This essay is for the victims.

Victims?

I can’t speak for other gun shops, nor for the gun departments of any sporting goods stores, nor those of any of the discount houses - but we have never had a distributor - a wholesaler - offer to rebate a portion of our cost when we discount a sale to a senior citizen, a soldier, or a cop.

I’ll bet no one has ever received such an offer.

So how do other gun stores, et cetera, afford such discounts?

Isn’t it obvious? Can’t you feel that itching, burning sensation?

Other stores that sell guns can’t afford discounts - so they overcharge you. Young customers. Middle-aged customers. Customers not in uniform.

How do you like paying someone else’s bill? (Not talking about taxes, that’s a different essay.) No, I just want to know how you like paying higher prices in a store that offers discounts, so that the store can seem a friend to the elderly, or to “our men and women in uniform, blah, blah, blah…”

Do you really like paying a higher price so that some old codger can get a deal?

You don’t?

That’s what we thought.

Health care will be destroyed because all incentive for any self-respecting humanoid to provide health care will be destroyed. The market for health care will be destroyed because (a) its consumers will come to expect less and less while (b) its producers become fewer and fewer.

Yes, Gwendolyn, I did mention an exception.

My plan.

My plan is absolutely fucking brilliant, guaranteed to come in within budget and stay vital. Providers will multiply, consumers will become responsible.

How would it work?

Not a fucking clue - except for one characteristic: we’d all be in the same boat. The Constitution prohibits the establishment of a privileged class in the United States, let’s put everyone - federal employees and elected officials included - under the same law. Same plan. Same deliverables, same options, same restrictions, same charges - for everyone.

Now, Congress has traditionally objected that they can’t do that (like they can’t put themselves into Social Security) - because of problems with defining their own compensation.

Bullshit.

Anything they do to regulate their health care (or pensions, for that matter) is bootstrapping, regardless. So that dog don’t hunt: they have no damned business setting up programs that exclude those of us who suck not at the teat public. If we pay for it, God damn it, we should be eligible for it.

Or no one should.

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This essay edited Wednesday 27 January 2010 at the behest of an anonymous reader who objected to the writer’s choice of words. For further comments on the subject of such editing, see the Weblog Page entitled “Adults Only” (to the right).

Why? Hell, if the thing was so poorly-built that the measly little earthquakes known in that part of the world were able to make it fall - well, who cares? Just because “fall” rhymes with “wall”?

All right, yes, I am spoofing. With an ax.

The fucking wall did NOT just “fall”: hundreds of Germans, fed to the back teeth with the arrogant, tyrrannical limitations on their freedom ATTACKED the wall with picks, hammers, crow-bars - Hell, they probably rammed trucks and bulldozers into the damned thing… and then vandals, bless their anarchist little hearts, came along and finished the job. Mostly.

No. The Wall never fell. The Berliners heeded the call of a pathetic superannuated madman and they tore the motherfucker down. God bless them, God bless the madman - and God damn CNN for trivializing a major event in human history, damn them for watering it down, for making it sound like a minor natural catastrophe, instead of a grand destructive act in the drama of human freedom.

Piss on ‘em.

Well, either that company needs a new wholesaler - or they made about twenty-five bucks on the sale of that Sigma to Brother Steven. Thus, the implication that they are liars.

I’m pretty sure they are liars. No one can buy and sell for the same price - not unless they’re standing on a street-corner, with no real estate, no employees, no shipping costs, no utilities - well, you get the idea.

So, remember - if someone tells you they’re selling guns for cost - they’re liars, out to exploit you.

The free market in ammunition is being discontinued. I’m guessing an Ammunition Buyer ID Card will be created; the new law requires fingerprinting - which would be problematic at the dealer level, so I’m guessing at the ID card. Sales to unregistered persons will be illegal, and sales records for ammunition will become permanent, unpurgeable, requiring dealers to build or lease new storage facilities for those receipts.

Cheaper Than Dirt? Hah! Mail-order will no longer be legal in Kalifornia - although how this will be enforced except by frequent spot-checks of UPS terminals (and similar establishments) is anyone’s guess.

