Most depressing; guns all over the place

Down Under

This guy Monis is a follower of Mohammad, maybe only incidentally to the point here.

Not incidentally,  he has long been credibly implicated in hate-mail harassment, rape, and murder. He is also a resident of an Australia approaching its third decade of "no guns" -- except for guys like him, thugs.

One of the first guns Canberra banned back in the 1990s was the pump shotgun,  which is what Monis used to take a restaurant full of hostages and set off a three-fatality scuffle down in Sydney yesterday.  He invaded the joint knowing that none of his victims had the slightest chance of opposing him with equal force. Law-abiding subjects of the Queen, they meekly surrendered their self-defense rights years ago.

He would have lacked that confidence in much of the United States where any large random gathering may easily contain a few law-abiding citizens of the Republic, armed and quite willing to meet his force with their own.

No one pretends that victims shooting back create soft and lovely resolutions to murderous situations. When a thug waves his gun, any time, any place, the atmosphere becomes ugly and bloody,  but some immediate equality of force between the good guys and the bad leads to the chance of a better solution than, "Oh My, Cyril, I do hope someone has notified the authorities."

His religion is mentioned above only to highlight the handiest excuse for Hellish evil, the faith factor, not exclusive to Islam.  His lawyer explains:

"This is a one-off random individual ... “His ideology is just so strong and so powerful that it clouds his vision for common sense and objectiveness,” the lawyer said.

Or, in other words, if your deity tells you to do something, go ahead, no matter how horrid. We will understand and make appropriate allowances.


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In Newtown

One of the back doors to citizen disarmament  has for decades been intimidation of the industry that makes self-defense possible. A thug commits mayhem, sue the businesses.

And no nonsense seems too weak for a certain kind of special pleader:

“The AR-15 was specifically engineered for the United States Military to meet the needs of changing warfare,” attorney Josh Koskoff said in a release. “In fact, one of the Army’s specifications for the AR-15 was that it has the capability to penetrate a steel helmet.”

As though that is something new and  awesomely surprising.

Josh, it gives me a certain amount of pain to tab you as an historical  illiterate, or a charlatan, or both. (Though, on second thought, not all that much pain.) Military and civilian desire for powerful projectiles goes back at least  to the earliest days of the steel helmet. We can easily imagine a  Camelot wherein Arthur pines for a crossbow bolt powerful enough to "penetrate the steel helmet" of Lancelot  for diddling Guenevere. It is all very unpleasant, but hardly a cogent legal argument.

You may or may not get some mileage out of your negligent entrustment theory, but you merely pollute the atmosphere with bullshit when you spew such steel-helmet nonsense, probably designed, now that I think about it,  to begin polluting the jury pool.  Nothing like a good round of hysteria to get folks in a proper lynching mood.