Gun Shows Don’t Cause Sky to Fall

This has to be a pretty awful thing for the Brady Campaign to read:

A new study finds no evidence that gun shows lead to substantial increases in either gun-related homicides or suicides.

The University of Michigan and University of Maryland study also shows that tighter regulation of gun shows does not appear to reduce the number of firearms-related deaths.

That makes sense, since most of the people at gun shows are people like us.  Speaking of gun shows, I have the machine built with Ubuntu 8.04 that will run our touchscreen version of O-Match at the Allentown Gun Show this weekend.  It’s unfortunate, but the O-Match application phones back to the mother ship in order to download the questions.  I’m guessing NRA set it up this way so that if Obama said anything else stupid, it could be added to the mix.  Hopefully they have a standalone shockwave version that could run on my machine without a network connection. If not, I’ll have to figure out how to tether the machine through a cell phone connection, and hope they have cell phone reception in the hall.

Back to the original topic, I’ve been convinced that the reason the gun control people target gun shows, is because it’s one of our cheif organization and outreach tools.  They have to know that very few crime guns are traced to shows.  They can read the statistics as well as we can.

4 thoughts on “Gun Shows Don’t Cause Sky to Fall”

  1. Is the O-Match grabbing an xml file or something via http request? If so, maybe you could tweak your dns settings in Ubuntu, and spoof/mirror the gunbanobama.com uri to serve the question file locally?

    I haven’t really worked with Flash in years though, so I forget how it does these things.

  2. That’s what I was wondering. It maintains a constant link to the mother ship though. I might have to sniff the connection and see if it’s requesting anything that I could just download. I was hoping not to have to get into reverse engineering how it works… time is limited.

  3. Maybe tighter regulation of beef-jerkey would reduce choking deaths. Gun-shows are get-togethers for People of the Gun, an attraction point. The stuff sold isn’t especially marked-down or anything – most sellers know the value and price accordingly – even the peripheral crap.

  4. A new study proves what everyone knows
    Terrorists don’t buy their arms at gun shows
    Brady’s facts don’t quite fit
    Must be tough to admit
    There is no real gun show loophole to close!

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