No wonder they can’t answer Just One Question! The laws weren’t intended to “regulate for health and safety”. Kurt explains.

If the regulations were to “regulate for health and safety” Sebastian explains what that would be like.

I would like to point that it seems to me that the VPC is over stating things just a bit with this claim:

President Obama’s signing of a bill granting the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory authority over the tobacco industry now leaves the gun industry as the last American industry not regulated for health and safety.

Let me repeat. Guns are now the only consumer product manufactured in America not regulated by a federal agency for health and safety.

Could someone explain to me what federal agency regulates the following consumer products for health and safety:

• Software
• Buckets
• Jewelry
• Swimming pools
• Websites
• Books
• Music
• Entertainment
• Prostitution (legal in parts of Nevada and the Feds once owned a brothel confisicated for failure to pay taxes but the Feds couldn’t even make money running a whorehouse and they went out of business)
• Locks and keys
• Hand tools
• Cardboard boxes

Also note that the number of accident deaths due to gunshot wounds are at, or near, an all time low in the neighborhood of less than 700 per year (642 in 2006–See table 18).

Finally I would also like to point out that there is a private model for health and safety approval that appears to work quite well for electrical applicances. It’s call the Underwriters Laboratory.

Hence, Federal regulations are not needed because; 1) there isn’t a problem that needs to be fixed, and 2) There are private solutions that would work better if there were a problem.

A new book written by anti-gun bigot Dennis Henigan has just been announced. He calls it Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy. If I could borrow a copy rather than have my money go toward his furthering of discrimination against gun owners I’d take the time to read it. I’d love to take it apart in public for him. But since I don’t have a copy in hand right now I’ll just do what I can with what I presume are his best shots as given in the press release:

In Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy, published by Potomac Books, Henigan takes on the highly memorable, but completely unsupportable slogans that for decades have been the staple of the National Rifle Association and other relentless opponents of sensible gun laws, and dismantles them one by one. Lethal Logic also is the first book to assess the impact on the gun control debate of last year’s Heller decision by the Supreme Court and the book’s conclusions about Heller will surprise many on both sides of the issue.

…

Some of Henigan’s observations on the gun lobby’s “bumper sticker” slogans:

• “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Henigan counters with Ozzy Osbourne’s take on that: “If that’s the case, why do we give people guns when they go to war? Why not just send the people?”
• “But what you really want [is to ban all guns.]” Henigan explains that for the gun lobby, “the gun debate needs to be a debate about banning all guns. The slippery slope argument is the NRA’s primary means of achieving this goal.”
• “An armed society is a polite society.” The more guns, the safer we all are, the gun extremists say – and they cite Switzerland as Utopia. But Henigan points out that Switzerland has high gun ownership because of mandatory militia service, and that citizens in mandatory militia service face government inspection of the guns in their homes and must account for all their bullets. “Can you imagine the fury of the NRA’s opposition to any suggestion that guns in the homes of U.S. citizens be subject to government inspection?”

As to “If that’s the case, why do we give people guns when they go to war? Why not just send the people?” Try sending the guns without the people and see how well the war goes. It’s the people that make the difference.

Try this experiment (okay, do the thought experiment if you don’t think you can get the human subjects testing approval):

Suppose you were to drop Dennis Henigan and Sarah Brady in the woods with all the guns and ammo they can carry. And a half mile away you drop in an Army Ranger or Navy Seal completely naked, one hand tied behind their back and a patch over one eye. If you tell them only one side can leave the woods alive I’m betting that by the next morning, despited being outnumbered 2:1 and out armed, the warrior will be walking out of the woods fully clothed, armed, and wearing Sarah and Dennis’s ears as a necklace.

Gun are tools used by people. Without the people the guns don’t kill, with or without guns people can kill. Guns just make violence against people easier. Sometimes that violence is for good and sometimes it is for evil. Most of the time guns are used for good. Reducing the access of guns to good people enables evil.

