The NRA’s vigorous opposition to a domestic violence bill awaiting the governor’s signature in Delaware sheds new light on the gun-rights group’s legislative strategy when confronted with that highly sensitive issue. As the Trace reported last month, state lawmakers have been able to get the powerful lobby to play ball — up to a point. The fight in Delaware shows where that tacit cooperation ends.

SB 83, which passed both chambers of the Democratic-controlled legislature in June, would expand the definition of intimate partner to include persons who are in “substantive dating relationships” but do not live together. The NRA attacked the bill, which also mandates the removal of firearms and ammunition from those served with an order of protection, saying it was “designed to bypass due process to deprive gun owners of their rights in domestic abuse proceedings.”

That extension of protections to dating partners appears to be the line the NRA won’t cross. In some states, lawmakers have handed over domestic violence bills featuring gun prohibitions to NRA state representatives very early in the process and found common ground. But when bills have looked to change the definition of relationships that can be considered “domestic,” the NRA has balked.

http://www.thetrace.org/2015/07/delaware-domestic-violence-nra/

The National Rifle Association has disparaged the Howard government's gun buyback program as part of its ongoing feud with US president Barack Obama, who is again calling for stricter gun control in the United States.

In an opinion piece in America's 1st Freedom entitled "Australia: There Will Be Blood", a staff writer criticises the "familiar narrative of 'common-sense gun laws'", and attacks President Obama's recent praise for Australian gun buybacks in 1996 and 2003, which he mentioned while discussing the Charleston church massacre that claimed nine lives.

The article, attributed only to "A1F Daily Staff", paints the buyback as "big-government" overreach, attacks post-amnesty restrictions such as having to securely store a weapon unloaded, and claims that there is a growing consensus in Australia that the measures did nothing whatsoever to reduce crime.

To support that last claim, the author references a single article published in The Sydney Morning Herald in 2005 that put forward a crime statistician's view that the only thing that had changed since the buyback was that "there has been no other mass killing using firearms (since the massacre at Port Arthur)."

http://www.9news.com.au/world/2015/07/13/12/51/nras-attack-on-australian-gun-laws-off-target#YXliJCtyT0RZX5V3.99

In the two years since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, there have been at least 94 other school, college or university shootings in the United States.

During the last three months alone, there were 16 school shootings, including one week where there were five incidents across five separate states, according to Everytown, a lobby group against gun violence.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11297006/Revealed-the-94-US-school-and-university-shootings-since-Sandy-Hook.html

Viewed from the perspective of 21st century politics, where Republicans and Democrats largely have lined up on opposing sides of the gun control debate, Eleanor Roosevelt’s pistol offers a fresh take on the ongoing debate over the rights of gun owners, the Democrats who want to curtail them and the Republicans who want to expand them.

“I think that having an icon in the political arena and, truly, someone who was a world leader, having a true understanding of what your Second Amendment rights are, as an American, is just incredibly enlightening,” said Mike McCormack, chairman of the Dutchess County Republican Committee. “She got it.”

Dutchess County Democratic Committee Chairwoman Elisa Sumner had a very different opinion.

“I don’t think you can compare what she did in 1957 with 2015,” Sumner said. “At the time, you weren’t having mass shootings. You didn’t have Sandy Hook (elementary school shootings). You didn’t have people walking around with semi-automatic weapons, Uzis and Kalishnikovs. I don’t think there is a comparison at all. You’re talking about two different time periods. “She needed protection because of her liberal, civil rights circumstances. She needed protection,” Sumner said.

http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/news/2015/07/12/eleanor-roosevelt-gun-owner/29953377/

Before he assassinated the only black senator in the state legislature, Dylann Storm Roof stood at the Emanuel AME bible study session in Charleston and said, “You are …taking over the country.” He had been influenced by white power groups fomenting fear.

But over the decades, no group has utilized fear more skillfully than the gun industry and its lobby. The fear they induced has armed America and created a vicious cycle of lethal gun violence—the grim mass murders as well as the 89 gun deaths per day, 31 of them homicides.

During the past half-century, as hunting declined, the gun industry shifted from weapons for killing animals to those for killing humans, and told us we were perpetually under the threat of violent attack and needed a gun “ready for immediate use.” With virtually no regulations in place, civilians could obtain increasingly lethal, concealable military style firearms with larger capacity magazines.

