BATON ROUGE, Louisiana -- Lawmakers are seeking to shape Louisiana's gun laws with more than 40 firearm-related changes proposed this session. But while proposals, including several measures attempting to limit released convicts' access to guns, have come from lawmakers in both parties and within each chamber, disagreements lie in how to best curb the state's high recidivism and crime rates while respecting constitutional rights. Lawmakers have said a number of the... [San Francisco Chronic...
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Canadian Conservative MP Calls for Gun Amnesty Program
Surrey parents who discover their children are keeping a gun in the house should be able to turn the weapon over to police worry-free, according to the city's former mayor. Dianne Watts, now a Conservative MP, is calling for a temporary amnesty program that would encourage parents to help get firearms off the streets. The details haven't been worked out, but Watts said parents who hand over guns could be assured their children won't be charged for having them. She... [CTV News (Vancouver), ...
Clinton Slams Sanders With Sandy Hook Gun Massacre
PHILADELPHIA -- Armed with a blistering tabloid cover, Hillary Clinton is pitting Bernie Sanders against the parents of children murdered in Sandy Hook, part of an effort to punch her way into the critical New York primary. The inflammatory rhetoric underscores the importance of the April 19 New York contest to her campaign and the mounting frustration of Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, with the lingering primary battle. That irritation spilled... [Tampa Tribune (Flo...
141 Doctors Groups Urge Congress to Fund Gun Research
A coalition of more than 100 medical groups is asking Congress to fund research on gun violence at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to end a decades-long drought of federal public health research on the subject. The groups sent a letter on Wednesday requesting that Congress "end the dramatic chilling effect of the current rider language restricting gun violence research and to fund this critical work". The lack of gun violence research at the CDC is... [Guardian, via GunPol...
Middle East: Militias Use Facebook Groups to Sell Weapons
A terrorist hoping to buy an antiaircraft weapon in recent years needed to look no further than Facebook, which has been hosting sprawling online arms bazaars, offering weapons ranging from handguns and grenades to heavy machine guns and guided missiles. The Facebook posts suggest evidence of large-scale efforts to sell military weapons coveted by terrorists and militants. The weapons include many distributed by the United States to security forces and their proxies in... [New York Times, vi...
Firearm Dealers Challenge Gun Suicide Taboo in Colorado
MONTROSE, Colorado -- Keith Carey is a gunsmith in Montrose, a town with a frontier flavor set amid the mesas of western Colorado. He's a staunch, though soft-spoken, defender of the right to bear arms. Yet now he's a willing recruit in a fledgling effort to see if the gun community itself — sellers and owners of firearms, operators of shooting ranges — can help Colorado and other Western states reduce their highest-in-the-nation suicide rates. "Suicide is a... [San Francisco Chronicle, via...
Middle East Gun Runners Immune to Arrest in Arabian Sea
The Navy disclosed Monday that it recently confiscated a weapons cache from a small fishing craft in the Arabian Sea, seizing about 1,500 Kalashnikov rifles, 200 rocket-propelled grenade launchers and 21 .50-caliber machine guns. It marks the fourth seizure by a U.S.-led maritime task force in the region since September — and underscores the difficulties the United States faces in stopping weapons smuggling to nations like Yemen, where Houthi rebels continue to rely... [Washington Post, via G...
US Candidate Sanders over Immunity for Gun Makers
The air of collegiality between two of the Senate's most liberal members — Connecticut's Chris Murphy and Vermont's Bernie Sanders — is turning frosty over a Newtown wrongful death lawsuit. Murphy admonished his colleague on Twitter Tuesday for saying that the families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims shouldn't be allowed to sue the manufacturer of the Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle used to kill 20 first-graders and six educators in... [San Francisco Chronicle, via GunPol...
Racial Prejudice Fuels Opposition to Gun Control – Research
Racial prejudice could play a significant role in white Americans' opposition to gun control, according to new research from political scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In their paper, published in the journal Political Behavior in November, Alexandra Filindra and Noah J. Kaplan found that whites were significantly less likely to support gun control measures when they had recently looked at pictures of black people, than when they had looked at... [Washington Post, via Gu...
Former CDC Leaders Say US Govt Restricts Gun Research
For nearly two decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has devoted scant resources to the study of gun violence, even as fatal shootings constitute a public health issue claiming more than 30,000 lives each year. That lack of research is widely attributed to the Dickey Amendment, language tucked into a 1996 appropriations bill that the CDC, lawmakers, and the press have interpreted as blocking the agency from conducting research on firearms deaths and... [The Trace (USA), via ...