Say Anything Blog

Aren’t our second amendment rights the same ones we are told we lost after 9/11?

Where is the proof in that article that police officers were killed with ANY PARTICULAR type weapon. I did not find that. According to the FBI the preferred weapons of criminals are still 9mm handguns. And automobiles. Lots of cops being hit with cars. Going forward and backward.

And for the record, I am biased. I just purchased a Romanian made Kalashnikov RPK. And ain’t shot a single cop with it.

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem

It is the weapon of choice for guerillas and gangsters.

They still can’t bring themselves to call the terrorists “terrorists”; and as Two points out, the vast majority of weapons owned by US citizens aren’t used for any criminal purposes.  Gun legislation is an extreme example of the tail wagging the dog.

If life doesn’t begin at conception, why do they call it birth control?

Assault is a behavior, not a weapon.

Been doing google sweeps on police officer deaths, just a quick, informal read through. Out of 163 seperate news reports 136 were killed with handguns, 21 with shotguns/rifles, 7 in car crashes.

Carbines and small caliber rifles have seen an upswing in driveby shootings, and in incidents in homes/apartments, though 12ga shotguns are still the preferred weapon in these instances.

The actual point of this article is the growing militarization of municipal police personnel. A trend that people should be worried about.

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem

I have to wonder how much of this is caused by willful ignorance on the part of reporters.  There is no way of knowing if this twit actually knows anything about weapons at all.  He could merely be parroting a press release that the police have published.  it wouldn’t be the first time a news agency ran a story without fully vetting the information.

"Although I can accept talking scarecrows, lions and great wizards in emerald cities, I find it hard to believe there is no paperwork involved when your house lands on a witch.”
- Dave James

CNN’s done this kind of stuff before.  I linked to one other story. 

I will say that the weapons banned under the 1994 law were redesigned and available in no time.

What’s going to happen to US industry when the global warming extremists like John McCain double the price of electricity?  I would think all these factories will close and set up in countries where they aren’t scared of technology.

I will say that the weapons banned under the 1994 law were redesigned and available in no time.

Thus the fact that this article relies entirely on semantics (the definition of “assault weapons”.  If no “assault weapons” were produced between 1994-2004, then the amount of “assault weapons” used in crime could potentially be reduced, but they would be replaced by nearly identical non-assault weapons.

This is like saying that if we banned producing red cars, then there would be less red cars involved in accidents.  Does that mean that banning red cars made driving safer?

This is like saying that if we banned producing red cars, then there would be less red cars involved in accidents.

Or if we surveyed the types of vehicles involved in drive-by shootings and banned those cars with those characteristics (speakers in the wheel wells, spinners, fuzzy dice, etc.)then we would eliminate drive-by shootings!

For any voter trying to choose between the two candidates for commander in chief, there is no better test than this: When American strategy in a critical theater was up for grabs, John McCain proposed a highly unpopular and risky path, which he accurately predicted could lead to success. Barack Obama proposed a popular and politically safe route that would have led to an unnecessary and debilitating American defeat at the hands of al Qaeda.

Frederick W. Kagan

Proof: Actually, that would work.  Of course, well-founded profiling works every time.
The old profiling of weapons based on what they looked like(the previous “assault weapons” ban) wasn’t well-founded, which is why it didn’t work.

If life doesn’t begin at conception, why do they call it birth control?

Notice that the article takes what goes on in Miami, probably one of the two or three biggest places for the drug trade, and assumes that it applies nationwide.  Talk about a hasty generalization!

Even more, the article doesn’t really clue in to the fact that most of those fully automatic weapons used in Miami are probably not purchased there, but ultimately come from Latin America and, transitively, most likely Cuba and the former Soviet Union.  Banning “assault weapons” here does NOTHING to reduce the problems seen around Miami for that simple reason.

If you’re interested in horribly misused statistics, take a gander at the Brady Campaign’s website.  Over the years, I’ve seen them claim that a high proportion of police murders were assault weapons based on the bullets (guns were never recovered in about 1/3 of the cases), that gun traces are equivalent to gun uses in crime, and that a lower rate of usage of guns in crime, and not the overall crime rate, is equivalent to a safer society.

Finally, it’s just plain sad to see that too many policemen apparently think that their job consists of matching whatever the criminals have in terms of firepower.  While certainly there are cases when exactly this is needed, going forward with this assumption is going to make the police/citizen relationship needlessly adversarial and cripple good police work.