Obviously if someone breaks into your house, breaks open your gun safe, takes your gun, goes down the street and robs a bank with it, that is not your fault.

But if you leave a loaded gun laying around unsecured, and a four year old grabs it and shoots a five year old dead, you, the gun owner, have just committed homicide.

Almost everything else is in between, and yes, there is a line there, or more than one, that has to be found. But we are a civil society and we can deal with the difficulties of drawing that line. And, anyone who is uncomfortable with there being such a law can easily address their anxiety. Just live in a gun free home.

I bring this up because the Washington Post has a new piece by John Cox and Steven Rich addressing this issue. Here.

And, right, if your car is locked up and in your garage and the key is with you in the house, and someone breaks into your garage, hot wires your car, drives down the street and uses the car in the commission of a crime, that is not on you. If, on the other hand, you leave your car unlocked and running on the street and somebody jumps in it and takes off and commits a crime with the car, that is at least partly on you. And somewhere in between lies this line, see?

In the house lived my parents Joe and Betty, Grandma (dad’s mother) and Great Aunt Tillie (mom’s stepfather’s sister). Grandma and Tillie were very old so they took lots of medicine. Also, they were very old and therefore had a special dispensation from the pharmacy, allowing them to get the medicine in non-child proof bottles.

So the colleagues came over, and that included a woman with her young son, older than toddler age but not much. During our lunch, he was off in the kitchen or someplace amusing himself with a coloring book or something.

But then the child walked into the room and we could see that his face, mainly around his mouth, was covered with azure blue substance, as were his hands. Just as realization of what this blue substance was dawned on his mother, I, the others, Great Aunt Tillie, who had just walked into her bedroom (she had been in Grandma’s bedroom watching soaps), exclaimed, “My medicine!!!!”

If you drive out of the driveway of that house on Hackett and swing around the Boulevard in the middle of the road, you go through a red light no matter what (because it is always red in one direction). Then you can drive down the street and encounter one more red light, then at the corner of S. Manning, there is another, then you can turn right then left and swing directly into the emergency room entrance of St. Peter’s hospital. In other words, it is about a 300 second drive if you ignore the lights. The mother of the child with the blue face, who had clearly just eaten an entire bottle of Great Aunt Tillie’s blood pressure medicine, did so. Meanwhile, the bottle, now empty, was gathered up, and a call to the hospital was made. By the time the young boy was being taken out of the car and shuffled into the hospital, the ER staff was ready and they pumped his stomach. He was not made critically ill, he lived. The blue dye took a while to get off.

He was lucky. That could have been a gun.

One day I was standing in the dining room in the home of my then mother-in-law, Ardith. It was Thanksgiving morning. Ardith was about to set the table with my help, and she asked me go into the drawer of the Prairie Style built-in cabinet at one end of the dining room, and pull out the place mats. I opened the wrong drawer, and instead of seeing place mats, I saw folded up table cloths. Not yet realizing that I had the wrong drawer, I pulled up the corner of the table cloths, expecting to find a layer of place mats underneath.

There were no place mats, but there was a .32 caliber Smith and Wesson pearl handled revolver. No holster, loaded.

“What’s this, a gun?” I said, lamely.

My mother-in-law was at first very surprised to see this, had no idea what it was. Then, she remembered. That pistol had been under those never-used table cloths for years. It was her brother’s, or something. Something she always meant to get rid of. Had no idea why she hadn’t yet. So then, she did. She got rid of it. I don’t remember how. Good thing I found it and not some blue-faced kid.

I know of a young girl who tried to commit suicide, but was rescued and went through treatment. Not long after the event her home was invaded by a sexual predator. She and her mother got rid of him, but it was a bit traumatic. So, mom bought a gun, found a place to keep it, and told her daughter, who was still very much in suicidal mode, where the gun was kept. I’ll tell you how that story ended in a moment.

A few years ago I was helping people to manage the materials of a medium size middle class suburban estate. The owner had died and we were sorting everything into categories. Stuff individuals wanted. Stuff to give to the veterans. Stuff to give to Goodwill. Stuff for the estate sale. Stuff for Craig’s List. All that. Also, stuff for the dumpster. It was an enormous amount of work. A lot of stuff fell through the cracks, most likely, and even though I personally had my hands on pretty much every item in this estate, if you asked me where a particular item ended up, in many cases I couldn’t tell you. It was all happening very fast, it was a hot summer, there was a lot of sweat and toil and confusion.

