Finnish volunteer militias on the Russian frontier, boar and elk hunters and the Swiss army’s pensioner reserve won reprieve on Thursday from tighter European gun control following last year’s Islamist attacks on Paris.
At a meeting of EU interior ministers in Brussels, officials accepted an array of objections and agreed to review draft plans that could have barred minors from owning firearms, restricted online weapons sales and, notably, banned private use of most semi-automatic rifles, like the Kalashnikovs used by Islamic State militants in the French capital in November.
EU and French officials, who have pushed to block loopholes, stressed that after the return to the drafting table the new regulations were still on schedule to be agreed by governments in June before sending to EU lawmakers. Diplomats and officials said the review should secure exemptions for special interests.

Source: Militias, hunters reprieved from post-Paris EU gun control | Reuters

Pro Gun groups in Europe have been battling the immense monster that is the European Union and seem to have managed a temporary victory which I hope it becomes permanent.

They are not organized or have the level of grassroot support we have over here so their work is a thing of legend. Earlier this week, a member of the European Congress/Whatever tried to introduce basically a watered-down copy of Dianne Feinstein’s 2013 AWB after promising gun groups she was all for them and their rights. So basically they lie the same over there, just in a different language and with more body hair.

And today’s assignment is another “study” on gun control published in The Lancet.

Paris (AFP) – Gun deaths in the United States can be slashed by over 90 percent through universal application of laws requiring background checks of buyers and easy tracing of every bullet fired, researchers said Thursday.

Conducting a background check on every single gun buyer could more than halve the national gun death rate from 10.35 to 4.46 per 100,000 people, said a paper in The Lancet medical journal.

Background checks for all ammunition purchases would cut the rate to 1.99 per 100,000 people, and “firearm identification” to 1.18 per 100,000.

Firearm identification requirements oblige manufacturers to store images of the unique markings that every gun makes on the bullets it fires, for cartridges at crime scenes to be easily traced to the gun that fired them, and hence its owner.”Federal implementation of all three laws could reduce national overall gun deaths to 0.16 per 100,000,” said a press statement by The Lancet — a drop of over 90 percent cut.

Source: In US gun control, not all laws are equal: study – Yahoo News

Here is the rub: Two more publications also mention the same report but with different focus:

Closing the so-called “gun show loophole” and placing a ban on assault weapons have been major talking points people in favor of stronger gun control laws, but a study published Thursday in the British medical journal The Lancet suggests that these moves would actually result in more gun deaths, not less

Source: Study: Some Gun Control Laws Result in More Deaths – US News

And…

Implementing three state gun control laws at the federal level could reduce the rate of American gun deaths by more than 90%, a new study has found.But leading gun violence researchers have called that result “implausible”, and said the study’s design is so flawed that some of its findings are not believable.

Source: Gun control study’s dramatic results ‘implausible’, say leading researchers | US news | The Guardian

When you have somebody from the Bloomberg-paid John Hopkins’s School of Medical Gun Control and Other Ugly Stuff calls the study Full Of Shit (In scientific terms), you know there is something wrong with it.

My take: Somebody was hitting the hash pipe way too hard and ran with the Unicorns in Barcelona.

Caught this over at the MDA Facebook page:

I know that you love to dance in the blood of martyr every person you can who has died from a gunshot wound.  Hacks gotta hack.  I get that.  I don’t want to make light of a family’s suffering, but this post of your is kind of beyond the pale.

“Eric Tusing, 27, was reportedly playing Russian Roulette with a gun he thought was unloaded when it fired, killing him.”

Really!?!  You are going to martyr as a “tragedy” a young man that played Russian Roulette?  You do know how that “game” is played, right?  What the point of it is?

This was a case of terminal stupidity.  Not and accident, not unintentional, just dumb.  There is no gun control that would have stopped this from happening.  If an adult is willing to point a gun at their head and pull the trigger… well… if the natural law of self preservation didn’t prevent this, there is no law of man that would have either.  Especially since the news article you cited said:

“They say the kids have always grown-up around guns and learned to always assume a gun was loaded.

So they still can not believe this happened. Last month they were told 27-year-old Eric Tusing was in Burlington, joking with friends about playing Russian Roulette.

That’s when he accidentally shot himself not knowing the gun was loaded.”

So this guy KNEW safe gun handling and did this anyway.

Let me redirect you to another article from a few years back that has just a little bit more integrity than this one.

“Bungee Jump Kills Local Man, Police Say Cord Was Homemade.”

