Wampum

The Weapon Shops of Isher

Dom-V? No Thanks.

Dear Larry, and the rest of the nice folks at Gun Owners of America and the 2004 Candidate Questionaire Maine team,

Thanks for the questionaire. I was going to blow it off as yet-another-exercise-by-pompous-airheads, except for three questions. They gave me pause. And then of course there was the how-wrong-can-you-be question about domestic violence and access to defensive arms. So, you're right on the clip question (#6), clips are just well-formed cowboy coffee cups with springs on their bottoms. You're right on the cosmetics too (#5), the "military" appearance issue is really just a sumptuary law, can the commons wear crimson and velvet, in hardware drag. You're right on the Sharps question too (#15). Its downright funny that anyone is trying to regulate a tube type that last committed a street crime when Abe Lincoln was still in the White House. Of course, if you've any buffalo on staff I could see your point.

However, you appear to be seriously out to lunch on just about everything else.

Look, Berkeley, Cambridge, Moscow, and the rest of the latte-loving portions of the Republic have passed local laws attempting to keep the Feds from moving nuclear waste, nuclear fuel rods, nuclear weapons components, nuclear weapons, and so forth through their little burgs. You go the preemption route and claim the locals can't force you to check your hardware when in Dodge and you're running with the big dogs, who'd be just as happy dumping glow-in-mid-day-slurry into your backyard pool as they would be dumping it in the water supply of some Gawd-forsaken tribe of Indians out in Upper Nowhere. I can't believe there is a collection of gun nuts stupid enough to want the Feds to tractor-trailor up a double-wide full of leaky 1960s-era 55 gallon drums, go jacks-down, and leave the little darlings to age out in the open under a theory of Federal supremacy and no local preemption. That takes care of questions #2 and #3.

Questions #1 and #8 are at odds with each other, but I expect you knew that when you put them on the same push-poll and seperated them respectably. Look, either American arms are crap, more likely to fail after a month of normal use than the average arms on the Central Asian grey markets, and you busta caps on any buy-side limitation, question #1, and the executive staffs of Colt et al do perp walks on the strict liability issue, question #8, or the executive staffs of Colt et al, and their shareholders all sleep soundly, and you eat some sort of buyer's limit.

You have to pick one row and hoe it. You definitely do not want to claim both busta caps and non-liability on the part of the manufacturers, cause if you do, as compulsive buyers of weapons (you're not replacing worn out guns, neh?), you're looking at the wrong end of an addiction arguement. Putting gun owners on the same level as the miserable, dog food eating, paycheck-squandered-on-Powerball-tickets loosers, that isn't the best line an advocacy organization could take, neh?

Besides, to be realistic about this, campaign contributions from Colt outweigh those from the arms-rich, dollars-poor splinter sect of the armed population. I'll make you a bet. Donald Zakhlis will send my client money just because I'm taking a piss all over you and your margin of wingnuts, because he doesn't want the liability in exchange for the marginal sales the gun-a-month-club make on the low end of the product/price curve. Besides, you guys don't actually buy new, so you're just after-market churn and nobody's bottom-line.

Let's see, that leaves #4, #7, #9-11, #12, #13, and #14. Look, questions #4 (registration), #7 (age), #9 (buyer check), #10 (licensing), and #11 (quickie buyer check) are all the same question, and an utter waste of time for serious people. Question #12 (locks) is a no-brainer. A three year old can point, aim, and fire a standard handgun. You don't want to go into question #7 as a champion of the rights of draft-age teens to win fire-fights with your starting point being the rights of pre-schoolers to pump a round through Barney, or the baby-sitter.

The only serious question left is #13, lucky 13. The domestic violence question. Unfortunately you have this one upside down. The issue isn't taking a firearm, statistically a piece of crap that hasn't seen Hoppe's or brush longer than the lifetime of the relationship-at-risk, and only marginally more likely to kill, maime or simply frighten the snot out of the potential intended toe-taggee than the potential intended toe-tagger. The issue is the prompt delivery of an effective arm to the battered spouse. A call to 9-11 should yeild, not just a peace officer intent on re-establishment of peace, until he hops back in his rig and heads back to the doughtnut shop, but an assortment of ladies arms, and a helpful assistant, who can match shades of makeup appropriate for recent bruising, and a tastefull assortment of sub-9mm accessories.

