Coming Soon to the California Hit List: BB and Pellet Guns

From "California Dreamin'," my Rights Watch column in the Sept. 2005 issue of GUNS Magazine, on newsstands now:

"Pellet Guns and BB Guns: Dangerous Playthings on the Open Market," by the Senate Office of Research, calls for regulating air guns with the same restrictions as firearms.

Its author is a former Los Angeles Times hack, the SOR Director is a former aide to termed out (anti-gun) Senate President Pro-Tem John Burton, and the report was prepared at the “request” of Jack Scott, another notorious gun banner.

To prove how dangerous air guns are, the report cites an instance where “[a] 16-year-old boy sustained a severe midbrain injury from a self-inflicted combination BB/pellet gun wound through the roof of his mouth.”

The “study” states “anyone can get a pellet gun with a muzzle velocity of 1,000 feet per second—more powerful than some .45 automatics.”

To back the claim that a pellet gun has “more striking power than many classes of handgun firearms,” it provides an endnote—but one that references back to the original claim, in a nice bit of circuitous deception.

You can read this bit of taxpayer-funded subversive nonsense here.

All you need to know about "study" author Max Vanzi: "Max has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley."

Ditto for SOR Director Donald Moulds: "...Don was a Visiting Scholar and Teaching Fellow at Harvard University, a Ford Foundation Scholar, and a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Cultural Values and Ethics and at the Program for the Study of Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security..."