RINGWOOD — Numerous guns and 40,000 bullets were recovered from a hidden room inside the Skyline Drive residence of a 35-year-old man who was arrested Friday on assault-weapon and ammunition charges, authorities said.

Ringwood police went to Mariusz Cebula’s home on Friday evening to seize his firearms — a provision of a domestic-violence restraining order issued by a judge.

Authorities characterized Cebula as a collector of military-issue firearms, with a particular affinity for weapons utilized during the Second World War. Among the items collected by Cebula were what police described as ordnance, which officials determined to be inactive.

As authorities combed through the home, they unearthed a hidden “bunker” under the basement floor of Cebula’s home.

http://www.northjersey.com/news/police-seize-guns-40-000-bullets-from-hidden-room-in-ringwood-home-1.1376857

"The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun." says Wayne LaPierre, the vice president of the National Rifle Association.

That's become the kernel of the NRA's response to recent mass shooting tragedies -- if only more people carried guns for protection, the thinking goes, then they would be less likely to be victimized by gun-wielding criminals.

“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” LaPierre said

The challenge to that argument is that, data show, guns are rarely used in self-defense -- especially relative to the rate at which they're used in criminal homicides or suicides. A recent report from the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group, put those numbers in some perspective, and I dug up the raw numbers from the FBI's homicide data. Take a look:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/19/guns-in-america-for-every-criminal-killed-in-self-defense-34-innocent-people-die/

Seeking tighter controls over firearm purchases, the Obama administration is pushing to ban Social Security beneficiaries from owning guns if they lack the mental capacity to manage their own affairs, a move that could affect millions whose monthly disability payments are handled by others.

The push is intended to bring the Social Security Administration in line with laws regulating who gets reported to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, which is used to prevent gun sales to felons, drug addicts, immigrants in the country illegally and others.

A potentially large group within Social Security are people who, in the language of federal gun laws, are unable to manage their own affairs due to "marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-gun-law-20150718-story.html?ref=yfp#page=1

When Ian Johnstone was just 10 years old, his father was shot during a random robbery attempt in San Francisco. The perpetrators were a group of teenagers who had been using drugs; the 16-year-old shooter fired once into the elder Johnstone's back, instantly paralyzing him. A week later, his dad died in the hospital from complications

"You can't help but feel frustrated and jaded and powerless about the issue," says Johnstone.

From this conversation, Gun By Gun was born. In less than two years, the organization has crowdsourced more than $80,000, using the money to collect more than 750 guns in four cities over the course of five campaigns.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nationswell/one-man-is-crowdfunding-a_b_7819012.html

A recent study published in The Journal of Preventive Medicine offers new support for the argument that owning a gun does not make you safer. The study, led by David Hemenway, Ph.D., of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, examines data from the National Crime Victimization Survey — an annual survey of 90,000 households — and shows not only that so-called “defensive gun use” (DGU) rarely protects a person from harm, but also that such incidents are much more rare than gun advocates claim.

A 2014 Gallup poll suggests that Americans increasingly perceive owning firearms as an effective means of self-defense — having a gun makes one less likely to become a victim of a crime. But as Hemenway’s study demonstrates, this belief is not supported by crime statistics. Contrary to what many gun advocates argue, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data reveals that having a gun provides no statistically significant benefit to a would-be victim during a criminal confrontation.

The study found that in incidents where a victim used a gun in self-defense, the likelihood of suffering an injury was 10.9 percent. Had the victim taken no action at all, the risk of injury was virtually identical: 11 percent. Having a gun also didn’t reduce the likelihood of losing property: 38.5 percent of those who used a gun in self-defense had property taken from them, compared to 34.9 percent of victims who used another type of weapon, such as a knife or baseball bat.

What’s more, the study found that while the likelihood of injury after brandishing a firearm was reduced to 4.1 percent, the injury rate after those defensive gun uses was similar to using any other weapon (5.3 percent), and was still greater than if the person had run away or hid (2.4 percent) or called the police (2.2 percent). These results were similar to previous research on older NCVS data which showed that, while using a firearm in self-defense did lower a person’s risk of subsequent injury, it was less effective than using any weapon other than a gun.

http://www.thetrace.org/2015/07/defensive-gun-use-armed-with-reason-hemenway/

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Let’s start with an undeniable truth: In the United States, the people have the right to keep and bear arms. And let’s then acknowledge that the childish interpretation of that constitutional amendment—that Americans have the right to whatever accessory they can put on, in or over a gun for the sole purpose of making it more deadly—is a dangerous falsehood.

Therein lies the chasm between those seeking constitutionally impossible forms of gun control and their political opponents, who view every proposal regulating weaponry as the first step toward dictatorship. Caught in the middle are the majority of Americans who think people should be allowed to keep guns but seesaw over tougher laws regarding those weapons.

http://www.newsweek.com/2015/07/24/bullet-initiative-354203.html

Firearms being stolen from unlocked cars is a growing trend in St. Johns County, law enforcement officials say.

The most surprising part of the trend, perhaps, is from where the weapons have gone missing.

“For the past seven years, we’ve been telling the community to lock their car doors or at least put their valuables out of sight,” said Cmdr. Chuck Mulligan, a spokesman for the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office. “But recently, we’ve seen some of the cars people break into have firearms in them.”

The emerging trend is for thieves to target a particular neighborhood, checking every unlocked car on a street for valuables.

http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2015-07-14/car-hopping-firearms-part-new-trend

Big changes could be coming to how guns and bullets are sold in San Francisco, even though there is only one shop in the city that's legally allowed to sell firearms.

Nonetheless, after a violent start to 2015, city leaders are trying to make it even tougher to buy and sell guns.

Farrell’s proposal has two main parts: The first portion would require the videotaping of all gun and ammunition sales in San Francisco, as well as video surveillance of all places in the store where guns or ammo are kept, handled and transferred.

The second portion of Farrell’s proposal would require ammunition dealers to store and electronically send sales data to San Francisco police every week for at least five years.

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Francisco-Could-Make-Gun-Sale-Regulations-Even-Stricter-315018131.html

WILLIAMSBURG — The Zoning Board of Appeals voted 3-0 on Monday night to deny CRD Metalworks a special permit that would allow it to keep operating on Hyde Hill Road.

The neighborhood is not zoned for the business, which makes tree-splitting equipment. Owner Chris Duval promised to fight the ruling in court.

"The NRA's going to get involved soon," he said. "It's going to get ugly before it's over."

Neighbors of the rural area have complained about the noise from the factory as well as from the shooting that takes place on the property. Duval and some of his 14 employees shoot during work breaks and after their shifts, Duval said. Some are also upset about the Confederate flag Duval has raised near the building and other signs they consider garish.

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/07/williamsburg_zba_denies_permit_for_confederate_flag_flier.html#incart_m-rpt-1

An anti-violence coalition sued three suburban villages Tuesday, saying they need to do more to regulate gun stores whose weapons have been recovered in large numbers at crime scenes in low-income neighborhoods in Chicago.

The Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Catholic Church, and the Rev. Robin Hood, a West Side pastor, are among the plaintiffs in the civil-rights lawsuit against the villages of Riverdale, Lyons and Lincolnwood.

Lyons officials said they already have met with Chicago police to address their concerns about a gun shop there, while an attorney for Lincolnwood said officials there could not see “any conceivable basis for liability” on the part of the village.

The lawsuit, filed in Cook County Circuit Court, says those villages have “lax or insufficient methods of administration in licensing and regulating gun dealers.”

http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/7/71/751389/suburbs-face-lawsuit-seeking-tougher-regulation-gun-shops