American-Manifesto.com In Defense of American Exceptionalism

just ask the English.  They saw a 400% increase in gun crimes after the 1998 gun ban.  Even better their government lied to them about it.

Added an honor killing in London to the Body Count.  It is from January 23, 2006.  Here's the BBC link from the Body Count plus an additional account.

Cynthia Tucker (of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) had a piece published in today's Inquirer trying to address the question of whether dissent is patriotic.  Her answer: yes.  My answer: sometimes.

I'm not one of those people that says criticism of the country is inherently wrong but I don't buy the generic argument that dissent is patriotic either.  [...]

Al Qaeda, it seems, may be rethinking its tactics.  There are signs of a shift to smaller, more frequent attacks similar to what has been seen in Israel.

Recommendations include "kidnappings, the holding of hostages, the use of women and children as human shields, exhibition killings to terrorize the enemy, suicide bombings and countless gestures that [...]

Daniel Vice, an attorney for the Brady Campaign, recently had this to say about gun owners: "getting a concealed weapons permit just means you haven't committed a crime, yet."

Yeah, Dan, I guess a lawyer is just someone that hasn't been disbarred yet.

Yes, folks, it happens here too.  You'd think a violation of someone's human rights in the U.S. would draw a little more attention from the media.  Oh, that's right.  This guy isn't with the Bush administration.  It's not newsworthy.

Updated: There was also an honor killing in Texas in January.  See also the Body Count page for other domestic [...]

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The CDC makes available an online searchable database of mortality statistics.  You can slice and dice the data in all kinds of interesting ways.  I decided to poke around to see what I could find for firearms data and the results were pretty remarkable. 

I decided to run the data for Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  I [...]

Say what you will about Kerry, Gore (in his pre-Prophet days), Clinton, Dukakis, Mondale and Carter but I doubt they were inspiring any revolutionary art portraits.  The fact that Obama is inspiring the revolutionary left ought to serve as a warning.  Will enough people pay attention?

Note that's not "Happy Fourth of July".  It's "Happy Independence Day".  The distinction is worth remembering I believe. 

Congress didn't simply give us a midsummer holiday for the heck of it.  They did it to celebrate what has to be one of the most audacious and ballsy events in modern history: the Continental Congresses’ declaration of [...]

When a leftist is doing the explaining, of course.  This is from a recent letter to the editor in the Inquirer.

"[A previous writer] accuses Barack Obama of having 'a love affair with high taxes'. This is a mischaracterization of a rollback of the Bush tax cuts, which is not the same as a "tax increase." A [...]

It seems that a postcard with a picture of a dog is causing angst among Muslims in a Scottish town.  The local police force distributed the card which had a public service message and a photo of a dog being trained for police work on it.  It seems that the Muslims consider dogs unclean and [...]

New data from the CDC apparently indicates that about half of all firearms deaths are from suicide.  I certainly don't wish to minimize the tragedy of suicide but there are couple problems with how this is being reported.

The AP article published in the Philadelphia Inquirer points out that the success rate from suicide attempts with firearms is [...]