At least they were accurate and didn’t screw it up. LOL
My bandwith is safe. 🙂
UPDATE: Since Eliot Spitzer mentioned that the members of MAIG should also join the Coercive Gun Purchasing program, I checked the numbers to include all LEOs in the US. in 2008 there were 593,000 police officers (Local & State) and 120,000 Federal Law Enforcement Officers as per the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Than bring the LEO number to 713,000 and total number of possible guns to buy for both all US Military and all US LEO to 3,713,000 or about 2 months and a week worth of gun purchases if we go by last year’s NICS checks.
Now, this is just seen from the point of view of one gigantic purchase order. The reality is that it cannot happen that way for several reasons:
Firearms come with a very long expiration date set in several decades. And that is if they are used hard and heavy. Only active service military engaged in firefights would be included in this statistic. Most LEOs never use their firearm in the line of duty and if so, we are not talking about long protracted firefights with thousands of rounds spent. The only other group that uses guns in a regular basis are the Civilians and even so it is not unusual that guns last and are passed from generation to generation. Taxpayers would probably revolt at the idea that their local LEOs needed brand new sidearms every year and even the most pro-gun congress would laugh at the request for funding for Federal LEOs every year. So, a gigantic purchase order for 3,713,000 firearms would be a one time in a decade or two making of even lower impact. Also, the “old” firearms would probably end in the open market and sold gun dealers that will sell them to civilians as police trade-ins for a very cheap price denying the original idea of reducing the number of guns in the hands of citizens.
Firearms Manufacturers probably will not bend over the requirement espoused by Spitzer because it would mean angering a very loyal clientele. Tomkins PLC (a British company) bought Smith & Wesson in 1987. In 2000 they entered in a deal with the Clinton Administration and “agreed tonumerous safety and design standards, as well as limits on the sale and distribution of their products.” The consumer backlash & boycott was so effective that Tomkins PLC sold Smith and Wesson a year after signing the agreement with the Clinton Administration for bout 10 cents on the dollar. Rest assured that this lesson is firmly imprinted in the minds of Gun Companies CEOs and at the end of the day, just like any business, they are in place to make money and not to placate cheap political activism.
I and many others in the Gun Culture find both amazing and repulsive that people with no experience whatsoever in firearms fancy themselves as experts on the “gun problem.” It is pathetically obvious that Eliot Spitzer’s knowledge about the gun industry is almost nil and based on deluded political fantasies that Gun Control is something that the American Citizens want by a large majority. We have come a long way since the Clinton years but some appear to be still stuck there and, let’s hope they stay there. The amount of harm they can create will be almost zero.
Anybody who is/was short of money and owned an used car, eventually buys a Haynes Manual to do some sort of basic repair and maintenance. What I did not know is that Haynes offers manuals for other types of vehicles, animals and even musical instruments.
And for the Geek Kid from the 60s nothing rocks more than the coolest flying machines on TV back then.
The Thunderbirds? Oh it is on!…wait… SWMBO just heard me squee and has reminded me my Amazon Wish list is as long as the No Fly list and economic moderation is a must….damn it.