Tiffany and Adrian McKinnon returned from vacation to find their Montgomery, Ala., home ransacked. "Tears just rolled down my face as I walked in and saw everything gone and piles of trash all over my home," recalled Tiffany. Adrian was surveying the damage when, incredibly, a man walked through the back door wearing Adrian's hat! Police say Adrian pointed a gun at the suspect and told him to lie on the floor. Then Adrian got an idea: He forced the suspect to clean up the mess. When police arrived, the suspect griped about his treatment. "The police officer laughed at him when he complained and said anybody else would have shot him dead," said Tiffany. (Associated Press, 10/18/07)
Locksmith Dennis Baker, the victim of three burglaries in less than a month, has a home security system and three surveillance cameras monitoring his property. But police say the fourth burglary was foiled by an unlikely source-Baker's pet parrot, Salvador, which says "hello" when it sees someone. Presumably spotting the prowler, the bird squawked, "Hello, hello," waking Baker, who retrieved a gun and investigated, locating the suspect in a garage. Baker noted," ... He had his hands in his pockets when he came through here. I had no idea what he had." Baker shot the burglar, killing him. (The Dallas Morning News, Dallas, TX, 10/17/07)
Eighty-three-year-old Raymond Bunte is the kind of person anyone would like to have as a neighbor. He heard a loud noise from his neighbor's house and, knowing the neighbor was at work, decided to investigate. A strange vehicle was parked outside, so Bunte used his own to block it. Noticing the front door was kicked in, Bunte grabbed his 12-gauge shotgun and ordered the burglars out of the house. Police say one suspect fled, but the other got into his vehicle and tried to run over Bunte, who then shot and killed the assailant. The second suspect was caught by police. (Wilson County News, Floresville, TX, 10/03/07)
Returning home to find a man rooting around in her living room, a 22-year-old woman quickly fled to the bedroom. She locked the door behind her and obtained her husband's handgun and ammunition. According to authorities, the young woman fled to an adjacent bathroom and turned the door's lock while the intruder forcefully entered the bedroom. She quickly loaded her husband's gun and, when the intruder began pounding on the bathroom door, she fired a single shot. Upon realizing his intended victim was armed, the once brazen thug fled the home. (The Record, West Paterson, NJ, 09/26/07)
A 5:30 a.m. knock on the door tends to arouse suspicions, and as a 21-year-old homeowner discovered, sometimes they're justified. He opened the door in the early morning hours to find a man pointing a gun at him. "The occupant of the home obtained a handgun and fired shots at the assailant," Jackson, Miss., Police Department Sgt. Eric Smith said. "During the course of the invasion, multiple shots were fired by both occupant and alleged armed robber." The intruder was shot multiple times and will be charged after his release from the hospital. It was the third time in just more than two weeks that an armed citizen in Jackson fired upon a would-be burglar. (The Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, MS, 10/15/07)
Photographer Jeff Dykehouse, whose non-profit business provides free portraits of terminally ill children and their families, was working in his shop when the sound of breaking glass interrupted his labor of love. The photographer grabbed a firearm and went to the front of the shop, where he found an intruder had broken through the glass door. According to police, Dykehouse announced he was armed, but the intruder ignored the warning and charged, forcing Dykehouse to shoot him. The intruder died at the scene. (The Grand Rapids Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 10/09/07) |
There is no element in the poisonous alchemy of the globalist gun ban crowd more dangerous to American freedom than the twin evils of gun-owner licensing and firearm registration. Never forget that they exist only as precursors to gun confiscation. Registration is the key ingredient in the anti-gun rights brew marking presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's core beliefs. And photographing and fingerprinting honest American citizens as a condition of potential gun ownership is the key gun control scheme of Hillary's rival, U.S. Senator Barack Obama, D-Ill. As for gun confiscation? Both leading Democratic candidates, Obama and Hillary, are supporters of firearm bans. For Clinton, that includes the confiscations that took place in New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina. Hillary has pushed vigorously for a harsher version of Bill Clinton's semi-auto ban, a hallmark of their "co-Presidency" and a stark reminder of what 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would have in store for you upon