Snowflakes in Hell

Over on a comment at Uncle’s site, Ron W Says:

It’s always assumed that so-called “assault weapons” are useful only for criminal assaults or military offensive tactics (from whence the name). Military assault weapons are full-auto and have been illegal to citizens since 1934 without an expensive and intrusive fed permit.

But the semi-auto legal weapons are great for personal self defense. They should be called self-defense rifles (or weapons) and those of us who believe in, defend and exercise the RKBA should focus on that aspect and point out repeatedly that armed self -defense is a basic human right.

This reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to blog about. I know the term “assault weapon” is a problem for us. I agree we ought to do our level best not to use it. But all the other terms I’ve heard people wanting to apply strike me as poorly thought out euphemisms.

So what’s the best thing to call an AR-15? Homeland defense rifle? Self-defense rifle? Sport utility rifle? All these terms make me gag, not because they aren’t accurate, AR-15s are useful for all those things, but because no one other than gun blog readers has any idea what the hell you’re talking about. Let’s call them “rifles” or if you want to be a little more specific “service rifles”, of which there is a specific class of competition. A service rifle is any rifle that’s made from a military pattern. For competition purposes, this would be the M1, M14, and M16. The notion that these rifles have no sporting purpose was always a myth perpetrated by the anti-gun groups and people like Charles Schumer and Mitt Romney. Any time you hear someone utter that load of crap, feel free to throw service rifle competition back in their faces. So can we go with service rifle? It’s not scary sounding, because it doesn’t have the term “assault” or “weapon” in it, and there are certainly legitimate sporting uses for them.

Time to make some more blogroll additions. I’m adding Tam’s site A View from the Porch, What Would John Wayne Do?, the Michael Bane Blog, Publicola, and finally Cam Edwards.

The VPC loses any semblence of credibility with this article:

Critics, however, say the NRA pressures lawmakers to ignore the problem.

“The people who are intimately familiar with these laws, the people at the NRA, they know exactly what’s going on,” said Kristen Rand, legislative director of the nonprofit Violence Policy Center. Florida’s gun lobby and the program’s administrators “know they’re permitting some bad people, but they don’t want the general public to know that.”

If criminals records are imcomplete such that some felons are getting permitted, isn’t that the government’s problem rather than lawful permit holders? Last I checked, the NRA, much to dismay of many of its members, was supporting the bill to improve the NICS system, which would fix a lot of these problems. Sorry Kristen Rand, but you’re a liar.

UPDATE: The media apparently doesn’t agree with due process, and many of the folks discussed here were never actually convicted, which means they aren’t felons at all. So it would seem the VPC aren’t the only ones who are liars.

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.1 as best I can tell. The editor in WP 2.1 seems to be rather disabled, but 2.0’s editor never really worked corretly for me. I was used to writing all my posts in HTML for LiveJournal. I think I’ll have to continue doing that. Either way, at least most things seem to be working. Let me know if anything is broken.

Monday could be a slow blogging day, since I spent most of the night working on a backup script for the blog that would also store a copy offsite remotely, and then upgrading to WP 2.1. If I have time to put up a few things tomrorow, I will, but no promises.

While I’m trying to work out some issues with being able to back up the blog (it runs on my current home server, and the database runs on my MythTV DVR box), I should point to this bit on StrategyPage detailing the Top Ten Myths of the Iraq War. If you don’t subscribe to StrategyPage, I highly recommend it. Glenn’s podcasts with Jim Dunnigan and Austin Bay are always really good as well. Check out Glenn’s podcast archives to find them.