Howard Dean has both taken some flak and gotten some credit for being at least a bit softer on guns than his Democratic competitors. Recently he has been given to dodging Second Amendment questions by saying he believes in letting states decide for themselves. It will be interesting to see, if he should be elected, whether he applies this rather extreme form of federalism to other constitutionally protected rights.
In the meantime, i.e., before his election, his handlers should try to see to it that he says as little about gun-related issues as possible. Otherwise he’s liable to blurt out more embarrassing comments like this one in Harlem this morning, when he and Gore urged the other Democratic candidates to cease their criticism of Dean. As William Saletan pointed out in SLATE, Dean
thanked Gore “particularly [for] those words that said that the 11th Commandment now also ought to apply to Democrats. As you know, I’ve been picking buckshot out of my rear end in some of these debates, and we’re going up to New Hampshire tonight and see if I do some more.”
Dean the gun nut obviously doesn’t know the difference between buckshot and birdshot, although he most assuredly would if were ever shot with both. Bird shot you can pick out, unless you were shot at close range. Buckshot, however, is a completely different story. A round of birdshot contains hundreds of tiny pellets; a 12 gauge round of #1 buckshot (it comes in different sizes), by contrast, contains twenty .30 caliber pellets and #3 buckshot contains twenty .25 caliber pellets. One tester observed that “the power of a blast of buckshot is equal to 10 rounds of 9mm bullets.”
If anyone within debating distance of Dean blasted him with a load of buckshot, he would not be pulling them out of his rear end, which is apparently where he got the comment quoted above.
Keeping his head nearby
“I’ve been picking buckshot out of my rear end in some of these debates,” said Howard Dean, as reported by William Saletan in Slate. John Rosenberg begs to differ: Dean…