Dr. Doolittle

We discussed the issue of doctors being nosy about guns in two previous YGN posts.

Today I find this article about how that issue is impacted by 0bamacare:

If Your Doctor Asks You About Guns, Do You Have to Answer?

The takeaway: the language of the so-called Affordable Care Act protects the rights of doctors to poke their nose where it does not belong, but it also says that the patient is not required to answer:

“”Most people will think they have to answer. They don’t need to answer under the law,” he [Judge Napolitano] explained.”

Interesting.

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Smart Guns Redux

A company in Georgia is claiming to have technology to make Smart Guns viable.

Computerworld: Smart gun company aims to begin production soon

“According to Miller, had smart gun technology been available to Nancy Lanza, she could have programmed her guns so that only her fingerprint could have activated them; she could have enabled her son to shoot them at a firing range and disabled them upon returning home, or she could have enabled them for her son to use all the time, Miller said.

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Liberals meet Reality

While I am not surprised that the whiny Newtown parents are actually hypocrites that don’t really care about child safety, it was shocking for me to see that they are so open about it:

Newtown Voters Reject Budget Hiring Security Guards for Schools

“Newtown voters on Tuesday rejected town and school budgets that contained an extra $770,000 to cover the cost of hiring new police officers and security guards for Newtown’s public and private schools.

Legislative Council chairman Jeff Capeci said: “At the end of the day, Newtown voters thought it was too much of an increase.”

Yeah, it’s not like there’s childrens’ lives at stake or anything.

They had no problem loudly and obnoxiously agitating for unconstitutional state laws that will cost many millions of dollars to implement (and will end up bankrupt and ineffective like Canada’s now-scrapped registration scheme), but when it is coming our of their own wallets, child safety is apparently not important enough to pay for.

I shouldn’t be so hard on them I guess.  It takes a lot of money to pay for their mansions, pleasure boats, and zoning restrictions that keep minorities out of Newtown.  They might not have any cash leftover to protect their own kids.

I wonder if sad-sack crybaby Neil Heslin will drag his framed paintings to the town budget meetings to protest this dangerous breach of child safety?

Pinching Pennies

I like Savage as a company, and I like their guns too.  Inexpensive and accurate.  You don’t have to be a skinflint yankee to know that there’s a difference between “inexpensive” and “cheap”.  One quality is admirable, the other is to be shunned.

Savage used to make a handy .22LR/.410 over-under called the Model 24.

Handy and versatile, and easy to feed.  A lot of prepper/survivalist types sang their praises.

I was disappointed to learn that Savage discontinued the Model 24 a few years back.

The only other gun which combined these useful calibers was the also-discontinued Springfield Armory M6, which was more portable but less ergonomic.

Baikal also makes a .22/20ga or .223/12ga over under.  (I might have to consider one.)

But now I see that Savage has replaced the Model 24 with a new gun, the Model 42:

Model 42

Available in .22LR or .22WMR over a .410 shotgun barrel, the Model 42 boasts a more-modern design of synthetic stock than the Model 24, thus increasing its street cred among preppers.  I looked forward to seeing one, and perhaps adding it to my arsenal.

After examining a Model 42, I realized that Savage cheaped out on this new gun in one significant way, with 3 specific effects.

The ejector is manually-activated, unlike an original Model 24 which partially extracts the shells when you break the gun open.  Not a dealbreaker; and I can see some scenarios where it would be an advantage to leave the shells in the chamber until you decide you want them out.  But for fast firing this change is a step in the wrong direction

The ejector mechanism is made of plastic:

MIM would be an upgrade!

The extractors are made of straight pieces of razor-thin metal, and look extremely fragile:

While I like the looks of the Model 42, I am disappointed with this lowering of quality.  I think I will look for a used Model 24.  Or maybe look at a Baikal.

Dan the Hat

Author, liberal and gun owner Dan Baum wrote a book (“Gun Guys: A Road Trip”) about the conflict of his gun ownership and his otherwise liberal politics.  The Atlantic has published an interview with Baum, which I am going to dissect below.

Why am I going to dissect it?  Quite simply: his beliefs are for the most part mutually exclusive.  He has to engage in some elaborate rhetorical dancing, and employ pretzel logic, in order to truly accept both beliefs.  And at some point he will have to jump one way or the other from the fence he is sitting on.

Full disclosure: I verbally sparred with Baum a few times in the comments sections of gun blogs.  While our exchanges were not abusive, he is stubbornly liberal, while clinging to some distinctly non-liberal views and attitudes (and I am not referring exclusively to “good” non-liberal traits).  He took particular exception to the common (and accurate) practice of referring to liberal gun grabbers as “gun grabbers”, so much so that he quit participating on one blog over the issue.

My issue is not with Baum personally (although his ever-present hat is kind of pretentious, LOL), but rather with the erratic logic which he uses to make his arguments as well as the inconsistencies in his beliefs.

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