Report: ‘Overwhelming Evidence’ That More Guns Equal Less Crime

As gun ownership has increased dramatically, gun-related violent crimes have gradually decreased over the past six years in the state of Virginia, according to a new analysis.

From 2006 to 2011, the total number of guns purchased in Virginia increased 73 percent, while the total number of gun-related violent crimes decreased 24 percent over that period. And when adjusted for population growth, the number of crimes further decreases to more than 27 percent, with 79 gun-related offenses per 100,000 in 2006 dropping to 57 by 2011.

Virginia Commonwealth University professor Thomas R. Baker conducted the analysis at the request of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Baker told the paper that the findings appear to contradict the popular premise that more guns cause more violent crime.

“While there is a wealth of academic literature attempting to demonstrate the relationship between guns and crime, a very simple and intuitive demonstration of the numbers seems to point away from the premise that more guns leads to more crime, at least in Virginia,” said Baker.

Baker examined data from the Virginia Firearms Transaction Center, which tracks the number of gun transactions for every federally licensed Virginia firearm dealer, to state crime data from 2006 to 2011. That data demonstrated that an increase in gun purchases one year was often followed by a decrease in gun crime the next year.

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Video: Barack Hussein Obama, “Our Lord and Savior”

Appearing on Sunday night’s Soul Train awards in Las Vegas, Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx called Barack Obama “our lord and savior.”

“It’s like church over here. It’s like church in here. First of all, give an honor to God and our lord and savior Barack Obama. Barack Obama,” he said.

Since the 2008 election, several have attempted to deify Barack Obama.

ABC’s Jake Tapper noticed the messianic tone of Obama’s first presidential campaign and wrote: “It’s as if Tom Daschle descended from on high saying, ‘Be not afraid; for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people: for there is born to you this day in the city of Chicago a Savior, who is Barack the Democrat.'”

In November 2010, Newsweek declared him “god of all things” on its cover, and first lady Michele Obama once declared of her husband: “This President has brought us out of the dark and into the light.” Read more from this story HERE.

Former Employee: ACORN Still Alive and Well

Former ACORN employee and whistleblower Anita Moncrief said ACORN is far from dead and is still “colluding” and “working with” the President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice.

Moncrief appeared with Conservative commentator David Webb in a one-hour special about the “District of Corruption” movie on FOX News’ “Hannity.” She specifically discussed how community organizing groups on the left put pressure on institutions like banks to get them to relent to their “equal outcomes” agenda.

Moncrief said ACORN would help people report food stamps and other “under-the-table” incomes as income to get subprime mortgages that eventually caused the housing market to collapse.

“ACORN’s agenda is Obama’s agenda,” Moncrief said. “It has not gone away.”

She said people would come to work at ACORN idealistic but there was a top-down culture of corruption that encouraged employees to look the other way “for the greater good.”

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‘Two and a Half Men’ Star Says Show Is ‘Filth,’ Urges People Not to Watch in YouTube Vid About His Faith

The teenage actor who plays the “half” in the hit CBS comedy “Two and a Half Men” says the show is “filth” and, through a video posted by a Christian church, has urged viewers not to watch it.

Nineteen-year-old Angus T. Jones has been on the show since he was 10 but says he no longer wants to be on it . . .

“Two and a Half Men– if you watch Two and a Half Men, please stop watching [it]…I’m ​on ​Two and a Half Men; I don’t want to be on it. Please stop watching it. Please stop filling your head with filth.

Please– it’s, you know, people say it’s just ‘entertainment.’ The fact that it’s entertainment– do some research on the effects of television and your brain, and I promise you you’ll have a decision to make…it’s bad news.”

Comments begin at 7:37:

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Steyn: Uninterested Voters Helped Dems on Election Day; Romney Ran ‘Small, Shriveled Campaign’ (+audio)

Filling in on Rush Limbaugh’s Monday radio show, National Review columnist Mark Steyn said that Republicans lost big on Election Day because less engaged and more uniformed voters turned out in force.

“We do very well in off years, in the midterms — 1994, 2002,” Steyn said. “Republicans can have good years then because essentially they’re low-turnout elections — people who are engaged in politics vote. In the presidential years, people voted — a broader pool of voters comes in, and they’re basically people who swim in the broader culture. They’re not people who know the name of their congressmen or governor, and [they] aren’t terribly interested.”

Steyn, author “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon,” added that the GOP has had persistent problems getting motivated voters to the polls.

“We face getting clobbered every four years about that,” he said. “Basically there has been no decisive — if you discount the first President Bush in 1988, because that was Ronald Reagan’s coattails — there has been no real active enthusiastic vote for a Republican presidential candidate in almost 30 years. The left had a point — we did lose the popular vote in 2000.”

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It’s On: GOP Split Resurfaces in West Virginia Senate Race

West Virginia Rep. Shelley Moore Capito’s Senate candidacy is already creating an unsettling sense of déjà vu for Republicans.

An experienced and popular candidate with wide name recognition announces a bid in a state that looks ripe for a pickup — and anti-establishment, Beltway-based conservatives swiftly object . . .

“Congresswoman Capito has a long record of support of bailouts, pork and bigger government,” Club for Growth President Chris Chocola said in a statement. “She voted to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for massive expansions of government-run health insurance, giveaways to Big Labor, and repeatedly voted to continue funding for wasteful earmarks like an Exploratorium in San Francisco and an aquarium in South Carolina. That’s not the formula for GOP success in U.S. Senate races.”

