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• Everything that appears in a Michael Moore movie is true.

There you have it: the myth column of the fifth column. What’s so striking about liberal myths is not only how many there are, nor even that they’re given currency by the New York Times and the CBS Evening News and in the House and Senate, but that they’re so laughably implausible. If 150,000 women died of anorexia every year, the hospitals would be overrun with starving women. That’s three times as many people that die in car accidents every year.

Similarly insane was the Left’s terror of plastic guns. A gun couldn’t fire if it was made of plastic. The explosive force of the bullet would shatter a barrel made of plastic or ceramics. There has never been a gun made without using metal for the barrel. The “plastic gun” that liberals claimed could foil metal detectors was the Austrian Glock—which is 83 percent steel. Only the handle and frame of the so-called plastic gun were constructed of a modern polymer, making the Glock lighter and more comfortable to hold.

And yet, in the eighties, Democrats tried to ban the Glock, despite assurances from both the director of civil aviation security for the Federal Aviation Administration, Billie H. Vincent, and the associate director of the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Phillip C. McGuire, that “plastic guns” were easily picked up by the most primitive metal detector.9

In response, the Democrats produced some nut in Florida who claimed he had spent seven years drawing … a picture of a plastic gun. Yes, a picture. Liberals were terrified! Democratic representative Mario Biaggi said nonexistent plastic guns were a “triple-barrel terrorist threat,” and Democratic representative Robert Mrazek warned that the nonexistent gun was going to be “the terrorist’s weapon of choice, and certainly we ought to be able to stall it long enough to let technology catch up.”10 I’ve designed an invisibility potion—only on paper, so far. Imagine what the terrorists could do with that!

Then-representative Chuck Schumer demanded that Glocks be outlawed on the basis of unconfirmed reports that Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy had placed an order for more than a hundred Glocks.11 Of course, police forces and gun owners across the United States were ordering them, too, because they’re very comfortable and reliable guns.

Nonetheless, news articles reported, “The administration declined Wednesday to endorse legislation prohibiting the import or domestic sale of plastic handguns that terrorists could slip through airport metal detectors.”12

In the end, Congress passed a bill banning guns with less than 3.7 ounces of metal by a 413–4 vote in the House and a voice vote in the Senate. They might as well have outlawed Martian death rays. Even the Glock contains 19 ounces of metal. The National Rifle Association did not object to Congress banning an imaginary gun. With less toleration for fools, Representative Dick Cheney was one of four congressmen to vote against the ban on a nonexistent gun.

Liberals are like the contestants on Monty Python’s Stake Your Claim, but without the sense to concede the point.

Game Show Host: Good evening and welcome to Stake Your Claim. First this evening we have Mr. Norman Vowles of Gravesend, who claims he wrote all Shakespeare’s works. Mr. Vowles, I understand you claim that you wrote all those plays normally attributed to Shakespeare?

Vowles: (proudly) That is correct. I wrote all his plays and the wife and I wrote his sonnets.

Host: Mr. Vowles, these plays are known to have been performed in the early seventeenth century. How old are you, Mr. Vowles?

Vowles: Forty-three.

Host: Well, how is it possible for you to have written plays performed over three hundred years before you were born?

Vowles: Ah well. This is where my claim falls to the ground.

Host: Ah!

Vowles: There’s no possible way of answering that argument, I’m afraid. I was only hoping you would not