“I came running out into the yard here, shouting, waving my arms at the bear, thinking that would care him away,” the retired financial planner told the station. “But it didn’t. All it did was leave the dog and come right for me.”

Ninnemann briefly escaped and ran to the corner of the cabin, but the bear mauled him again. Ninnemann’s wife, Marie, then found a shotgun in the cabin’s basement, but she didn’t know how to load it properly. She instead took the weapon outside the struck the bear on its head, allowing her husband to escape. The couple then backtracked into the cabin with the gun pointed at the bear.

[...]

The bear, which was only a year old, then continued to circle the cabin and looked into its windows. A responding deputy later shot and killed the animal with “one shot,” Gerre Ninneman said.

Ninneman suffered bite marks from his waist to the back of his head and required staples to close some wounds. He was hospitalized but is expected to recover, as is the couple’s dog.

Ninneman said he was grateful for his wife’s help and will teach her to how to properly load and fire a shotgun.

The D.C. Council is considering requiring people to purchase liability insurance before they can get a license to own a gun.

The bill would mandate that prospective gun owners maintain at least a $250,000 policy. The policy would cover damages from negligent acts or intentional acts that aren’t undertaken in self-defense.

Lawmakers in a number of states including California, Maryland, and New York have proposed similar bills, likening the requirement to auto insurance — but none have passed the legislation.

Insurers have concerns about the concept, the New York Times reported earlier this year, because insurance does not generally cover intentional or illegal acts:

The insurance industry is wary of some of the proposals to require gun owners to buy liability coverage — and particularly of bills, like one that was filed in New York, that would require coverage for damages resulting not only from negligence but also from “willful acts.”

Robert P. Hartwig, the president of the Insurance Information Institute, said that insurance generally covered accidents and unintentional acts — not intentional or illegal ones. “Insurance will cover you if your home burns down in an electrical fire, but it will not cover you if you burn down your own house, and you cannot insure yourself for arson,” he said.

Some claims stemming from shootings have been covered by homeowners’ insurance — even by policies that said they did not cover illegal acts.

A background check now must precede any gun purchase in the state, including private sales, according to the state’s new laws. State police have become overwhelmed with requests, the Connecticut Post reports:

State Police Col. Danny Stebbins said Friday that a backlog in background check requests has exploded to more than 62,000 from about 1,000 in December, a spike of more than 6,000 percent.

“The numbers are way up,” Stebbins said, explaining that much of the increase is related to private gun sales, which now require a background check along with sales at a retailer.

“We didn’t see this coming and there was no way we could be prepared for it,” he said.

The law is estimated to cost the state up to $17 million through fiscal year 2015, according to the Post, including $4 million for state police to carry out background checks, permits, and the development of a gun offender registry.

Ahead of the gun control package’s passage, Connecticut customers faced long lines at gun stores all over the state, in an apparent rush to buy guns and ammunition.

The new laws also limit magazine capacity and expand the number of banned guns under the state’s assault weapons ban.

Manchin said some of the changes to the legislation may seek to allay concerns that background checks for family-to-family gun transfers are included in the current bill:

CHARLIE ROSE: What is possible in your judgment to get passed through the Senate?

JOE MANCHIN: I truly believe the background check bill is possible to get.

CHARLIE ROSE: Not the one that failed last time?

JOE MANCHIN: We have to make adjustments to it and find out where the comfort zone is but what we need to do really is be out and educate the law abiding gun owners like myself, people that might belong to the NRA or other organizations that don’t believe this is a threat to their second amendment. This bill not only protects your second amendment but expands the second amendment.

The Manchin/Toomey amendment which would have expanded background checks to gun shows and internet sales failed last April.

Obama made gun control a major legislative issue shortly after the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., and OFA quickly got behind the president.

OFA failed in its first major effort vote in favor of gun control legislation last month, Politico reports.

OFA’s pledge to punish senators who voted against gun control was the first big test of the group’s reach – and, undoubtedly, a difficult one, given that many of the senators voting no were in deep-red states where Obama lost badly. Even measured against those odds, there are almost no successes to point to. […]

There were no events in North Dakota or Alaska, each home to Democrats who voted no. In Arkansas, the lead state volunteer planned events in and around Little Rock, where he lives, and posted them to OFA’s website. Barely anyone showed.

OFA was unable to sway the votes of four Democrats in red states. It also did not change the votes of any of its GOP targets. 

