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.

A .250 average sucks unless it's baseball

Y’know, where I come from, only getting 1 thing right out of 4 is a 25% success rate. So screwing three outta tfour up is a 75% failure rate. That’s not exactly a stellar performance. Hitting .250 in baseball is acceptable, but not when you’re the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

In the past month or so, the Unites States Supreme Court has handed down four decisions that caught my attention, enough so that after letting them fester a bit, I need to puncture the boil and let the pus drain out.

First up is the ridiculous notion that terrorists are somehow on an equal par with American citizens. The Court, in a 5-4 ruling, decided that the detainees at Guantanamo Bay have a constitutional right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention and that the guarantee of habeas corpus applies at the Navy base in Cuba, the court said, and the truncated alternative procedure that Congress set up was not an adequate substitute. A writ of habeas corpus is a judicial mandate to a prison official ordering that an inmate be brought to the court so it can be determined whether or not that person is imprisoned lawfully and whether or not he should be released from custody. A habeas corpus petition is a petition filed with a court by a person who objects to his own or another's detention or imprisonment.

In essence, this gives the Gitmo detainees access to the American courts just like they were American citizens instead of detained insurgents and hostile enemy combatants against the United States. Last I checked we weren’t traipsing the 380,000 German prisoners of war that were brought stateside to POW camps through our courts to let them have the same rights as Americans back in World War Two. Nor did we offer habeas corpus to the estimated 140,000 or so Chinese and North Korean POW’s from the Korean War. Anyone we took prisoner in Vietnam, well, they were turned over to “Marvin the ARVN” and probably got shot long before they could complain.

But giving access to American courts to non-American enemies of the state is just folly. I suppose we taxpayers can foot the bill for them to have free legal counsel too. Sheesh, these dudes were living in caves before we captured them; now they get three hots & a cot, a brand-new Koran, and a pretty fly new rug to kneel on for Allah-time. They’re getting free medical care. They’re living far better in captivity than they would be out in the Afghan mountains, so they oughtta just be happy for that alone, because if it was the Israeli Mossad holding them, they’d be in a world of hurt far worse than a nice tropical Club Gitmo vacationland. Last I checked, Gitmo was in another country, and I do believe they ruled once before that other countries are out of he jurisdiction of habeas corpus.

Here in the good ole’ US of A, the court ruled that the Constitution prohibits the death penalty for the rape of a child. The decision overturned laws in Louisiana and five other states that had recently extended their death penalty laws to cover child rape. Two men were on death row, both in Louisiana, for raping young girls.

Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority that death was a disproportionate penalty for even so “devastating” a crime when the death of the victim did not result. Excuse me? You’ve got a turd who’s raped a young girl and probably torn her innards to a pulp, psychologically scarred her possibly forever, and even if she does recover through serious counseling she’ll have trust and intimacy issues for a damned long time, and you’re telling me that the death penalty is too severe? What about the damage the victims have to live with? Go down to Blockbuster & rent “A Time to Kill”, sir.

And in a second death penalty decision, the court rejected a challenge to Kentucky’s method of execution by lethal injection, ruling that there was insufficient evidence that the state administered a common sequence of three drugs in a manner that posed an unconstitutional risk of pain and suffering.

The decision raised the question of whether a challenge based on more compelling evidence — the plaintiff’s lawyers could not demonstrate that a Kentucky execution had encountered a problem — might succeed where this case had failed. The answer is unclear. The court promptly allowed several lethal-injection executions to take place, ending an informal six-month moratorium on executions. Justice Stevens, while voting with the majority, used this case to call for abolition of the death penalty. Problem here is that it just postpones the whole debate over lethal injection and holds it over for another round of argument. It solves nothing and passes the buck. I call this another failure.

And besides, how easy are we supposed to make the death penalty anyways? We’re killing someone. The condemned is put to sleep and rendered unconscious before the second drug causes the death itself. The only real feeling is the prick of the needle, which when compared to the pain & suffering of the condemned’s victims, who could have been stabbed repeatedly, shot, bludgeoned, strangled, etc., is pretty much negligible. It’s a lot more humane than electrocution or hanging. The only thing that makes death quicker and painless, since it happens so fast the condemned can’t feel it, is beheading by a guillotine.

Overturning the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, the court ruled that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to own a gun for private use — not only in connection with service in a militia. The 5-to-4 decision left unanswered questions, but also much room for continued gun regulation, short of an absolute ban.

In finding the District’s law against handgun ownership unconstitutional, the high court determined that Americans have the right to own guns for self-defense and hunting. It was the first time in nearly 70 years that the court had taken up broad questions about the 2nd Amendment's protections of the right to bear arms.

