Carrying a gun isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I learned that most people I encountered actually didn’t feel better knowing that I had a gun. And, though I tried to keep it concealed in a hip holster under a shirt or jacket, the people who inevitably did glimpse it frequently wondered why I had it and whether my gun or my presence put them in danger — like the staff and customers who panicked at that Walmart in Missouri. Even the people who knew and trusted me — knowing that I was a responsible gun owner who had been threatened — wondered if being near me in public exposed them to … danger …
… it’s SO much like this one – so much like hunderts of ‘merican boy deaths – that I thought I’d throw it into the mix.
A man, [who had earlier consumed alcohol and taken a Percocet pain for which he didn’t have a prescription], admiring a friend’s pistol during a gathering of friends, accidentally shot and killed another man with it …
[The shooter] had asked to hold a visitor’s pistol, which was loaded but did not have a bullet in the chamber. While admiring the gun, [he] pulled its slide back and simultaneously squeezed its trigger, police said, citing the witnesses’ accounts.
One of the visitors said he tried to warn [him] that he had loaded a bullet into the pistol’s chamber when he pulled the slide back, but it was too late — he had already fired the gun.
“We were looking for things that were new and exciting,” [one parent] said. “You can only buy so much cookie dough, cheesecake and wrapping paper. We were looking to be unique in our offerings the best we could.”
… you get American deaths like this one, of a Colorado State University student. Both he and his armed to the teeth housemate seem to have been shitfaced when they started playing around with the housemate’s … let’s see…
… military-style AR-15 carbine, a Remington pump-action shotgun, a Springfield .45-caliber handgun and a Glock 34 9 mm semi-automatic handgun with a mounted flashlight and 17-round magazine.
Strange brew… see what’s inside of you — drugs, alcohol, and… hey… a fatal bullet! How about that!
Who cares. The police initially believed the beyond-bogus story the housemate concocted about how you know a young man with his whole life before him and no history of depression just up and marched into his room, took his Glock (conveniently loaded) and shot himself through the head with it. Case closed! Kids these days.
Only after all sorts of shouts and cries from the dead guy’s family have the police who I mean nu? I mean every day around here some hopeless jerk with a gun kills his kid boohoo you expect us to sit up and take notice when another one bites the dust? So the guy keeps changing his story, his timeline, his alcohol consumption, his everything – I guess that’s why he failed two lie detector tests…
[He eventually admitted] he posed for a couple of Snapchat photos with [his housemate] before the incident, which contradicts his initial statements to police that [he housemate] came into his room without warning, picked up the gun and shot himself… [He also made] four calls to family, … removed the 17-round magazine from the Glock 34 and ejected the round from the chamber and put the gun in [his housemate’s] lap before police arrived. He also moved [his housemate’s] marijuana pipe from the room and cleaned up several beer cans.
So a guy’s lying mortally wounded in front of you. What do you do? … Hello muddah, hello faddah, here I am at…
… an “adequate supply” of AR-15s for the general population here. When Colt announced it was discontinuing them, UD worried that there might still be inadequately supplied pockets of America; but Colt assures us that it has carpeted the country in consumer rifles and will now concentrate exclusively on the “military and law enforcement.”
I guess I should believe them, but I’m concerned that my own little town of Garrett Park, for instance, may not in fact have its quota of semi-automatic rifles in case of guerilla warfare or a fascist overthrow.
Note to UD: Talk to the mayor.
There’s another problem with what Colt has done. Right now the weapons advantage seems on the side of the criminal and the insane; won’t this new policy shift the balance?
… with everything a 22-year-old pisher needs to own to make an evening special:
But that’s not all: Tequila!
[One roommate,] who started drinking earlier in the day, took four shots. [The other] drank six shots.
They were playing, or whatever, with all these toys and one of them, a 21-year-old CSU student, ended up dead on a bed who knows how? A night of madness that turned to sadness much too soon.
