For you, it might actually have been a better idea to tread on them. Just saying. GunFAIL CLXXXIII
Closing the books on February and inching just a wee bit closer to current news, I’ve got another typical week of GunFAIL to report to you. Twenty-five people accidentally shot themselves, eight kids were accidentally shot, six GunFAILS resulted in fatalities, six guns were accidentally fired into neighboring properties or vehicles, and five were accidentally fired while out and about in public, shopping, dining, etc. Well done, everyone!
Tops in craziness this time around? Well, let’s see. First, there’s our title story, about the Arizona man who came upon a den of rattlesnakes and decided to shoot them all, presumably so that no one would tread on them and thereby offend Freedom and Liberty. But apparently, one of the snakes “startled” him, and when he turned to fire at it, he accidentally shot himself in the left arm. No word on whether he managed to shoot the rest of the snakes, much less the practical joker that caused him to Second Amendment himself.
Another story with a more tragic outcome still has me puzzled: The Texas man who somehow shot and killed his roommate “during an apparent discussion ... over what is faster: a gun or a knife.” I don’t know whether the victim was arguing that a knife was somehow “faster” than a gun, or even what that might mean. But I can tell you this: The gun is what killed him. Well, of course, it was really the gun owner’s decision to pull the trigger that did it. Seems he “thought the safety was on.” I doubt that would have been a problem with a knife, though. And nobody was stabbed, by the way, though it’s hard to believe they would have been any more responsible with a knife—if they even had one—than they were with the gun. Tragic.
Let’s point out one more story, as another cautionary tale. I’ve mentioned a few times that if you have a gun in your purse, your purse is a holster. And you can’t just put your holster down anywhere. Well, another thing you can’t do is swat people with your purse, as though you were some kind of old lady character in a Benny Hill sketch. In real life—or at least in Dallas, Texas—when you do this, you risk having the gun fall out of your purse and discharge. Or for that matter, fire while still inside the purse. It was the former that was the problem when a Texas woman tried that stunt in a Dallas-area mall. Thanks for keeping us all safe, conscientious permit holder!
Well, there’s no sense in dragging this out any further. You can review the rest of the stories—tragic, comic and in-between—below the fold.