I’ve always believed that one of the key problems in our system of government is that we all confuse passing laws with making changes.
As anyone who’s ever managed people knows, there’s a world of difference between sending memos (or policy and procedures documents) and changing employee behavior.
It looks like the Beltway shooter’s gun was never really sold (requires registration)…

TACOMA, Wash. – Three days into the search of a Tacoma gun store, federal agents on Saturday were still trying to figure out how a rifle used in the Washington, D.C.-area sniper shootings got into the hands of suspect John Allen Muhammad.
The .223-caliber Bushmaster arrived at Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply in June, but no record has been found indicating it was sold, said Richard Van Loan, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent involved in the search. Gun dealers are required to keep such records.

No kidding.
Here we have what appears to be a major breakdown in the existing systems designed to keep guns out of the hands of proven violent nutjobs.
I kinda hate to echo the NRA (except when I think they’re correct), but maybe we should spend some effort on figuring out how to enforce the laws we have before we burn a lot of midnight oil figuring out new ones?
Just a thought.
(Link thanks to QuasiPundit)

res ipsa loquitur, and all that.
(from United media)

[Update: All fixed. I didn’t have the rights to do everything I tried to do…another annoying user-caused problem.]
Well, my comments are FUBAR’ed at the moment…let me explain: Blogger got hacked, and they may have gotten the ftp logins and passwords (including mine) – if you use Blogger and are publishing elsewhere, make sure to change yours!
So I did…and in so doing somehow disabled comments. I have a fix request in, and it should be fixed Real Soon. I’ll let everyone know…
Apologies.

I tend to blog along two tracks: immediate, real time responses to something I hear about or read, and things that I intend to write about (I actually carry the list onto my ‘to-do’ list in Outlook). And I’ve been pretty busy over the last day or so, getting some proposals out for new projects (the consultant’s never-ending, shark-like search for new work), working to finish up documenting the project I’ve been working on, helping the Middle Guy with his two deadline crises caused by a) a team member on one of his projects turning in an obviously-plagiarized-from-the-web analysis of ‘Hamlet’ (he asked me what to do, I told him he couldn’t turn it in because as the guy in charge, he was responsible if one of his team did something wrong and he knew about it); and b) the last-minute rush – caused by the delay in the Hamlet project – to get his presentation boards done in time for his forensics tournament today.
I am always ready to help my kids do their work, but I always refuse to do the work for them, unless what they ask me to do is basically clerical…I’ll proofread or do layout, or help with Word, but I won’t edit or write (I will comment and criticize, but I won’t do line-by-line editing)…so I was given six small JPEG images and had the job of Photoshopping them into something that could be printed at 11 x 17 down at the neighborhood Kinko’s and not be seen as abstract expressionist art.
I have three good graphic artists who sometimes do work for me; one does major work now for an entertainment company, one is a product designer for a musical instrument company, and one a successful freelance web designer and teacher of web designers.
I can’t tell you how amused they were to be getting IM’ed by me late into the night with dumb-ass Photoshop questions. I’ll be hearing about this for years.
It all got done, and I dropped him at the bus at 0700, wearing a suit, with a pillow and a lunch and a stack of foamcore boards…isn’t parenthood fun??
So two blog posts I’ve meant to do have gotten stacked up, and while I’ve wrestled with both in the back of my head, neither one has been pinned to the mat yet.
William Burton is on track to become the first North Korean Warblogger, and I owe him a more detailed explanation of why I think it’s not the same level of crisis that Iraq and the Islamists are.
My sketchy points:
First, North Korea is a client state of China, and always has been. This a) limits our freedom of action vis a vis NoKo (if we were to rename it like a trendy Manhattan neighborhood), because at some point the Chinese begin to get upset, and we have to deal with them…which we’d rather not do for a few hundred million obvious reasons (plus where would be get our cheap TV sets?); and b) gives us a better path to limit the NoKo actions, by getting the Chinese to do it for us. And I’ll bet the phone lines between us are just burning up these days.
Next, because while the NoKo government is run by a loon, he’s a relatively ineffectual loon, and their depredations have been limited pretty much to machine-gunning South Korean patrol boats, attacking U.S. soldiers who are pruning trees, and a bunch of other ineffective, meaningless ways they can rattle their sabers and demonstrate their well-known Korean equanimity (just a joke there – I studied martial arts with a number of Koreans, and did business with some Koreans, and I can tell you that equanimity is a word that just flat got left out of their dictionary).
There’s more geopolitical stuff as well, which goes to the fact that NoKo is, like East Germany a refuge for simpleminded tyranny, poverty, and ignorance in a region that is working it’s way out of those things, while the problem of Iraq is one that has ramifications for the whole Islamist conflict that seems to be brewing right about now.
I’ll do better later, honest.
And I owe Jeff Cooper a response to his thoughtful reply to my stepping on Tom Spencer’s toes. Again: notes:
First, I really appreciate Jeff’s calm effort to impose equanimity…he’s right about much of what he says, not right about some other stuff (which I’ll explore more), but the ‘role’ he takes on in his post is genuine, humane, acknowledged and appreciated.
He takes my comments to be a general criticism of the political climate, and then explains that for now, we need to stay on the reservation because: At this point, I’m much more concerned with keeping control of the Senate than I am with reforming the Democratic Party; as far as I’m concerned, we can return to that long-term project two weeks from today. That’s a legitimate position, and I’ll agree that my partisan geography (A Republican will get elected to the Senate from California when monkeys fly out of Brett Gurewitz’s butt – an inside joke for all you Bad Religion fans out there) doubtless effects my views.
But…I’ll hold Jeff to that. Let’s get through the election, and then we’ll talk about this some more. And my interest isn’t in reforming the Democratic Party, it is in figuring out how to reform politics as it is practiced here; it’s not in specific policies, but in the way that policies are created.
And as to Tom; no matter how much I step away and then come back, his replies remain simply annoying. No, Tom, I wasn’t criticizing the points made in the post that I clipped, I was criticizing your whole blog, or the three or four pages I read of it before I gave up.
Yes, I’m glad you think that bitter sarcasm will keep the embattled home team fired up, but my experience (in helping run campaigns and winning a few) is that it drives away the people you need to try pull over to your side and become less embattled, and leaves you with a core group of embittered, sarcastic outsiders. I was always under the impression that the point was to broaden the base and convert the heathen – that way you get to try and implement the ideas you espouse.
And I’m thrilled as punch that you are a loving parent and have an intellectually satisfying job, as opposed to my lonely, alienated drudgery rinsing sludge here in the fishmeal plant. Sometimes I try and sit and talk with my betters but the reality of class just keeps us apart. Or maybe the smell of fishmeal. It’s sad, really.
But I’ll leave everyone with one serious thought: Tom doesn’t think this matters, that the effect of this whole process is limited to the ten thousand or so who care about political blogs. He’s wrong. I’m not doing this to create or sell policy. I’m doing this because it forces me to express and defend my ideas; to sharpen and fact-check them. The blog isn’t how I use my ideas and isn’t my outlet for my ‘political’ urges – my life is. This is a dojo where I get to learn and practice things that I can take out into the world and use to be a better citizen and help build a better future for my kids.
I may do a fuller response, but it probably won’t be useful.

