Gun Deaths? Let’s Do Nothing!

On this subject I’ve often written that doing nothing doesn’t seem to be working, which I firmly believed until I did a search through the old archives.

This searching stuff all started when I suddenly remembered a “News of the Weird” story about this guy who got mad at his girlfriend. She ran out, hopped in her car, and was about to drive off. He grabbed the nearest “thing,” which turned out to be a shotgun. His girlfriend got quite shaken as he ran toward her brandishing a shotgun, but that was nothing compared to how she felt as he smashed her windshield with the butt of the gun, discharging it, and blowing his head off.

So I was curious: How many gun owners and aficionados are actively working to reduce their numbers?

I’m sure you all remember that somewhat recent “death by selfie” incident. Some young kid from Mexico City put a gun in one hand and a phone/camera in the other, then forgot which was which and blew his brains out.

We know that war zones aren’t particularly safe places, but it definitely wasn’t safe for a young soldier by the name of Isaac Young, because he had the hiccups. We all know that the best way to cure the hiccups is to scare someone. And the best way to scare someone is to pull out a gun and point it at him, which is exactly what one of his fellow soldiers did, except the gun went off, curing Young’s hiccups permanently.

We can all agree that gun safety classes are necessary, in fact, I believe they should be more rigorous, and refresher courses should be taken twice a year. But the classroom phase is so boring. It’s when you finally get one of those puppies in your hands that the class gets exciting. But when you are bored to tears sitting and sitting and sitting, it’s best not to think, “Kill me now.” This is because the practical is coming up and you’re going to have a loaded weapon on your hands. Brian J Parry got bored in class. When they finally gave him his gun, he blew his brains out.

In a gun safety class, one really should learn the difference between a semiautomatic weapon with a clip, and a “revolver.” One great difference is that with a revolver you can play Russian Roulette. You can’t play this with a semiautomatic, because even if you put just one bullet in it, when you cock the gun, that one bullet will automatically enter the chamber. A man from Houston (Home of the Gun-Nut) found this out the hard way.

Hunting accidents are an annual event, but the problem as I see it is that one hunter is always shooting another, which isn’t fair. We need more hunters like that one in Virginia who carried his shotgun by the barrel, and while walking through brush, its trigger got caught on a branch, and, you guessed it, blew his head off.

But sadly, it’s nearly always someone else who pays the price of a hunter’s stupidity. An old guy shot his son in the back of his head in 2014, and that same year, one hunter slipped in the mud and his gun went off killing his buddy. In Virginia that December, a hunter shot his friend in the head, and that turned out to be only the 19th hunting gun accident since September.

We’re told we need guns to protect our homes, but statistics show us that this practice isn’t all that safe, even for people who handle guns in their professions. In August of 2014, a deputy shot his 16-year-old daughter (in Virginia) mistaking her for a burglar. A stepdad who had just returned from Iraq shot his wife’s teenage daughter, mistaking her for … a deer, or a terrorist, or something other than a teenage girl.

Sadly, far too many who don’t own guns or aren’t packing a gun get injured or killed because someone with more ammo than brains comes into their lives. How about the babysitter who was packing? She took a little nap while her charge found her pistol and blew his brains out. Then there was the father who popped in on an old friend and his toddler ran off to find his friend’s loaded gun. The father paid the ultimate price when he failed to answer his kid’s burning question: “Daddy, what’s this?”

Now maybe you remember the guy who was playing which his guns, doing all those cowboy tricks, spinning his gun around when one went off killing himself. Even cowboys aren’t stupid enough to do those tricks with loaded weapons. Sadly again, even in these situations, others seem to get it even more often than the gun-nut. One guy doing those same tricks shot his girlfriend, while another shot through the floor of the apartment above him wounding his neighbor.

Others (other than the gun-nut) seem to get hurt more often than the gun-nut. Just one month earlier (than the guy above shooting his neighbor) in Arizona, a guy with a gun tucked in his waistband killed his girlfriend when it went off. Then there’s the lady who, while visiting friends, got a call and went outside to take it. Everyone heard a gun blast and then a knocking at their door. They opened it and their friend who had stepped out to take her call was bleeding from her leg. She’d been hit by a stray bullet fired by a guy committing suicide.

