For those who’d like to get their minds off the War Against Islamism, and contemplate lighter fare, consider the possibility that Yellowstone could explode.

This is due any day now, geologically speaking (meaning any time from tomorrow to tens of thousands of years from now), and when it does, we won’t have to worry about global warming any more–it will mean (among other things) several years of planet-wide winter, and perhaps even a return to the glacial period that we just came out of a few thousand years ago.

Try writing the environmental impact statement for blasting much of western North America with magma and ash, and then encasing Canada, much of the US, Europe, and Russia in a couple-mile thick sheet of ice…

Jeff Goldstein answers Brian Linse’ question about why there isn’t a “gun-show loophole.”

To really deal with this issue, we have to have a common understanding of what the word “loophole” means.

Most people take it to mean a gap in the law that permits those who take advantage of it to bypass the intent of the law. At least, that would be my definition.

So, as Glenn says (as quoted in Jeff’s response), those who call this a “loophole” are making an implicit argument (but not one that many of them want to make explicitly, because they know that once it’s out in the open, that they’ll find few who agree with them)–they are saying that the intent of the law is to ensure that no guns are ever sold from one person to another without a background check.

Thus, those who complain about gun-show loopholes would have to show (perhaps from the findings or report language of the legislation) that this was indeed Congressional intent.

If they can’t do so, then they should stop disingenuously calling it a loophole, and call it exactly what it is–a legitimate (and intended) exemption for non-dealers.

[Update at 8 AM PDT]

Eric Olsen has weighed in:

I can honestly say that I do not know which is more important: a citizen’s right to unfettered access, or the seemingly obvious fact that the more guns there are, and the more people who have them, the more likely it is that someone will get shot.

“Seemingly obvious” != True

Certainly, in a society with zero guns, the chances that someone will get shot with a gun is zero. But beyond that, once guns are introduced, even a crude game-theory analysis will show that there’s no obvious simple correlation between numbers of guns and numbers of gunshot victims–there are too many variables, and the payoff matrices become too complex. Probably Lott has done as much work on this as anyone. And his work is not just theoretical–he can back it up with hard statistical data from the various experiments in various states.

For instance, if only criminals have guns (which is, unfortunately, the end result, if unintended, of many measures urged by gun-control proponents), then the number of gunshot victims might be high, or low, depending on whether the intent of the criminals is to cause mayhem, or to simply extort the citizenry. If the latter, it would be possible for them to get what they want by simply brandishing the weapons, against which the law abiding would have no defenses.

If the goal is mayhem, and the criminals just shoot people for the hell of it (which, unfortunately, some criminals do) then allowing criminals only to have guns will probably maximize gunshot victims.

In the latter case, if concealed carry is allowed, the citizenry can now defend itself, and the number of guns increases. Does this increase the number of shootings? It depends. If the weapons are used to deter the criminals, the number of shootings actually goes down. If the deterrence doesn’t work (say, because the criminals are crazed on drugs, or otherwise irrational), the shootings might go up, or go down, but at least it’s criminals being shot instead of just the law-abiding.

But to me, it’s not at all obvious (seemingly or otherwise), that “more guns means more gunshot victims.” And in fact, that’s precisely why Lott titled his book, “More guns, less crime.”

A day later. This is really serious. I wonder what the problem is?

[Update at 7:46 AM PDT]

Well, I managed to get to my column. But the main page is still loading very slowly, and I can’t get to the front page of the “Views” section.

There’s a new history of the Space Shuttle over at the NASA web site. I haven’t read it, but it’s written by Tom Heppenheimer, who’s usually pretty scrupulous in his work, and has never been much of a NASA cheerleader. So I’ll give it a qualified endorsement, for those who are interested in how the Shuttle came to be the way it is, warts and all. I do hope to getting around to reading it soon and doing an actual review.

In a major turn of events in the story yesterday that many thought was another “hate-crime” dragging of a black man, it turned out that an angry girlfriend actually stabbed him in the, er…behind.

In a major turn of events in the story yesterday that many thought was another “hate-crime” dragging of a black man, it turned out that an angry girlfriend actually stabbed him in the, er…behind.

In a major turn of events in the story yesterday that many thought was another “hate-crime” dragging of a black man, it turned out that an angry girlfriend actually stabbed him in the, er…behind.

More progress on the nanotech front–single-molecule transistors using a single cobalt atom as a gate. It’s going to be hard to get much smaller than that. No word on how long until we have practical devices.

Charles Murtaugh proposes building an undersea colony to test out social conditions in a space colony, with the rationale that it is a similarly harsh environment, and could prove out predictions about the state of civil liberties in such a place.

There are a couple of problems with this. The first is that I don’t know anyone who wants to live at the bottom of the ocean (I know lots of folks who’d like to live in space). I won’t go into the reasons for this right now, but just state it as a fact, at least in my experience. I’ll be interested in hearing of any counterexamples.

The second is that the undersea environment is much, much harsher than the space environment. The only thing that’s easier about it is the cost of accessing it. Everything else, from a habitat-design standpoint is tremendously more difficult.

It’s much easier to design to a vacuum than many atmospheres of negative pressure. The hazards of firing a gun in a well-designed space colony are vastly overblown (pardon the expression), but damaging a negative pressure vessel with a large amount of overpressure would result in an instantaneous and catastrophic collapse.

The third is that space provides interesting and potentially-useful environments for industrial production (large amounts of energy and materials, cheap vacuum, weightlessness). If the ocean were a good environment for technology development/production, the dolphins would have beaten us to the technological punch.

For these reasons (and others) I think that we’ll have space colonies long before we have undersea colonies, but I’m interested in counterarguments.

The good news is that my Fox News column is up. The bad news is that the Fox web site is down, and has been for the past few hours, so I don’t know what it looks like, or the URL. I’m guessing it’s a denial of service attack, and I’m told they’re working it.

[Update at 2PM PDT]

The Fox site is still pretty much shut down. I’ve managed to get a few bytes and partial pages, but they’ve got big-time problems. Hopefully they’ll get it sorted out before my column is replaced with the next one…