Hey, Look Over There! It's A Distraction!

Snoop Dogg has called for, if you can believe it, a world gun amnesty.



That's right -- an amnesty.



He wishes guns would go away, so no more lives would be cut short unnecessarily.



I find it odd that he wishes guns would go away, yet he is asking for a gun amnesty. Why do I find it odd? It's his choice of words: Let's look at the definition of "amnesty": 1 an official pardon for people convicted of political offenses. 2 a period where no action is taken against people admitting to particular offenses.



With both senses of the word, an amnesty grants people freedom from prosecution, or a pardon for their conviction. It is an indulgence, an official release from responsibility for any and all wrongdoing. What Snoop Dogg is asking for is this: he wants all criminals who have misused guns to be forgiven for their crimes, and to not be held responsible for those crimes. Instead, he wants you to blame the guns, which will be rounded up, chastised, and ostensibly destroyed. But you can be certain that some of them will end up in new homes, whether legally or otherwise. After all, criminal uses of guns have all been forgiven, and responsibility has now been redirected to the gun, so why not?



It's a cute little game of Three-Card Monte. You see, Snoop was arrested in October for illegal possession of pot and a gun, so he has a vested interest in redirecting everyone's attention from blaming the criminal to blaming the gun. He couldn't be more blatant if he stood up and shouted "Hey, fo' shizzle! Looks up there! It's bizzle a distractionizzle..." or something equally Snoopish. Or Snoop-Doggish. Or whatever he calls that "-izzle" patois he came up with.



His fervent hope is that you'll be so gullible, you'll go "What? A distractionizzle? Up there?" And turn to look while he switches cards, or takes the pea out from under the shell, or whatever metaphor you want to use. Suffice to say, he has redirected your attention to the "eeeevillllle gunzuh" instead of the simple and salient fact that he broke the frakkin' law.



Please be clear on this: His gun and bag of weed did not somehow, by grace of nanotechnology, alien intervention, evil demonic influence, or the power of Das Erlkonig, acquire intelligence, the power of independent movement, and mesmerizing beguilement abilities that let them force poor Snoop into carrying them around in defiance of the law, all to further their Evil Plan to corrupt Rapperdom and clean-cut American boys and girls everywhere with their foul bullet-beams and THC-fields. We're doooooomed! Look! A distraction!



No. Snoop put the bag of weed in his pocket because he wanted to smoke it. He put the gun in his pocket because he wanted to carry it. He knew both actions were against the law, but he chose to do them anyway. Instead of dabbing glycerine from his eyes and begging his congregation's forgiveness for his sins in some disingenuous Swaggartesque farce, he should be owning up to his mistakes and taking his lumps in court, and potentially, behind bars.



Instead of blaming the guns, which made no choices, he should blame himself. Every single gun used to take a life "unnecessarily cut short" had a finger on its trigger telling it to go off, a hand on the grip holding it steady, an eye behind the sight pointing the way, and a brain behind the eye making the choice to do it all.



Guns are neither good nor bad. Guns, however, are formidable. Formidable things must be treated with great care, much knowledge, and overwhelming respect.



But criminals treat nothing with care, have no use for knowledge, and confuse respect with fear. This is why we have violence at their hands. Not because of the power of their tools -- but because of the coldness of their hearts.





The Range Bag

Predicting the DuQuesne University Response

Yes, there was Yet Another Shooting at an educational institution. At DuQuesne University near Pittsburgh, PA, shots were fired during a dance, injuring members (or soon-to-be members) of the basketball team. The story so far is that there was a fight over a girl involving persons who were not students, objects were thrown in anger, then a gun was drawn and used.

When I heard this, I groaned.

I can hear it already...the bleating of the sheeple, the screaming of the anti-gunners...the lip-smacking of the anti-rights people who will gleefully use this tragic event as "ammunition" to attack the lawful rights of people who did not commit this crime.

Let's see if I can predict what we'll hear:

- "We need to ban the guns!"

That's a no brainer. They always want to ban the guns outright for everyone, even when it's just a single thug who commits the crime.

- "We need tougher gun control!"

Wait a minute. Gun control consists of LAWS. We have thousands of such laws already, twenty THOUSAND of them, give-or-take a few hundred. The schmuck who did this is a criminal. Criminals are people who break laws. It's a good bet he's either a) too young to own a gun, or b) has a criminal record, so he can't own a gun legally anyway, so what good will one more gun law do in such a case? Answer: NONE.

- "We need a one-gun-a-month law to control 'straw' purchases!"

Well, we do need to control straw purchases, or gun buys performed by persons able to legally perform the buy who do it solely to provide them for people who can't legally buy or own guns themselves. It's like taking a drug test for your buddy because he likes to relax with a nice bowl of Columbian redbud in the evening, and finds that pee test at work just a little difficult, but you're clean, so he asks you to pee in a bag for him so he can sneak it into the cup. It's just plain undignified, and pretty damned illegal.

But one-gun-a-month laws don't serve that purpose. There's no evidence they work to prevent crime. And, did you know that the form you fill out for ATF is automatically sent to local law enforcement if you purchase more than 3 guns in a given month, or too many at once? The cops already know when multiple weapon purchases are being made. Just find the ones that are selling their guns to criminals, and bust 'em.