the return of this "political team." For his part, Obama has variously supported bans on the manufacture, sales, and possession of handguns; the extension of the Clinton gun ban; and most remarkably, in 1998 as a state senator, embraced the call to "ban the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons." In seeking to capture the White House in November 2008, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are lying in saying they support the Second Amendment. A look back into recent history reveals the truth. As a prominent leader of the George Soros-funded and Rosie O'Donnell hosted Million Mom March in May 2000, Hillary Clinton made this single demand: "We have to license and register all handguns." But as the New York Times elaborated, it was more than that: "If elected to the Senate, Mrs. Clinton said she'd work with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., on her bill that would require prospective gun buyers to first obtain a gun license by passing a background check and a safety course exam. The bill would also establish a national registry to record all gun sales." As for Obama, as the U.S. Supreme Court is about to hear the landmark challenge to the District of Columbia's total handgun ban, he blithely labeled that draconian law "common sense," and said he believes it is constitutional. D.C. not only bans private ownership of handguns, but also prohibits operable long guns in private homes for self defense. In all the years I have been on the frontlines of this fight, there have been no conversations more sad and more elemental to the future of our freedom than with activists in two English speaking countries a world apart. Both good men experienced tyranny-the theft of their freedom, their dignity, their honor and their private property-made possible through licensing and registration. My friend in Australia-a licensed gun owner who had first forfeited his registered semi-auto and pump rifles and his self-loading shotguns in 1997-described the gun bans in that country. Holding his most prized possession, a fine Krieghoff Luger, he said: "My father fought in World War II. This is the only remembrance of his service that I have. Now I have to give it to the government for destruction." Asked about resistance, he said angrily, "If your guns are registered, all of this bravado just withers. If your firearm is registered you have a choice, you either have to give it up, or you're going to jail. Keep your NRA strong. Don't ever allow the government to register your guns." My friend in England, like his Australian counterpart, was a licensed gun owner; he had given police obligatory information about his guns and was forced to agree to warrantless inspections of his home to check on his gun storage. That was before police took his guns for destruction. He had the same message for Americans: "If they don't know you have firearms, they can't come and take them away from you." That truth was emphatically repeated by John Crook, the man who replaced Rebecca Peters as the gun confiscation guru in Australia, after she moved on to her U.N.-world gun-ban perch. Crook, who headed "Gun Control Australia," said on a "World Today" broadcast interview, "where there was gun registration, [we] brought in a lot of guns. After all, two-thirds of a million guns is a lot to bring in ... ." Those two-thirds of a million registered long guns were chopped and torched, often in front of their licensed owners. That ban was followed by a massive increase in violent crime, which was followed by another round of gun confiscation and destruction, this time of handguns not approved by government-like my activist friend's war souvenir Luger. In pressing for the handgun ban, Rebecca Peters confessed that the long gun ban she created was really aimed at sporting guns and collectibles: "The fact that many civilians owned self-loading or semi-automatic rifles and shotguns for the purpose of sport did not make those guns suitable for civilian ownership." Her ban, she said, "took away nearly 700,000 of them to be melted down into soup cans and bus-stop benches ... ." That brings us back to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. If either wins the White House, and if gun rights majorities are not returned to the u.s. Senate and House, I guarantee that Peters and her boss, George Soros, will be writing the gun control agenda, beginning with registration and licensing, all with the goal of turning our guns-Americans' guns-into international soup cans and park benches. We must organize, as never before, and vote to keep our guns out of the wrong hands-out of the hands of an oppressive gun ban regime! |
