpoint at least once.

Along with this frightening crime wave, a weak economy (unemployment is at 12 percent) helped Jair Bolsonaro win election in October with 55 percent of the vote. Three days before his inauguration, he announced that his first effort would be to keep one of his key campaign promises: to expand his country’s gun laws. He tweeted: “By decree, we plan to guarantee the ownership of firearms by citizens without criminal records.”

That’s a far cry from the law presently in force (since 2003), which

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, January 1, 2019: 

Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, who assumed his office on Tuesday, made many campaign promises. He supported his country’s national sovereignty and opposed abortion, affirmative action, and drug liberalization, while supporting closer relations with the United States and Israel. But his signature promise — supported by his famous finger-gun salute — is to liberalize his country’s gun laws. Since its enactment in 2003 Brazil’s murder rate has soared: Brazil has the highest homicide rate in Latin America and the eighth highest in the world.

Parallels to the U.S. president and the head of the National Rifle Association are obvious,