Private sales? Joey the Ammo Guy who comes in twice a month with a U-Haul van full of ammo? A black market, in other words? Obviously. Ditto for Joey getting into shootouts with Luigi from Reno, over sales territories, ditto for counterfeit ammo of questionable quality (and safety), ditto for SWAT teams rampaging through the homes of innocent victims of informer error - Hell, wasn’t the insane War on Drugs bad enough, that Kalifornia had to invent its own equally psychotic variant?

And few will move out of the state, for many good reasons: (a) can’t sell the house; (b) can’t afford to buy another house; (c) can’t find a job elsewhere that will let us move…. and on and on and on…

Kalifornia, you have a million street-lamps - what’s the problem, no one remembers how to tie a noose? 

Friends and Family Members, John Ross (in Unintended Consequences) was right. When he wrote his magnum opus, the giraffes were attacking freedoms almost as soon as the last old geezer who remembered “how it used to was” died. Now, applicants for naturalization have to stand up and declare with conviction “The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves”.

Apparently, the giraffes of the INS are still laboring under the delusion of the Tyrant, who told himself that the Confederate States of America was not an independent nation, and that they still groaned under the boot of Northern imperium. The truth is that, as soon as they passed their individual state Acts of Secession, none of the Confederate States regarded Abraham Lincoln as anything but an arrogant blowhard, and the United States as a hostile neighbor. Why would a Proclamation of the Northern Tyrant matter to citizens of the Confederate States?

Thus, the EP freed no one in the Confederacy and - look it up, read it - no one in the Union, either. Slavery in the United States was just fine with the Tyrant and, while he pretended to hate it in the Confederacy, he had no authority there.

Could Abraham Lincoln have issued a Democracy Proclamation, requiring an end to the monarchy in Great Britain? Of course not: Great Britain was - and is - a foreign country. As was the Confederacy.

Regardless of the continued crack-dreams of the INS. Or any other giraffes.

It was brute force, the blood-red iron of the United States Army, that ended slavery in the Confederacy - along with any remaining vestige of state sovereignty - along with any real concern for the consent of the governed.

Your ancestors’ tax dollars at work.

He asked “Why should private citizens - not police, not military - be allowed to own handguns capable of firing more than three shots?”

I dearly hope this posting generates some comments; I’ll start it off with the two answers I gave The Visitor:

First, and most important - great and despicable evil is committed when we leave all the good guns in the hands of The Bad Guys.

Second - suppose there are two or more BG attacking you? How good a shot are you? How many misses can you afford? When the adrenaline is pumping and tunnel vision is setting in and your fine motor control leaves for someplace else - can you do The Job in three shots?

What in Hell is he talkin’ about?

Let me explain.

You go into Wal*Mart, pick out an 870, fill out the paperwork, then - assuming your DL and your CPL were accepted - you start to leave. Then you stop and ask the “associate” how much they charge for use of FFL, on an Internet transfer.

“Huh?” is the intellectual response.

Wal*Mart, you see, generalizes, specializing only in monopolizing retail within the ZIPcode.

We specialize in specialties.

We don’t carry a variety of Remington 870s; have you any idea how many variations Remington offers? No, we order the one you want. (Be persistent: sometimes the boss is in a lazy mood. Talk to the guy by the front door: I’m lots more adventurous. Greedy, too.

We don’t just sell guns, either: we repair guns, we install accessories, and sometimes we even buy guns.

Our gunsmith specializes in a variety of types of modifications, and generalizes in repairs to a variety of makes and models.

Do we carry a complete variety of all makes and calibers and sizes of ammunition? Hell, no! We have neither the room nor the budget.

But - if you want a reliable source of CorBon 10mm ammunition, let us know how much and how often, and we’ll do our damnedest to take care of you.

(At a Wal*Mart price? Hell, no!

No, we can’t do everything; we can’t carry everything.

We specialize.

Keep an eye on the website; you might be surprised at what you find.

Nothing, though. Not a comment - not even a link.

What is this - “common decency”? Was Dead Teddy acting with anything remotely resembling common decency when he drove that young woman to an early death?

There must be something of a sort of reference on MADD’s website - or they really are worthless.

More, later; stay tuned.

 He died the next day.

Brother Adam’s 24/7 was returned a week later: no harm, no foul - and The Armed Citizen prevails again.

Seen anything about it on the news? What does that tell you? Maybe a citizenry that can take care of itself is nothing newsworthy…

Well, fuck ‘em. We know - don’t we?