Please have no illusions: the thug that did this is not some poor little waif. He's not the victim here. He's not a victim of society. He's a sick little animal. He's a rabid squirrel with a deadly weapon beyond his own stature. He's not entitled to carry that weapon because he's either a criminal parasite, a child, or both, but he does it anyway because he doesn't care about our laws. All he does care about is fulfilling his own desires, stroking his own ego, and feeding the slavering monster of his overdeveloped little id. To him, we are not fellow citizens. We are those who should be fawning at his feet, giving him "respect" because we are afraid of his "power" -- the power to hurt, maim, and kill without reason or concern for morality or justice.

This is not a person who will care about a new law. He cheerfully ignored 20,000 laws to shoot up a basketball team. If you hand him a piece of paper with the new law on it, he'll probably laugh and polish his gun with it. Then he'll shoot you.

Of course, that isn't true for the law-abiding gun owners. They'll be hurt by it. They'd follow the damned thing. Not because they wanted to, not because they agreed with it, not because they thought it was a good idea -- but because they are good, decent, people. People who obey the law because that is the covenant they have with their society. Because that is their own personal honor.

They didn't do it, but they will be punished for it. And that is simply wrong.

--- The Range Bag

Proliferation My Ass

Today's my birthday. But heck, I can't sleep late. I woke up at my usual time, got up, went to the john, and turned on the tube to catch the news while my partner got ready to go to work. (Just for a class, then she's coming home to spend the rest of the day with me. Yay!) Now, a lot of people rip on Fox News for being "right wing", but you wouldn't know it for watching the local affiliate in Philadelphia. They're not anything like the cable network, with a decidedly left-of-center spin that frankly makes my teeth hurt. I'm sure it gets some of the Fox people more than a little annoyed, too, and it should.

This morning's news was no exception. It seems that last night, the crooks and scum in Philadelphia were working overtime, racking up five dead and two injured from criminal violence. Of course, the immediate and knee-jerkingly predictable response from the City is "it's because of the proliferation of guns in the City", and "we need better gun-control laws." It seems that Da Mayor just got back from the big summit on Crooks Taking Over Cities...sorry, the Summit on Gun Control that Mayor Bloomberg called in New York, and the message got a little skewed in the transmission. Bloomberg at least got the salient portion of it right:

"Illegal guns are hurting innocent people across America, whether you are east of the Mississippi or north or south of the Mason-Dixon line,"

The operative word here is illegal. This statement is better than Mayor Street's blanket "guns are the cause of crime" screed that keeps getting blasted across Southeast Pennsylvania, but it still isn't on target, so to speak. Street's stance is that the proliferation of guns is the causative factor in the rampant wave of crime and violence in Philadelphia. Mayor Street doesn't understand the concept of cause and effect.

Inanimate objects don't cause anything to happen. There is no "critical mass" of firearms that will suddenly cause crime to start happening spontaneously in their vicinity solely because they are present. I don't care how many guns you pile up, spread around, or make available, guns don't cause crime or violent behavior any more than pencils cause spelling errors -- or writing. Pile up all the pencils you want, hundreds, thousands, millions of them, spread pencils in a layer a hundred thick and a mile on a side, and at no time will writing spontaneously just happen. Well, duh, you say. A person has to pick up the gun, or the pencil, and use it!

Bingo. A person must decide to use the gun. For good or for evil, a person must make a value judgement and decide a course of action. They might choose a gun, or a machete, or a pointed stick, or a rock. Or a pencil. Now they must decide their intent, what they want to do with that tool. Will they use it to protect people? A loved one or neighbor, or perhaps will they use it to protect themself from harm? Do they want it in order to work with the law, to protect their rights under the law? Or do they simply want to seize power, and see the tool as an easy means to do so?

The persons we call "criminals" are, by definition, persons who break the law. We have made rules in order to get along, to protect our property, to say "this is mine, that is yours, and it is wrong for you to take what is mine simply because you want it unless you pay me for it and I agree to let you buy it from me." Criminals don't like such rules. When they want something someone else has, they seek other methods to acquire them, such as raw applications of power that run contrary to established rule of law, including wanton use of indiscriminate force. We call this "violence". The impulse to do so does not come from the weapon, or from the availablility of weapons. It comes from the desire of the criminal to have what someone else has, and the criminal's lack of concern for anyone else's desires on the subject.

Simply put, they don't care that you don't want them to have your stuff, they're going to take it even if they have to kill you to get it. They'll take your money, even if they have to sell you poison to get it. They'll force you to bow down to them, even if they have to wave a weapon in your face in order to get you to do it. They call it "respect", even though all it is is a reputaton for brutality.

This is not new. It has been happening for as long as the human animal has been swinging antelope thighbones as skull-crackers, and the first such being realized it would let him take another human animal's stuff. Hey, wow...this sure is easier than going out and killing my own dinner! Killing Ogg was a whole lot easier than killing a wild boar, and Ogg had already killed a boar. Now I have a boar, and Ogg is no condition to complain. And Ogg's neighbors are afraid of me, and are giving me boars so I don't do to them what I did to Ogg. How cool is that? I rule!

