From the last round of debate:

Via Documenting Failure.

Guns! Guns! Guns!: Assault rifles, high-capacity magazines flying off local shelves following election

In yet another article covering the recent rush on guns and accessories:

Two other local gun shop owners approached by the Odessa American reported similar rushes on guns, especially assault rifles and high-capacity magazines, which are capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

“High-powered assault rifles with high-capacity magazines” is how the story is told. Except, of course, that the weapons aren’t “high-powered,” they aren’t “assault rifles,” and the magazines aren’t “high-capacity.”

The high-cap magazine term is a place where the pro-gun side allowed the other side to frame the debate. 20 and 30-round magazines aren’t “high” capacity, they’re “standard” capacity. But no one, and I mean no one, sees it that way.

Magazines and ammo will be the next battleground.

A game warden was driving down the road when he came upon a young boy carrying a wild turkey under his arm.

Some are wondering if this is hedging bets against a new assault weapons ban in the event that Obama gets elected. It might be. It appears that it would have got around H.R. 1022 as long as you don’t add a shoulder thing that goes up.

Jeff Soyer:

Wyoming’s Democratic Governor Dave Freudenthal, “A” rated by the NRA, was in Pennsylvania claiming that Obama is “in the right place” on gun control…

I guess when Obama re-institutes the phony “Assault Weapons Ban” and you can no longer buy some of the most popular sporting rifles in the country, that, according to the Governor, is “the right place.”

Time to add another AR to the safe?

Part of letter written to the editors of the Chicago Tribune

I could write to members of Congress, who have the power to effect change, but by allowing the assault weapons ban to expire they have already shown how much they care. I could write to the courts, which also are powerful, but our highest court has already shown a willingness to eliminate passages from the 2nd Amendment so the justices can strike down gun-control laws aimed at reducing senseless killings. As a result of the action and inaction by those two branches of government, our cities are flooded with handguns, murders are on the increase, and the gangs’ weaponry is vastly superior to that of the police. I think I’ll save those stamps. [emphasis Murdoc's]

I don’t recall any passages being eliminated from the 2nd Amendment. I presume he thinks he means that the Supreme Court ignored the part about how the 2nd applied to the National Guard or something similar.

It’s also interesting that the sunset of the AWB helped flood the cities with handguns.

As for gang weaponry being superior to police weaponry, he apparently wasn’t paying attention during the ban. The golden example of heavily-armed criminals in the US is, of course, the North Hollywood Shootout. That occurred in 1997, during the Assault Weapon Ban, with weapons that had been illegal for decades because they had been modified to be fully automatic.

No other examples come close. And this example doesn’t prove the letter writer’s point.

Here is one more bit from the letter:

Where is the community rising as one to tell the gangs they are powerful against an unarmed few, but they are puny and powerless compared to 8 million strong rising against them.

Ah. The community should rise up. Sounds a bit too much like a call for “Kumbaya.”

Overshadowing all of this, of course, is the fact that all the guns he’s talking about and many more are all completely and totally illegal in Chicago already.

Obama explains his support of the assault weapons ban

Dion Attempts to Trick Voters with Ludicrous Assault Weapons Ban

Looking at the Liberals’ own press release, it’s pretty obvious that Dion wants to draw a fictional line between “respectable” firearms that government should tolerate (for now anyway), and “scary” firearms that “serve absolutely no purpose in our society.”…

If Dion gets elected and passes his proposed “Scary Weapons Act,” those few bad guys will gleefully hang on to their scary weapons while law-abiding homeowners are unjustly forced to forfeit their lawfully-acquired property, which may have proved very useful in defending themselves from scary criminals. The stubborn few who refuse to give up their lawfully-acquired property will become honorary scary criminals themselves.

All sounds awfully familiar, no?

UPDATE: Just noticed this in the comments of the National Post editorial linked in the story:

by Jay Brezny
Sep 10 2008
11:36 AM
This editorial completely misses the point. It doesn’t matter how you define “assault” weapons, the bottom line is no one needs semi-automatics for hunting purposes. Handguns for home defence can be defended. Rifles for hunting are obiously defendible. But semis are not — no one needs semi-automatic rifles for any legitimate purpose. Nice try, though.

That also sounds awfully familiar.

My guess is that the commenter thinks he’s talking about fully-auto weapons when he says “semi-automatics.”

Which is, of course, also awfully familiar.

Man found guilty in Super Bowl plot

A man accused of planning a massacre at this year’s Super Bowl was convicted Thursday of federal charges…

Authorities alleged the 36-year-old Havelock bought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition from the Scottsdale Gun Club on Jan. 30. The documents say Havelock wanted to kill people at the Feb. 3 Super Bowl in Glendale and was armed when he reached a parking lot near University of Phoenix Stadium where pregame activities were happening.

Remember back when the Einsteins on Democratic Underground were arguing that since the media reports called it an “AR-15″ that is must absolutely be a real (select-fire) AR-15?

Whoops. They were mistaken. Or morons. Or, most likely, mistaken morons.

Anyway, the guy’s dad is (somewhat understandably, I guess) playing the “my boy would never have done that” game:

Havelock’s father said his son was generally a good person who was being punished for momentarily snapping.

“I know what kind of kid he is. If he was a bad kid, I’d say ‘you deserved what you got.’ But he’s not,” Frank Havelock said. “He needs to talk to a counselor. He doesn’t need to be incarcerated.”

Look. Everybody has problems. We all “momentarily snap.” But very few of us “momentarily snap” and then buy a gun to massacre a bunch of people. Even though this guy had a last-second change of heart, he needs more than a good counselor.

He was going to kill people because his liquor license application had been rejected. In retrospect, that was apparently a good call.

Buyback guns being destroyed in 1997.
I don’t see many “assault weapons” in there.

The first sentence in a Time story noting that the 1996 Australian gun control laws have made no difference in gun-related crimes in the country:

On the afternoon of April 28, 1996, Martin Bryant snapped.

It’s a case of “he just snapped”:

A striking figure with his long blond hair and milky skin, he had just eaten lunch at a café within the historic site of Port Arthur, a former prison in Australia’s island state of Tasmania. Described later by his sentencing judge as a “pathetic social misfit,” the 28-year-old then reached into his sports bag and, in the manner that others might pull out a sweater, withdrew two military-style semi-automatic rifles, which he used over the next eight horrifying minutes to kill 35 people — men, women and children — in what remains Australia’s worst mass murder.

Just a normal guy who, for no reason whatsoever, just went nuts suddenly. Coincidentally, he just happened to be carrying two rifles in his bag.

Yeah. Right.

It’s the “he just snapped” theory that gun control types like to use when arguing against legal ownership of guns, military-style or otherwise. It helps plant the idea that anyone can suddenly turn into a murderous monster at any time, and therefore dangerous weapons need to be kept from everyone all the time. Because everyone can suddenly become a killer with no warning.

Where are all the stories about concealed carry permit holders “just snapping” and shooting people willy-nilly? If it can happen to anyone, surely it would happen to at least some of the people who regularly carry guns. But we haven’t seen that, have we?

The Australia killer’s gun was acquired illegally, by the way. Good thing they passed a law making it illegal.

I pointed out previously that when people claim an AWB has helped prevent “Columine-style massacres,” they’re either ignorant or liars. Columbine happened in the middle of America’s ten-year AWB, so the baseline massacre they’re using doesn’t even fit their own storyline.