August 11, 2026

Spending, not guns, on our minds

A funny thing happened to President Obama on his way to increasing federal regulation of firearms. Members of Congress noticed that gun control wasn’t a top priority for their constituents and handed the President his first major legislative loss. Instead, Americans are still more concerned about the economy and the state of our fiscal house. […]

Guns and Social Network Reactions

I think it would be safe to say that very few of political watchers had gun regulation on the radar in the days before the Sandy Hook shootings. Since…well, it’s hard to talk about anything else (and not just because the fiscal cliff story is the least-interesting-and-most-difficult-to-understand-but-perhaps-most-important-story this year).

With that in mind, I asked a couple friends over at PoliticIt to take a look at what trends they saw in social media immediately before and immediately after the Newtown shooting. (PoliticIt, if you’ve not heard of it before, is the brainchild of Josh Light and Sterling Morris. They collect data from social networks, the internet, and “the real world” to create a measure of politicians digital influence that accurately predicts electoral success.)

They showed me some interesting things.

Larry Correia on gun regulation and arming teachers

The more I hear, the more I think we need not only need a conversation about guns and mental health, but we probably ought to learn more about what we are talking about before we go around maligning them. In the last couple days, I’ve heard people in the news attack “semi-automatic” weapons (newsflash: almost every single gun in the world is a semi-automatic weapon–it just means that after you fire a round, a new round is pushed into the cylinder so you can fire another round) and “assault” rifles, a term that didn’t really exist until the mid-1980s and which creation only served to popularize the Bushmaster.

If you read nothing else, you should set aside a few minutes and read author Larry Correia’s (see a review of his first book, a best seller, here) two-bits. A former gun store owner and a Utah Concealed and Carry Weapon permit trainer, he provides some interesting insights to the debate