Friday, January 4, 2008

Nail Gun Regulations?

Richard Williams was sentenced yesterday to life in prison without parole for murdering his wife with a nail gun. My heart goes out to their children & extended family members for their tragic loss. Richard's attorney tried to blame the murder on depression. That often works but did not this time. I was surprised he didn't blame it on the excessive availability of unregulated nail guns. It is after all the nature of anti gun folks to blame anything & everything for causing violence other than the actual criminal who performed the violence.

I suddenly wondered how often nail gun violence takes place, so I did a google search for "nail gun death" and there were about 197,000 results. With all of that nail gun violence out there, why hasn't the Brady campaign asked for legislation regulating nail guns? They are after all supposed to be interested in stopping all forms of violence are they not?

They could campaign for new legislation requiring the ATF (BATFE) to issue FNLs (Federal Nailgun Licenses) to all Nail gun dealers. The BATFE would be renamed to the BATFEN (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives, and Nail guns), and nail gun dealers would be required to run a background check on all purchasers of Nail guns. All Nail guns would be issued a unique serial number that investigators could use to locate the original nail gun purchaser. The ATF could then harass all Nail gun dealers for allowing customers to place a Y instead of a Yes on their forms or for abbreviating the county name. BATFE agents can't be expected to know what a Y means after all.

But no, the Brady folks won't be calling for any such thing. Why? Because they know such tactics would not work to reduce violence. In fact, reducing violence doesn't even appear to be what they are actually after. They simply hate guns, and want them to be outlawed altogether. Why else would they be in support of the DC handgun ban which not only did not reduce violence in DC, but actually increased it?

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