I realize the ability (and to a certain extent the desire) to get elected is largely uncorrelated with intelligence but the ugly parallels to statements like the following just jump out of the page at me:

While our Constitution guarantees people a right to bear arms, the decision was made to allow states to regulate guns, in order to allow them to develop strategies that meet the individual states’ demographic, economic and lifestyle needs. What works for Florida or Texas may not work for New Jersey and vice versa, and gun control should be the sole provision of the individual states, not the federal government.

Replace “a right to bear arms” with “will not be slaves” and “guns” with “ni**ers”.

Now start heating up the tar and gathering the feathers for New Jersey State Senator Loretta Weinberg.

I find it interesting that the most anti-gun president ever has a strong tendency to run scared from any confrontation with gun owners. The draft regulation to ban shooters from many public lands will apparently be completely dropped (via email from Daniel at work):

The Obama administration says it will not restrict recreational shooting on public lands, reversing a draft policy that had caused an uproar among gun owners and hunters, especially in the West.

In a memo sent Wednesday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he would direct his agency to “take no further action to develop or implement” the draft policy, which would have restricted target shooting on some public lands near residential areas.

I wonder if Obama has some plan for implementing this “under the radar”. Or is he just going to maintain as low a profile as possible on gun issues?

No response yet from The Brady Campaign, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, or the Violence Policy Center. Perhaps someone should check on them to make sure they don’t start looking longingly at their bottle of whiskey and bottle of sleeping pills.

It isn’t something to rely on but sometimes even a BB gun is better than no gun at all:

Young said after pleading with the man to stop, the boy hit him in the head with a board. At that point, the man stopped assaulting the woman and ran after the boy.

“The suspect believed that the boy had run out of the house and when that happened the mom locked the door,” he said. “The suspect then tried to gain entry through an open window.”

When Paul Newman, 45, threatened to kill the woman and her son, the boy shot him in the face three to four times with his pump-action BB gun.

It’s interesting how the AP reported the same incident. In the AP story the boy shot him “as he grappled with the woman”. There is no mention of the guy leaving the house and then trying to get in through a window.

I spent a lot of time with Paul Barrett of Business Week at Gun Blogger Rendezvous in Reno a couple months ago.

He has another article on guns up on the web now. This time it is about guns “walking” to Mexico. It was interesting and had some information on the topic I was only dimly aware of (the extent to which the Bush administration was involved in a  similar program).

As I told him in email I still have some work to do with the words and phrases he uses. An example:

Detty, the proprietor of Mad Dawg Global Marketing in Tucson, Ariz., is a federally licensed firearm dealer who sells the high-capacity, military-style rifles at gun shows or from the living room of his Spanish colonial-style home on the outskirts of town.

“Military-style” is misleading in a derogatory manner. The original AR-15 was a civilian firearm before it modified and sold to the military as an M-16. And I’m nearly certain there have been just as many if not more AR-15 rifles sold to private citizens as the militarized version have been sold to the military. So “military-style” is inaccurate at best and at worst it is intentionally inflammatory. And what does “high-capacity” mean? Who is the arbitrator of gun accessory descriptions that gets to decide what is “high-capacity” versus “normal-capacity”? “High-capacity” is the inflammatory phrase used by the anti-gun people.

Another example:

Also working for him was the striking ineffectiveness of federal gun laws.

While technically true it again is inflammatory. What is equally true is that any law, be it federal, state, county, or city, is going to be ineffective when it tries to block the exchange the goods or services between willing parties. The country learned that lesson with Prohibition in the 1920’s, the War on Drugs for the last 30 years, and it cannot be a surprise to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that an attempted ban on firearms that were exceedingly difficult to legally define would soon be circumvented. And with a few more brain cells one would have little trouble predicting that the sales of such firearms would increase with legal restrictions against them (Forbidden fruit).

The implication of Barrett’s phrase is that if only the federal gun laws were written better or more broad they would have been more effective. Are the laws against recreational drugs effective enough for you?

If someone wants to avoid alienating a large group of people they should avoid using words and phrases that add little or nothing to the topic at hand and are offensive to those same people. I don’t think I’m just being a little thin skinned. Those words and phrases are the same words and phrases used by our political enemies who on a daily basis attempt to restrict and eliminate the exercise of the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. It would be like invoking images of male sexual predators of little boys while advocating prison sentences for consensual homosexuals. It’s misleading and inflammatory with the sole purpose of denying a specific enumerate right (freedom of association in the case of homosexuals).

Update: Forest/trees. Regardless of the inflammatory phrasing it is a very good thing that the bungling and illegal acts of the ATF are getting mainstream media attention.