So where will this story end up in tomorrow's L.A. Times? It's the story of a guy going postal, with a gun, at a factory in Missouri. I wonder because this local story about a guy going postal with a sword didn't make the A section, let alone the front page.

One would think that a local story warrants greater coverage than an out-of-state story; however, one lunatic used a gun while the other used a sword. Will the Times hype the gun story? Or will they give it less coverage than the local story they relegated to the B section? We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see.

How does one blog a radio program? I almost drove off the road yesterday laughing myself silly. I was listening to the John and Ken Show. Their guest was Democratic strategist Bob Mulholland. During his entire appearance, Bob managed to avoid answering a single question. John Kobylt, at one point, realized that it was necessary to remind listeners that this was a real guest, not a joke. A caller would ask about the budget and Bob would ramble about abortion and gun control. When asked about taxes, he blurted out something about George Bush. John ased him if he had Tourette's and described the conversation as being like talking to a mental patient. It was great radio, however unenlightening Bob might have been.

Ostensibly, Mulholland was there to tell why Wile E. "Gray" Davis shouldn't be recalled. With friends like Bob...

Will the Skeet-Geeks finally get it? James Swan writes about the UN's small arms conference coming up next week in NYC. He points out what many gun rights activists have been saying for years: The UN would like nothing more than to disarm average citizens. The skeet-geeks are the hardest to get involved in protecting our gun rights. They convince themselves that no one's interested in taking their guns. In fact, groups like the UN view their pretty shotguns as identical to RPGs and machine guns. To them, a gun is a gun is a gun. Let's hope that articles like this one wake them up to that fact.

Has the CA State GOP sprouted some cojones? The State budget is about to slam into a wall and the Republicans in the senate refuse to budge on taxes. Looks like they've found their collective mojo since Mojo left.

Ugliness at Oxford...

A professor at Oxford sent this missive off to a PhD candidate:

From: "Andrew Wilkie" awilkie@worf.molbiol.ox.ac.uk
To: "Amit Duvshani"
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2003 9:58 AM
Subject: Re: PhD application

Dear Amit Duvshani,

Thank
you for contacting me, but I don't think this would work. I have a huge
problem with the way that the Israelis take the moral high ground from
their appalling treatment in the Holocaust, and then inflict gross
human rights abuses on the Palestinians because they (the Palestinians)
wish to live in their own country.

I am sure that you are
perfectly nice at a personal level, but no way would I take on somebody
who had served in the Israeli army. As you may be aware, I am not the
only UK scientist with these views but I'm sure you will find another
suitable lab if you look around.

Yours sincerely,
Andrew Wilkie

It took chutzpah to write this and then complete stupidity to hit the send button!

Over at The Corner on National Review Online: "CHIEF JUSTICE FUNNYMAN"

I don't know how many times I've self-censored myself on FreeRepublic today. I hit the reply button and then realize that nothing I have to say would fail to be offensive. What have I been censoring? Well... Let's put it this way: There's a nexus between the Texas Sodomy case, California's run-away taxes, and the acronym BOHICA.

Cow...

Here's a cool tool for blogging on the fly. Go to this page on Blogger.com. There's a link called "BlogThis" near the bottom of the page. Drag that to your personal tool bar. It's a little javascript that opens a blogging window. This one's obviously for Blogger.com users. Other services may have their own. Mozilla users should check out MozBlog.

Firearms Industry Wins Another Court Victory

In another significant legal victory for the firearms industry, a New York appellate court on June 24 upheld a trial court's August, 2001 order dismissing a lawsuit brought by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer against gun makers. The appellate court said manufacturers of lawful and non-defective products cannot be sued for allegedly creating a 'public nuisance' when criminals misuse firearms.

From The NRA-ILA News Center

Another nuisance suit quietly bites the dust.

Everybody else is chiming in on the "Texas Sodomy" ruling, so I might as well join in...

There's a lot of talk about the... um... mechanics of the acts involved. As a libertarian, I respect the right of people to do dangerous, immoral, and destructive things to themselves. It's your life; who am I to tell you not to ruin it? And since I don't want you poking your nose into my affairs, I ought to afford you the same courtesy.

However, I'm torn on the larger issue at hand: Should the US Supreme Court be telling the states how to run their affairs? On the one hand, I like the reservation of powers and rights embodied in the 9th and 10th Amendments. Governance in the US was intended to be from the bottom up; not the top down. On the other hand, I don't want things like gun laws written by the loons in Sacramento. In that case, I'd like nothing more than to see SCOTUS use the 14th Amendment to ram the 2nd down their throats.

The garmongous FreeRepublic thread on this is here.

Got that dual boot thing working. (For those who are curious, my old Win2k drive is set up as the master on IDE0 with the new Linux drive as a slave. I let LILO write to the master's MBR and everything's happy.) My next bit of fun is convincing Windows that there's really something to see on that new drive. (Linux sees the Windows drive with no problems.)

Blogger just completed an update. They were down for most of yesterday. Oddly enough, I missed it.

There are some new features to the interface. It ought to be easier to use.

I'm sure that there was something in the news that I could have commented on over the weekend, but I was on vacation. (The mountains were lovely. Thank you for asking.)

I've been playing with Linux this past week. I loaded Slackware 9.0 onto a "new" harddrive. (It came with what was then a new machine; however, it was pre-loaded with WinXP so I stuck to my old drive with Win2k and all my stuff rather than messing with XtraProblems.)

