Tag: gun control

Fordham professor makes up statistic about AR-15s to peddle gun control

A Fordham University history professor recently was caught fabricating a statistic about the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

In a May 19 Slate article, gun control advocate Saul Cornell claimed the AR-15 is “200 times more deadly” than the rifles used in the American Revolution.

“Recent events in New York have brought the grim realities of America’s gun violence problem into sharp relief,” Cornell wrote. “In both instances, the perpetrators took advantage of the nation’s lax gun laws and legally purchased firearms whose lethality would have been unimaginable to the authors of the Second Amendment.”

Cornell also chided conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices for clinging to “originalist fantasy” and being “happy to parrot the propaganda” put forth by the National Rifle Association.

But National Review’s Kevin Williamson asked Cornell about the “200 times” statistic and discovered the professor had used World War II-era machine guns as a “stand-in” for AR-15s.

Keep reading

Democrats to Vote on 8 Gun Control Measures

Democrats in the House Judiciary Committee will hold a vote on a gun control package Thursday which includes six gun control measures that would not have prevented the Uvalde attack.

The package is titled the “Protecting Our Kids Act.”

Punchbowl News reports that the package contains eight gun controls. Six of those gun controls would not have prevented the Uvalde attack.

Nadler’s spokesman confirmed the list of bills the House Judiciary Committee will consider under the broader “Protecting Our Kids Act.” They include:

  • The Raise the Age Act
  • Prevent Gun Trafficking Act
  • The Untraceable Firearms Act
  • Ethan’s Law
  • The Safe Guns, Safe Kids Act
  • The Kimberly Vaughan Firearm Safety Storage Act
  • Closing the Bump Stock Loophole Act
  • The Keep Americans Safe Act

Those six include background checks for “ghost guns,” gun storage requirements for homes with minors present, additional penalties for gun trafficking and straw purchases, a bump stock ban, and a requirement that existing bump stocks be registered under the auspices of the National Firearms Act.

Keep reading

Canada introduces law to freeze handgun sales, ban look-alike toys

Canada’s government introduced legislation Monday to implement a “national freeze” on the sale and purchase of handguns as part of a gun control package that would also limit magazine capacities and ban some toys that look like guns.

The new legislation, which resurrects some measures that were shelved last year amid a national election, comes just a week after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in their classroom in Uvalde, Texas.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters the new measures were needed as gun violence was increasing.

“We need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action firmly and rapidly it gets worse and worse and gets more difficult to counter,” he said.

The handgun freeze would contain exceptions, including for elite sport shooters, Olympic athletes and security guards. Canadians who already own handguns would be allowed to keep them.

Keep reading

NBC’s Chuck Todd: Second Amendment Right ‘Does Not Exist’

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

But NBC’s Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press,” says that doesn’t mean Americans have a right to bear arms.

“This current version of the Republican Party is being held hostage by a vocal minority obsessed with an absolute right that does not exist,” Todd said on his show on Sunday.

Todd went on an anti-gun, anti-GOP rant to open his show, following in the footsteps of liberals who blast anyone for offering “thoughts and prayers” after a shooting in Texas left 19 children and two adults dead.

“It’s become our uniquely American ritual of words after each episode of this uniquely American serial tragedy. Thoughts and prayers, nothing we can do,” Todd said. “No law would have stopped this. The real problem is mental illness. If only the victims had been armed. More thoughts and prayers.”

Todd argued that the law’s to blame.

Keep reading

Biden calls 9mm ‘high-caliber weapons,’ suggests banning them

President Biden on Monday took aim at 9mm handguns, appearing to suggest that the “high-caliber weapons” ought to be banned. 

The president made the remarks outside the White House after returning from a visit to the site of a mass shooting in Texas where 21 people, including 19 elementary school children, were killed last week. 

Recounting a visit to a New York trauma hospital, Biden said doctors showed him X-rays of gunshot wounds. 

“They said a .22-caliber bullet will lodge in the lung, and we can probably get it out — may be able to get it and save the life. A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body,” Biden said. 

“So, the idea of these high-caliber weapons is, uh, there’s simply no rational basis for it in terms of self-protection, hunting,” Biden added. “Remember, the constitution was never absolute.” 

“You couldn’t buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed,” Biden said. “You couldn’t go out and purchase a lot of weaponry.” 

The president, however, ruled out the possibility of issuing an executive order on guns, saying: “I can’t dictate this stuff.” 

Keep reading

Don’t Surrender To Do-Somethingism On Guns

Before we even knew how the killer of 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, had obtained his guns, Chris Murphy was engaging in his customary performative emotionalism on the Senate floor, literally begging Republicans to “compromise.”

Compromise on what exactly? Murphy has never once offered a single proposal that would have deterred any of these mass shooters. Literally minutes after his routine, Murphy was asked about the obvious mental illness prevalent among most of these shooters. “Spare me the bullsh-t about mental illness,” the Connecticut senator responded, “ripping” the GOP. “We don’t have any more mental illness than any other country in the world.” That’s how serious he is about compromise.

Whether America is more prone to mental illness or not, these incidents are almost exclusively perpetrated by young men who have exhibited serious anti-social behavior. All of them break a slew of existing laws. All of them have either obtained guns illegally, or legally before having any criminal record. In many, if not most, cases, the shooter is already on the cops’ radar because he has threatened others or written insane, violent manifestos. In a study of mass shootings from 2008 to 2017, the Secret Service found that “100 percent of perpetrators showed concerning behaviors, and in 77 percent of shootings, at least one person – most often a peer – knew about their plan.”

Rather than focusing on these tangible entry points for potentially useful legislation, instead of proposing ideas on better identifying shooters before they act, instead of thinking about how schools could be structurally safer, instead of debating the efficacy of putting more cops in schools — and none of these are panaceas, mind you — Senate Democrats were busy dunking on Republicans for failing to support bills that have absolutely zero to do with mass shootings.

Chuck Schumer planned to introduce H.R. 8, an expanded background check bill, and H.R. 1446, a bill that would close the alleged “Charleston Loophole” (before he realized it wouldn’t be politically expedient.) “Alleged” because Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston in 2015, got a clean background check, not because of any “loophole,” but because local prosecutors had failed to respond to the FBI’s request for information. It was a case of human error, or negligence. So maybe Democrats should be promoting a “law-enforcement-should-do-its-job” bill. Because all “universal” background checks do is stop friends and families from gifting guns. Straw purchases are already illegal, as Schumer, Pelosi, and Murphy already know. And passing expanded background checks after a school shooting is tantamount to demanding stricter drivers tests after a hit and run.

Democrats, obsessed with largely irrelevant issues like AR-15s and “universal background checks,” are largely living in the early 1990s. Joe Biden’s address to the nation consisted of a litany of hackneyed talking points he’s been regurgitating for decades now — including that transcendently stupid joke about deer in Kevlar. “As a nation, we have to ask, when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” Biden said — again.

Keep reading