Nothing?s Sacred Sticking to My Guns Kyle Lohmeier

I. One with the Gun Culture

Readers have seen me lambaste, lampoon, chide, insult, deride, and otherwise
bitch out loud about gun control advocates in this nation. In fact, I’ve
done so on such a frequent basis one might suspect that doing so is my
favorite thing on Earth. It really isn’t. This piece was intended to be the
Last Pro-Gun Column. It likely won’t be, because the anti-gun forces are so
good at making me madder than hell, but that’s the idea. It should be the
Last, because the argument, from any logical, objective and rational
standpoint, is already over and I’ve won.

Make no mistake, given a chance, I’d write about firearms all the time. Not
in the way I normally do, mind you, but in the way the world’s luckiest
professional writers, the staff of Guns & Ammo, American Handgunner et al.
do. The way I normally write about firearms, debunking the absurd positions
taken by anti-gunners, is getting tiresome. The reason being is the same
reason why I did not and could never go into early elementary education; I
get very bored explaining the painfully obvious. To me, explaining why Rosie
O’Donnell, Diane Feinstein, Chucky Schumer et al. are dead wrong is akin to
teaching second graders basic science. I already know why grass is green and
I lack the requisite patience to explain it to a seven year old. Similarly,
I already know why the ideas espoused by the aforementioned anti-gunners are
simply wrong. The only difference between explaining science to
seven-year-olds and debunking anti-gunners is that seven-year-olds, upon
seeing scientific evidence, won’t argue an interpretation of that evidence
that is not only wholly incorrect, but also patently absurd. Doing just that
in the face of overwhelming evidence, however, is the stock-and-trade of gun
control advocates.

As I said, considering the research done by John Lott, the CATO Institute,
the data in the FBI’s annual uniform crime report, crime trends in the UK
over the last decade and even a casual look at firearm crime rates in
Australia over the last five years, it’s painfully obvious to me which side
of the gun control argument has already won a decisive victory in the realm
of facts and reality. Of course, liberals and anti-gunners don’t exist in
the realm of facts and reality, they prefer to ignore reality, which has
this obnoxious habit of refusing to support their claims, and instead plead
to people’s emotions. Dragging anti-gunners from their personal fantasy land
back to the real world where unarmed Australian subjects are savagely beaten
in their own homes by bands of home invaders is not, believe it or not, my
favorite thing to do on Earth.

II. Unintended Consequences

Yet, the people who are most painfully ignorant of firearms, namely state
and federal lawmakers, are in charge of making up the rules that regulate
them. Naturally, not a single one of their proposed or enacted rules and
regulations is effective for its stated purpose, or even makes a whole lot
of sense.

For instance, in 1994 the Clinton Crime Bill limited the magazine capacity
of pistols for sale on the civilian market to ten. Not once since then has
someone been spared after being shot at ten times because just as their
assailant was about fire that eleventh and finally fatal round, they ran out
of ammo. One of the unintended consequences of the magazine limit has
greatly irked lawmakers, who, being painfully obtuse, were unable to see it
coming. See, a full-size 9mm pistol can easily hold 15 or more rounds in a
magazine that fits flush inside the handle. Glock’s big full-size model 17
holds 18+1 (18 in the magazine plus one in the pipe) 9mm Luger cartridges
and their compact model 19 holds 15+1 rounds of 9mm Luger. With the new law
in place, gun designers wondered: why not cram the mandated 10 rounds into
as small and concealable a package as possible? Enter the Glock models 26,
27, 29 and 30, sub-compacts holding nine or ten rounds of 9mm Luger, .40
S&W, 10mm Auto and .45 ACP respectively in a smaller package than any gun
maker had hitherto created. Gaston Glock’s timing was excellent as his tiny
sub-compacts hit the market just as more and more states were adopting
shall-issue CCW laws and the concealability of these guns made them instant
successes.

Here’s another wonderfully stupid ban put in place by our government. A
German gun maker called Steyr has this neat little rifle called the AUG. The
AUG is far-out looking by conventional standards, the receiver being coated
in gray plastic and the action is arranged in a bullpup configuration, where
the magazine is inserted behind the grip. This increasingly common
configuration gives the AUG a relatively long barrel in a rifle that has a
short overall length. Otherwise, the civilian version of the AUG was fairly
typical. It fed .223 Remington cartridges from a 30-round detachable box
magazine and fired those semi-automatic, meaning one shot per pull of the
trigger.

