Today I was driving around in my car and listening to talk radio. OK, I know, I’m a right wing radical. But Dear Readers, can you really defend the crap that serves as musical entertainment on the radio these days? The offerings of No Doubt? Or, Lady Gaga? Justin Bieber? Come on, listening to that crap would have you driving off the road into a tree on purpose.
Anyway, I heard this guy espousing that if Connecticut (in case you missed it, the state where the recent Sandy Hook massacre took place) had laws restricting the number of shells allowed in magazines then fewer kids would have been killed. He argued that if mags were restricted to 10 instead of 15 or 20 rounds, everything would be just dandy. This is what passes for intelligent thinking on the subject of gun control that has been much in the news in recent days. Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion but people who don’t know shit about a subject should try to keep quiet. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with guns would know that it only takes seconds to change magazines. That’s hardly enough time for frightened six year olds to organize a counter attack on the shooter.
The anti-gun movement has been all aflutter with this latest opportunity to pass even more restrictive laws on guns. This comes from politicians who see a chance to get some face time and pander to a constituency that consists primarily of people who have never been in the military and have never hunted or owned a firearm. C’est normale.
The sad news is that they will probably pass something and the most likely candidate will be gun registration. Lawmakers will ignore the fact that Canada has already tried gun registration and it failed miserably. It was recently rescinded. It cost about a hundred times more than it was supposed to, compliance was spotty and it did absolutely nothing for the death rate by guns. Nor will the anti-gun folks consider the experience of Mexico that has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world. They also have a much higher rate of gun related death than the US and fully 2/3rds of the guns in the homes of Mexicans are illegal. Registration simply doesn’t work.
In this image, here are two weapons for consideration. The lower one would be banned by Feinstein’s legislation, but the top one would not. The surprising thing is that they are the same weapon, a Ruger 10/22. They are identical rifles except for the added cosmetics. If you think the bottom one looks scary, you should see it with the round drum rather than the banana clip.
The obvious fact that the only people who register their firearms are the honest owners who would never shoot anyone seems to elude people who say, “We must do something!” What never occurs to these people is to look seriously at the nut bags that do this stuff. Not many gun owners suddenly decide to shoot up a kindergarten. What’s going on with those that do?
It occurred to me that the current push to demonize guns is the same mentality that dominated after 9-11. In the aftermath airline travelers had their cuticle scissors, nail clippers and cork screws confiscated under the absurd theory that an 80-year-old grand mother might use one of these “weapons” to take over an airliner. Subsequent attempts at airline sabotage tightened regulations and soon we were subjected to restrictions on the size of our shampoo bottles. Our toothpaste tubes could not be larger than a bureaucrat’s flaccid penis. Then we had to take off our shoes and belts and have our genitals groped. While grannies were being strip-searched and wheel chair bound passengers fondled, the TSA could not do the one thing that made any sense… profile. Young men of Arab extraction and from Middle Eastern countries do one hundred percent of all terrorist attacks. Is some special attention given to them? Not a chance.
This demonization of the inanimate object and not the person committing the crime is hardly new in our modern society populated by too many greedy lawyers and generous judges. Fell off your bike? Sue the bike manufacturer. Broke your neck on your trampoline? Sue the maker of that thing. No matter that you jumped out of tree in an attempt to launch yourself over your garage, its the trampoline’s fault. No blame is attached to the fools who injure or kill themselves using perfectly fine equipment. No individual is ever to blame for their misfortune or foolhardy behavior.
Like the baby pool I saw on the back porch of my friend’s place. Maybe 3 feet in diameter and 4 inches deep when filled, it had the following warning emblazoned on the inflated tube, “No diving”. Really? You think someone who could read would actually attempt to dive into a pool of water 4” deep? Maybe. So the company lawyers dictated that the message be put there.
Blaming the gun and not the shooter in these incidents is no different than confiscating granny’s scissors or your corkscrew. It won’t do anything but it will give some people and politicians the conviction that, “at least we’re doing something!”