Eideard

Sign made from 3 tons of crushed guns

Mexico’s president called on U.S. officials to stop gun trafficking across the border Thursday, saying the move would be the best thing Americans could do to stop brutal drug violence.

“The criminals have become more and more vicious in their eagerness to spark fear and anxiety in society,” President Felipe Calderon said. “One of the main factors that allows criminals to strengthen themselves is the unlimited access to high-powered weapons, which are sold freely, and also indiscriminately, in the United States of America.

Speaking in Ciudad Juarez, the border city across from El Paso, Texas, that has become Mexico’s murder capital, Calderon said a dramatic increase in violence in Mexico was directly connected with the 2004 expiration of the U.S. assault weapons ban…

…Calderon stood in front of a massive new sign, constructed with tons of decommissioned arms. “NO MORE WEAPONS,” the sign said — in English. Americans on the other side of the border are the intended audience, Calderon said…

Out of 140,000 weapons Mexican authorities have seized since Calderon declared a crackdown on cartels at the beginning of his presidency, 84,000 were high-powered assault weapons, Calderon said.

More than 47,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico since December 2006, according to government statistics.

Calderon’s plea for Americans to reduce drug consumption is laughable, of course. We have been a society based on mood-altering chemical dependency for decades. It starts with cigarettes and coffee, marches on through beer and hard liquor into prescription goodies all too easily accessible through your friendly family doctor. Symptomatic treatment is the watchword of America’s pharmaceutical industry.

Meanwhile, there’s nothing wrong with symptomatic solutions to drug gangsters across the border, drug gangsters who leak their wars and profiteering across that border every hour of the day. Who stands in the way? Right-wing plutocrats in the arms industry and their flunkies in the NRA and both wings of political hacks – for a start. Even the mildest attempts to police guns trafficked across the border are shut down by sophistry and campaign dollars, lobbying and coercion.

Republican primary polling station is a pretty quiet place

Beneath Rick Santorum’s stunning three-state sweep on Tuesday stands another stubborn sign of dissatisfaction with the status quo: Republican turnout is down. I’m talking embarrassingly, disturbingly, hey-don’t-you-know-it’s-an-election-year bad. It is a sign of a serious enthusiasm gap among the rank and file, and a particularly bad omen for Mitt Romney and the GOP in the general election.

Here’s the tale of the tape, state by state, beginning with Tuesday night: Minnesota had just more than 47,000 people turn out for its caucuses this year — four years ago it was nearly 63,000 — and Romney came in first, not a distant third as he did Tuesday night. In Colorado, more than 70,000 people turned out for its caucus in 2008 — but in 2012 it was 65,000. And Missouri — even making a generous discount for the fact that this was an entirely symbolic contest — had 232,000 people turn out, less than half the number who did four years ago.

Always proudly rebellious, South Carolina has been the great outlier in this election cycle. With Newt Gingrich making an all-out push for conservatives in a conservative state, turnout was up almost 150,000 over four years before.

But in Florida, the decline became unmistakable. Maybe it decreased because the Romney and Gingrich campaigns, plus super PACS, spent more than $18 million in the Sunshine State on TV ads, of which 93% were negative in the last week alone, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group. After all, negative ads depress turnout. But after all the mud was thrown, 1.6 million people turned out in the nation’s fourth largest state, which might sound impressive until you compare it with the nearly 2 million who turned out in 2008.

Nevada was even worse, with 32,894 people turning out to vote in a state with more than 465,000 registered Republicans. Four years before, more than 44,300 participated in the caucus. Turnout was down more than 25% despite the GOP caucuses being the only game in town. Party officials were expecting a turnout of more than 70,000…

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Logan, Ohio — A man repeatedly shot his adult son and two sisters-in-law in his living room, killing them in front of his terminally ill wife, then fatally shot himself on the front porch as family tension about the cancer-stricken woman’s care apparently boiled over…

An earlier dispute about whether the woman should have been fed tea and toast or the orange her husband had peeled for her apparently set off the shooter Monday, 63-year-old Paul Gilkey…

The sick woman, 59-year-old Darlene Gilkey, witnessed the shootings from a hospital bed in her living room but wasn’t injured, the sheriff said. The family friction escalated into violence in the evening when Paul Gilkey went to a bedroom, retrieved a semiautomatic handgun and began threatening relatives, North said…

Gilkey, known as David or Dave because he went by his middle name, served a decade in prison beginning in 1974 for killing a man in Athens County in May of that year, according to court records. He also had a 1986 arrest for felonious assault, according to the sheriff…

Which didn’t keep him from having a gun in the house.

Darlene Gilkey was receiving hospice care through a company in nearby Lancaster, whose chief executive declined to comment Tuesday because of privacy restrictions. Investigators said she was taken to a hospital after the shootings rattled the normally quiet area.

I’m never surprised when people do something crazy and criminal. I am perpetually astounded over the candyass and cowardly politicians who are so cowed by the NRA and nutballs whose guns are grafted replacements for their sexual organs.

RTFA for the details.

