The homemade plastic gun has arrived

Defense Distributed has hand fired the first ever 3-D printed plastic gun. And the politicians are having a fit. The entire point of the project is an exercise to prove that technology makes certain classes of laws moot over time.

The irony is thick in Rep Steve Israel’s reaction to the news. He wants to extend the existing limitations on homemade weapons

Security checkpoints, background checks, and gun regulations will do little good if criminals can print plastic firearms at home [my emphasis]

Did you catch that? We have to tell criminals not to print plastic firearms because otherwise the gun regulations will not work. Doh!

91% support background checks? Yes, but why?

You always have to look at the whole data set from multiple angles. Lets take

Do you support or oppose - requiring background checks for all gun buyers? 91% said yes, 8% said no

and compose that with

Do you believe that if there are background checks for all gun purchases the government will or will not use that information in the future to confiscate legally-owned guns? 48% said confiscate, 38% said will not

Lets put those two things together.

Even if we assumed that all the people against background checks believed they would lead to confiscation, and peel them off the list, that still leaves 40% of the people polled who are both in favor of checks and also believe it will lead to confiscation.

If you think that checks will lead (not might lead, will lead) to confiscation, why would you be for checks… because you want the guns confiscated.

If they think the guns should be confiscated, why are we even debating them about background checks. They don’t care about background checks. Those people are not trying to keep guns out of criminals hands, they are trying to keep guns out of everyone's hands. So this 91% stat is misleading at best, and useless at worst.

Either that, or there is some serious cognitive dissonance going on and if that’s the case, the poll is invalid on its face.

In the spirit of “trust but verify” here is the original poll that everyone is citing.

Occupy court verdicts a mostly positive thing

A friend posted on facebook a list of 5 recent court verdicts for the Occupy folks. I agree with 4 of these. Can you guess which 4?

1. Not Guilty: the jury agreed with the protesters that the message of the protest was important enough to override the trespassing charges
2. Not Guilty: Independent video footage showed the arresting officer lied after the police claimed no police footage existed.
3. Not Guilty: three undercover Austin police officers had infiltrated the Occupy group and goaded the protesters into this act
4. Not Guilty: the park’s supposed curfew law was enforced rarely and inconsistently, meaning the police’s crackdown was a targeted attempt to infringe on First Amendment Rights
5. Not Guilty: basically the same as #4

Now 2-5 all make sense. Inconsistent laws and overzealous (to be generous) police need to be held in check. But personal property rights do not. Does #1 mean that I can now go Occupy the Occupier’s home’s living room because I disagree with him?

Feinstein’s justification is also a sham

I know it is but I have a hard time believing this is the whole of her justification for instituting a new weapons ban (or actually that anyone buys it). From her summary

A Justice Department study of the assault weapons ban found that it was responsible for a 6.7% decrease in total gun murders, holding all other factors equal.

This looks like a very good “hard fact” but the very next line in the exact same study says

However, with only one year of post-ban data, we cannot rule out the possibility that this decrease reflects chance year-to-year variation rather than a true effect of the ban.

Get that? It says, there was a decrease in gun murders (note: not in overall murders) but its possible it just normal variation because its so small. She cites a study that is wishy-washy on its face because they are showing a trend with a single data point (1 year). You can’t show a trend with a single data point. Especially one small enough to be natural variation.

Don’t you think if there was a better study to cite, she would?

I’m not going to bother to quote the rest of her reasons that she claims “Assault weapon bans have been proven to be effective” I’ll summarize:

When we banned these guns, these guns were seen to be used less in the crimes we were concerned about. The police also noticed a drop in the rate that these guns were confiscated from criminals. We do not have any data that the crimes we were concerned with happened any less frequently or lessened their impact on civil society. The crimes still happened, they just didn’t happen with these specific guns anymore.

All of the data they show is that they took away the guns. Hey look! We banned them! Then we found people used them less! Huzzah!

They don’t have any data (because there isn't any) that shows that banning guns is effective for anything except banning guns.

If you think this way, how could you possibly give anyone a weapon?

• Man tells city council not to ban his gun.
• Man tells city council he has a carry permit
• Councilman asks if man is carrying
• Man says yes
• Councilman makes a motion to (illegally) remove the man from the meeting
• Motion fails
• Councilman immediately excuses himself out of fear of being in a room with a gun.
• Mayor apologizes to man for councilman’s attempt to restrict his 2nd amendment rights

Kudos to the mayor, but the most interesting thing here is that the councilman appears to be making a hasty retreat in the politest fashion out of fear that a firearm exists in his vicinity.
The fact that the council man immediately gets up and leaves the meeting before it is over betrays the thinking behind most gun control legislators. They believe that the average man is an animal. That he is subservient to his basest instincts and has no self control or morality. That he is eventually going to get hopping mad and use it in a fit of rage.

The 40% background check stat a sham

Words are important.

You may see a number of people (including the White House) stating that 40% of gun sales are done without a background check. That is not quite true. The number seems to come from a 20 year old study which was a phone survey to determine what and how people acquired their weapons. What it actually said was

About 60 percent of gun acquisitions involved federally licensed dealers [my emphasis]

“Acquisitions” not “Sales.” Why is this important? Because 29% of the acquisitions were gifts, inheritance, etc. Not sales.

Only 7% of total acquisitions were done mail order or at a gun show. Of those 7%, many were dealers (who do background checks) and some were not.

There is no giant sales loophole.

And all of this is inferred from the type of acquisition. They didn’t ask “when you got your gun, did you pass a background check?”

(for completeness there is some 4% “other store” category that for some reason doesn’t fit into the 60% they assume does background checks. I’m not sure how any store can legally sell a gun without being a licensed dealer who does background checks)

Gun control metaphor fail

“Shouting fire in a crowded theater” is not the same as “Possessing a gun in a crowded theater”

“Possessing a mouth in a crowded theater” is the same as “Possessing a gun in a crowded theater”

“Shouting fire in a crowded theater” is the same as “Waving a gun around in a crowded theater”

But then again, we already have laws against that so what’s a pent-up-frustrated-politician-who-hasn’t-increased-the-police-state-recently to do?