Things That Make Me Want to Parse My Eyes Out with a Sharp Stick

From today's NYT: My commentary in italics

November 23, 2004

Rare Weapon to Hunt Deer
By FOX BUTTERFIELD

The rifle that killed five Wisconsin hunters and wounded three more on Sunday was an SKS 7.62-millimeter semiautomatic assault weapon not normally used in hunting animals.
Which immediately begs the question: Who the fuck is it used to hunt?

"This is not a gun you go deer hunting with," said Lawrence Keane, senior vice president and general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry trade association.


The reason the SKS is not used by hunters, Mr. Keane said, is that it is designed for combat soldiers and is therefore underpowered for killing an animal like a deer with a single shot, the goal of good hunters.
Because the object of war is to make the other guy suffer. Therefore, you use an underpowered rifle that's going to make him think about why he's dying as he's doing it.

"The ethics of hunting are you don't want the animal to suffer needlessly," Mr. Keane said.
The ethics of kiling people, however, is a whole different thing.

Mr. Keane said he suspected that the man accused of the Wisconsin killings was not a trained hunter, since with the SKS he was carrying, he would have had to shoot a deer several times to kill it.

The SKS is a precursor of the AK-47 assault rifle. Though it has a longer barrel, it otherwise looks much like the AK-47. It has become popular in the United States among gun collectors, target shooters and some criminals, because it sells for less than $200, or more than $100 less than an AK-47, said Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Violence Policy Center, a gun control group.
Who knew death could be so cheap?

By executive order, President Bill Clinton barred the importing of Chinese- and Russian-made SKS rifles. But the Bush administration, Ms. Rand said, has specifically authorized the importing of SKS's from Yugoslavia and Albania.
Because we need to give economic support to peoples who spent most of the 1990's engaged in ethnic warfare that killeds thousands of them. Now they have all those extra guns and they need money.

It is not known where the SKS used in the Wisconsin shootings was manufactured.
But if it turns out that it was manufactured in China or Russia, then, as with everything that has gone wrong in the past 12 years, it must be William Jefferson Clinton's fault.