Mr. Saturday Night Special/Got a Barrel That’s Blue And Cold

“The fact that our current military could obviously crush any Red Dawn bullshit if it chose to do so is not relevant to this point. ”

I’m tempted to call BS on that idea; our current military can’t control Iraq, let alone the USA.
My only doubt is that I feel that the average Iraqi is both better-armed and more ornery than the average American.

Actually, since the Cheney incident I’ve seen a lot of friends of mine who are total gun freaks posting about how stupid and careless Cheney was. They tend to have been off-the-reservation anti-Bush libertarian types to begin with rather than core Republicans.

What a fantastic post. Whoda thunk it – acknowledging complexity and competing reasonable interests on a blog. Next thing you know, they’ll figure out a way to slice bread before you buy it.

I in general think that Americans should be allowed to have guns, as they seem to want them. (also with guns as they are currently designed they are out of range of me). It always does surprise me though that there are plenty of Americans who believe that if there was a serious danger of totalitarian government in the USA, the majority of private gun owners would be on the anti-totalitarian side. It just doesn’t seem to fit the observable facts so well.

…if there was a serious danger of totalitarian government in the USA, the majority of private gun owners would be on the anti-totalitarian side.

I am sure citizens of Oakland preferred black panthers to racist cops.

Great post.

7: It always does surprise me though that there are plenty of Americans who believe that if there was a serious danger of totalitarian government in the USA, the majority of private gun owners would be on the anti-totalitarian side.

I was thinking exactly the same thing. The gun lobby tends to employ the image of courageous democratic rebels battling against tyranny in describing the 2nd Amendment, but much of the actual history of heavily-armed societies consists of various factions battling for tyranny: their own. In an America that spawned the kind of right-wing terror cell that holds credit for its largest domestic attack outside al Qaeda, you’d think that would give some people pause.

Actually, ordinary soldiers still do carry sidearms into battle. If there has been any decline, I suspect it has more do to with the current sidearm on offer for most of our troops: a type-92 9mm Beretta. The 9mm bullet was chosen to get us in line with the rest of NATO and the Beretta in particular was chosen to appease Italy. Unfortunately, the Beretta is not particularly highly regarded in many circles (at 9mm, Glock and Glock-ish pistols are, from my casual observation, far more preferred) and many feel that the 9mm lacks stopping power against fanatic opponents (like, oh, say, the Taliban). I bet that if the army went back to the old .45 acp, using one of the updated 1911-style tactical models (from Springfield, Kimber, etc.), you’d see sidearm carrying shoot back up. If I were facing insurgents in Iraq, I too would forego the current pistol option in favor of a 12 gauge shotgun with 00 buckshot. And I’ve read that more and more troops are doing just that. But if a 1911-style .45 acp were available, I would definitely take it.

All of that said, however, as a gun “enthusiast” (though not to the extent that the cost of that hobby is permitted to cut into the budget for others, such as golf or wine collecting), my first choice for home defense is a 12 gauge pump shotgun (the Mossberg 590, in my case) with high velocity birdshot. This delivers an awesome punch at short range with low penetration of walls (a key consideration if you plan to start shooting in the living room and you care about others in your house). It does not require as much accuracy under stress as a pistol. It delivers incredible firepower and can probably outgun, in the confined space of a home, anything an intruder is likely to have short of an MP5 or something like that (and realistically no intruder is going to have something like that). And its discharge in close quarters is terrifying and likely to be enough to get an intruder to flee. And if they take a hit from that sucker and keep coming, well, I guess they are entitled to my flat screen TV. I don’t see why someone needs more than this for home defense.

I have actually had prolonged arguments with one libertarian loony who claimed, among other things, that civilian ownership of nuclear weapons should be permitted, and that all medical care should be private and that nobody should be allowed to pay for anyone else’s, that mothers who can’t pay for the medical care of themselves and their children during childbirth should be left to die ‘for their own good’.

So there is a strand of political thought (using the word in its loosest possible sense) that holds to private ownership of nukes.

