Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop thinks the city's new push for more data from gun companies that supply weapons to the police department will help "shape the dialogue" nationwide on gun safety, according to today's Wall Street Journal.

The city initiative, which Fulop devised last year, seeks information from the gun manufacturers such as how they dispose of old weapons and whether they make assault weapons available for sale to civilians. Gun-rights groups have protested, calling the plan political.

Fulop, who advocates for stricter gun-control measures, told the Wall Street Journal the city can change the firearms industry.

"It shows municipalities and police departments have the ability to shape the dialogue," he said.

http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2014/05/jersey_city_mayor_wants_to_shape_the_dialogue_on_gun_control.html

More than a decade ago, New Jersey mandated that handgun merchants switch to selling personalized “smart” handguns once the technology became viable. That effort to make firearms safer for gun owners and their families now has provoked a nasty and dangerous crusade to keep the guns off the market.

The latest victim of this campaign of intimidation is Andy Raymond, co-owner of Engage Armament, a Rockville, Md., gun store specializing in custom assault rifles. No gun control advocate, Raymond decided to carry the Armatix iP1, a handgun that requires its handler to wear a matching watch for it to work, to provide his potential customers a wide choice of firearms.

Instead of sales revenue, however, he got death threats from gun nuts who do not want to see the New Jersey law come into effect. If no one in the country sells the iP1, the law will remain dormant. As did the owner of a Los Angeles-area gun store who was also set to carry the smart gun, Raymond gave in, deciding not to sell the product. When The Washington Post asked him if he would ever carry the iP1 under different circumstances, he replied, “I just can’t.”

Now New Jersey’s lawmakers are thinking about lifting the mandate, with the idea that doing so would blunt the opposition that has cohered around smart guns and ease their entry into the market. Once more consumers know about, experience and trust the technology, the thinking goes, more of them will choose products with simple electronic safeguards against unauthorized use. The number of suicides, accidents and other tragedies, which kill thousands every year, would drop.

http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/05/editorial_new_jersey_should_be.html

The National Rifle Association, no stranger to bad publicity, is under fire from the media for its plan to bankroll its own TV and Internet media channel that plans to launch a variety of shows promoting different approaches to firearm culture.

The NRA has spent months promoting NRA Freestyle, a new multimedia initiative that, according to its website, is a place “where adventure, style and culture collide.” Shows slated to begin soon are “Media Lab,” featuring a Navy SEAL’s commentary on violence in TV and movies, “NRA Sharp,” and “I Am Forever,” about a teenage girl on “her journey toward personal protection.”

The show to attract the most attention, though, has been “Noir,” a talking heads show featuring Colion Noir and Amy Robbins, who says her intention is to “highlight women shooters and our influence in the gun world.” The shows premieres later this week, but Noir, an African-American, has been the subject of an online conversation for his new position in a world seemingly made up of, as he put it, “old, fat white guys.”

He’s attracted more than 35,000 Twitter followers, 181,000 Facebook likes, and over 200,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. It was YouTube where he made himself known, posting short videos in which he describes himself as an “Urban Gun Enthusiast,” and sermonizes about the ridiculousness of a certain politician’s anti-gun comment, for example, or on how powerful a specific gun is.

http://rt.com/usa/157804-nra-creates-tv-channel/

Since the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the Second Amendment includes the right to bear arms in self defense, guns rights advocates, led by the NRA, have challenged laws that have put restrictions on carrying guns in public. Their argument has been that these restrictions prevent them from protecting themselves in public. Many of these challenges have failed, with lower courts ruling that restrictions are in line with the ruling of District of Columbia v Heller, which said that handguns in the home were permissible for self defense.

In the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: "Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose." The opinion even pointed out that laws banning concealed carry were permissible.

New Jersey's law is very strict and make it all but impossible for anyone not a member of law enforcement to carry a gun in public. It requires gun owners to indicate "specific threats or previous attacks demonstrating a special danger to applicant's life that cannot be avoided by other means" in order to get an open carry permit. Approval must be granted by the local police and a Superior Court judge.

The "justifiable need" requirement survived two lower court challenges, which were upheld in 2012 by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. The plaintiffs petitioned the Supreme Court to challenge the appeals court ruling. This week, the Supreme Court rejected the challenge, leaving in place the 3rd Circuit's ruling and New Jersey's law.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/23619-new-jersey-allowed-to-require-justifiable-need-to-carry-a-firearm-in-public

GRADY COUNTY, GA (WALB) -Grady County Commissioners are saying no to firearms at Barber Park.

County leaders are standing by their decision that flies in the face of a recently passed state law. When you drive through the gates into Barber park, county leaders say you'll have to leave your guns at home.

