Numerous media outlets are reporting on shortages of ammunition. Paired with a recent Homeland Security procurement request, rumormongers have claimed the government is buying up ammo. That's not true. And the numbers make that clear.
The NRA just had an amazing victory in defeating a bill to require universal background checks on gun purchases — something it endorsed 15 years ago — and yet the speakers at its 142nd annual convention in Houston sounded awfully bitter. Here's how Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, and more defended freedom against those sissies in the White House.
If you would like to be a gun owner, you will need the following things as of next week: a 3D-printer, Internet access, and a nail. Defense Distributed, the libertarian group focused on creating shareable 3D firearm models, now has a working prototype.
There will be an aspect of the NRA's convention — which opens today with an all-star list of speakers — that feels like a victory celebration. But after steamrolling over an ineffectual Organizing For Action, the NRA may have met its toughest opponent: Public Policy Polling.
The NRA has remained quiet while legislation to nullify federal gun laws has been introduced in dozens of states.
There are more indicators that last month's Senate vote on expanding background checks was something of a dress rehearsal. Another vote appears to be brewing. Americans support the idea — as, apparently, do some Senators who opposed it last time.
PublicMind Polls released a doozy on Wednesday afternoon. According to their research, Americans generally want new gun laws. Oh, and a quarter of us see a conspiracy in the Sandy Hook shootings and three-in-ten think armed rebellion is imminently necessary.
The people responsible for a large percentage of America's gun violence are worried that New York's strict new gun laws will severely affect them. Sounds good. Except that the people all work for Hollywood.
Families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting are making good on their promise to keep the issue of gun control alive even after the failure of new legislation in Congress.
Of the Senator's latest expert suggestions — that the Boston bombings and Benghazi showed a national security weakness — President Obama said, "No, Mr. Graham is not right on this issue, although I'm sure it generated some headlines." Wrong. What it generated was cable news hits for Graham. And the No. 1 thing Lindsey Graham is an expert on... is getting on TV.
It wasn't easy dethroning Mitch McConnell as America's least favorite Senator, but Flake has done that in just three short months, a new poll out Monday reveals — and his fall from rising-star grace is not quite the head-scratcher you might think.
General Electric has decided it will no longer help America buy guns. Not that America needs much help.
After senators filibustered a gun background checks bill, President Obama gave an angry speech, promising that "we can still bring about meaningful changes that reduce gun violence so long as the American people don't give up on it." But according to a new Washington Post/ Pew Research Center poll, the American people are kind of over it.
The Arizona Republican senator told her, in a handwritten letter, that "strengthening background checks is something we agree on." A few days later, background checks was not something they could agree on, because he voted to filibuster the bill.
A 14-year-old middle school student appears to be staging some sort of intriguing political protest in Logan, West Virginia, where he was recently charged with causing a disruption after wearing an NRA T-shirt to school.
Politicians finally have enough material to begin exploiting the Boston marathon bombing. Immigration, plus a little guns.
Today you can find on the website of The Washington Post, above articles reporting how the NRA successfully blocked new gun regulations, ads paid for by the NRA, telling Congress to "Get serious" about doing something about gun crimes. That's called "chutzpah."
There was mass fury at the Senate for filibustering a weakened gun background checks bill that had been driven by the outrage that one man with an AR-15 could kill 20 schoolchildren. What's more interesting is whether all that rage will end up changing anything on its own.
Gun control is one of the most divisive issues in the country, and Wednesday's face-off in the Senate reminded of that. But Gabrielle Gifford's new piece in Thursday's New York Times reminds us that we're human.
A lot of gun control advocates are upset about what happened in the Senate on Wednesday as a (mostly) Republican minority filibustered gun regulations that the majority of Americans support.
Despite clear demonstrations of the ease with which anonymous weapons transactions can occur online — including ties to mass shooting incidents — the issue has been largely sidelined during the political debate.
President Obama will not get his vote on gun control in the Senate on Wednesday. Or, at least, not on a package of bills that could pass. The Manchin-Toomey compromise on background checks has been declared dead by its sponsor.
On Capitol Hill, Senators Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey are scrambling to find the 60 votes needed to pass their compromise background check bill — and are considering how to sweeten it to lure their reticent colleagues.
This week's discussion of the Senate vote on gun reforms is like sportscasters talking about going for it on a fourth down. If the bill fails: game over. If it passes, proponents of reform still face the daunting opposition of a ferociously conservative House.
There's a tangibility to numbers that's hard to escape in the gun control debate. Twenty-six killed at Newtown. Forty percent of gun sales that currently require no background check. But this week, the only important number is 60.
After weeks of secrecy about his approval of a plan set to be introduced this week, Rubio appeared on basically every Sunday morning talk show known to man to back the plan.