It has all the hallmarks of a traditional Christmas: an ornate tree piles of presents and a pair of lovingly clasped machine guns.

A gun club in Arizona is cashing in on its members fondness for their weaponry by offering them the chance to be photographed holding their armaments and their loved ones.

Visitors to the Scottsdale Gun Club can pay $5 – $10 for non-members – to be pictured with a pair of heavy weapons and a slightly nervous looking Santa Claus.

In the backdrop of the photos is a Garwood Minigun, which can fire up to 6,000 rounds per minute…

The club’s website exhorts readers to “Get your holiday picture with Santa & his machine guns!“

Several of the example pictures include young children either holding guns or sitting in Santa’s lap as their parents pack heat.

This is not a joke, folks. I know that our readers around the world – especially those who have suffered the pain of war, the invasion of their homeland by political criminals like Hitler, will wonder if all the citizens of the United States are as irresponsible, demented and foolish as this lot?

I’ve been a gun owner most of my life. There have been periods when I truly enjoyed handgun hunting – though I don’t hunt anymore. I have always supported registration, licensing and legitimate questions associated with gun purchases. The kind of thing these nutballs never approve of.

The National Rifle Association has filed a lawsuit challenging a new federal regulation requiring gun merchants along the border with Mexico to report bulk sales of certain semiautomatic rifles, contending that the Obama administration exceeded its powers by imposing the rule last month without Congressional permission.

The N.R.A. is bringing the lawsuit in the name of two firearms dealers in Arizona. Its complaint asks a judge in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia to issue an injunction barring enforcement of the rule by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“N.R.A. has always viewed this as a blatant attempt by the Obama administration to pursue their gun control agenda through back-door rule-making, and the N.R.A. will fight them every step of the way,” said Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the gun rights group…

“We think that the action we have taken is consistent with the law,” Eric Holder told reporters, “and that the measures that we are proposing are appropriate ones to stop the flow of guns from the United States into Mexico.”

The rule requires licensed firearms dealers in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas to report within five days whenever someone buys more than one weapon like a variant of the AK-47 assault weapon. The rule covers any semiautomatic rifle capable of accepting a detachable magazine and ammunition larger than .22 caliber.

The rule is meant to make it harder for Mexican drug cartels to obtain military-style weapons and smuggle them to Mexico, where they are illegal to sell to consumers. American weapons — often bought by “straw buyers” who have a right to buy them for themselves — have been flooding across the Southwest border for years, fueling drug violence in Mexico.

We’ve blogged about “straw buyers” before. None of this means much of anything to the monomaniacs running the NRA. There was a time when they were a useful organization supporting sensible practices for hunting and sports gun owners. Now, they’re the military center of the nutball brigade.

Plus – I get to crap on people who really defame my background. Just as I can joke about flying with my wife’s family full of pilots – I come from an extended family full of gunsmiths, trap shooters and hunters. Some of the best fun I’ve had in the Southwest was handgun hunting when I lived in the Navajo Nation. Would I join the NRA? Not even with counterfeit money from the Koch Bros.

Photos by P.K. Weis, REUTERS

U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (L) smiles next to her mother Gloria Giffords at TIRR Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, the day after the launch of Endeavour and the day before her cranioplasty, in this May 17, 2011 photo released on her Facebook page Sunday.

Keep on rocking in the Free World.

BTW – under the latest revisions to gun law in Arizona, creeps like Jared Lee Loughner could still have purchased a gun.

The White House said on Monday that the Justice Department is reaching out to “stakeholders on all sides of the issue. The goal would be to look at ways to find common ground” on “common-sense measures” on guns to improve public safety and security, while respecting the Second Amendment…

But NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre told Reuters in a telephone interview that if asked to attend such a meeting, the country’s leading gun-rights group would say no.

“I mean absolutely not,” adding that such a meeting would be with firm opponents of gun rights…

Obama waded into the politically treacherous gun control debate on Sunday, calling for reform of rules to prevent attacks like the one that wounded an Arizona congresswoman two months ago, while making conciliatory remarks toward gun owners.

In an opinion piece published in the Arizona Daily Star, he said some 2,000 people had perished from gun violence in the short time since a gunman in Tucson killed six people and shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in the head.

“Every single day, America is robbed of more futures. It has awful consequences for our society. And as a society, we have a responsibility to do everything we can to put a stop to it,” he wrote.

Obama said he hoped the Tucson shootings could spark a national discussion on preventing gun violence.

“Most gun-control advocates know that most gun owners are responsible citizens. Most gun owners know that the word ‘commonsense’ isn’t a code word for ‘confiscation,’” he wrote.

What LAPierre has clarified, once again, is that joining the NRA is like joining some fundamentalist religion that brooks no interference by common sense, open minds or rational thought and dialogue.

New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, sent a team of undercover agents to the Crossroads of the West gun show in Phoenix, Arizona, just 120 miles away from the scene of the Tucson shooting. There, on 23 January, they bought a Glock 9mm pistol of the kind wielded by Jared Loughner when he killed six people and wounded 13, including the US congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, at a public meeting in Tucson.

