Gun Control? My hands are neither cold nor dead so no, you can't have it.

I can't even begin to say what a horrific tragedy it is, what happened Friday in Newtown. And pretty much anything that could be said about the victims and how tragic it was has already been said by people more eloquent than I.

Of course, the expended brass had barely finished clinking on the classroom floor when yet again people were screaming for gun control. On my Facebook wall my European and Canadian friends were all wondering when the USA would finally start doing serious gun control, because it works oh-so-well in their own countries. In fact, the person who started the conversation lives near gun-controlled Toronto, where in June a guy opened fire in a shopping mall, hitting five people, two of whom died.

If you're an avid reader of my stuff here, you'll recall that after the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado I wrote against gun control, because I feel that gun control is not the solution to things like this. Liberals and the ill-informed & under-informed who swallow whatever pabulum the Leftist media spoon-feeds them think guns are evil, using the logic that an inanimate object commits crime unto itself all on its own without a human being being responsible for their own actions.

The guy who opened fire at the Clackamas Mall in Oregon last week? He stole the weapon that he used. All the media reported on was that the shooter used an AR-15 with emphasis on calling it an assault rifle. This is one of those instances where although it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's not a duck. The media adores the term "assault rifle" or "assault weapon". If I assault you, then by default the weapon I used is an assault weapon. Cain killed Abel with a rock, making a large stone the first assault weapon. Last I checked, no one was advocating rock control.

Historically the term "assault rifle" is generally traced back to the German Sturmgewehr-44 in the latter part of World War Two. Up until then their standard infantry rifle was a bolt-action rifle with an internal 5-round magazine. The word Sturmgewehr literally meant "storm rifle"....as in a rifle to storm, or assault, a fortification. It used a 30-round detachable box magazine and could fire fully automatic. It was later the basis for the Soviet AK-47 family of rifles.

Herein lies the rub. Civilian models of military-style weapons, by law, are semi-automatic. They are incapable of firing the entire magazine off in a continual burst like the original assault rifles. A semi-automatic weapon requires you to squeeze the trigger each time you wish a round to be fired. The only "automatic" part of the operation is that the expended brass cartridge is automatically extracted & ejected as the next round is fed into the chamber from the magazine. It is not a machine gun. The US military's M-4 carbine, the latest permutation of the M-16 family, does not fire full auto except for a special variant used by Special Operations forces. Instead, the weapon has the S-1-3 trigger group, which means you have the options of Safe, Semi-Auto, and 3-round burst only. Back when I was a soldier, I carried an M-16A1 that was able to fire full auto, and they were being phased out in favor of the A2 with a burst feature instead; this was in 1988.

But, the media thinks anything with a detachable box magazine is an assault rifle. Uninformed talking head politicians on the Left who want to outlaw large-capacity magazines fail to realize that it's even easier to conceal three ten-round rifle magazines than to conceal a larger 30-round magazine, and anyone with a bare modicum of experience with a weapon can drop an empty magazine & insert a fresh one in under five seconds.

The media also likes to mistakenly refer to something they call an automatic pistol. Again, this is because they are either A) stupid, B) manipulating the masses, or C) both.  A pistol is either a revolver with a cylinder that holds on average 6 cartridges, you know, cowboy style six-shooters....or it is a magazine-fed semi-auto that (say it with me now, kids) fires a round each time the trigger is squeezed and it extracts & ejects the spent casing & a new one is loaded from the magazine. Depending on caliber, they will carry an average of 7 to 18 rounds. Mine carries 8 in the magazine and I can have a ninth round in the chamber.

By the by, I have been safely handling, operating, and carrying weapons of various types from pistols to rifles to shotguns to belt-fed machine guns to grenade launchers (though mostly rifles and handguns) for over 25 years. I also have a 100% success rate at never injuring anyone with any firearm I have had in my possession, either for duty or for pleasure shooting. Not every gun owner is a homicidal maniac, despite what the media would have you believe.

Back to Oregon; something else the media doesn't want you to know: the Clackamas Mall shooter was confronted by a private citizen with a concealed carry permit, and afterwards the next shot he fired was to take his own life. The media is also not too quick to report an armed, off-duty female deputy working security an a San Antonio movie theater prevented a mass shooting after a gunman opened fire this past weekend. In 2006, assistant principal Joel Myrick used a handgun to stop fleeing school shooter Luke Woodham. Woodham, who had killed his mother that morning, murdered two students and wounded several others before Myrick, an Army reservist, rammed his car into Woodham's and then drew his .45 and forced Woodham to surrender.

The media will bury the story of the Utah man who shot & killed an intruder in his home this morning in defense of his wife & three young children.

No, the media wants you to believe all law-abiding gun owners are monsters.

I generally don't read the Huffington Post (if it was printed on paper I'd line a hamster cage with it) but happened upon this article of theirs and all the dimwitted anti-gun rhetoric that went along with it. Of particular interest was the rank system used by their acolytes, where by the more posts you parrot the Liberal party line on, the farther up the HuffPo elite ladder you climb. 

Meanwhile, some businesses are either buckling to pressure from the anti-gun lobby or are closing ranks to pull spin control.

Mail order and online shooting supply retailer Cheaper Than Dirt! issued this statement at 6PM Tuesday :

Cheaper Than Dirt! has temporarily suspended online sales of firearms.
As a long time supporter of the Second Amendment, Cheaper Than Dirt! will continue to promote the safe and responsible use of firearms by law abiding customers. During this temporary suspension, we will review our policies and promotions.

They issued a statement earlier today letting us know they will resume their online sales once they update and improve their process....I dunno what's to improve. They do not ship direct to your door like Amazon. They send it to a Federal Firearms License gun dealer in your area who then facilitates the rest of the sale, like calling in the background check, and tacks a small user fee onto the transaction for the service. Sounds to me like they tucked tail & are laying low till this blows over.

Meanwhile, Dick's Sporting Goods announced today they will no longer sell military-style firearms, afraid that soccer moms will no longer come in to buy overpriced sneakers and yoga mats. And Walmart pulled the Bushmaster rifles from their online advertising, because the very name is due to quickly become poison and all of you pariahs who own one will be vilified & ostracized by people who wouldn't know an M-4 from a musket. The venture capital company that owns Bushmaster, Cerberus Capital Management, has now announced that they will sell the company, knuckling under to pressure from their biggest shareholder, the ultra-liberal California Teacher's Union's retirement pension plan.

Look, people. Over 900 people were killed after drinking tainted Kool Aid in Jonestown in 1978. No one's ever tried to ban Kool Aid, because Kool Aid didn't kill those people; a guy who had them drink it after lacing it killed them. It was merely the delivery system. Guns were the delivery system that was central to the killings in Newtown, but it was a mentally ill 20-year old who killed those people.

And that brings me to the fact that this is not a gun control issue; it's a mental health issue. Pretty much all these high profile killings have mental illness in common. Loughner in Tuscson, Holmes in Aurora, the list goes on & on.

Has anyone stopped to think about the long term effects of brain candy on the mentally ill? How many acts of violence are tied to long term use of severe antidepressants and ADHD meds? I really want to know.

So, of course, Obama and the Liberals want to once again come for our guns. The people who want to take away guns from private citizens are protected by....people with guns.....yeah, exactly. Turns out that Feinstein & Reid both have carried guns for protection but they want to make sure you can't. And so Obama will appoint a panel of sycophants to look for ways to disarm the populace, while they run guns to Syria and Mexico.