Since we last discussed this about 17 days ago, Bill Adams and Charles Lake shot themselves while handling their handguns. They weren’t shottin’ intruders or varmints or nuthin’. Just holding or loading. Some guy in florida was “putting his gun away” when the 9mm went off. But bullet passed into his neighbor’s apartment and shot her while she was sleeping. A dood down in Hatchez, Mississippi woke in the middle of the night to a sound he mistook for an intruder. He shot hisself in the damn pinkie toe.

Thoze-all might have been people who knew nohting about guns, hard to say, but Jack Haning of Lubbock has been messing with guns his whole life, but he still managed to shoot himself in the leg after showing off his new handgun to his coworkers. He did not live.

James Crawford of Virginia was playing with a 9mm at a party. He thought the gun was empty so he wuz pretenging like he was shooting himself in the head but then he shot himself in the head for real. He did not live.

Maybe James Crawford was a drunk dumbass teenager with no callin’ to have a handgun, but a security guard in St Petersburg Florida who is licensed to havea gun was hidden in a small closet with two young men in the church explaining to them the safety features of his Ruger 9mm when he pulled the trigger. The bullet went through the wall and hit Hanna Kelly, the 20 year old daughter of the pastor in the head. She is in critical condition and, well, is not really expected to live. Something tells me there is more to that story than meets the eye at this particular moment.

Most of those were in the south, which makes me wonder about the south. But up oi Ohio, Wellington Roemer shot himself through the thigh and gut when his weapon discharged as he exited his vehicle. Previous to that he had posted this on facebook: “I’ll keep my money, freedom & guns, you keep the change.” with a picture of Obama.

Back in the south, in South Carolina in fact, a woman carrying a valid permitted gun in her purse shot her friend in the foot when the gun went off by itself. Though she had a permit, she was in fact not allowed to carry the gun into the mall. No word on if there will be charges, or if anyone is looking into the safety of that particular weapon which appears to, well, not be safe.

While we are on the subject of malls, a woman was shot in Jacksonville, in the arm, by a stray bullet. That may be different from all these other cases because it could have been some sort of violent crime in which an innocent bystander was shot. But I include it here because we might want to have a discussion of the utility of carrying guns around in shopping malls. If only everyone in that mall was packing, that guy who shot the woman by accident would never had pulled that gun out out of fear.

In another case of a person who should know better, a former chief of police of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, shot himself in the hand while cleaning his gun.

One of the arguments that Gun Rights Apologists (GRAs) make is that guns will always fall into the hands of criminals no matter what you do, so you might as well not bother with rules or laws or procedures that limit the sale, purchase, distribution or ownership of any kind of firearms. This is, of course, a foundation-less assertion and a rather self-serving one at that. There are two reasons why it is wrong. The first and most obvious is that even if there is a flow of guns from legal to illegal ownership, making that process illegal does send a message, secure funding, and keep the process on the radar screen for law makers and law enforcers; The difficulty of enforcing a law can certainly be taken into account when deciding whether or not to bother with the law, but only after it has been designated as unimportant or insignificant on other grounds. Laws about victimless crimes that are impossible to enforce are probably not worth enacting or expending much energy on. Laws about victim-rich crimes, on the other hand, should not be abrogated just because enforcing them is hard.

But there is a second reason that the argument that “guns will fall into the hands of criminals anyway so don’t bother” is wrong: The flow of guns from legal ownership to illegal possession can be affected by the implementation of statue, according to a recent study. Continue reading Legal guns to criminal’s hands: Is it uncontrollable? →

In Minnesota, you can carry a gun around, concealed, if you have a permit. Why? Well, I suppose so that if you get mad at someone you can pull your gun out and shoot them.

According to wcco:

The Cook County Sheriff said the man who opened fire Thursday in a courthouse in Grand Marais got the gun from his own vehicle.

Daniel Schlienz was convicted on a sexual assault charge in Cook County Court. After the jury found him guilty of criminal sexual conduct, he left the building then came back into the courthouse and into County Attorney Timothy Scannell’s office with the loaded weapon.

He then shot a witness i his trial, the county attorney, and injured a bailiff. Fortunately, he was an incompitent marksman so no one was killed.

I do not yet know if he had a carry permit, or was using it legally, but certainly despite the best efforts of the NRA it is still not legal to carry a weapon into a courthouse.

This is obviously a matter of mental illness. What gun advocates often do not admit, however, is this: It is exactly the the intersection between lax or permissive gun laws and mental illness that facilitates this kind of event. Stricter gun regulation is needed exactly because of this intersection, not the opposite.

Andrew Rosenthal:

Of all of the lobbying organizations that feed off fear, and rely for their funding and power on dividing Americans, one of the worst is the National Rifle Association.

The NRA never misses a chance to misrepresent the positions of people who advocate reasonable gun control, to make Americans afraid that the government wants to take away their right to defend their homes and their loved ones, and to turn any attempt to have a sensible conversation about guns into an assault on the Second Amendment.

Why else would the NRA support a law that makes it more difficult to prevent suicides among members of the armed forces?

Let me explain. …

Continued here.

Hey, I have an idea! Let’s get drunk and field strip this pistol while it’s loaded! What could go wrong?

Continue reading File this under “people are too stoopid to own guns” →

Hunting season is starting soon or has already started in North America. I believe we are shooting the ducks now in Minnesota. Hmmm. I wonder if this is the year we call the Sheriff to report the guys who hunt illegally in the marsh by the cabin. People are a bit more safety conscious with a toddler toddling around, even though he actually presents a very small target and the marsh is a bit far away for a shotgun blast to be much of a problem.
Continue reading Try not to shoot anybody, OK? →

If only….

The history books and Dr. Who have it wrong, according to the latest research.

VINCENT Van Gogh did not commit suicide but was shot by a teenager with a Wild West obsession and a faulty gun, according to a new biography.

Short of claiming that the Dutch artist never cut off his ear and never painted sunflowers, the Pulitzer Prizewinning authors of “Van Gogh: The Life” could hardly have produced a more startling revelation from their decade of research.

… Interesting …
Continue reading Gun Control: Too Little Too Late for Vincent Van Gogh? →

Delbert Huber, an 81-year old Kandiyohi County Minnesota man, got into a verbal argument with 43 year old Timoth Larson. Huber settled the dispute by blasting Larson with his gun. Larson is dead. Larson was a special ed teacher at St. Michael-Albertville Middle School West.

Twenty Two year old Mattisha Houston killed Joseph Wells in Houston. She was shooting at a tree in her back yard, missed the tree, and Wells was killed while watching his TV.

Timothy Huber, the son of Delbert was also arrested. [source]

This is not the usual sort of thing I like to point out, but since it was close to home I thought I’d mention it .

______________

Johnnie Flow armed herself with a handgun last February, because she felt her family was being threatened. The gun was not legal, and apparently there was no attempt at safety training.

Then, her 3 year old son go thold of the gun and shot her other kid, 2-year old Payton, in the stomach.

Johnie says:

“I’m not a bad mother,” Flow said. “Anybody who knows me knows my babies mean the world to me. That was just a freak accident.”

Ah, Johnnie, sorry, no. You are a bad mother. That was not a freak accident. That was you having a loaded gun that was not locked away. You turned one of your kids into a victim of gun violence, and the other into a perp. That does not mean that you can’t be a good mother, but just saying that you are a good mother because you want it to be true is a stupid as leaving a loaded gun in reach of your toddlers.

Also, you are reproducing too fast. Slow down.

The victim was release from the hospital on Saturday.

______________________