Gun control: an open letter to Governor Christie

Christie is a Democrat & I have NO use for him.

The Dems took 2 months loading up the Hurricane Sandy bill with their special interest BS instead of writing a short bill to get assistance to the victims immediately.

Excuse me, but what part of hurricane relief:
- requires millions of bullets? Obama going to do more Skeet shooting?
- does the Drug Enforcement Administration need $1 MILLION for salaries & expenses?

There's plenty more, especially salaries & expenses:

http://api.ning.com/files/0zb...


After they loaded it up with crap, they slapped it down in front of the Republicans & said "Sign It!" (Remind you of Obamacare?) When the Repubs said, Whoa, wait a minute, we can't sign this bill full of sh*t, Obama & the Dems immediately took to TV & the Internet with a full blown campaign to "blame" the Repubs for delaying the bill to help the victims. They played it up big time!

What a crock! And Christie fell for their propaganda hook, line & sinker! What a moron! He should have been screaming his guts out at the Dems.

Remember when the Dems critisized Pres Bush over Katrina?

Question: Do Democrats do anything other than BLAME Republicans for their own mistakes & shortcomings?

(1) In order to study and verify the COLOSSAL FAILURES of STRICT gun control laws, all one needs to do is research CHICAGO's abhorrent history!!!

http://articles.chicagotribun...

Chicago's pointless handgun ban

City gun ordinances proved to be a failure

March 04, 2010|By Steve Chapman

When Chicago passed a ban on handgun ownership in 1982, it was part of a trend. Washington, D.C., had done it in 1976, and a few Chicago suburbs took up the cause in the following years. They all expected to reduce the number of guns and thus curtail bloodshed.

District of Columbia Attorney General Linda Singer told The Washington Post in 2007, "It's a pretty common-sense idea that the more guns there are around, the more gun violence you'll have." Nadine Winters, a member of the Washington City Council in 1976, said she assumed at the time that the policy "would spread to other places."

But the fad never really caught fire — even before last summer, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the D.C. law and cast doubt on the others, including the Chicago ordinance before the court Tuesday. The Second Amendment may kill such restrictions, but in most places, it wasn't needed to keep them from hatching in the first place.

Maybe that's because there were so many flaws in the basic idea. Or maybe it was because strict gun control makes even less sense at the municipal level than it does on a broader scale. At any rate, the policy turned out to be a comprehensive dud.

In the years following its ban, Washington did not generate a decline in gun murders. In fact, the number of killings rose by 156 percent — at a time when murders nationally increased by just 32 percent. For a while, the city vied regularly for the title of murder capital of America.

Chicago followed a similar course. In the decade after it outlawed handguns, murders jumped by 41 percent, compared with an 18 percent rise in the entire United States.

One problem is that the bans didn't actually have any discernible effect on the availability of guns to people with felonious intent. As with drugs and hookers, when there is a demand for guns, there will always be a supply.

Who places the highest value on owning a firearm? Criminals. Who is least likely to fear being prosecuted for violating the law? Criminals. Who is most likely to have access to illicit dealers? You guessed it.

If we were starting out in a country with zero guns, it might be possible to keep such weapons away from bad guys. But that's not this country, which has more than 200 million firearms in private hands and a large, perpetual supply of legal handguns.

Only a tiny percentage of those weapons has to be diverted to the underground trade for crooks to acquire all the firepower they need. While gun bans greatly impede the law-abiding, they pose only a trivial inconvenience to the lawless.

This is especially true at the local level. Banning guns from one city makes about as much sense as banning them on one block.

It's hard enough to halt the flow of guns over international borders, where governments police traffic. It's impossible to stop them from crossing municipal boundaries — which are unmonitored, undefended and practically invisible.

Tens of thousands of cars enter Washington and Chicago each day from places where guns are easily and legally obtainable. Any of those vehicles could be transporting a carton of pistols to sell to willing thugs. If you're on an island, you're going to get splashed by the waves.

