When will reality deniers look at the facts? America Is Awash In Guns, And Crime Is At Record Lows For the average American alive today the odds of being murdered have never been lower — even though Americans possess millions more firearms. Most Americans believe America is submerged beneath a tidal wave of gun violence. A Pew Research poll in 2013 found that 56 percent of Americans thought gun violence had risen in the last 20 years, 26 percent thought it had remained the same, and only 12 percent thought it had fallen. You might be surprised to learn the 12 percent were right. The gulf between the facts about guns and the public’s perception is immense, and was created deliberately. Anti-gun advocates invent new terms (“assault weapon”) andpoliticians lie to win over a skeptical public. Too often these myths are swallowed by journalists and celebrities who don’t bother to check the data and don’t know how modern firearms actually work. The myth that rising sales of semi-automatic rifles have led to rising levels of gun homicides is pervasive. “The United States has been pummeled by gun violence since the assault weapons ban expired in 2004,” readThe Boston Globe’s June 16 editorial in a typically misleading statement of alarm. Although a Globe reader would reasonably conclude that the country is suffering a spike in homicides, the opposite is true. All violence, including gun violence, in America has declined dramatically for more than two decades. Gun Ownership Up; Gun Crime Down Using federal government data, University of Michigan and American Enterprise Institute economist Mark Perry last year measured the gun homicide rate against the number of guns per person from 1993-2013. As the number of guns per person rose from 0.94 to 1.45, the gun homicide rate fell by 49 percent, from 7 to 3.6 per 100,000 people. Also using federal government data, the Pew Research Center reported last year that non-fatal gun victimizations have fallen from 725.3 to 174.8 per 100,000 people from 1993-2014. So all gun-related crime is falling, not just gun homicides. The United States seems to be recovering a large chunk of the civility obliterated in the tumult of the 1960s and ’70s, suggesting (as do global historical data) that human-on-human violence is predominantly a product of culture, not technology. The U.S. homicide rate more than doubled from 1963-1973 and remained high for the next 20 years. In 1973, the rate was 9.4 per 100,000 people; in 1993 it was 9.5. Although we will need more time before we can know for sure, this spike in homicides appears to have been an historical aberration. Since 1993, the homicide rate has collapsed and it now hovers around its 1962-63 level. In 2014, the homicide rate was 4.5 per 100,000 people, less than half the rate in 1995. The last time it was that low was 1963, when the rate was 4.6. The median age in the United States is 37, so for the average American alive today the odds of being murdered have never been lower — even though Americans possess millions more firearms than they did two decades ago when homicide rates were higher. The Same for Rifles (‘Assault Weapons’) What about so-called “assault weapons?” The FBI divides firearms into handguns and rifles, with the rifles category covering everything from the little .22-caliber rifles kids shoot at summer camps to the dreaded AR-15. In last year’s “Uniform Crime Report,” the FBI listed the number of homicides committed with rifles since 2010. (A few thousand homicides each year are committed with firearms of undetermined type — most likely handguns. These are numbers for confirmed rifle deaths.) The numbers are: 367 in 2010; 332 in 2011; 298 in 2012; 285 in 2013; and 248 in 2014. This decline in confirmed homicides by rifle coincided with a massive increase in the number of “assault rifles” Americans own. From 2010-2014, sales of semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 rose 28 percent per year, the Los Angeles Times reported on June 13. So while the number of rifles in circulation was increasing dramatically, the number of confirmed murders committed by someone using a rifle fell by almost one-third. During the same time, the number of homicides committed with handguns fell by 9 percent. The data produce one inescapable conclusion: The entire premise for a new “assault weapons” ban — that the proliferation of “assault weapons” has led to unprecedented carnage — is completely untrue. Yes, the United States is a particularly violent Western country. But blaming this on America’s love of guns is simplistic and wrong. The homicide rate in the United States does not track neatly with the gun ownership rate. When searching for ways to reduce homicides in the United States, it would be more helpful to discuss America’s macho culture or America’s violent culture than America’s “gun culture.” That is, if your goal really is to make America a more peaceful place. If your goal is simply to win elections by scaring the public, then you would be talking like Sens. Harry Reid and Chris Murphy. http://thefederalist.com/2016/06/22/america-is-awash-in-guns-and-crime-is-at-record-lows/
Dems on the floor protesting in their typical grandstanding style. Bobby Rush leading the pack apparently forgets his life as a thug on the streets of Chicago. Black Panther, arrested on illegal weapons charges. Rush's own apartment was raided in December 1969, where police discovered an unregistered pistol, rifle, shotgun, pistol ammunition, training manuals on explosives, booby traps, an assortment of communist literature. Now Bobby is horrified , just horrified by all the violence. Hey Bobby, how many lives did you destroy? Like Jackson, Sharpton and other race hustlers he woke up to where the easy money is and took his thug ass for a ride on the political gravy train. Fuck you Bobby. You're nothing but a f'n street thug, and everyone with an once of intellectual honesty knows it.