The case started as District of Columbia vs. Dick Heller, beginning as a group of plaintiffs suing over D.C.'s local gun ordinances, including one barring the registration of handguns by private individuals. Heller was a security guard at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington who could have a handgun at work but not at home, and his lawyers argued the 2nd Amendment creates an individual right of handgun ownership.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court's ruling that had dismissed Heller's suit, finding that the 2nd Amendment did protect an individual's right to bear arms. The Supreme Court took the case and heard oral arguments in March.

When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. I know that’s a tired old cliché, but it’s true. Banning guns does NOT deter gun crime. In fact, it makes it easier for criminals to engage in heinous crimes. How many criminals stop and go, “Damn, I better not shoot this guy in the back of the head; guns are illegal here…”?

Be real. Grow up. If you won’t smell the coffee, at least acknowledge that the beans have been ground & the water’s been boiled, sport. A criminal will do what criminals do, regardless of the laws. However, if a would-be rapist or purse-snatcher or home invader has a strong suspicion that they very well could get their rib cage ventilated by a 230-grain .45-caliber handgun round, they very well may think twice before messing with you.

I know that I sleep a lot more soundly knowing that I have a large-caliber handgun within arm’s reach and that I am well-versed in how to use it to defend me and mine.

The decision has caused a veritable panic amongst liberals and Democrats who view all of us gun owners as cavemen and criminals. Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago was apoplectic at the idea that someone might dare to challenge Chicago’s 26-year old ban on handgun ownership, despite Chicago Police Department statistics showing that from 2004 to November 2007 there were 43,685 firearms-related violent crimes in the city. Gee, Dick, how many of those crimes were because no one could defend themselves?

How many Virginia Tech students might have lived had there not been a campus gun ban? The shooter didn’t abide by the ban, but everyone else did. Maybe some quick-reacting student or teacher with a carry permit could have prevented some deaths.

Of course, no sooner did the Court decide that D.C.’s ban was unconstitutional than the City Council put forth some delusional ruling that when you’re not using your gun to defend yourself, it has to be kept unloaded and either disassembled, or secured with a trigger lock or kept in a gun safe. Are you frikkin’ kidding me? Hey, Mister Criminal, please wait a moment and don’t drill me with a round to the forehead while I take a minute to unlock my gun, reassemble the pieces, load it, and then defend myself….

The city continues to maintain that "most semiautomatic pistols" remain illegal under D.C.'s "machine gun" ban, which bizarrely covers not just automatic weapons but "any firearm which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily converted or restored to shoot...more than 12 shots without manual reloading," even if each trigger pull fires just one round. Sweet Jesus, people. Sure, my personal handgun only holds 7 rounds, but most semi-auto pistols, at least in the ever popular 9mm round, can hold 15 to 18 rounds, depending on the manufacturer.

Meanwhile, the procedure for legally owning whichever handguns are allowed sounds pretty much like jumping through flaming hoops:

•A District resident who seeks to register a handgun must obtain an application form from the police department's Firearms Registration Section and take it to a firearms dealer for assistance in completing it.
•The applicant must submit photos, proof of residency and proof of good vision (such as a driver's license or doctor's letter), and pass a written firearms test.
•If the applicant is successful on the test, s(he) must pay registration fees and submit to fingerprinting. The police will file one set of fingerprints and submit the other to the FBI for analysis and criminal background check.
•Police will notify the applicant whether all registration requirements are satisfied. At that point, the applicant returns to the Firearms Registration Section to complete the process and receive a departmental seal on the application.
•The applicant takes his or her completed application to a licensed firearm dealer to take delivery of the pistol. If the dealer is outside the District, the dealer transports the pistol to a licensed dealer in the District to complete the transaction.
•The applicant takes the pistol to the Firearms Registration Section for ballistics testing. When testing is complete, the applicant may retrieve the pistol and take it home.

Holy shit. What a fiasco. You get an application so cumbersome that you have to go to a gun dealer just to fill it out, pass a test, pay fees, get printed (the PD will be checking those prints against unsolved crimes and storing them against future crimes), go back to the bureaucrats to complete processing, go BACK to the dealer, or drag some poor dealer from Maryland or Virginia into DC to monkeydick around with a DC dealer, then go get the gun tested to see if it’s been used in a crime and to have the results databased for future crimes, and then you get to take it home. What a complete & utter Scandinavian Squirrel-Screw.

Know what I did? Walked into the shop, said I wanted to buy it, filled out a very simple form, gave the dude my license, he made a 5 minute phone call to check my bona fides, took my money and handed me my gun. Total process: 10 minutes.

At least the Supreme Court Jesters got this one right, so that law-abiding citizens can legally defend themselves and shoot for fun & recreation. However, at least three other decisions got botched, so that’s a 25% success rate. Not that stellar for the finest legal minds our country has to offer.