A blind squirrel finds an acorn (but doesn't know what to do with it)

In a publication called "BostonNOW" there was an article yesterday with a title that (unintentionally, I am utterly convinced) strikes at the heart of the gun law/gun rights debate. The article is called "Mass. gun laws are strict, but guns still easy to get."

Yeah--as I understand it, during Prohibition, alcohol was easy to get. Throughout the decades of the "War on Drugs," the various (ostensibly) "controlled" substances have been easy to get. Hmm--I think I might be on the verge of identifying an underlying theme here. Could it be that when there's a demand for something, some folks will move to provide a supply, prohibition-type laws notwithstanding? Could it be that strict gun laws are useless, as well as unconstitutional?

By the way, for sheer amusement value, check out this sentence from the article:

Citizen Y carries a 9 mm semi automatic pistol. Citizen X carries a .38mm.

".38mm," eh? Now that's small. I thought the Swiss Minigun, at 2.34mm (.092 caliber), was tiny--but that's over six times the diameter of "Citizen X's" .38mm (.015 caliber). But I digress.

Back to our scheduled programming:

Every year 4,000 gun crimes are committed in Massachusetts, although the Commonwealth has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation.

But I don't suppose that the ubiquity of "gun crimes" has prompted the author to question the effectiveness of those "strictest gun control laws in the nation," has it?

"The problem is," according to Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis, "Instead of a few large illegal dealers in this state, we now have many small dealers who will sell maybe one, two, maybe five guns and there are many more of them, unfortunately."

Well, thanks for explaining to us what "the problem is," Commissioner. Tell me--how do people who sell "maybe one, two, maybe five guns" come to be seen as "dealers"? Is someone who sells one or two cars to be considered a car dealer, subject to a car dealer's licensing requirements? If so, I'll bet there are more "unlicensed car dealers" than "unlicensed gun dealers."

Team 5 Investigates went undercover to a gun show in Vermont, and within minutes, found a federally licensed dealer who was willing to sell us a semiautomatic weapon and its magazine, even though we did not have a permit.

Yeah, well--call it the pesky spirit of Ethan Allen, if you wish, but Vermont doesn't require a government-issued permission slip for the exercise of that particular Constitutionally guaranteed fundamental human right of the individual, so your lack of a "permit" was irrelevant.

The most chilling part of the article, however, comes next:

Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley says gun traffickers won't be permanently put out of business until the law is changed to go after smaller dealers. "A legislative idea that we will propose is just the mere possession of three or more firearms would infer that you were going to distribute," said Conley.

I'm not going to catalog my collection online, but suffice it to say that it's in the double digits (and financial realities keep it much smaller than I would like it to be)--and the only way I'm going to "distribute" those guns is, to borrow a phrase, "from my cold, dead hands."