Myself I think private individuals should be allowed to detonate the Sun on command. Right now only Rupert Murdoch has that right, which is patently unfair.

Any of the other 10 amendments about the rights of state governments vis-a-vis the federal government? No? Oooh, snap!

You’re forgetting about the 10th Amendment, which states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

raising the likely prospect that many would be just as capable with turning their guns

Should read “raising the likely prospect that many would be just as comfortable with turning their guns…”

Dsquared and Doctor Slack think that gun owners are more totalitarian in their potential political behavior.

Setting aside the facts of the matter, for my money, the key to understanding our current political arrangement is that people vote for the party that doesn’t make them feel guilty.

People that don’t want to feel guilty about abortion or sexual preference or a lack of money or a lack of religious piety or racial status vote Democrat.

People that don’t want to feel guilty about gun owning or pollution or a lack of charity or bigotry or war-mongering vote Republican.

The interesting thing is that Democrats see the Republican list and say “Look, but people SHOULD feel guilty about that stuff”. The Republicans look at their list and say “look at how big our base will be if we can absolve people’s guilt for ALL of that.”

The party that can be self-righteous to the biggest group wins.

Back to the facts for Dsquared and Doc Slack. I think they confuse social oppression with totalitarianism. For example, a lynching is not totalitarian. That’s the whole point, its outside government, its a social thing. I don’t believe the majority of gun owners suppport a uniform totalitarian oppression, they prefer a market in small, grass-roots oppressions.

doctor slack:

Even if your contention is true, I fail to see what the point is. Are there people on the political fringe who are willing to kill their fellow citizens? Certainly yes, though of course the number of incidents in which there has been actual violence associated with these types has been minimal. Are these same folks “obsessed” with firearms? Well, I suppose you could argue that, but so are several million other Americans who haven’t the slightest trace of murderous impulses. Could these people kill others with firearms? I suppose so, though the only large scale incident in which militia types have killed other Americans involved no firearms at all.

In other words – are you arguing that we should restrict ownership of firearms because there is a fringe element that might use these firearms to kill people, even though we can’t point to actual examples of this happening, but instead can point to examples of militia types killing people using items that we couldn’t easily ban without also banning modern agriculture and the moving from one apartment to a new apartment?

Actually, since the Cheney incident I’ve seen a lot of friends of mine who are total gun freaks posting about how stupid and careless Cheney was.

The NRA’s response, on the other hand, has been positively Trappist, proving that they’re not about teh gun saf3ty, and all about the GOP.

Do foot soldiers carry handguns into combat? Not so much.

From one of the most important 2nd Amendment cases, US v Miller, which upheld the prohibition of sawed-off shotguns:

“In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession of a ‘shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.”

That is, the non-military character of the firearm tended to legitimate its prohibition—same sort of reasoning Belle’s using here. I have no idea whether she’s right about handguns and the military, though I never remember seeing a handgun among my grandfather’s rifle-heavy Marine momentos. Of course, that Miller line of reasoning is problematic for the prohibition of automatic or semiautomatic weapons. (Maybe not so much a problem for the regulation of nukes—since the criterion isn’t just military utility but something like customary-for-individual-soldiers-in-a-militia; individual soldiers in the National Guard certainly aren’t issued with individual nukes.)

The Supreme Court has never held that the Second Amendment is incorporated into the due process clause, and it wouldn’t make sense to do so.
The Court hasn’t so held; but there’s some convincing evidence that at least some of the 14th Amendment’s authors and ratifiers at the time were concerned to protect freedmen’s rights to own guns—rights which were typically the very first thing taken away when southern whites regained control of any level of government, the better to keep freedmen down with reign-of-terror tactics. [The amendment’s framers of course were thinking of federalizing the individual rights of freedmen primarily through the Privileges or Immunities clause, not Due Process, but that was before the S Ct gutted the former.] Relevance is subject to one’s opinion on originalism, of course. But, at least as an originalist matter, it’s apparently plausible to think that the 2nd was incorporated against the states into the P/I Clause—somewhat more plausible than the incorporation of the Establishment Clause into the Due Process Clause, say, which is something that everyone except Clarence Thomas now accepts as settled.

