How to advance freedom? One word: plastics. And 3D printing.

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Benjamin: Yes, sir.

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?

Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it? 

With the much-publicized successful test-firing of the world's first 3D printed gun, politicians wasted little time calling for a ban on the plastic weapon.

When will they learn?

In the 1960s and 1970s, it was the "Saturday Night Special," a loosely defined term roughly encompassing any inexpensive handgun, that was the target of special bans, including the Gun Control Act of 1968. That Act referred to them as "relatively inexpensive pistols and revolvers (largely worthless for sporting purposes)" That phrasing stood on its head the Supreme Court's 1939 reasoning in U.S. vs. Miller, which upheld a ban on private ownership sawed-off shotguns specifically because they did not have "some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia..."* The courts have never held "sporting purposes" to be relevant to the Second Amendment. But inexpensive guns challenged the state's monopoly on violence, so they had to go.

In the 1950s, it was "zip guns," or home-made firearms, once popular among street gangs (even among fictional street gangs,) that were identified as particular contributors to crime. Since they could be built by anybody with a little ingenuity, zip guns also threatened the state's monopoly on violence, so they had to go.

So now we have these large, awkward, one-shot plastic guns threatening the Republic. As of today, you'll need to buy an $8000 printer in order to make one, and you'll need a new barrel after each ten shots or so, which is significantly more expensive and less convenient than a "real" gun. But let's stipulate that technology tends to come down in price and improve in quality over time, and assume that one day anybody could "print" a more practical gun.

Where Schumer and his cohorts are so badly mistaken is in their apparent belief that banning this application of the revolutionary printing technology is somehow putting their finger in the dike. Maybe they are right. After all, the Dutch boy's finger was only a temporary solution - the dike would still have failed without permanent repairs.

But 3D printed guns are not a leak in the sea wall; they are a storm surge that first overtops, and then destroys the levee.

The question is whether you should keep trying to build higher levees, which will ultimately consume all of your resources for diminishing benefit, or learn to live with the ocean. The 3D printer is revolutionary technology, and not only for weapons. It is less akin to zip guns, and more akin to Gutenberg's press, which ultimately democratized literacy and advanced the cause of human freedom.

It is true that the 3D printed guns should cause us to re-think gun control, but reviving earlier failed attempts at micro-regulation hardly qualifies as "re-thinking." The rich will always have health care, and money, and guns; 3D printing is for the rest of us.

* U.S. vs. Miller, strictly read, would seem to especially support private ownership of "assault rifles," a ruling the Constitutional Law Professor in the White House might do well to review before calling for a ban on those "weapons of war." There's nothing wrong with believing the Court has decided a case wrongly, but we must at least acknowledge the current state of the law.

Polling shows that news media are incompetent

Gun crime has plunged, but Americans think it's up, says study - latimes.com: Despite the remarkable drop in gun crime, only 12% of Americans surveyed said gun crime had declined compared with two decades ago, according to Pew, which surveyed more than 900 adults this spring. Twenty-six percent said it had stayed the same, and 56% thought it had increased.

So says the LA Times, before going on in head-scratching bewilderment as to how Americans could be so ill-informed.

Look at it this way news reporters: that poll is really a report card on you. It turns out, you fail when it comes to keeping people informed.

And articles like this one, and all of those over the last day or two regarding this recent report about the fall in crime over the past twenty years, are great examples. Reporting these days consists of re-wording press releases - sort of like a C student rephrasing an encyclopedia (or Wikipedia) article instead of doing any research.

Crime didn't start falling twenty years ago, it started falling thirty years ago, and US murder rates are the lowest they have been in fifty years. Fifty!

Yet "helicopter parents" won't let their kids outside alone because to watch the news, you'd think it was all Mad Max out there. There is less crime now than there has been in the entire lifetime of most living Americans.

But they don't know that if they get their information from the news media.

Sauce for the goose?

Followers of the Supreme Court may recall Chief Justice John Roberts' famous quote from the majority opinion upholding Obamacare last summer:

It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.

Justice Roberts might well keep that in mind as he contemplates the consequences of the political choice made by California voters, who passed Proposition 8 into law in 2008.

Many (most) on both sides of gay marriage are arguing the wrong issue

Today's debate over "gay marriage" is really about no such thing. It is about a gay marriage license, and if we were to actually debate that issue, the arguments might get quite interesting.

A government-issued license, as any gun owner will surely attest, is not a granting of rights, but an infringement upon them; a granting to government of the power to regulate. This is a very important point, and one that many - if not most - on both sides of the current debate entirely miss.

For traditionalists, the argument against gay marriage often includes the objection that the government should not "sanction" or bless such unions with a license. But since when does a government license confer blessings? Blessings are from God, expressed through our churches; licenses are from government and subject to conditions and regulations. When you got your driver's license, it did not signify that the DMV was celebrating your ability to drive, or granting you such a right. It only signified that you had met certain regulatory thresholds required to purchase the privilege of operating a motor vehicle on government streets. That privilege remains subject, of course, to the state's ongoing scrutiny of your adherence to regulation, and is subject to revocation by the state. You need no license to drive on your own private property.