Human beings, being pattern-seekers, like to mush things together no matter how well or poorly they fit. Today, those things happen to be abortion and guns. It turns out to be a bit of a stretch.
Senators have come up with compromises on immigration and gun control even though Washington was supposed to be paralyzed and President Obama's agenda was supposed to be pretty much dead, smothered by the fiscal cliff, the sequester, and the NRA.
Just shy of four months after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the full Senate voted for the first time in 19 years to consider major reforms to gun legislation. Here's what the data tells us about what might happen next.
Opponents criticize Wednesday's background check compromise, suggesting it wouldn't have prevented several high profile mass shootings. Indeed, of the 30 incidents since 2003 that we looked at, the new deal would quite possibly only have stopped one.
The planned GOP filibuster of gun-control legislation was losing steam on Tuesday, as more than half a dozen GOP lawmakers abandoned their conservative colleagues' effort to block consideration of the bill.
As Washington runs to-and-fro on firearm legislation, student gun enthusiasts at some universities are taking matters into their own hands by showing their desire for concealed weapons on campus. Here's how the gun lobby inside actual schools is trying — and failing — to set an example, one empty holster at a time.
President Obama, tired and clearly emotional, made another pitch for Congress to act on new gun restrictions Monday evening in Connecticut. His task: to translate the fury and urgency of the boisterous crowd in front of him into action in DC.
A poll released over the weekend indicated that Americans don't want new gun laws — they want better enforcement of laws that are on the books. It also suggested that they don't actually know what laws exist. Which made us wonder: How would we do?
By the NRA's logic, one "detail" in the 225-page "report" that the gun lobby's National School Shield task force has now corrected should make the whole report just about useless. Yes, there are enough school shootings that last week's NRA-funded research findings managed to find a school shooting that never happened.
Reports of a possible compromise on the Senate's gun control package will certainly be welcomed at the White House. But it cements where the debate is happening. It's not Democrat vs. Republican. It's NRA vs. the middle.
States aren't waiting to act on guns. But while high-profile restrictions packages make headlines, most new state gun laws have instead focused on loosening controls. Activism, partisanship, and time are a powerful combination.
President Obama's trip to Denver today to lift up Colorado as "a model of what's possible" on gun control in D.C. The interesting comparison, though, isn't why Congress won't stand up to the NRA — that answer is obvious — but what happened to the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, the state's gun lobby that is, if anything, more radical than the NRA.
Erosion takes time. With news that the Senate vote on new gun legislation will move out another week, opponents gain seven more days to wear down support for its elements — even for popular elements like new trafficking regulations.
Wayne LaPierre was MIA at the NRA's even Tuesday, replaced by moderate-sounding Asa Hutchinson, just the latest move by the gun lobby to repair its image now that its legislative victories have been all but secured.
The National Rifle Association, the ongoing lobbying interests of which primarily exist for the promotion of buying more guns under the auspices of "safety," has apparently concluded that the way to keep schools safe is to bring more guns on campus, with its $1 million task force suggesting Tuesday that the government change laws surrounding gun-free zones and make the NRA's estimated $6.6 billion pipe dream a reality.
How can the National Rifle Association oppose something as checking whether someone is legally barred from buying a gun before they purchase one, i.e. universal background checks? Because the NRA is not reasonable anymore.
The spectrum of political responses to gun violence is neatly defined by two policy measures that advanced over the last 24 hours: new gun registration, permits and paperwork in Connecticut and in a Georgia small town mandatory ownership. That these are the poles, though, suggests that opponents of new gun laws have already largely won.
Despite a brief spike in interest after the Sandy Hook shootings, Americans care less about gun control than ever, even as gun control passes in Connecticut and stumbles through the Senate. Sounds like a great time for the NRA to stage another PR stunt! And that's exactly what the NRA is doing on Tuesday.
On Thursday, President Obama gave a gun control speech and Mayor Bloomberg's group released new gun control ads, all while the NRA runs offensive ads about the president's daughters and rambles about how Bloomberg "can't buy America." That's true. It's much more cost-effective to buy Congress.
From the details revealed in 2,700 pages of documents about the lead-up to Jared Loughner's attack on Giffords in 2011, it seems as though gun control advocates will find much more to strengthen their arguments than will the NRA.
For all of the decades of debate about what the Second Amendment means, it apparently took a Tucson gun store owner just a few weeks to discover the limits to the right to bear arms: people who support gun control aren't covered. Sorry, Mark Kelly. Your assault rifle purchase has been cancelled.
If you liked the Rand Paul filibuster of March 2013, you'll love the Rand Paul filibuster of April 2013. Unless you want the Senate to enact new gun restrictions, and unless you liked the part where he stood up and talked for twelve hours.
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