Posts

Al Sharpton Targeted by Zombie Gun Product?

/in /by

“Poor Al he was a Sharp guy,” begins the description of a gun target firm’s newest “Life-Sized Tactical Mannequin Target.” With a dark skin tone and features that seem to resemble the civil rights figure and MSNBC cable news host Rev. Al Sharpton, the Zombie-looking gun target called “Al Zombie”comes with the disclaimer that “[a]ll Zombies Industries’ products represent fictitious characters and are works of fiction” and “[a]ny resemblance to actual persons (living or dead)” is “entirely coincidental.”

Was “Al Zombie” meant to resemble Rev. Sharpton?

“No,” said Nicholas J. Iannitti, Vice President and Director of Sales for ZMB Industries, LLC, by telephone from the firm’s headquarters in Poway, California. “If you look at our website you can see” our statement that all Zombie target characters are fictitious.

But Zombie Industries, on its Facebook page, attributes what seems like a fictitious quote to a a colleague of Sharp ton’s, who, like him, has criticized Zombie Industries for making a Zombie gun target that seems to resemble President Barack Obama, and that was briefly on display last month at a National Rifle Association convention.

“I don’t know,” said Vice President and Sales Director Nicholas Iannitti, when asked about what seems like a tongue-in-cheek product endorsement attributed to the progressive, nationally syndicated talk radio host Joe Madison on Zombie Industries’ Facebook page. “I wasn’t involved.”

In May Madison was on Sharpton’s MSNBC show PoliticsNation, where they both criticized the presence of “Rocky Zombie,” which they said resembled President Obama, at an NRA convention.

Rev. Sharpton called the target a “stunning, offensive display from the far right,” dubbing it the “Right-Wing Horror Picture Show.” Madison on the same program said, “They are a sorry bunch of people that I can’ t use words for, but I do take offense and I think anyone else, black, white or any other color, would take offense at this.”

Little more than one month later, ZMB Industries decided to apparently make use of the controversy. Now the firm has added what seems to be a mocking quote attributed to Madison on itsFacebook page boasting of another new Zombie mannequin target.

“New Model: Gun Control Lobbyist,” reads the main image on Zombie Industries’ Facebook page. “Lower than a snakes Belly!” reads what seems like a product endorsement on the same page, attributed to “Joe Madison, Radio Host describing Zombie.”

Madison, who now has a program on Sirius XM, could not be reached for comment.

To finish reading the article, please click here.

Was that gun used in a crime? Now you can find out

/in /by

On Sunday in New Orleans, Laderika Smith, 28, returned from the store to find her five-year-old daughter bloodied and lying on the bedroom floor with a gunshot wound to her head. The girl soon died. Her mother has been charged with Relative Cruelty to a Juvenile. She has not yet entered a plea.

“It is all too common,” Doctor Gary A. Smith, president of the Child Injury Prevention Alliance, told MSNBC. “Children are curious. They watch TV cartoons and a make-believe world,” he added. When kids see guns, “they don’t recognize the danger.”

Smith’s daughter fatally shot herself with a .38 revolver that her mother kept in the home, as Smith admitted to New Orleans police. For decades, a .38 revolver was the firearm most commonly used in crimes, according to ATF studies including a July 2000 report, which is the last time that the ATF issued any comprehensive report. Instead, for more than 12 years– since the first inauguration of President George W. Bush in 2001–the ATF has provided little or no such national data to the public.

“Why was it stopped for over 10 years?” ATF Acting Deputy Chief of Public Affairs Donna Sellers told MSNBC. “I cannot really answer why a decision was made to stop publishing that information,” she added. “The decision was made this year to increase transparency and provide the public with more thorough information on crime guns.”

On June 19, the ATF published its findings for Firearms Trace Data for 2012. Data for previous years posted on the ATF website’s statistics page include no more than very general information for each state along with the District of Columbia and U.S. Virgin Islands, making in difficult to discern national trends of the types of firearms used in crimes, or where they were bought.

The data for 2012 includes nationally aggregated summaries including “Firearms Types” and “Top Calibers” of weapons “Recovered and Traced” in crimes, along with data on where the weapons used in crimes were purchased and where they ended up, and how long they have been in circulation.

“Tracing crime guns provides critical information that assists domestic and international law enforcement,” Sellers told MSNBC.

To finish reading the article, please click here.

Six months after Sandy Hook, grassroot groups and the gun debate

/in /by

After the horror of the Newtown shooting, gun reform advocates expected to finally see a change. Yet Friday marks the six-month anniversary of the tragedy at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and, largely due to the efforts of the gun lobby, none of the nation’s federal gun laws have changed.

“The NRA and special interests have been schoolyard bullies,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut told reporters after a press conference Thursday with Newtown family members in the Capitol. “We lost the first vote, but we’re going to win the last vote.”

