by Bill Brassard

Fresh off primary victories in three states, presidential candidate Rick Santorum demonstrated his strong support for the individual right to keep and bear arms by visiting H&H Shooting Sports Complex in Oklahoma City en route to a rally today.

H&H is a NSSF Five Star member range owned by Miles and Jayne Hall.

The Santorum rally originally was scheduled to be held at H&H, but a surge of requests to attend the event forced a change to the Magnuson Hotel and Convention Center, where a crowd estimated at close to 2,000 gathered. The candidate delivered a speech that focused largely on energy, reported News On 6.

During his pre-rally visit at H&H, Santorum said, "I wish we could have had it here, this would have been perfect."

He added, "I am very impressed. It is easy to see why gun ownership is so strong here, and I stand tall with the Second Amendment."

Said Miles Hall, founder and president of H&H, "It was a great honor to show a small but important part of the shooting industry to one of our presidential hopefuls."

by Chad D. Baus

TheDaily.com reported recently that justifiable homicide in the City of Detroit shot up 79 percent in 2011 from the previous year, as citizens in the long-suffering city armed themselves and took matters into their own hands.

According to the article, the local rate of self-defense killings now stands 2,200 percent above the national average. Residents, unable to rely on a dwindling police force to keep them safe, are fighting back against the criminal scourge on their own. And The Daily says they're offering no apologies.

From the article:

"We got to have a little Old West up here in Detroit. That's what it's gonna take," Detroit resident Julia Brown told The Daily.

The last time Brown, 73, called the Detroit police, they didn't show up until the next day. So she applied for a permit to carry a handgun and says she's prepared to use it against the young thugs who have taken over her neighborhood, burglarizing entire blocks, opening fire at will and terrorizing the elderly with impunity.

"I don't intend to be one of their victims," said Brown, who has lived in Detroit since the late 1950s. "I'm planning on taking one out."

How it got this bad in Detroit has become a point of national discussion. Violent crime settled into the city's bones decades ago, but recently, as the numbers of police officers have plummeted and police response times have remained distressingly high, citizens have taken to dealing with things themselves.

The article goes on to say that in Detroit, a city of about 700,000 people, the number of cops has steadily fallen, from about 5,000 a decade ago to fewer than 3,000 today. Detroit homicides — the second-highest per capita in the country last year, according to the FBI — rose by 10 percent in 2011 to 344 people.

According to the latest data available to The daily, the average police response time for priority calls in the city is 24 minutes. In comparable cities across the country, it is well under 10 minutes.