The parents of a 4-year-old boy who was fatally shot Sunday, apparently by his sibling, won’t face charges, police said… The child was one of three who were shot Sunday in Tarrant County. Arlington police were investigating two shootings — a 6-year-old boy who was shot in the head by his brother and an 8-year-old girl who was wounded in what police were investigating as an accident.
**************
As usual, everything’s better in Texas! Took Indianapolis eleven days to shoot three kids.
The failing NASCAR (to use whozit’s favorite phrase for the New York Times)** seems to have decided that big scary ads for AR-15s and AK-47s are alienating the few people left at their races, and the gunnies is pissed, man. Sandwiched between images of huge tits and dead-eye snipers, this editorial is way steamed about NASCAR’s sudden rejection of assault rifle ads this racing season – and if you put this together with Beto’s thing and the letter all them corporate leaders sent to the Senate, things are looking a bit on the shitty side for those who like to pretend they are part of the Tet offensive.
** NASCAR’s failing cuz it’s boring when no one dies. (“Pretty soon there will be 50mph speed limiters, mandatory turn signal usage, and spring loaded bounce bumpers. NASCAR has become a joke.”)
Hamas has reportedly called the NRA’s lawsuit strategy “a mistake,” and urged instead that they focus on strengthening the charitable arm of the organization.
She killed both of her adult children – and then herself – with a gun (or guns) she had in her house. Why did Marsha Edwards have guns? The police are saying very little – not about guns, or a final note, or substance abuse issues, or psychiatrists… With the exception of one neighbor who apparently called her a “very, very unhappy woman,” we got nuthin. We got lots of the use of the word “tragedy,” and lots of Give God the Burden, which UD finds mighty odd for a double murderer. Of her own children.
What is it about some women who kill? UD‘s reminded of ol’ Amy Bishop, who shot her brother to death and was sent home to mommy. I understand you can’t do anything to Marsha Edwards now (Bishop, decades later – after she mass-murdered her University of Alabama colleagues – was indicted for the fratricide), but we should at least find out why a murderously deranged mother was able to buy a gun and kill her kids with it. She lived in a wealthy, ultra-safe, gated community… Why the gun? Can we ask when she bought it, or if she got it from a friend, or whatever? It’s the thing that ended three lives – shouldn’t we know something about it?
As the Marsha Edwards story vanishes into that tragic woman plus the cosmic mystery, it leaves the stink of the normalization of a household appliance able to be used with stealth, ease, and one hundred percent fatality.
“People tend to drink a fair amount of alcohol when you don’t have many other sources of entertainment. Everybody has guns. You get the stress of a poor crop, of tariffs, and you can’t sell your wheat for what it costs to put in the ground. Cattle prices may or may not be good. The bank’s knocking at your door. Your kids are moving away because of brain drain. So people a lot of times tend to deal with it with a single bullet.”
A Montana psychiatrist sums it up.
None of [the gun control] efforts … have been as instantly effective as [Dmitriy] Andreychenko’s stunt [ – entering a WalMart in body armor and holding a semi-automatic rifle – ] in making the point that wearing military protective gear and carrying a semi-automatic weapon should perhaps not be considered an acceptable way to behave, during peacetime, around people who are shopping for paper towels.
… is a nascent movement born of the latest attack on gun rights – the rollback of open carry while grocery shopping. Studies show that absent regular visual and physical access, inside and outside the home, to AR-15s, Alaskans’ impulse to detonate their heads will be significantly mitigated.
As famed for red pulp as Florida is for orange, we Alaskans have stood at the top of America’s suicide rate until recently, when we were very slightly overtaken by Montana. As local legislators keep an anxious eye on that slippage, POSR joins ranks with the Alaskan Independence Party to militate for nationhood, and the self-determination that accompanies it.
Meanwhile, join with us in singing our anthem:
TO HIS COY PULPER
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s aim and that gun’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I reach for thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet barrel finger’d such pulping brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
But it’s the kind of stunt that could catch on. That would be fun to watch.