{"id":154,"date":"2002-10-08T10:16:39","date_gmt":"2002-10-08T14:16:39","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=154"},"modified":"2002-10-08T10:16:39","modified_gmt":"2002-10-08T14:16:39","slug":"gun-laws-and-the-maryland-sniper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/?p=154","title":{"rendered":"Gun Laws and the Maryland Sniper"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I oppose mild gun laws, because they don&#8217;t work and cultivating disrespect for the law by passing ineffective laws is a bad idea; and I oppose harsh gun laws, because they <em>do<\/em> work, and disarming the citizenry is a worse idea. That said, I suspect the shootings in Maryland are exactly the sort of crime that Draconian gun laws would discourage. Susanna Cornett <A HREF=\"http:\/\/bias.blogfodder.net\/archives\/2002_10.html#003220\">plausibly speculates<\/A> &#8212; Susanna is <em>always<\/em> plausible &#8212; that the Maryland perp is employed, reasonably functional, without a criminal record, and an ardent gun hobbyist. (Also white, male and in his 30s or 40s, which is less relevant for our purposes.) If owning guns were essentially illegal, wouldn&#8217;t shooting sprees of this type by otherwise law-abiding people be among the first things to go?<P ALIGN=LEFT>The Brady Campaign, oddly, says it will <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.wtopnews.com\/index.php?nid=104&#038;sid=9552\">&#8220;refuse to capitalize&#8221;<\/A> on the shootings in Maryland, when to do so would be far less dishonest than usual.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I oppose mild gun laws, because they don&#8217;t work and cultivating disrespect for the law by passing ineffective laws is a bad idea; and I oppose harsh gun laws, because they do work, and disarming the citizenry is a worse idea. That said, I suspect the shootings in Maryland are exactly the sort of crime <a href='https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/?p=154' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}