Guns, Dogs, and Cats

John McCaslin, in his regular Washington Times column, takes on a typical mix of disparate topics. First:

Arguing that criminals, not guns, are the root cause of crime and violence in America, a veteran congressman has reintroduced legislation to ensure the constitutional right of all Americans to own a gun and unload it in defense of self, family and home. The alternative, says Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett, Maryland Republican, is found right here in the nation's capital, a city that banned the private ownership of handguns and "was rewarded with a higher homicide rate that now ranks amongst the highest in the country." The congressman recalls the words of Thomas Jefferson, that gun restrictions "disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes."

One of the least valid arguments made against gun control is the one that says a certain city or state has very restrictive laws, yet it has a very high gun crime rate. The purpose of that argument is to try to prove that gun control won't work, and criminals will always have guns.

The argument is valid only as long as gun control laws are no more than a hodge-podge of state and local restrictions. In the case of Washington, D.C., in particular, all anyone has to do is take a short drive into another jurisdiction. That's why federal gun control is essential, and for many types of weapons it already works. Otherwise, you could legally park a howitzer in your front yard and have a machine gun bunker out back, just in case the neighbors attack. Read more about gun control here.

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Then McCaslin ventured into the animal world:

We reported recently that investigators of voter fraud in California determined that of the state's pets illegally registered to vote, cats tend to vote Republican and dogs tend to vote Democrat.

Now, a Maryland physicist writing a "dissertation on dichotomies in the differential equations for universal 'expectation values' as a function of time applying to all individual biosystems" is questioning the scientific method and authority of fraud investigators in reaching their conclusions.

"I remind you," Seamus Finbar of Annapolis writes to Inside the Beltway, of "a higher authority than any statistical poll; the authority of the ubiquitous existentialist Dr. Franz Kafka in his immutable and unchallengeable assessment of all dogs: 'The totality of all knowledge and of all questions and answers lies in the dog.'

"Frequently I consult my 165 pound Rottweiler-Mastiff when I am stumped in the universal language mathematics. His name is Max," says the physicist.

"Naturally Max is a Republican," he continues. "Even his eyes are reddish, not blueish. They reflect the color in each state of our republic last Election Day. Max snarled when he read the title of your [column]: 'Left-leaning dogs.' "

As for cats, Mr. Finbar educates: "Cats live within the boundary conditions of their own solipsistic little world; are unstable and unpredictable even today. They are loyal only to those who feed them and stroke their fur. Seems that cats are Democrats to me."

My colleague Cat takes great exception to that last sentence. Read this, and you'll understand why.