I rule. Wow, tyranny is born. Tribal structures have built themselves in this fashion since the dawn of time. And most of them did it without guns.

The gun itself is unimportant. What is important is the willingness of the criminal to ignore society's laws so he can fulfill his own desires, and his utter disregard for human life. If a criminal doesn't have a gun, he'll use a knife. If he doesn't have a knife, he'll use a club. If he doesn't have a club, he'll use a rock. If he can't stab it, strangle it, or pummel it, he'll burn it. The most common atrocity weapon in the world isn't the handgun -- it is the machete, a common tool used for gardening...and to massacre hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions throughout history. And you can buy one at Wal-Mart for five dollars.

Oh, and one of the shootings last night, that Mayor Street blamed on the "proliferation of guns?" The shooter started off by walking into a bar and throwing a Molotov Cocktail before he started shooting at his targets. It had nothing to do with the availability of guns. This guy would have driven a car through the building if that was all he had.


---The Range Bag

Mr Grimason said: "Arms control is close to my heart after losing my son, Alistair to a gun.

This was said by the father of a little boy killed during the Dunblane Massacre in Scotland 10 years ago, during a UN media circus on arms control. Once again, we see a tragic juxtaposition: a dead child or loved one, and a woeful lack of perspective on the part of the survivor.

It is horrible that Alistair Grimason died that day. It's tragic and sad and if it could have been prevented by predicting that the lunatic who shot up that school was about to commit an atrocity, it should have been. But one thing that did not happen was that Mr. Grimason did not "lose his son to a gun."

Mr. Grimason lost his son to a lunatic. He lost his son to a human being's malice and insanity. He lost his son to the actions of a person who decided that killing children was the way to address his own personal demons. Of course, he was wrong, absolutely wrong, but he believed he was right. He believed he was justified in taking a firearm to a school and shooting children. But be perfectly clear on this point. The gun used to shoot those children did not grow legs and creep into the school, and yank its own trigger. Bullets did not magically load themselves into it, and the gun did not float in the air and point itself magically at those little, fragile bodies.

A human hand loaded the gun. A human eye aimed the gun. A human finger pulled the trigger. And a human brain sent the impulses that controlled all of those organs. A diseased brain, but a human brain nonetheless. A gun did not take Alistair Grimason's life, nor the lives of the other children that day. In fact, guns do not take any lives. People take lives. It has been said so many times "Guns don't kill people, people kill people", that no one hears it anymore. The phrase is almost trite. But it is dreadfully, horribly true.

Why doesn't anyone hear it? Why do they block it out? Why do they insist on continually blaming little hunks of metal, wood, and plastic for the evil and horror perpetrated by human will? Why do they demand that a gun, which will sit on a table until it rusts to a pile of debris without a hand to wield it, is the true bad actor, when it is the hand of Man that is truly to blame?

Because they refuse to accept that people must be held responsible for their actions. The people who scream the loudest that guns are to blame are the same people, generally speaking, who also refuse to hold anyone responsible for anything they do. Alcohol abuse is "a disease", and isn't their fault. In fact, just about any behavior someone doesn't feel like controlling is a "disease", and they don't have to control it. They can give up, put the blame on genetics, or a bad childhood, or society, or another race, or every other race, or the acts of some minority, or the acts of the majority, or the will of God, or the random fluctuations of the Universe. Anything, anything at all that lets them abrogate their ownership for the ill they do.

People do what they do, and must be responsible for the acts they perform. They can't blame the tools they use, or the weather, or the phase of the moon, or the bit of mustard or undigested sausage. Blaming guns for the murdered dead is like blaming pencils for misspelled words. Banning guns for the evil done by evil people will only do one thing: it will let the evil people get away with it.

"Spray Fire"

These are words to conjure with, words to join "Boogeyman" and "Baba Yaga", and other terms of evil juju that parents tell children to scare them into behaving. They started out as something with real meaning, but got corrupted, turned into folk legends, and thence, into scare legends suitable for terrorizing babes in the night.

It used to refer to the use of fully-automatic fire from a military machine gun, used tactically to suppress enemy movement while advancing or retreating. It involves throwing as much lead into an area as possible, totally unaimed, with the simple desire of keeping the enemy from shooting back out of concern for getting hit by a chance round. The enemy knows it is simply a sparse lace curtain of lead flung scattershot into their general direction, but the hope is they will not wish to roll the dice and expose themselves to the expanding cone of fire and possibly be hit. It tends to be a fairly effective tactic -- battlefields are noisy, scary, and adrenaline-soaked places, and fear is an effective tool. Out of the many thousands of rounds sprayed in this fashion, it is rare that one actually hits a target.

Spray fire is not as it is portrayed in movies, chattering machine guns, with the enemy being scythed down like a field of wheat, the blood spurting out in slow motion, each bullet claiming a life in a deadly ballet of coordinated mayhem. Spray fire is an ammunition-wasteful tactical maneuver for keeping the enemy's heads down and their guns quiet, or at least, quieter.

One thing it is NOT is something performed by semi-automatic civilian weapons. The most recent incarnation of the "spray fire" boogeyman is that so-called "assault weapons", ugly-looking pseudo-military semi-automatic rifles can somehow be used to "spray fire" -- and are, by gang members and other thugs during the commission of crimes. This is arrant nonsense.

