Editor's Note: Today's feature is reproduced with permission from http://www.shellypalmer.com/2013/05/3d-printing-is-way-scarier-than-plas.... We might not agree with Shelly's characterization of printing guns as the "dark side of the technology" but we agree wholeheartedly with his description and assessment on the future of 3D printing.

by Shelly Palmer

Ever the publicity hound, Sen. Chuck Schumer, who obviously has no idea what additive manufacturing actually is, came out big and strong against "stomach-churning" 3D printed plastic guns last week.

"Everyone's seen the movie 'In The Line of Fire,' where one of the great bad guys, [played by] John Malkovich, labored at making a gun out of plastic and wood so it could get through metal detectors and he could assassinate the president..." Senator Schumer went on to say, "But that was only a movie, and just this week, it has become reality. We're facing a situation where anyone -- a felon, a terrorist -- can open a gun factory in their garage and the weapons they make will be undetectable. It's stomach-churning."

by Jeff Knox

That demented, hate-filled terrorists could build bombs and detonate them in a crowded public place should not have come as news to anyone. That's what terrorists have been doing around the world for decades - centuries. That it could be done in the U.S. by people we had welcomed with open arms, should also have been no surprise. Islamist extremists have been promising, and perpetrating attacks in the US since the 1970s. Other extremists, from anarchists, to White supremacists, to Puerto Rican separatists, to anti-abortion activists, to radical leftists have perpetrated acts of terror on our soil since the foundation of the republic. Indeed, American revolutionaries of the 1700s were considered terrorists by the British. The use of violence as a means of advancing a social or political goal is as old as society itself. How it is remembered generally depends on who wins and is around to write the history. Nonetheless acts of terror, particularly when perpetrated against civilians, generally backfire and engender hate and loathing for the assailant’s cause rather than sparking the desired changes in policy.

by Chad D. Baus and Jim Irvine

This week, an Associated Press article by Julie Carr Smyth, entitled "Ohio's state school board urged not to arm teachers," hit the wires and shot around the state and across the country.

The article is making waves because, according to Carr Smyth, Attorney General Mike DeWine made comments at a State Board of Education meeting that go against his previously-expressed support for arming employees in school buildings to stop an armed killer inside a building.

Other officials are quoted painting a picture of unified opposition to armed persons in our schools, both in the original AP article, and also in a follow-up article published by the Columbus Dispatch, entitled "State public-safety chief rejects arming teachers."

After investigating the assertions and quotes presented in these articles, we can report that the truth is a far different story.

Perhaps the true goal of these articles was exposed in Joe Vardon's opening sentence in the Dispatch story, when he suggested that the quotes contained in the articles might succeed in "...blunting any momentum behind proposals to arm teachers." Many school boards are already moving ahead with armed protection, and it seems some are desperate to derail this progress.

Consider again the AP headline, "Ohio's state school board urged not to arm teachers," and consider also how DeWine's comments are being spun by liberal Ohio blog site "Plunderbund" in it's coverage of this article: "DeWine changes his mind on arming teachers."

But is either headline correctly describing DeWine's comments?

Not according to DeWine's office, and not according to a comparison of his comments on Tuesday to those made last December immediately following the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary.

NEWTOWN, Conn. -- The National Shooting Sports Foundation® has launched its annual nationwide offer to schools nationwide to receive--free of charge--educational videos that teach children about firearm safety and wildlife conservation.

NSSF, the trade association for the firearms, ammunition, hunting and shooting sports industry, has been a leader in firearm safety and conservation education for decades.

The firearm safety videos teach students how to react if they should encounter a firearm in an unsupervised situation. The conservation titles educate students on how wildlife and wild lands are protected, and how hunters support this effort with contributions amounting to more than $1 billion annually.

NSSF believes all teachers and their students, whether in public, private or home schools, can benefit from the important messages in the videos, which are contained on two DVDs. Both the Firearm Safety DVD and Conservation DVD can be ordered online. Each of the individual video titles can be previewed online.

by Chad D. Baus

State Representative Bob Hagan (D), who recently announced that his candidacy for U.S. Senate is grounded in his anger that Sen. Rob Portman (R) stood up for gun owners' constitutional rights in recent votes against gun control, has apparently figured out that support for gun control is his ticket to gaining media attention for his fledgling candidacy.

This week, Hagan introduced House Bill 160, a gun control bill that is getting Hagan the attention he craves from willing media outlets across the state.

From WFMJ (NBC Youngstown):

State Representative Bob Hagan wants Ohio to join other states which have enacted Domestic-Violence Gun Control Laws.

Hagan said on Monday that he is sponsoring legislation that would force any person named in a domestic violence protection order to surrender their firearms to law enforcement within 24 hours.

by C. D. Michel

Teaching Americans gun safety is like teaching politicians how to lie. It comes naturally.

Despite the National Rifle Association (NRA)’s high profile political activities, gun safety training and marksmanship comprise the overwhelming majority of its activities. Roughly 80% of its budget goes to these types of programs.

Gun control organizations, recognizing a way to rebuild themselves and fool the public into being less critical of their gun ban messages, have deceptively rebranded themselves as "gun safety" groups. In the process, they distort conventional notions of safety training and ignore that organizations like the NRA have been conducting actual gun safety classes since Reconstruction.

This is one of the gun ban lobby’s more modern and transparent political canards. While the disingenuous rebranding ploy insults true gun safety trainers, the gun ban lobby’s attempt at “safely” positioning also ignores one truly relevant trend; thanks to real and very common gun safety training programs, accidental gun deaths and injuries are at historic lows, and still falling.