The proponents obviously knew all along this city-by-city approach had serious shortcomings. But they figured it was bound to curtail gun availability somewhat. They also hoped that by prohibiting handguns in one place, they were beginning a bigger process.

First, they expected that other cities and states would follow suit. Second, they wagered that strict controls at the local level would acclimate Americans to new regulations at the national level.

But things didn't work out that way. The persistence of crime in supposedly gun-free zones didn't build support for broader gun control by showing the limits of piecemeal legislation. It weakened the case, by proving that such regulations have little impact on the people who present the biggest danger. Instead of a broad upward avenue, it was a dead end.

Gun control supporters fear that if the Supreme Court invalidates local handgun bans, the consequences will be nothing but bad. That would be easier to believe if the laws had ever done any good.

Steve Chapman is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/chapman

schapman@tribune.com


(2) In order to study and verify the FULL SUCCESS of REQUIRING RESIDENTS TO OWN at least one firearm AND ammunition for it, all one needs to do is research the history of KENNESAW, GA!!!

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/...

FT Magazine


Kennesaw, where everyone is armed by law

By Anna Fifield

Last updated: September 25, 2010 9:32 am

Kennesaw, Georgia, is Everytown, USA: a mixture of old wooden bungalows and cookie-cutter subdivisions, of seventh-­generation locals and Mexican immigrants.

But this city, half an hour’s drive north of Atlanta, is unique: it is the only place in America where it is compulsory to own a gun. In 1982, Kennesaw City Council unanimously passed an ordinance requiring households to own at least one firearm with ammunition. The law states that its purpose is to “protect the safety, security and general welfare of the city and its inhabitants”. Kennesaw’s ordinance was a heartfelt assertion of second amendment gun rights, a principled and legislative rebuttal to a law passed earlier that year in Morton Grove, ­Illinois, banning guns within the city limits.

“It was official, but we were protesting as much as anything,” recalls Fred Bentley, a lawyer, who was already 56 when he wrote the ordinance. Looking every part the southern charmer in a grey suit and spotless white shirt topped with a gingham bow tie, Bentley keeps a loaded .38 revolver by his bed and two double-barrel shotguns from his hunting days. Otherwise his guns are decorative – a Brown Bess ­revolutionary-era musket stands by the door of his office.

Kennesaw residents were outraged not only by Morton Grove’s assault on the second amendment of the Constitution – which gives all Americans the right to bear arms – but also by “the slobbering way that the press portrayed the law as taking a stand against ‘evil’ handguns,” says Robert Jones, the president of the Kennesaw Historical Society and the owner of a .357 Magnum handgun. The American Civil Liberties Union challenged Kennesaw’s law as unconstitutional, but the federal court let it stand, although the city did add a clause exempting conscientious objectors, criminals, the mentally disabled and people who could not afford a gun.

Jones says: “In 1982 this was a rural community of about 5,000 people. The whole town was very conservative and about 95 per cent of people owned guns anyway, so it was a very symbolic law.” Indeed, the law contains no penalty for violation and no one has ever been prosecuted for not owning a gun. Local police estimate that only 50 per cent of households have a gun.

But almost 30 years after the law was passed, it is still in place and still popular, not least because Kennesaw’s crime rate has remained disproportionately low, even as the town’s population swelled from 5,000 in 1982 to almost 35,000 now. According to the latest FBI statistics, Kennesaw recorded 31 violent crimes – mainly robberies and aggravated assaults – during 2008. In other similar-sized local towns the figures were much higher – 127 in Dalton and 188 in Hinesville. For property crimes – largely burglaries and thefts – Kennesaw recorded 555 while Dalton had 1,124 and Hinesville 1,802.

“Firearms are involved in less than 2 per cent of the crime around here,” confirms Craig Graydon, a police lieutenant who has served in Kennesaw for 24 years. “If nothing else, [the firearms law] draws a lot of attention to the importance of crime prevention.” Though it will give liberals heartburn, Kennesaw’s gun policy works.