Friday, March 04, 2005

The Two Front War

Things are heating up on the "sceond front" of the current antigun offense, the attack on little bitty bullets going really fast, the 5.7 X 28 and the guns that chamber the round. This from Newsday:
Armor-piercing Gun Targeted

WASHINGTON -- In late December, police in South Jersey moved in to arrest a local drug dealer and made an unsettling discovery in his car.

Besides more than a kilo of crack cocaine, they found a new type of handgun that was capable of piercing police body armor, according to Camden County Prosecutor Vincent Sarubbi.

The weapon, called the Five-seveN by its Belgian manufacturer, FN Herstal, began showing up on U.S. streets last fall, according to law enforcement officials.

The gun is now itself a target - of legislation introduced yesterday by four lawmakers from New York and New Jersey that would ban it from the United States. The sponsors are Rep. Eliot Engel (D-Bronx), Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sens. Frank Lautenberg and Jon Corzine, both New Jersey Democrats.
First. let me point out the intentional disinformationarmor-piercing gun, as if the gun has anything to do with it with the penetration capabilities of a bullet! Second quick point...all the parties involved on the antigun side acknowledge that the armor-piercing 5.7 X 28 ammo, SS190, is not available for sale in the United States. Newsday also points out that according to ATF, the SS192 hollowpoints current available for the FNH Five-seveN (and recently announced P90 semiauto carbine) are NOT armor-piercing.

So what?

This is just the next stage an intentional disinformation campaign engineered by the Brady Center, Violence Policy Center (VPC) and their running dog political lackies like Charles Schumer, Frank Lautenberg, Diane Fienstein, Barbara Boxer, etc. Brady is taking the lead on the 5.7 X 28; the VPC are the shock troops against the .50 caliber.

Notice the focus of This Year's War is on specific ammunition; the guns that fire the ammo are almost tangental in the battle. That's because the antigun forces are, as I've said before, on the ropes. Fund-raising has collapsed; with the exception of CNN, the mainstream media (MSM) has been burned so badly that they're leery of overblown antigun claims (after all, the AWB expired and no one seems to be handing out AK-47s on streetcorners, as predicted). So the antigun lobby has gone back to its biggest pre-AWB success...banning "cop-killer" bullets.

After all, Winchester Black Talon bullets had never killed a cop, were no more penetrative than a dozen other specialty rounds and were arguably no more "lethal" than many other hollowpoints or specialty ammunition. But they had a scary name, and the antigunners were able to mount their strategy and get it running before we as an industry were able to respond. And we lost.

And, in truth, the antigunners have gotten better at what they do in the insuing years. Let's take a look at their strategy:
1) They play to our biggest weakness, which is that, "The facts are on our side." The facts are on our side, but that does not matter! Instead, it allows us to expend our energies and resources on "proving" them wrong. They, on the other hand, understand perfectly they're in a Media War, not the Yale Club's debate society. One sound byte on morning television is worth $100 million in studies disproving said byte, because the larger whole of society doesn't care. Folks, the other side intentionally puts out disinformation to draw our fire, and just like Charlie Brown and Lucy's "football game," it works every time! How do I know this? I have my cherubs and seraphim; besides, it's what I would do in their place!

2) They pick their battles — and their enemies — carefully. Notice they have gone after the 5.7 X 28 (a roughly .22 caliber bullet in the 30 grain range that can be fired in a handgun with a velocity of more than 2000 fps) and not the .22 Hornet (a roughly .22 caliber bullet in the 40 grain range that can be fired from a handgun — the superb Taurus Raging Hornet — with a velocity of more than 2000 fps). Why? Because the antigun spinners understand perfectly well that ballistics is ballistics...properly loaded, a .22 Hornet (or another dozen cartridges I could name, including the .22 Jet, the .218 Bee, the .221 Fireball, the new WSSM .223, the venerable .30 Carbine or it's .22 caliber clone, the 5.7 Johnson, wildcats like the .19 Calhoun or the ancient 5.7 MMJ and even the rimfire .17 Remington Mach II) can do anything a 5.7 X 28 can do fired from a handgun. My long-range handgun, a custom (from J.D. Jones/SSK Industries) T/C Contender single shot in .223, makes the 5.7 X 28 look like a sad puppy in every category and is spot-on accurate out to 500 yards. The antigunners took on the 5.7 X 28 because they get a free ride off the military descriptions of a cartridge not available in the United States and because FNH, while a huge international arms conglomerate, is basically a small player in the U.S. Is there anybody out there willing to bet me that a .17 Mach II won't zip right through a Level IIA vest? But all the major arms companies have handgun and rifle offerings in .17 Mach II (the hottest new cartridge since the .40 S&W), and believe me, the outcry over such an attack would be staggering. Notice that the antigunners aren't willing to go up against even a single powerhouse like Taurus — popular, heavily funded, headed an aggressive chief executive with a "take no prisoners" attitude.

The same rationale defines the attacks on .50 calibers. The cartridge is a military exotic, most of the manufacturers are small and the antigunners are betting that the whole of the industry — as well as the larger body of gunowners — will be unwilling to go to the mattresses over such niche cartridges.

3) The other side plays for precedents; we play for absolutes. For example, what are the long-term potential consequences of losing .50s? We say, well, we lost ,50 caliber rifles, which only effects a tiny number of shooters. They say, we now have a precedent on the books giving us grounds to ban cartridges and guns built for long-range accuracy, penetration, lethality, etc. HMMMMM, doesn't that sound like any rifle cartridge? Give up the 5.7 X 28? Heck, that's only a handful of pistols, so it really has zero effect...right? Except that there will be a precedent for banning any cartridge that can penetrate a Level IIA vest, which, as I have written earlier, is CAN OF REALLY NASTY WORMS!

4) The other side knows we like to play defense, so they make sure we have that opportunity. Why? Because if you're ever watched Monday Night Football, you know that ultimately, defense can never win the game against a good opponent. We've played defense for decades and won most of the battle; in the closing years of the Clinton administration we came damn close to losing the war! Of course defense is important, but so is an aggressive offense. If we have such an offense, would someone please point it out to me?

5) We like "wait and see." See if it will blow over. See if we dodge a bullet this time. See if the other side runs out of steam, funding or initiative. See if the topic gains any traction. Sort of like the first President Bush stopping "Stormin' Norman" Schwarzkopf at the gates of Baghdad to see of Sadam would settle down. "Wait and see" only buys you another war on odwn the line. Or to use a more current example, if John Kerry's spinners had been faster to respond ont he Swift Boat Veterans' controversy, we might be haviing a very different conversation here today! Six or seven years ago, the industry's unstated policy on the VPC was that it was a fringe antigun group and would eventually go away like the festering pimple it was. Now it's one of the most aggressive — and most successful — of our enemies.


IF YOU MADE IT THIS FAR, CONGRAT!

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