As gun ownership rates climbed, accidents declined

Nationally, the gun ban lobby has steadily lost each of its arguments, and so the patience of most of the voting population. They lost the criminological argument thanks to reams of research gathered and posted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (a federal agency) and the National Academy of Sciences showing no connection between gun control laws and reductions in violent crime[GS1] . They lost the Constitutional argument when the Supreme Court certified, again, that the Second Amendment protected a fundamental individual right; just as the NRA, and constitutional scholars, had said all along. They lost the self-defense argument over the last two decades as 42 states voted to allow citizens to carry concealed firearms in public — and the dire predictions of Wild West shoot-outs in the streets didn't happen.

Exaggerating the risk of death in the home from guns is their last fear card. So they have turned the debate to “gun safety,” and mislabeled gun accidents as a disease.

Gun control advocates claim that firearms are inherently dangerous. Some go as far as to cite suspect research that insinuates (but, due to methodology mistakes, failed to prove) that the existence of guns in the home were contributory to deaths. But during the last few decades, private firearm ownership has steadily risen, while accidental firearm deaths have steadily dropped. The gun ban lobby;s claim that more gun control will improve safety runs counter to the data. That shows people are increasingly safe with firearms – even without the "benefit" of Vice President Joe Biden's advice.

Overall, from 1979 through 2009 (a conveniently round 30 year window for analysis), the accidental death rate from all types of firearms has fallen a whopping 80%! It has dropped from 0.9 deaths per 100,000 people to less than 0.2 in 2009. Meanwhile, the accidental death rate from guns has fallen vis-à-vis handgun ownership at a much faster rate. Refuting the gun ban lobby's claims is the fact that accidental deaths from firearms fell nearly 90% as a function of handgun ownership, dropping from four deaths for every 100,000 handguns in America to less than 0.5. This occurred despite the number of revolvers and pistols owned in private hands doubling in the same period.

Click here to read the entire article at CalGunLaws.com.

by Chad D. Baus

Last week I wrote about the intense media effort to force Sen. Rob Portman into changing his vote on gun control legislation in the Senate. I pointed out that journalists, gun ban extremists and uninformed or misled letter-to-the-editor writers continued to use a discredited statistic which claimed that 91% of people preferred that that gun control bill had passed, all in an effort to give the legislation a second chance. Finally, I invited the many people who were thankful for Sen. Portman's vote to respond with letters of their own.

The response has been overwhelming.

The following letters of support were published by the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Guns not the problem; it's lack of respect for human life

I very much appreciated Senator Portman's "no" vote on more gun control.

Recently, African American activists brought together by the Center for Urban Renewal and Education at the National Press Club discussed their support for the Second Amendment, recounted the history of the NRA as an organization that fought to ensure that freed slaves could defend themselves from the Ku Klux Klan, and argued against current attempts to pass gun control laws, observing that "gun control is about black people control."

Excerpts:

Full version:

Things haven't been very good for President Obama lately. [Last] week, Congress heard from witnesses concerning his administration's fatal failures related to the September 11, 2012, attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Not buying into the make-believe nonsense that Obama has improved America's standing among terrorists devoted to our destruction, jihadists recently attacked the Boston Marathon. The unemployment rate has decreased by only 0.4 percentage point since January.

And then there are the things that Obama really cares about. Perhaps symbolically, [last] week, Republican senators Bob Corker (Tenn.) and Saxby Chambliss (Ga.) defeated Obama and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) in a game of golf. Likewise, reporters have been suggesting that the defeat of Obama's gun control agenda in the Senate puts his political clout in as much doubt as his golf prowess.

Columbus Dispatch editorial cartoon, 5/8/13

Adding to the bad news for the Obama agenda, a report issued by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS-a component of the Justice Department) shows that firearm homicides in general, and violence at schools, have decreased substantially during the last two decades; the percentage of homicides committed with firearms has decreased; and only a tiny percentage of state prison inmates imprisoned for gun offenses obtain their guns from gun shows. As the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin characterizes it, the report is "wonderful news for the country and rotten data for anti-gun advocates."

To make matters worse for Obama, the story has been picked up by some heavy hitters in the national news media. In an article for U.S. News and NBCNews.com, veteran reporter Pete Williams points out that the BJS report shows that 40 percent of criminals get their guns from friends and family members, and another 37 percent get theirs from theft or other illegal sources. Lest gun control advocates accuse the BJS or Williams of having a pro-gun political agenda, Williams notes that "The report is strictly factual."

In his article for the Washington Post, Jerry Markon says that while "gun shows were central" to the recent debate in the U.S. Senate over expanding background checks to cover private firearm transactions, "Less than 1 percent of state prison inmates who possessed a gun when they committed their offense obtained the firearm at a gun show," according to the report. (To be precise, the figure reported by the BJS is 0.8 percent.)

On May 8, the U.S. Senate took up consideration of S. 601, the "Water Resources Development Act of 2013." During the debate, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) offered an amendment to extend the Right to Carry to lands administered by the Army Corps of Engineers.

The Corps manages over 11.7 million acres, including many recreational areas. In 2009, Congress passed legislation protecting the Right to Carry in national parks and wildlife refuges, but lands under Corps of Engineers management are not covered by that law.

With strong bipartisan support for the amendment, the final vote was 56-43. However, under the rules for consideration of the bill, 60 votes were required for passage.

On the same day, the House Veterans Affairs Committee voted to approve a provision to require a judge or magistrate to declare that a person who receives veterans' benefits is a danger to himself or to others, before the person can be prohibited from possessing or acquiring firearms.