The Clinton Regime banned the AUG from further importation. Still legal and
readily available however is the Armalite AR-15 and its numerous variations
made by several other companies, the Ruger Mini-14, the Bushmaster M17S, and
several other similar arms. What do these have in common with the AUG? They
all chamber the .223 Remington cartridge, they’re all semi-automatic,
they’re all fed from a detachable box magazine that holds up to 30 rounds
and the Bushmaster further resembles the AUG in that it too is a bullpup
design. So, why ban just the AUG when so many other functionally identical
rifles are still around? Because the people who crafted this ridiculous law
knew zero about firearms aside from the fact they don’t want civilians
owning them. Furthermore, there’s several semi-automatic rifles that feed
from 20 or 30 round magazines that chamber the far more serious .308
Winchester cartridge. Again, our lawmakers are clueless when it comes to
firearms. Well, firearms and a whole host of other issues, but firearms
especially.

III. Assault Rifle, Defined

It?s not just individual rifles that gun control advocates in Washington
D.C. and elsewhere are ignorant about, but entire classes of rifles are
referred to incorrectly either because lawmakers don?t know any better, or
(more likely) so they can further demonize them. Given a chance, lawmakers
will happily refer to anything as an “assault rifle.” Chucky Schumer?s list
of “assault rifles” he?d like banned includes the Remington 700, a
bolt-action rifle!

So, allow me to clarify for everyone, just what an assault rifle is. The
term “Assault rifle,” has the misfortune of being coined by Adolph Hitler to
describe the MP44, which chambered a new medium-power cartridge, the 7.92×32
Kurz (short), which is smaller than the 7.92×57 Mauser cartridge being used
in the general issue Mauser Kar 98k bolt-gun, but larger than the 9mm Luger
Parabellum in use in sub-machineguns and pistols. Neither a submachine gun,
but automatic like one, nor a full-size, full-power rifle, Hitler dubbed the
new weapon with its 30-round magazine, “sturmgewehr,” or assault rifle. By
definition, an assault rifle must be capable of either full-automatic or
burst (usually three rounds to conserve ammo) fire. All rifles sold without
a very hard to obtain machine gun license or a class III FFL in the U.S. are
semi-automatic and therefore by definition not assault rifles. In essence,
the “assault rifle ban” lawmakers are clamoring for is almost 70 years old
we call it the National Firearms Act of 1935.

As ignorant as lawmakers are about guns, dedicated anti-gunners outside the
beltway are even worse. Groups like Americans for Gun Safety and the Brady
Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence are not only founded and led by
extraordinarily ignorant people, but seem to attract similarly simple-minded
dullards to their ranks. The worst thing about these groups is their names.
To AGS, “gun safety” means a ban on private firearm ownership, and the only
campaign Brady is on is the same one she’s been on all along. While
Monster-dot-com founder Andrew McKelvey’s AGS is a relative newcomer to the
gun-control scene, Sara Brady’s been around ever since a nut-job with a puny
Ivers Johnson .22 revolver thought he was impressing Jodie Foster some
twenty years ago. At least until recently, Brady had the decency (or what
passes for decency coming from her) to be honest about her goals and called
her group Handgun Control Inc. Last year, however, the Bradys dropped the
word “handgun” from the name altogether and appear to be trying to pass
themselves off as a group that supports something less than a wholesale ban
on all handguns.

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Part two
IV. The Wholesale Ban

My complete opposition to a ban on handguns (or long guns) is multi-faceted
and more involved than the simple fact that I thoroughly enjoy shooting.
Constitutional issues aside, I’m opposed to such a ban because it would be
impossible to enforce and the result of trying to enforce it would be a
disaster. For the sake of argument, however, let’s say Sara Brady got her
wish and Bush signed into law a bill that calls for the immediate
confiscation and destruction of all handguns and a ban on all future sales
by Federal Firearms License holding gun dealers (the only ones the
government can control). How would the ban be enforced?

Naturally, the BATF could contact police departments in states that mandate
handguns be registered and thereby obtain a list of people who have legally
registered pistols in that state. Every state that requires handgun
registration has a slightly different method of cataloguing those records.
In Michigan, for instance, those records would refer to handguns that have
been bought within the last ten days. In large city police departments’
records there would be multiple green cards that refer to the same gun, one
that’s been sold a few times to other city residents after the original
owner bought it from an FFL dealer. Similarly, there would be cards
referring to guns that have cards in other police departments’ records.
Thus, compiling and up-to-date and accurate list based on these records
would be a daunting task.