Thus far, I'm impressed. It fired right up, and saw our home network. It's so much easier to monkey with things when the Google is available. LILO isn't happy with how I have the old Win2k drive installed. (Or perhaps Windows is broken.) But I can still see the drive so all my stuff's safely copied to the new drive. (I'll see if Grub can get the old drive to boot later.) For now, I'm having fun tinkering.

The staff at Reason goes after the NY Times and UCLA over a recent study on gun dealers. The NYT headline screamed "50% of Dealers Willing to Sell Handguns Illegally, Study Says". But, as Jacob Sullum writes, reality is a bit different...

The question of an illegal straw purchase was broached with a different, much smaller sample:

The researchers also made 20 follow-up calls to randomly chosen dealers and said they needed to buy guns for girlfriends or boyfriends because they were not "allowed to."

In 16 of those cases, or 80 percent, the dealers responded with unequivocal "nos," indicating that the purchases would clearly be illegal. In the remaining four cases, the dealers agreed to sell the guns, even though they indicated that they knew that would be illegal, the researchers said.

In other words, the percentage in the headline for "Dealers Willing to Sell Handguns Illegally" was off by a factor of two and a half, and that's assuming the sample of 20 dealers adequately represented gun retailers nationwide.

The original study from UCLA doesn't make the headline's claim, but the abstract can easily leave one with that impression. It does make the statement "Most dealers were willing to sell a handgun regardless of the end user", but one has to go digging to find out that in most cases, the dealer was being asked if they'd make a legal sale. Only a small percentage were asked about blatantly illegal sales. And of those, most in the small sample said "no".

Of course, one can brush off the Times as being only a little more reliable than the World Weekly News. When they start reporting on Bat Boy, let me know. I am, however, disappointed with the study's primary author, Susan Sorenson. I know Dr. Sorenson. And while we may not agree on firearms policy, I would have hoped for better. The study is sloppy and the results misleading. The study compared dealer behavior across jurisdictions. What's shady for one dealer may be perfectly legal for another. And in most cases, the dealers were asked if they would be willing to make legal transactions. (What a shocker; they were willing to do so!) Larger samples chosen on a per jurisdiction basis would have been revealing. Also, though I don't know what difference this would make, the study limited calls to dealers in large cities with more than 10 dealers. Los Angeles is mentioned as just such a large city, but there aren't 10 dealers in the city limits. Thus L.A. dealers should have been excluded. Should the handful of dealers in the nation's 2nd largest city have been included? Perhaps so, but the paper doesn't make it clear if they were or weren't.

All in all, the study confirms that gun dealers are willing to sell guns. Some, though we cannot say with any confidence how many, will sell guns illegally. In the same fashion, we can also guess that tobacco dealers will sell cigarettes; and that some small percentage will sell to minors. In short, some part of any population, like the population of gun dealers or tobacco dealers, will break the law. Most, however, do not. The study's claim that a Federal gun registry would solve the problem is unwarranted. Tracking transactions between law-abiding parties will not do anything to affect the behavior of those who break the law.

Separated at birth??

Heh, heh, heh... Ralph Nader is thinking of running for President again.

Go, Ralph, go!

An incendiary temper is one thing, but this is ridiculous...

Have you ever know a person who goes out of their way to be offended? I'm sure that we all know someone like that; the person who thumbs through dirty magazines looking for pornographic pictures. The person who stands next to a smoker and coughs loudly. The person who reads the L.A. Times opinion page on the look out for naked liberalism. You know the type. They seek out that which gets their dander up. Well there's just such a person who found offense on a dirt road in the middle of the California desert. The source of their displeasure? A cross.

Out in the Mojave Desert, on what's now public land, is a cross. The cross was erected in the 1930's by a group of WWI veterans. They built it as a memorial to their fallen comrades. Back then, the rocky outcrop was in the middle of nowhere. Decades later, it's now part of the Mojave National Preserve. According to the ACLU, that makes it a Federal establishment of religion in violation of the 1st Amendment.

Why did this story catch my eye? Because I know the area where the cross is located. I had never seen it so I did a little research to find out where it is. It turns out that it's on a stretch of road that I've travelled before, though I never noticed it. There is, however, an individual who did, somehow, spot it from this obscure road. And this individual was "deeply offended" by the sight of it.

At this point, you might think that the "deeply offended" party is a local resident. That would explain how they noticed something that I so easily missed. That's not the case, however. The guy who filed suit to have the cross torn down lives about 3 hours away. He reportedly saw it while driving from Rialto, CA to Las Vegas, NV. But as I said, I know the area. He would have driven miles and miles out of his way on a dirt road to see the 6' tall cross in the Mojave.

For the moment, the cross is covered with a tarp. There was a Federal judge who ordered it torn down, but that order has been stayed pending appeal.

This morning, Dennis Prager had an interesting thing to say about Mr. Deeply Offended and his allies at the ACLU. He compared them to the Taliban. And he compared their wish to destroy this cross to the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan in Afhganistan. He said that both the Taliban and the ACLU were motivated by the same thing: Religious radicalism. And he's correct. Both are radical adherents to their respective religions; The Taliban to Islam and the ACLU to Secularism. Both seek to destroy anything that offends their religion. (And neither shrinks from vandalism, which is why I haven't said exactly where the cross is!)