FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED NOV. 16, 1997
Last time, Lisa Myers of NBC was reporting on a White House plan to block import of various military-style semi-automatic weapons -- even though these weapons meet all the requirements of current U.S. law.
"So gun makers -- many of them overseas," Ms. Myers of NBC continued, "made cosmetic changes to get around the law. To make legal one style that was banned in 1994, gun maker simply got rid of the military-style features like the bayonet mount and the flash suppressor, which made it hard to see someone shooting in the dark."
Let us take a moment to savor this delicious idiocy. The firearms manufacturers carefully read the law, and altered their product to obey the law. Yet both the White House and its courtesans in the press now report that someone who went to the trouble of obeying the law was in fact just "making cosmetic changes to get around the law."
How is this different with being charged with driving 43 miles per hour in a 45 mph zone, "using a loophole to get around the law, which was obviously intended to get you drive much, much slower"?
If the result of passing a 45 mph speed limit was that all the drivers were now found to be travelling at 43 mph, would we report that the speed limit law is therefore "in tatters," as Ms. Myers summarized the current status of Sen. Dianne Feinstein's (C-California) 1994 "assault weapons ban"?
Not only that, this grinning network simpleton, who started out not knowing an assault weapon from a semi-automatic, and who joins Herrs Hitler and Goebbels in the presumption that the only measure of a weapon's legitimacy is its potential "sporting use" (hardly what the Founders had in mind when they specifically guaranteed our firearms rights so we could form "militias" to overthrow tyrants -- though the phrase does in fact derive directly from the Nazis' 1938 Gun Control Act, as Aaron Zelman and Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership have so fully documented), now adds the knee-slapper that flash suppressors are designed "to make it hard to see someone shooting in the dark."
Here's a clue, Lisa: The flash of still-burning powder escaping the end of a rifle barrel will tend to follow the same path as the bullet, the progress of which must be unobstructed toward the target for reasons even you should be able to figure out.
Therefore, encasing the muzzle of a weapon in a tapered or slightly wider diameter "flash hider" can do nothing to hide the weapon's discharge from the person being shot at. The only function of a "flash suppressor" is to partially hide the flash from the shooter, who would otherwise be rendered night-blind for several minutes.
(The suppressor thus plays the same role as the night pilot's deliberately closing one eye when lighting a cigarette in the cockpit, to avoid contracting both his pupils and leaving him night-blind for several critical minutes.)
Nor can we any longer dismiss this anti-gun ignorance and bias as accidental. Correspondents Denny Church and friend T.N. (of Cary, North Carolina) report that on Oct. 22, MSNBC (the network's cable partnership with gun grabber Bill Gates' Microsoft, featuring Ms. Myers) began an on-line poll asking if folks want more gun laws. By the time the responses had reached 2,300, the pattern was growing obvious, with 84 percent of respondents voting "No" to more gun laws (a similar margin to the 3-to-1 factor by which Washington state voters rejected a similar proposal on Nov. 4, despite vast financial support for the victim disarmament gang from Microsoft chairman Mr. Gates.)
"The next day I went to MSNBC to check out the results and there was nothing -- no information whatsoever," Mr. Church reports. "I tried searching their site six times but came up empty." Mr. Church further reports Lisa Myers has yet to respond to his friend T.N.'s inquiry about the "disappearing poll," which was reportedly located at http://www.msnbc.com/news/118462.asp.
"The American public trusts you to report the news honestly," the North Carolinian wrote to Ms. Myers. "This is news, isn't it?"
And so now to the spectacle of doddering congressmen who refuse to allow their younger colleagues to bring their laptop computers onto the floor (dismissing them as unseemly gimcracks), but who lack not a smidgen of the arrogance required to write laws to regulate the Internet -- we can add a bunch of whimpering bed-wetters who depend on better men to defend their homes and families (you can bet their bodyguards have real assault weapons), attempting to regulate weapons they wouldn't even be able to field strip and reassemble in broad daylight on a pleasant spring afternoon -- let alone in a dark sewer as the assaulting FBI men prepared to flood their escape tunnel with CS gas.
If you don't care about guns, just imagine a presidential spokesman saying that in order to ban bibles, or textbooks, or anything you love, but which Congress has not yet gotten around to outlawing, the White House had said last month it intends to "take the law and bend it as far as we can."
Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The column is syndicated in the United States and Canada via Mountain Media Syndications, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas Nev. 89127.
-- Samuel Adams