Aware of the problems, OFA acknowledges that it’s restructuring — but that’s left them months behind on fulfilling Obama’s promise that the group, formed from the remnants of his reelection campaign, would mobilize an existing majority behind a second-term agenda that includes immigration, climate change and the economy.

Barrasso’s principle contention was extending background checks when the administration is not enforcing or prosecuting violators of the current background check system is a meaningless action:

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Let me ask you this. I completely agree about mental health legislation. I don’t think anyone would disagree with that if they take a close look at the problem and it being an equal component. But guns are clearly, right now, flying loose in our society. Why wouldn’t you want — I mean, putting mental health aside, we should do it together but we can’t apparently in Washington. Why wouldn’t you want a better background check system, a more complete one, or one at least that is better than the one we have? Why wouldn’t you vote for that?

JOHN BARRASSO: The one that we have now they are not implementing and not enforcing. What makes you think they will enforce one that does more checks on more people? I mean, that’s my question. And in terms of actually the bipartisan mental health proponent, Lamar Alexander, conservative. Tom Harkin, liberal Democrat, they came up with a proposal, 95 senators voted in favor of. That should be the base bill.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: There’s a better background check bill that you would support?

JOHN BARRASSO: I support the background check law that we have now but it’s not being enforced.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Okay.

JOHN BARRASSO: Neither the administrations, the current one or the one before has enforced that.

Nowhere good.

Taxes are up on the wealthiest 2 percent of taxpayers, but the Bush tax rates remain the same for the other 98 percent. And the Alternative Minimum Tax has been indexed for inflation. Permanently.

Obama’s second-term cabinet picks have been or are in the process of being confirmed. The most contentious choice, Chuck Hagel, won the support of only four Republicans after delivering what is widely regarded as the worst performance at a confirmation hearing in modern memory.

Obama signed the sequester cuts into law on March 1. Despite several attempts to portray the cuts in the worst possible light, and to make them as painful as possible, they remain in place.

Obama wasted several months on gun control legislation on which he did not campaign and which would not have prevented last December’s horrible mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. His proposals were watered down to the point where gun control advocates ridiculously said a compromise of a compromise on background checks was the defining political issue of our time. And the compromise of a compromise lost.

The president’s best hope for significant legislation before 2014 is the immigration reform the Senate Judiciary Committee will take up in earnest next week. But the success of that bill depends on it not being associated with the president. Indeed, the president is reportedly cautioning liberal groups not to demand too much on immigration so Republicans will continue foolishly to believe a “comprehensive” bill is in the interests of the nation and their party. It isn’t.

Obama’s call for an increase in the minimum wage is going nowhere. Nor is his call for further measures to reduce carbon emissions. Education, energy, and transportation initiatives have faded away. The president was forced to explain at this week’s press conference that the implementation of the Affordable Care Act is not, despite what members of his own party are saying, a “train wreck.” His approval rating is below 50 percent. Six Democratic senators are retiring (so far).

Obama is losing the press. E.J. Dionne is wondering where’s the hope and Maureen Dowd says the president is a lame duck. The antiwar left doesn’t like his drone policy and civil libertarians are angry Guantanamo is still open. A few deficit hawks continue to argue for a budget “grand bargain” that will not happen and that Obama is powerless to effect. Though the glue that holds the Democratic-media coalition together—animus against Republicans and conservatives—remains strong, that coalition is not expanding or advancing its agenda.

On the contrary: We are beginning to see the sort of party divisions that are only supposed to happen inside the GOP. Sens. Baucus, Pryor, Begich, and Heitkamp came under fierce criticism from fellow Democrats after they voted against the Toomey-Manchin background check amendment. Now Baucus is retiring, Pryor and Begich are vulnerable in 2014, and Mike Bloomberg and Obama’s Organizing for Action say they may target pro-gun Democrats. Greens and unions fought in the Massachusetts Democratic Senate primary, and the greens won.

Hispanic groups say amendments supported by gay-rights activists may jeopardize the immigration bill. The president’s proposal for adjusting the way Social Security benefits are calculated angered safety-net liberals. Hardly anyone not on the payroll of the DCCC will tell you the Democrats will take back the House next year, and on the Senate side, the question is really how many seats the donkeys will lose. Is this really the picture of political health?

