Yakima Herald-Republic Nov 12, 2009
Gun Show Loophole Sees Many Weapons Smuggled Into Mexico
"It's cash and carry and then it's gone in the wind," [ATF Agent Jessie] Summers said of gun shows. ...read the full article


Beaver County Times Nov 12, 2009
Aliquippa Considers ‘Lost or Stolen’ Ordinance
ALIQUIPPA -- Aliquippa Council is considering an ordinance making it illegal for city residents to fail to report lost or stolen firearms to the police. The law makes it a criminal offense to fail to report a lost or stolen gun within a certain time period after the discovery of the loss. Mayor Anthony Battalini, a member of Pennsylvania's Mayors Against Illegal Guns Coalition, pushed for the new ordinance not long after his counterpart in the Allegheny County borough of Munhall got a similar ordinance adopted there last month. "I asked Tom (Stoner, Aliquippa's city manager) to get a copy of their ...read the full article


Cleveland Plain Dealer Nov 12, 2009
Cleveland Officials Cheer Appellate Court's Ruling In Firearms Case; Gun-Rights Advocate Expects Reversal From Ohio Supreme Court
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The 8th Ohio District Court of Appeals has sided with Cleveland in the city's fight to enforce its local gun ordinances. In a ruling Thursday, the three-judge panel declared that a 2007 state law unconstitutionally restricted the city's powers to regulate firearms. The judges reversed a lower court's decision to uphold the law, which says that only federal and state codes can limit the right to bear arms. The ruling, if it stands, would be a significant victory for Cleveland and other municipalities that have battled to preserve self-governance rights, a concept known as home rule. The Ohio Supreme ...read the full article


ABC News Nov 11, 2009
Alleged Fort Hood Shooter Bought Gun, Despite Ongoing Terrorism Investigation
Sources tell ABC News that in August 2009, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan walked into the Guns Galore gun store in Killeen, Texas, and legally purchased the FN Herstal tactical pistol that authorities believe was used to massacre soldiers at Fort Hood. An FBI background check under the National Instant Background Check System was done when Hasan purchased the pistol -- but that information was never shared with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington, which was aware that Hasan had repeatedly contacted a radical imam suspected of having ties to al Qaeda. The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force ran down intelligence ...read the full article


New York Times Nov 10, 2009
At Fort Hood, Some Violence Is Too Familiar
FORT HOOD, Tex. -- Staff Sgt. Gilberto Mota, 35, and his wife, Diana, 30, an Army specialist, had returned to Fort Hood from Iraq last year when he used his gun to kill her, and then took his own life, the authorities say. In July, two members of the First Cavalry Division, also just back from the war with decorations for their service, were at a party when one killed the other. That same month, Staff Sgt. Justin Lee Garza, 28, under stress from two deployments, killed himself in a friend's apartment outside Fort Hood, four days after he was told ...read the full article


ABC News Nov 10, 2009
How Alleged Fort Hood Shooter Slipped Through The Cracks
The drift net of the U.S. intelligence system had detected the alleged Fort Hood gunman months before last week's shooting rampage. But the nature of his communications with an Al Qaeda-connected, Islamic scholar was non-threatening and did not warrant further investigation, according to officials briefed on the case. Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan came under scrutiny by officials beginning last year for communicating with Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been a scholar at a mosque Hasan attended when he lived in Virginia. The Virginia mosque where al-Awlaki taught had also been visited by 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Hani Hanjour. Officials determined that ...read the full article


Seattle Times Nov 10, 2009
Police: DNA From Officer's Slaying Matches Suspect
DNA found at the scene of the Oct. 22 firebombing of four police vehicles and recovered from the scene of the fatal shooting of a Seattle police officer matches that of suspect Christopher John Monfort, police said today. Police also said during a news conference that they have matched the ballistics from an assault rifle found in Monfort's apartment on Saturday with the bullets that killed Officer Timothy Brenton and wounded his partner Britt Sweeney on Halloween night. Montfort, who is in Harborview Medical Center recovering from gunshot wounds, is being held on investigation of aggravated first-degree murder and first-degree attempted murder. ...read the full article


Roanoke Times Nov 10, 2009
Fight To Expand Gun Rights Is Far From Over
This is a big week for the Virginia Tech chapter of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus. It's Defense Education Week, and the student group, which has 100 to 200 members, has organized a week's worth of seminars and gatherings in support of concealed carry on Virginia college campuses. Monday night's featured speaker was Philip Van Cleave, president of the pro-gun Virginia Citizens Defense League. Earlier Monday, I spoke to Ken Stanton, 32, a serious-sounding engineering graduate student and the vice president of the Virginia Tech chapter of the concealed carry group. Here's his argument in favor of guns on campus: "We've had a couple ...read the full article


Newsweek Magazine Nov 10, 2009
Critics Point To 'Terror Gap' In Gun-Control Laws
New details about the case of accused Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan is refocusing attention on what critics call a glaring "terror gap" in federal firearms laws that has allowed hundreds of suspected terrorists to purchase weapons in recent years. A General Accounting Office study last summer found 963 instances in which individuals on the FBI's terrorist watch lists sought to purchase guns between February 2004 and February 2009. In 90 percent of those cases, or 865 times, the terror suspect was permitted to buy the gun because. under the rules governing a federally mandated background check, they did not ...read the full article


Sydney Morning Herald Nov 9, 2009
America's Gun Outrage: 276 People Killed Or Wounded A Day
By now you will have heard of Major Nidal Malak Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who shot 13 of his colleagues dead and wounded 31 inside the army's largest base, Fort Hood in Texas, last Thursday. Taryale Petter, John Herman, Jason Rodriques and Marcus Gonzalez are names you may not know. Taryale was only 15 years old. Early on Friday morning, aboard his Philadelphia school bus, he pulled a handgun from his bag and shot another child. Hermann, a Minnesota cop, on Tuesday shot dead a man who ran over a plastic traffic cone in a car park. On Friday morning, Rodriquez, 40, ...read the full article