Final Protective Fire

Wednesday, January 15, 2003

 

In this post, Glenn Reynolds starts Fisk'ing a Washington Monthly article that dishonestly tried to tie the D.C. area shootings to the "evil" NRA stopping the poor, wittle innocent ATF from enforcing the gun laws. Dave Kopel joins in and when finished, we see more dishonest gun-hater propaganda revealed for the mass of lies and misrepresentations that it always is.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds adds to his list of articles parroting VPC press releases. The gun control extremists are currently obsessed with .50 BMG caliber sniper rifles as their next target despite the fact that this is a type of rifle that is so expensive that only a few dedicated hobbyists in long-range target shooting can afford them. It is almost never used by criminals. So instead, the VPC attempts to link their discredited gun control policies to terrorism. The attempt of the article to which Reynolds links to associate these rifles as a anti-aircraft threat is ludicrous, real terrorists obviously have access to real anti-aircraft missiles these days.

UPDATE 2: Evidently, someone read something I didn't write in the email Glenn Reynolds quoted. There are all kinds of threats to airliners, as we've learned, including box cutters. There is a limit to the extent to which I'll discuss viable terrorist tactics on this blog, but the very idea that an unguided .50 caliber bullet weighing less than a tenth of a pound is more of a threat to an aircraft than a self-guided warhead of more than two pounds of high explosive is quite amusing. Not to mention exaggerating the effective range of the .50 rifle and ignoring the more than 3 mile slant range of even the older MANPADS he scorns. This is nothing more than the usual exaggeration of gun control groups as Glenn Reynolds points out. Why Flit decides to fall for it, I don't know. The gun control groups do not have your safety in mind as established by their hysterics at the idea of arming pilots. What they have in mind is demonizing their target of the day. UPDATE 3: Suman Palit has similar thoughts. As further support for Glenn Reynolds' observation that this is not a real discussion about security but about gun control politics, notice how often the fact that the caliber of these rifles is that same as the military machine gun is brought up. The machine gun in question, the classic Browning M2, is strictly controlled in this country because its a machine gun - capable of fully automatic fire unlike the rifles at issue - not because of its caliber. But deliberately blurring that distinction is just further evidence of the inherent dishonesty of the discussion.

Robin 1:41 PM