Here it comes . . .

I wondered today what the forcible citizen disarmament lobby's angle would be, in exploiting yesterday's atrocity:

Their difficulty will lie in the fact that even the most extreme of the anti-gun extremists tend to know better than advocating the disarmament of the military and police (who, after all, would enforce the disarmament laws, if the government had no means of backing them up with force?).

[ . . . ]

Sometimes, a mass shooting will offer the blood dancers an opportunity to justify their calls for bans on so-called "assault weapons," but no such firearms were apparently used for the Ft. Hood rampage. There's no word yet on where the killer acquired his firearms--I can't rule out the possibility that he obtained one or both at a gun show, but since there was nothing in his records that would disqualify him from purchasing and owning guns (if you can be a major in the Army, you can presumably pass a Brady background check), no "gun show loophole" would have been necessary for him to acquire firearms.

So far, it looks as if they're working two different angles. The first is the "veterans are dangerous" angle. I present the Brady Bunch's Paul Helmke:

When I heard of the tragedy yesterday, we were in the midst of planning a response to the latest dangerous legislative proposal from the gun lobby in the United States Senate - language to automatically restore access to guns to veterans designated by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Justice Department as ‘mentally incapacitated’ or ‘mentally incompetent.’ In light of what happened yesterday - a violent attack by an emotionally unstable soldier - it is even clearer that the proposal being pushed by Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina should be rejected.

Helmke is referring to S. 669 and H.R. 2547, both called the "Veterans 2nd Amendment Protection Act." Let's take a look at the summary:

Veterans 2nd Amendment Protection Act - Prohibits, in any case arising out of the administration of laws and benefits by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, considering any person who is mentally incapacitated, deemed mentally incompetent, or experiencing an extended loss of consciousness from being considered adjudicated as a mental defective for purposes of the right to receive or transport firearms without the order or finding of a judge, magistrate, or other judicial authority of competent jurisdiction that such person is a danger to himself or herself or others.

In other words, if a veteran is determined to be a danger, his Second Amendment rights can be trampled to Helmke's little heart's content--the only difference is that now the veteran will have his day in court first. Can't have that, obviously. Keep in mind, that's without even getting into the fact that the murdering scum was not a combat veteran, and a growing body of evidence points to his motivation having been Islamic militancy.

The other angle, that both the Brady Bunch and the VPC are working, is the news that the handgun used was the FN Five-seveN.

It was a handgun that was designed to fire bullets through body armor. A U.S. Senator and a U.S. Congressman urged a legal ban on civilian possession of the firearm, which began being referred to as the "cop killer gun." The gun, manufactured by FN Herstal of Belgium, is lightweight and easily concealable, and was designed as a military sidearm to complement military rifles made by the same company. One law enforcement expert referred to the Five-Seven as "an assault rifle that fits in your pocket."

While no police officer has reportedly been killed by a suspect armed with a Five-Seven, it may now have taken the lives of U.S. soldiers. Today, several news sources are reporting that it was the Five-Seven that Nidal M. Hasan used in his shooting attack at Fort Hood in Texas Thursday

Never mind that commercially available ammo for the Five-seveN has no unusual armor piercing ability (and that few, if any, of the victims yesterday were likely to have been wearing body armor, anyway).

The blood dancing begins.

Update: Someone is working early--on a Saturday, no less.
(Click to enlarge)