Supposing it would even be possible to compile a useable list from those
records, using it, letters could be mailed out to handgun owners,
instructing them to bring their guns in to the local police department for
collection. Naturally there’d be holdouts, patriots would doubtlessly engage
in some civil disobedience and instruct the BATF to take a flying leap.
Whether or not they’d survive the fusillade the boys of F-Troop are known to
release through the walls and windows of an uncooperative subject’s
dwelling; is another matter altogether.

Now, in states that don’t have pistol registries like Michigan, the BATF
would have to rely on dealer records. These would be fairly useful in
finding out who brought home a specific gun from an FFL dealer. If that
person then turns around and sells the handgun to someone else, there’s no
record of the transaction. Thus, dealer records would be of very limited use
in finding handguns.

Then, there’s the handguns that are most commonly used in crimes anyway,
stolen, illegally sold, or otherwise untraceable pistols. The BATF, the
state police or even your local police department has no idea where these
guns are right now. If they did, they’d have arrested the person with it
already. No gun ban that congress can create will ever, ever have any effect
on these firearms. Actually, that merits repeating, in italics even: No gun
ban that any congress can create will ever, ever have any effect whatsoever
on guns that are stolen, illegally (or even legally) sold by one non-dealer
to another, or have otherwise been removed from the paper-stream that
follows a pistol from manufacturer to wholesaler to dealer to owner. None.
Can’t be done. Ever.

So, therefore, who would be disarmed by such a gun ban? The peaceable
law-abiding schmoe who dutifully handed over his God-given right to
self-protection. Criminals (who were criminals before the gun-ban, not just
those patriots who became criminals by definition after the gun-ban for
skirting it), being criminals, wouldn’t bother bringing in their guns for
destruction and since they took their guns out of the paper trail by virtue
of how they obtained them in the first place, the government would be none
the wiser anyway.

What then would be created by a wholesale ban on handguns is a situation
where the only people who have handguns are criminals and the state’s
surrogates of violence, the police and military (and a few patriots as
well). Since the police are powerless to protect American citizens from
violence now, imagine what would happen if America’s criminal population
suddenly found her civilian population unarmed and therefore ripe for the
picking? McKelvey’s AGS floated a vision of blood running in the streets
from road-rage shoot outs should Michigan’s CCW law be passed. Six months
afterward, there’s not so much as a drop of blood on the street and not one
of the predicted wild-west shootouts have taken place, much to their dismay
I’m sure. If McKelvey and Brady really want to see the blood flow, give them
their wish, disarm all the law-abiding civilians, thus leaving them naked in
the face of criminal predation, and watch the streets turn into raging
sanguineous rivers of death and misery.

V. What About the Cops?

Oh, but the police are there to protect us. Remember? Therein lie two
fundamental problems with gun control advocates. I, being rational, can only
think of two reasons (aside from general insanity/stupidity) why people are
devoutly anti-gun: They either think people in general simply aren’t
responsible enough to possess firearms or, they’re fundamentally pacifistic.
The first reason I dismiss on general stupidity. If Michigan will issue a
16-year-old girl a license to affix her teal Pontiac Sunfire to the rear
bumper of my Blazer as I drive along at 80 miles per hour on I-94, then how
can that state deny anyone not currently clad in a strait jacket a firearm?

In the latter case, most pacifists, it turns out, only think they?re
pacifists. In reality, true pacifists are very, very rare, and for two very
good reasons: most people aren’t that dumb, and those who are don’t live
very long. I’ve had conversations with “pacifists” before who have told me
they can’t even imagine owning a gun, much less using one to defend
themselves, because, they assure me, they don’t believe in violence. Then, I
ask what they’d do if they heard their front door smash inward at 3 a.m.
Invariably, they tell me they’d call nine-one-one. I then ask: “And what do
you expect the police to do once they arrive?”

The “smarter” pacifists see where I’m going and try to skirt the issue and
insist they’d have the cops arrest the man (not that they’d have any say in
what the police decide to do). I then insert variables like “What if he
wouldn’t give up?” “What if he was trying to rape/kill you?” Eventually,
they fess up that they’d expect the cops to shoot the assailant if it came
down to one or the other of them having to die. Thus, in the end, they’re
not pacifists at all, they’re just too big a weenie to dirty their hands in
their own self-defense and expect surrogates to do it for them.

