Frankly, I'm really sick of this whole thing.  There's a handy website called Google that dispatches these rumors with a simple query, but it seems that people would rather fly into hysterics over innuendo than check facts.

I am responding to the numerous daily emails I get about the matter by simply cutting and pasting the following into the reply box.  I also have a few printed copies to hand out to address personal queries.  Feel free to reprint and use this.

You do not, and will not, have to report your guns on your income tax forms.

This is at best a …

In September of 1993, America Online (AOL) granted Usenet access to its subscribers. The infrastructure was crippled by the sudden, overwhelming influx of new users, none of whom knew the protocols or cared to learn. These were the days when a 28.8k modem was considered screamingly fast, bandwidth was precious, nobody had the time to sift through countless "me too!" posts.

In early 1994, Dave Fischer referred to this period as the September that Never Ended, and the name stuck. Usenet was, for all intents, dead as a medium and would never recover.

11/05/08 will go down in history as the gun industry's version of this phenomenon. I have seen more lunacy in the last six months than I've seen in my entire life. I've heard conspiracies that would make Art Bell chortle, and trust me, that guy believed in everything. I thought it would die out, but it hasn't.

I got a call from an NRA rep this morning, asking me for my support on a "critical issue." OK, which one?

His response? HR 45, a bill that was introduced in January. I wrote about it in February, and it hasn't gained an inch of traction since. It's dead, people. Just like last year.

And yet, I'm getting frantic calls about it in May. It was the big story in America's First Freedom last month. Are they truly this far behind the curve? I don't think so.

So, why are they bugging me about it?

OK, I think I get it. A hostile alien race is planning an imminent attack on Earth. Conventional weapons are useless against them, but owing to their squishy physiology, the meager .380 ACP cartridge is the only thing that can stop them.

Am I close? Because that's the only reason I can see for the inexplicable shortage of .380. Some folks are stockpiling it like there's no tomorrow, while those who were late to the party seem to be going into apoplexy over the sudden shortage.

Demand quickly exhausted the supply, and now we're seeing crap like this:

Some guy yelled at me about this today. People seem to yell a great many political things at me lately. Frankly, it's all quite tiring. Anyhow, this doofus went of on an unsolicited rant about how President Obama was going to "shut off the internet at will."

Man, I thought, I gotta know how he can do that. So, I googled (is that a verb now?) "Obama shut down internet," and I was led to the documents for the Cybersecurity Act of 2009. The actual bills are S. 773 and 778. The first draft is here [pdf].

I skimmed through it and found that it echoed almost everything I'd heard about last year's CSIS report. Basically, the report acknowledged a few things that should have already been glaringly obvious:

That our government's computer infrastructure is vulnerable to attack and disruption,
That you can trust Congress, who are experts on these things, to throw tons of money at it if you like, and
It won't do much good.

So, in the interest of doing something, Congress came up with S. 773. It's a really professional-looking, well-organized proposal that's basically full of hot air. And it's expensive hot air, too.

Still, I didn't see anything sinister until I neared the end. There's some boilerplate about funding, qualifications and clearance for Federal I.T. contractors, and a program of "challenges" to incite students into becoming code monkeys for The Man.

185gr Golden Sabers loaded on ~6.5 grains of HP38. Nice and warm, and just scratching at supersonic. The best part is, I didn't have to do the work. A customer of mine took up reloading, and I'm just the (quite) willing guinea pig.

Given the current economic downturn and the trend of hoarding ammunition to the point of scarcity, many folks are turning to reloading. More power to them!

Reloading isn't just about saving money. It allows you to tailor loads to your specific gun and situation, and once you've got the process down, you can achieve accuracy easily surpassing many factory loadings.

Case in point: I've got a marvelous .38 Special defensive load that runs a 125gr XTP over 8 grains of HS6. It reaches 1220ft/s out of a 4" barreled revolver, and falls just subsonic in a snubnose, all while running at less that 20,000 CUP. That's a bit warmish for factory loads, but still well within the tolerances of a good gun.

The sky is not falling, people. Really.

So, H.R. 45 has been proposed and sent to a House committee for review. Big whoop. So does Carolyn McCarthy's revised Assault Weapons Ban. Every year, like clockwork, she throws it out there, and every year it withers on the vine.

This is no different.