A few things about SayUncle’s quote of the day. I’ve long beleived that while Brady Campaign (and HCI before the name change) was more strategically savvy, in that they realized that politically, they had a long way to go before a total ban on handguns, and thus decided on an incrimental approach, VPC was much better at tatical political battles. The Brady Campaign might have realized that assault weapons were a great bit of incrementalism, but it was Sugarmann who understood what “assault weapons” really were, and came up with the strategy to decieve the public make the ban happen.
For the most part, I think the Brady Campaign is often generally clueless about guns and in many cases our guns laws. I’ve actally always been somewhat impressed by Sugarmann’s depth of understanding of the issue, that I haven’t seen an analouge for on the Brady’s side. Dr. Strangegun is correct; the VPC knows what’s it’s doing, and I’m sure believe that the ends justify the means.
Oh, yes, they are good. In response to the statement that the AK wasn’t designed to be “fired from the hip” (hence the sights), they took a section from the Soviet AK manual showing training on firing from the hip while moving. They just selectively skipped the other sections before it showing accuracy fire from standing, prone, and kneeling positions using the sights.
Of course, we are continually told that we are paranoid for thinking that gun control groups aim to ban guns—they just want “reasonable restrictions”—despite the fact that our friend Sugarmann from the VPC used to head the National Coalition to Ban Handguns and wrote a book called Every Handgun is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns.
Wait a second … “Every Handgun is Aimed at You”? And they say we’re the paranoid ones?
They quote from an army field manual about using small arms to shoot down aircraft, but the freaking manual shows pictures of heavy and light machine guns massing their fire (which are small arms, but not the way the VPC meant).
Here’s the relevant field manual they cited in their “Birdhunting” “study”.
I think, technically, a helicopter could be shot down with a black powder cannon. Let’s see them issue a report against that.