That sounds familiar

The Tyler Morning Telegraph (Tyler, Texas) has been seeking reader reactions to the spike in firearms sales spurred by the the impending HopeandChange™. One respondent didn't seem to think it was a good idea.

"I think people are completely overreacting," Chad King wrote in a reader comment he submitted. "It's funny to me that people are buying guns that they fear are going to be taken away from them. That makes absolutely no sense. ... Republican or Democrat, we all have to agree somewhere in the middle that certain guns only belong on the battlefield and serve no purpose in the hands of children and criminals."

"Only belong on the battlefield," eh? That sounds an awful lot like the (now vanished) urban policy we've been promised:

They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent, as such weapons belong on foreign battlefields and not on our streets.

Ignoring for the moment the fact that there's no guarantee that the only battlefields over the next few years will be "foreign battlefields," and that the "Only Ones" are presumably not being equipped with "patrol rifles" for use on foreign battlefields, the assumption here seems to be that making something illegal will make it go away. By such "logic," that "War on Drugs" must be just about won by now, eh? I suppose it might bother some if I point out that a ban on militia-capable firearms is rather difficult to reconcile with shall not be infringed--I guess they'll just have to deal with being bothered.

Another aspect of what Chad King says (in reference to so-called "assault weapons") comes at the end of the sentence. To repeat:

. . . serve no purpose in the hands of children and criminals.

That also sounds quite a lot like something straight from the mouth of the Obamessiah (this time his Democratic Convention speech).

. . . but don't tell me we can't uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals.

And that takes me to what I see as the main point of this post (yeah, I know--it takes me a while to get there). I'm assuming that by "AK-47s," he refers not to real AK-47s, which are already extremely tightly controlled, but to the semi-automatic copies commonly available to private citizens in most states.

I have a problem with the ambiguity of that position. Presumably, the "Lightworker" is well aware of the fact that criminals are already barred by law from possessing any firearms. That would seem to mean that by "keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals," he means keeping them out of our hands--the hands of peaceable armed citizens.

Obviously, keeping such firearms out of the hands of such citizens will do nothing, in and of itself, to prevent violence--the idea is that to keep them out of the hands of criminals, you have to keep them out of everyone's hands (never mind that that is impossible, also). Once you acknowledge that, it seems to me that you acknowledge that the laws against criminals possessing firearms don't work--if they did, you wouldn't need another law, keeping AK-47s out of their hands.

In other words, the response to the ineffectiveness of gun laws is . . . to pass more gun laws. That oughta work.