Guns

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Gah.  All over the auction sites and every gun show is some fucking "Parade" rifle or bayonet that's so-called because it's chromed.

It's usually some third rate piece of shit, invariably pitted and worn, with chrome on top of the pitting and marks.  Frequently there are pieces missing.  There are often scour lines where the original crisp machining has been blurred by someone's buffing wheel.

The proper way to describe one of these would be something like this:  "Used, crappy, old bolt ation rifle.  Some gap-toothed, slack-jawed, white trash, inbred yokel did a piss poor job of chrome plating it because he'd sucked down too much shine boiled off in the radiator of Pappy's '32 Ford, so his already sub-par brain approached genuine retardation and he thought this was a clever thing to do.  It's probably safe to shoot but we don't guarantee it.  Fifty bucks and it's yours."

Instead, the seller usually tries to tack $50-$100 onto the top Blue Book value.  But ask him for any reference to a "Turkish/Austrian/Spanish/Italian Parade rifle" that was chromed historically, and he can't find one,  because they almost never really existed.

There are so many of these things, and they are all so badly done in the same fashion, I have to wonder if somewhere in Appalachia was some proto-Meth head who did nothing but take old Mausers and dip then in chrome as an excuse to snort the acid fumes out of the tank.  Or did he just have an equally brain-damaged brother who did cut-rate autobody work and thought it would be cool to toss them into the tank along with the bumpers?

Add these to the list of people to assassinate if time travel ever becomes possible.  Those poor old rifles have seen enough battles and rebuilds across Eurasia without being roofied with brake cleaner and raped with chromium sulfate.

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From comments in another thread, regarding, "But the commanders know better than you, and don't want troops armed when they have no need of a weapon":

Retired military. My service is a matter of public record on my site, Wikipedia, and the dozens of people on Baen's Bar who've met me personally.

A rational person would observe that the military members at WNY did, in fact, need weapons this morning, and did not have them.

Will there be potential incidents if troops are armed all the time? Likely. Those have to be balanced against ongoing, increasing threats.

It seems unlikely there'd be more violence at a stateside base, than in the war zone where everyone is under severe stress. The number of incidents there is few. So we can expect there to be fewer here.

There could be some incidents of weapon loss or theft, but the cost/benefit analysis makes those really unimportant overall. They'd be less significant than losses from police evidence lockers.

Keep in mind all those troops and personnel are unarmed from home to duty and back again. A simple surveillance will provide all kinds of terror targets, as was done in Europe during the Cold War.

Also, it is impossible to secure against such threats. You cannot disassemble and cavity search every vehicle and person entering. Any response must contain a reactive component. A reactive component requires armed force in the immediate area to the hostile.

If only the military could find a large number of people trained with weapons to be on hand to respond...

"But Mike, we've kept making ourselves more and more helpless, and we're still getting attacked!  What can we do?"

"Stop being pussies."

Sarcasm aside, if you can't trust an officer or NCO with a sidearm, as every Barney Fife cop in America is trusted, then either we need better recruiting standards, or you need therapy. I'm betting on the latter.

If there were statistically an armed NCO in every duty section, there'd be a lot less of this, because the shooters don't want to die until AFTER the make their statement.

Consider also that anyone working on base, or living off base, is guaranteed to be defenseless from home to gate and back.  Easy pickings for some future terrorist (and this is an easy prediction, because it happened several times in Europe during the Cold War).

An "Armed Force" actually needs to be, you know, an ARMED FORCE. 

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"Guns can kill" is a completely dishonest argument. Alcohol kills, and people under the influence of alcohol kill, more people than guns, even with the laws on the books. Alcohol serves no valid non-medical purpose in society. If it's about saving life, we should be pushing to ban booze...which was tried disastrously.

AIDS spread by gay men kills more people than guns. Would it be unreasonable to require blood tests before engaging in such behavior?  Nor does society as a whole particularly benefit from unsafe sex outside of wedlock.

"People die" is a completely invalid and dishonest justification for restricting rights, and SCOTUS says so. Such arguments were tried for booze, for porn, for AIDS, for any number of things.

So I won't even entertain such arguments.

However, I can argue that if we assume that all guns magically disappeared, and none of those dead were killed in some other fashion, it would still take 1000 years of so-called "gun deaths" to equal the body count the Nazis managed in under a decade.

So against the possibility that the US just might be ruled by some murderous nutjob some time in the next 750 years, I will not only keep all my guns, I will seek more, and I will seek bigger guns that shoot more bullets.

For the children.

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California has a ban on 30 round standard capacity magazines (which they dishonestly call "high capacity").

But, if you have a an AR15 in .50 Beowulf caliber, then that same magazine holds 10 rounds, and is a 10 round magazine.  Even if you could put 30 rounds into it in 5.56mm.  So, call it a ".50 Beowulf magazine," and it's legal.  Call it an "AR15 magazine" and it's not. Even if it's the same magazine.

If you are not a professional in this field, and pass a law, we who are professionals will find a way around it, and will.

Because fuck you, that's why.

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