It's A Crime It's a terrible thing when Americans can't trust those elected to enforce the law and protect you from the lawless. But as violent crime explodes in many of America's larger cities, anti-gun politicians are trying to blame and banish your Second Amendment rights for the criminal violence that they either cannot-or will not-control. A prime example is Philadelphia where, last fall, six police officers were shot in the line of duty in less than seven weeks. They should have been trying to solve the most pressing problems "Why are shootings of police increasing?" and "How can we protect police by incarcerating the most dangerous offenders?" Instead, Philadelphia's politicians seized the opportunity to push their own tired, phony solutions: more gun bans that will only affect law-abiding citizens. "Solutions" meant only to appease their most fearful and uninformed constituents. Philadelphia's Mayor John Street brazenly blamed NRA. "The NRA aren't [sic] going to the hospitals. They're not at these funerals," he said. "They turn a blind eye when it comes to getting these guns off the street." A few weeks later, Pennsylvania's Governor Ed Rendell-himself a former mayor of the "City of Brotherly Love"-gave a 40-minute, fist-pounding presentation to a legislative committee in the state capital, demanding more anti-gun laws. Straight from Bill Clinton's political playbook, uniformed officers from Allentown, Philadelphia and Reading, Pa., sat behind Rendell, while State Police Commissioner Jeff Miller sat at his side. It may have been a classic case of C1intonian diversion in yet another way: In March 2000, when President Clinton went on The "Today Show" and blamed your NRA for gun deaths in the U.S., and hosted a gun control rally at the White House, some suggested that the reason for the rally was to divert media attention away from his presidential pardon of 16 federal felons that same day-including one who later allegedly funneled $107,000 to Hillary Clinton's brother. In similar fashion, some say the reason behind Pennsylvania Governor Rendell's 40 minutes of unprecedented gun control theatrics was simply an attempt to divert media attention away from a grand jury investigation of fellow Democrats in the state legislature for misusing taxpayer dollars for electioneering. It is blatant intellectual dishonesty for politicians to shamelessly exploit police shootings to push self-serving gun-ban schemes that can only fail. And when they greedily grab the podium to do so-even before those wounded officers have come home from the hospital, or their brothers and sisters in blue have had time to remove the mourning bands from their badges that goes beyond cynicism. That's contempt of the ugliest kind. As a retired police captain with 20 years behind the badge who considers himself a brother to police officers across the country, I am deeply offended and angered by such brazen duplicity and disrespect displayed by those blatantly opportunistic anti-gun politicians. Last fall, Street said, "My administration has made public safety its number one priority. We will leave no stone unturned" in the fight against crime. Yet, according to federal and state statistics, between 2002 and 2006, while Philadelphia's murder rate increased by 50 percent and its murder clearance rate decreased by 30 percent under Street, Philadelphia's police department was cut by 340 employees! In fact, in 2006, Philadelphia had 477 fewer police employees, sworn and civilian, than it did when Street took office in 2000! Is that what "leave no stone unturned" means? Is that supporting our police? As Pennsylvania's Republican Chairman Robert Gleason asked, "How many police officers could have been hired with the $17.1 million in grants, loans, and incentives Rendell gave Comcast to build a shiny new skyscraper in downtown Philadelphia?" Unfortunately, this sad phenomenon isn't limited to Philadelphia. Instead of asking why gun bans are such a dismal failure in his own crime ridden city, New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg is trying to force New York and Washington, D.C.-style gun bans down the throats of every American, in every state, every county and every city. Instead of admitting that his city might suffer unique crime problems of its own, Miami Police Chief John Timoney (ironically, Philadelphia's former police commissioner) is asking Congress for new national-level gun bans. Speaking of irony-Philadelphia just hired Washington, D.Cs former police chief, Charles Ramsey, as its new police commissioner. The bottom line? Until politicians support our police with sufficient personnel, tough prosecutors unafraid to prosecute, and hard-nosed judges willing to sentence violent felons to real "hard time," big-city violent crime will rage out of control-with, or without, gun bans. And until they truly get serious about what really causes crime, weak-kneed politicians will continue to scapegoat your freedoms-and in so doing, they will continue to do grave and unforgivable injustices to the memory of those fallen officers they so cynically pretend to honor and cherish-and that should be a crime |