Bonus! Three for one day

Last week, I discussed a piece by Woody Bass (who really, really HATES guns), in which he asked the question "Are Guns Too Accessible?"--to which his answer, clearly, is strongly in the affirmative. In it, he promised to reveal his plan for greatly reducing, or even eliminating, what he considers the problem of people buying firearms for self-defense, without learning basic gun safety measures.

Well, yesterday, the plan was revealed, as promised. Basically, it's a six step plan whereby anyone who wishes to buy a gun must undergo a great deal of training in order to exercise his Constitutionally guaranteed fundamental human right of the individual to keep and bear arms. Hmm--placing extensive conditions on a fundamental, unalienable right--doesn't sound quite right, does it? Perhaps we should license journalists, as well--after all, much damage is done by people exercising their First Amendment rights clumsily and irresponsibly.

One concern I have with the Woody Plan is that the extensive training it calls for would have to be quite expensive. Not a problem for wealthy people who wish not to be disarmed, of course, but for lower income families (who are more likely to live in neighborhoods in which self-defense could become necessary), this could effectively render them at the mercy of any thug who wishes to victimize them. Seems rather regressively elitist, doesn't it?

I had planned for today's post to be solely about the Woody Plan, but today my inbox had two more things I thought were worth commenting on, so today readers get a bonus--not one silly piece advocating civilian disamament, but three! The first is an Op-Ed piece by the Gun Guys' favorite hoplophobe teenagers, the Milonopoulos brothers. They're apparently students at Stanford, and if this is any indication, they certainly have a great deal to learn.

They start by quoting one of the Columbine killers, Eric Harris.

In an essay released last year by investigators of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, 18-year-old gunman Eric Harris mused, “Students can get weapons into school too easily and they have [too] much access to weapons outside of school.”

It seems to me that Harris and Klebold were counting on the prospect of their classmates, and the faculty and staff, not having weapons. The "Gun Free School Zone" concept certainly worked brilliantly for them, didn't it?

In 2004, Congress let expire the federal assault weapons ban, a measure that prohibited the sale of military-style assault rifles that included those used by Klebold and Harris in the Columbine massacre.

I'm a bit surprised that Niko and Theo would bring that up, since the fact that the Columbine shootings occurred right in the middle of the ten year "assault weapon" silliness would seem to provide fairly convincing evidence as to just how pointless that measure was.

The rest of the piece is more of the same, so we'll just move on to our last bit of nitwittery--a letter to the editor of the Philadelphia Daily News. The author of this letter contends that a major factor driving the levels of violence that far exceed those of 30, 40, or 50 years ago, despite vastly more draconian gun laws, is technology.

The most obvious is gun technology, including the invention of Teflon-coated, hollow-point, "cop-killer" bullets, the wide availability of automatic assault weapons capable of spraying an area with deadly projectiles and cheap concealable plastic weapons not easily detected by scanning equipment.

Let's look at these technological developments, shall we? "Cop killer" bullets first. Care to provide some numbers of officers killed by Teflon coated bullets shot through their body armor? Should be easy--it's a small number (right around ZERO, I believe). In truth, the Teflon coating has nothing to do with making a bullet more capable of defeating armor--the coating protects the rifling in the bore of the barrel from the hard, dense materials (like tungsten) that actually do imbue a bullet with a greater capacity to penetrate armor (such materials are banned by federal law for use in handgun ammunition available to the general public). Oh--and hollow points? Those were invented in the 1800's--not exactly "high-tech."

"Automatic assault weapons"? Fully automatic weapons have been very tightly controlled for over 70 years, and have been used in very few killings.

The "plastic weapons" line is especially amusing, I haven't seen that for a long time. There is no such thing as a plastic firearm. Yes, there are numerous handguns with polymer frames, but the barrel, the slide, and many other parts can only be made of metal (for reasons of both physics and legislation). This guy seems to have remembered just about every anti-gun media buzzword except "gun show loophole." He'll probably get to that in the next letter.

I imagine one of the coolest things about writing civilian disarmament advocacy pieces is the complete liberty from the expectation that the writing will be constrained by facts.