The New York State Rifle & Pistol Association wants to protect the right of any well-connected person to carry a concealed weapon by concealing the permit lists from public scrutiny. One has to wonder if there is more to the reasoning than to merely protect the privacy of gun owners. Might it also be that New York is trying to conceal any knowledge that they might be doing - as Florida has done - permitting convicted felons to carry concealed weapons?

Maybe New York wants to also emulate Florida's blind eye to gang bangers openly carrying assault weapons on the streets of Palm Beach? If so, they should contact Century International Arms Inc. (CIA - I get it!), located right across the street from a sheriff's substation in Palm Beach, and have them open up a branch in New York. It should be no big deal for one of the largest purveyors of fine previously-owned military surplus in America! It should be a piece of cake for a company once linked to the Iran-Contra operation, as they would already be experienced in the shipment of military weapons.

Currently, they are buying much of their inventory from China, just like Wal-Mart! But because the US Government of George W. Bush sees no reason to inhibit the actions of "free" enterprises like Century International Arms Inc., CIA Inc. just might find they have put themselves out of business. How?

It's a long and sordid tale.

Not long ago, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) discovered, thanks to an Associated Press investigation, that the Defense Department was making a little "Shock And Awe" money by holding a yard sale and selling off some of their surplus and obsolete parts inventory - including F-14 parts desperately needed by a nation currently under political assault and threatened with war by the world's last superpower, namely Iran. Iran also happens to be the last nation on Earth flying the F-14, the American fighter made popular with movie-goers in Top Gun. It thus seems that "The" Donald Rumsfeld's responsibility was far too large for him to oversee properly, and Wyden is pushing legislation to ban this practice.

This selling of spare weapons parts to a targeted hostile nation is, of course, bad enough, but it also seems that the Pentagon has been one of the most egregious violators of the principle of non-proliferation of nuclear bomb material - the very reason Iran is in the Bush Gun's sights.

The Chicago Tribune has published that, among other clients, the US government supplied bomb-grade material to Romanian Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who had begun the process of separating plutonium out of the enriched reactor fuel intending to make a couple of Eastern European Hiroshimas happen. Sadly for him, he soon faced the Romanian equivalent of Texas Justice, and the project halted in its tracks, with the bomb parts still lodged within a U.S.-supplied research reactor in Pitesti, Romania.

Worse, when the Vietnam War ended, the US left behind a research reactor in the Central Highlands stocked with bomb-grade plutonium.