A semi-automatic weapon such as they are vilifying can only fire a single shot per pull of the trigger. The mechanisms of these cosmetically-enhanced varmint guns cannot perform the military exercise called "spray fire" because they cannot keep firing all of their ammo with a single pull of the trigger. You must pump the trigger quickly, one pull per bullet, to blaze out all of your shots in some kind of wild blaze. But this is not "spray fire". The rate of fire is no more than a police officer's handgun could perform the same task -- the rate at which a person can clench their finger and pull back an 8 lb trigger spring repeatedly. If it is more than one or two a second, that's downright amazing. And I couldn't do that for very long. My hand would get tired after a magazine, maybe two. "Spray Fire" involves hundreds, maybe thousands of rounds. Not ten or twenty. Can you clench your index finger and pull 8 lbs back an inch and a half a thousand times at a rate of two per second without stopping to rest? While running and screaming and changing magazines? While fighting? While doing things that gangbangers and criminals do? Do you think anyone would even TRY?

Didn't think so.

This is a boogeyman. This is outright nonsense. This is yet another case of the anti-rights community trying to confuse the rest of the country into believing that simple civilian arms that are no more formidible than a teenager's gopher gun is somehow the same thing as a soldier's machine gun -- just because it looks like one.

Then that tricked-out Dodge Neon I saw you ogling should go 160 miles per hour and cost $150,000 -- because it sure looked like a Lamborghini. But wait...it still has the same old Dodge Neon engine and transmission, you say? The outside was just tricked out to LOOK like a Lamborghini? But these gopher guns are just tricked out to look like M-16's...and you want us to treat them like M-16's...you even say they can "spray fire" like M-16's, which they can't do...what's the difference in the logic? Now pay me the $150,000 you owe me for that Neon!

Don't be tricked by the "spray fire" boogeyman. That's just a sweater hung over the Stairmaster in the corner.

--- Gwen

The Range Bag

"Are you serious?"

That's what Senator Alan Cropsey, R-DeWitt of Michigan said, when told about the GLBT shooters' organization the Pink Pistols. He actually thought the formation of a chapter just outside Detroit was a "publicity stunt" of some kind -- as if an organization with 38 chapters in 28 states needs to stage "stunts".

I'm certain there was also a certain amount of, shall we say, concern on the part of the honorable senator to hear that a bunch of queers in his state were now running around with guns. After all, he had lobbied hard for the "Defense of Marriage Act", that restricted marriage to one man and one woman, and has been very outspoken on the subject of gay rights -- usually against.

The sound of confused fear in the Senator's voice isn't new. It was heard once before, shortly after the Dred Scott case, when it was made clear that all those nigras that were freed would now be entitled to carry weapons under the auspices of the Second Amendment. Then it was "Are you serious? Nigras, with GUNS?" Followed up with the inevitable: "We gotta DO something!" Unfortunately, something was. That was the beginning of the gun-control era, with laws being steadily enacted to restrict ownership of firearms by one group or another, usually along arbitrary lines. At first, it was along racial lines -- blacks were expressly forbidden to bear arms, because they were "of suspect character". Well, that's how many gays are prevented from getting concealed-carry permits in those states that still have discretionary licensing, when the local Sheriff determines that a homosexual person is "not of good moral character".

Let's coin a new acronym -- UNWAG -- "Uppity Nigger With A Gun". That's what the turn-of-the-century legislators wrote their laws to prevent. They wrote laws to outlaw inexpensive firearms that people of color could afford, and derided them as "niggertown Saturday Night Specials", a name we still have, at least in part, for weapons affordable by poor people. But mostly, they were afraid that the downtrodden classes that were preyed upon those with prejudices and bigotry would take up arms to protect themselves. And the black people DID. They armed themselves with firearms to protect themselves against the KKK when the lynchings started, and defended themselves well. The response? To make laws against owning the types of firearms they used to defend themselves.

Well, now we have the Pink Pistols, and the acronym changes to UQWAG -- "Uppity Queer With A Gun". The queers aren't content to come out of bars at the end of an evening and find a bunch of Good Ol' Boys with baseball bats, and run down the street helplessly stabbing at 9-1-1 on their cell phones anymore. They're taking up arms, owning guns to drive away the bat-wielding bigots that would hurt or kill them.

Terribly sorry, Senator, if this makes you uncomfortable. The queers say they only want to defend themselves against attack, so you have nothing to worry about. Unless you planned to go out and bust up a few faggots this Friday night?

One of the loudest voices screeching against so-called "assault weapons" is Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). Sen. Feinstein is one of the authors of the original 1994 Assault Weapons Ban and one of the "usual suspects" in the continuing and compelling saga of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Senator Feinstein is a True Believer. She Truly Believes that simple, semi-automatic rifles -- that fire once per pull of the trigger, and have no more intrinsic firepower than any other rifle of the same caliber -- somehow become more powerful, more evil, more devastating, by wrapping them in military-looking plastic, steel, and fiberglass and adding flash hiders, folding stocks, pistol grips, and little sockets for hooking on a foot-long knife to turn the rifle into a crude spear.

