TGO David

You guys really ought to click the hyperlinked objects... because Lott does a great job of substantiating his points with FACTS. That's something the anti-rights groups hate, because it leaves them with very little wiggle room to distort the truth to their own gain. This is really good reading! --Tungsten John R. Lott Jr.: D.C. Handgun Ban Friday , September 14, 2007 By John R. Lott Jr. Is banning handguns a "reasonable regulation"? The District of Columbia certainly hopes that the Supreme Court thinks so. D.C. filed a brief last week asking the U.S. Supreme Court to let it keep its 1976 handgun ban, but how the city argued its case was what was most surprising. Instead of spending a lot of time arguing over what the constitution means, the city largely made a public policy argument. D.C. argues that whatever one thinks about the Second Amendment guaranteeing people a right to own guns, banning handguns should be allowed for public safety reasons. Claiming that the Second Amendment doesn't protect individual rights might be a tough sell, but the city's public safety argument will be at least as tough. After the ban, D.C.'s murder rate only once fell below what it was in 1976. From 1977 to 2003, there were only two years when D.C.'s violent crime rate fell below the rate in 1976. After the ban, DC’s murder and violent rates rose relative to Maryland and Virginia as well as relative to other cities with more than 500,000 people. But it is not just D.C. that has experienced increases in murder and violent crime after guns are banned. Chicago also experienced an increase after its ban in 1982. Island nations supposedly present ideal environments for gun control because it is relatively easy for them to control their borders, but countries such as Great Britain, Ireland, and Jamaica have experienced large increases in murder and violent crime after gun bans. For example, after handguns were banned in 1997, the number of deaths and injuries from gun crime in England and Wales increased 340 percent in the seven years from 1998 to 2005. Passing a gun ban simply doesn't mean that we are going to get guns away from criminals. The real problem is that if it is the law-abiding good citizens who obey these laws and not the criminals, criminals have less to fear and crime can go up. D.C.’s brief makes a number of other claims: The ban comes "nowhere close to disarmament of residents. The District's overwhelming interest in reducing death and injury caused by handguns outweighs respondent's asserted need . . . ." The obvious key here is that DC says people can use rifles and shotguns for self-defense. D.C. also adds that they don't believe that the regulations that lock up and require the disassembling of guns does not "prevent the use of a lawful firearm in self-defense." But locked guns are simply not as readily accessible for defensive gun uses. In the U.S., states that require guns be locked up and unloaded face a 5 percent increase in murder and a 12 percent increase in rapes. Criminals are more likely to attack people in their homes and those attacks are more likely to be successful. Since potentially armed victims deter criminals, storing a gun locked and unloaded actually encourages increased crime. — "All too often, handguns in the heat of anger turn domestic violence into murder." To put it bluntly, criminals are not your typical citizens. Few people should be fearful of those who they are in relationshipswith. Almost 90 percent of adult murders already have a criminal record as an adult. As is well known, young males from their mid-teens to mid-thirties commit more than their share of crime, but even this is categorization can be substantially narrowed. We know that criminals tend to have low IQ’s as well as atypical personalities. For example, delinquents generally tended to be more “assertive, unafraid, aggressive, unconventional, extroverted, and poorly socialized,” while non-delinquents are “self-controlled, concerned about their relations with others, willing to be guided by social standards, and rich in internal feelings like insecurity, helplessness, love (or its lack), and anxiety.” Other evidence indicates that criminals tend to be more impulsive and put relatively little weight on future events. Finally, we cannot ignore the unfortunate fact that crime (particularly violent crime even more so murder) is disproportionately committed against blacks and by blacks. — "handguns cause accidents, frequently involving children. The smaller the weapon, the more likely a child can use it, and children as young as three years old are strong enough to fire today's handguns." Accidental gun deaths among children are, fortunately, much rarer than most people believe. With 40 million children in the United States under the age of 10, the Centers for Disease Control indicates that there were just 20 accidental gun deaths in 2003. 56 children under the age of 15. While guns get most of the attention, children are 41 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation, 32 times more likely to accidentally drown and 20 times more likely to die as a result of accidental fires. Looking at all children under 15, there were 56 accidental gun deaths in 2003— still a fraction of the deaths resulting from these other accidents for only the younger children. Despite the image of children firing these guns and killing themselves or other children, the typical person who accidentally fires a gun is an adult male, usually in his 20s. Accidental shooters overwhelmingly have problems with alcoholism and long criminal histories, particularly arrests for violent acts. They are also disproportionately involved in automobile crashes and are much more likely to have had their driver's licenses suspended or revoked. Even if gun locks could stop children from using guns, gun locks are simply not designed to stop adult males from firing their own guns — even if they were to use the gun locks. Of course, D.C. makes other claims as well, but the city’s crime problems and the fact that they began after the gun ban are hardly a secret. After the ban, D.C. regularly ranked number one in murder rates for cities over 500,000 people. That wasn’t even close to being true before the ban. The fact that D.C. must argue that the gun ban reduced the murder rate shows how incredibly weak the city's case really is. *John Lott is the author of the book "Freedomnomics," and is a Senior Research Scientist at the University of Maryland.

