Here Come the Judge, Here Come the Judge

Tam at A View From the Porch has some unkind words about a popular handgun:

The continued sales success of the Taurus Judge and its spinoffs is the most damning condemnation of the general firearms and ballistics knowledge level of the average American shooter that I have ever seen.

And it's true. the Judge is a big, clunky, ponderous handgun that--contrary to what you'd assume about a "handheld shotgun"--fires some of the weakest shotgun shells around, 2 1/2" .410 cartridges, which are notably less powerful than common defensive handgun rounds. Taurus' attempt to fix this problem, the Magnum Edition Judge, makes the gun even longer and heavier, comically so, and manages to bring it up into the power range of a standard .45 or .357 handgun round. It's a gun that does nothing particularly well, and yet it sells like hotcakes to people who hear nothing more than "handheld shotgun".

But I'm not dismayed by the Judge's success. I think it's awesome. People buy all kinds of things based on hype and cosmetics without properly researching them. What the Judge's popularity means isn't that Americans are getting less literate in ballistics; it means that more guns are being bought by people outside the gun community. It means the market for guns is becoming a bit more like the market for cars and cameras and toasters. If there's one thing Americans can learn from foreign countries like Great Britain and New Jersey, it's that when only devoted enthusiasts are buying guns, gun rights are in serious danger. Long live the Judge, and long live underinformed consumers.

I had no idea...

...that Simpsons opening sequence was designed by Banksy.

Smell like a monster

Old man gun safety

Talk guns with an obsessive gunnie for a little while, and you'll become aware of a conflict in the gun world: casual gun owners and gun manufacturers are in love with a multiplicity of safety mechanisms, while more devoted gun aficionados don't like all the superfluous mechanical devices complicating their serious tools. Smith and Wesson has generated plenty of grumbling by including an internal trigger lock in all their revolvers, for example, and gunnies will go on and on about the new "lawyered-up" versions of the Ruger MkII pistol, which have added a magazine safety and a loaded chamber indicator. The only real safety, they say, is between your ears. All the doodads just create opportunities for malfunction and teach you bad habits.

It turns out this is nothing new. British firearms enthusiasts were arguing about the value of "safety" features in guns at least a century and a half ago:



In this respect Mr. Adams's pistol excels all others that have hitherto been made. It shoots with one action. That, in fact, is the first requisite of a good military pistol--namely, that it can be seized with one hend, right or left, and fired in a moment with a single draw of the trigger finger. To pull up the hammer, as in Colt's, is a superfluous and most disadvantageous drawback; while a double action, as in Tranter's [which used a second trigger to cock the hammer], is a similar error, as one cannot be expected to play the fiddle on a pistol when in action. But it is said that a pistol is more dangerous when it can be fired by a draw of the finger. Exactly; and that is the very reason that it is the best. The sharpest razor is the most dangerous for children or persons who do not know how to use it. But the sharpest razor is the best because it is the sharpest. And so it is with Adams's pistol. The very quality which makes it preeminently good for service is the quality that makes it dangerous in the hands of boys or bunglers. A pistol that requires two actions to fire is more safe in a house than one that requires only a single action; one that required three would be still more safe; and one that would not go off at all, as sometimes happens with those that have complex and fanciful notions attached to them, would be perfectly safe. Adams's pistol is not constructed for what is absurdly termed safety (which is procured by blunting the razor), but for action--for the most rapid action that can be executed with the simplest effort. It is the elementary pistol, and the best for military service because it is elementary.

Knock-knock

Consumerist has an odd readership. On the one hand, they have a faction of stereotypical modern-US-liberals, prone to seeing racism and evil robber barons as the root of all ills, and sometimes seeming unable to conceive of any solution to any problem that doesn't involve government intervention, even where they acknowledge the problem was caused by government intervention in the first place.

But then they can post a story about banks sending lockbreakers to bust down the doors of occupied houses, and the overwhelming majority of responders say some variation on "this will end badly. I would've shot the guy."

At the moment, there's only one person angsting about how _mean_ it would be to shoot somebody who's "only doing his job".

Now, Consumerist does also have a faction of libertarian readers who use it to help choose who to do business with and how to do business with them. But this almost unanimous consensus proves one thing: Americans believe in self defense, they aren't shy about using guns to achieve it, and that belief in self-help isn't naturally tied to either end of the liberal/conservative spectrum. We've been pushed for a long time to believe it was by a Democratic party run by anti-gun metropolitan politicians, but that mask has cracked. It's no wonder gun control can't get a foothold anywhere these days.

Perspectives

A Consumerist article covers this:

Kmart Warns Spanish Speakers Not to Open Stuff Before They Buy.

It includes a photo of a little handwritten note on a Kmart shelf, written in Spanish, asking customers not to open packages.

Is your first reaction:

A - "I guess in some Spanish-speaking cultures it's normal to open packages and inspect the merchandise before you buy, and some recent immigrants shopping in that store don't yet know that it's a faux pas in the US. Interesting cultural difference."

- or -

B - "That's racist!"

I thought the first. The majority of Consumerist readers seem to think the second. Are they overreacting, or is my white male privilege blinding me to the daily oppression of the Latino shopper?

On Headlines

Because it's much punchier than "twentysomething female undergraduate psychology students from Ontario self-report more culpability than twentysomething male undergraduate psychology students from Ontario":

This just in! Women apologize more than men!