The phase of Obama’s second term in which he controlled the agenda was over weeks before his inauguration. From Election Day 2012 to January 2, 2013, Obama rode high as Republicans squirmed under the pressure of looming tax increases on every American. This was the moment that gave rise to the triumphalist rhetoric of Obama’s second inaugural and State of the Union and the corresponding liberal commentary proclaiming the president’s eagerness finally to crush the Republicans.

In retrospect, though, that moment ended when Obama signed the tax deal making practically all of the Bush rates permanent. Obama must have believed he still had leverage in the impending sequester cuts, which were expected to be so horrible that the Republicans would be forced back to the negotiating table. And perhaps that might have happened. Perhaps it might even happen one day in the future. But it hasn’t happened yet.

Republicans called Obama’s bluff, let the cuts go through, and have paid no price. The failure of the gun vote in the Senate was a second demonstration that Obama suddenly was at the mercy of events. It was a point made emphatically and terribly when the Tsarnaev brothers detonated their bombs at the Boston Marathon.

The terror attack took the gun control fight out of the news and scrambled the rest of the president’s agenda. The revelation that the terrorists had been granted asylum, and the immigration status of the three suspects taken into custody Wednesday, threw into question the notion that immigration is an unalloyed good.

As if that weren’t enough, the disclosure of possible use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Civil War made the president even more defensive. “Red lines” had to be redrawn. New rationalizations for inaction had to be made.

From Obamacare to spending to foreign policy, the president is reacting to events rather than shaping them. It’s what happens when you win reelection without a clear agenda that has a realistic chance of passing Congress. It’s what happens when your foreign policy is based on the concept of leading from behind.

“After string of setbacks, more charm may be the last, best option for Obama,” read the headline in Monday’s Washington Post. Really? This is the president who “really doesn’t like people.” If charm is all he has left, it’s over.

Barring a rapid and widespread economic recovery—try not to laugh—Obama and his supporters have every reason to expect similar dismal results over the next 100 days. And over the 1,262 days after that.

Between 50 and 60 people gathered to march through D.C.’s lobbying corridor, stopping to chant and hoist Fairey’s poster at offices that do business with the nation’s largest Second Amendment organization.

“Down with lobbyists! Down with the NRA!” the protesters shouted. “Shame on the lobbyists! Shame on the NRA!”

Fairey, the creator of the iconic Obama “Hope” poster and a reliable front of liberal pablum since, was not among the tens of protesters Thursday.

He did weigh in on his newest effort from afar, however.

“If God tells us to love our neighbor and not to take another human life, where do the assault weapons and piles of ammo fit into these ‘Christian values?’” Fairey has said of his new poster. “I personally think assault weapons fall more in the ‘Satan’s values’ category.”

Fairey’s new poster depicts a hand holding a weapon with questionable form. The type reads: “America, the Land Where God Saves & Satan Invests in Assault Weapons and High Capacity Magazines.”

The text is somewhat derivative of a series of Jewish novelty t-shirts that read, “Jesus saves, Moses invests.”

The D.C. activists gathered at McPherson Square, the site of one of D.C.’s Occupy camps during the Occupy Wall Street protests that swept the country in 2011.

The purpose, organizers said, was to shame not only the NRA but also the lobbying shops that worked with them to stymie gun-control legislation.

Source: CJ Ciaramella

“I consider this a form of economic vigilante justice,” Occupy organizer Justin Wedes told the small crowd.

After the speeches, protesters marched to five lobby shops where they planned to deliver manila envelopes with pictures of a 16-year-old girl who had been gunned down in D.C. One picture showed the girl alive. The other was a gruesome shot of the girl, dead.

“Stop Working for the NRA” was Sharpied on the envelopes, which were delivered to one lobbying shop by the girl’s mother.

The organizers had originally planned to drive a hearse full of caskets to the firms back on April 16, a day before the contentious Senate vote on background checks. But the Boston bombings put the protest and the macabre imagery on hold.

Some brief confusion ensued Thursday when protesters arrived at the first nondescript office building and no one could remember which lobbying firm was located inside.

“Whatever, we’ll get it to them later,” one organizer told another after milling about for a few minutes. “Let’s not stand around looking like idiots.”

“The main problem with gun legislation and gun violence is the permissivity of ownership,” John Schuster, a D.C. resident, told the Washington Free Beacon as the group trundled down K Street.

