Occasionaly I have some sympathy for the media. They can’t be experts on everything they write about. But this instance is just too rich. And Alan Korwin does such a good job of skewering them:

The lamestream media told you:
An armored car heist in Phoenix was committed using automatic weapons. An unknown amount of cash was stolen, and police are looking for the suspects. No shots were fired during the robbery.

…

Several days later, the followup story claimed that automatic OR semiautomatic weapons MAY have been used, and suspects were in custody, increasing skepticism in those parts of the community that are awake.

Today (July 28), the headline says “Toy rifles aided three in heist,” and Bosnia-Herzegovina natives were the apparent culprits. “Fake AK-47 assault rifles” were used in combination with pepper spray. I am not making this up.

According to the report, toy fakes can be scary sounding “assault rifles.” The money has been recovered. No correction has been issued. The reporter is still at large.

The sad fact is that the anti-gun lobby’s “vision” of gun control just doesn’t work. It can’t because it targets exactly the wrong group of people: law-abiding gun owners. Gun control isn’t crime control — it is only about divesting law-abiding citizens of their rights.

Bruce N. Mills
July 31, 2006
Guns and rights
Globe and Mail, Toronto Ontario

My magazine changes are pretty good, but not anywhere near this good.

And the anti-gun bigots wonder why we think restricting a magazine capacity is just plain stupid as a means of reducing crime.

I participated in a steel match at the Lewiston Pistol Club last weekend. I just posted the results on the Lewiston Pistol Club web site. Although the same people are ahead of me that were ahead of me last month I’ve closed the gap some. I really need to start shooting while I’m in the Seattle area during the week.

Continuing my watch on the enemy I found Washington Ceasefire does a very interesting dance with numbers. From their Gun Facts page:

• Last year in the United States, approximately 214 children died from accidental shootings and more than 1,000 suffered from non-fatal firearm injuries.
• In 2001, there were 14,571 kids injured by a firearm.
• Every 7.5 hours a child or teen was killed in a firearm-related accident or suicide in 2000.

At first glance you think they aren’t consistent. After all if a child was killed every 7.5 hours you would have almost 1200 dead in a year instead of the 214 on the first line. But the first line just references accidental shootings. The last line includes suicides, justifiable and praiseworthy homicides, and is for a different year as well. And doesn’t injury in the second line include those killed? Well… probably the 1,000 in the first line refers only to accidental shooting that were not fatal and again it’s for a different year. And “injured by a firearm” would include injuries on the “non-business” end of the gun such as “scope eye” from shooting a rifle with your face too close the to scope and recoil from firing cause it to hit your face (typically just above your eye).

And it’s interesting to me they spend most of their time on “kids and guns”. Apparently they are shooting for maximum emotional appeal.

The numbers they should be looking for are the ones that answer Just One Question.

I just browsed over to the Brady Bunch website and found them claiming in a recent press release that lax gun laws increase the violent crime:

Weak gun laws have not made Florida a leader in fighting crime: Arguably, they have helped to make it one of the two most violent states in the Nation.

They, of course, cherry-picked their states. They should have looked at my post on the Brady “Report Card” versus crime rates. But maybe they did and that is why they chose to cherry-pick their states.

I have never been able to get an answer from these type of people. They say things like this:

As for Australia, a study from Oxford University Press states: “Despite reports of a crime wave in Australia following recent restrictions on the private ownership of firearms, evidence actually shows sweeping reductions in gun-related death, injury, and crime.” (Small Arms Survey 2004 Yearbook, June 2004)

The results in Australia are important because more than 700,000 guns were removed from the community (the equivalent figure in the USA would be 40 million guns). No other nation had ever attempted anything on this scale. In the country’s leading newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, the question was asked, “So, ten years later, can we see a difference?” The answer was resoundingly, yes. The results are in: Australia’s tightened gun controls have been followed by remarkable reductions in gun deaths.

It is true that in an area that arouses such passions as gun control, statistics are a minefield because of the difficulty in comparing like with like. But in all the stuff that came my way as a result of what I wrote, one point stood out: “Stick to apples and apples: real gun violence versus real gun violence.

It just doesn’t seem to matter to them that the violent crime rate can go up as long as the crime rate where guns were used goes down. A million people a month could be killed with machetes because their guns were taken away from them (Rwanda) and that’s better than if a few people were killed with guns.

These people have mental problems.

Is it just me or do you see a similarity in people that are fearful of guns and gun owners? I remember the rallies against I-676 (Washington State initiative to register handguns) where a few pro-676 people showed up and a couple years later attending a rally in Olympia (capital of Washington State).  The anti-gun people just looked different. Here I see the same look. I want to say timid but that’s not quite it. I sense a weakness. Perhaps a lack of assertiveness. Here’s the picture:

I keep thinking “grass eaters”, “sheep”, and “prey”. Why is that? And is it something that could be changed with training? Would a few hours on the range and in the classroom convert them to “sheep dogs”? Would their appearances change such that other “sheep dogs” such as I, and the “wolves”, notice the difference?

Update: It’s fear. That’s what I see. I figured it out when I was in the shower this morning. It’s like they are in a German concentration camp and they are submitting a petition to the camp commander.

I also should have commented on the text of the article. They say Cincinnati should ban handguns like Morton Grove, IL. That ordinance was held up as constitutional. There’s just one problem. The Ohio Constitution has a provision for the right to keep and bear arms that IL doesn’t have. And of course, there is Just One Question for these fearful people.

Be sure to read the comments to this post. More enlightenment is awaiting you there.

Keep your blood pressure medicine handy as you read this. USA Today doesn’t want to hear about defensive gun use. They made up details to avoid reporting about it in a story.

When you travel by air with your firearm do not leave the magazine in your semi-auto. Especially if the magazine is loaded. Claiming that having an empty chamber counts as an unloaded gun may not work. Some jurisdictions may even consider the gun loaded if the magazine is loaded and in a different suitcase from the gun.

I once had two TSA employees argue for 15 minuts about a loaded magazine I had even with the gun completely empty. The smarter of the two finally won that arguement but I could have had to argue that point myself to a prosecutor and/or judge. And one time I wait for over 30 minutes because the TSA guy claimed he couldn’t determine via the X-ray if the magazine in the grip of my Ruger P-89 was empty or loaded. The rules wouldn’t allow him to touch the gun and drop the magazine to check it out, I wasn’t allowed to touch anything once they had it under their control. So we to wait for a police officer to arrive from some distant city or something to take all of five seconds to pick up the gun drop the magazine, say, “It’s fine.”, reinsert the magazine, put my gun back in it’s case and walk off.

Even if it is a muzzle loader. A fifty caliber hole will let all the blood out and ventilate your insides. And in someways perhaps even do a better job than many of the more modern defensive tools.

From Clayton.