Macon-Bibb County Commissioner Al Tillman hopes someone will mount a legal challenge to block the July 1 implementation of Georgia’s new gun law.

But in the longer term, he wants a concerted effort to scale back the authorization for guns in various public places.

The concern is twofold, he said: expense and safety. In discussing hot-button issues, he’s often heard people talk about what they’d do “if I had my gun.”

“Well, now, folks will have their gun,” said Tillman, himself a gun owner who thinks the new law goes too far in removing oversight.

http://www.macon.com/2014/06/08/3139564/macon-bibb-officials-talk-of-push.html#storylink=cpy

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David Letterman let loose on Anderson Cooper Wednesday night by telling him that he's fed up with legislative inaction on gun control following Sandy Hook, which he thought would be a turning point. Cooper concurred, and said if that didn't prompt efforts to curb the availability of guns, nothing would.

"For the love of Christ, when are we going to do something about this nonsense?" inquired Letterman, rhetorically. "Nothing will move until everyone knows or has a family member that has been gunned down."

http://politix.topix.com/story/12429-letterman-throws-down-on-guns-for-the-love-of-christ-when-are-we-gonna-do-something

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The lyrics in Serial Killa, a track on Snoop Dogg’s breakthrough album, Doggystyle, are emblematic of the violence associated with the former gangsta rapper from California. The main message of the song: if anyone insulted him, he would shoot to kill.

More than twenty years after the release of his premiere album, Snoop Dogg, now known as Snoop Lion, is an outspoken voice in the ongoing campaign to end gun violence.

“We are the voices that the youth listen to; they respect us. So, we are the ones who can put a half pause on the gun violence when we speak as one – as a whole rap community,” he said during a “No Guns Allowed” event last Thursday. During a time when gun violence is projected to kill more people than car accidents, and violent lyrics used to criminalize people of color, Snoop’s call for no more guns is both timely and necessary.

The title of the event was inspired by Snoop’s entrance into anti-gun advocacy two years ago. After re-branding himself in 2012 — by changing his name to Snoop Lion and releasing the reggae album Resurrection — his song No Guns Allowed became a hit single. In it, the rapper-turned-singer croons, “Let the music play, me don’t want no more gunplay. When the bodies hit the ground, there’s nothing left to say, ay, ay. Me don’t want to see no more innocent blood shed. Me don’t want to see no more youth dead. Come hear me now.”

http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2014/06/03/3443815/snoop-dogg-gun-violence/

Chicago has many law-abiding gun owners who handle their weapons safely and responsibly. The ordinance proposed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to regulate gun sales in the city is not about them. It's about Chicago's other gun owners: violent thugs who kill innocents as well as each other while terrorizing countless citizens with the ever-present threat of death by bullet.

Those are the people who have given this city a murder rate far higher than that of other big cities, including New York and Los Angeles. The measures Emanuel requests won't incapacitate all or most of them. But they would make a significant difference in how easy it is for criminals to get guns.

Emanuel would prefer to allow no gun shops. After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Chicago's ban on handgun ownership, the city passed a law outlawing gun stores. But in January that ban also fell, at the hands of a federal judge who ruled that it violated the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

He gave Chicago six months to enact a new ordinance allowing gun stores. But he stressed that "nothing in this opinion prevents the city from considering other regulations ... on sales and transfers of firearms to minimize the access of criminals to firearms."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-chicago-gun-shop-ordinance-0601-20140601,0,3752393.story

Hidden safely behind one screen or another, wicked cowards like to insult Rochester’s crime victims. They might type that a teenager deserved to be shot because he was out past 10 p.m. Or that murders of city residents aren’t really so bad because they lead to fewer welfare recipients.

Their towering intellects were on display after news that the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and people hurt by the 2012 Webster Christmas Eve shootings would be suing Gander Mountain.

“If they win, I hope the relatives and everyone involve (sic) get CANCER!” a person using the name Mancave Heywood wrote in Facebook comments following the article. “(Unprintables) in this world just want an easy payout!”

“Heroes no more!” wrote Jennifer Valentine of the two firefighters who were killed rushing to put out a fire on Christmas Eve and the two who survived their injuries.