Now that's just hurtful. But I'll see that challenge and raise you the likelihood that we'll have some Class III toys at our G2G if Hero Gear participates. PS: We've been given preliminary OK on using a facility near Winchester. I'm waiting for Joe @ Hero Gear to return from his "vacation" blowing stuff up and playing uber-ninja-soldier, then we'll put our heads together and figure out a firm date for the event.

We were supposed to get some much needed rain here today, but it looks as if we're going to be out of luck again. Or maybe it will wait and start dumping on us as soon as the weekend really starts. Again, welcome. Read and... when the urge hits... reply or post!

Reef plays the Trouser Trout.

I've been studying on that one and will probably change it over today.

You know, it really does suck that the burden falls upon the innocent party to clear their name. In cases such as this, I think the State should be required to refund the legal expenses incurred. Just my worthless, rambling opinion.

Disney owns one. I've shot a few. Why?

Whoa Mike. Disney just had your case confused with GregRN's thread which did involve a restraining order and also was just resolved in a satisfactory manner. He wasn't assuming anything or making accusations about you.

Creeky is dead on with his analysis.

I haven't heard of any kabooms with the 9mm either. And yes, the firearms that were originally designed for a larger caliber and then down-sized to accommodate the smaller calibers generally is a more robust design.

Tennessee: Patron State Of Shooting At Things Glad you enjoyed. Ya'll come back now... ya hear.

Welcome to the group. Hope to see you around often!

I've never seen this one before. And of course, it's a weekend where I can't even begin to attend.

I see your top-loader and raise you this... A guy over on the XDTalk forum posted that and said it's one of the ways around the Commiefornia restriction. It doesn't have a pistol grip, so he is therefore able to have a detachable magazine. Personally, I'd throw myself in front of a freight train if I had to live in a state that had absurd laws like that. PS: I think Joe sells them down at Hero Gear.

So when are we going shooting?

Congrats!

And they're working... you're already investing in smarter firearms and holsters.

Sweet. Just so you know... after a few days of wearing it, especially with jeans, the leather will begin to mold itself both to the gun and to your body. The tab of leather that protrudes beneath the muzzle will actually start to curl up a little around the muzzle area of the kydex, which makes it even more comfortable to wear. I love my MTACs. I've got one for the 1911 and the HK now.

Welcome to the family.

It's not about you... it's about them. The people who want to feel safe and think that so-called deterrents like hanging up signs or passing ridiculous laws will actually make them safe. I hear the politically correct crowd hollering all the time about "minority rights" but it never occurs to them that the smallest minority is the individual. And my individual rights are supposed to be life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and it it's my individual right to be able to protect all of those things.

Nah... they'd just force the kid to use a British cop since they don't carry guns.

Wouldn’t you feel safer with a gun? British attitudes are supercilious and misguided By: Richard Munday Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2409817.ece Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselves on our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killing spree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benighted colonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, that Americans still resist calls for more gun controls? The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they are indeed generally perverse in their effects. Virginia Tech, where 32 students were shot in April, had a strict gun ban policy and only last year successfully resisted a legal challenge that would have allowed the carrying of licensed defensive weapons on campus. It is with a measure of bitter irony that we recall Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, recording the words of Cesare Beccaria: “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.” One might contrast the Virginia Tech massacre with the assault on Virginia’s Appalachian Law School in 2002, where three lives were lost before a student fetched a pistol from his car and apprehended the gunman. Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only by the law-abiding. New York has “banned” pistols since 1911, and its fellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar bans. One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of the strictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down to Vermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence (one thirteenth that of Britain). America’s disenchantment with “gun control” is based on experience: whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the face of more restrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to possess a firearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years all violent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread of laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens. Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states that had followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau of Justice reported that “firearms-related crime has plummeted”. In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailably entrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime Victims Survey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over the past decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all the legal ones. We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery. If armed crime in London in the years before the First World War amounted to less than 2 per cent of that we suffer today, it was not simply because society then was more stable. Edwardian Britain was rocked by a series of massive strikes in which lives were lost and troops deployed, and suffragette incendiaries, anarchist bombers, Fenians, and the spectre of a revolutionary general strike made Britain then arguably a much more turbulent place than it is today. In that unstable society the impact of the widespread carrying of arms was not inflammatory, it was deterrent of violence. As late as 1951, self-defence was the justification of three quarters of all applications for pistol licences. And in the years 1946-51 armed robbery, the most significant measure of gun crime, ran at less than two dozen incidents a year in London; today, in our disarmed society, we suffer as many every week. Gun controls disarm only the law-abiding, and leave predators with a freer hand. Nearly two and a half million people now fall victim to crimes of violence in Britain every year, more than four every minute: crimes that may devastate lives. It is perhaps a privilege of those who have never had to confront violence to disparage the power to resist.

Not many 1911s are chambered in .40SW except for those popular among USPSA Open competitors, though, and the .40SW seems to be the cartridge that is most prolific among cases of Glock failures. Of those competitors who do use the .40SW in a 1911 platform, I'd wager that many of them are very experienced reloaders or use rounds provided to them by very experienced reloaders. Suffice it to say, then, that the kaboom problem does appear to be restricted mainly to those Glocks that are chambered to shoot rounds with high case pressures.

