I get it. Someone bent on mass murder who has only a 10-round magazine or revolvers at his disposal probably is not going to abandon his plan and instead try to talk his problems out. But we might be able to take the “mass” out of “mass shooting,” or at least make the perpetrator’s job a bit harder.

To guarantee that there would never be another Tucson or Sandy Hook, we would probably have to make it a capital offense to so much as look at a gun. And that would create serious 2nd Amendment, 8th Amendment and logistical problems.

So what’s the alternative? Bring back the assault weapons ban, and bring it back with some teeth this time. Ban the manufacture, importation, sale, transfer and possession of both assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Don’t let people who already have them keep them. Don’t let ones that have already been manufactured stay on the market. I don’t care whether it’s called gun control or a gun ban. I’m for it.

I say all of this as a gun owner. I say it as a conservative who was appointed to the federal bench by a Republican president. I say it as someone who prefers Fox News to MSNBC, and National Review Online to the Daily Kos. I say it as someone who thinks the Supreme Court got it right in District of Columbia vs. Heller, when it held that the 2nd Amendment gives us the right to possess guns for self-defense. (That’s why I have mine.) I say it as someone who, generally speaking, is not a big fan of the regulatory state.

I even say it as someone whose feelings about the NRA mirror the left’s feelings about Planned Parenthood: It has a useful advocacy function in our deliberative democracy, and much of what it does should not be controversial at all.

And I say it, finally, mindful of the arguments on the other side, at least as I understand them: that a high-capacity magazine is not that different from multiple smaller-capacity magazines; and that if we ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines one day, there’s a danger we would ban guns altogether the next, and your life might depend on you having one.

But if we can’t find a way to draw sensible lines with guns that balance individual rights and the public interest, we may as well call the American experiment in democracy a failure.

A Conservative Case for An Assault Weapons Ban

The GOP and Me

A Muslim-American’s history with the Republican Party—and how they lost him:

“Newt Gingrich, who also ran for President, introduced an angle that I – and presumably every American of sound mind – had never considered before. Speaking at a Texas church in March, 2011, Gingrich brought up his grandchildren to the audience, and then said, ‘I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.’

“I’ll admit: I had never considered the threat of secular, atheist, radical Islamists before. But then, that’s why Newt Gingrich was running for president and I wasn’t. He sees things the rest of us don’t. He even has the ability to see things that don’t actually exist.”

(Source: longreads.com)

Koch Industries warns employees of "consequences" if they don’t vote for Republicans

Republicans Vote to Block Transparency on Political Ads

The FCC voted in April to require television stations to put detailed data on political ad purchases online. The information, which includes who buys ads, for how much, and when they run, is currently open to the public but is available only on paper at individual stations. Media companies have lobbied hard against the rule, and the National Association of Broadcasters recently sued in federal court to stop it. The rule is currently under review by the government and will not go into effect until July at the earliest.

The spending is leaving its mark on Florida, the site of today’s crucial GOP primary. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and his allies, especially the pro-Romney Restore Our Future, aired 12,768 television commercials in the state through Wednesday compared with 210 by former House speaker Newt Gingrich and his supporters, a study released Monday by the Wesleyan Media Project shows.

(source)

I’d lost interest in the Republican debates, but if Newt really got this endorsement, well that just flipped the script. 

10 Other People Ronald Reagan’s Diary Only Mentions Once

mentalflossr:

During last night’s GOP debate, Mitt Romney attempted to minimize Newt Gingrich’s connection to President Reagan:

“I looked at the Reagan diary. You’re mentioned once in Ronald Reagan’s diary. And in the diary, he says you had an idea in a meeting of young congressmen, and it wasn’t a very good idea and he dismissed it. That’s the entire mention.”

But the former Speaker is in good company. The Reagan-Mentioned-Me-Once-in-His-Diary Club includes lots of big names. For example, Drew Barrymore!

“Out on the South Lawn a ceremony recognizing the Young Astronauts program. Little Drew Barrymore — the child in “E.T.” — was one of the children. She’s a nice little person.”

10 Other People Ronald Reagan’s Diary Only Mentions Once also includes Pat Riley, Harry Caray, the A-Team and Muhammad Ali, who gave the president an autographed Muslim prayer book, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt Reagan was a closet Muslim terrorist hell-bent on America’s destruction. Right?

5 Takeaways From The GOP's South Carolina Debate

A decisive win by front-runner Mitt Romney would probably spell the end of the race for at least one and maybe more of his rivals. So Monday night’s Fox News debate in Myrtle Beach was one of the last opportunities for his competitors for the nomination to make the winner of the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary seem less like the inevitable nominee.

On that score, while his rivals scored points against him, none seemed to do anything to upend his candidacy and Romney, for his part, committed no major gaffes. So the former Massachusetts governor still seemed to have a good shot at winning South Carolina, a state which has voted for every eventual Republican nominee since 1980.

Also: fact-checking last night.

Santorum: I Didn’t Say “Black People,” I Said “Blah People”

Santorum defended his tongue-slip on FOX News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” saying: “I looked at that, and I didn’t say that. If you look at it, what I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of — blah — came out. And people said I said ‘black.’ I didn’t. And I can tell you, I don’t use — I don’t — first off, I don’t use the term ‘black’ very often. I use the term ‘African-American’ more than I use ‘black… I can tell you as someone who did more work for historically black colleges, I used to have — every year, I used to bring all the historically black colleges into Washington, DC to try to help them, because they get very little federal money through the bureaucracy, and so I help to try to introduce them to people in the Department of Education so they could have more resources.”

So that clears that up and we’re all good now.

Gingrich told a town hall meeting at a senior center in Plymouth, N.H., that if the NAACP invites him to its annual convention this year, he’d go there and talk about “why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.

Seriously, you guys are killing me.