C-SPAN is using Periscope and Facebook Live to broadcast the House sit-in http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/22/12006500/c-span-uses-periscope-facebook-live-for-house-protest Or on the radio http://www.c-span.org/networks/?channel=radio
A Crypto-Anarchist Will Help You Build a DIY AR-15 Cody Wilson’s Ghost Gunner milling machine makes the most crucial element of an assault rifle. It costs just $1,500 and there’s a waiting list to get it. By Rob Walker| June 22, 2016 Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat From During a recent visit to Defense Distributed, the mood is casual, with workers starting to trickle in between 10 and 11 a.m. The nonprofit’s workspace takes up roughly 1,900 square feet in a bland office park in northeast Austin, and the only exterior marking is a sticker on the door advertising a small-business association. Inside, it looks like any other small-scale manufacturer, employing about 15 people, mostly male. Clever millennials with idiosyncratic political views, they swap observations about Donald Trump—viewed as so absurd that his ascendancy might result in perversely productive chaos—as they strip wires and screw machines together. Cody Wilson, the mediagenic 28-year-old behind Defense Distributed, paces around, multitasking: A detailed discussion of the high failure rate of a batch of couplings from a Chinese supplier gives way to phone calls to line up a new accounting firm. Occasionally he chimes in on the Trump speculation, but Wilson does not vote. To do so would acknowledge the legitimacy of a political system he doesn’t believe in. Defense Distributed is most famous for the Liberator, the world’s first design code that can be fed into a 3D printer to create a complete, working gun. After Wilson released the code online in 2013, it was downloaded more than 100,000 times around the world. Then the Department of State ordered Wilson to remove the files. Posting the blueprint for an American audience is legal, but according to the State Department, because the web is global, he may have violated weapons-export regulations. The Liberator attracted a fusillade of press coverage and political backlash and landed Wilson on Wired’s list of “the most dangerous people on the internet.” Wilson’s journey since being “smashed” by the government—as he puts it—has been three years of nonstop stress as he scrambled to save his project. In May 2015, Defense Distributed filed suit against the State Department and related parties, alleging that its position on the Liberator files violated the First, Second, and Fifth Amendments and seeking to allow Wilson’s organization to post its code again. It lost, then appealed. At the beginning of June, the Fifth Circuit court in New Orleans heard oral arguments from Wilson’s and the government’s lawyers. Its ruling, which could be issued in a few weeks, will determine the future of Defense Distributed and, potentially, protect a burgeoning DIY tech weapons culture under free speech. To fund his legal quest, Wilson has overseen the creation of a newer product called the Ghost Gunner. It’s not a gun, it’s a 50-pound, $1,500 desktop machine, about the size of a microwave oven, that mills the most crucial element of a semiautomatic assault-style weapon. That means that anyone who buys it can build their own version of the AR-15—without a serial number. That’s the same category of weapon as the Sig Sauer MCX used in the June 12 mass murder in Orlando. The magazine AR-15, a lush and hefty spinoff of Guns & Ammo, says the Ghost Gunner “will rewrite the future of firearms.” In the meantime, it’s become a $2 million-a-year business.... http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-cody-wilson-ghost-gunner-ar-15/
So what? The fact remains that in two years as many are killed by guns as were killed in the Vietnam war. That Australia has proven gun control works. Assault weapons and hand guns need to be banned.
Concealed Permit Holder Stops Attempted Mass Shooting in Chicago http://www.breitbart.com/big-govern...der-stops-attempted-mass-shooting-in-chicago/