So it is with marriage.

There is a reason that people must go to court to obtain divorces, but not to break up with girlfriends. Marriages are regulated by the state. Romantic relationships are not.

It is a plain fact that homosexual unions, cohabitation, same sex couple benefits, homosexual churches, marriages, neighborhoods and hospital visitation are outlawed in exactly zero states in this country. A court decision "granting the right to marry" would do no such thing. What it would do, is to make these gay romantic relationships subject to regulation.

At its core, government marriage licensing arose as a way to protect women and children from abandonment, and to protect the parental rights of fathers; ultimately, to ensure the safe and healthy raising of our next generation. Whether any of this was ever really the business of government is another question. What is not in question is that none of these justifications for government regulation apply in any way whatsoever to gay couples.

As it happens, these reasons apply less and less with each passing year to heterosexual couples. The CDC reports that more than 40% of children in the United States are born to unmarried mothers. Beginning in 1970, no-fault divorce laws, now the standard throughout the nation, made leaving a marriage significantly less of a burden, loosening the state's actual control of marriage.

As a result, marriage is nowhere considered a permanent institution under the law, and regulations designed to protect the material well-being of children focus on the financial - paternity suits, child support - entirely separate from the relationship in which the child was conceived.

Marriage is indeed a sacred institution, and it has meant throughout the ages, only one thing. That is still true. Families who wish to live in this tradition can, and ought to, marry in their churches, and abide by the vows that, for the most part, they are already publicly proclaiming in their wedding ceremonies. That's marriage.

What is no longer true, is that government licensing of marriage in the United States is in anybody's interest - if, indeed, it ever really was.

Rather than expand the regulatory state to spy and intrude on gay relationships, the question we should be debating is how to rein in, or even eliminate the state's intrusion into sacred matters such as marriage.

Let's keep defense cuts in prespective

Over at The Corner, Jim Talent shares the graphic below to warn of the horrors of the coming defense cuts:

Just in case nothing jumped out at you about the graph, take a look at the one I made below, which shows the exact same data, but in the correct proportional scale:

Somehow, the impending doom seems less scary, particularly in light of the ending of two wars and reduction in active duty personnel. Using grossly distorted graphics to scaremonger about defense cuts is pure propaganda.

Of course, the cuts ought to be made intelligently, and with an eye towards maintaining an appropriate level of preparedness. But the notion that more is always better is just as foolish in the Defense Department as it is in every other part of the budget, and I get a little tired of people who think it is somehow "conservative" to always wail for more spending on the Armed Forces.

If this be heckling, make the most of it...

As any sane person can see, this father of one of the Sandy Hook victims was not "heckled." To the contrary, I'd say this is a great example of civil discourse.

(h/t HotAir)

No, your simple fix would not have prevented it from happening

The moment a terrible event happens, the floodgates of idiots who think they know the one thing that could have prevented it is opened. Here are a few of yesterday's instant comments (unattributed, but real,) along with a few responses:

Forget guns. Is there any controversy that mental health care should be cheaply and readily available to all without stigma?

Thanks for not talking about guns, but what does the rest of that even mean? We don't know anything about the shooter - was he already in some kind of treatment? How often have we seen previous shooters who were either in treatment, or had refused it? One of the marks of psychopathy is that the psychopath doesn't know there is anything wrong with him. What you really would need is an easier ability to: a) involuntarily commit people; and b) some way to know which ones are crazy and which ones are dangerous. Call the Department of Precrime.

The schools need armed guards, preferably outside and visible!

Is that a school you'd send your kids to? Really? This school was already on permanent lockdown and legally declared a "gun-free zone." You just want to wrap layers and layers of armor and metal detectors around the schools, and layers and layers of kevlar and bubble-wrap around the children.

The what about their busses? Little League games? Parks and playgrounds? What kind of society will we be if we actually try to prevent all bad things from happening anyplace?

In the end, none of those measures will work, because, like the TSA, we will always be fighting the last battle, making nobody safer but everybody less free. The psychopath will never be foiled by measures that would've blocked the previous lunatic. The psychopath lives in the present, and finds the targets that still exist.

So stop it. Live your lives.

The only law proven to reduce mass shootings is concealed carry.

There is something to this, but the fact is that it's not really the law that stops the mass shootings. Unless you want to mandate concealed carry, you need a person in the area who actually has a gun.

For individual self-defense (and defense of others) to be both possible and effective you really need two things:

1. A moral and courageous populace, willing to defend the weak and to fight evil, even at personal risk.
2. Freedom.

The more "safeguards" we try to put in place to "prevent tragedies like this," I fear, the less we will have of both of those things.