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May 5, 2008
Guns: Who Should Have Them?
Some folks on the internet are making a big deal out of a recent envelope sent out by the Hillary Clinton campaign showing a left-handed Mauser rifle with a double-set trigger. For example, via Instapundit:
Senator Hillary Clinton’s mailing attacking Senator Barack Obama’s record on guns appears to include a striking visual gaffe: The image of the gun pictured on the face of the mailing is reversed, making it a non-existent left-handed model of the Mauser 66 rifle.
First, as commenter HJ points out at Politico, Mauser does make left-handed rifles.
http://www.mauser-usa.net/mauser_faqs/mauser_faqs.html
1.Are left handed Mauser Rilfes available?
All M03 rifles are available left handed, in all calibers and all grades!
And even if the image is a reversed right-handed rifle, so what?
One of the most influential books during my period as a gun-rights activist was Dave Kopel's 1995 book Guns: Who Should Have Them?
On the cover is a Smith & Wesson revolver. The cylinder-release latch is on the wrong side of the frame. It should be on the left-side, where it can be manipulated by the shooter's thumb. It appears that this is not a simple image-reversal, since the lettering on the frame is correct [It's kind of hard to tell from the pictures I've found on the web, so I'll verify that later today by checking my copy of the book when I get home].
I'm no fan of Hillary Clinton. But that some copy editor made a mistake (or took artistic license) says no more about her than the cover of Guns does about Dave, who has done more for the gun-rights movement than all of the silly childish pedants on internet forums put together. Buy the book. And get a copy as a gift for a friend. Believe me, its well worth reading -- even after 12 years. Anyone who would dismiss it simply because of a minor gaffe made by some editor is doing himself a great disservice. Likewise, anyone who feels superior because they think they caught Hillary Clinton making some stupid mistake needs to stop reading too much into it.
As a famous law professor once said, "But being right once is not the same as being right always. That is easy to forget, of course, as there are few pleasures more insidiously addictive than the belief in one's own moral and intellectual superiority." [hyper-link to David Brin added]
Disclosure: I know Dave.
UPDATE: I received the following e-mail from Dave:
From: Dave Kopel
Date: Mon, May 5, 2008 at 10:43 AM
Subject: Left Handed Rifles (Instapundit, May 4, 2008)Yes, that's true. The Prometheus Books art department flipped the image, to
make it look better.
Flipping the image would have reversed the cartouche, so they actually cut
out the cartouche before the flip, and pasted it back in after the flip, to
preserve its proper orientation.
David B. Kopel
Research Director
Independence Institute
13952 Denver West Parkway
Suite 400
Golden, Colorado 80401
303-279-6536
www.davekopel.org
kopel.tw (Chinese)
www.independenceinstitute.org
UPDATE: On a related note, there was this Heckler & Koch catalog cover from a couple of years ago:
Posted by Robert Racansky on May 5, 2008 at 9:52 AM
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