Buy a truck and get a free AK-47 gun. That’s the deal a Missouri truck dealer is offering new customers who buy a pick-up truck in August. Mark Muller, owner of Max Motors in Butler, says he knows people will be bothered by the promotion.
But not to worry, Muller is not handing out free guns. Instead, he will give buyers a voucher to use at a gun store after they obtain a license to carry a concealed weapon.

Wonder how many people are bothered by the fact that owning a gun is now made an incentive; you buy a vehicle and you get a free assault rifle; and keep in mind that an AK-47 is not a hunting assault rifle, it is a short distance multiple rounds per minute gun that is not accurate over the distances required for hunting.

At the same time, this inaction was something that the western backers of Pakistan were not able to understand; it seemed like a vindication of the fact that the Taliban was not something that the government or the military seemed to want to tackle; and the pressure exerted was incredible. There was a huge flurry of articles and interviews about how Pakistan is on the verge of collapse, that the institutions have lost credibility and were not able to ensure social justice in the country (which encouraged the growth of a force such as the Taleban), that the nuclear arms hosted by Pakistan were in danger of being taken over by the Taleban, and so on.
There is also another view that is seeming to emerge, that action taken by the Government on the urging of western Governments would turn the population further against the west and against the actions of their own Government; already there is a feeling that this is not Pakistan’s war and that forcing the Pakistani army to fight their own Muslim brothers is just not done. The view was that it needed for people to hear more about the kind of society that the Taleban is bringing on, and that as the Taleban occupied more areas of the country and that people realized that now they were in mortal danger, that this was not something that was happening far away, they would finally turn against the Taleban. This would be a time for the Government to take action.
Currently, the Pakistani Government has declared that the pact in Swat is dead, and fierce military action is underway against the Taleban. There is no common thoughts on whether the Government did indeed plan it this way, or whether the action was taken because the pressure on the Pakistani Government and the army was proving impossible to face; indeed, the fact that the Pakistani military has always been a proponent of the strategic depth option in Afghanistan makes it hard to say either way. It needs to be seen whether the action will go all the way, or will end when Zardari comes back to Pakistan.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s unprecedented ruling that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense in their homes will immediately shift the legal battle over gun rights to California, the state with some of the toughest gun control laws in the nation. Gun rights advocates, led by the National Rifle Association, plan to file suit in federal court today challenging a San Francisco law that bans handguns in public housing, pouncing quickly on Thursday’s decision striking down Washington, D.C.’s broader ban on the same weapons.

The Supreme Court revived the nation’s gun control debate by directly assessing, for the first time in history, the meaning of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. In a 5-4 ruling, the justices placed limits on modern society’s efforts to deal with gun violence if they violate a constitutional right established two centuries ago to allow citizens to take up their muskets against government control. In the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia stressed that the ruling does not preclude all regulation of firearms, citing restrictions in schools and government buildings and laws against felons possessing guns. The court left intact D.C.’s requirement that guns be licensed but struck down its requirements that firearms be equipped with trigger locks or kept disassembled.

This is probably for the first time that the Court has actually ruled on the question of whether the Second Amendment applies to individual citizens or was meant to apply to the militia (that were thought necessary at that time since there was no army, and the conception was that militias would be important for ensuring the security of the state). What is going to happen now is that there are a number of cases where existing cases and regulations are going to get challenged at the instigation of the NRA (National Rifle Association). Also, the worries about the changes to the Supreme Court due to the pushing of conservative justices seem to be coming true even more.
This ruling is going to cause a nightmare for administrators trying to control the spread of gun control and crime prevention, especially with regard to handguns (that are the most easily concealed of weapons); expect many more cases and litigation over this. Lower courts, especially in places such as New York, Washington, and California are going to have a much harder time deciphering this ruling and coming out with is permissible and what is not.