Dsquared’s original point was that broader human experience and history doesn’t give us reason to believe that heavily-armed societies are all that tyranny-resistant.

q.v. Iraq, during and after Saddam.

Jacob T. Levy: The Marines did carry a single-stack 1911-style .45 acp as a standard sidearm in WWII. It was standard issue but probably the first thing the marines re-collected when soldiers demobilized. The reason is that in that era the military was adopting new assault rifles at a much faster pace than new pistols. In fact, that basic pistol was pretty much the standard sidearm from WWI through the Reagan era. So they wanted to re-cycle them. (The Marines of Vietnam were often stuck with “shot out” WWII vintage 1911 .45s.) Today the military has adhered much longer to a more basic and limited suite of assault rifle designs than they had before the Sixties.

To the extent that soldiers did not carry a .45 pistol in WWII, it was usually b/c their main weapon was so damned heavy (eg the BAR) or they had a Thompson style submachine gun already. Carrying of pistols was certainly not limited to, for instance, officers.

As for the statement “Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense”, can you give a date on that case? I’m pretty sure 14 and 16 inch shotgun barrels are pretty widespread today, particularly in the more elite units and those stuck with the (awful) task of urban counterinsurgency .

I would really emphaisze that, while I think shotguns are sufficient and in many respects preferrable to home defense, any decline in pistol-carrying in today’s army probably has more to do with the crappy choice of pistol than anything else. The army should never have abandoned the basic 1911-style .45 acp and all of the military arguments for doing so were basically non-sense.

By the way, Belle, a little off topic but if you ever want another interesting gun-related topic to chew on in the wee hours, I would look into the social consequences of so many military weapons getting transferred to cops, mainly during the Clinton era. The net effect has been to militarize many police forces (see, for example, the explosive growth in SWAT teams) and potentially profoundly transform the relationship between many elements of modern police departments and the public. These weapons made possible tactics that likely influenced the institutional mindset of police departments, and I would argue in very detrimental ways. For instance, there is a growing list of horror stories involving SWAT teams, whose writ now extends far beyond their original mission.

Nick #29: I’m sorry if that creeps you out, but I’m not sure why. Would you prefer that gun owners know very little about their weapons? That doesn’t seem very safe to me. And besides, my technical knowledge has led me to a less extreme view than some: I think it tends to be the less techically informed who seriously think they need a machine gun for home defense.

By the way, I also collect wine and so can go on and on about certain regions and vintages. If this were a wine forum you would have seen that side of me, and have no inkling of my ideas about guns. But the topic here is guns, and any frutiful discussion will involve some interplay of legal and technical issues. Without the former, you can’t put this into any larger social context (as Belle and some of the commentors have ably done). Without the latter, this is simply an abstract discussion with no real grounding in the practical consequences of rules informed by those larger social considerations. I hope that any future wine discussion involving the two of us doesn’t creep you out (though you could rightfully be bored to death by it).

About 30 years ago, some humorist whose name I no longer recall wrote an article in Playboy advocating had what I still think is the best way of handling the gun issue. (Of course that’s why I bought it.) He proposed federal gun licenses that said, in effect, Jim-Bob here is a good citizen and can have all the guns he wants. Counting on the desire of any privileged licensiate to restrict access and raise the prestige accruing to their licensed status, the Jim-Bobs of the world would themselves start demanding actual, and gradually tougher, standards for obtaining such licenses. Before you knew it, every licensed gun owner would have gone through the equivalent of basic training, registered their weapons (much like cars), and bought liability insurance (much like cars), and who knows what-all else.
I don’t see that the debate has advanced much since then.

