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NY Paper to Publish Additional Gun Owners’ Names, Addresses

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The New York newspaper that drew criticism for publishing the names and addresses of hundreds of legal gun permit holders is doubling down by publishing the personal information of even more law-abiding gun owners.

To great criticism, the Journal News published an interactive map showing the names and addresses of the legal gun owners in Westchester and Rockland counties just before Christmas.

Now the paper has announced it will next publish the names and addresses of permit-holders in Putnam County with an eye toward eventually politicizing the names and addresses of every gun owner in the state.

The Journal News has defended its controversial violation of the privacy of New York’s legal gun owners by claiming that since the records are open to the public to find in government archives, they should be allowed to publish all the names and addresses.

New York State Senator Greg Ball slammed the Journal News, saying that the paper is treating law-abiding citizens like “sex offenders.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Utah Teachers Get Free Gun Training in Response to Newtown Shooting

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photo credit: guardian elite

(Reuters) – Kasey Hansen, a special education teacher from Salt Lake City, Utah, says she would take a bullet for any of her students, but if faced with a gunman threatening her class, she would rather be able to shoot back.

On Thursday, she was one of 200 Utah teachers who flocked to an indoor sports arena for free instruction in the handling of firearms by gun activists who say armed educators might have a chance at thwarting deadly shooting rampages in their schools.

The event was organized by the Utah Shooting Sports Council in response to the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, this month that killed 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The council said it has typically attracted about 16 teachers each year to its concealed carry training courses. But Thursday’s event near Salt Lake City, organized especially for educators in the aftermath of Newtown, drew interest from hundreds, and the class was capped at 200 for space limitations.

“I feel like I would take a bullet for any student in the school district,” Hansen, a special education teacher in a Salt Lake City school district, told Reuters after the training session.

Read more from this story HERE.

Desperate Screams of the Press Clowns

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By Erick Erickson. If you ever needed a reminder of how pathetic the cast of clowns who make up the reporters and journalists in the media is, look no further than the David Gregory story and the reaction to it from the press corps. It is a non-story to them [see story below].

Glenn Thrush, debating this with me on twitter notes, “The more [you] talk about the fake Gregory story the less [you] talk about Newtown. Classic play fake.”

But isn’t it directly related? We’ve moved on to begin discussing policy to prevent acts like Newtown happening. David Gregory was engaged in that discussion — the very discussion the press says we must now have.

The press has chosen to ignore that Connecticut’s law worked. Adam Lanza could not buy a gun himself. He had to murder his mother and take her guns. Read more from this article HERE.

NBC’s David Gregory Violated DC Gun Laws By Brandishing Hi-Cap Magazine?

By Katie Glueck. Some political and media types weren’t impressed by headlines this week reporting that D.C. police are investigating the alleged display of a gun magazine on NBC’s Meet the Press. They took to the Internet with their disdain for the story.

“Excellent use of DC police resources, investigating ‘Meet the Press’ for committing an act of journalism,” snarked the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

“When guns are outlawed, only David Gregory will have guns,” Slate’s Matt Yglesias offered.

The Twitter sarcasm came a day after police said they were “investigating” after “Meet the Press” host David Gregory brandished what appeared to be a 30-round gun magazine on the Sunday show while interviewing National Rifle Association head Wayne LaPierre. Police said use of a magazine in that context could have violated D.C. laws.

The story picked up Wednesday as conflicting reports emerged concerning what NBC knew about the legality of displaying the magazine. Read more from this story HERE.

Russia’s Pravda: ‘Americans, Never Give Up Your Guns!’

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photo credit: gre.ceres

These days, there are few few things to admire about the socialist, bankrupt and culturally degenerating USA, but at least so far, one thing remains: the right to bare arms and use deadly force to defend one’s self and possessions.

This will probably come as a total shock to most of my Western readers, but at one point, Russia was one of the most heavily armed societies on earth. This was, of course, when we were free under the Tsar. Weapons, from swords and spears to pistols, rifles and shotguns were everywhere, common items. People carried them concealed, they carried them holstered. Fighting knives were a prominent part of many traditional attires and those little tubes criss crossing on the costumes of Cossacks and various Caucasian peoples? Well those are bullet holders for rifles.

Various armies, such as the Poles, during the Смута (Times of Troubles), or Napoleon, or the Germans even as the Tsarist state collapsed under the weight of WW1 and Wall Street monies, found that holding Russian lands was much much harder than taking them and taking was no easy walk in the park but a blood bath all its own. In holding, one faced an extremely well armed and aggressive population Hell bent on exterminating or driving out the aggressor.

This well armed population was what allowed the various White factions to rise up, no matter how disorganized politically and militarily they were in 1918 and wage a savage civil war against the Reds. It should be noted that many of these armies were armed peasants, villagers, farmers and merchants, protecting their own. If it had not been for Washington’s clandestine support of and for the Reds, history would have gone quite differently.

