Well, if they actually existed (they don’t), the utility would be significantly lighter weight, which is exactly why plastic framed guns with a bunch of metal in them (for purely practical “we can’t make the whole thing out of plastic yet using today’s materials science” reasons) are so damned popular.

1) I miss being able to use HTML tags in my comments, and
2) You have the slowest blog in the history of blogs.

So that leaves us with gun control changes, rather than prohibition. Your example of plastic guns shows that you recognize that certain types of gun control (up to and including bans on certain TYPES of weapons) can make sense and be good policy. At that point, it becomes a question of where one draws the line. The likelihood that you need (or even have legitimate use for) a 20-round magazine is very close to as small as the likelihood that you need a plastic gun, for example. Now, I should note here that I don’t really support a magazine capacity limit, simply because crimes involving such tools are uncommon enough that banning them wouldn’t make much difference, even if everyone DID comply. I’m merely pointing out that it’s the sort of thing that people can argue about in good faith without being “gun grabbers” or prohibitionists or whatever.

From the “quibble” file, your argument against the national 55 MPH speed limit could just as easily be an argument against speed limits of any kind. I doubt that was really your intended point, but really, what’s the difference?

Another quibble: You write that, “Locking up or executing pepple predisposed to commit murder will surely result in fewer murders,” but I don’t think there’s evidence to support that this is “surely” the case. It will surely result in fewer (future) murders committed by those specific people, but across society as a whole? The evidence is far from clear. There’s even evidence that suggests that more executions and more imprisonments result in MORE violent crime, not less; that evidence is not conclusive, of course, but neither is the evidence for the converse. My point being that while what you say seems to make sense, we cannot say that it’s “surely” the case.

But the main thing I see here is that the roofie angle undermines your point, because the same arguments can easily be made for guns: yes, they have legitimate uses, but they also can easily be used for evil (and, indeed, are very frequently used for evil purposes), so we ought to have strict control of who can and can’t have them, coupled with punishments when we find the “wrong” people with them. Now you can argue about the frequency of good uses vs. evil uses, but nobody can dispute that evil uses are remarkably common; and you also can argue about who should and shouldn’t have them, but again, it’s a matter of line-drawing.

Finally, it makes sense to take a step back and ask what the purpose of gun control ultimately is. The whole point is (or ought to be) to reduce gun crime and gun violence. The means to that end is making it harder for the “wrong” people to get their hands on guns. Now we can argue about what constitutes “the wrong people” — you’d likely say criminals and the mentally ill, while I’d go with a broader definition — but I think you’ll agree that any attempt to do that is necessarily also going to make it somewhat harder for the “right” people to get them. So again, it’s a debate about where one draws the line.

And, given that it cannot be pointed no-direction, he has it pointed up rather than covering the crowd (or down, on the guess that those fancy lawmaker-storage-units often have marble floors for maximum ricochet).

So he’s tolerable on #2.

It’s #3 he really, really screws up on, and relatedly not taking #1 seriously enough.

(I’ll also give him a pass on #4, since he’s not shooting it – he fails #3 and #1, not #4.)

Rule 1 is, “All guns are always loaded”. The End.

It’s impossible to treat an unloaded gun as if it’s loaded because there is no such thing as an unloaded gun. If a gun doesn’t have any ammunition in it, it is “clear”, but it is still loaded.

Mindset is important to gun safety. Stating that it’s possible for a gun to be unloaded, and therefor safe, allows a dangerous complacency to creep into the subconscious. Stressing that the object a person is handling is always dangerous at all times and under all circumstances keeps the mind focused and aware.

For instance my father, who was a gunsmith and had repaired guns that fired with the safety on, taught me, “Guns don’t have safeties. The safety is between your ears”.
With that mindset ingrained in my subconscious, and even though I won’t own a semi auto pistol without a safety lever which I’m diligent in using (my carry gun is a Gov’t Model .45 which I carry in Condition 1, or cocked and locked), in my mind there are no safety devices in that pistol and I conduct myself accordingly at all times.
I’ve been handling guns with total awareness of the four rules for so long that it has become automatic to handle them safely. I really don’t know how to handle them any other way. To avoid complacency I review the rules and my habits frequently, as should all gun owners. The possibility of complacency creeping into the mind is something I stress in all my classes and I encourage anyone who reads this to give it some serious thought.