She also somehow believes that the number of cartridges in a magazine is somehow related to the number of volts in a battery, or the number of pounds of pressure in a truck tire. She believes that the size of the magazine -- the little metal and plastic box that spring-feeds rounds into the gun -- increases the power of the bullets themselves, that having 30 of them rather than 10 of them makes the gun more "powerful" somehow. This is arrant nonsense. You can change a 10-round magazine in about a second. A 30-round magazine is a convenience, nothing more, one that is frequently offset by the device's unweildy size and greater expense. In a semi-automatic weapon, there's a law of diminishing returns for magazine size versus clumsiness and cost.

She also believes that "assault weapons", these three to four foot long rifles that kick like being hit with a pitched ball, belch a 2-foot tongue of flame when fired, and have a per-round cost of 16-20 cents, are somehow carried in cars by gang members, to be stuck out of windows and "pumped" randomly in drive-bys.

"If you're a drive-by shooter, do you go out with a .38-caliber revolver? I don't think so. You just point (an assault weapon) out the window and pump away . . . and you're bound to hit somebody. What kind of a gun is that for civilian society?"

This statement appeared in an article by the Copley News Service, underlining Sen. Feinstein's "Land of Oz-like" belief about weapons that would need a mystical "sword-boy" from the old Highlander TV-show following around her mythical gang member to hand him the huge, ungainly weapon upon command, then make it disappear without a trace. The rifles she refers to as "assault weapons" are large and not someting you want to be swinging around in a car, much less firing inside the confined space of one. Your hearing would not survive, even if you could do it without strangling yourself or ripping your ear off with the action. Not many gang members go on drive-bys wearing firing-range earplugs!

And she somehow believes that you can "pump" the trigger of a rifle faster than you can "pump" the trigger of a pistol. Why, I don't know. The weapons affected by the "assault weapons" ban are not machine guns. They fire once per pull of the trigger. They don't "spray" anything. They don't "pump" anything.

And, worst of all, Senator Feinstein should actually do some research once in a while before she starts babbling. On Saturday, March 15, Joshua Holland, a 19 year old resident of Truman Circle, East Naples, Florida, was arrested for attempted felony murder and resisting arrest without violence. Young Mr. Holland, a gang member, is alleged to have fired a revolver into an occupoied vehicle that was stopped at a traffic signal. The driver of the Toyota Echo Holland was a passenger in said he pulled a revolver and shot into the other man's car while they were stopped at the light. This is but one example, and it took me five minutes to find using Google.

It's clear that gang members don't carry huge rifles to shoot at other people from cars. That's silly. They're too big, too clumsy, and too hard to conceal. Even though this young thug had an easily-concealable revolover, he was recognized and caught.

This is just another lie, just another piece of silliness intended to sow Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. It's a boogeyman.

Yeah, right, Senator. Gang members will shoot huge, thousand-dollar rifles from cars, when they could be using small, concealable pistols a quarter of the price..

Does Elvis speak to you? Do you see spots?

--- Gwen

The Range Bag

This whole argument about "Assault Weapons" just makes me angry.

The people who scream that "assault weapons are military weapons", and that they should be kept away from civilians, that they have no civilian use, don't know what they're talking about. They have been fooled.

There has been a Big Lie told that is worthy of Goebbels, worthy of the Big Lie that Jews are the source of Germany's troubles. The Big Lie I'm talking about is that "assault weapons" are in any way related to "assault rifles" used by the military. "Assault rifles" are fully-automatic machine guns. They are designed to fire a lot of ammunition in a short period of time.

They are not designed to kill a lot of people. They are designed to wound a lot of soldiers on the battlefield, so they will soak up a lot of behind-the-lines resources, like doctors and helicopters and ambulances, blood, food, and fuel. They will have to be taken somewhere else and cared for by someone other than their sergeants, and that's a good thing.

Even their ammo is restricted by the Geneva Convention to "ball" or "full metal jacket" ammunition that just punches little holes in the enemy, rather than the much more damaging "hollowpoint" ammunition. The current round is also a .223 caliber bullet, barely bigger than the .22 caliber round ifired by rifles we used to give our kids to hunt squirrels. If we really wanted to arm our soldiers with machine guns designed to be horrible murder machines, they should be the old Tommy-guns, firing .45 caliber hollowpoints. What those "flying ashtrays" hit, would likely die, especially if chewed by hollowpoints.

But I digress. Suffice to say that an "assault rifle" is a very specific thing -- a machine gun, designed to wound large numbers of soldiers by firing large numbers of small bullets very quickly, taking them off the battlefield. The anti-gun lobby has come up with a new term -- "assault weapon" to describe something ELSE, a weapon that merely looks like a military arm, that doesn't function like a military arm, and are trying to make you THINK is a military arm.

Sad to say, this is partly the fault of a marketing plan gone horribly wrong. Face it, soldiers have been "cool" for a long, long time. It has been normal to worship soldiers as heroes for as long as there have been soldiers and other boys and men to worship them. Remember "G.I. Joe"? Well, face it...the old weapons our boys used in WWII and Korea were just plain butt-ugly. The Thompson sub-machine gun is impressive but ungainly, looking like a cane making love to a hubcap, and an M-1 Garand rifle just looks like...well, like any other rifle. Nothing to write home about.

