A two-fer from Reason magazine's blog

A couple of good stories from the last few days at Hit & Run, the Reason blog...

Terminology and narrative shaping galore...

But terminology is important, and the casual use of assault weapon puts a thumb on the scale in favor of prohibition by implying that the phrase, which was invented by the anti-gun lobby, describes an objectively defined class of especially dangerous guns, as opposed to an arbitrary category of firearms whose looks offend activists and legislators. Notice how Gabriel implicitly acknowledges the latter reality even while using a term designed to confuse and scare people. The Times, which editorially has always supported bans based on this fraud, also has a history of uncritically referring to "assault weapons" in its news coverage. In a December 21 story about a surge in gun purchases that seems to be driven by fear of new restrictions, Stephanie Clifford highlights this bias by using the phrase "so-called modern sporting rifles" while mistakenly describing semiautomatiuc military-style guns sold to civilians as "assault rifles," which are guns carried by soldiers that can fire automatically. The implication is that the term used by gun manufacturers to describe their own products is suspect, while the term used by people who want to ban those products (or, as in this case, a garbled and plainly inaccurate version of that term) can be treated as a neutral descriptor.

The second piece goes deep into the story of black market firearms worldwide, and is worth devoting some time to.  Solid info throughout and some really great sourcing links...

Gun Restrictions Have Always Bred Defiance, Black Markets

Csaszar points out that, after Austria prohibited pump-action shotguns in 1995, only 10,557 of the estimated 60,000 such guns in private hands were surrendered or registered.
And when Germany imposed gun registration in 1972, he says, owners complied by filing the appropriate paperwork on 3.2 million firearms. This was a bit awkward, since estimates of civilian stocks were in the 17-20 million range.
The low level of compliance with registration laws gives a good idea of where many of the world’s illegal guns come from, but it isn’t the whole story. If people are keeping firearms in defiance of their governments’ wishes, they obviously want to own guns no matter what the powers-that-be intend. And as has proven true in so many cases, demand usually provides its own supply.

So we get a lesson in how statists will use semantics to their benefit to pursue a prohibitive policy, and an even more stark reminder of how ineffective prohibition really is.

Supply and demand, as immutable as the First Law of Thermodynamics.