Complete with the Friday totty we missed this week.  Apparently this week’s photo set is an illustration of how they wash taxicabs in Russia; if so, we approve.

I mentioned Part 1 of this piece a while back; today we have The Assault Weapons Ban: How Silly Was It? (Part Two) Excerpt:

The Washington Post, May 23, 2011:

On March 30, the 30th anniversary of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, Jim Brady, who sustained a debilitating head wound in the attack, and his wife, Sarah, came to Capitol Hill to push for a ban on the controversial “large magazines.” Brady, for whom the law requiring background checks on handgun purchasers is named, then met with White House press secretary Jay Carney. During the meeting, President Obama dropped in and, according to Sarah Brady, brought up the issue of gun control: “to fill us in that it was very much on his agenda,” she said.

“I just want you to know that we are working on it,” Brady recalled the president telling them. “We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”

In every practical respect, the firearms-related provisions of the “assault weapons ban” were an objective failure. But absurd restrictions on firearms weren’t the only part of that legislation that passed only to succumb to an outcome quite different than it’s anti-gun progenitors had in mind.

Along with creating the term “assault weapon,” this Clinton-era law also created the similarly arbitrary term “high-capacity magazine.”

A detachable magazine is a container that holds cartridges for a given firearm, and the number of cartridges typically varied with the size and the purpose of the weapon at hand and the size of the cartridge it fired. Small turn-of-the-century handguns typically carried magazines of just 6-7 cartridges. The standard magazine capacity of many pistols that became popular in the 1980s was 15 rounds or more. The standard capacity of military grade rifles and carbines was 20-30 rounds. As time progressed, firearm designers were finding ways to put a larger number of cartridges in the magazines of their weapons.

Read the whole thing; the entire ‘assault weapons’ ban was a classic example of political stupidity, an utterly empty gesture that was pure posturing over substance.  It accomplished nothing and died a well-deserved and unlamented death; it should remain in its unmarked, un-mourned political grave.

Ever since the first of these idiotic laws were proposed, I’ve been saying that these laws were comparable to trying to eliminate speeding by outlawing red cars.  It’s probably asking too much of our current stripe of pols to expect them to actually bother to learn anything about the objects, processes or industries they are trying, in some cases with wild abandon, to tax, regulate and even wipe off the map.  But great jumping cats!  Trying to outlaw a rifle because of its appearance and maintaining another rifle which is functionally goddamn identical because its stock is wood instead of plastic and it lacks a bayonet lugs – that’s breaking new ground in political idiocy.

And seriously – bayonet lugs?  Really?  When was the last time you heard of a street gang war resulting in a bayonet charge?  Drive-by bayonetings?  Are these politicians even awake when they think this horseshit up?

Enjoy your Sunday, True Believers.  I’ve got a lot to do before I head back to America’s own little Caribbean paradise on Tuesday, but watch this space for more as events warrant.