If guns that look like (but do not function like) military assault rifles are evil, then all we need to do to dispel the evil is to make them cuter.

Hello Kitty AR-15 - evil black rifle meets cute and cuddly

They identify "evil features" they can use to generically classify these "military style" weapons in sweeping terms. Of course these features, such as plastic pistol grips, barrel shrouds, and bayonet lugs have absolutely nothing to do with the firearms potential lethality in the real world and are merely cosmetic features. After all, it really doesn't matter what color the firearm is if it fires the same ammunition right? Well, in the "spirit" of the California Assault Weapon Ban I decided to do my best to alleviate the fears of my fellow citizens and gun-banning legislators when I put together a new AR-15 for my wife.

3D printing has been getting a lot of hype, but the question of obtaining all the plastic always seemed a huge limitation. Just what we need, more plastic, right? But now (or coming soon), there's Filabot, which recycles many household plastics into filament for 3D printers. So that soda bottle, or clamshell from the deli, could take on a whole new life. This could get interesting.

Filabot Turns Your Plastic Junk Into Material for 3-D Printers

Filabot promises to help turn your plastic crap in to 3-D printed fanciness, alleviating one of the biggest sustainability problems for 3-D printing.

...

Unlike some of the more outlandish promises about how 3-D printing might save the world, McNaney’s project has a point. The world is awash in disposable plastic containers like soda and water bottles. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that junk could be re-used on site?

About two years ago, I posted about how the U.S. put the wrong Statue of Liberty on a stamp. Now Canada has made a similar amusing blunder: putting the wrong maple leaf on the new Canadian dollar 20 bill:

The Bank of Canada has barked up the wrong maple tree with its new plastic banknotes, using a foreign Norway maple leaf as the emblem on the notes instead of the sugar maple that the country has on its national flag, an eagle-eyed Canadian botanist says.

In recent discussions I've seen several people ask why anyone would need a firearm capable of firing more than N rounds (for arbitrary N) without reloading. The experience of Officer Peter Soulis provides some valuable lessons. While gunfights such as this are rare -- most defensive gun uses, by police or civilians, don't even result in shots being fired, much less the sort of firefight that happened here -- understanding worst-case possibilities is important for anyone who wants to be prepared for emergencies.

(The prose of this piece from Law Officer magazine shades to the purple -- the bad guy is grinning with blood lust, the hero full of calm resolve -- but let's not let that distract us.)

Soulis was shot during a traffic stop:

Instantly, he realized he'd made a grievous blunder. Grinning with blood lust, Palmer [a pseudonym -tms] lunged across the seat and shoved a Smith & Wesson Sigma up into firing position. Before Soulis could react, the S&W barked flame, driving a 9mm solidly into the center of his chest. The impact knocked Soulis back slightly, but his vest stopped the bullet.

Palmer was out of the Toyota a split-second later, firing the gun at him over the roof. There was no other cover nearby, so Soulis went down onto one knee behind the front fender to put the Toyota between them. But, at the same instant, two rounds crashed through his left arm, one just above the wrist and the other dead center on the forearm. Another struck him in the left thigh, although he wouldn't become aware of it until later.

...

Soulis was also becoming apprehensive about his wounds. The bullet hole in his left wrist was an ugly, swollen mess that made him wonder if he would have enough dexterity to reload...

Are the Jobs Walmart Is Promising Veterans Any Good? (Video) | The Nation

Walmart drew positive press and White House praise this morning for pledging to hire 100,000 veterans over the next five years. The plan, first reported by the The New York Times, was formally announced by Walmart US President Bill Simon in a keynote address at a National Retail Federation conference. It was panned by labor activists, dozens of whom marched through the Jacob Javits convention center lobby following Simon’s speech.

...

“You’re still subject to all the crap that comes from working for Walmart,” Owen told The Nation. “Extremely low wages, poor benefits and everything else. If that’s the best that’s available for veterans, then there is something wrong.”

Making the rounds: General Stanley McChrystal's curious statement about guns has been getting a lot of likes from gun control advocates:

"...an M-4 Carbine fires a .223 caliber round, which is 5.56 millimeter at about 3,000 feet per second. When it hits the human body, the effects are devastating. It’s designed to do that and that’s what our soldiers ought to carry. I, personally, don’t think there’s any need for that kind of weaponry on the streets, and, particularly, around the schools in America. I believe that we’ve got to take a serious look."

General McChrystal seems somehow to have missed the point rather widely. If someone is attacking you, presenting an immediate threat to your life (or that of another innocent person), you need a weapon that will stop them quickly and reliably.

That means, unfortunately, devastating their bodies. There is no reliable way of quickly rendering an attacker harmless that does not involve a potentially lethal level of damage to their body. I wish we could give everyone a phaser set to stun, but it's not the case. It's unpleasant to contemplate, but the whole point of defensive firearm use is to devastate someone's body.