The Senate Conservatives Fund, which was founded by South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, also signaled outright opposition.

“Congresswoman Capito is not someone we can endorse because her spending record in the House is too liberal,” said SCF Executive Director Matt Hoskins. “If Republicans in West Virginia want to save their country, they need to find another candidate with the courage to say ‘no’ to more spending and debt.”

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Gone to Pot: University Opens Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research

photo credit: matthew kenwrick

ARCATA, Calif. (AP) — A public university located in one of California’s prime pot-growing regions has formed an academic institute devoted to marijuana.

The Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research at Humboldt State University plans to sponsor scholarly lectures and coordinate research among 11 faculty members from fields such as economics, geography, politics, psychology and sociology.

The Times-Standard of Eureka reports (https://bit.ly/V5H8zy) that one professor is studying recent campaigns to legalize marijuana, while another is investigating the environmental effects of pot cultivation.

“If anyone is going to have a marijuana institute, it really should be Humboldt State,” economist Erick Eschker, the institute’s co-chair, told the newspaper. Eschker is studying the connection between marijuana production and employment in the county.

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Brave New Creed: ‘No Country for Old (White) Men’

photo credit: marion doss

Collectivists of the Washington establishment, representing both major parties, have analyzed the 2012 election results and come to a lovely conclusion: old white men are the problem. The only difference of opinion between the two factions regards how one ought to handle it.

Democrat experts declare that laughable old coots are the natural core of the Republican Party, so one need only join the cool leftist majority and leave Grandpa in his kitchen chair to mutter to himself until death shuts him up for good. Republican experts, as the reluctant stewards of these cantankerous fogies, are more circumspect: they merely want to leave Grandpa ranting in the corner with his talk radio shows, while they attend to the urgent business of selling off his prized possessions (e.g. property rights, national sovereignty).

On one side we have the Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Paul Krugman types haughtily declaring that the Democrats are the party of women and minorities, and the Republicans the party of old white men. See how colorful, female, and young we look? See how monotonously white and graying they look?

On the other side we have campaign strategist Steve Schmidt, ACU chairman Al Cardenas, and others declaring that “Rush Limbaugh’s audience” should be ignored as a bunch of old white men who (apparently for that very reason) no longer represent America. Since when is “representing America” a matter of head counts and demographics, rather than of principles? Such thinking seems reasonable only to men who have lost the forest of encroaching leftist authoritarianism for the trees of electoral victory. (See how well their Constitution Fire Sale method has worked out so far!)

This mocking, bitter dismissal of the mature white male is a nearly poetic symbol — as if we needed another one — of the degraded state of civilization. Old men — whether white, black, olive, yellow, or red — have traditionally been regarded as the sage voices in their communities with regard to matters of public policy and private virtue. Having seen more, learned from mistakes, and grown weary of youth’s careless chasing after the chimerical “new,” they have commonly been appreciated as a steady source of common sense and moral rectitude. Age may not necessarily bring genuine wisdom, but it has traditionally served an invaluable function in humanity’s natural system of checks and balances: it casts a skeptical eye upon youth’s grand designs, thus raining on the often misguided parade of “progress.”

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National Pediatric Group Recommends Children Get Morning After Pill Before Sex

A national pediatric association is recommending that doctors prescribe women age 17 and younger the morning-after pill in advance of them actually needing it, under the assumption that they will be more likely to use the emergency contraceptive if they don’t have to make a doctor’s visit at the time.

The American Academy of Pediatrics issued the new policy statement Monday. According to a report by Reuters on the statement, which is published in the December issue of Pediatrics, the group believes that because federal law prevents over-the-counter sales of such contraception to those under age 18, the teens will be more likely prevent unwanted pregnancy if they already had the necessary prescription on hand.

The battle for over-the-counter availability for emergency contraceptives was in the spotlight last year as the Food and Drug Administration overturned a 2005 ruling that prevented teens from obtaining pills like Plan B without a prescription. The Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius though overruled the FDA’s decision maintaining the requirement for a prescription for minors.

Reuters reported former FDA assistant commissioner for woman’s health, Susan Wood, saying of AAP’s new policy that “it’s not often you see physician organizations saying that their patients are better off without the physician involvement.”

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Corporate Tax Cuts Enacted: Economic Stimulus Old-School-Capitalist Style . . . in China!

photo credit: wisegie

China’s new round of structural tax cutting is likely to benefit more than 900,000 enterprises nationwide, according to a working conference held here on Monday to discuss the country’s piloting of replacing business tax with a value-added tax (VAT).

About 710,000 enterprises have been covered by the tax-cutting program, and another 200,000 will be included starting from Dec.1 this year, according to the meeting jointly held by the Ministry of Finance and the State Administration of Taxation.

Shanghai piloted the program on Jan. 1 this year in an effort to decrease the overall tax burden and boost the transportation and service sectors. The pilot was then expanded to provincial regions including Beijing, Guangdong and Zhejiang later this year . . .

The reform has effectively promoted the growth of tertiary industry, especially the service sector, and encouraged the development of small and micro-sized enterprises, those present at the meeting agreed.

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