One of the most common excuses used to explain why the 10,000+ gun-control laws in the US never deliver what they promise is “leaky borders.” Because there exists some other city/state/country “nearby” that has less restrictive laws, criminals will just travel there to get guns. They never explain why criminals aren’t using guns more often in that other, less-evolved place, but that’s a side issue.

Enter England, a nearly perfect test case for gun control. Physically isolated from all those bad gun-loving countries, and they never had the quantity of guns the US had, or the violent crime. Over the past eighty years they’ve gradually eliminated virtually all gun ownership from society. Paradise Island, yes?

No. Crime in general, and with-gun crime in particular, has been increasing steadily since 1920, and the near-total ban on handguns has only accelerated the problem. Meanwhile, the violent crime rate in the US has been dropping steadily for years, with the murder rate down 45% since 1980.

Is there still more murder in the US? Yes, if you’re a young black man living in the worst parts of our major cities. You know, those places where it’s illegal to own a gun? Where the concept of calling 911 for help is openly mocked?

I never bought Lott’s argument that increasing gun ownership reduces crime, but it’s quite clear that reducing or eliminating it doesn’t help, either. Could it be because law-abiding citizens with guns aren’t career criminals? Sounds obvious, I know, but somehow legislators keep overlooking it.

The Senate’s vote to turn the aid to Iraq into loans is being spun as part of the Bush Junta’s evil plot, but who actually voted for it? Mostly Democrats.

I guess it’s okay when they’re in it for the oil money.

If this is a quagmire, can someone please mire some quags in California? Soon? Pretty please?

It was a pleasant three-quarter-mile walk to my neighborhood polling station, and I’m delighted to report that my chad-cutter performed perfectly. If all of the other dangerously obsolete voting machines perform as well as mine did, and people actually follow the instructions on the ballot, there will be no excuse for a Florida-style clusterfuck.

Win or lose, though, I’ll bet $20 that the mostly-anonymous accusations made against Schwarzenegger will be quickly forgotten, even by the obviously-biased LA Times. Because nobody’s actually interested in whether he did those things or not; they were just convenient dirt.

I didn’t need much coaxing on the first part; it’s been obvious for a long time that Gray Davis is no friend to California citizens, and his recent determination to screw things up so badly that nobody can fix them was just icing on the cake.

Who to vote for was trickier. McClintock has a few gotchas, but he’s otherwise palatable. Unfortunately, he simply can’t win. Bustamonte’s pandering to the Hispanic community is most clearly demonstrated by his refusal to make even a token effort to distance himself from his racist ties. Most of the rest are in it just for the cheap publicity, and have nothing to offer a local school board, much less an entire state.

For a while, I toyed with the idea of voting for Georgy. She’s a little too fond of Clinton for my tastes, and she’d be eaten alive in office, but a strong showing would have made a few pros sweat about their habit of ignoring the tech community. Not gonna happen now, though.

In the end, what pushed me toward Arnold was the coordinated media smear campaign. He’s been in the public eye forever, and the worst dirt they can dig up is a handful of bald-faced lies (quickly disproven) and unsupported allegations of “groping”? That makes him one of the cleanest politicians in the country.

Oh, and for the record, it’ll be a ‘Yes’ on 53 and 54, too. Infrastructure is one of the few legitimate uses of tax money, and diverting it from other, “social” programs is a good thing. And since the racial data that would be banned by 54 is often used to fund some of those other programs…

Yesterday, a man sliced open my eyeballs, fried them with a laser, and took $3,700 out of my wallet.

And I am immensely grateful.

Courtesy of CustomVue LASIK and the Friedman Eye Center, my vision is the best it’s ever been, and it’s supposed to get even better over the next few weeks. I’m temporarily a bit farsighted, and I’ve got a touch of spherical aberration that makes it look like I’m viewing the world through an old portrait lens, but it’s still pretty darn amazing.

Twenty-two years of glasses, fixed with five minutes of surgery.

I think this guy has demonstrated his lack of fitness for membership in the gene pool; he just failed the IQ test. His girlfriend should be put on probation for five years as well.

1. become a youth pastor.
2. acquire a sixteen-year-old girlfriend (you're thirty).
3. videotape yourself having sex with her.
4. put sex tapes in trunk of car.
5. put girlfriend in trunk of car.
6. drive across international border, failing to declare smuggled underage girlfriend.

Under other circumstances, I might be willing to believe that a sixteen-year-old is mature enough to be dating a much older man. Our laws on the subject are pretty arbitrary, after all, using date of birth as a convenient proxy for physical and emotional maturity. Many sixteen-year-olds are adults, and should be treated as such. Many people over eighteen, on the other hand, shouldn’t be trusted with wet matches.

These two? Not a chance. “Hey, sweetheart, now that we’ve been dating for a while, let’s take a road trip from Illinois to Alaska, and I’ll hide you in the trunk of the car to keep the Canadian border guards from getting suspicious.” “Gosh, Michael, what a swell idea. You’re sure the rest of the youth group won’t miss us?”

Still, nothing can top the bass player from Phish coaxing the 9-year-old daughter of a Hell’s Angel out to a deserted boathouse at 1am for “art photos”. Now that’s stupid.

The Democrats of the “selected, not elected” crowd were extremely unhappy about the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore. Democrat Gray Davis has just been saved (temporarily) from those nasty election-stealing Republicans (not to mention the rest of us) by the 9th Circuit Court, who cited Bush v. Gore as precedent.

Apparently, the best way to protect voters from the heartbreak of hanging chads is to stop them from voting at all…

“Only Democrats and Dictators are afraid of elections.” — James D. Hudnall