Among the items was a revolver, unloaded but with a box of bullets, in a cardboard box. It could have gone to any one of these places. As it turns out, the family decided to include it in the estate sale — estate sale managers know what to do with firearms because many, many estates have these long forgotten random guns. But it could easily have ended up in a box of junk somewhere, a box of stuff we never had time to really look through. Hell, it could have ended up at Goodwill or inside a box of other stuff that someone picked up via Craig’s list.

A few days ago, a family with I think five kids had the chance to buy a hover board for one of the kids, used, via something like Craig’s List or at a garage sale, or something. So they did. They took the box home but did not get around to opening it. Everybody was busy with school and stuff. It could wait for later.

Two days ago, the kids were all home and playing outside, with some friends. One of the kids, an 8 year old boy, went inside the house, quite possibly to dig out the hover board to play with. In the process of doing so, he found a pistol that had been tossed in the box. He assumed, I’ll guess, it was a toy. But it was a loaded gun. Within a minute or so after discovering the gun, he was dead.

Only a few people are killed in the US each year because somebody treated a handgun like just another piece of stuff we keep in a drawer or a box. Tens of thousands of people are killed each year by guns in the US, though, because of a lot of different scenarios. This is only one of them.

But all these things are related. Mass shootings, including mass shootings in schools, criminal activity that results in shootings, suicides, accidental shootings of all kinds, are all related in America, because we have a pro-gun culture which sees treating guns as dangerous items as somehow unfair, or unconstitutional. (See this for further discussion on the links.) And, because this pr-gun culture results in there simply being a gazillion guns. Guns are everywhere, even in random places kids can stumble into.

Gun deaths are so common for a lot of reasons related to this gun culture, but almost all the reasons can be distilled down to two:

1) People are stupid about and careless with guns; and

2) A small number of people are so into having guns as toys (and extensions of their personalities, etc.) that we have a plethora of guns and they are pretty much out of control.

You are responsible for the guns in your life, including the guns that show up and volunteer to be part of your life. You need to keep the guns unloaded and locked up, the ammo separate.

Some of you will say, “yeah but…” then produce some lame excuse about someone invading your home. For you, I have special instructions.

1) Make your home hard to invade. They have these things called locks. They make it hard to open a door or window. Get locks;

2) Make your home noisy to invade, so if someone is invading your home, you get warning before they are there. They make easy to use inexpensive alarms for that purpose, or you can do something more professional. Or just tie a tin can to your doorknob;

3) When the home invasion starts to happen, you will have several minutes to call 911, unlock your gun, load it, and search around for the invader;

4) But be careful, because in scenarios like this, the home owner with the gun actually has a higher chance of injury or death because they are armed. You may not believe or understand that. Fine. The fact that you do not understand how that happens is precisely why it has a good chance of happening. I can’t help you with that; and

5) Try not to shoot anyone innocent, like the relative coming home late or the drunk neighbor who got confused, or the cop that came to help you.

What happened in the case of the young woman who was suicidal, who’s mother brought the gun home and told her where it was? Well, having been to some therapy already, she had more than a little clue about what to do. She told her mother to that getting a firearm and, essentially, handing it to her suicidal daughter, was not OK. So the gun was hidden better, but I suspect their relationship was never quite the same after that.

Put your gun in a gun safe. . Maybe use a trigger lock. Keep your ammo locked up. And if all else fails, have one of these handy.

Some of it appears to lie in their (“our”) biological vulnerability. … about 30% of males (versus 9% of females) have a form of the MAOA gene that reduces the levels of an important neurotransmitter, and this in turn impairs their ability to deal effectively and prosocially with stressful situations …

But [genetics] is only a part, perhaps a small part, of the larger story. Males are also especially immersed in a culture that glorifies and justifies violence, and particularly male violence. …

These cultural messages and themes poison male consciousness. To put it bluntly, although the mentally ill on average are no more violent than the sane, even “crazy people” act within a cultural framework. They respond to cultural scripts that tell them “if this, then that.” For example, no account of the massacre of nine African Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in June of 2015 is sensible without the recognition that there is a long tradition of racism as a rationale for killing black people in America…

…

All of these factors are compounded when the issue is young males. In recent decades, neuroscience researchers have demonstrated that human brains do not mature fully until people reach their mid or even late 20s, for the most part. These immature brains are particularly prone to make mistakes in interpreting the meaning of emotions in others, of judgment, and in assessing the risks and benefits of action. …

What is more, when young males have had an accumulation of adverse childhood experiences, the odds that they will have problems with both emotional regulation and executive function increase….

