This morning, the Boston Globe announced that gun permits in the Bay State had fallen by 25% in a single year.

They alsopublished a "primer" on obtaining a gun license in the Bay State.

The fact that they published this piece while Bruce was incommunicado can NOT be a coincidence.

Bruce is one of those statistics. He spent over a year applying for his gun license, then waited three and a half months between its formal issuance and actually getting it in hand.

He no longer holds a Massachusetts gun license because he got fed up and moved up here to New Hampshire.

The article practically Fisks itself.

While some law enforcement officials praise the decline, police, politicians and antigun advocates caution that there are still plenty of illegal guns on the streets, contributing to a steady pace of violence.

90,000 fewer gun-owners in the Bay State, yet no noticeable affect on gun violence. Common sense would seem to indicate that the legal gun owners are not the problem, but common sense is practically illegal in the Commonwealth.

Edward Arsenault, 70, of Fairhaven, was turned down for his license renewal earlier this year because he had been convicted in juvenile court of stealing a chicken from a chicken coop when he was 9 years old, in 1946.

Mr Arsenault's preadolescent adventures in purloined poultry didn't keep him from getting his gun permit, but somehow it is relevant when he wants to keep it? Luckily, a police chief gave him an endorsement, and he had the decision overturned in court (at, I'm sure, considerably greater expense.)

In Boston, the number of licensed owners fell from 7,577 in 2001 to 4,374 this year, a drop of 42 percent. In the same period, gun licenses in Cambridge dropped 25 percent to 782; 71 percent to 484 in Brookline, and 33 percent to 1,150 in Newton, state records show.

A 42 percent cut in legal gun owners in Boston, yet the murder rate hasn't fallen appropriately. According to the Boston Police Department, for the period from January 1 and August 5 (the last time they reported the numbers), there were 49 murders in 2006, and there have been 46 in 2007 -- a drop of less than 4%.

2nd Amendment activists like to say that "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." The corollary of that truism is that taking the guns away from the non-criminals will, at best, not affect the criminals in the least -- and at worst, embolden them.

In the meantime, all you've achieved is to piss off people who generally obey the law and respect authority -- the kinds of people governments should encourage.

In short, you've created Massachusetts.

If anyone is interested in reading a REAL account of a (now former) Bay Stater (or, as I dubbed him, "XMASHOL"), check out pretty much any of these articles of Bruce's.