If "gun rights" mean anything, other than too much beer and testosterone and some socially useful slaughterhouse not visited, and Nam does come to mind, if it has a Constitutional meaning, then it has to mean the protection of the weak from the strong. That, in a nutshell, is where you blow it. You're on the side of the armed batterer, the dom-v perp, piously praying to prevent partial patriarchal pacification. You should get out of the line of fire. The gun goes to the dom-v vic, and self-defense is self-defense.

Basically, the Avon Lady is higher up on the food chain, and she could be working a side-line with Colt products, and that's where public policy and the public purse should be. Loaner weapons for as long as the risk exists, like white bicycles in Amsterdam. Good weapons at reasonable prices, with reasonable rates of fire and reasonable return terms. With good engineering and mass production, the cost point on a single-use defensive weapon can be less than a pair of off-brand shoes, with the interesting side-effect that advanced materials construction could make women's defensive arms invisible to the existing metal detection regime that screens out men's offensive arms in some social circumstances. Lipstick with attitude, available in several shades of dissuasion. That takes care of your #14 (Vermont-style concealment) as well.

That leaves rate-of-fire, question #6, and cosmetics, question #5.

The whole semi-auto and mag question really is just auto-sear in disguise. Look, I've friends who import IMI (Uzi) for ... European governmentally licensed buyers. There are few legit uses for high-rate-of-fire or sustained-fire weapons, and to be blunt, most users of auto- or near-auto- projectile weapons would be better served by rethinking their problem, or using shaped- or omni-directional charges. On average, a kilo of Semtex or C4 has fewer unintended killed and wounded than an excited first-time gunner with a MAC-10 and a couple of back-to-back bannana clips in similar target environments. The whole semi- thing is simply non-hunter, non-marksman, and non-sense.

I suppose I should point out that shooting cement-filled Coor cans a mile down range and dusting pre-killed automobiles is pretty fun, and I hear that recreational machinegunning, like recreational artillery, is a lot of fun, but the safty requiremnts, not to mention the cost of the ammo, make both about as exotic as polo. It is sort of daft to hang an every-man-must-have-a-polo-pony arguement out in a transportation policy foodfight, and fixating on the near-fully-auto when working the arms and domestic tranquility policy areas is, well, as wierd as fixating on polo ponies.

Cosmetics. You don't actually contest the right of goverment to require that military-style weapons, the AR-15 say, be finnished in happy colors rather than gun-metal gray or camo? You agree that funtion, not style, is the issue to retain, and if government chooses to make civilian market weapons conform more to the frilly girl's bike model of engendered tools than the BMX boy's bike model, that is not an infringement on gun rights, neh? A bike is a bike after all. Pedals, wheels, seat, frame. Brakes optional.

Well, responding to your push-poll has been a lot more fun than I thought it would be, and I'm damn sure that a lot more Mainiacs are happy with the three-round limit on smooth bore weapons, and wouldn't notice if held to five for rifled weapons, and don't have much use for pistols, and could live comfortably with the laws of Quebec or New Brunswick, than not. Your guys are probably the same ones that do bear over doughnut and whiskied-apple baits. I guess there's no real harm in firehosing small dead bears, its just something I can't imagine doing. There are cultural differences between Indians and Euro-Americans, and that's one of them.

I enjoy shooting. Cutting paper at distance with a nicely balanced .22 target pistol is relaxing, and the smell of cordite, well, it is one of those things. Put my client down for a grade of "F", and if you ever manage to write a non-push-poll, send it, the price of a decent dinner for two, and we'll look at it. I want to see a concealed weapons question, a DU question, with a lead question on the side, to flush out those anti-waterfowlers, a projectile coating question, and a prior act or state of mind question.

It is probably too much to hope that my client's primary, or general election opponants are going to debate the set of social uses of firearms issues. We probably won't run into a Second Amendment Simpleton until we get to Augusta, so doing standup comedy with of one of your folk heros will have to wait until then. As a shooter, it simply amazes me that sport shooting has been taken over by political droolers, but then again, the Republicans got run out of their party by religious droolers, so I guess it is just one of those things.

You know y'all can still emigrate to Idaho and Paraguay, right?

Sincerely, etc.

This is where the GOA 2004 Candidate Questionaire Maine will go. It is far too long, and poorly written, to type out for them.

Posted by at March 26, 2004 10:31 PM | TrackBack