Finally, of course, there is the matter of arming troubled young male with lethal weapons. It is the access to guns that makes young male people so dangerous, especially when they are troubled, angry, or somehow “crazy.” …

Despite growing gender equality with respect to access to guns culturally and physically, it remains true that males are more gun-identified than females. And it is guns that make American violent behavior so lethal. Guns make suicide attempts particularly deadly (85% lethal vs. less than 10% for pills). It is guns in the hands of males that make domestic disputes—mostly violence against women—so dangerous. It is guns that make cop–civilian confrontations so deadly (most of which involve males on both sides). It is guns that make racist ideologies in the heads of troubled young males lead to nine dead bodies in a church in South Carolina, because “guns don’t kill people; people with guns kill people.” Or more accurately, “male people with guns.”

From the commentary, “Mass Murder: A Perspective on Young Male Killers“, Violence and Gender. 2:3, September, 2015.

The rate of gun ownership in a state predicts the rate of gun deaths in that state.

This works across countries as well.

Once again. Politicians who have voted in favor of NRA policies need to go.

Photo above from TIME

As a response to this policy, the president of the Faculty Senate, Jonathan Snow, gathered a group of faculty and gave a powerpoint presentation that included the slide at the top of the post.

Snow’s presentation was not any sort of official university statement, but the slide does a good job of demonstrating the likely effect on faculty student relationships under the conditions where students are more likely to pull out a handgun and plug the professor.

The situation, and the context for this presentation, are written up in this post at the Chronicle of Higher Education. PZ Myers discusses it here. The powerpoint presentation is available here.

A suitable response faculty may consider is here.

Two New Hope police recruits were at the City Council meeting being sworn in. They left the City Council room, and in the lobby outside the room, police in the lobby fired on by a man wielding a rifle or other sort of long gun. Police officers returned fire and killed that man. Two police officers were hit, are in hospital, no one else was killed.

There are a number of unknowns at this point such as were the recruits the cops that were hit? Who was the perp and why did he do that? These questions will be cleared up in due course, I’m sure.

But there are two other questions that I have. First, why was city council member John Elder packing a handgun? In this photograph from the scene, he is seen holding his pistol:

So, my first question is, why is a New Hope City Council member packing a gun at the meeting?

My second question pertains to something John Elder says during the incident. He is seen holding his gun, pointing it towards the doors leading to the lobby, in a shooter’s stance. During this time he instructs the technicians to turn off the cameras. The way he says it is a bit odd; he tells them to “go to a commercial.” I assume the meeting is being shown on public access TV (for once, some excitement on public access TV!) and he may simply be interested in protecting the public from seeing something gruesome. And that may be good. But it also was an elected member of the government carrying a gun in what I assume is a no-carry zone (that needs to be verified) trying to limit evidence of that act.

The third question I (and everyone) has is this: How do you get a long gun in a city hall?

I should note that Elder is a former policeman, and his having the gun in the city hall may have been entirely appropriate. Also, if someone is going to have a gun in a situation like this, I’d rather have it be a sworn officer of the law, or someone like Elder, who has law enforcement experience. Had this incident moved into the council room, he would have been able to put a stop to it, perhaps. So, please understand, these are questions I’m asking, not accusations I’m making (people get very touchy about guns).

I’m reminded of a wedding I went to years ago in Arkansas. The wedding was officiated by a federal judge in a federal courtroom. An assistant to the judge is who was getting married, and they decided to do it this way, with just a few family members. (I was a family member.) We all went to the court house after hours, with the judge and the soon to be wedded couple. When we got to the security check, we all simply walked around it, judge leading, and headed back to his courtroom. This was a few months after 9/11 when security was tight in all federal facilities, already tightened earlier after the Oklahoma City bombing. But it was an example of how security can become suddenly very lax under certain conditions.

Personally, I’m very annoyed at all the extra security, but it seems that only minimal security could have kept a rifle out of the city hall!

The Star Tribune has the story.

I find the graphic they used a bit odd:

The overall form of the graph shows a decrease over time. But it really shows an increase. You just have to know how to read it. The Y axis is the number of days since the last shooting, which as we can see is very high for several shootings before about 2011, but very low after. But, once you do understand the graph it makes the point very clearly. Notice that there are several time periods prior to 2011 which also have low numbers (meaning more shooting events) but those periods are never very long. There seems to be a dramatic and sustained increase in rate of shootings.