But the M-16...now THERE was a RIFLE! The thing was an "image" marvel! It's all angles, tubes, lines, pipes, handles, knives, and other little poky bits and places for nifty surface design that, frankly, made the thing just look cool as HELL. It looks impressive in the hands of a soldier -- even though all it does is throw a lot of itty bitty bullets that just poke little holes and send the other guys to the hospital more often than anything else. IF they hit anything, because the soldiers weren't interested in accuracy, just throwing lead.

But they were cool. I mean, face it...who wouldn't think something that looks like this:

Wasn't cool?

Now, thing is, that picture isn't a military M-16. It's a civilian gun. It's a simple rifle, one designed to fire the same bullet as the M-16, but it only fires them one at a time, once for each squeeze of the trigger. The thing the manufacturer did was to make the outside of the thing look like the M-16, so it would look really, really cool and attract the dollars of the guys who still worship G.I. Joe with the kung-fu grip. It's basically a squirrel-hunting gun with a fancy outsides, designed to stoke the testosterone pumps of military-minded gun enthusiasts. Nothing more.

And it is no more "powerful" as a firearm than THIS gun:

This rifle fires exactly the same bullet. It has a far different exterior, and a different firing mechanism, using a bolt-action to eject the cartridge and move a new one from the magazine to the chamber instead of being semi-automatic. But it does the same exact thing as the scary-looking military-appearing weapon above, and has exactly the same firepower. I chose pictures of .223 Remington rifles with the same length barrels, so they would have as close to the same muzzle velocity as possible, so I would be comparing apples to apples.

The package -- the fancy military-looking exterior, with all the knobs and doors and nifty relief sculpted gizzies -- has absolutely ZERO effect on the bullet and what it does to the target when it hits it. A "flash suppressor", or a "bayonet lug", or a "pistol grip", or even a "high-capacity magazine" (all compoenents that fit into the disqualification of an "assault weapon" under the ban) do ZERO to the actual firepower of the weapon. They only make it LOOK cooler...or scarier, depending on your point of view.

The worst part of the whole "assault weapons ban" isn't that they lied about what the weapons were. It's that they lied about what they were used for. They claimed that criminals were using "assault weapons" for crime, and that banning them would get them off the streets, and implied that they were getting dangerous machine guns away from gangs and criminals by passing this law.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Some criminals did own weapons like the Bushmaster XM-15 above. But they didn't carry them to commit crimes. It would be silly. They used handguns if they used guns at all. Or shotguns. But because they OWNED these scary guns, they became part of the statistics the anti-gunners are using to scare you, even though they didn't use them.

They claim these "terror weapons" are used to kill police officers. They actually aren't, not all that damn often. The number of cases where they have been used against police can be counted on the fingers of one hand. They claim they're dangerous because they can penetrate bulletproof vests. Well, any rifle can do that -- those vests are designed to protect against HANDGUN rounds, not rifles! A simple cowboy-style lever-action hunting rifle in a piddly .30-30 caliber could do it. They claim they can "spray fire" a whole neighborhood. No, they can't...those are machine guns, and these guns only fire one bullet at a time. They're trying to convince you that these are machine guns because they LOOK like machine guns.

And they say there's no reason for the "assault weaons" except to murder people, that they're no good for hunting. Not so. The round is perfect for varmint hunting. They're used all the time for keeping the coyote population down out West, and they work great on groundhogs and other small mammals. And because it's semi-automatic, firing only one round at a time, this verision is a lot more accurate than the spray-firing machine-gun original. People even use them for competition shooting.

Just because a Dodge Neon has been tricked out to look like a Lambourghini doesn't mean it IS a Lambourghini, and should get charged the same insurance rate as one. It doesn't have the same engine as one, can't go as fast as one, doesn't have the same transmission and suspension as one, and isn't nearly as expensive as one. They just made it look cool so you'd buy it.

This is a similar case. They just made the lie scary so you'd buy it.

--- Gwen

The Range Bag

It's sad.

Where have all the cowboys gone? There was a song by that title a few years back, bemoaning the lack of "Lone Rangers", happy endings, and other romantic figures. Now, Citizens of America is singing the Blues and shutting the doors because of a distinct dearth of angels.

The anti-gun movement has all too many of them. They seem to be popping out of the woodwork, more than willing to shell out piles of money to destroy our inalienable rights. They're pleased to pump out huge piles of cash to support organizaitons that lie and distort and inflame. And some millionaires have placed their entire fortunes at the disposal of the anti-rights cause, a huge, multi-million-dollar thorn in our sides.

Where are our angels? Where have all our cowboys gone? We have our own millionaires, but they aren't stepping forward. They're sitting on their piles of money like dragons on their hoards, secure with their own bellies full of phlogiston, but unwilling to spare a single spurt of flame to protect the rights of others. Not so much as a nugget of gold a flawed emerald from their cascades of gems and bullion to spare to defend the rights they take for granted.

Now we've lost Citizens of America. After 3 years of effort, they're shutting down. The donations were too few, too far between, a day late, a dollar short. The industry didn't pony up, the gun owners didn't pony up, the millionaires on OUR side didn't pony up. One by one, the advocates that fight for our rights are going to fall, buried under the money thrown by the anti-rights supporters.