When a guy about the same age ties a bunch of elastic cargo straps together and jumps off a bridge, that’s not a accident or a tragedy either.  There is no consumer protection legislation that would have stopped that.  You just can’t protect some people from themselves.

I feel bad for this family.  I can’t imagine the heart ache of having to bury two sons.  One son getting shot by a dropped gun feels dubious to me (drop testing is an industry standard, but maybe it was an old or defective gun), but at face value will accept that as accidental.  The son who shot himself playing Russian Roulette?  Do not, do not, do not, use his lethal idiocy to try and restrict my civil liberties.

“It’s just a question of what’s the presumption. Can I carry a concealed weapon any place I don’t see a picture of a gun with a big red circle and a line through it, or should I know with the law is should I assume I can carry a weapon into someone business if I’m not told its welcome by the proprietor?” Sen. Don Harmon, (D) Oak Park, asked.

Source: New Bill Looks To Reverse Gun Sign Law | News, Weather, Sports, Breaking News | WRSP

After hearing this, I would get  up, ask for a point of order, call the Master-At-Arms and demand that this guy be given a breathalyzer test. It took me three times to half way understand what he was trying to say and I had the advantage of reading the whole article.

The NYPD is the second biggest purchaser of guns in the country after the federal government, Stringer said, but the department has refused to disclose exactly how much it spends on firearms for security reasons.
Cops choose their own guns from a department list of approved models.

Backers say that if the city tells gun manufacturers they’ll buy from whoever produces the technology, the industry will fall in line.

“We want to create that market. We demand a smart gun. And the company that produces the smart gun will get our business,” Stringer said. “These gun manufacturers, they don’t want to introduce smart guns because they’ve got to take on their friends at the NRA. We’re now going to say to the NRA, we’re bigger than you, we’re stronger than you. Because we’ve got the money.”

Source: Top pols urge mayor to invest in smart guns for NYPD – NY Daily News

NYPD is what? 35,000 cops? So let’s exercise power and buy all of them a new pistol…but that would only amount to one month or maybe a month and a half of gun sales…. in New York State.  According to ATF numbers, there were  34,195 background checks which included 11,963 for handguns and 15,324 for long guns…in February alone.

Notably absent from the Daily (We hate the NRA soooo much!) News are comments from the NYPD Union or rank and file members. I mean, if they are the ones that are going to get socked with this guns, they should have a say about it, right?

New York politicians should stop riding the Magical Government Unicorn for Gun Control and figure out a way to reduce violence.

And for you laughing pleasure, please check the photo from the article and accompanying caption.

You just can’t make this s*** up.

Hat Tip to The Gun Writer.

Now add to that a “stand your ground” law that says anyone who feels threatened, no matter where he is, can shoot to kill. No longer would he have a legal duty to try to avoid confrontation, much less try to determine if a threat was real. He could shoot first and ask questions later.

Source: Editorial: Legislature considers making Missouri’s terrible gun laws even worse. | The Platform | stltoday.com

And what God-Awful change to Missouri’s laws is being cooked for the St. Louis Compost-Dispatcher to raise a doomsday alarm?

Yes, the actual law will be expanded to include the ability to defend yourself anywhere as long as you are being a good citizen. Nowhere in the actual law or proposed changes one can find the annulment of other basic tenets to claim self-defense: Innocence, Imminence, Proportionality and Reasonableness. Yet the Editorial Board at the St. Louis Compost-Dispatcher make it sound as if you will be allowed to kill anybody that looks crossed at you because you got the last cold can of soda from the store. And then we have this last gem:

A study at Texas A&M University found that “stand your ground laws” do nothing to promote public safety and increase homicides by 8 percent. The study found that victims are disproportionately African-American.

First, given Missouri’s history with Jim Crow’s laws, specially when applied so Blacks could not be armed, this is just pure hypocrisy. Plus the data from Florida has shown that Blacks are also the biggest beneficiary of SYG. Second, the link they provide does not go to a study by Texas A&M but a paper published by Everytown for Gun Safety, Michael Bloomberg’s pet Gun Control group.

And still I have yet to find one single Legal genius that can explain to me why is it that my life must take a depreciation every time I cross some stupid imaginary legal line: On this side of my home threshold I am golden to defend myself, move over it and I am a hardened criminal that should rot in prison.

There has to be some sort of Gun Control’s Blue Book of Life Values somewhere I can borrow.

SADD (Same assholes, different day.) Because range safety is overrated..

Via ENDO