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An old gun control meme that we have been hearing for years has been making a serious comeback as of late: The founders only meant the Second Amendment’s reference to ‘arms’ to apply to muskets.This certainly means that people cannot own cannons or nuclear weapons.

There are a lot of reasons why this is a false statement, but I will give you my favorite:
Letters of marque. The issuing of letters of marque are mentioned in the Constitution as one of the enumerated powers of Congress. You see, piracy was a crime punishable by death, and any nation’s warship that caught a pirate would hang them on sight. However, it was considered a matter of national policy if a nation were to attack the trading vessels of a nation with which they were engaged in hostilities. So, national governments would issue a letter to the owner or captain of a naval vessel, authorizing him to raid and capture the vessels flying another country’s flag. These letters were called “letters of marque.”

A letter of marque would be issued, first describing the ship by the number and type of guns on board, and then naming the captain being granted the letter, and then the specific actions that he could perform under this letter. Guns being the naval definition: seagoing cannons. Since it is necessary for a captain to already own his warship before being granted the letter, this is pretty strong evidence that the founders had no trouble with private citizens owning the equivalent to a modern day destroyer.

This is actually how the colonials were able to cut off the supplies coming to the British army. At one point, the privateers were hiring so many sailors to man ships for these letters of marque, that Washington was having trouble finding soldiers for the land army. There are an excellent couple of books on this fascinating bit of Revolutionary War history, and these are the two that I recommend:

George Washington’s Secret Navy
Patriot Pirates

Certainly if the founders were to think it wise and prudent for citizens to own warships, they would have no problem with modern day implements like fighter jets, artillery, or any number of other weapons. I would agree that nuclear weapons have little use in private hands, but my position on this is simple: Amend the constitution to say something similar to:
AMENDMENT: Be it resolved that the states and the people declare that the right to ‘arms’ protected by the Second Amendment do not include the right to keep and bear nuclear or biological weapons. The right and power to keep and bear nuclear and biological weapons is reserved to the states and to the union. Congress and the States have the power to restrict ownership of such weapons by individual citizens, and may pass laws in the furtherance of same.

I’m sure you would have little problem passing and ratifying such an amendment.

I listen to the conservative talk shows, and they are sitting here complaining about Obamacare. Move on. That fight is over, and it has been lost. The Democrats have all ready moved on, and the longer you sit there, bitching about the last battle, the more battles they are winning by default.

According to Google, the page where relief funds are requested by the United Way was created three days before the shooting took place. This is a bit hard to believe. Can anyone with more Internet knowledge than I explain how this is possible?

EDITED TO ADD: Because the web page goes on to talk about all of the 911 truther nonsense, it makes it even less credible in my mind.

The gun control proposals, including the proposed executive orders that will be issued by the White House, in my opinion, are not the true endgame. The real goal here is to provoke a few hot headed gun owners into enacting a “Second Amendment remedy.” Once this happens, the President will have the excuse he needs to declare martial law. This is the true reason behind this unconstitutional power grab.

To you Republicans: This is where I get to say “I told you so.”

Cheaper than dirt received a lot of criticism because they stopped selling firearms in the wake of the Newtown shooting. They also raised PMAG prices from $12 to $60 in an attempt to profiteer on the instant demand.

Many shooters, myself included, vowed to never buy there again. Now they are back pedaling, and claiming that the stoppage in firearms sales was caused by large demand. Funny, that isn’t what they said initially. Many comments on the post that are critical of CTD were deleted, and now comments are closed.

Frankly, I hope they go under.

Suppose that I came up with a plan to eliminate poverty once and for all: Let’s give every person in the country $100,000. That would enable everyone to buy whatever they want, right? Except who would go to work the next day at the car lot, the sandwich shop, the grocery store, or anywhere else, knowing that they would only get $10 or less, when they had a shopping spree to take care of?

So after a day or two, the vast majority of people in the country would be out of food, and out of gas. Since no one is at work, there are no goods to be had anywhere at any price. People will be screaming for stuff. It begins with craigslist, a man selling sandwiches for the low price of $500. They sell like crazy to the starving.

He decides to open himself up a sandwich shop. The only problem is that no one is going to work for $10 an hour, so he has to pay his people $1,000 an hour. Sandwiches now cost $750 each.

That is how inflation works, although at a slower pace. In 1962, what $100,000 could buy you today could be had for just over $13,000. In 1912, that same hundred grand worth of products would have cost a mere $4,350. As the government continues to put more money into circulation, it takes more and more money to entice people to continue working. We call that inflation. As the government continues to print and borrow money in order to give it to others, it causes more and more inflation.

This is why this so-called economist is an idiot. His plan is for Obama to mint a one trillion dollar coin, and use it to buy debt from the fed. In essence, print the money out of thin air. He claims that this will do no economic harm. Well, of that is true, lets go ahead and mint up 30 of those coins, pay off the entire debt, and then cut every American a check for $50,000. Dumbass. Paul Krugman needs to contact the college he graduated from and demand his money back.

This is a follow up to the post last month on the effect of urbanization on crime rates and why it is not an even comparison between the US and Canada.All of the data following comes from the FBI Uniform Crime in the United States report for 2011.

There were a total of 14,022 deaths declared to be “murder or nonnegligent manslaughter.” To make things simple for me to type, and to make this post more readable, I will refer to this category of death as “homicides” for the rest of this post.

In the United States, there are just shy of 88 million people who live in cities with a population of 100,000 or more people. (Population groups I and II) This represents 28.15% of the total population of the country.

If we combine groups I and II, we see that there were 7,424 homicides in this population group. This resulted in a homicide rate of 8.46 per 100,000. For the remaining 224 million people in the country, the homicide rate is 2.94 per 100,000. In other words, 28 percent of the country is responsible for 53 percent of the homicides.

I downloaded the data to a spreadsheet, and did a little more arithmetic.

Cities that have a population of 1 million or more, with a total population of 25.2 million, were the site of 2,223 homicides. That means that the 8 percent of Americans who live in cities of over one million are responsible for 15.8 percent of the murders.

So let’s reduce that to the Canada versus US discussion. For the purposes of this, we will exclude the Americans who live in cities of over 500,000. There are approximately 269 million people in the US that are not living in cities of over 500,000 people. In those areas, there were 10,043 homicides, leaving a rate of 3.73 per 100,000.

Canada reports a homicide rate of 1.6 per 100,000. However, Canada only includes first and second degree murder, manslaughter, and infanticide in their statistics as “homicides,” furthermore, Canada requires that a person must be CHARGED with the crime in order for the death to be reported as a homicide. The United States, on the other hand, includes all intentional killings of one human by another (except deaths caused by negligence, suicide, or accident; and justifiable homicides), and no arrest must be made. This means that unsolved murders do not count towards Canada’s statistics. For this reason, a direct comparison between the statistics of the two nations is not valid.

Even so, the disparity between the murder rates of the two nations is much narrower than the anti gunners would have us believe.