Have the rest of you seen this idiocy yet? California legislators have proposed a law that will require components inside of new handguns that will stamp each fired casing with the handgun's serial number. This will be the death of reloading if it happens. Spent shell casings would be imprinted By James P. Sweeney COPLEY NEWS SERVICE September 11, 2007 SACRAMENTO – The Assembly sent the governor a bill yesterday requiring that the next generation of semiautomatic handguns stamp identifying serial numbers on spent shell casings. The legislation that would establish the first law of its kind in the nation could have a lasting impact on the war on crime, according to backers. But the limited application of the bill does not figure to be felt for several years. The bill covers only new models or brands of semiautomatic handguns approved for sale in the state after Jan. 1, 2010. That excludes nearly 1,300 different semiautomatics already sold in the state. Revolvers, which do not discharge shell casings, also are not covered. Nonetheless, supporters said tagging microscopic codes on ammunition fired from the guns of choice for gang members and violent criminals could prove invaluable to law enforcement. “Chiefs of police from Stockton to San Diego, from Fresno to National City, 65 of them standing together in support of this bill because they see the potential to solve gun crime,” said Assemblyman Mike Feuer, a Los Angeles Democrat who carried the measure, AB 1471. Feuer said the bill is being watched across the country, all the way to Washington, D.C., where Congress is weighing a similar proposal. But in a passionate debate between gun-control Democrats and gun-rights Republicans, critics dismissed the technology as unreliable, expensive and easily thwarted. They warned that it would drive up the price of guns and drive manufacturers out of the state. “There is nothing like this is any other state, and no other state is seriously considering this because they know it doesn't work,” said Lawrence Keane, general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Council, an industry trade association. The Assembly approved the bill on a 43-29 vote that fell largely along party lines. The Senate narrowly passed the bill last week. All involved are now closely watching for a signal from Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has taken no position on the bill. Gun-control backers have been pushing the concept, known as microstamping, for several years as an alternative to ballistic imaging, a much more complex system that relies on individual markings on bullets. Feuer attempted to shift the debate away from the traditional gun-control rhetoric, insisting his bill would not restrict anyone's access or ability to use firearms. “This is not a gun-control measure,” he said. “This is a public-safety measure.” The legislation would require new semiautomatics to be manufactured with firing pins or some other internal part etched with an individual serial number. Feuer said gun makers have said the identifying parts can be added for as little as $1 per gun. But Keane said it would require an overhaul of the manufacturing process and add up to $200 per gun. After all that, the internal code could be easily sanded off. Feuer staged a demonstration of the technology last month for journalists and some of Los Angeles' ranking law enforcement officials. The test used a microstamped weapon that had been fired more than 2,600 times. “Everyone there could determine which gun fired the bullets,” Feuer said. More than 60 percent of homicides in California are committed with handguns and about 70 percent of the handguns sold in the state are semiautomatics, according to a legislative analysis of the bill. Moreover, Feuer said, his measure could help deal with so-called “straw purchasers,” those who buy guns legally for those who cannot. Opponents portrayed the legislation as another assault on the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. Those who live a life of crime typically do not buy weapons legally and certainly wouldn't be foolish enough to use guns with coded firing pins, they said. “There are so many ways to game this technology, that's the difficulty,” said Assemblyman Rick Keene, R-Chico. “This is not ready for prime time.” To those that invoked the Second Amendment, Assemblyman Sandré Swanson offered up another passage from the Constitution. “This is about life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” said Swanson, a Democrat who represents Oakland, where 148 people were killed last year and 93 so far this year. As the bill moved through both houses, the legislation was amended to address criticism that it relied on patented technology available only from a single source. That supplier, NanoMark Technologies, has agreed to provide the technology for free to California and other states. The measure also requires the attorney general to verify that the technology is made available to more than one manufacturer, Feuer said.

Kids Told To Remove Tiny Rifles From Graduation Caps POSTED: 9:20 am PDT September 12, 2007 UPDATED: 9:38 am PDT September 12, 2007 <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.knbc.com/js/13260191/script.js"></script><!--startindex-->RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. -- Cornerstone Elementary School will review its zero-tolerance policy toward guns on campus this fall after fifth-graders were told to remove weapons from the hands of toy soldiers that festooned their graduation caps. "We don't want to repeat mistakes or offend people," Walker Williams, superintendent of the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District, told the Daily Breeze."We didn't intend to offend." The school principal, Denis Leonard, did not want to talk to the newspaper. Glen Nakata, the father of fifth-grader Austin, met with Williams and district officials in July to discuss the policy. "I'm glad they're taking these steps," he told the Daily Breeze. A lawyer for the National Rifle Association, Chuck Michel of Long Beach, suggested district officials had taken the policy to a ludicrous extreme. "This school district recognizes that they don't have any reason for doing this," he told the Daily Breeze. About 10 years ago, a teacher at Cornerstone started what is now a tradition: having youngsters decorate their graduation mortar boards to illustrate what they might do in the future. Source: http://www.knbc.com/news/14098267/detail.html