Last time I checked Belgian citizens owned both handguns and long arms, and Italian citizens long arms

With a chart based on early-90s-data…Norway, Finland, France and (of course) Switzerland have higher gun ownership rates than Belgium or France, and Sweden & Spain are not far behind Italy. And unless I’m mistaken, the UK (and ROI?) are the only European countries to effectively ban handguns.

I’d have to agree with Say Uncle. I don’t have a gun in the home, but if I wanted one for defense it’d be a handgun. I’d want my left hand free if need be. And being of smaller stature I would appear to be (and am) someone you could easily wrestle a shotgun from. I’d want to give the burglar less of a target.

Case in point, from that link about ‘house guns’:

If you’re in my home uninvited rummaging through my belongings, I will lawfully assume that you mean me and my loved ones harm. You will be considered a hostile target. The only warning you will receive will be the 230 grain, jacketed hollow point piercing your flesh.

Convince me that the person who wrote those words doesn’t, on some level, want the opportunity to act out that scenario.

I think it’s the imagined scenarios which have the capacity to appear creepy: not my intention.

I simply asked myself, at some point in time, what is and is not reasonable for home defense, and then just left it at that. And the most important factor was what would be the best way of getting the intruder to just split (my preferred resolution to the thing) while still having a pretty fail-safe defensive weapon. And putting some time into technical considerations here seems reasonable.

But I don’t spend my time trying to game things out in my head (right now a persistent problem with cracking tile on one part of my bathroom floor is my main domestic concern), and I have never blown up a tree. That sounds ridiculously dangerous. And pointless.

I simply asked myself, at some point in time, what is and is not reasonable for home defense, and then just left it at that.

Understood. That linked post, though, is truly creepy, especially when ‘SayUncle’ talks in the comments about shooting any cop that dare touch his arsenal. Micropenis alert, methinks.

nick s: I just read Say Uncle’s thoughts and you are right: he is nuts. You shoot someone when you are backed into a corner with NO options left. If they appear to be interested in your flat screen TV in your den, let them have it. Material things are not worth killing over.

And Pepe, if you are smaller you’ll need both hands to shoot something like a .45 acp. I shoot one (just for fun at the range) and I am well over 6 feet tall with a heavy frame, and I find my accuracy depends on having both hands on the gun. And if I were scared that would probably only make this more true.

Get a 20 gauge shotgun if you are concerned about this. It will be more manageable for you, will still get the job done, has comparativley low penetrating power against walls (a huge consideration) and has a demonstration effect that still makes by far the best of all outcomes (the intruder just runs) the most likely.

No, I don’t want to hear your theory. If it says “right of the people” it doesn’t mean “the right of individual states to form militias.”

Besides, how many of the people who argue that really believe that South Carolina or Texas can have it’s own militias that are totally independent of the Federal Govt, w/ the President not being commander in chief? For it to mean the National Guard (which didn’t exist then), they’d have to argue that the 2nd is a totally redundant amendment to allow the feds to have an army reserve.

Besides, how many of the people who argue that really believe that South Carolina or Texas can have it’s own militias that are totally independent of the Federal Govt, w/ the President not being commander in chief? For it to mean the National Guard (which didn’t exist then), they’d have to argue that the 2nd is a totally redundant amendment to allow the feds to have an army reserve.

I’ll take a stab at a reading of the Second Amendment that answers this:

The Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to be a part of his local militia by ensuring that he has the right to carry the requisite arms. It’s an individual right, but the scope of that right is defined by the end specified in the amendment’s introductory clause (the language the NRA always omits). Analogously, the First Amendment does not let you say whatever you want whenever you want—e.g., libel, or yelling “fire” etc.

Two hundred years later, the states have decided, for various reasons, to do without their militias, or to convert them into the National Guard. This tends to undercut the original purpose of the Second Amendment, but only because the world has changed since 1789.

…because 2:30 in the morning with someone monkeying around in my home…

Where do you live, people – in Rio de Janeiro?