Moscow fell, for example, not from a lack of weapons to defend it, but from the lieing guile of the Reds. Ten thousand Reds took Moscow and were opposed only by some few hundreds of officer cadets and their instructors. Even then the battle was fierce and losses high. However, in the city alone, at that time, lived over 30,000 military officers (both active and retired), all with their own issued weapons and ammunition, plus tens of thousands of other citizens who were armed. The Soviets promised to leave them all alone if they did not intervene. They did not and for that were asked afterwards to come register themselves and their weapons: where they were promptly shot.

Read more from this story HERE.

Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Plans to Put Armed Posse at Schools (+video)

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An Arizona sheriff has proposed placing an armed volunteer posse at many Phoenix-area schools, in response to the deadly school shooting in Connecticut.

Earlier in the week, Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne proposed firearms training for one educator in every school in the state. Following that lead, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said Thursday he wants to start dispatching volunteer patrols to schools within a week, according to MyFoxPhoenix.com.

The report emphasized that the plan calls for armed posse members around the perimeters of schools, not inside them. It will focus on about 50 schools within Maricopa County.

Read more from this story HERE.

Steyn: Laws Are for Little People, Not David Gregory

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A week ago on NBC’s Meet the Press, David Gregory brandished on screen a high-capacity magazine. To most media experts, a “high-capacity magazine” means an ad-stuffed double issue of Vanity Fair with the triple-page perfume-scented pullouts. But apparently in America’s gun-nut gun culture of gun-crazed gun kooks, it’s something else entirely, and it was this latter kind that Mr. Gregory produced in order to taunt Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. As the poster child for America’s gun-crazed gun-kook gun culture, Mr. LaPierre would probably have been more scared by the host waving around a headily perfumed Vanity Fair. But that was merely NBC’s first miscalculation. It seems a high-capacity magazine is illegal in the District of Columbia, and the flagrant breach of D.C. gun laws is now under investigation by the police.

This is, declared NYU professor Jay Rosen, “the dumbest media story of 2012.” Why? Because, as CNN’s Howard Kurtz breezily put it, everybody knows David Gregory wasn’t “planning to commit any crimes.”

So what? Neither are the overwhelming majority of his fellow high-capacity-magazine-owning Americans. Yet they’re expected to know, as they drive around visiting friends and family over Christmas, the various and contradictory gun laws in different jurisdictions. Ignorantia juris non excusat is one of the oldest concepts in civilized society: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Back when there was a modest and proportionate number of laws, that was just about doable. But in today’s America there are laws against everything, and any one of us at any time is unknowingly in breach of dozens of them. And in this case NBC were informed by the D.C. police that it would be illegal to show the thing on TV, and they went ahead and did it anyway: You’ll never take me alive, copper! You’ll have to pry my high-capacity magazine from my cold dead fingers! When the D.C. SWAT team, the FBI, and the ATF take out NBC News and the whole building goes up in one almighty fireball, David Gregory will be the crazed loon up on the roof like Jimmy Cagney in White Heat: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” At last, some actual must-see TV on that lousy network.

But, even if we’re denied that pleasure, the “dumbest media story of 2012” is actually rather instructive. David Gregory intended to demonstrate what he regards as the absurdity of America’s lax gun laws. Instead, he’s demonstrating the ever greater absurdity of America’s non-lax laws. His investigation, prosecution, and a sentence of 20–30 years with eligibility for parole after ten (assuming Mothers Against High-Capacity Magazines don’t object) would teach a far more useful lesson than whatever he thought he was doing by waving that clip under LaPierre’s nose.

To Howard Kurtz & Co., it’s “obvious” that Gregory didn’t intend to commit a crime. But, in a land choked with laws, “obviousness” is one of the first casualties — and “obviously” innocent citizens have their “obviously” well-intentioned actions criminalized every minute of the day. Not far away from David Gregory, across the Virginia border, eleven-year-old Skylar Capo made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days. For her pains, a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter accompanied by state troopers descended on her house, charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species, issued her a $535 fine, and made her cry. Why is it so “obvious” that David Gregory deserves to be treated more leniently than a sixth grader? Because he’s got a TV show and she hasn’t?

Read more from this article HERE.

Video: Ted Nugent Tells Gun Control Advocates to ‘Drop Dead . . . You Can Suck On My Machine Gun’

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In a recent appearance on the Piers Morgan show on CNN, Rocker Ted Nugent delivered a clear and unequivocal message to the British advocate of gun control and other foes of the Second Amendment. It’s not going to happen.

Petitions have been circulating regarding Morgan’s status in the US after his harsh criticism of Second Amendment Rights after the Sandy Hook school shooting two weeks ago.