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/local/columnists/bryant/2014/05/24/bryant-lawsuits-necessary-weapon-gun-sellers/9508407/

In a post Tuesday, I listed the mass shootings since January 2013 in which at least three people were killed. It’s an agonizingly, depressingly long list, and I cited it as the prime reason we need meaningful gun control. The post received the usual blowback from gun owners, most of whom skipped over the scope of gun deaths in this country to look more myopically at last week’s tragic events at Isla Vista (which I mentioned only in passing, seeing this problem as much broader than the most recent headlines).

But there also have been responses from people who share my disgust at the endless gun violence that pervades American culture. A few asked what should be done. My personal preference? It’s a decidedly minority viewpoint, but I say, ban them, with a carve-out for hunting weapons.

For example: Hunters could own shotguns (and rifles where state laws allow them for hunting), but they would have to be registered and the owners would have to pass a gun safety course before they could get a hunting license (already a requirement in most, if not all, places). That license would be a prerequisite for registering a hunting weapon. Resale of a weapon should be monitored to preclude passing it along to unqualified people. Ammunition sales would be tracked much like we do sales of pseudoephinedrine (an ingredient in meth).

As for handguns, assault-style weapons, etc., let’s have a flat-out ban. Beyond the histrionics of the gun lobby, there is no defensible reason for such weapons to be a part of our culture. They exist for one purpose: to kill. Yes, hobbyists also like to use guns for target shooting and other nonlethal purposes, but it’s hard to say that desire for sport outweighs the atrocious level of gun-related deaths in this country.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-gun-control-ban-homicides-suicides-20140528-story.html

BARTOW COUNTY, Ga. —Georgia's new gun law goes into effect July 1 and it is already causing some confusion in Georgia campgrounds.

Channel 2's Diana Davis found that local park rangers have had to ask some campers carrying firearms to leave.

The campgrounds around Allatoona Lake are expected to be jammed this coming Memorial Day weekend.

Park Rangers told Davis some campers are confused about Georgia’s new, more permissive gun law.

http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/new-gun-law-does-not-pertain-many-campsites/nfzYC/

When I launched Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, I understood I would encounter opposition from those who took issue with my view – the same held by most gun owners – that firearm safety and responsibility go hand-in-hand with our Second Amendment rights.

I knew that sometimes these debates would get heated. In fact, I’ve always welcomed and embraced debate. That said, I’ve also always vowed to remain civil and to avoid cruel, ad hominem attacks in my work as a gun violence prevention advocate.

Unfortunately, as several recent incidents chronicled in Mother Jones make clear, a number of people on the extreme other side of this debate have shown they have no interest in adhering to a similar pledge.

In recent months, the vitriol coming from the other side has reached new levels of concern.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/shannon-watts-gun-extremists-intimidation-threats

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Last week a federal judge in Washington, D.C., upheld the District of Columbia’s common-sense gun-registration laws. They are laws that should be emulated in St. Louis.

Unfortunately, they can’t be. State law preempts local jurisdictions from gun laws that are any more restrictive than the ones passed by the state — and Missouri takes perverse pride in having some of the least restrictive gun laws in the nation.

The Legislature, in the last two years, has considered nullifying federal gun laws. Lawmakers who want to ignore the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause should sympathize with a city that wants to nullify the state’s preemption law. The guess here is that they wouldn’t.

The District of Columbia, as a stand-alone entity, doesn’t have to worry about gun-happy rural and suburban Republican lawmakers who fear the gun lobby. Having lost the headline part of the 2008 Supreme Court case D.C. v. Heller — the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to own firearms — Washington’s city council set about reading the fine points of the decision.

http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/the-platform/editorial-at-least-one-american-city-has-sensible-gun-laws/article_c798c78a-4bac-51f8-83f1-f255179b508a.html

The editorial board's look at firearm-related deaths in Cuyahoga County this year is intended to provide an informed picture of lives lost and communities affected; to highlight some of the public policy issues involved; and to examine whether gun violence is a growing public health crisis in the county.

Among the policy issues that hinder efforts to halt illegal firearm sales is the difficulty in tracing crime guns -- in part because of federal legislative impediments.

Also of concern is Ohio's failure to enact a safe-storage law to encourage gun owners to secure their firearms properly, to keep them out of the hands of minors.

The latest Cuyahoga County figures are for April. During the month, county Medical Examiner Tom Gilson ruled that gunshots had claimed the lives of 12 residents. Seven were murdered; five took their own lives.

http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/05/the_smoking_gun_a_running_tall.html