Really, for the price of a good .45 acp you could buy a ton of non-lethal countervailing measures that would make it very hard for an intruder to slip into your kid’s room but not hinder the approach of people like, say, firemen. And why not follow Tyrone Slothrop’s (#47) advice here: kids love dogs, and dogs will kick ass to defend their kids. Slothrop recommends the Shephard, which is a good choice. I own English bulldogs. They’re great with kids but, if kept in shape, are essentially as capable as a pit bull in defense of their family. Or why not a pit bull? If they’re raised in a loving environment, they are prefectly fine but as strong as hell. And any of the three (or any number of other breeds) are good guards who will get the job done in close quarters as well as any human/weapon combo.

Any prior certitude about your rights (even if the law confirms it) would mean nothing against the knowledge that you had just blasted her.

No doubt. However, I don’t just play a gun nut on the Internets, I’m one in real life too. And, as Cheney should have taken into consideration, remember Rule #4: Know your target and what’s behind it. I would not fire willy-nilly at someone. I would, of course, confirm that any person in my home was an uninvited miscreant before shooting.

Regarding other safety measures, I have some. But those measures also have to ensure I can get in quickly and she can get out, in the event of a fire. A determined intruder could circumvent those while I await the police, who could be 15 – 20 minutes away (I’m in the country). An intruder who is preoccupied with trying to keep his insides in won’t have the motivation to circumvent such measures. From my standpoint, a firearm is the best choice as I already have it, know how to use it, am a good shot with one, and it serves recreational purposes. I have it for the same reason I have a fire extinguisher, I hope and pray to never use it but it’s there if I have to.

The problem with pit bulls is they are not fully domesticated. Once they decide to attack its all instinct. Other dogs can be convinced or trained to stop.

James,
That simply isn’t true about Pits, and its interesting how every era of America brings some notion of an incorrigibly vicious breed (remember the Doberman in the Seventies?) before the dog loses thug cache and reverts to normalcy. The only difference between the Pit and the English Bulldog is ease of breeding, which has sent the price of the latter through the roof and out of the range of most thugs. The English bulldog has the same baseline temperment and intrinsic capabilities. Its just raised differently. Most people treat then like a toy dog and let them get obese. Raise them the way thugs raise pits and you’d have a very different (and frankly pretty scary) dog on your hands. My male English bulldog is, of necessity (he has a congenital weakness to his hind legs that could make weight gain effectively crippling), lean and hard. And people can scarcely believe he is a bulldog, both for his looks and more assertive (though certainly not vicious or dangerous) temperment. I’ve also known people who’ve gotten pits from puppyhood, raised them in a loving manner (and allowed them to get love handles), and I assure you that that has a transformative effect. The neither look as aggressive (its amazing what floppy ears and a bit of softening of the face through weight gain do to transform their appearnace) or act as aggressive (they are more like my chubby, and lazy, female bulldog). I understand your concerns about them, but this is a much maligned breed. I assure you. If you raised a human being the way many of these really vicous pits are raised, you’d have a serial killer on your hands.

Frankly, having dealt heavily with both, I think the only really notable difference between Pits and Bulldogs and other breeds of the same size is strength and some degree of higher tolerance for pain (though this is often exaggerated: drugs and vicious training often greatly enhance this working tolerance for pain). Did you know that many of the vicious pits are fed steroids to enhance their bite power? Unfortunately, this has the same consequences for dogs (eg weak impulse control) as humans. And there other breeds that match their strength and pain tolerance. The chow for example is an extremely capable fighter in terms of its physical capabilities. And it is a very popular family dog.

Finally, by lineage pits actually should be one of the most domesticated breeds: they come from the ancient bulldogge lineage, which ultimately likely emerged from the even older mastiff type line. Its not like they just came from wolves.

I agree that pit attacks are terrible, but put the blame where it is due: human owners who engineered a killer out of a dog.

You are correct, he’s an AB (the recreation of the english bulldog before people decided squattier is better). He’s a man-killer. Look at him savaging this poor child.

