It's the same license.

Gunsmiths also perform repairs and maintenance, and I'm fairly certain Occupational Health and Safety regulations that require repairs to be done by a qualified individual apply to the police.

Yeah, that's the point: it's not really news. As much as I respect his accomplishments, Ray sounds like the boy who cried electric wolf these days.

Indeed...it's minimum wage, and babies are much better deep fried in a tempura batter.

Could be worse: Ray Kurzweil.

How do you fix a problem and keep it fixed without knowing why the problem exists?

1 - Strict mode.

2 - Cats don't seem to respond predictably to any input. I posit they're our perceptual interpretation of random number generators.

That just makes it more fun.

Even if the mistress is a paid agent of the politician's opponents, and the blackmail payment is to outbid them? Two (or is it three?) wrongs don't make a right IMO, just wondering about other people's views on using the money counteract someone else's dirty tricks/use of bribe money...

And spiders. Sadly ThinkGeek doesn't sell those any more...

Exactly; saying "X has increased since Y, therefore Y caused the increase in X" is simplistic nonsense because it ignores previously existing trends and other confounding factors (for example, I'd say that the consistent correlation between arrests for amphetamine possession and assault rates suggests a greater probability of a direct causal link, but that doesn't make it true).

I'm not sure it's correct to say the 1996 ban on semiautomatic long arms* didn't do anything: the previously existing trend suggests there should have been a few mass shootings since then, but the number dropping to zero overnight could also be explained by dealers voluntarily tightening up their practices or some other factor, so that's a "maybe". The wider ramifications for other violent crime are even harder to quantify, since semiautomatic long arms aren't typically used for self defence...not even the criminologists and statisticians with access to finer grained data and years to study it can agree, I doubt there's greater expertise here. And trying to relate it to the US, which has a completely different attitude to guns and historically far higher ownership rates, is probably futile.

*Handguns have been restricted since 1901 in New South Wales and for similar times in other states. It hasn't been legal to carry a gun without a valid reason (which doesn't include self defence) anywhere in Australia for over 100 years, so it's improbable that the 1996 ban on semiautomatics made any real difference to crime rates at all.

The only part of that I actually wrote was

The rest you made up.

False. There was no appreciable increase in the three years after the ban came into effect. There has been an increase since, however that follows a trend line that started before the gun ban, so there is no correlation between the ban and the incidence of rape.

Sweden's population growth rate has been under 1% for the last 50 years. Doesn't look like the policy is successfully encouraging much to me.