General McChrystal was speaking about 5.56mm rifle rounds. Rifles -- of all sorts -- are used in only about 3% of homicides in the U.S. If we pretend that we could make all rifles disappear, and that people who would use them to commit crimes wouldn't just substitute handguns, and that no one ever uses them defensively, the impact on violent crime would be still be statistically imperceptible. So the general may be knowledgeable about warfare, but his statement here suggests he doesn't know much about violent crime.

It's worth noting that at close range, that small but fast bullet is not much more lethal (in some case, less lethal) than a larger but slower bullet from a large-caliber handgun.

And compared to other rifle rounds, like the sort used in the M1 rifles soldiers carried in WWII or by "big game" hunters, the 5.56 is actually less powerful; it's an intermediate-power round, not a high-power one.

Stumbled upon in criminological reading: this report on gender differences in violent crime victimization. It is from 1994, when violent crime was near it's peak; more recent data shows that violent crime against both males and females has decreased sharply since then. But I expect that the general patterns of differences in how violent crime affects men and women differently would still hold true today. A more recent report with a less detailed analysis shows that women are still more likely to know their attackers while men are more likely to be attacked by strangers; important stuff to consider as we work to reduce violence against all people.

This report examines how the sexes do or do not differ in the
patterns and number of violent victimizations they experienced.
Using the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and the
Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHR) of the FBI, the report
presents selected characteristics of the victims, incidents, and
offenders.

...

* During 1994 men experienced almost 6.6 million violent
victimizations; women experienced 5 million. For every 3
violent victimizations of males, there were 2 of females.

* Females were more likely to be victimized by persons whom they
knew (62% or 2,981,479 victimizations) while males were more
likely to be victimized by strangers (63%, or 3,949,285).

* In 1994 for every 5 violent victimizations of a female by an
intimate, there was 1 of a male. Intimates committed over
900,000 victimizations of females and about 167,000
victimizations of males.

* For homicides in which the victim-offender relationship was
known, an intimate killed 31% of female victims age 12 or older
(1,394) and 4% of male victims 12 or older (669).

* Women separated from their spouses had a violent victimization
rate (128 per 1,000) over 12 times that of separated men (79 per
1,000), divorced men (77 per 1,000), and divorced women (71 per
1,000).

* When multiple offenders committed the violence, both males
(79%) and females (65%) were more likely to be victimized by
strangers than by persons whom they knew.

* Most violent victimizations did not involve the use of
weapons. Offenders were armed in 34% of victimizations of males
(2,047,502) and in 24% of victimizations of females (1,128,100).

* Female victims were more likely than males to report robberies
and simple assaults to law enforcement agencies.

* In assaults, but not robberies, females were more likely than
males to sustain an injury. When injured during a violent
crime, male victims were more likely than female victims to be
seriously hurt.

* Females were more likely to be victimized at a private home
(their own or that of a neighbor, friend, or relative) than in
any other place. Males were most likely to be victimized in
public places such as businesses, parking lots, and open areas.

I guess the shark-mounted version is just a matter of time now. German Military Laser Destroys Targets Over 1Km Away

First, the system sliced through a 15mm- (~0.6 inches) thick steel girder from a kilometer away. Then, from a distance of two kilometers, it shot down a handful of drones as they nose-dived toward the surface at 50 meters per second....

The Independent reports on how the Obama administration has continued Bush II's policy of rendition -- the practice of holding and interrogating terrorism suspects in other countries without due process. (Sadly, I expect Obama apologists will make the same sort of excuses for this as they did for the NDAA and for drone murder.)

The men are the latest example of how the Obama administration has embraced rendition — the practice of holding and interrogating terrorism suspects in other countries without due process — despite widespread condemnation of the tactic in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

...

Because of the secrecy involved, it is not known how many renditions have taken place during Obama's first term. But his administration has not disavowed the practice. In 2009, a White House task force on interrogation and detainee transfers recommended that the government be allowed to continue using renditions, but with greater oversight, so that suspects were not subject to harsh interrogation techniques, as some were during the George W. Bush administration.

...

Lawyers assigned to represent the defendants in federal court in Brooklyn said the men were interrogated for months in Djibouti even though no charges were pending against them — something that would be prohibited in the United States.

...

Harry Batchelder Jr., an attorney for the third suspect, Madhi Hashi, 23, concurred. "Let's just put it this way: They were sojourning in Djibouti, and all of a sudden, after they met their friendly FBI agents and CIA agents — who didn't identify themselves — my client found himself stateless and in a U.S. court," said Batchelder, whose client is a native of Somalia who grew up in Britain.

The sequence described by the lawyers matches a pattern from other rendition cases in which U.S. intelligence agents have secretly interrogated suspects for months without legal oversight before handing over the prisoners to the FBI for prosecution.