Even More On Guns!

In an earlier post, I excoriated attorney, Irv Pinsky for his intended lawsuit against the State of Connecticut in relation to the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Apparently Mr. Pinsky has had a, um, change of heart. He has dropped the suit. Maybe it had something to do with the fifty death threats he received. Maybe it had something to do with the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association's disapproval of his plan. They publicly called it "ill-advised;" we can only imagine what they told him privately.

Read the article HERE

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The WAR ON GUN VIOLENCE seems to be waged only in the media. Most of the talking heads on TV are liberal anti-gunners who simply cannot keep their bias from coming through. They cluck their tongues and roll their eyes, trying to make us believe that the whole country supports banning guns now. They talk about the NRA as if it is merely some disconnected monolithic corporate entity, forgetting the millions of American citizens...law-abiding gun owners (like me) who are NRA members and for whom the the organization speaks.

But even politicians are backing away from any real restrictions. Vice President Joe Biden's committee will not be suggesting that President Obama ban "assault weapons" (something the president is anticipated to do anyway).

Here's the problem: What is an "assault weapon?" Most people do not know, and indeed there is no real definition of one. It's kind of like the old definition of pornography given to us by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: "I know it when I see it." Which doesn't help us much when it comes to firearms.

We see ominous-looking rifles like the infamous Bushmaster .223/AR-15 and, because we've seen one too many Rambo movies we might be tempted to assume that these are "machine guns" capable of continuous fire. They are not.

The civilian "semi-automatic" AR-15 only fires one single bullet with each trigger pull. Just like my semi-automatic Glock pistol.

Look at this rifle below. It is the Ruger 10/22.

Looks like a "normal" (i.e. non "assault weapon") rifle, eh? But do you know that it is a "semi-automatic" rifle and normally contains ten bullets in its magazine? There are magazines available on the aftermarket that hold up to 50 bullets.

So banning "assault weapons" because they look nasty is just stupid.

We already have enough gun laws on the books, thank you. But if you want to do something, try putting a restriction on the size of the magazine that a rifle can hold. That might make Mr. and Mrs. Joe Public feel better. Hold on! I said "try putting" because what's to stop someone from ordering a high-capacity magazine that is manufactured and sold overseas and having FedEx deliver it to your door? (FedEx doesn't open every package to see what's being shipped.) But...but...Bob, doing such a thing would be illegal! Yes. But remember, criminals generally don't care about what's legal and what's not.

And regardless, it's so easy and quick to change magazines that even if they were limited to ten rounds it would not matter much to someone who wants to kill a bunch of people. Just carry more loaded mags with you. Reload!

So a restriction on magazine capacity is stupid.

Rational people know that there is almost nothing the government can do to stop horrible random acts of violence. NONE of the proposed gun laws would have had any effect at all on the number of deaths in any of the recent "mass shootings." As long as guns are legal in this country (and trust me, they always will be), such an event will surely happen again, and no amount of hand-wringing, posturing or new gun law is going to change that.

Rational people know this. Radical extremists, like that loony Senator Dianne Feinstein are the ones who are completely out of touch with reality. Her call for a national gun registry is simply insane. It tells me that she knows very little about the American people or its history or culture.