The authors explain it this way:

As the chart above shows, a public mass shooting occurred on average every 172 days since 1982. The orange reference line depicts this average; data points below the orange line indicate shorter intervals between incidents, i.e., mass shootings occurring at a faster pace. Since September 6, 2011, there have been 14 public mass shootings at an average interval of less than 172 days. A run of nine points or more below the orange average line is considered a statistical signal that the underlying process has changed. …The standard interpretation of this chart would be that mass shootings, as of September 2011, are now part of a new, accelerated, process.

The big concern now is this: Black will riot in cities across the land and/or mainly whitish vigilantes will flood the streets and shoot anything with a hoodie.

For the most part neither of these things will happen. If there is one thing we’ve learned from the last few decades of changes in gun laws, sudden and dramatic events related to firearm use and abuse, etc. is that a) the brownish people never really go to the streets to kill all the whitish people and b) the gun nuts never really change what they do or the rate at which they do it. And, I’ll add c) criminals and miscreants don’t pay much attention to any of this stuff. Nothing is going to happen.

I’m not saying that there isn’t going to be change. The Zimmerman trial outcome has actually helped to galvanize the anti-gun lobby a little bit, and that lobby was already in action. If anything, this event may bring into the fold a few groups that were not already as engaged. It turns out that the youth are at constant risk of being killed or maimed in this country by older males with firearms, and that this risk applies across levels of privilege, variations in skin tone, regions of the country, urban vs. rural, and all of that.

For young people in the United States, your chance of being killed by a firearm-wielding adult male, in a fire arms accident, or by a self inflicted gunshot, is much higher than the chance of dying of any disease. Guns are the new polio. Guns are the new small pox. Guns are the new plague.

Two things are starting to dawn on the American population. First, we are realizing that the possession of handguns as a constitutionally protected right to stave off an oppressive government is a failed fantasy. Imagine having the right to free speech but everyone’s larynx is removed routinely at birth. Imagine having the right to free assembly and due process but we are locked in separate cages at the age of ten forever. Absurd ideas, aren’t they? We are guaranteed the right to stave off an oppressive government by having a right to own firearms. That worked great with the Patriot Act. The NSA … they never considered spying on American citizens because HANDGUNS. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies will never use Drones on US soil because …. hey, wait a minute …

The second thing we’ve come to realize is that guns are actually very very dangerous. For a couple of generations we’ve grown up with “bang bang you’re dead” style entertainment on TV and in movies, and I think a lot of people don’t realize what really happens when someone pulls the trigger. People don’t experience the temporary (or not) loss of hearing from the sound (especially in a closed space), the smell of the explosion that happens inside the gun, the smell of the blood that spills of the floor. When you ears start to hear again after the shots, there is the sound of the screaming or moaning or incredulous ranting (“You shot me, you shot me, I can’t believe you shot me”) followed by some sort of silence, the silence of a severely wounded person, the silence of a brooding son or daughter with a minor injury to the flesh but a permanent injury to their psyche having just been shot at by daddy, or the silence a person makes when they lie unconscious and bleeding out, or the silence of a corpse.

But now we have soldiers, many more soldiers, among us who know that guns are real and “bang band you’re dead” is not. We have an increasing awareness of an increasing number of incidents in which all the people in a school or all the people who went to see a movie or all the people who visited their candidate for Congress or some other thing suddenly experience the terror of the blasting, the smells, the screaming, the different kinds of deathly silence, and in many cases, personally experience the tearing and exploding flesh, with the lucky ones perhaps being those who are killed quickly by some guy who has expressed his constitutional right to bear arms by firing as many bullets as possible into a crowd.

The Zimmerman verdict moves us measurably closer to effective gun control. This is not the way we should be moving away from the Middle Ages and towards a Civilized World, but it is in fact the only way we seem to be moving. There will be more stand-your-ground shootings, more archaic laws, more unjust verdicts, more mass shootings, all against the background of something close to 3,000 firearm assisted youth suicides and a somewhat larger number of deadly gunshot wounds during crime and street fighting, and no effect on what the government or big corporations do to repress or exploit the average person and no invasions from Canada or Mexico that could only be stopped by a “well regulated militia.” And every now and then some truly good guy will shoot a truly bad guy, stopping the bad guy from doing something truly bad, and people will notice that a handful of such cases against thousands and thousands of gun related deaths a year is not worth it.

