Bang! Bang! You Aren't Just Shot, You're Eviscerated!

From The Gun Guys on one nasty bit of "home enthusiast" equipment:

Here’s a nice editorial from over the weekend about the .50 caliber ban currently working its way through the New Jersey legislature. The Philly Inquirer lays out exactly why this weapon is so dangerous, and why the only way to really prevent it from being used against our citizens is to get it off of gun store shelves completely.

The measure, which unfortunately has been detoured, takes aim mainly at what gun-control advocates call the .50-caliber sniper rifle. Gun-rights advocates call it the .50-caliber bmg.

By either name it is a weapon of great velocity and long range. It is used against enemy fortifications in battle. Place this rifle’s .50-caliber bullet alongside a .22-caliber bullet, and it is like an elephant next to its calf. (The new law would also outlaw a handgun version of the weapon, though in each case current lawful owners would be exempt.)

A police officer’s body armor cannot stop this bullet. Some versions of this bullet are incendiary or armor-piercing. The weapon can be devastating even if fired from more than a mile away. Imagine it in the hands of terrorists targeting planes at takeoff or landing. The alleged Fort Dix conspirators come to mind.

Corraling this weapon is sensible to do and will pose little inconvenience to recreational users, except to deprive them of using it for target shooting. It cannot be used for hunting in New Jersey; the state already prohibits hunting with all cartridge-firing rifles.

Not to mention that with the five inch bullet used in this firearm, any hunting target that gets shot at won’t have much left of it anyway. The fact is that leaving this weapon available to anyone with cash and an ID (and, at gun shows, just anyone with cash) is opening the door for any terrorist in the United States to walk into a gun store and walk out with a military grade weapon (a weapon that’s both used by and against our troops in Iraq).

3,000 September 11th Deaths; Compare To More Than 30,000 American Deaths By Gunfire Every Year

Stop Gun Deaths

Uh Oh, Will Bush Declare War Against Chimpanzees Next?

With this news from the Washington Post:

Chimpanzees observed fashioning spears from sticks and using the tools to hunt small mammals.

...can Bush declaring war on chimps for their ability to make simple weapons be far behind?

I mean, chimps fit many of Bush's criteria for warmongering:

• they don't recognize him as the second begotten son of God Himself (I often wonder if Dubya thinks Jesus was merely his prototype, a failed alpha version?)
• they're brown
• they're poor and far less powerful

Thoughts?

Iraq's Insurgents Get Their Weapons Not Just From America, But Largely From the Department of Defense

Read it and weep from Rosa Brooks (scroll down but I think the intro is well worth your time, too):

ACCORDING TO the defense lawyers at his trial, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby didn't lie to investigators about his role in outing covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. He was just so darn busy with pressing national security matters that he kept forgetting the chummy chats about Plame he'd had with NBC's Tim Russert and Time magazine's Matt Cooper — not to mention his two-hour lunch on the same subject with Judith Miller (late of the New York Times).

The ladies and gentlemen of the press appear skeptical about Libby's "bad memory" defense. But, personally, I find his claim entirely credible.

After all, in the run-up to the Iraq war, President Bush was so busy with pressing national security matters that he completely forgot to ask any questions about the gaping holes in the intelligence presented to him. Condoleezza Rice was so busy with pressing national security matters that she forgot to take false information about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction out of Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, even though the CIA told her that it was false. Dick Cheney was so busy with pressing national security matters (water-boarding prisoners; shooting small animals) that he totally forgot you're not supposed to pressure people to come up with bogus intelligence in the first place.

And the easily forgettable journalists mentioned above were so busy enjoying their access to administration national security officials that they forgot that journalists are supposed to actually investigate stuff, instead of just breathlessly repeating what an "anonymous source" told them over lunch.

Given all the forgetting that was going on back in 2003, why shouldn't we believe that Scooter had a faulty memory too?

Astute observers will have noticed that there's still an awful lot of national security-related forgetting going on today. The Bush administration, for instance, has already forgotten that relying on questionable intelligence can lead to disaster and has taken to announcing direct Iranian involvement in attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq as if it were incontrovertible fact.

According to some anonymous U.S. officials at a very secret, no-recording-or-photography-allowed session in Baghdad on Sunday, U.S. forces have discovered Iranian-made components in some of the bombs used by Iraqi insurgents. Naturally (having forgotten that there might be no war in Iraq at all if it hadn't been for excessive media respect for anonymous sources), every U.S. media outlet dutifully played along and reported the claims. Of course, those claims are hard to verify because both the evidence and the identity of the officials are secret.

Meanwhile, Bush, who keeps forgetting that our intelligence has at times been dangerously wrong, insists that he "can say with certainty that the Quds force, a part of the Iranian government, has provided these sophisticated IEDs that have harmed our troops…. When we find the networks that are enabling these weapons to end up in Iraq, we will deal with them."

Reinforce your bomb shelter, President Ahmadinejad.

Oh, wait; I forgot something too! (Just so you know, I'm also really busy thinking about pressing national security matters.) My fellow Americans, it is my duty to reveal to you that Iran is not the only powerful state that's arming the Iraqi insurgents. On the contrary. There's equally solid evidence that another major world power has been providing the Iraqi insurgents with thousands of new RPGs, machine guns, sniper rifles and other weapons.

Just who is behind this act of hostility? The United States — or anyway, the U.S. Department of Defense.

You heard me. According to the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, about 14,000 of the weapons bought (with your tax dollars!) for distribution to Iraqi security forces got, um, misplaced somewhere between getting to Iraq and being transferred to the Iraqi army and police. Instead, analysts say, many of those weapons ended up in the hands of You Know Who.