- Common Sense Flame Regulation

Nicholas Kristof needs to feel better about himself, and he has a host of childish new laws he’d like to see enacted in order to prove it. They won’t make you any safer, or improve your life in any way – but they will give the authorities the tools they need to arbitrarily force their political views on a percentage of the population. And since that view matches Kristof's, he naturally thinks that would be great. As usual, he’s not worried about the effect of these laws at all; only their intent. That’s right – liberals are thinking about gun regulation again.

A crazy person shot some people in Arizona, so Kristof thinks it’s time to start infringing on the rights of the non-crazy. He compares guns to cars and claims that we have made cars incredibly safe through regulation. It’s not true of course, and the data doesn’t support it. 40,000 Americans die in cars every year - far more than the 1,500 who are accidentally killed each year with firearms. (Which by the way is also far less than things like swimming pools and bicycles.) But it sounds good when he says it. And since that’s enough for the average NYTimes reader, I suppose it will now become a part of liberal self congratulatory dogma.

But if he really wanted to make a good analogy to gun regulation, he should compare gun regulation to regulating the use of fire instead.

Suppose the anti-fire lobby wanted all uses of fire regulated. They wanted you to have to register every fire making device you owned and only use it in government approved ways. You could only turn your stove on three times per day. If you turn it on more than that you are guilty of a crime punishable with 3 years in prison per additional use. And in an effort to aid compliance with the ‘common sense fire law’, the government can mandate timers that will automatically prevent that dangerous ‘4th usage’.

They can mount a breathalyzer on the stove and make it only turn on when you are sober. Or they can make sure it will turn on only during those hours of the day when the least fires are started. If that means you have to cook your dinner at 3:45 in the afternoon - so be it. It's really for your own good.

They can prevent your furnace from turning on at an unapproved time as well, and mandate that you only heat your food, your water and your home to certain temperatures. This will have the additional 'social benefit' of reducing your carbon footprint. Fire kills thousands every year after all, and does billions in property damage. It’s only common sense that we have some ‘reasonable regulation’ of it.

And how about portable lighters and matches? The government recognizes that some people might need them in pursuit of their jobs – but a person should only be allowed to buy one per month, and should have to demonstrate a ‘clear need’ to a judge in order to carry one on their person. They should all be registered of course so that if a fire starts we know who to hold accountable. And anyone who sells matches or a lighter to a child or other ‘unauthorized persons’ should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

Toward that end, maybe the govenrment can 'invest' some tax payer money in new technology to make a lighter only work if the thumb on the lever has the right fingerprint - or maybe we can customize the material that the lighter burns so that it will leave a 'tell tale' forensic tag in the soot of an unaccounted for blaze. And matches can all be stamped individually with a permanent microscopic serial number so when they're found at the scene we can determine who to arrest.

Naturally we should keep a list of people who the government feels are incapable of handling the responsibility of dealing with fire. The people on that list should simply move someplace warm and make it a point to keep lots of blankets in their house. The mentally ill should be on that list naturally. In fact, lets put ‘global warming deniers’ and Sarah Palin voters on that list too while we’re at it. We all know how crazy they must be right? After all – it’s just ‘common sense regulation’ of something that scares the pee pee out of liberals. It’s only ‘common sense’.

Honestly, it’s really tiring fighting the same fight with self satisfied ‘know it alls’ like Kristof. How many new ways do I have to figure out to say the same damned thing? How many times can they make the same idiotic mistakes (which others always have to pay the price for) before they finally learn?! Well they haven't yet I suppose so let me put that all important paragraph here:

Passing a raft of new gun regulations will not make anyone any safer. Criminals and the crazy are the ones who use guns to hurt people and they don’t give a rat’s patootie about your idiotic laws. This model of decision making where you punish the innocent in an attempt to effect the guilty, does not work. It’s never worked in the past. It still doesn’t work. and it's not going to work in the future. Ban any damned thing you want to and the people who commit crimes will still get them - or make them - or steal them. It makes no sense at all to try to control the actions of a few by limiting the (constitutionally protected) rights of the many.

Seriously – can’t you all just get your heads out of your butts for the two seconds it would require you to learn that one simple lesson? Honestly Kristof (and all you other people who think gun bans work) … just grow the F#@! up would ya?! It's not common sense, it's stupidity that ignores the facts and the data. It may make you feel better, but making you feel better about yourself should not be the basis for social policy.