We were driving past the new location of East Coast Gun Sales a few weeks ago, and I told my wife I had been planning to check out the new store. They had been advertising their move to a larger location, with added facilities like a gun range, for over a year. I was thinking it would be interesting to fire off a few rounds with different caliber weapons and see what it felt like. "They went out of business," she said. She didn't know why.

According to the Altoona Mirror, back in 2007, East Coast's owner James Faith, and Michael Kurty, a police officer and firearms instructor, had been demonstrating a rebuilt mini-Gatling gun during a social event at a sportsmen's club. I'm not sure if this was before or after the chicken Kiev. The Gatling had an electrically-powered magazine, which soon jammed. So Faith unplugged the magazine, while Kurty, the firearms instructor, helpfully stood right in the path of the barrel. Because with no electricity, how could a weapon filled with bullets—which contain gunpowder—possibly fire?

In my column this week at The Daily I argue that it's time to give up on a strict second amendment interpretation and allow for states and municipalities to decide on their own gun control laws.  Since I grew up with guns, I'm actually sympathetic to states that want to have concealed carry laws or or that want to allow unregistered gun ownership (like former home state, New Mexico).

But, it makes no practical sense to me that in a country where you can have countries where alcohol can't be sold and towns where strip clubs can't be built, but that you cannot have a town or state where gun ownership is banned, even if that's what the residents want.  All this because of an amendment to the Constitution that seems to me was explicitly included because, at the time, the Framers were worried that they might have to call on every able bodied man to lock, load and get ready for the next British or French invasion (or, more likely, to repel a perfectly justified attack from a Native American tribe).

In, 500MW from half a gram of hydrogen: The hunt for fusion power heats up, ExtremeTech trumpets a potential efficiency breakthrough in magnetic confinement fusion, the type used at ITER:

Basically, to keep fusion going you need to sustain a temperature of around 11 million degrees Celsius, which requires a huge amount of electricity. Fusion chambers are usually lined with heat-resistant carbon tiles in an attempt to reduce wastage, but the problem is that protons and neutrons escaping from the fusion reaction hit the wall, cool down, and then bounce back into the reaction, reducing the temperature. Electricity must then be used to increase the temperature back to 11 million Celsius.

The PPPL [Princeton Plasma Physics Lab], led by Bruce Koel, have found that a thin layer of lithium metal (the third element in the Periodic Table) absorbs these protons and neutrons, preventing them from bouncing back into the pot, and thus reducing the power requirement of keeping the fusion reaction going.

Like a fairy tale hero, Rick Santorum hopes to win the Republican nomination by spinning poop into gold.

On Sunday, he laid into a New York Times reporter, saying, "Quit distorting my words. ... It's bullshit."

The public use of an expletive by a "serious" presidential candidate provoked condemnation from his opponents, while respectable news outlets gleefully smeared the word "bull----" across their august pages.

But Santorum is trying to make the most of the shitstorm. On Fox News, he proudly declared, "If you haven't cursed out a New York Times reporter during the course of a campaign, you're not really a real Republican." He followed up with a fundraising letter titled, "I Am Ready to Take On The New York Times."

Republican analysts are closely evaluating the effectiveness of Santorum's "Real Republican" response, which could become a staple of right-wing damage control strategy. Focus groups have responded positively to hypothetical retorts by other conservatives who have taken wrong turns up shit creek. Here are few examples: