Greg lent me his copy of Florida Firearms Law, Use & Ownership by Jon H. Gutmacher apparently because he wanted my blood pressure to start skyrocketing. I've only started reading it and already I'm pissed.

Gun ownership and usage is actually very a simple concept. Shooting someone or threatening someone with a gun without cause is a crime. Simply owning a 50 Browning Machine Gun and 20,000 rounds is not a crime. Pulling out your .22 and shooting your neighbor in his knee because he accidentally sprayed Round-Up on your lawn is illegal. Pulling out a .223 and shooting a person breaking into your house is justified.

However, as only lawyers can do, they've taken a simple concept and created a Byzantine labyrinth of rules, laws, gotchas, and catch twenty twos that one would suppose are put in place to provide the mechanisms for the justice system to dispense justice, however the reality is all it does is create criminals out of practically every person who wishes to exercise their rights to self defense.

One of the biggest steaming piles of horse shit is the 'definition of a firearm'. Blind men describing and elephant while actually touching a gazelle is a pretty good analogy.  The worst part of it all is the need to define a firearm.

Imagine this scenario. Some carpenter gets all whacked out on Wood Glue and saws off a few people's heads. The nannies in charge decide that assault saws should be regulated. Being that none of the pricks ever passed shop 101 doesn't stop them, by the way.

So they define a saw by the handle girth, the number of teeth, the angle of the teeth, and the age of its design. Hacksaws aren't covered, and neither are circular saws. If there are more than 100 teeth, you cannot buy it without a license even though you could still cut wood (or heads) with 50. Oh, saws longer than 20" are banned too.

The problem is that you're trying to define "saw" when what you should be doing is "defining crime".

That's what I'm getting from this book. All these stupid laws that are impossible to accurately follow do nothing to actually stop anything, all they do is make more "criminals". And we keep "amending our constitution" to make it harder to follow the law (and conversely harder to change the law back!).

You know what all this is like? The laws are written to be almost like the Zero-Intelligence Tolerance rules in grade schools. There is no way to write a law that covers 100% of every situation so you leave the details to a judge and jury. Instead, we're raised on a steady diet of having others think for us or simply giving up and buying into Zero-Tolerance.

Damn you Greg.