"I own a gun!"

So says New York's hysterical Governor Cuomo who fleshes it out with "I've hunted...I own a Remington shotgun...You don't need ten bullets to kill a deer."

1. I wonder how many of those background checks lately have been on gun-grabbing politicians who don't want to get caught lying when they trot out the obligatory  "I own a gun, but...".

2. When the gun arrives do they call in a gun consultant who begins, quite necessarily, with  "Now, Governor, you hold on to the wooden parts and point the metal parts at the deer. Try hard not to get  that part  mixed up."

3. Your Remington shotgun, Governor, is likely a Model 870 or variant and hence one of the world's deadliest assault weapons at close range -- such as from one end of a classroom to the other.  While it holds only six bullets, each one of them may legally contain eight or nine littler bullets, each as big around as a medium pistol bullet. So you're slinging an offensive weapon capable of firing 48 to 54 bullets without reloading! Why, that's  almost twice as bad as having two 30-round magazines cuz after first one runs out of bullets  you have to reload, giving the hall monitor time to knock you out with  a Dixon No. 2.

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I think you're a little out of your league here, Sir, both in knowledge of your chosen subject matter and in demagogic skills. You might be better off to study the technique of the governor just up the coast from you. Governor Malloy has it down pat. When  faced with a serious policy issue, call in the teevee cameras and cry.

Got a second, Your Ineptness?

Thank you.

There was this other leader, old guy named Churchill.

May, 1940. He and his countrymen look across the channel and notice quite a lot of Nazis suddenly appearing in places where they weren't supposed to be. That gets them thinking about their own cottages in the face of Hun power. And that gets Mr. Churchill thinking about Brit civilians with those awful, nasty guns. And smiling.

"The swift fate of Holland was in all our minds. Mr. Eden had already proposed to the War Cabinet the formation of Local Defense Volunteers, and this plan was energetically pressed. All over the country, in every town and village,  bands of determined men came together armed with shotguns, sporting rifles, clubs and spears."

I mean,  just for whatever the thought is worth to you, Sir, recognizing of course that it could never happen here.

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"The Battle of Britain," the Bantam reprint, pp 48-49

Depends on whether you like your girls with guns

Or prefer a greater order of submissiveness

Just like Milton and Mrs. Friedman, TMR endorses your right to choose.

And this the last post about constitutional government and economic freedom I intend to write this morning.

Makes me sick

The electrical teevee news on CNN and MSNBC was drearier and more banal than usual this morning. So I flipped over to the Fox thigh fest. The theory was that if a guy is going to kill brain cells he might as well try to stir his hormones in compensation. It didn't work very well.  So I shut it all off, got out the check book, and started paying bills, first the health insurance premium.

Now, extreme self-revelation is well and good. Hell, it almost a staple of bloggery, but I'm uncomfortable with it. Readers already know the most intimate facts of  my life -- retired wire service man, political operative, semi-skilled handy man,  a devourer of books with an unhealthy interest in firearms, water sports, and women who manage knees-together allure with bits and pieces of fabric giving a decent scope to a man's imagination.

So I offer my invasion of my own privacy here reluctantly and only in service of larger truth.

 Here's what I spent on health care last year:

About 200 Federal Reserve Cartoons, all out-of-pocket. Broken down, that represents one uninsured prescription renewal, perhaps 30 generic ibuprofen and aspirin tablets, a  partial box of bi-carb,  a few pair of one-dollar reading glasses (1.25 and 1.5 diopters if you must know),  and a modest number of band aids.  Disregarding a spendy surgery -- only partially insured -- to ameliorate a hearing problem years ago, that's a reasonably typical year.

I report this only to claim that I am not a frequent defiler of  the venal healing industry -- either that part of it representing American socialism or its near-relative, my "private" insurance.

My reward? An 18 per cent increase in the already back-breaking premium which has more than doubled in six  years. And if you go by the news, I'm luckier than most.

I talked this over with an insurance expert, an old friend. He said it's complicated (No shit, Sam Spade?) but that if you're looking for a one-word reason, "Obamacare" is accurate. Surprise, isn't it? Who would have thought that free or cheap doctoring for x million more people might require a little extra from people who pay for it?

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Al Capp used to get big laughs at the expense of ATT when it held a government-protected monopoly on telephone service.  Ma Bell's ambitions were modest, he admitted. She would happily settle for owning all the wealth in the country. And if you want to draw comparisons between that and His Ineptness's new death grip on you, your doctor, and your insurance company, why, it's okay by me.