Gun marketers emphasized 1) fear of “criminals” (who don’t look like you), 2) fear of government, 3) fear of being outgunned, and 4) fear that any regulation of guns or their buyers was a slippery slope toward gun confiscation.

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/247090-gun-violence-and-the-marketing-of-fear

Always in this country, the worst that can happen brings out the best in us. It happened on Sept. 12, 2001, when New York City started to get back up. It happens this time in South Carolina, where the Confederate flag, a symbol of racism and hate, finally comes down once and for all. From now on, the only people still clinging to the notion of that flag honoring courage of Southern soldiers will sound like weird, bigoted members of the Flat Earth Society.

The flag was lowered Friday morning. Seven members of the South Carolina Highway Patrol Honor Guard, two of them black, did the honors, less than a month after Dylann Roof allegedly murdered nine people, including the pastor, of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. It all happened because righteous Americans, white and black, stood up. The flag goes to a Confederate relic room in a museum down the road, relic being the key word.

The families of the dead at Sandy Hook Elementary wish it was as easy to see change on guns as it was with a flag that once was used to rally the Ku Klux Klan.

Nothing about a moment like this brings back the dead or changes what happened at that prayer meeting. Nothing changes how many school shootings and church shootings we have had in this country since Sandy Hook, even as the gun lobby continues to run onto the field flying the flag of a Second Amendment, the original intent of which is constantly misrepresented, and prostituted, in America.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/confederate-flag-drops-fast-not-guns-lupica-article-1.2288049

SEATTLE (AP) - The Seattle City Council is considering a new tax on gun sellers to collect money for gun violence prevention and research on how to reduce the impact of gun violence on the city and its residents.

Under the proposal, gun and ammunition sellers would be charged $25 for every firearm sold in Seattle and 5 cents for every round of ammunition sold. City officials estimate the new tax would collect between $300,000 and $500,000 a year.

http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Seattle-City-Council-considers-gun-violence-tax-on-gun-sales-312571381.html

CONCORD — Gov. Maggie Hassan promised she would veto a bill that revoked the licensing requirement for anyone who wants to carry a concealed handgun in New Hampshire, and on Monday — to no one’s surprise — she delivered.

Senate Bill 116 would have repealed the requirement to obtain a permit from a local law enforcement official to carry a concealed pistol or revolver. The measure passed the House and Senate, but not by the two-thirds margin needed to override the governor’s veto.

“New Hampshire’s current concealed carry permitting law has worked well for nearly a century — safeguarding the Second Amendment rights of our citizens while helping to keep the Granite State one of the safest states in the nation,” Hassan said. “Our concealed weapons permitting system gives an important oversight role to local law enforcement, while allowing for appeals through appropriate channels.”

http://www.unionleader.com/article/20150706/NEWS0621/150709462&source=RSS

The death this week of a 3-year-old boy after what appeared to be an accidental shooting at his grandparents' house in Spring brings to mind a recent article in The Washington Post about guns in Japan, a nation with some of the tightest gun-control laws in the world and, not coincidentally, one of the lowest rates of gun deaths in the world (12 last year, 10 of them tied to crime syndicates).

Let's say you want to own a gun in Japan. First, you must attend a class on gun law and gun safety, then pass a written test. Next, you must submit paperwork to the police about your family, work and educational background, as well as a medical certificate declaring you're not depressed or an alcoholic. The police will check to see if you have a criminal record and look into whether you've had any domestic or neighborhood disputes. A police officer will visit your home to see where and how you intend to store your gun.

That's Japan and this is America, of course, where our fealty to the Second Amendment would never allow such intrusive government oversight. What we do allow are 33,636 firearms-related deaths a year (in 2013), including such corollary damage as the death of 3-year-old youngster who finds a loaded gun in his grandparents' nightstand. His is the fifth accidental child shooting in Harris County this year, including at least three deaths.

Nothing unusual about Harris County. A recent report found that nationwide at least two children are killed every week by accidental shootings. The numbers are probably vastly under-counted.

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Unnecessary-deaths-6371572.php