As to “But what you really want [is to ban all guns.] … the gun debate needs to be a debate about banning all guns.” No, the debate doesn’t have to be about that. Why not answer Just One Question? Justify the existence of any legal restriction on guns with data that conclusively demonstrates the restriction improved public safety. Or if that is something Henigan wants to avoid then explain why a “reasonable restriction” against gun owners wouldn’t be just as constitutionally repugnant as a similar restriction against black slaves who had been freed by the 13^th Amendment.

As to government inspection of guns and accounting for all the bullets in the homes of the Swiss Henigan has to heavily distort the truth to make his point.

Here is the part where what Henigan says is mostly true:

Each such individual is required to keep his army-issued personal weapon (the 5.56x45mm Sig 550 rifle for enlisted personnel or the SIG 510 rifle and/or the 9mm SIG-Sauer P220 semi-automatic pistol for officers, medical and postal personnel) at home with a specified personal retention quantity of government-issued personal ammunition (50 rounds 5.56 mm / 48 rounds 9mm), which is sealed and inspected regularly to ensure that no unauthorized use takes place.^[2]

Here is what Henigan completely ignores in order to make his point:

The government subsidizes the production of military ammunition and then sells the ammunition at cost. Swiss military ammo must be registered if bought at a private store, but need not be registered if bought at a range. Registration consists of entering your name in a log at the time of sale. No serial numbers are present on the individual cartridges of ammunition. Technically, ammunition bought at the range must be used at the range, but according to David Kopel “the rule is barely known and almost never obeyed.”^[2] Ammunition for long gun hunting is not subsidized by the government and is not subject to any sales control. Non-military non-hunting ammunition more powerful than .22 LR (such as custom handgun ammunition) is registered at the time of sale.^[10]

The article goes on to say:

Purchases from dealers of hunting long guns and of small bore rifles are not even recorded by the dealer. In other words, the dealer would not record the sale of a .30-06 hunting rifle, but would record the sale of a .30-06 M1 Garand rifle.^[2] According to chapter 2 article 10 of Swiss law, people over the age of 18 do not need a permit to purchase a rifle for use in hunting, off-duty shooting and sport-shooting events.^[10]

So why is it that Henigan didn’t tell us the rest of the story? That’s right, the facts hurt his case. He can’t make his points without cherry picking the data.

If those are the best shots Dennis could come up with the rest must be so poor as to be the equivalent of not getting his shotgun to get on paper with an USPSA target at five feet. Which of course means he must be shooting blanks.

As pointed out in a comment by fishyjay:

Herbert concludes his column with this:

” The first step should be to bring additional gun control back into the policy mix.”

So the NRA has been lying about the Obama administration wanting more gun control, and the Obama administration should respond by pushing for…more gun control?

You can’t make this stuff up.

Sometimes you just have to conclude the anti-gun people have mental problems and/or they have crap for brains.

From an opinion piece:

Still, it’s hard to argue that the easy availability of handguns and assault weapons is good for crime prevention or what the Founding Fathers had in mind in the Second Amendment.

Yes, they are right on the first point. It is hard to argue “easy availability of handguns and assault weapons is good for crime prevention”. If it were easy then people wouldn’t have so much trouble answering Just One Question. But I don’t think that is what they meant.

But on the second point, “shall not be infringed” obviously means availability cannot be restricted by the government.

As usual, the gun banners have trouble thinking straight. He apparently believes words mean what he wants them to mean rather than what they actually say.

At times the only way I can make sense of some of the things the anti-gun people say is if they are of the belief there is no such thing as personal property:

Although police will run serial-number checks on all firearms submitted, they will not hold residents legally responsible for the guns they return.

All guns will be destroyed and not kept for resale, said O’Keefe, who had his own gun stolen during a burglary in 2006.

“The guns they return“? Do they think the guns were on loan from the police?

And what does “not kept for resale” mean? Does that mean something different from “not resold”? It almost seems like they might mean “reloaned” but didn’t want to come right out and say that.

I have to conclude these people frequently have mental problems.