Month: May 2003

YOU Are Responsible for Your Protection

I heard about this on the radio this morning, but Instapundit had the link to the story: Man tried to hijack, crash Qantas plane – TRIED being the operative phrase.

Money quote:

The 40-year-old man stabbed two flight attendants and injured two other people before he was overpowered by crew and passengers aboard QF1737.

No more “Let the experts handle it.”

Another Vote for the Competition

Wyatt over at Giant City has a short post up on “Second-Guessing the Second Amendment“.

Money quote:

Has she just gotten caught up in pop culture’s latest wave of anti-American angst, the most notable aspect of which (lately) is this notion of an outdated Second Amendment? When she declared her disdain for gun owners, she did so with great conviction and a big smile. I smiled back at the time, simply marveling at the sort of hubris – or ignorance – that must be required to second-guess some of the greatest political and philosophical minds of the 18th century.

I can’t decide if I should invite her to the range or buy her a ticket to Rwanda.

She obviously believes that the State will protect her.

I HATE Blogger…

Checked in this morning, I get HALF of ONE post.

Marvelous.

OK, Check My Logic On This:

The Violence Policy Center, that [sarcasm] stalwart unbiased source of nothing but facts in the gun debate [/sarcasm] has a new scaremongering publication out:

Bullet Hoses: Semiautomatic Assault Weapons—What Are They? What’s So Bad About Them?

There’s this ten-point list of their EEEEEEVil features:

1. Semiautomatic assault weapons (like AK and AR-15 assault rifles and UZI and MAC assault pistols) are civilian versions of military assault weapons. There are virtually no significant differences between them.

Well, they’re SEMI-automatic. I call that “significant.”

2. Military assault weapons are “machine guns.” That is, they are capable of fully automatic fire. A machine gun will continue to fire as long as the trigger is held down until the ammunition magazine is empty.

Nice of you to make the distinction

3. Civilian assault weapons are not machine guns. They are semiautomatic weapons. (Since 1986 federal law has banned the sale to civilians of new machine guns.) The trigger of a semiautomatic weapon must be pulled separately for each round fired. It is a mistake to call civilian assault weapons “automatic weapons” or “machine guns.”

Well, hell. Nice of you to FINALLY make the distinction after telling all your buddies back in 1998:

Assault weapons – just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms—are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, COUPLED WITH THE PUBLIC’S CONFUSION OVER FULLY AUTOMATIC MACHINE GUNS VERSUS SEMI-AUTOMATIC ASSAULT WEAPONS – anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”

Seems you were encouraging confusion back then.

4. However, this is a distinction without a difference in terms of killing power. Civilian semiautomatic assault weapons incorporate all of the functional design features that make assault weapons so deadly. They are arguably more deadly than military versions, because most experts agree that semiautomatic fire is more accurate—and thus more lethal—than automatic fire.

Wait a minute. What?

5. The distinctive “look” of assault weapons is not cosmetic. It is the visual result of specific functional design decisions. Military assault weapons were designed and developed for a specific military purpose—laying down a high volume of fire over a wide killing zone, also known as “hosing down” an area.

Which is it, “accurate semi-auto fire” or “hosing down” an area? Make up your damned mind.

6. Civilian assault weapons keep the specific functional design features that make this deadly spray-firing easy. These functional features also distinguish assault weapons from traditional sporting guns.

Again, accurate fire or spray fire. Which is the deadly one again?

7. The most significant assault weapon functional design features are: (1) ability to accept a high-capacity ammunition magazine, (2) a rear pistol or thumb-hole grip, and, (3) a forward grip or barrel shroud. Taken together, these are the design features that make possible the deadly and indiscriminate “spray-firing” for which assault weapons are designed. None of them are features of true hunting or sporting guns.

And who said the Second Amendment was a protection for “sporting guns?” If I recall correctly, the 1939 U.S. v Miller case hinged on whether or not Miller’s “shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches” was a suitable militia weapon. Well, if semi-automatic “assault weapons”, by your definition “incorporate all of the functional design features that make assault weapons so deadly” then they fill the bill, don’t they? They meet the Miller test, and are then protected by the Second Amendment, right?

8. “Spray-firing” from the hip, a widely recognized technique for the use of assault weapons in certain combat situations, has no place in civil society. Although assault weapon advocates claim that “spray-firing” and shooting from the hip with such weapons is never done, numerous sources (including photographs and diagrams) show how the functional design features of assault weapons are used specifically for this purpose.

Well, as you yourself pointed out, this is less lethal than aimed fire. Pick a position and stick to it, would you?