Nugent warned that anyone seeking to take his guns away would face a backlash in the next election, or something worse.

See video below:

Journalists’ Addresses Posted In Revenge For Newspaper’s Google Map Of Gun Permit Owners

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A week after the Newtown massacre, The Journal News published an interactive Google Map with the names and addresses of gun permit owners in select New York cities. The bold move has escalated into a transparency arms race, after a Connecticut lawyer posted the phone number and addresses of the Journal‘s staff, including a Google Maps satellite Image of the Publisher’s home. “I don’t know whether the Journal’s publisher Janet Hasson is a permit holder herself, but here’s how to find her to ask,” read Christopher Fountain’s blog post. The double irony here is that open data was heralded as a tool of enlightened civic dialog, and has been co-opted for fierce partisanship, bordering on public endangerment.

The Journal‘s original publication of the map sparked nationwide outrage and thousands of angry comments. Gun permit holding is public information in New York, and can be acquired through a mere request via the Freedom of Information Act. But, coming on the heals of the Newtown shooting, the publication had a clear provocative intent. “New York residents have the right to own guns with a permit and they also have a right to access public information,” said a defiant Hasson.

Given that Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle used in the School shooting was reportedly legally registered with the killer’s mother, the Google Map sparked a debate about whether gun owners should be labeled like other potential menaces to society, “The implications are mind-boggling,” said Marine Scott F. Williams to The Journal News, “It’s as if gun owners are sex offenders (and) to own a handgun risks exposure as if one is a sex offender. It’s, in my mind, crazy.”

Read more from this story HERE.

The Cost of Living in a Free Society

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We often hear the phrase “Freedom isn’t Free”, and we generally attribute that cost to the sacrifice our fighting men and woman make to preserve our republic. But we should all realize that we also must pay the price at times for the privilege of living in a free society. In the wake of the devastatingly crushing news of the school shootings in Newtown Connecticut on December 14, we are left pondering what we can do as a free society to prevent this type of tragedy from ever occurring again. Perhaps we should first ask ourselves, What price are we willing to pay?

Of course the first remedy after an event like this spouted by the simpleminded media and politicians with a larger agenda is to assault the Second Amendment. We are so accustomed to this attack on our freedom that many of us immediately begin to fret about the battle to come over gun rights instead of mourning the loss of the victims of the massacre. But we never have long to wait before a “gun grabbing” senator or even a president begin to capitalize on the tragedy to promote the idea that “El número dos” from our Bill of Rights is an outdated concept that needs to be ignored, altered, or abolished outright. But would a move to remove guns from legal firearms owner’s hands ensure a safe environment for us and our children forevermore? Of course not. The worst school massacre in U.S. history occurred in Bath Township, Michigan in 1927. The deranged individual used a makeshift bomb made from commercial explosives to kill thirty eight elementary school children, two teachers and four other adults. In China, on the same day as the events in Newtown, a deranged man slashed twenty two school children with a knife. Crazy will always find a way to be crazy, and the world is full of tools that can be used to carry out such attacks. So are you willing to give up your freedom and security in the form of your firearms to provide an inadequate, destined to fail guarantee of safety as a result?

One course of action that some have promoted is increased vigilance by the state in the monitoring and control of those in our midst with mental health issues. Of course the state would first have to identify those individuals that are deemed (by them) to be a possible threat, no doubt predominantly at the public school level. And then take over their care, medication and or incarcerate them through commission to a mental health facility if they are evaluated to be a risk. While we do need to pay more attention to the folks in our society that are afflicted with mental issues that may affect that same society as a whole, forgive me if I doubt the government’s ability to address the issue while protecting constitutional and parental rights in the process. As they have already shown, they have a dismal record of addressing behavioral and developmental problems (real or make believe) among our children so far. So the question is, are you willing to give up your rights as a parent or your own personal liberty to insure that anyone with the perceived potential to go postal at some point in the future as determined by some governmental bureaucrat are contained through mandatory medication or incarceration?

Read more from this article HERE.

New York Newspaper Faces Backlash After Publishing Map of Gun Permit Holders

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A local New York newspaper is drawing the ire of its readers after publishing an interactive map that shows the names and addresses of thousands of residents who have handgun permits.

The online map was published by The Journal News along with an article under the headline: “The gun owner next door: What you don’t know about the weapons in your neighborhood.”

The newspaper obtained, and then published, the names and addresses of pistol permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The article, in explaining the decision to publish the information, pointed to the school massacre in nearby Newtown, Conn., and the concerns of some residents about which of their neighbors might have firearms.

But readers swiftly condemned the move. They pointed out that the interactive map could make the gun owners a target, but also make clear to would-be robbers which homes do not contain a gun.

Read more from this story HERE.