A New Stephen King Book Is Out....

...and for once, I won't be buying it:

Stephen King has entranced millions with tales of dread but his latest volume will read like a horror only to the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights advocates. The best-selling author made an unexpected charge into the national debate on gun violence on Friday with a passionate, angry essay pleading for reform.

For you little people, that it. Not for himself.

King, who owns three handguns...

And fondly imagines that once they've banned 'assault weapons' (whatever they are) they won't start looking at his handguns, no doubt.

...aimed the expletive-peppered polemic at fellow gun-owners, calling on them to support a ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons in the wake of the December shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school which left 20 children and six adults dead.

Do it fort the chiiiiillllldrrrreeeeeeennnnn! Stevie wants you to!

"Autos and semi-autos are weapons of mass destruction. When lunatics want to make war on the unarmed and unprepared, these are the weapons they use," King wrote.

When they aren't using bombs. Or knives. Or cars. A smarter person might just conclude the problem lies with the people wielding the tools, not the tools themselves...

I mean, it certainly isn't books!

King recalls that the fictional schoolboy killer in his 1977 novel Rage, which was published under a pen name, Richard Bachman, resonated with several boys who subsequently rampaged at their own schools. One, Barry Loukaitis, shot dead a teacher and two students in Moses Lake, Washington in 1996, then quoted a line from the novel: "This sure beats algebra, doesn't it?"

King said he did not apologise for writing Rage – "no, sir, no ma'am" – because it told the truth about high-school alienation and spoke to troubled adolescents who "were already broken". However, he said, he ordered his publisher to withdraw the book because it had proved dangerous. He was not obliged to do so by law – it was protected by the first amendment – but it was the right thing to do. Gun advocates should do the same, he argued.

Hey, maybe we should ban books?

Stick to what you know about, chum. Politics ain't for you.