Yeah, off topic but there are two types of ABs. Performance (like mine is) and the Johnson American Bulldog. The latter resembles more what you describe in that they’re heavily built. You can google up johnson american bulldogs and see pics on why they’re different. You’re right, they tend to be out of thug price range.

I would, of course, confirm that any person in my home was an uninvited miscreant before shooting.

Yeah, right. You’ve imagined ‘goblins’ (oh, how I love that term, with all its connotations) in your home, and you’re going to see one before you see what’s really there.

I have it for the same reason I have a fire extinguisher, I hope and pray to never use it but it’s there if I have to.

With all due respect, bullshit: you don’t lick your lips at the prospect of putting out a fire or meticulously describe the way you’d deliver a tight group of CO2 blasts.

With all due respect, bullshit: you don’t lick your lips at the prospect of putting out a fire or meticulously describe the way you’d deliver a tight group of CO2 blasts.

And I don’t do that with guns either. Of course, in your little world I must be some salivating, neanderthal, red stated Jesus freak who’s enjoying chimpy mchitlerburton taking us straight to Hell or some such, right? Hey, it’s fun to just make up things about people! I should do that more often.

No respect meant at all, you’re full of it.

In point of fact, the OK bombing came from a couple of people who had tried to join the Michigan Militia, and been shown the door. And this will remain true no matter how many times it is said that they were “linked” to the militia.

“Linked” is such a delightfully vague term, isn’t it? Strong enough to carry the implication of shared guilt, weak enough to defend against a libel suit…

69. Did the states decide that, or did the Feds decide that for them? What if the states decide to convert back to separate militias after President Hillary is elected, or are they not allowed to change their minds once ‘delegating’ power to the Feds?

“The world has changed” is BushCo’s favorite post 9/11 rationale for their violations of Constitutional restrictions on Fed power – if you accept that premise, what argument do you have left against them?

Without having thought about it an awful lot, my understanding is that the states are sovereign enough to retain control over their National Guard units to some extent, and certainly could establish citizen militias that would not be subject to the control of the President (as Commander in Chief).

The world has changed over 200 years in the sense that the states do not seem interested in continuing to maintain citizen militias. No one says they can’t. But if there are no militias, then citizens don’t rely need to be carrying the weapons they would use in one.

Apropos of many of the dog posts, did I miss something, or did a bunch of people start assuming that we were all talking about dogs that have been trained to be aggressive? I’ve done a lot of training with my GSD, but none of it involved aggression.

“But if there are no militias, then citizens don’t rely need to be carrying the weapons they would use in one.”

Precisely backwards. The reason that it’s guaranteed that Americans can be armed suitably for militia use, and not merely that states can have miitias, is that militias, being necessary to the security of a free state, are SO important, that the potential to raise one in an emergency has to be safeguarded even against states deciding not to bother with them anymore.

“Militia” as used at the time of the writing of the Constitution was not a term referring to standing military organizations under some jurisdiction below the national level. It referred to a) the entire body of citizens eligible for military service, and b) units of nonprofessional soldiers. Since “militia” is used in the single tense – “a well-regulated militia” rather than “well-regulated militias” – Definition A applies here.

In that time, “well-regulated” meant “skillful,” not “under the bureaucratic thumb.”

Therefore, “a well-regulated militia” translates into “a draft-eligible body of men competent with firearms” in modern parlance.

(To the best of my knowledge, no one ever cited the 2nd Amendment to deny women firearms ownership or use.)

72: And I don’t do that with guns either.

Say Uncle, it has to be said, this:

“If you’re in my home uninvited rummaging through my belongings, I will lawfully assume that you mean me and my loved ones harm. You will be considered a hostile target. The only warning you will receive will be the 230 grain, jacketed hollow point piercing your flesh.”