Above all, and please never lose sight of this, guns are toys. We are talking about the preservation of the right to play with specific toys, and the right to extend that play into the street and to involve people who did not want to play with these toys to begin with. Stand your ground is a game, it is boys with their toys playing cops and robbers. Boys with their toys build forts in their homes and protect them from invasion. Boys with their toys get together in groups and go out on the street to play army. Boys with their toys collect toys and take them apart and put them together and clean them until they are shiny. Boys with their toys go to big meetings with other boys and trade and sell and exchange and show off. Boys with their toys go to galleries where they can practice and raise their scores.

George Zimmerman was a boy with his toy, and he played cops and robbers, and Treyvon Martin died because he did not follow Zimmerman’s instructions to stand down. Half this country thinks it is OK for a boy like George to take his toy into the street and make other people play and kill them when they do not. The other half is appalled. That second half, it’s growing.

Nonetheless it is important.

If a plane crashed and 365 people died in the crash and it turned out that the plane crashed because there were two commercial airline pilots playing chicken, people would notice, people would get mad, people would go to prison, new laws would be passed and new rules would be made, and no one would be saying it isn’t important. No one.

Well, those ca 365 deaths that happen every year in the US because two idiots are playing chicken or because some cop left his private handgun loaded and unlocked on the night stand or because some buzzed dudes decided to practice shooting in the living room of their apartment are the same thing.

So it is important, which is a point I wanted to make here, but not the main focus of this post. Instead, I want to try something a bit fast and loose and dangerous but that might be interesting.

You know that on National Gun Appreciation Day a gazillion responsible gun owners got together to fork over their hard earned money to gun dealers and otherwise play around with their hardware. During this process, a certain number of people have taken bullets or fragments of bullets as various firearms were accidentally discharged. As of this writing, 8 people have been shot. John McKay is documenting this here.

But they all lived, and in fact, I think none of the incidents were serious enough to have made it into Ohh Shoot blog were it not for the connection to the Gun Appreciation Day events. (Even then, I’m not sure if they’ll be covered there or not).

What does this mean? Well, there may be a number, a factor, that we can multiply by the number of near deadly or deadly incidents of the type that seem to happen at a rate of about one per day, to estimate the total number of dumb-ass accidental woundings that happen every day above and beyond the more spectacular ones, when people merely get nicked and don’t bother getting medical attention, or the incident is otherwise not reported.

So far, that number could be around 8, based on John’s data. But really, are we sure that every single event happening at the Gun Appreciation Day is being reported? Maybe we should round up to 10. In any event, we should wait a few days for the dust and smoke to settle, and see what John’s final count is, and consider which cases were serious enough to have been widely reported and to make it into a blog like Ohh Shoot.

At present, it would not be entirely absurd to suggest that between 3,000 and 4,000 events occur in the US each year in which someone does something dumb with a gun, the gun goes off, and someone gets nicked. How many times does something like this happen, the gun goes off, but no one is nicked? I’ll guess ten times that. About 35,000 times a year, somebody does something dumb with a gun and it fires unexpectedly. About 3500 times someone is nicked with the bullet or shrapnel but not seriously injured. About 350 times there is a serious wounding or death. Mostly, we hear about that last category.

Don’t like my numbers, assumptions, or calculations? Fine! Provide your own in the comments.

Let’s spend a little time to appreciate guns. Because this is the very first Gun Appreciation Day! I’m not sure why we’ve never had a Gun Appreciation Day before, but now that we have one let’s celebrate with a review of the last month’s interesting stories about guns! Yay!

For completeness, because I’m sure Gun Appreciation Day was generated in response to the massacre of 20 six year olds and their teachers and other school personnel in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, we’ll go back to the day before that event, to something sort of local to me, and review events over the last month or so.

An old man in Rochester, Minnesota heard someone on his patio, so he grabbed his 9 mm and pumped a couple of rounds through the door. It was his granddaughter sneaking around outside. She was shot in the throat, lived, but was in serious condition for a while. Yesterday, the local officials charged him.

On December 14th, as you know, 26 people at an elementary school, mostly six or seven year olds, were executed by a guy who borrowed his mom’s guns. He killed himself.

