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

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/