Tam has an amusing piece up on the Remington Hit Piece.
She notes that the story centers around a old gun that was very likely modified by an amateur, that discharged when dropped. She points out that modern drop safeties are a VERY new development, and we still teach in safety class that you don’t do shit with loaded guns like climb fences or getting into a tree-stand. Her analogy is great!
Complaining that a 1920s firearm may not have been drop safe when you were actively ignoring two or more of the Four Rules of firearm safety is like complaining that you drove your Ford Model A head-on into a brick wall and the airbags didn’t deploy.
Sean happens to note a similar short-sighted comment.
Apparently Mr. Winkler is unaware of why loaded guns were banned in Boston buildings in the Revolutionary War era. It’s because they were flintlock muzzle loading muskets. That means that they didn’t have what we think of as safeties. They were inherently unsafe because any spark near the breech end could set them off.
I also noted that in 18th Century Boston even on warm days it wasn’t uncommon to have a naked flame from a fireplace or a candle in many of the rooms of public or private buildings. Naked flames and loaded and/or primed flintlocks is VERY dangerous. If an ember finds your flash pan, or your touch-hole, your gun is gonna go “BOOM”.
But Mr. Winkler thinks that makes it perfectly reasonable to ban the safety-laden modern guns, with self-contained ammunition into buildings that are now lit by electric lights, and heated by various methods that DON’T involve a naked flame.
This is a VERY common way for people to think. You’ll often hear a story that happens in flyover country where somebody does something stupid with a gun on private property, and a pointy-head in New York or California will ask “Was the gun Registered? Did the person have a license?”, because obviously the stupid laws in New York are in effect in Wyoming or Montana.
Same goes for whatever local laws your idiots passed. Like Massachusetts blue laws. Until recently it was illegal to open your retail store on Sunday here. It was also illegal to sell alcohol on Sunday. It is STILL illegal to buy beer or wine in ANYPLACE but a LIQUOR store. People think this is reasonable, and some how assume that EVERYPLACE else is like that, and if we allow somebody to buy a six-pack at the 7-Eleven, Massachusetts will become some horrible drunken Petri dish.
Another great example is this XKCD comic. The rollover for that comic is “An ‘American Tradition’ is anything that happened to a Baby Boomer twice.”
The same can be said about the whole “Global Warming” fiasco. You’ll hear some Woodstock Alumni talking about how much colder the winters were when s/he was a kid. Maybe they were colder, and the snow higher…or maybe you were three feet shorter, and Gore-Tex and Thinsilate hadn’t been invented yet.
Either way this gets me thinking that so many “Progressives” seem to think the world started the day before they were born…yet they chide Creationists for Thinking the Earth is only a Few Thousand Years Old.
