Shortly before his death while covering the Spanish Civil War, the French journalist Louis Delapree complained that his reports from the front were being censored. In his last despatch for Paris Soir before his plane was shot down, Delapree ended acidly with the observation that 'the massacre of a hundred Spanish children is less interesting than a sigh from Mrs Simpson'. More than a dozen widows, their children and their extended families in Northern Ireland can be... (GunPolicy.org)

As the political debate over the federal government's controversial gun registry continues to rage, Canadian cops on the beat say they are divided over whether the new system will help them fight crime. Many officers who've been discussing the issue over their daily coffee believe the registry is already a bust. "It just seems like it's been an exercise in futility," Edmonton police Sgt. Patrick Tracy says of the system, which became operational on Jan. 1. "We already... (GunPolicy.org)

Government plans for a crackdown on gun crime are "simplistic" and "ill-judged" according to senior figures in the Scottish legal establishment. A former high court judge, former Lord Advocate and the Faculty of Advocates have criticised plans to give automatic five-year jail terms to people who are in illegal possession of firearms. The proposals, announced in the wake of the New Year shooting of two Birmingham teenagers, have also been condemned as a knee-jerk... (GunPolicy.org)

Intent on dispelling stereotypes of "ultra-right-wing, angry old white guys," gun enthusiasts gathered in Dartmouth Saturday to speak out against the federal firearms registry. "We're not here to get arrested," host Brian Hurlburt told the audience of about 40 people gathered at Farrell Hall. "But a number of us here may be criminals — at least the Liberal government thinks we are." Ottawa's controversial Firearms Act has drawn a shooting gallery full of criticism... (GunPolicy.org)

John Evers owns almost 50 guns, and he wants you to know that he's not a gunslinging hick who deals drugs and goes on murderous rampages. Like many Canadian gun owners, he says the Chretien government's embattled firearms registry has stereotyped him as a reckless criminal. "If people would talk to a gun owner, (they would) realize that we are not the guy on the street selling drugs, we are not the mass murderer," Evers said during a gun-lovers rally yesterday at... (GunPolicy.org)

Last Friday, the Home Office hosted a summit meeting the purpose of which was to "do something" about the increasingly serious problem of guns on our streets. Gun crime was up by more than a third last year. That is not a short-term blip. Over the past 50 years, the long-term trend has been relentlessly upwards. In the whole of 1954, there were four robberies in London in which guns were used. Today, four armed robberies take place in London every day. So the... (GunPolicy.org)

Lisa Miner had just let her dogs out one afternoon when she noticed a stranger inside her enclosed front porch. "I'm not afraid of you. I'm going to hurt you," the young man told her, according to Miner. Miner, who is 38, grabbed her handgun from a nearby television, slipped a bullet into the chamber and told him to leave. "He looked at me and he looked at the gun and I shot him," Miner recalled last week. Miner, whose intruder survived the neck wound last March and... (GunPolicy.org)

The numbers don't lie. Last year in Virginia, instant background checks stopped 2,365 firearms from getting into the wrong hands. Of that total, three of four sales were halted because the buyers had a history of serious crime or wife beating, according to records of the Virginia State Police. Instant background checks have made it harder for criminals to menace Virginians. But not yet hard enough. With one big exception, the days are gone when criminals could buy as... (GunPolicy.org)

Thousands of schoolchildren in cities across Britain are to be given anti-gun lessons and be taught about the problems of gang culture as the Government struggles to contain the spiralling problem of armed crime among the young. As Home Secretary David Blunkett admitted that people were becoming more scared of crime, Government officials revealed that the lessons will be introduced as part of the attempted crackdown on gun culture which saw the death of two teenage... (GunPolicy.org)

WASHINGTON — A government plan to move the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to the Department of Justice has both sides of the gun debate worried. Some gun owners, already skeptical of the Bush administration's efforts to monitor the activity of citizens, fear that the change could increase surveillance and make big government even bigger. Meanwhile, proponents of gun control are concerned that Attorney General John Ashcroft's support of gun rights will... (GunPolicy.org)

When the federal government ordered all Canadians to register their handguns, shotguns and rifles, people in Calgary formed long lines at the police station in their eagerness to comply. No one staged demonstrations. No one wrote letters to the editor in protest. Sounds like fiction, but that's what happened in the summer of 1940 when wartime regulations decreed that all firearms in the country should be registered. Though there appeared to be little opposition to... (GunPolicy.org)