The agents filmed the gun sales using hidden cameras…

Under current federal law, that sale was legal because of the so-called “gun show loophole” that allows occasional gun sellers to trade weapons without carrying out a background check to ensure that the purchaser is not mentally ill, a criminal, or a drug abuser. Such “private” sales are responsible for 40% of all gun sales in the US.

Of less certain legality was the purchase that the New York investigators went on to make of a SIG-Sauer SIG Pro 9mm pistol for $500, and a Smith & Wesson for $450. In both cases, the undercover agent admitted to the seller that they “probably couldn’t pass a background check“…

The seller demands only the production of an ID card to go ahead with the purchase, and the investigator then says: “So, no background check?”

The seller replies: “No.”

Investigator: “That’s good because I probably couldn’t pass one, you know what I mean?”

The undercover operation was a repeat of a sting that New York carried out on gun shows in Nevada, Tennessee and Ohio in 2009. That exercise found that 63% of the gun sellers approached were in breach of federal law by willingly selling guns to people who admitted they probably wouldn’t pass a background check.

Same old, same old. NRA voters will vote the same rigid pattern they always vote regardless of politicians standing up for sensible gun laws. Doesn’t matter.

Between payoffs and cowardice, our leading members of Congress provide about as much leadership as the Easter Bunny.

A decade ago, politicians and the press routinely reported on gun stores across the nation that had the most traces for firearms recovered by police. In 2003, under pressure from the gun lobby, Congress passed a law that hid from public view the government database that contained the gun tracing information.

The Washington Post has obtained the names of the gun dealers nationwide with the most traces over the past four years…

Topping the overall list with about 2,390 traces is Vance Outdoors in Columbus, Ohio. Owner Todd Vance said his that grandfather started the business on Cleveland Avenue in 1938 and that the store is a top source for shooters, hunters, anglers and boaters in central Ohio.

“We are one of the higher-volume gun dealers,” he said. “We sell thousands of guns.”

Vance said that he and his employees are “very vigilant” about straw purchases, in which someone buys for a person prohibited from owning a gun, and that they turn down 10 to 20 suspicious sales a week. He said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives conducts a month-long inspection annually…

Of the more than 60,000 guns recovered in Mexico and traced back to the United States, the ATF is able to link only about 25 percent to the dealers who first sold the weapons and the purchasers who bought them. In the United States, on average, 65 to 70 percent of the weapons recovered are successfully traced back to dealers and buyers…

Of the leading stores with Mexican traces, Lone Wolf, eighth on the nationwide list, is No. 1 on the Mexico list. Over the past two years, it had 185 of its guns recovered and traced south of the border. Geography is a prime factor in those traces…

Everyone has the same excuses. Given the laws and the gun lobby that maintains “reasonable” excuses for guns used in crimes – there are no surprises.

Transparency doesn’t apply to the gun industry and their retailers as far as our politicians are concerned.

Harry Reid’s owned guns longer than Republicans have been able to spell NRA

The National Rifle Association, the powerful lobbying group that has been a longtime nemesis of liberals, is facing mounting criticism from influential allies on the right and even from its own board over a series of recent moves they say are selfish, short-sighted and ultimately harmful to the conservative movement.

Critics cite a list of transgressions, from considering an endorsement of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), to endorsing moderate Republicans — and even Democrats — rather than their more-conservative challengers, to taking a cautious approach to Second Amendment court cases and President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees.

And they are especially angry about the group’s willingness to play ball with Democratic leaders on campaign finance legislation vigorously opposed by congressional Republicans, powerful business groups and nearly the entire conservative movement.

Republican congressional leaders have privately conveyed their unhappiness to NRA officials, but online conservative activists linked to the tea party movement have been vociferous in their criticism.

“The NRA is all about the NRA — helping their organization and not necessarily the cause,” said influential conservative blogger Erick Erickson, who has repeatedly taken to his blog RedState in recent weeks to urge conservatives to turn their backs on the NRA…

Har! Rightwingers believe that single issue organizations should kneel to all of their ideology.

Chris Cox, the NRA’s chief lobbyist, said the criticism ignores the reason the NRA is such a powerful brand: that it focuses on its core mission of advancing gun owners’ rights, rather than on trying to advance the goals of the conservative movement, writ large…

Technically, the NRA — a $300 million organization with unrivaled lobbying power, a massive member-services operation and an active political-action committee — is nonpartisan. It derives significant clout from its ties to conservative, pro-gun Democrats and in recent years has increased its contributions to Democrats as they retook Congress and then the White House.

Absolutely hilarious. These dumb bunnies, these lockstep demagogues believe that anyone who agrees with one portion of their religion must obey all the other precepts in the rightwing catechism. Perish the thought someone has an independent thought or conclusion.

I criticize the NRA often for it’s moribund politics, presuming they’ll fall in line with whatever the Teabagger Right upchucks, this week. Refreshing to see a touch of dedication to what was – after all – their original mandate.