"We just don't believe that's necessary, so by a vote of 5 to 0 the commission voted not to allow firearms, at our recreation facility," said commission chairman T. D. David.

The decision comes after the Georgia General Assembly passed and Governor Deal signed a law that allows guns to be carried into bars, churches and some government buildings but the David says it's just not the right choice for his county.

http://www.walb.com/story/25469181/grady-co-sticking-to-guns-on-park-gun-ban

State agents Tuesday arrested the owner of a gun shop and security school, charging him with fraudulently certifying he witnessed an armed security guard applicant pass a firearms proficiency test when, the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services alleges, he did not instruct the applicant.

Frank Abay, 43, is one of about 20 state-licensed firearms instructors the Team6 Investigators has confirmed are under investigation for providing fraudulent firearms proficiency certificates to about 2,400 armed security guards.

He is charged with four felonies: scheme to defraud, forgery, uttering a fraudulent firearms training certificate and witness tampering.

Abay was a subject in a Team6 Investigation last week that traced one apparently fraudulent certificate to an armed guard who killed a barber shop owner in the Little Haiti mall he was patrolling, and was then shot to death by a Miami police officer.

http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/Firearms-Instructor-Arrested-In-Probe-Of-Bogus-Armed-Security-Guard-Licenses-257264371.html

This is a mailer from the National Association for Gun Rights. Inside is a fundraising letter sent by Sen. Rand Paul:

[center][/center]

The quote on the outside of the mailer comes from an Obama speech after the Newtown shooting. Obama’s quote was not about banning guns, it was about engaging citizens.

This is the full quote:

“In the coming weeks, I’ll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens — from law enforcement, to mental health professionals, to parents and educators — in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this, because what choice do we have? We can’t accept events like this as routine.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/gun-rights-letter-signed-by-rand-paul-takes-obama-insanely-o

A teenager's fatal shooting of a troubled Army veteran father who threatened his family then tossed the child a loaded gun was legally justified, a Vermont prosecutor said Wednesday.

No charges will be filed against the child of Kryn Miner, 44, a veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, who was shot and killed inside the family's Essex Junction home last month.

Miner had threatened to kill his four children, physically assaulted his wife and threw a loaded handgun to the teen who came to her aid.

"Do you want to play the gun game?" Miner — who served in the 82nd Airborne Division and was sniper qualified — asked the teen, according to authorities. The teen said no, but fired six shots when Miner pulled another gun from a bag. Miner was hit five times.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/prosecutor-shooting-dad-veteran-justified-23624567

Missoula Mayor John Engen said while international media have focused on the recent shooting of a teenager by a Grant Creek homeowner claiming self-defense, a national gun violence group he belongs to has not dug into the so-called “castle doctrine” yet.

“I am a member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns,” Engen said Friday. “My part in that is about promoting common-sense gun laws, and chief among those are programs for expanded background checks. I think other common-sense gun organizations are paying attention to this, but I haven’t had contact on this issue.”

German exchange student Diren Dede was killed while allegedly trespassing in the garage of Missoula homeowner Markus Kaarma on April 27.

Kaarma has been charged with felony deliberate homicide, but his lawyer plans to claim self-defense under Montana’s “defense of an occupied structure” law. It’s a variation of the “your home is your castle” doctrine, absolving a shooter of guilt for using lethal force for self-defense at home.

http://missoulian.com/news/local/mayors-against-illegal-guns-yet-to-take-stand-on-castle/article_6f032f6a-d255-11e3-a1b4-0019bb2963f4.html

…is 30,000 corpses each and every year. There are a lot of other secondary considerations. But that is, overwhelmingly, from a prolife perspective, the single most important fact.

My views on our gun culture are fairly simple. It can be boiled down to this: the human tradition of the second amendment does not trump the divine revelation of the fifth commandment. That’s because, to repeat, the single most important fact of our gun culture is 30,000 corpses each year.

In case that is still fuzzy, allow me to repeat it one more time: The single most important fact about American gun culture is 30,000 dead people each year. Are there other important questions about property, safety, and liberty? Sure. But the single most important fact is 30,000 corpses.

If it were Al-Quaida killing 30,000 Americans each year, it would be treated as a civilizational emergency requiring a national effort to prevent as many of those deaths as possible. But because it is Americans killing themselves and each other, the reply that I consistently get to that fact is a huge amount of fantasizing about the Great Hitler Gun Confiscation that Is To Come, and a kind of terrified paralysis that turns a blind and hostile eye to even the most common sense attempts to effect even the teeniest change to the status quo.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2014/05/the-single-most-important-fact-about-our-gun-culture.html