Groups on both sides of the debate including Mayors Against Illegal Guns and the National Rifle Association have already begun spending money on attack ads against senators who did not vote as the groups’ wished this spring. But advocates on both sides seem to agree that the debate will be decided not by money but by the ability to mobilize grassroots support and voters.

“[A] real grassroots gun control movement? It doesn’t exist, and has never existed,” recentlynoted Sebastian, a pen name for a popular Second Amendment activist and blogger in Pennsylvania read by activists on both sides. The blogger has dismissed well-financed gun reform efforts as “astroturf,” as opposed to real grassroots support, deriding Mayor Bloomberg as “Astroturf-in-Chief.”

“Sebastian’s right about the past,” Mark Glaze, the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, told MSNBC.com. “For a generation, the NRA had three advantages,” he added. The gun lobby has long enjoyed a strong grassroots base, members who make gun rights a priority when they vote,  and a budget of up to $250 million a year to strengthen their clout.

Please finish reading the article here.

For NRA’s new president, not his father’s gun club

/2 Comments/in /by

James W. Porter II [CORRECTION: The original article incorrectly reported James W. Porter, Jr. Mr. Porter was named after his uncle, not his father.] assumed the unpaid, but politically important post of president of the National Rifle Association Monday. While the role puts the Birmingham, Ala., attorney for the first time on a national stage, he is hardly an unknown within the gun lobby.

Nearly 20 years ago, I observed Jim Porter in action behind closed doors at an NRA board meeting in Minneapolis. He was committed, boasting to colleagues that “when you open my veins, NRA blood runs out.”

But he was also a “traditionalist” then, on the opposite side of the gun lobby’s more radical rising stars. He had little to prove: his credibility was assured by his legacy status as the son of Irvine C. Porter, who served as NRA president from 1959 to 1960.

Under his father’s leadership, the NRA was still trying to define its national role. Coming out of the violent tumult of the 1960s, NRA leaders voiced support for more gun control, not less.

“The National Rifle Association has been in support of workable, enforceable gun control legislation since its very inception in 1871,” the NRA’s then-paid Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, ret. Gen. Franklin L. Orth, wrote in American Rifleman magazine in 1968.

Porter and the NRA have been on a radical journey ever since.

CORRECTION: Original story also identified the late Neal Knox as an Oklahoman National Guardsman. Mr. Knox was born in Oklahoma, and later served in the Texas National Guard.

Please read the full story here: http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/05/06/for-nras-new-president-not-his-fathers-gun-club/

Fresh off victory, NRA looks toward 2014

/in /by

Fresh from its biggest legislative victory in years, the gun lobby is gearing up for its next project: backing their congressional champions in the 2014 midterm elections. But this time the landscape will be different. At least one, if not more, gun reform groups are promising to spend millions of dollars challenging those incumbents who voted against gun control.

Both sides in the nation’s debate over gun policies are already looking to raise money to spend in 2014, in what promises to be an unprecedented struggle. The National Rifle Association morphed into the gun lobby only in the late 1970s when the group abandoned its more than a century long practice of backing gun control measures. Today’s NRA leaders are already preparing their supporters for the fight.

To finish reading the story, click here.

 

How the gun lobby has already blocked Boston’s bombing investigators

/in /by

One avenue of investigation is already closed off to forensic officials working the Boston Marathon bombing case due to efforts dating back decades by the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers.

The FBI said Tuesday that gunpowder, along with pieces of metal and ball bearings, were packed into at least one pressure cooker and another device to make the crude bombs that killed three people—including an 8-year-old boy—and wounded more than 170 more during the Boston Marathon Monday.

But a crucial piece of evidence called a taggant that could be used to trace the gunpowder used in the bombs to a buyer at a point of sale is not available to investigators.

“If you had a good taggant this would be a good thing for this kind of crime. It could help identify the point of manufacturer, and chain of custody,” Bob Morhard, an explosives consultant and chief executive officer of  Zukovich, Morhard & Wade, LLC., in Pennsylvania, who has traced explosives and detonators in use in the United States and Saudi Arabia, told MSNBC.com. “The problem is nobody wants to know what the material is.”

Please  continue reading the article at MSNBC here.

Gun lobby helps block US from signing UN arms treaty

/1 Comment/in /by

Senators passed an amendment to block the Obama administration from signing any future U.N. Arms Trade Treaty in a 53-to-46 vote early Saturday morning before dawn. The measure, introduced by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., was one of dozens passed as part of an all-night “vote-a-rama” that led to the first national economic budget passed by the Senate in four years.

The gun lobby-backed Inhofe amendment requires the executive branch “to uphold Second Amendment rights and prevent the United States from entering into the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.”

To finish reading the story, please click on the link below:

http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/03/25/gun-lobby-helps-block-us-from-signing-un-arms-treaty/