As Benjamin Franklin said...if we don't hang together, we shall all hang separately. A dollar here and a dollar there, in the pockets of the rugged individualists of the pro-rights community will NOT win the day against the anti-gunners, no matter how much we want them to. We need to have these dollars together in one spot. We need to set aside "rugged individualism" for the sake of common goals, and work to BEAT the anti-gunners once and for all. And we need to SHAME the millionaire pro-gunners into climbing over their Jack Benny vault defenses and start spending their money instead of lying on the piles of cash like fat, lazy dragons, sleeping in their caverns.

I call upon Charleton Heston and all of his friends to start spending money from their fortunes instead of just waving old flintlocks in the air. I call upon every gun manufacturer to find every spare dollar and dedicate it to ensuring there will BE a market for their wares next week, next month, next year. And I call upon every pro-rights individual to set aside indidviduality to pull together for the common goal of eradicating the anti-gun movement as the pack of lies it is.

"The most common "weapon" confronted by police officers was
automobile, which accounted for 32 cases of police firearm use. This
was followed by knives, at 11 cases. There were four cases where
police officers were confronted by bars and other blunt instruments.
...the NPA said there were only three cases where police officers
were confronted by suspects armed with firearms when they
resorted to the use of own guns."

These statements came from an article in "Japan Today" about the sudden surge in Japanese police firearm use over the past year. The point that makes it interesting to me is that it clearly illustrates the concept of weapon substitution in a "gun-free" zone.

Japan is always trotted out as an "ideal" gun-free culture, that their gun violence rate is incredibly low because guns were banned, therefore, banning guns HERE would be a good idea. This quote shows that the criminal element in Japan has simply substituted another powerful tool for the firearm when opposing the police: the automobile.

Here, when we point out that FAR more people die in automobile accidents than die from accidental shootings, the response is that automobiles have an overwhelming positive social value that renders the damage they do "incidental". We try to point out the same value in guns, but it's hard to do when the media won't report defensive gun use. But in this case, we have a clear example of a 10.6 times greater incidence of cars being used *as weapons* to threaten Japanese police, and an escalation of police force in response to the threat, using *firearms* to counter.

Clearly, the violence inherent in the criminal element is *not* in the weapon they choose to employ, as the anti-gunners would have everyone believe, but in the hearts and minds of the criminals themselves. When deprived of guns, they will simply switch to the next most powerful tool they can pervert to their purpose. This article is clear proof of this principle in action, and refutes that Japan's "gun free" status makes them more inherently non-violent.

--- Gwen
The Range Bag

Hey, now...THIS is a great idea!

I am so cheesed off at the liberal bonehead Michael Moore, that I have been looking for a way to express my righteous ire, but hadn't found the perfect way until now.

Join the "Buy A Gun For (In Spite of) Michael Moore" campaign on April 15, Tax Day!

Yes, really torque off this Brie-eating, limo-driving, baseball-cap-wearing troglodyte by going out and buying a new (or new to you) firearm and loudly proclaiming to all and sundry that you are doing so because Michael Moore ticked you off. If you can't afford a new gun, buy some ammo. Can't afford ammo, buy some foam earplugs, or some targets. Get something gun-related, something that unshaven, left-wing blatherskite would splutter and go apoplectic over if he knew it was being purchased in his name.

And we are not alone in this great struggle, oh, no! There are others! You can read about this campaign to stick a big, ugly thorn in that non-documentary making fictitious Oscar winner's side at Aaron's Rantblog.

Okay...maybe I'm overreacting. I don't actually know that Michael Moore eats Brie. But everything else is straight from the heart.

--- Gwen Patton
The Range Bag

One of the most infuriating phrases in all anti-rights rhetoric has to be "stop gun violence".

This phrase triggers my ire in so many different ways. It is so blatantly manipulative, it makes me ill, and at the same time, it threatens to be one of the most undeniably effective memes ever concocted by the opponents of the Right to Bear Arms.

And that is exactly what it is, a meme. In case you haven't heard that term, scientist Richard Dawkins coined the term to go along with "gene", an idea considered as a replicator, with the connotation that memes propagate through people parasitically, much as viruses do. A meme is some idea that is characteristically "catchy", easily passed between persons, and is, if well-crafted, very difficult to kill.

The concept of a gun as an anthropomorphic object, rampaging about on its own, performing all sorts of nefarious deeds, is a very potent meme that the anti-gun crowd has been very careful to nurture and propagate. Most Americans are at least intelligent enough to know that a gun is not a sentient thing -- it does not posess a brain, it is not alive, it has no arms, no legs, and cannot jump up and aim itself, cock itself, fire itself at random persons -- it requires a human being to actuate it. Guns (with the sole, rare exception of certain high-tech cybernetic mechanisms in the military) are inanimate lumps of metal and plastic, posessing no life whatsoever. Even if loaded, a gun will sit -- dead -- on a table, windowsill, car seat, or even upon a baby's changing table until it rusts or crumbles to powder from sheer entropy unless picked up and used by a living being.

