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LA: Reserve woman who shot neighbor in chest claims self-defense, acquitted at trial
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A woman who claimed she acted in self-defense when she shot her neighbor outside her Reserve home in 2015 was acquitted at trial Thursday.
A jury in St. John the Baptist Parish deliberated for 15 minutes before finding Tyranika Williams 27, not guilty on charges of aggravated battery in the shooting of Dwayne Cook on Oct. 8.
On the night of the shooting, Cooks - who survived the shooting - testified that his neighbor, Williams, came out of her house about 11 p.m. and shot him in the chest after he approached her and asked her for a ride to get cigarettes, according to a statement from Williams' attorney, Michael Smith |
IL: Illinois Woman Sues Public Housing Authority That Says She Can�t Have a Gun to Protect Herself from an Abusive Ex-Husband
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Can you lose your Second Amendment rights just by virtue of living in government-owned housing?
That is the issue in a lawsuit filed Wednesday by an Illinois woman and licensed firearm owner looking to overturn the East St. Louis Housing Authority's (ESLHA) prohibition on their tenants keeping guns in their residences.
The plaintiff�an ESLHA tenant identified only as N. Doe over concerns for her safety�wants to keep a weapon for self-defense, but has reportedly been threatened with eviction by both the housing agency and its executive director Mildred Motley�named as a party to the suit�unless she can verify that she does not keep a firearm in her home. |
UT: Failed - Gun confiscation
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Lawmakers rejected a bill that would have allowed police to temporarily confiscate guns of those deemed to be a threat, a proposal that came after a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, last month that killed 17. Republican lawmakers defeated the so-called "red flag" bill in committee after raising concerns it went too far in violating a person's constitutional rights without doing enough to address mental health issues. |
CO: The NRA waves the white flag on responsible gun ownership
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And for the majority of its existence, the NRA argued for responsible gun ownership up to and including reasonable, rational restrictions.
Unfortunately, the NRA has waved a white flag on advocating for responsible gun ownership. Their spokeswoman Dana Loesch made that abundantly clear when she made personal rhetorical attacks against 17-and-18-year-olds from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. I don�t doubt that many of those kids received talking points from gun-control advocates; but I�m even more certain the raw emotions and heartache fueling their advocacy are 100-percent their own. |
NRA: Fla. school safety bill 'punishes' lawful gun owners due to 'deranged individual'
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"Disappointment" and "punishment" was how the National Rifle Association reacted to the signing of Florida's first gun control measure in more than two decades.
�This bill punishes law-abiding gun owners for the criminal acts of a deranged individual,� wrote Chris W. Cox, executive director of the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action, on the organization's website. �Securing our schools and protecting the constitutional rights of Americans are not mutually exclusive. Instead of looking to the root cause of this premeditated violence, the gun control provisions in this law wrongly blame millions of Floridians who safely and responsibly exercise their right to self-defense.� |
MI: State Supreme Court denies new trial in porch shooting
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Chief Justice Stephen Markman dissented from the court�s decision, saying Wafer�s conviction �warrants reversal.�
�Defendant was deprived of the legal presumption to which he was entitled by statute, that he acted in self-defense out of an honest and reasonable belief of imminent death or great bodily harm when the deceased apparently tried to break down the doors of his home in the middle of the night. Had the jury presumed that he possessed such a belief, it would have been far more likely to find that the prosecutor did not disprove self defense beyond a reasonable doubt.� |
IL: Take assault weapons out of civilians' hands
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Practical safeguards to the Second Amendment do not threaten its repeal. In fact, reasonable gun control measures would ensure its continuance, since the current out-of-control trajectory could lead to too extreme counterbalancing.
The right to bear arms and self-defense is what long guns and handguns are for. Assault weapons are not the weapon of choice for self-defense or for hunting. Their only uses are for enjoyment and mass murder. |
FL: Florida Gov. Rick Scott breaks with NRA to sign new gun regulations
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The new Florida law imposes a three-day waiting period for most purchases of long guns, raises the minimum age for buying those weapons to 21 and bans the possession of bump stocks, devices that can make semiautomatic weapons fire like fully automatic firearms. It does not address the demand of many Stoneman Douglas students for a ban on assault weapons.
The bill does make it easier for law enforcement and judges to remove guns from people considered a danger to themselves or others, and it establishes a program to arm some school personnel, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in new spending on school security and mental health treatment. |
AK: In The Y-K Delta, How Easy Is It To Get A Gun?
