Saturday, January 15, 2011

Full-Capacity Already Under Attack

Here there and everywhere I've been finding editorials ranting about full capacity firearm magazines. Not newsstand magazines, but come to think of it, if they made THEM smaller and lighter we'd waste less energy transporting them from publishing house to end user, and wait a minute...

The other day I was reading an online article about the American highway system. Gone are the days when one had to travel hundreds of miles between gas stations, as the average...on major highway systems, that is...happens to be 35 miles between places you can fill-er-up.

One of the things that drains gasoline mileage is of course weight. Gasoline weighs approximately 6.6 pounds per gallon, and if we eliminated large gas tanks and offered only, lets say, 3 gallon tanks as opposed to 20, that's 17 times 6.6 and that comes to 112.2 pounds, then multiplying 112.2 pounds times the 350 million vehicles on the road at any given point in time...that's be over 39 BILLION pounds or 19 million 600 thousand TONS of excess weight. On average, and for passenger vehicles only, 100 pounds equals 1 mile per gallon in fuel economy, so sweet moses on a pogo DO THE MATH. 

Hundreds of millions of gallons of fuel. And even forgetting the cost to get it and make it and deliver it, how about all those thousands of lives lost from automobile fires?

Now, full capacity firearms certainly don't kill people just by being there, but vehicle fires certainly DO kill people. Just by being there when fender bending goes viral.

And those two passenger planes that smashed into the Twin Towers...

Thousands of gallons of highly flammable jet fuel. Enough of a blaze to melt steel and murder thousands of people. All so Ma & Pa Kettle can fly nonstop from West Bubblefuck to East Can'tGetThereFromHere, but at what cost in human life?

Home refrigerators, and freezers...20, 30, 40 cubic FEET of storage space for perishable foodstuffs. All that wasted energy just to keep American fatties in burgers and fries; and so Joe Sixpack can have the boys over for the BIG GAME.

Whew, all this is making me think. When Suzy Soccer Mom gives up her SUV and her maxi-fridge and her vacations to the Bahamas, and Chuck Couch Potato turns in his hundred-gallon beer cooler, I'll think about my full-cap magazines. Until then, pound salt.

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