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Over at New Jersey Voices, Bryan Miller writes on a tragic accident where an 8-year-old boy, Christopher Bizilj, was killed while firing a full-auto Uzi machine pistol. Of course, being a propaganda officer for the People’s Republic of New Jersey, he spreads the belief that new laws are required, that those laws should target semi-auto as well as full-auto arms, and that guns, even in the hands of 8 year old boys, “are a stand-in for erections”.

I responded thusly:

This accident is receiving widespread coverage on gun blogs; it is not remotely being covered up. Everyone agrees this was tragic, and that giving full-auto machine pistols to children is horribly irresponsible — they can be tricky for even an experienced adult to manage, because the repeated recoil causes the muzzle to kick back and up. Most children simply lack the strength to maintain control.

However, there is no similar problem with either semi-autos, which fire one round for each trigger pull, or with tripod-mounted heavy machine guns, because they cannot repeatedly and cumulatively kick back.

Most folk I’ve read who advocate training children with guns at an early age, strongly recommend giving them a bolt-action .22 rifle: It’s low powered, it’s long enough to be hard to point at yourself, and you must work the action manually between each shot, making rapid fire impossible. Plus, long guns are much easier than handguns to aim accurately.

===

Mr. Miller, your conflation of full-auto and semi-auto is strong evidence that you are either an ignoramus or an ideologue, or both. You have demonstrated clearly that your opinions on this matter simply cannot be trusted.

I’m not saying that you should be forbidden to express your opinions, even in a public forum like this, even though most of your very dangerous opinions are based on gross errors and outright lies.

However, when real grown-ups are talking about serious issues, such as the right of The People to keep and bear arms, you would do well to sit down, hush up, and listen. You just might learn something.

===

Even though I militantly disagree with your opinions, sir, and even as I trust you with a keyboard and a web server, I trust you — yes you, Mr. Miller, and all my fellow citizens, sight unseen — with guns, even machine guns, far, far more than I trust my government with so much as a paperclip, or worse, a filing cabinet, if you and I are disarmed.

If you go crazy, you’ll be able to kill maybe a dozen people before the rest of us take you down like a rabid dog.

But when governments go crazy, as they tend to do immediately after disarming their citizens, they kill hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, while wrecking whole cultures and doing their best to erase history.

No, sir, it certainly is, as you say, most certainly not about hunting. It’s about my selfish desire for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — even for the likes of you.

My comment is awaiting moderation.

[update]
When I posted this, there was one comment showing.

Apparently, that was right before the editor released the moderation queue. Now there are 177 comments. Mine is still awaiting approval. It’s NJ, so of course most of the comments are pro-disarmament, but there is a strong showing of pro-liberty voices, most of them pointing out the blatant ignorance and lies on display.

[update 2]
Ack! No, the 177 comments are on the original article at the Boston Globe, not on Miller’s ignorant commentary. Still, there are now several comments on Miller, all from freedom-lovers.

[update 3]
Other comments have gone up since I posted mine, but mine has not appeared. Most of the comments posted so far are very critical.

Tags: Bryan Miller, Christopher Bizilj, gun control, uzi

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Bill of Rights, Dammit!, Guns and Ammo, Press. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.