Schuster did not consider the Second Amendment an individual right, as the Supreme Court has ruled it to be.

The ideal solution to guns, Schuster said, would be to “repeal the Second Amendment and replace it with something the Supreme Court can’t misinterpret.”

Although the general consensus was most certainly against the NRA, others were more in favor of the right to bear arms.

Anthony Robledo, a 24-year-old dressed in skater-punk regalia—black hoodie, patches, worn-out leather boots—bore a sign that read “Yes Guns. No NRA.”

“I believe in the Second Amendment, and I believe that’s one of the amendments we need to assert in a responsible manner,” Robledo said. “The problem is there’s too many people who own guns and don’t know how to use them. This goes from your regular civilian to police.”

Participating organizations included Occupy the NRA, CREDO, MoveOn.org, Public Campaign, Every Child Matters, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, Left Action, Common Cause, and the Other 98 Percent.

A series of radio ads by the group Americans for Responsible Solutions will criticize the two for their votes against stricter gun laws.

Americans for Responsible Solutions is the gun-control organization of former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D., Ariz.) and her husband. Giffords was shot in the head by a deranged gunman in 2011, and she has been an outspoken supporter of stricter gun laws since.

“As Gabby said last week, if we can’t keep our communities safer with the congress we have, we will work to change congress,” Pia Carusone, executive director of ARS, said in a press release. “Sen. McConnell and Sen. Ayotte turned their backs on their constituents at home in order to do the bidding in Washington of the corporate gun lobby. We’re going to make sure their constituents know that, effective immediately.”

The radio ads say Ayotte and McConnell “ignored the will of the people.”

“This was common sense legislation written by a Republican and a Democrat, supported by law enforcement, and it protected Second Amendment rights, but Ayotte voted against it anyway,” one woman in the ad says.

The ads urge listeners to call Ayotte and McConnell and invokes the shooting in Newtown, Conn.

“We watched. We listened. We felt it. Newtown. But Sen. McConnell won’t listen to us,” a narrator says.

The McConnell campaign said the Senate minority leader is listening to the will of his Kentucky constituents.

“Sen. McConnell commends Gabby Giffords for her courage and perseverance but in Kentucky we have a fundamental disagreement with a gun control agenda,” McConnell campaign spokesman Jesse Benton said in an email to the Washington Free Beacon. “President Obama’s allies have been attacking Sen. McConnell on this issue for months but his support for Kentuckians’ Second Amendment rights will not waver.”

Public support for gun control legislation has ebbed since the Newtown shooting. A recent USA Today poll found only 49 percent of those surveyed favor Congress passing a new gun-control law, compared to 45 percent opposed. A NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in early April reported 55 percent backed a stricter gun law, compared to 61 percent in February.

Additionally, a Washington Post/Pew poll found 39 percent of Americans were happy or relieved the gun control legislation failed, while 47 percent were disappointed or angry.

A poll by the left-leaning Public Policy Polling firm showed 44 percent of Granite State voters said they approve of the job Ayotte is doing while 46 percent said they disapprove.

The poll also found 75 percent of New Hampshire voters support requiring background checks for buyers at gun shows.

Blumenthal disputed the suggestion, stating Baucus’ retirement was probably a family decision and based on larger career goals:

THOMAS ROBERTS: So a new USA Today poll shows support for stricter gun control measures is slipping. A poll shows 49 percent of Americans are now in favor of Congress passing stricter gun laws while 45 percent are opposed. Our NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll earlier this month showed 55 percent backing stricter gun controls, down from 61 percent in February. All of this comes after a bipartisan bill that would have expanded background checks for gun buyers failed to win the 60 votes needed in the Senate last Wednesday, which President Obama called “shameful.” Joining me now live is Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. Sir it’s good to have you here and I want to start off with the big news from this morning, NBC News now confirming that Democratic senator Max Baucus of Montana will not run for reelection next year and he is one of four Democrats who voted against the background check measure last week. A liberal group, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, had vowed to target him and others, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mark Begich of Alaska, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, who also voted against the measure. All but Heitkamp face reelection in 2014. What do you think of the decision of Baucus not to rerun?

RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: A surprise and a loss to the Senate. He is a key figure in tax reform as well as a variety of other measures and extraordinarily distinguished career and a decision probably based on family consideration, larger career goals, and the desire to focus on the work at hand in the Senate on areas like taxes and other consequential issues.

Full interview:

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