From Will Dabbs (via national treasure Joe Huffman):
After the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, the Australian government outlawed most guns, confiscating some 650,000 firearms. Gun control enthusiasts often look lustfully at our friends Down Under as role models.
That’s the background. Here’s the QOTD:
Even in a slow year, we gun-crazy Yanks buy that many new firearms every two weeks.
And those are just the guns reported as sold. There may be still more…
From Bradley Iger at MotorTrend:
“Politicians and automakers have discovered that trying to change the buying habits of Americans through legislation and a reduction of choice is a great way to alienate a substantial portion of the motoring public.”
Too bad the penalty for such “alienation” doesn’t include copious quantities of tar and feathers, but I’ll take what I can get.
From The Divine Sarah:
“Communism is a hot house plant because it originates from intellectual abstraction; because it doesn’t work mathematically; because, contrary to image, its biggest fans are always intellectuals of a certain type; because it can’t survive without leeching off functional systems, and because it can’t survive the free dissemination of information.”
If by “intellectual” she means “of the mind”, then I agree. But a socio-economic theory that cannot stand up to the most basic of questions is the province of the unutterably foolish, not of actual rational intellectual thought.
From The Englishman:
“Why do the Yanks have a No Kings Day when they’ve not had a king for centuries? It’s like the French protesting against soap.”
From Frank J. Fleming (another longtime Intarwebz buddy*):
Sadly, he doesn’t do much at IMAO anymore, focusing on fun stuff there while saving his unfair, unbalanced and unmedicated commentary instead for Twatter.
*Back in the day, I even had the T-shirt:
From Breitbart:
“The press treats every shutdown like the asteroid about to kill the dinosaurs. It might not sell papers anymore, but it definitely triggers clicks and shares. Markets, by contrast, treat it like what it usually is — a Washington melodrama that doesn’t dent the real economy.”
And the public? With every shutdown, we learn just how inessential so much of our government is to our day-to-day lives, and how much we need to prune it, drastically.