Not that calling the police will save them; the police never get to the
scene of a robbery, rape or home invasion in time to do anything but take a
report. Don’t get me wrong, by all means in a home invasion reach for the
phone to call the cops, but only after the .357 is in hand and leveled at
the bedroom door.

VI. Smart Guns

A recent tack the gun-control crowd has taken is in advocating the
development and use of so-called “smart guns.” This is, probably, the
dumbest idea ever formulated and is further evidence that the people who
regulate firearms, lawmakers, know nothing about them or the people who use
them. Even basic economics eludes the lawmakers who first came up with the
“smart gun” idea. If members of the gun culture wanted a “smart gun” an
enterprising gun maker would have already built one. We here in the gun
culture have made no such requests of the firearms industry. We have asked
for lighter, more compact and more easily concealable firearms for
self-defense. They’ve responded with sub-compact semi-autos and revolvers
incorporating space age lightweight alloys of titanium and scandium. That no
smart gun has yet been developed is evidence that no real gunner wants one,
with good reason.

Here’s why: In the provided lesson plans for the NRA Basic Personal
Protection in the Home course is a section on selecting a handgun for home
defense. According to those lesson plans (and common sense, really) the
single most important feature of any handgun being considered for home or
personal protection is functional reliability; the gun simply has to work
when called upon. Therefore, any pistolero worth his salt will have nothing
to do with a so-called “smart gun.” Reason being, what separates these
“smart guns” from good old-fashioned dumb guns is that there is a mechanism
on the “smart gun,” that, as a default setting, renders the gun inoperable.
If, and only if, the right finger print is scanned, or the supplied ring is
in contact with the pistol’s frame, or the supplied radio transmitting ring
or bracelet is close enough to the gun, will the mechanism unlock and allow
the firearm work. There is absolutely nothing “smart” about the premise of
“smart guns.”

What sits on my nightstand is a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver. Why?
Because revolvers, by their nature, are less prone to malfunction than are
automatic pistols and quality wheelguns, like S&Ws, even less so. That
choice for my nightstand wasn’t an accident. God forbid I need my gun
chances are the situation will dictate that the gun needs to work and work
the first time. There is peace of mind in knowing that, if the trigger is
pressed, that S&W will undoubtedly launch the 125-grain Gold Dot stored in
the charge-hole immediately right of the barrel. Always. Therefore, the very
last thing I would ever want on my gun is some electronic gimmick that has a
default setting to make the gun not work.

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part three
VII. Conclusion

It’s unfortunate the degree of suffering under criminal predation the
Aussies and Brits have to endure due to lawmakers in their own nation who
have fallen prey to the mad dreams of Brady’s ilk. Of course, Brady’s bunch
is so obtuse (or evil) they’d require the same sort of suffering be visited
upon American citizens too. And even then, if given their gun ban, they’d
view the resulting slaughter of peaceful, law-abiding citizens at the hands
of well-armed criminals not as an indictment of their insufferable
ignorance, but as further “evidence” that they were right all along and the
only fault of the gun ban is that it didn’t go far enough.

Since Sara Brady et al won’t likely even read this piece, and wouldn’t take
it to heart if they did, this probably won’t be the Last Pro-Gun Column, the
be-all end-all, after all. Just so long as everyone realizes there is no
need to politely consider the anti-gunner’s premise as even remotely valid.
Most of us will suffer other people’s opinions and views as part of polite
discourse, even if we disagree.

There’s two basic ways to look at gun control, the one right way (it’s
wrong) and one of an infinite number of wrong ways (it’s anything but
wrong). Private firearm ownership not only has a place in a free society, it
is the only thing that guarantees that society remain free. There’s evidence
that a person or society’s access to firearms no more automatically causes
crime to occur than having access to a can opener automatically causes soup.
What there isn’t, however, is any objective, scientific evidence that
suggests private gun ownership leads to increases in violent crime in
general. Nor is there any evidence that “handgun-free” cities and countries
(like Washington D.C. or Australia) experience less violent crime. As such,
in a free society, a person is welcome to dislike firearms and free to
choose not to own one, what they should not be free to do, however, is make
any attempt to prevent me from owning what makes, models, calibers and sorts
of firearms I choose to own.

Kyle Lohmeier