On the 19th, two 20-something year olds went to a gun show in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. One of them bought a 9mm handgun, loaded it, and the gun went off. He shot himself through the hand, and shot his friend in the ass, all with one bullet! Apparently, that’s OK, no charges were filed. You can do that in Kentucky.

A few days after Christmas, Robert Furey, of North Carolina, told the cops that he shot his teenage neighbor with a high powered rifle. He had heard someone coming in the house so he started shooting. 15 year old Nick Exley was killed on the spot. Furey later changed his story to “it went off by accident when I was showing him the gun.” But don’t get the wrong impression. It isn’t necessarily the case that everyone who is a killer is also a liar! Maybe just this one guy.

On December 31st, Attorney Guy Dotson of Tennessee shot himself while cleaning his handgun. It was a through and trough. Dotson specializes in weapons related law:

Guy R. Dotson Jr. and M. Andy Brunelle have more than two decades of combined experience with a broad range of gun charge cases. From arrest to outcome, you can count on them for thorough research and investigation, and preparation of your case as if it is going to trial. We skillfully negotiate with prosecutors and persuasively present your story to a judge and jury if necessary.

I have not heard if he survived. Anybody know?

Happy New Year! On January 2, two people were killed in Vermont while appreciating guns. Louis Miller was holding his handgun when it went off. He wasn’t drunk, but may have been buzzed. Buzzed gunplay is drunk gunplay, people! Anyway, he’s dead. Also, Jacob Lehouillier of Vermont was killed by his brother while he was cleaning a shotgun. The very next day, in neighboring Massachusetts, two guys were playing “quick draw” to see which was quicker, a knife and a gun. One of them (the one with the gun) proceeded to shoot the other, who was hospitalized in serious condition. That apparently is not legal in Massachusetts, so charges were filed. The very next day, on January 4th, 8 year old Easton Brueger was killed by his daddy who was cleaning his gun when it went off. Easton did not die quickly.

On January 7th, 10 year old Aaliyah Boyer, of Pennsylvania, died. The was struck in the head by a bullet discharged for celebratory reasons. No one knows who shot the gun randomly into the air. The very next day, Al Dastmalchi, of North Carolina blasted his brother, George, thinking him to be an intruder. In an unrelated event, police had been called to the home earlier that night to deal with a domestic disturbance, at which time George was taken to the hospital to sober up, and later released. This shooting was totally legal in North Carolina so no charges will be filed. Stand your ground! Kill your drunk brother! The very next day, a four year old boy was shot by Brian Bruno, of Kansas, while playing around with a handgun. The boy was not killed. Bruno had pulled the trigger thinking the handgun to be unloaded. He is being charged. The very next day one 12 year old in Alabama killed another 12 year old boy with a 20 gauge he had gotten for Christmas.

On January 14th, Alex Shaw, of St. Petersburg, Florida, thought it would be a good idea to give his friends a gun safety lesson. He had bought the gun to protect himself after his father was shot dead by armed intruders last June, the same month Alex’s mother died of cancer. Anyway, Alex was telling his friends about how to keep the active chamber empty for safety. In demonstrating this, he put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger. The chamber was not empty, Alex killed himself.

On the 15th, Antonion Brown of Illinois killed his girlfriend, Sydni Blackwell while messing around with a gun. She did not die quickly. Brown was a convicted felon and thus should not have had a gun. The very next day, in Virginia, Casper Jones, 58 was shot in the head by his 4 year old nephew, one of the many children he apparently cared for many days. He died. So much for that day care option!

On January 17th, an FBI agent was accidentally shot on the range during a training session. He’ll live. The next day, Mark Bornino and Daniel Volpone, of Ohio, were target practicing in their back yard without a backstop. Mary Kuruc, who lives about a third of a mile away, got her microwave shot. They were using an AK-47 with high capacity magazines, some other guns, had hundreds of rounds of ammo, and they were drunk.

So, I hope you enjoy the rest of Gun Appreciation Day!

All of the stories above came from a blog that you should put in your RSS reader in order to appreciate guns every day: OHH SHOOT].

UPDATE: Gun Appreciation Day itself is not just a day to appreciate guns, but also, to play with guns, and when we play with guns what do we do? We shoot each other and ourselves by accident! John McKay has a post on the current situation with Gun Appreciation Day Caused Gunshot Wounds, which he says he’ll keep updated over the next few days if more information comes in. Check it out: Happy Gun Appreciation Day!