Duelling news

I keep trying to save my friend's soul. He +tries+ to be a good anti-statist, but always get hung up on guns, and I think in his heart of hearts he's believes they  should be confiscated and converted to manhole covers. My latest effort, below,  is  generated by the Exeter, Rhode Island, gun squabble, and the congressional spat over what to do about plastic guns.

Personally, I trace part of the problem to the ready availability of The New York Times in his region. A copy can be purchased every day in undetectable cash deals, no permit required, no cooling-off period, no age limit, no restrictions on concealed -carry or  even brandishing. 

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I suppose your  "Exeter Swamp Yankees" and my Iowa Hog Lot Wranglers share a passion other than oiling and stroking our barrels as we contemplate the the pleasure of our next mass murder.

I refer, of course, to our well-known study of epistemology and our curiosity about why, to certain groups, knowledge becomes valid by virtue of publication in the New York Times.

Why, just the other day my epistemology advisor, Melvin "Pigs" Dykstra, blew his nose on his sleeve and announced that he had been reading BusinessWeek lately and found (in his own quaint words), "By golly, guys, blamed if I ain't startin' to think that there's some other stuff to read and a lot of it ain't wrote by pointy headed interlecturals who genufuct or however you call it to that picture of Ol' Abe Rosenthal on their desks."

Here's what I think he was referring to:


A sample about "undetectable" guns: We’ve been down this road before. In the late 1980s, gun-control advocates tried to ban an Austrian-made Glock that was fabricated mostly from industrial-strength plastic and demonized as a weapon that would defy airport security. Congress held hearings and then passed the original undetectable gun ban. Strangely, though, the Federal Aviation Administration concluded that the Glock wasn’t really a threat at all. If screening personnel paid attention, they could detect the gun-shaped piece of plastic, not to mention the bullets needed to make the Glock lethal, the FAA said. “That was a big ‘oops’ moment,” Richard Aborn, a former president of Handgun Control, now known as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, once told me. “We made the classic mistake of failing to do our homework.”

And about self-willed guns killing  people: 

Apart from politics, dispassionate observers must question the simplistic liberal slogan that more guns equals more crime. The U.S. has seen a two-decade period during which private gun ownership has continued to soar (some 300 million firearms are now in civilian hands), while crime has diminished.

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Mel's opinion got back to the Democrat who lives in his county. He flicked the dust off his Hillary button and yelled that Business Week is just another one of those right-wing tea-party rags owned by Rush Limbaugh and edited by the National Rifle Association.

That made Mel maddern a wet hen, but he calmed himself and quietly corrected the button man. He allowed as how he thought the magazine belongs to (former) Mayor Whatzizname Bloomberg who started up Mayor's Against Illegal Guns.  And who, he might have added, openly and blatantly reads (and even approvingly quotes)  The New York Times.

As an aside, I need to note that Bloomie usually doesn't quote the Times about free-for-all Terry Stops of New York City citizens guilty of EWBBB, that is, Existing While Being Black or Brown.