...is now available!

Thanks JP!

...is now available!!

(See "NRA Instructor Discounts" link above in header bar)
Thank you to Del for giving us the first one for 2014!

Despite the fact that we have the President, Biden, and countless others parading on TV talking about the importance of passing NEW gun crime legislation it appears that in 2013 we have almost the LOWEST number of gun crime prosecutions since 2005! In fact, there is only 1 year that is lower than 2013. There can only be one reason for this: the lack of "universal background checks" ... "assault weapons"? ... "hicapacity magazines"? Oh wait. That doesn't make sense!

In fact, what is seemingly insane is the logic that making ADDITIONAL gun laws will somehow make any difference when we don't even enforce the ones that we currently have.

Anyway, here is the article: LINK: http://news.yahoo.com/federal-gun-prosecutions-decline-despite-obama-executive-action-233021126.html

I reproduce it here before it gets rewritten/disappears like Biden's comments that Syria isn't a threat:

Federal gun charges decline despite Obama executive action
Liz Goodwin, Yahoo News
By Liz Goodwin, Yahoo News December 3, 2013 9:23 AM

Gun prosecutions [click pic to enlarge]

Federal gun prosecutions since 2005

More than a year after the Sandy Hook school shooting, President Obama’s directive to amp up prosecutions of federal gun laws hasn’t made much difference in how many people are charged with gun crimes.

U.S. attorneys that prosecute such cases charged 11,674 people with breaking federal gun laws in the fiscal year that ended in September, compared to 11,728 people the year before.

“The federal gun charge numbers are not an accurate reflection of the Department's efforts to investigate and prosecute gun violence,” said Allison Price, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, in a statement. “The fact that we may not prosecute a gun case in federal court does not mean the case is not prosecuted at all.”

Many gun cases are handled at the state and local level, she added. "Our priorities are to keep our kids safe, help prevent mass shootings, and reduce the epidemic of gun violence in this country,” Price said.

Obama’s directive was one of 23 executive actions on gun violence he released last January, a month after the mass shooting at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School that left 20 children dead. The president’s legislative efforts to limit ammunition magazine sizes and expand background checks to cover more gun sales died in the Senate a few months later.

The Justice Department says it has taken other steps to increase firearms enforcement, including forming a task force that advises federal prosecutors on how to reduce gun violence, and creating a database to allow law enforcement to trace weapons across jurisdictions.

But the figures show how ineffectual the president’s executive action was, at least in the short term, in ginning up prosecutions. Without new legislation or increased resources, U.S. attorneys are unlikely to prosecute more gun crimes, experts say.

The National Rifle Association and some Republican lawmakers have argued that the Justice Department does not adequately enforce gun laws that are already on the books. Even Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, formerly Obama’s chief of staff, said in October that the feds have done a “horrible” job of prosecuting gun crimes in Chicago .

Obama’s directive to the Justice Department to “maximize enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime” was supposed to be an answer to those critics.

“It’s been deplorable and woeful, the lack of prosecutions for criminals who break gun laws,” Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the NRA, told Yahoo News.

The powerful gun group helped defeat a bill to expand background checks in April in part by arguing that the Obama administration rarely prosecutes people who claim they are eligible to buy a weapon and then are found by the National Instant Crime Background Check System (NICS) to be felons or otherwise disqualified. In 2010, the Feds prosecuted only 44 people who tried to illegally purchase a weapon — less than 1 percent of all people who failed their background checks. The department has instead focused on prosecuting people who violate more serious federal gun laws.

The Justice Department would not say whether that number has increased since 2010. The department has focused on “complex multi-defendant cases” since 2008, Price said.

Over 10 years, NICS checked 100 million gun purchases, and declined people 700,000 times for being felons or having another disqualifying factor on their records. Increasing prosecutions of those people is a rare patch of common ground between the NRA and gun control groups.

“It’s a complicated problem, and frankly, we’re the ones who first raised it,” said Mark Glaze, the president of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a gun control group backed by Michael Bloomberg. “Out of tens of thousands of people, only a relative handful are prosecuted.”

Glaze said many of these cases are difficult to prosecute because U.S. attorneys already are overworked, and using them to charge people with a “paperwork violation” can seem wasteful. Glaze wants 50 U.S. attorneys added to prosecute people who didn’t pass background checks but still tried to buy guns.

The organization also has suggested that the Justice Department conduct a study of a random sample of the 700,000 illegal sales that were declined to try to figure out if any factors predict which buyers commit crimes in the future. That way, U.S. attorneys could focus on prosecuting cases that showed those risk factors.

But others have argued that prosecuting people for failing their background checks is a waste of time in a legal landscape littered with gun traffickers and other more serious offenders. Some buyers are declined because they didn’t realize something on their record disqualified them from purchasing a weapon.

“The reason the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] doesn’t make it a high priority to target people who attempt to buy a gun from the gun dealer is they spend the majority of their time targeting violent offenders who use guns illegally,” said Mike Bouchard, the former assistant director for field operations of the ATF. “By taking that person and arresting them, it has little to no impact on violent crime.”

This prioritization of serious offenses predates Obama: The Justice Department under President George W. Bush also prosecuted well under 1 percent of people who attempted to buy a weapon and were declined.

Usually the news articles about active shooter situations or the school "mass slayings" (their words) are useless. In fact, they are filled with rhetoric that equates to gibberish. I have yet to have anyone explain to me how a "universal background check" would have stopped the Newtown Shooting. Forget the fact that such a requirement is volunatary and unenforceable. Or better yet explain to me how an "assault weapons ban" in state which already had one would have? But, I digress. Here is an article from Y! that makes good sense and is well written! I reproduce it here, before it disappears or is changed into something incoherent. LINK: http://news.yahoo.com/spike-in-mass-shootings-creates-demand-for-different-police-approach-132625638.html

I have bolded some of the points that I think are significant. Think about it. Police CAN'T get there fast enough. It is up to you to stop the attacker by any means necessary. Yes, you could try to stop them with a folding chair or fire extinguisher. A pistol would be better (assuming you can't have your rifle).

