Some are more significant than others, but here are a few things that bug me.

First of all, www.

That precedes every uniform resource locator on the World Wide Web.

I know it stands for World Wide Web, but it takes too long to say.

The letter "w" has three syllables. To say www takes approximately .8 seconds.

To say a single syllable letter three times takes roughly half that amount of time, .4 seconds.

So if the world wide web was called the Total Transcontinental Tree, or ttt, we could save roughly half of the time we take everyday saying www.

That may not seem like much, but I heard recently that there are 67,000 new Internet connections every day. There are hundreds of millions of people on the Internet already.

Even people who don't use the Internet still have to say www. Multiply all those .4 seconds of extra oratory and you can see we are wasting thousands of hours every day saying www when we could be saying ttt.

Why did they start wrapping drink straws so tight at fast food restaurants?

I remember when you could tap the straw a couple times on the counter, rip the end off the paper wrapper and the straw would just fall out.

Now you have to peel the paper halfway off the straw before you are able to extract it.

When I was a kid, I would rip the end off the straw wrapper and pull the straw partially out. Then I would twist the still-sealed end of the paper tube.

Blowing through the open end of the straw would send the wrapper flying across the restaurant. It was great fun.

You can't do that with a modern straw. Maybe I just answered my own question.

Why do downtown merchants complain about a lack of parking and then take the parking space right in front of their business?

People who play games with statistics annoy me, too.

Take crime.

The general consensus in today's America is that crime is down.

But the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence says no, crime is up. Way up. Skyrocketing.

Here's the deal.

Justice Department figures show that since 1992 there has been a demonstrable decrease in violent crime.

In an average city of 250,000 people or more, about 1,890 Americans would be victimized by a violent crime - murder, rape, robbery, burglary.

Since then, the number has dropped to 1,218. Therefore, the Justice Department says, violent crime is down by more than a third from where it was seven years ago.

I'll buy that, that's good news.

But not the NCCPV. They use 1969 as the benchmark year instead of 1992. In that same average city in 1969 there were 859 people hit by violent crime. So over the past 30 years crime is really up by more than a third.

I suppose they may have a point, but it sounds more like they are trying to justify their existence.

Maybe they want to keep crime on the front burner as an issue in this country. That's OK, I guess, but why throw cold water on the notion that crime is decreasing?

And finally, this insidious notion that if you don't like a legal product, you can sue it out of existence.

First it was the tobacco industry. Now it's the gun industry.

It's the classic "end justifies the means" mentality.

And of course the Bill administration has willingly, wholeheartedly signed on to the nonsense.

Last week the federal government dreamed up a national lawsuit against gun manufacturers.

The federal class action will be brought by local authorities running housing projects under the Direction of Housing and Urban Development. This because residents in federal housing are gunshot victims.

Of course residents of federal housing projects are also victims of stabbings, but nobody's suing Chicago Cutlery. And residents of federal housing projects are victims of beatings, but nobody is suing Louisville Slugger.

Basically, what the government is trying to do is force the gun manufacturers to change the way they do business. The government wants the gun makers to initiate certain business practices it thinks will limit the number of guns that get into the hands of criminals.

Gun makers already are being sued by cities. The government figures a few federally financed lawyers thrown in will be too much for the gun makers to endure.

Some of the stuff that the government wants gun makers to do would probably make their business a lot less profitable. But the government is betting that the lawsuit will be even more detrimental to the financial health of the gun makers.

The government hopes gun makers will settle, cut their losses and do what the government wants. And if a few of them actually go out of business? Well, hey, that's just a bonus.

The problem with all of this is that nothing the gun makers are doing is illegal. The business practices the government doesn't like are all perfectly legitimate.

If the administration believes legal conduct to be detrimental to the public good, it should work to enact legislation to make that conduct illegal.

If they don't want gun makers selling guns, they should make the practice illegal. But Congress won't go along with it. And that pesky Second Amendment keeps getting in the way.

No problem. No need to play by the rules of the republic. No need to craft legislation or amend the Constitution.

Just call in the lawyers.

And just this past Wednesday Bill ordered his top aides to come up with creative ways to use his executive power to put pressure on the gun industry.

And all of this is going on - this big push against guns, this hue and cry for legislation and lawsuits - when gun violence, deaths and even accidents are on the decline. Crime is down, remember? Bill tells us that all the time.

Even if you don't own a gun or care about guns this should scare you.

The federal government has awesome power.

If it can wield that power without restraint, if it can circumvent the legislative process, if it can use class action lawsuits to force policy, if it can coerce legal businesses with executive orders, then it is a government to be feared.

First it was tobacco. Now it's guns. What's next? [[In-content Ad]]