The Instapundit is feeling dubious and uncertain about the potential for garage-shop illegal manufacture of firearms. He thinks that it's an argument "too clever to succeed". My neighbors back in the day made their own hand-made single-shot zipgun and a couple single-shot shotguns made out of pipe and the like. But they were also the kids that were missing peripheral bits and pieces of themselves from various accidents, industrial or otherwise. I would expect that this sort of thing would be as accident-prone and dangerous as, say, stills or back-alley abortion shops. Which is itself an argument as valid against total gun control as against prohibition or a ban on abortion, yes?

The more I think about it, the more all three issues are alike in their subconstitutional characteristics. The only real distinctions here is that they enacted a bad amendment against alcohol, invoked extraconstitutional judicial activism in favor of abortion, and are rangling over an old militia establishment for and against gun control. "From my cold dead hands" seems against the spirit of "'A well-regulated Militia, being necessary for the security of a free State...", but so does a totalizing gun control. The three issues are all, at their core, moral issues of control
- alcohol against the self, guns against others, abortion against the biological future. Who should have control?