Making Assumptions

The old saying about avoiding assumptions because when you assume you make an ass out of you and me is correct. Yesterday, a number of non-gun bloggers saw the notice about hearings to be held by the Senate Judiciary Committe next week. The title of the hearings was “Firearms in Commerce: Assessing the Need for Reform in the Federal Regulatory Process”. They immediately thought this was some backdoor effort by Democrats to get back at us bitter clingers now since they might not have a chance after the coming elections.

Gun bloggers, on the other hand, were not so ready to jump to this conclusion. Instead most readily connected these hearings to the BATFE Reform Act when has been working its way through Congress. The House version, HR 2296, has 240 co-sponsors and the Senate bill, S. 941, has 36 co-sponsors including Pat Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

And guess what? The primary focus of the hearings will be on S. 941. I have a “for background purposes” release on No Lawyers – Only Guns and Money that I received this morning from Erica Chabot, the Committe Press Secretary.

The bottom line is the most obvious answer is often the correct answer. It was in this case.

7 thoughts on “Making Assumptions”

  1. How am I supposed to get my workout if I can’t jump to conclusions?

    (Also, anyone remember “The Phantom Tollbooth”?)

  2. The legislation will create a net revenue increase of $4 million over 10 years. Where is the money coming from? What concerns me is that this is a tax when it is not be presented as such.

  3. It should be pointed out that making incorrect assumptions makes an ass out of you and me. Mathematicians make assumptions all the time, yet they come to some interesting conclusions! (Occasionally they make wrong conclusions, which I won’t go into here…)

    On the other hand, economists make assumptions all the time to simplify their model-making. Sometimes such things backfire on them, though, because they miss something that needs to be taken into account…but then, if they didn’t simplify things, they’d be stuck with something over-complicated, called “pure, chaotic real life”, and they would never get any work done.

  4. Well that was the case unless you were a threeper blog. But I am generalizing as not ALL of them went crazy, just most.

  5. Steve – if it’s supposed to come from this bill, it’s probably mostly coming from the fines that will result from the new “serious/minor violation” scheme it implements. It has lots of revenue potential, assuming it doesn’t put most dealers out of business.

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