Article appears below in entirety:

 Spike in mass shootings creates demand for different police approach

The school in Newtown. The Sikh temple in Wisconsin. The movie theater in Aurora. America’s angst over shootings in public places is growing, and for good reason.

According to a study obtained by Yahoo News, rampages like the Washington Navy Yard and Los Angeles airport shootings have tripled in recent years.

The report, written by the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center at Texas State University, will be published next week in the “FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin,” a training publication for criminal justice professionals.

Researchers considered only active shootings in public settings where the primary motive appeared to be mass murder and at least one of the victims was unrelated to the suspect. Shootings during crimes such as bank robberies, drug deals, and gang violence were excluded.

“The rate at which these events occurred went from approximately one event every other month between 2000 and 2008 (5 per year) to more than one a month between 2009 and 2012 (almost 16 per year),” the researchers wrote. “Our tracking also indicates that this increased rate has continued into 2013.”

Other key findings from the 110 active-shooter attacks indentified by researchers:

Shootings most often take place at businesses (40 percent), followed by schools (29 percent), outdoors (19 percent) and other places (12 percent).

The median number of people shot is five. The median number killed is two.

Shooters are 94 percent male. The youngest was 13 and the oldest 88.

They often use handguns (59 percent), followed by rifles (26 percent), shotguns (8 percent) and unknown weapons (7 percent). In 33 percent of the cases, the gunman used multiple weapons. In 7 percent of the shootings the gunman wore body armor.

The average median time for police to respond to these incidents (where data was available) is three minutes.

Despite the hurried police response time, the study found that almost half of the active shootings are over before officers arrive.

“This points to the phenomenal speed with which these events occur,” the researchers wrote.

Changing police protocols

The FBI formed a team to study active shootings after the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Among other initiatives, the agency has adopted an active-shooter training, which was developed at Texas State University after the 1999 Columbine High School killings in Colorado. The program’s core course prepares first responders to isolate, distract and stop active shooters as fast as possible.

According to the new study, patrol officers, who are usually the first on the scene, had to use force to stop the gunman in nearly a third of the attacks.

“These events unfold very quickly,” said Katherine Schweit, a special agent who heads the FBI’s active shooter team. “We know that if they go to the threat, they save lives.”

The training is a major shift in police protocol. Since the 1970s, many departments conditioned street cops to contain the scene and wait for more skilled tactical officers to arrive.

“You were supposed to call the SWAT team to come handle the problem,” Terry Nichols, a former police officer now an assistant director at ALERRT, told Yahoo News.

That was the accepted strategy in 1999 when two teenagers killed 12 students and a teacher at Columbine. The shooters took only 16 minutes to kill 13 people and wound 21 others. But it took three hours and 14 minutes to find the gunmen, who had committed suicide. The SWAT team’s methodical response was later criticized as being too slow.

“Everything has changed. It’s now, get in there and go,” Nichols said. “Time is absolutely of the essence.”

The new approach proved vital on Dec. 13, 2013, when a heavily armed student carrying a shotgun, machete and three Molotov cocktails stormed into Arapahoe High School in suburban Denver. Police said the gunman, who was looking to harm his debate coach, shot a fellow student but then committed suicide when he realized a deputy assigned to the school and a security guard were closing in.

Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said the suspect stopped firing on others and turned his weapon on himself 80 seconds after entering the school.

"We believe that the response from the school resource officer and from the unarmed school security officer was absolutely critical to the fact we did not have additional injury and or death," Robinson told reporters.

In addition to tactical maneuvers for swiftly ending the threat, the ALERRT program also teaches police medical skills like how to apply a tourniquet.

“Law enforcement officers must be trained to provide point of injury care, quickly interface with EMS and fire and remove wounded victims to high levels of care,” Nichols said.

Sandy Hook ‘turned the tables’

The gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary committed suicide about a minute before officers reached him, but not before killing 20 first-graders and six adult staffers.

“It just turned the tables for everybody,” said Adam Madsen, a veteran police officer in Roy, Utah. “It opened everyone’s eyes when little kids were attacked.”

Madsen said he knows of at least two dozen departments in northern Utah that are on the waitlist for the ALERRT training, which puts officers through lifelike scenarios with active shooters and mass casualties.

“Before Sandy Hook we had a waitlist of 25 to 30 agencies wanting the training,” Nichols said. “Now we run anywhere from 250 to 300. It’s been overwhelming.”

The course, which is offered to departments at no cost, is funded by grants from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the FBI and and the state of Texas. More than 100 FBI agents have also undergone advanced instruction so that they can help scale the course across the country.

“The faster and more we can do, the better,” Schweit said. “We feel it is a very urgent matter. Every day I get notices about potential active -hooter situations, it seems.”

What citizens can do

While many attackers commit suicide, the new study states potential victims stopped the attacker in 17 cases that ended before officers arrived.

“This tells us that citizens and bystanders have a very real and active role in stopping these events,” Nichols said. “If we can properly prepare and educate civilians, maybe we can get to where 90 percent are stopped by civilians long before the police arrive.”

The FBI has been busy promoting instructional videos and literature to educate the public on workplace and other scenarios.

“Run, hide and fight are your essential options in a shooting situation,” Schweit said. “The better prepared civilians are, the better they’ll be able to respond themselves.”