… really does convey the very impression of gleeful anticipation that you ardently deny having conveyed. Talking about “hostile targests” and the “jacketed hollow point piercing your flesh” really does not make you sound like someone who is hoping and praying never to have to use their firearm.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Nick is making unfair assumptions about you on that score. It’s very easy to misread ommon forms of hyperbole in people’s everyday discourse and come to mistaken conclusions about them as a result. Maybe you’re usage of that hyperbole comes tagged in your mind with all the necessary implied caveats about gun safety and moral rectitude and not actually blowing someone away for the hell of it.

But consider for a moment the post you’re commenting on, in which the author makes a specific effort to get (us) out of a single mindset and set of rhetorical habits about guns. And consider that (assuming you’re an American) you really do live in a country where other people do employ that kind of rhetoric and really are bloodthirsty, trigger-happy whackos. It seems to me that this could give you some cause to think twice about the kind of rhetoric you use—on your blog or anywhere else—and the role it can play in furthering the widespread image of gun enthusiasts as creepy nutjobs. And if you don’t think any change in attitude is warranted, at the absolute minimum you could treat it as an opportunity to actually explain a bit of that misunderstood context to those who aren’t familiar with it, instead of defensively assuming the other person is assuming you’re “some salivating, neanderthal, red stated Jesus freak” in their “little world.”

The problem with letting people have guns for self-defence is that, if my neighbours have the right to shoot first, I’m a potential target. So if you want a weapon for pre-emptive self defence, I claim the right to pack superior firepower and fire first in self-defence if I have the impression you might be about to shoot me.

Now, in an alternate reality, I might stroll past the end of your garden and say hello, fingers tight on the trigger of my Swedish K, whilst you respond, leaning casually over the M60. But I doubt it, frankly. I’ll take neither of us being armed over that scenario.

If I was concerned about the security of my home, I’d get a large dog. Dogs have many good points: dual purpose (they’re pretty good at intrusion detection and alarm), highly visible/audible deterrent, usually non-lethal (which saves legal trouble), and fully automatic. Dogs are also nice, which guns are not.

Cape – no. Big hat and false nose – yes!

But seriously, are there legal limits on carrying non-firearm weapons? What about crossbows?
The advantage a sword has is that there is a lead time between drawing it and trying to kill the other person – which, as alex points out, makes self-defence a bit easier than with a gun, where it’s a lot easier to drop someone without giving them a chance to shoot back. It’s also a lot trickier to kill someone with a sword unless you mean to – you can ‘stab to wound’ with much more confidence. Also, very unlikely you’ll accidentally stab a passerby.
Obligatory Cryptonomicon quote (sorry for the language):

“Any advice for a young Marine about to ship out?” Lieutenant Reagan asks.

“If you have ten Nips running at you screaming, shoot the one with the sword first,” Shaftoe says.

“Ah, smarrrt,” Reagan says, crinkling his eyes. “You shoot him because he’s the officer, right?”
“No, fuckhead!” Shaftoe yells. “You shoot him because he’s got a sword! You ever have anyone run at you waving a fucking sword?”

Slack, I doubt i’m the first to use ‘over the top’ rhetoric. Actually, i don’t think that rhetoric is all that over the top. it’s just not wrapped up in a bunch of PC ‘if, then’ statements to make it more palatable to soccer moms.

Belle #87: Understood. I thought for a second Singapore was even stricter than I thought :)

Doctor Slack:
That’s totally unfair: do you have any idea how many kids soccer games I’ve had to sit through?

Besides, the two most wicked shots I’ve run into at the range are indeed by most definitions soccer moms.

What about crossbows?

Donald Graham didn’t like what he saw one February evening on I-95 in Massachusetts. Two men in a car were tailgating a woman driver, flashing their lights in a threatening manner.

Indignant, Mr. Graham began following the men closely, flashing his own lights. After about eight miles of mutual antagonism, the men stopped on an access road and got out of their cars.

At some point during the resulting altercation, Mr. Graham, 54, a retired bookkeeper and minister, produced a hunting crossbow from his trunk and released a 29-inch arrow into the chest of Michael Blodgett, one of the other motorists. Mr. Blodgett, 42, later died at an area hospital.