We know this. It is a fact. We don't need to be told. So how come there's so much vituperation against "the gun?" Why is "the gun" the bad guy? Why is there "anti-gun" legislation? Why do we have to get "guns" off the streets, and why is there such an initiative to curb "gun violence?" The implication -- the meme -- is that the gun is doing all of it, that people aren't doing any of it at all.

This is deliberate.

But why? Why would anyone want to shift the blame from the people performing the violence to a lump of metal and plastic? Why not say "stop violence with guns?" Why not say "anti-violence legislation?" Why not say "stop criminals from shooting people?" Why start a meme against an inanimate object?

Because the inanimate object represents power and freedom, and it is the desire of those who have crafted the meme to control the sources of power and freedom allotted to us, that's why.

If we have a gun, we don't need to wait for a police officer to come and protect us from a criminal -- we will feel confident enough to do it ourselves. These people don't want us to do that. They want us dependent upon outside authority figures, even when those authorities are inadequate or despotic.

If the public is armed, we are not easily cowed when the government breaks the mandate under which it operates. This is precisely what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Second Amendment. It had nothing to do with "national guards", or government-run militias, it had to do with making sure that our own leaders couldn't send "redcoats" after us again to subjugate us unfairly, against the laws of the land.

So the tools themselves are vilified, made "evil", by catchy phrases and misdirection. A meme is crafted, and emotions channelled. The only way to beat a meme is to be aware that it is there, and to refuse to listen to it. You have to realize that your brain is being tickled by the catchy jingle, the bouncy rhythm, the simple turn of phrase.

It isn't "gun violence", it's human violence. It just happens that the human in question chose to use a gun.

Don't be fooled. Inoculate yourselves against this meme.

--- Gwen Patton
The Range Bag

Here's a new look for The Range Bag. I decided that the old software, a program called Safari, just wasn't doing what I wanted. It was hard to use, clunky, and not well suited to my purposes. It was really designed for building newsletters, not a blog, and that's what this is now.

Hence my change to using Blogger for this site. It's free (at least until Google decides to change the business model), relatively easy to use, and provided a decent template for the basic page. It took a few minutes to get the FTP portion set up properly, but once I did, it worked quickly and cleanly.

Those of you who don't know yet, some of these blogs will also appear as columns in The KEYSTONE, the quarterly newsletter of the Pennsylvania Chapter of the Second Amendment Sisters. Since the newsletter is quarterly, and I'll most likely have things to say more often than that, I'll be choosing particularly pithy things to include there. If you're interested in The KEYSTONE, it is freely available to anyone. You don't have to be a member of the Second Amendment Sisters, but, of course, I do recommend it.

I know the content on this site has been spotty in the past few months, I will plead to bad health over the Xmas season and low energy level after dealing with it. But, to quote Buddy from Night Court, "I'm feeling much better now, so I hope to be posting more regularly. With an easier interface, I think I will be.

--- Gwen Patton
The Range Bag

Just one.

We hear that exhortation a lot, as a statement of minimal acceptable value or maximum acceptable outrage. "If it helps 'just one' child...", "If we can get rid of 'just one' gun...", these are examples of how it is used by those who spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt , drawing Just One Line to hem us in. If we take Just One Step out of line, they'll take Just One Cut between our shoulders and our chins.

But *we* can take heart from "just one", too. All too often, we are individually daunted by the enormity of the task of changing the world around us for the better. It looks like such a huge job, battling the armies of billionaire-funded haters who have each pledged to destroy Just One Amendment from the Bill of Rights (which will result in the
enslavement of Just One Nation, but they have Just One Brain-Cell, so they don't see that). We start feeling like Sissyphus, doomed to push Just One Boulder up Just One Mountain for Just One Eternity.

But it isn't really that bad. We're not that bad off, we've just been convinced that all those "just ones" have added up to a mountain we can't climb. But if each of us changes Just One Thing, it will make a big difference, one that will be clearly visible. Take Just One Friend to the range and teach them that guns aren't the evil they always thought they were. You don't have to convince ALL of your friends -- Just One!

Write Just One Letter to Just One Congresscritter about Just One Law. You'll be surprised how easy it was, once you've done it, making that pile you've been looking at with despair seem smaller. Then you can write Just One More and it doesn't seem so bad...

Teach Just One Child about Eddie Eagle, or suggest the program to Just One School. Even if you don't succeed in getting them to adopt it, you have tried, Just Once. That's better than NONE, and who knows -- you might succeed! Or, if you're feeling brave, run for Just One Office in Just One Election -- heck, even if you get Just One Vote, at least you'll know you tried. And you might just WIN!

Every trip begins with Just One Step. Every battle is opened with Just One Shot. And every Just Once, wouldn't you like to see the look on their faces when they see us no longer paralyzed by the size of the task before us? You can. All you need to do is try, Just Once.

Just One Gunshow, Just One Article, Just One Rally, Just One Shoot, Just One March, Just One Protest, Just One Lesson, Just One Donation, Just One Story, Just One Interview, Just One Truth -- all of these are small things, simple things, single things that can be done by one person, just ONCE, but will make vast differences. And, if you like them, you can do something wonderful.

You can do them AGAIN.

--- Gwen Patton
The Range Bag