Meryl Yourish busts the AP and other media for calling the Chechens “guerillas” rather than “terrorists”. She’s absolutely right.
Guerillas attack military targets.
Terrorists attack unprepared civilians.
Let’s be clear about this.
And it’s infuriating to see the Salon headline as ’67 hostages die as Moscow siege ends’. Over 700 hostages were saved from a group of murderous thugs through the professional work of the Russian rescue team.
Good for them.
Between Chief Moose and the Russians, the good guys have had a good week.
Now if we could only make that unnecessary…

I’ve been thinking about Paul Wellstone, and how to respond to the loss of someone who was the antithesis of the things I criticise about modern politics…someone who operated from sincere beliefs, from an inclusive patriotism, and from a belief that while he had opponents, that his opponents could be operating from the same kind of place.
Peggy Noonan beat me to it.

We have reached the conclusion with reference to clauses “a” through “c,” that Professor Bellesiles contravened these professional norms, both as expressed in the Committee charge and in the American Historical Association’s definition of scholarly “integrity,” which includes “an awareness of one’s own bias and a readiness to follow sound method and analysis wherever they may lead,” “disclosure of all significant qualifications of one’s arguments,” careful documentation of findings and the responsibility to “thereafter be prepared to make available to others their sources, evidence, and data,” and the injunction that “historians must not misrepresent evidence or the sources of evidence.”

Much like the case of the Central Park Jogger, my basic response is “the system works”.
Like Bellesisles, I tend to believe that the role of the gun in American history is somewhat overstated, so my initial response to his book was positive.
But as I followed the controversies afterward, I have to say the his critics made serious points, and that his response to them was a textbook example of how not to defuse a bad situation. Even reading the report (pdf file), it appears that he didn’t do the logical things that would have defended his academic credibility, if not the specific research in question.
I’m sorry for him and his family, and glad that the academic community has performed careful review and upheld its integrity.

Just finished talking to the folks at www.mysitehosting.net, where I’m hosting this blog. They’re interested in hosting other MT blogs, and asked me to get the word out that they will offer free MT setup with their $14.99/month hosting plan.
Go to www.mysitehosting.net to sign up and then contact blogs@mysitehosting.net for more info.