Now the woman who was killed by her own gun that her toddler pulled from her purse while they were shopping is something that happens just about as often as incidents in which the individual packing shoots himself. Like Todd Canady: buying milk at Wal-Mart and while fumbling around for his wallet, somehow shot himself in the leg.

Then there’s the guy who takes his gal’s pink pistol, (because she’s a girl and doesn’t know how to handle a gun) puts it into his belt, and shoots his dick off.

This even happens in Trinidad. Police where called because some guy in a uniform was slumped over in his car. They arrived to find a security guard who had shot his dick off, carrying an illegal handgun. Michael Smeriglio? Shot off his dick while cleaning it. Tavares Colbert? Was heading out to sell his illegal gun and decided to test it . . . by shooting his dick off. Wal-Mart isn’t the only place you can shoot yourself. How about Lowe’s? Josh Seto walked into Lowe’s with his girlfriend, reached into his waistband to make sure his gun was secure, and blew his nuts off. Even teens get in on the action. A 17-year-old walked into a Vallejo, CA emergency room complaining of pain “down there.” Down there was where his dick used to be, apparently.

But the worst of the worst is when someone blames someone else for shooting his dick off. Donald Anthony Watson wound up in an emergency room in South Dakota with his dick missing. He claimed that it had happened during a botched robbery and that somebody else had shot him. To top it off, he blamed a black man for the crime.

The officers taking down his story immediately doubted it. One officer told him, “Sir, you do realize this is South Dakota, right? and that I happen to be the only black man in the five county area? And that’s only because I was transferred here from Minneapolis. And sir, do you know how hard it is to shoot a white man’s dick? Nobody is that good with a pistol.”

Obviously the more guns in circulation, the more people will be killed or wounded. This is simple statistical fact, at least in America. However, I think it’s time for the statisticians to stand up and tell us if gun-nuts are killing themselves at a rate significant enough to solve the problem in the long run. While, of course, entertaining the rest of us. That too is important.

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I wrote this a long time ago. Yes, it’s fun to laugh at people shooting themselves, but that’s not really who is dying. The recent carnage in Buffalo, NY, and the elementary school at Uvalde, TX is proof that we must stop this insanity.

I wrote this very short story just days before Uvalde:

There are more unicorns in the US than good guys with guns. Even the cops on site did nothing.

The only reason we can’t get gun reform is that profits are more precious than people.

Gun Reform Works

It’s worked all over the world and it can work here. No other country has the number of mass shootings we do and it’s because we cannot pass sane gun reform with half of Congress bought by the NRA.

The first thing we can do is outlaw weapons of war. It seems that a huge group of morons want to argue about the term “assault rifle,” but those of us who are trained in them have no problem distinguishing a “hunting” rifle from the weapon of choice of these mass murderers.

• Parkland: AR-15
• Las Vegas: AR-15
• Aurora, CO: AR-15
• Sandy Hook: AR-15
• Waffle House: AR-15          
• San Bernardino: AR-15
• Midland/Odessa: AR-15
• Poway synagogue: AR-15
• Sutherland Springs: AR-15
• Tree of Life Synagogue: AR-15

Ban this weapon. Ban large magazines. Ban bump stocks. Create “red flag” laws with TEETH and universal background checks with waiting periods. And still more can be done, even requiring licenses to purchase and own a weapon, and law suits against weapon manufacturers and shops that sell the guns used in mass murders. Gun owners need to buy insurance just as car owners buy insurance.

And since Republicans in Congress love holding up pictures of fetuses and aborted fetuses, it’s time to force them to see the images of the carnage from school shootings.

The second amendment wasn’t written in stone. It is obsolete.

We have to weed out of Congress all those who are bought off by the NRA. And we need a guaranteed “right to vote” and universal mail-in ballots. I’m sick and tired of seeing battle-field carnage on our streets, in supermarkets, and in our schools.