Should Malls Have To Allow Guns?

The Somali terrorist group Al-Shabbab released a video on Sunday calling on Western Muslims to launch a homegrown attack on the Mall of America in Minnesota.

This has led local gun owners and activists to call on the Mall to repeal its longstanding gun ban. Minnesota legislator Tony Cornish is now drafting a law to bill that would force the mall to allow customers to carry in public areas of the mall.

"The situation with the Mall of America is completely ridiculous. The complete opposite of what they should be doing,” he said. “If we’re threatened with an attack of any type, the last thing you ever want to do is disarm citizens.”

Cornish is completely right about the stupidity of the mall’s gun ban -- researchers like John Lott have shown that gun free zones do nothing but attract killers and murderers.

But he is wrong to use government power to force the mall the change its policy.

Private property owners have the right to decide what items people bring on their property, no matter how wrongheaded. The Constitution and the Second Amendment are there to limit the power of the government, not there to give the government power over the individual.

Instead of trying to get a law passed, Minnesota gun owners should take an approach that is not only more constitutional but also more effective – boycott the mall until they come to their senses.

Obama Issues Executive Order Banning .223-Caliber Ammo

President Obama is once again using an executive order to bypass Congressional authority and the will of the American people. This time the objective is backdoor gun control.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives recently proposed banning the manufacture, sale or importation of .223-caliber ammunition, commonly used in the AR-15 and other general-purpose rifles. It has also recently been used in several kinds of handguns.

Obama is trying to justify the proposal by arguing that the M855 ball, the most widely used .233-caliber round, is “armor-piercing” and cannot be used in handguns, per the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended by Congress in 1986. He is also claiming that the ammunition in the AR-15 and similar rifles puts the lives of police officers at risk.

This logic is faulty. Because it has a traditional lead core with a steel tip, the M855 ball was originally exempted from the “armor-piercing” ammunition category it and has long been categorized as sporting ammunition.

Reclassifying the M855 will actually threaten more lives instead of saving them. Bob Owens at Bearing Arms smartly notes that banning the M855 would mean a return to the full-metal-jacketed 55-grain M193 round that NATO wanted to get away from in the 1970s because it was too “inhumane” for use against Soviet troops.

This executive order has no practical value whatsoever. It is nothing more than a silly attempt by Obama to flex his muscles. Since he failed to pass gun-control legislation through legal means, he has decided to abuse his office and engage in backdoor maneuvers to get his way.

European Police Admit That Gun Control Isn’t Working

European police are finally admitting that gun control laws do nothing to stop violent terrorist attacks and the murder of innocent civilians.

A recent report by Time Magazine proved that despite the strict gun regulations in place throughout most of Europe, the black market for arms is thriving more than ever.

Europol Chief of Staff Brian Donald told Time that were two “large seizures” of assault weapons in Europe over the past two weeks, including “several vanloads of 30 or 40 weapons at the time” with “AK-47s, Scorpions, handguns and semiautomatic rifles.”

Donald also mentioned a new training exercise for young police recruits: buy a Kalashnikov rifle or a similar weapon off the street.

“One came back two hours later with an AK-47,” Donald said. “He bought it for €1,000.”

While terrorists like ones that attacked Charlie Hebdo are busy arming themselves to the teeth, Europeans who choose to follow the law cannot purchase a self-defense weapon without passing a number of hurdles. Even police rarely carry anything bigger than a pistol.

This makes European countries a ripe target for homegrown terrorists like the Charlie Hebdo attackers and psychopaths like Anders Breivik, who killed nearly 100 people in Norway in 2011.

As Donald Trump recently said: “If the people so violently shot down in Paris had guns, at least they would have had a fighting chance… Remember, when guns are outlawed, only the outlaws will have guns!”