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00Publius Contributor - 2nd Amendment - Crime - Democrats/Leftists - Media Bias - News - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Warner Todd Huston

Tallahassee Dem. Newspaper: Big Brother Should Track Guns With GPS

June 28, 2008 by 1 Comment

-By Warner Todd Huston

She thinks she has lit upon a “responsible idea” to regulate guns. The idea Megan Kristen Lewis of the Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat thinks is “responsible” is to put global positioning tracking devices (GPS) in every gun. That way the government could track down your firearm if it is “stolen” or used in a crime.

Miss Lewis attempts to assure the reader that she really is a fan of guns before she unleashes this great idea, of course. She knows people with guns, she claims, and she doesn’t “fear” them. Why, she grew up around them, she says. Of course, they were always locked up in a safe so no one could get to them. Still, she says her Father taught her about “weapon safety from a very young age.”

Sadly, her Father neglected to teach her about the Constitution or about world and American history because if he did her Big Brother gun tracking program idea would have never occurred to her in the first place.

To buttress her case, Lewis recounts a story where a local Florida man accidentally shot himself with a .22 and seems to imagine that this is something extraordinary. But, this sort of silly singling out of an accident obscures the fact that humans are sometimes careless. Further, it’s a fact that gun accidents are not nearly as wide spread as other types of accidents. Car accidents, for instance, far out weigh gun accidents by many magnitudes of percentage. Does Miss Lewis want to restrict cars because of these accidents? I doubt it ever even occurred to her.

But, let’s get to her brilliant idea.

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00Publius Contributor - 2nd Amendment - Constitution - Crime - Democrats/Leftists - Media Bias - News - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Warner Todd Huston

WaPo: Scalia Says ‘Hear, Hear’ to Machine Guns in D.C.?

June 27, 2008 by

-By Warner Todd Huston

It didn’t take long for the Washington Post to weigh in on the wrong side of the Second Amendment issue, did it? The Post’s Colbert I. King could not contain the disgust he feels for at least one part of the Constitution more in his response to the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment ruling today. He flipped his top and went so far off the deep end that he seemed to imagine that Justice Scalia just gave the nod for citizens to get “machine guns” to indulge their newly affirmed ability to indiscriminately fire their loaded guns “at will” in D.C. In fact in this op ed, King was so unhinged that he seemed to utterly dispense with logic as he penned his newest ode to the wild-eyed phobia that is his inordinate fear of guns (yet, curiously, not of criminals).

King’s very first few paragraphs seem to be written without the slightest bit of reflection of how illogical his position on the concept of gun laws is because it looks as though he imagines that criminals might obey a draconian anti-gun law, or any gun law for that matter if only it is enforced. One wonders why Mr. King thinks criminals are called criminals if laws would prevent them from doing anything? Worse, King can’t seem to tell the difference between a law-abiding citizen using a gun in self-defense and a criminal using it for evil. It seems as if to King criminals and citizens are indistinguishable.

King begins his spittle-speckled rant with some informal colloquialisms.

There’s one group of District residents absolutely unfazed by today’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling shooting down the District’s strict handgun ban: the dudes who have been blowing away their fellow citizens with abandon since the law was put on the books 32 years ago.

Excuse me, Mr. King, but these “dudes” have been thumbing their noses at your 32-year-old gun ban, too and for the entire 32 years. The new SCOTUS ruling is certainly initially meaningless to them, but so is your three decades old gun ban that was supposed to fix it all, sir. How hard is that to understand?

I reiterate, criminals do not obey laws, sir. This is why we call them criminals.

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00Publius Contributor - 2nd Amendment - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Media Bias - News - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - The Law - Warner Todd Huston

Miami Herald: 2nd Amendment is ‘Mythical Right ‘

June 10, 2008 by

-By Warner Todd Huston

The Miami (FL) Herald let lose with another propagandistic broadside against the 2nd Amendment on Thursday featuring some more moaning and false statements about how horrible it is for America that the misnamed “assault weapons ban” has lapsed. There is much wringing of hands, waterworks, histrionics and over dramatics by the aptly named Fred Grimm here. In “What’s a few dead cops to the gun lobby?” Grimm’s final pronouncement is that the 2nd Amendment is a “mythical right” but in between there are many misstatements and out right lies.

Grimm starts out putting on some faux “shock” that a modern “semiautomatic assault rifle” he had the occasion to handle was so light. “The shock was in the weight of the thing. Less than six pounds,” Grimm writes. And, what exactly does this mean? A butcher knife weighs less then a pound and can kill, too. What does weight have to do with anything?

Then the scare tactics:

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