Slattsnews

Tim Blair brings clarity to hysteria as sloppy media milk a tragedy for every teardrop.

As the number of guns in the US increases, the deaths keep going the other way. “The rate of gun-related murder and manslaughter fell 11 per cent from 2008 to 2010, the most recent year for which comparable statistics are available,” Businessweek reported in October. Moreover, “the gun-killing rate has fallen a total of 51.5 per cent since 1993.”
This is not to diminish the shocking slaughter of 27 people, most of them very young children, in Connecticut. There is no moral way that a crime on this scale can be understood as anything less than pure evil.

It seems that every two-bob commentator in Australia is demanding the US tighten gun controls, ignoring the practical, legislative, economical and political impossibility of such action.

Henry Ergas calls the prime harridan on her government’s deplorable record in women’s employment:

LITTLE Miss Bossy tells everyone what to do. Little Miss Naughty is badly behaved.
And Little Miss Fickle breaks her promises. But no one is as scary as Little Miss Ogyny, especially when she goes on the attack.
Not that she understands the difference between ad hominem and ad nauseam. Nor is she shy of veering into a Little Miss Statement.
For despite all the noise Julia Gillard makes about gender women achieved far greater progress under the Howard government than they have under Labor.
Since Labor came to power, the female unemployment rate has risen from 4.4 to 5.2 per cent. And surveys show women feel more at risk of losing their job now than at any point in the Howard years.

A terrific story in today’s Strewth column in The Australian about one of this turf fan’s favourite training families:

Canine castaway
A TRIP to the races on Saturday with wife Karen turned into a dog day afternoon for Warrnambool dentist Bill Wilde, who doubles as a racehorse trainer with his son Symon. Frantically readying horses to race at Stawell and Cranbourne, where the Wildes were in the winner’s stall, nobody noticed Symon’s staghound Snatch was missing as Bill drove out of the stables with a five-year-old gelding named Lord Wimble in tow. After more than an hour travelling at mostly 110km/h along some rough country road the vehicle carting the horse transport came to a halt for the first time at a T-intersection outside Cressy — some 40km north of the western district town of Colac — only for Bill to see “a dog just like Symon’s overtake me” on the side of the road. “We were in a bit of a rush leaving and it must have jumped up on to that little platform between the tow-bar and the float and there it stayed,” Wilde said. “It was an amazing balancing act.” There were more than a few expletives uttered in the 10 minutes it took Wilde to catch the eight-month-old bitch. Karen rang their son, who was getting ready to bat at a western district cricket match, describing the high-speed journey on a 40cm by 40cm ledge. The dog went to the races, but was too scared to eat or drink after the ordeal and yesterday was too tired to move. As for the other four-legged passenger, who had the creature comforts that go with being the sole traveller in a two-horse float, Lord Wimble ran like a dog and finished third last.