Dense Weekend Reading

I strongly recommend that you spend some time onver on The Volokh Conspiracy reading through the Heller decision posts. There's a lot of 'em, and many are pretty dense, but they are all fascinating reading.

Also read Megan McCardle's fascinating piece over at The Atlantic:

Now the gun controllers pour out of the woodwork to claim that you're more likely to kill yourself or a family member with a gun than a criminal.

Some of the people deploying this statistic really ought to know better. Composition fallacy, anyone?

These are not double blind experiments. Guns may be the weapon of choice for all sorts of crimes; that does not mean that they cause the crimes.

Men like to kill themselves with guns. (This is not culture-specific; women tend to choose poison everywhere, presumably because of some deep fear of disfigurement). Gun suicides tend to be successful. But this does not mean that if you took away the guns, people wouldn't commit suicide. There are many other near-surefire ways of killing yourself, like jumping off a high bridge, gassing yourself with carbon monoxide, driving your car at high speed into a piling, hanging yourself, etc. Think of it this way: most people who choose to wear high heels are women. That doesn't mean that if I threw out my Manolos, I would turn into a man.