9. Unfortunately, most of the design features listed in the 1994 federal ban—such as bayonet mounts, grenade launchers, silencers, and flash suppressors—have nothing to do with why assault weapons are so deadly. As a result, the gun industry has easily evaded the ban by simply tinkering with these “bells and whistles” while keeping the functional design features listed above.

Aw, gee, sorry that the rules were so stupid? So were we. But we were sorry that they were stupid and passed. Your buddies tell us that the “Assault Weapons Ban was a big success” and needs to be renewed, but you’re telling us it was useless? And still needs to be renewed?

10. Although the gun lobby today argues that there is no such thing as civilian assault weapons, the gun industry, the National Rifle Association, gun magazines, and others in the gun lobby enthusiastically described these civilian versions as “assault rifles,” “assault pistols,” “assault-type,” and “military assault” weapons to boost civilian assault-weapon sales throughout the 1980s. The industry and its allies only began to use the semantic argument that a “true” assault weapon is a machine gun after civilian assault weapons turned up in inordinate numbers in the hands of drug traffickers, criminal gangs, mass murderers, and other dangerous criminals.

Don’t lay that off on US. You guys were the biggest marketing boost these weapons ever had. Every time you try to ban something you quadruple the market, if not more.

Get this straight: I bought my POST-ban AR-15 because you morons were trying to make it illegal for me to have one. It’s my “militia” rifle. My “sport-utility” rifle. My “homeland security” rifle.

You can’t have it. Period. End of story. Bite me.

Besides, if I follow your logic it means I ought to be able to get a less-lethal fully-automatic assault rifle. That would make you happier than my tack-driving precision rifle does now.

Doesn’t this doubleplus ungood newthink make your heads hurt?

Socialized Medicine – Equally Bad Care for All

Dad Dies Waiting for Surgery (New Zealand – nod to Kiwi Pundit for the link)

A 43-year-old father died of a heart attack at home after bypass surgery at Wellington Hospital was postponed twice this month.

Kapiti man John Russell was admitted to hospital for the scheduled operation both times but was sent home because of a shortage of intensive care beds. He died on his kitchen floor the following week, on May 17.

He had been waiting five months for his operation.

Capital and Coast District Health Board papers issued yesterday show Mr Russell is one of 12 heart patients to have their operation postponed recently.

The postponements occurred despite figures showing the health board has reduced the number of patients waiting longer than six months for elective heart surgery to 36.

But there’s more. According to Kiwi Pundit:

Wakefield hospital was available just around the corner, but last year the state hospital board terminated a program that would have allowed patients to be referred to the private hospital if necessary.

And he has a link to this business story with details about how the private hospital’s cardiac surgery unit is underutilized.

Oh yeah – I want the government put in charge of health care in the name of “fairness” – NOT.

So you’re a feminist?…Isn’t that cute!

Mike S. Adams strikes a blow for the First Amendment in the college environment of “tolerance.”

Way to go, Mike.

The piece begins:

Dear UNC-Wilmington Board of Trustees:

It has recently come to my attention that a feminist student at UNCW has taken offense to a sticker on my office door which reads “So you’re a feminist . . . Isn’t that cute.” I found this out after obtaining a copy of a letter her father wrote to you, the Board of Trustees. I could comment at some length on the obvious hypocrisy of this student’s decision to ask her father to defend feminism for her, but I won’t. Let me get straight to the point: I did not put that sticker on my office door.

(DISCLAIMER: And I wish this weren’t necessary – I am all for the rights of individuals regardless of their plumbing. This piece isn’t about feminism it’s about “tolerance” in the college environment, and the apparent double-standard exercised by liberal educators and their victims acolytes. So there. If you want to post hate-mail accusing me of being an australopithecine misogynist, I suggest you go spend some time reading Michelle, Rachel, and Connie, all of whom I admire greatly. If they’re not “liberated,” nobody is.

Of course, this assumes that a prickly “feminist” type would be found dead here, but one can hope. Wait, that didn’t come out right….)

Why I Love Lileks and want to have his….want to write as well as he does:

Today’s Bleat is gooooood stuff.

Excerpt:

Right before I woke up I dreamed I had an assignment: write a bad feature story in the style of the New York Times. When I woke I had the last sentence still in my head; I stumbled next door to the studio, woke up the Mac, and typed this sentence:

Over in the field, a hound was hunched over excreting a “striver,” the local’s term for the hard, elegantly tapered stools for which the wild dogs are renowned.

I recounted this dream to my buddy Bill, the copy editor who sits a few feet away from me at work, and we agreed that a “striver” would be the new term for a piece of writing that was painstakingly crafted, produced with some difficulty, and was an absolute piece of crap.

ROFLMAO! Go read. He’s got some interesting things to say about beer, too.