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Last August in Aniak, witnesses say that Joseph Yaska grabbed his AK-47, aimed it at his girlfriend, and told her to run. They say that he shot her twice and then turned his gun on a nearby truck. He allegedly shot and killed Bruce �Gotor� Morgan, who was sitting in the front seat, and tried to shoot several of his neighbors. When the Troopers caught Yaska, he told them that he was angry and didn�t know why. |
It�s All Good: A boy�s life with guns, a toll of woodchucks, guns as bonding agents...
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America�s ammo >> I wrote last week about .223 Remington cartridges, which in hunting loads are essentially dumdums . . . expanding bullets, designed for one-hit knock-downs & appropriate for hunting and self-defense (though a 9 mm. pistol or a shotgun is better against rural home invasion).� Societal challenge: how to keep .223s from scything down like machine-gun fire on urban concert-goers 500 yards away, on school-children & teachers down the hall?�We might consider 5-round magazines for civilian rifles. Pistol magazines are a more complicated matter. |
AR: Gun-control laws achieve nothing
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Disregard for history is the norm for would-be anti-gun, anti-self defense and anti-hunting advocates. So-called gun-control laws have never achieved their false goals to prevent crime in any country. They do make the law-abiding unarmed citizenry easy targets for power hungry dictators and crime.
Our Bill of Rights was considered necessary to protect specific citizen freedoms. The anti-Bill of Rights promoters wrote that those freedoms were included and protected within the Constitution itself. Today, the cry is to tear up all these governing documents and ideas, even though they are the best ever written. |
CA: This is how freedom is lost� Part II
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Please, those of you who want to overturn the 2nd Amendment, for Heaven�s sake stop using the argument that nobody needs an AR-15 in order to shoot deer.
The 2nd Amendment does not exist in order to protect the right to hunt. It exists to give the citizenry the right to defend themselves. But the left doesn�t like addressing that argument, because of the implication that maybe the government ain�t always so good at the job� so they insist that gun rights advocates just want to use high caliber howitzers to kill rabbits and muskrats�and who needs that?
It�s like saying that we need a 1st Amendment in order to protect our right to sing karaoke. |
Antigun Politicians Aim for America�s Most Popular Firearms With Expansive Ban
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Hoping to capitalize on tragedy, ignorance, and hysteria, 174 opportunistic anti-gun Democrats � led by Rep. David N. Cicillinie (RI) � introduced legislation last week proposing perhaps the most sweeping gun ban in U.S. history. The bill, H.R. 5087, is dubbed the �Assault Weapons Ban of 2018.� Yet its scope is so vast, and its drafting so poorly executed, that that the only semiautomatic firearms it clearly doesn�t reach are those listed in an appendix of what the authors consider permissible guns (many of which will be unknown or unavailable to the average consumer, if they�re available at all). |
WV: Senate Passes Parking Lot Protection Bill
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Today, the West Virginia state Senate passed House Bill 4187 with a 31-1 vote. HB 4187 will now return to the House of Delegates for concurrence.
House Bill 4187, sponsored by Delegate Geoff Foster (R-Putnam), will allow lawful owners of firearms to transport or store their firearms in locked, privately-owned motor vehicles without fear of civil liability, criminal liability or employer retribution. Throughout the country, many employers and business owners have adopted "No Firearms" policies that extend beyond the physical workplace or building to include parking lots � areas often accessible to the general public and not secure. |
FL: I Spent a Year Reporting on NRA Lobbyist Marion Hammer. Read Her Emails With Florida Officials.
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My goal was to understand how Hammer accumulates and wields power behind the scenes. The task required filing hundreds of public records requests to legislators and the governor�s office, among others. Over the course of my reporting, I acquired more than a thousand pages of correspondence between Hammer and lawmakers, government staffers, and various state officials. The messages reveal a lobbyist who not only shapes bills, but creates them. Hammer gives orders to state employees and elected officials, and they often follow them on the public�s time. |
CO: Denver-based think tank big recipient of NRA grants
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The Independence Institute has a long history in Colorado politics and is a prominent advocate of gun rights positions. Its research director, Dave Kopel, has written numerous law review articles defending gun rights and filed friend of court briefs supporting firearms owners and groups.
�It would make sense that America�s oldest civil rights organization, the NRA, would support our work,� said Mike Krause of the institute. �Indeed, we would like to think we are the most vocal and principled defender of the Second Amendment, and of the human right of self-defense, in Colorado. � |
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| I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908 [by an Indian extremist opposed to Gandhi's agreement with Smuts], whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defend me, I told him it was his duty to defend me even by using violence. Hence it was that I took part in the Boer War, the so-called Zulu Rebellion and [World War I]. Hence also do I advocate training in arms for those who believe in the method of violence. I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honor than that she should in a cowardly manner become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor. � Mohandas K. Gandhi, Young India, August 11, 1920 from Fischer, Louis ed.,The Essential Gandhi, 1962 |
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