Kennesaw, Georgia, has all the small-town fixings one might imagine in the American South.
There’s the smell of baked biscuits wafting from Honeysuckle Biscuits & Bakery and the rumble of a nearby railroad train. It’s the kind of place where newlyweds leave hand-written thank-you cards in coffee shops, praising the “cozy” atmosphere.
But there’s another aspect of Kennesaw that some might find surprising – a city law from the 1980s that legally requires residents to own guns and ammo.
After an attempted gang murder in the French city of Marseille last year, the police found what appeared to be a toy assault rifle, seemingly crafted from plastic and Lego parts.
“But the weapon was lethal,” Col. Hervé Pétry of the national gendarmerie recalled.
In the past three years, this model of homemade semiautomatic firearm, known as an FGC-9, has appeared in the hands of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, rebels in Myanmar and neo-Nazis in Spain. In October, a British teenager will be sentenced for building an FGC-9 in one of the latest terrorism cases to involve the weapon.
Finland plans to open more than 300 new shooting ranges to encourage more citizens to take up the hobby in the interest of national defence.
It is hoped that shooting in the Nordic country – which last year became Nato’s newest member and which shares a 830-mile (1,330km) border with Russia – could become as popular as football or ice hockey.
There are about 670 shooting ranges in Finland, down from about 2,000 at the turn of the century. By 2030, the government plans to increase the number to about 1,000.
Dec 27 – Gaston Glock, the reclusive engineer and tycoon who developed one of the world’s best-selling handguns, died on Wednesday aged 94, Austrian news agency APA said.
The Austrian won loyal followings among police and military across the world with the weapons that bore his name. Forbes estimated his and his family’s fortune at $1.1 billion in 2021.
His rise began in the 1980s when the Austrian military was looking for a new, innovative weapon.
h/t Mauser
German Kurd Jacob Duygu, found dead in 2021, designed a semi-automatic pistol used by criminals and paramilitaries around the world
The shadowy figure behind the world’s most successful 3D-printed weapon has been unmasked as a 28-year-old “incel” who claimed gun ownership was a basic human right.
Jacob Duygu, who was known by the pseudonym JStark 1809, developed the FGC-9 [F— Gun Control 9mm] in March 2020 after becoming frustrated at the standard of existing models.
Little was known about his true identity or background, but a report published by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) has now revealed him to be the son of Kurdish immigrants who served with the German military and held deeply misogynistic, racist and anti-Semitic views.
Colorado-based Biofire Tech is taking orders for a smart gun enabled by facial-recognition technology, the latest development in personalised weapons that can only be fired by verified users.
But in a sign of the long, challenging road that smart guns have faced, a prototype twice failed to fire when demonstrated for Reuters this week.
Calera, Alabama — At a gun range in the heart of Alabama, Gracie Barhill is getting acquainted with her month-old Smith & Wesson 9 millimeter.
“I’m young. I’m a girl,” she said. “I never know when a threat is going to come.”
The 19-year-old is taking a self-defense firearms course, “Girls, Guns and Gear,” that’s designed for women who are wary of threats.
“It’s absolutely undeniable, the world is changing and they want to be ahead of it,” said Scott Recchio, a firearms instructor at the range.
“To hear some tell it, gun owners are nothing but a bunch of old white dudes who care nothing about anyone who isn’t old, white, or male. As an old white dude and a gun owner, I kind of resent that characterization.
However, I’ll admit that I fit the model of “gun guy” these folks have built up in their heads. I can’t help it, it’s just who I am.
A recent survey, however, finds that this characterization isn’t remotely fair to gun owners in general, though.”
Credit card purchases of firearms in the US can now be tracked and purchases deemed suspicious can even be shared with law enforcement, according to a new measure approved by an organization that sets parameters for business transactions.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) voted in favor of creating a merchant code for firearms stores, according to Reuters.
Merchant codes are four-digit codes that categorize retailers across all industries; until now, gun purchases had been classified under “miscellaneous retail stores” or “sporting goods stores.”
Conspiracy theories sometimes have at least a thread of truth in them, which is what makes them valid to some on the far right.
One of those theories is that the federal government is not on their side. Concern has been raised in conservative circles about the hiring of 87,000 new IRS agents as just one example. Trust in the IRS has been in decline for many years, ever since President Richard Nixon used the government as a weapon against his political enemies and Lois Lerner during the Obama administration denied tax-exempt status to many conservative political and religious organizations.
This is a truly strange story that I was reading this morning at PJ Media. It turns out that the federal government is currently stockpiling massive amounts of ammunition and weapons. For some departments like the FBI, CIA, or Homeland Security, that kind of makes sense. But it’s not limited to just federal agencies whose primary focus is law enforcement. It turns out that the IRS has enough guns and ammo to launch a war. The numbers are rather staggering. They now have more than two thousand of their own law enforcement agents with thousands of weapons and more than five million rounds of ammunition. Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida has introduced a bill that would place a moratorium on these IRS purchases until we can see what’s going on.
It all started inconspicuously enough, 15 years ago, in late July of 2007:
With that 12 seconds of black powder peacemaking was launched a quiet, understated YouTube media juggernaut, less flashy than many of the bigger players but nevertheless a stalwart, dependable, gun-firing machine of reliability: Hickok45 has been firing every gun he can get his hands on since then.
I watched the AR-15 subsonic ammo video last night!
Team Biden’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) spent some $700,000 on firearm ammunition between March 1 and June 1, Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz said.
The IRS’s ammunition acquisition is “bizarre,” Gaetz told Breitbart News.
On a rainbow-coloured picnic table at what is usually a youth summer camp, a beaver carcass lies splayed across a garbage bag, a circle of blue-gloved women looking on.
As Christy Arsenault begins carefully cutting through a layer of muscle just below the beaver’s sternum and across its belly, to reveal its organs, game care instructor Nina Armitage provides guidance and tells the group that these skills can be applied to most other game, such as deer.
“You’ll see that the organs are attached to the spine,” Ms. Armitage tells the group. “If you were field dressing, you would hold your animal on a hill, belly side facing down. If you gently slide [your knife] against the spine, everything will naturally fall out.”
Go incognito.
The national debate around firearms has changed dramatically since Sandy Hook massacre – but so has the demographic of those buying them
Kristen Franke’s “Packin’ Neat” stall was a surprise hit at the National Rifle Association’s usually chest-thumping annual convention.
The women who lined up to enquire after Mrs Franke’s pink leather holsters and leopard-print handbags – designed specifically to conceal handguns – suggested a swift trade.
“I told my husband when we married that ours wouldn’t be a gun household, but that all changed when I became a victim of a crime,” Mrs Franke told The Telegraph of what gave her the inspiration for her bespoke family-run Florida company.
Armed female bystander kills man firing at party in West Virginia
A US woman has fatally shot a man who opened fire on a crowd of people with a semi-automatic rifle in Charleston, West Virginia.
Dennis Butler, a 37-year-old with an extensive criminal history, was killed after he targeted a group of around 40 people attending a birthday party.
Police spokesman Tony Hazelett said the woman’s quick reaction saved lives and may have prevented a mass shooting.
