Mrs. Uncle is doing the shopping thing and yours truly is babysitting. Junior is sleeping and blogging will be light this weekend. Some gun stuff of note:

JoinTogether continues to dance in the blood of the dead:

The Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort extends their deepest sympathy to the families and victims of the horrifying and deadly shooting in Sawyer County, where a man used an SKS semi-automatic assault rifle to gun down five hunters and wound three others. This tragedy demonstrates the urgent need for an effective federal ban on military style assault weapons. But since President Bush and Congress allowed the federal assault weapons ban to expire in September of this year and seem disinterested in passing a new law, Wisconsin lawmakers should, in the meantime, pass a comprehensive statewide assault weapons ban. Reports suggested that the shooting occurred after an argument escalated when hunters found 36-year-old Chai Soua Vang using a tree stand belonging to someone else.

SKS military style, semi-automatic assault rifles, like the one used in yesterday’s tragic shooting, are the most common assault rifles used to kill law enforcement offices in the United States, according to the Violence Policy Center, a Washington, D.C. based think tank. In 2004, six law enforcement officers in the United States have been gunned down by shooters using SKS assault rifles.

It is pretty much confirmed by police reports that the weapon used was a Saiga 7.62. The weapon is not an SKS but is a sporterized based on the Kalashnikov that was not affected by the ban.

A push for more gun laws in PA:

Within hours after 16-year-old Jalil Speaks died of a bullet wound to the chest, politicians and children’s advocates looked for the cause, and many settled on guns.

There are too many, and they are too easy to get, they said.

What went unmentioned after the shooting Monday was that the gun laws in Philadelphia are the same as everywhere else in Pennsylvania.

But in Philadelphia, Speaks was the 14th person under age 18 to be killed by a gun this year, while elsewhere in the state such shootings are almost unheard of.

However, the author is not blaming only guns but rather the socioeconomic breakdown of Philly:

A key difference in Philadelphia is that much of its population is poor, and poverty has long been correlated with an increase in violence.

The city also has an entrenched drug trade, whose practitioners consider a weapon as integral to the business as the illegal drugs themselves.

While other towns may wrestle with similar issues, nowhere else in the state are these problems concentrated so greatly.

In Philadelphia, the drug trade has spawned a flourishing traffic in illegal guns that sprung up to bypass state and federal laws that prohibit felons from owning firearms.

“Kids can go on the corner and buy guns like they can buy drugs,” said Bilal Qayyum, cochairman of Men United for a Better Philadelphia, an antiviolence group.

“If there was serious gun control and if there were fewer guns on the street, more than half these deaths would not have happened,” Qayyum said.

Statewide, firearms dealers sold 147,719 handguns in 2003, a typical year’s business, according to Pennsylvania State Police data.

Criminals don’t obey gun laws.

Posted in uncategorized on November 26th, 2004 by SayUncle | RSS 2.0 |