Milestone! My first (as far as I know) vituperative attack from the blogosphere

A couple months ago, I figured I had reached the zenith of my blogging "career" when I got my first heavy wave of comment spam (I can't remember what they were trying to sell) from China. This forced the annoying necessity of requiring people who wished to leave comments to use "word verification," in order to prove they weren't spambots, but "what the hell?" I figured--that's the price of "fame" ;-). Yesterday, I discovered an even more sure indicator that Armed and Safe is being noticed--another blogger found what I say objectionable enough to call me names.

I won't name the blog, or post a link--I'm not interested in giving his ego the satisfaction. I can't resist posting some kind of response, though. First, though, a little background. My critic is apparently another Illinois resident, more specifically, a resident of the district "represented" by Senator Dan Kotowski (for whom I have made no secret of my contempt). The blogger who took such umbrage at what I have had to say about Kotowski obviously holds a different view about the Senator.

What has our esteemed blogger stomping his little sheeple hooves is the fact that some gun rights activists (myself included) have railed against Kotowski's egregious agenda. He takes a brief stab at defending Kotowski's irrational demonization of .50 caliber rifles here (am I to assume that the same cartridge necked down for a .499 caliber bullet would be perfectly acceptable?):

One more such reasonable limit would be to ban .50 caliber rifles — these are the 5-foot long rifles which fire 5-inch long bullets capable of downing a passenger jet from the ground

What's the polite way to respond to that? Ahh . . . bullshit. .50 caliber rifles do not fire 5 inch long bullets--sure, the overall cartridge length is just under 5 1/2", but the bullets themselves are much shorter than that. As for downing passenger jets--it hasn't happened yet, ever, not just in the States, but anywhere. Collisions with birds have downed passenger planes--.50 caliber rifles have not. Perhaps birds should be the next target of Kotowski's witch hunts.

By the way, I should mention that I'm not that big a deal to this guy, and he dealt with me only briefly. First, he went after Big Gay Al:

Big Gay Al's Big Gay (Gun) Blog picks up on a recent NRA press release about a Kotowski press conference that was crashed by a gun-maker:

…when the senator pointed to an Armalite .50-caliber rifle and called it a "military weapon," he got the shock of his life. The top guy from Armalite [Mark Westrom] stood up in the audience and told the crowd that's not true. He said they'd never sold the rifle to the military.

That post from Big Gay Al is very similar to the ISRA press release discussing that press conference which Mr. Westrom snuck into. Apparently Big Gay Al, who is actually gun-toting, homosexual blogger Albert Lowe of Michigan, has never heard of fact-checking.

The problem for the Rifle Associations and the parrots who echo their baloney is that Sen. Kotowski didn't lie about a thing with regards to the Armalite .50 cal rifle. In fact, Mr. Westrom's company Armalite has in the past consulted with the military about this gun. They may not have "sold it" to the Pentagon (as Mr. Westrom technically said), but Sen. Kotowski never claimed they did in the first place. What the Senator did say, however, was that it was a military weapon — which it is. As such, it's also a potential terrorist weapon and would allow a wannabe Tim McVeigh or Mohammed Atta to obliterate a plane full of folks … leaving O'Hare in a jet bound for heaven instead of a Florida vacation.

Look, genius--if a firearm has never been adopted by any military, it is not a "military weapon," and referring to it as one is indeed a lie.

Now in his April 5th blogpost, Big Gay Al indicates that Mr. Westrom's Illinois-based company (Armalite) would simply close shop and move to a different state for manufacturing the gun if it were to be banned in the Prairie State. Based on the text of the bill as written, this is actually untrue. Armalite could make them but only for the military, the police, and a few select other law and marshall enforcement entities (as opposed to recreational "target shooters" or wannabe terrorists who feel a need to completely disintegrate their targets). Whether or not Armalite would choose to continue to do so would be up to them and their business' bottom line.

These companies do not get enough government business to make it without civilian sales as well. A law that locked them out of civilian manufacture would shut them down, and thus make them unavailable to the military as well. That was the point made by both the National Shooting Sports Foundation, and Al--and it is 100% correct.

Now he gets to me. I've written recently (here and here) about Kotowski's astonishingly dishonorable move of hijacking a bill designed to deal with the sick predators who sexually exploit children, and deleting all that language, and turning it into a magazine capacity limit bill. Supposedly, I am a very bad person for objecting to that.

Something else that's "gross"? Goofs who don't understand the legislative process. It sounds more complicated than it is but, up until the time a bill is voted on, the text of that bill is completely fluid and can (and does) change from hour to hour let alone week to week. One such goofball writes for a pro-gunner blog called "Armed and Safe". Apparently the "ignorant" part is implied. Blogger "45superman" titles his May 1st post: "Illinois State Senator Dan Kotowski supports the sexual exploitation of children" — another gross misrepresentation.

The bill in question started as a children's isssues bill but has since been revamped to account for gun safety as Sen. Kotowski works to ban large capacity magazines. Sexual exploitation has nothing to do with it, except for a partisan conservative who has decided that he can earn some cheap political points by twisting the words to sound sinister.

"Goof" though I may be, I understand more than I really want to about how the legislative process "works" (if you can call it that). I realize that the bill, before Kotowski got a hold of it, made no substantive change to existing law--it was introduced as what is referred to as a "shell bill." This is often done when the author of the bill hasn't gotten around to getting the text together, but the deadline for filing is coming up. By filing a bill with no real text, he can get it in before the deadline, and then amend it later. One could argue that such an approach to lawmaking is a hell of a way to run a railroad, and I would have trouble contesting the point. Still, it hardly seems unfair to expect that a bill advertised as being about protecting children from sexual exploitation to . . . have something to do with protecting children from sexual exploitation. Judging by the fact that the Senator who introduced the bill in the first place, Senator A.J. Wilhelmi, has already told constituents that he will vote against the amended bill, and that he is not at all pleased with what has been done to it, it would seem that it is not merely gun rights activists who find Kotowski's actions contemptible.

If Kotowski had found himself short of time as the original filing date for Senate bills approached, he should perhaps have filed his own shell bill--calling it "a bill for imposing draconian restrictions on law-abiding gun owners, with absolutely zero utility for saving life," for example. Instead, he chose to try to sneak his civilian disarmament legislation under cover of something that no Senator could easily vote against--a bill that is still presented as being geared to protecting children from sexual exploitation.

I am especially amused that I am now apparently a "partisan conservative"--my conservative acquaintances will be enormously pleased, I'm sure, to learn that I am abandoning my Libertarian alignment. To tell you the truth, I consider my brand of libertarianism to be vastly closer to Classical Liberalism (what is "liberal" about a government monopoly on the use of force) than to conservatism. I'm no neo-con--I'm a "paleo-lib."

Anyway, my blogging critic--thanks for noticing an obscure blog like mine--always good to get some extra exposure.