Ah. So that's why they're called fire ants.
Gonna have to do something about that.
Tuesday, May 07, 2013
Game Over for the Gun-Grabbers
[h/t Kent McManigal]
During WWII, the US manufactured, but didn't really do much to distribute or encourage the use of, a million FP-45 Liberator pistols.
It was a simple idea, and a good one -- mass-produce a disposable pistol, something cheap enough to air-drop by the thousands into areas occupied by the Germans and the Japanese. The Liberator was only intended to be fired once, or at most a few times. Its purpose was to let you kill an enemy soldier and take his "real" weapon.
The CIA briefly revisited the concept in 1964 with the Deer Gun, but that fizzled when Vietnam escalated into a "real war" instead of an insurgency versus occupying NVA troops.
Defense Distributed's new weapon is named for, and obviously serves the same function as, the original Liberator.
One news report says that the CAD files for printing it at home were downloaded more than 50,000 times on Monday alone, and that all the usual suspects are worried.
And worried they should be. Even more so than Defense Distributed's recent experiments with AR-15 receivers and magazines, this demonstrates that "gun control" is finally, forever, and irretrievably finished as a possibility. It never was going to work, of course, but this makes that fact so obvious that arguing otherwise finally sounds as silly as it really is, so silly that only a nutjob like Michael Bloomberg could possibly argue otherwise with a straight face.
Worry the victim disarmament wackos some more -- download the files yourself, even if you don't have anything to print them on yet!
What would really be cool is for people who do have 3D printers already to start up little clubs of, say, 10 friends. The one guy provides the printer. The other nine people go in on the cost of material to print 10 of these pistols, and on a 50-round box of .380 ammo. Everyone comes over for barbecue and beer or whatever while the printer runs; everyone goes home with a brand new Liberator and 5 rounds of ammo.
During WWII, the US manufactured, but didn't really do much to distribute or encourage the use of, a million FP-45 Liberator pistols.
It was a simple idea, and a good one -- mass-produce a disposable pistol, something cheap enough to air-drop by the thousands into areas occupied by the Germans and the Japanese. The Liberator was only intended to be fired once, or at most a few times. Its purpose was to let you kill an enemy soldier and take his "real" weapon.
The CIA briefly revisited the concept in 1964 with the Deer Gun, but that fizzled when Vietnam escalated into a "real war" instead of an insurgency versus occupying NVA troops.
Defense Distributed's new weapon is named for, and obviously serves the same function as, the original Liberator.
One news report says that the CAD files for printing it at home were downloaded more than 50,000 times on Monday alone, and that all the usual suspects are worried.
And worried they should be. Even more so than Defense Distributed's recent experiments with AR-15 receivers and magazines, this demonstrates that "gun control" is finally, forever, and irretrievably finished as a possibility. It never was going to work, of course, but this makes that fact so obvious that arguing otherwise finally sounds as silly as it really is, so silly that only a nutjob like Michael Bloomberg could possibly argue otherwise with a straight face.
Worry the victim disarmament wackos some more -- download the files yourself, even if you don't have anything to print them on yet!
What would really be cool is for people who do have 3D printers already to start up little clubs of, say, 10 friends. The one guy provides the printer. The other nine people go in on the cost of material to print 10 of these pistols, and on a 50-round box of .380 ammo. Everyone comes over for barbecue and beer or whatever while the printer runs; everyone goes home with a brand new Liberator and 5 rounds of ammo.
Thursday, May 02, 2013
There Oughtta Be A Law ...
 |
| Whitey Bulger |
There ought to be a law forbidding judges from "barring" any defenses those charged with crimes want to put to juries. Like this:
The new judge presiding over the James "Whitey" Bulger case has granted prosecutors' motion to bar the reputed mobster from arguing immunity at trial. ... Bulger's lawyers argued they should be able to present a trial defense claiming that a law enforcement official who has died gave Bulger immunity from prosecution.
In my semi-informed opinion (based mainly on the book Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob, by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill), Bulger can probably make a pretty good argument for the proposition, although he's attempting to attribute the immunity to a conveniently dead prosecutor (Jeremiah O'Sullivan) rather than to the FBI agents (John Connolly and John Morris) who were most active in protecting him as a "confidential informant" even as he built and presided over an organized crime empire in South Boston.
Maybe you can see the problem in this particular case:
The judge works for the same political establishment that is alleged to have been compromised to the extent that it would give Bulger immunity.
Wait, check that. It's not just "alleged" -- Connolly was charged, tried and convicted over it and Morris received ... ahem ... immunity in return for testifying against him.
That establishment wants to throw a few individuals under the bus and disown them and their actions instead of accepting the consequences of corruption that ran way up the political ladder.
Bulger's status a a confidential informant had to be approved at, and supervised from, the top echelons of the FBI and Justice Department, and that approval/supervision worked its way back down the ladder to people like US Attorney O'Sullivan, who implemented the immunity agreement by e.g. excluding Bulger from indictments even though the evidence was there to convict him.
Now, it's possible, maybe even likely, that jurors would disbelieve Bulger's claims, or convict him even though it believed the claims, were he allowed to present those claims. But that decision should be left up to them, not to the discretion of a judge running interference for the establishment.
I'd even advocated for extending the logic in this particular case to all cases. If some guy wants to argue that Satan possessed him to kill a prostitute, or aliens threatened him with a death ray if he didn't rob a bank, or whatever, let him do it. A jury is either competent to weight arguments, or it isn't. If it is, it should have unfiltered access to the arguments. If it isn't, why the hell do we have juries in the first place?
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