To Jeff Cooper and Tom Spencer…
…tomorrow…

There’s an interesting discussion going on between Juan Volokh, Mark Kleiman, and Dave Kopel about ballistic ‘fingerprinting’, which I discussed back here. My proposal was to take ballistic data from guns, and store them in a series of ‘private registries’, who would hold the data and registration data in such a way that a) only a limited set of queries would be answered, and b) the registry as a whole would be volatile, and could be destroyed by the registrar in the event of an effort by the government to take it (which destruction would be explicitly permitted in the enabling legislation).
My suggestion was way too complex. (Although it raises other interesting possibilities)
Mark Kleiman proposes a simpler (although somewhat less effective) system, whereby spent brass (and possibly bullets) would be filed and imaged in a database and stored solely against the make, model, and serial number of the gun.
The manufacturer’s existing systems can track the gun to the wholesaler, whose records would reveal the retailer, whose records would then link to a purchaser, which would take a match at least as far as the original new purchaser of the gun.
I have one argument for, and two against, this proposal.
The argument for is:
1) It will help solve some certain number of crimes that would otherwise not be solved.
The arguments against are:
1) It will cost money which would be better spent on other crime-prevention or crime-solving resources;
2) It won’t work very well because
a) the ‘image matching’ technology isn’t very good, the markings and characteristics of each gun change over time (or are easily changed), and so there will be an extremely low ‘hit rate’;
b) it will only be applied to new guns sold after the effective date (otherwise it begins to look like registration)which means it will apply to only a small fraction of the guns in circulation.
So on a cost-benefit basis, I wonder how effective it would really be. This ought to be (roughly) calculable, as an example: we assume that out of 500,000 crimes committed with guns, say 5,000 (made-up numbers alert!!) are committed with guns purchased in the last year. Of these, 1,500 are unsolved. Of these 50% involve spent brass or intact bullets, and we have a 20% chance of getting a match in the system, so we ought to be able to track 150 of these guns to their purchasers. Of these, 75% still own them, so we might get 120 ‘hits’ on a system like this. One issue would be the number of hits we would get through simple good police work, so the additional ‘hits’ would be, hypothetically, in the range of 60 – 80. Note that these numbers are entirely made up, and that I’m simply trying to demonstrate the mechanism whereby we could cost a system like this.
Imagine that 1,000,000 guns are sold every year (that’s less than I believe are actually sold, but sounds about right and I’m not doing research tonight); it costs $10.00 to fingerprint, image, and store the spent brass and bullets (real cost is probably double); we’re talking about spending $10,000,000/year to help solve 70 crimes. Now that will go down every year (in ten years, we’ll be spending $10,000,000 to solve 700 crimes). But on numbers like that, I’d say the proposed plan is a bust. Given some time, I’ll try and plug real numbers into this, and see how they come out (or you can do it and email the results to me!) but the question to the audience ought to be, how much do we spend on a program like this per possibly solved case?? $10,000?? $100,000??
There is a broader issue as well.
As I noted, On the other hand, there are a large group of people in this society who hate guns, and devoutly wish to make them go away…at least except for the ones they get to carry (see CA state Senator “Beretta” Perata) or their bodyguards carry (see Rosie). And these people are close to the levers of power, and it isn’t hard to imagine that one day they’d get those levers, and use them to do whatever they could to take guns away from everyone who wasn’t them. There’s a logical chain that goes from ‘fingerprint new guns’ to ‘fingerprint all guns on sale’ to ‘fingerprint all guns’ and suddenly, like the mythical frog in a pot, we’re being boiled.
On one hand, I’m convinced that the potential for this is very real.
On the other, I believe that the best way to resolve it is to politically defeat the hoplophobes (Col. Cooper’s – the ‘other’ Jeff Cooper’s – term for those who are afraid of and wish to ban the private possession of weapons) completely and thoroughly.
And to do that, we (the gun-rights defending population) need to find a way to reach out to the big group in the middle. Some of them own guns; some of them are afraid of guns. One thing we need to do (and that I do all the time) is to stand ready to discuss the issue of violent crime using guns and what can be done to limit it. And having had those discussions, we need to stand ready to support measures that a) don’t directly remove our rights or lead in that direction and b) have some hope of being effective (including being cost-effective).
I think that ballistic fingerprinting, as suggested by Kleiman, passes test a). I’m not so sure about test b), but that ought to be something where some reasonable set of facts can be brought to light.
I have some homework to do, I guess. Anyone want to help?
[Addendum: Don’t forget to read Rob Lyman and Steven denBeste on these issues. I infer to a point they make … that freedom has a cost, and just because we’re seeing it doesn’t mean we should stop paying it … but I seldom make the argument as persuasively as they do.]