Boy, 11, asks girl, 8, to see her puppies. She declines. He shoots and kills her

boing
102

At scout camp, the muzzle loader challenge was to shoot an axehead, split the ball, and have it go through two targets. We called it quantum marksmanship.

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103

Mythbusters did that a while back. Davy Crockett was well known for being able to pull it off.

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104

Or slide the action and check the chamber a couple of times (preferably).

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105

I have the same problem with my in-laws - the dad has acquired a handgun to protect himself ‘from immigrants’. I think your demands are perfectly reasonable.

The purse was one specifically designed for concealed carry, so the mother presumably believed that she was engaging in responsible gun ownership. The issue is that to render a stored firearm safe, you also have to render it useless in the sort of scenarios that gun defence proponents imagine will occur.

My father in law keeps his in a different house, so I suspect his real motive for acquiring it is far darker than a simple self-defence scenario.

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106

Random dude: “Where do you live?”
TailOfTruth: “Me?”
Random dude: “Ya, you!”
TailOfTruth: “Oh ya know, in tha good ol self destructive U.S. of sane!”

State’s/Federal congress after a widely reported preventable death/death’s caused by a gun, where a sane country’s legislative body would usually implement gun control measures:


The dude who walks into the bathroom, who doesn’t understand what the fuck is going on, is the UK/Australia/France/New Zealand/Germany/etc., basically any country that has actual gun control.

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107

And Mental health tracking for the rest of his, hopefully long (Does Tennessee still have the death penalty [presuming he is tried as an adult]?), life. I would hinder to guess that allowing him to purchase a firearm if/when he is ever released from prison would not be ideal for public safety or his own physical health (suicide).

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108

I do agree. There are systems that are supposed to make it work just as you say, but we know that they don’t.

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109

That’s what I don’t get about the argument that cars, knives, chainsaws, screwdrivers etc are just as bad as guns. I can think of the purpose for all of those things that have nothing to do with killing a living being. But guns? What are they for if not for killing?

The “guns don’t kill people” line is hollow rhetoric. What are guns made for? They are inseparable from the concept of killing.

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110

In fact, guns are basically useless and unsafe for any other use besides killing. They’re real shit at basically everything beside occupying displays and killing shit.

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111

I can’t even imagine how many people you beat to that one.

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112

As a natural born citizen of the US, I completely agree with you. I’ll never understand how, exactly, keeping an instrument of death (and attractive nuisance to anyone who might break into your home) is supposed to keep one safe.

I regret that I have but one <3 to give you.

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113

My car was once broken into because I had (stupidly) left the emergency glass break tool sitting out where it was visible. The thief even left behind his little nub of a glass break tool, since now he had a much nicer full-sized one.

A tool which is useful in the commission of future crimes is worth a lot more to criminals than yet another electronic thing that might net a few dollars on the street.

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114

^This. I live in a neighborhood that is frequently targeted by burglars (some bizarre perception that us workaday middle class family-types are “rich fuckers”) and keeping a gun in our house would have a higher than average chance of ending up in some criminals hands no matter how well we thought we had the damned thing locked up.

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115

One of the few people that I have known who have been burgled was someone with a sizeable collection of rifles and handguns (this was pre-Dunblane). They forced his gun safe, took the guns, nothing else.

IIRC he got fairly regular communication with the police as the weapons were recovered from various crime scenes.

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116

It’s supposed to 1. Not get stolen 2. Be at hand and loaded or quickly loadable 3. Be in your hands and pointed at the burglar while you are shouting at them to get the fuck out or die. Notice how all of that scenario has to fall neatly into order and can be thwarted a million different little ways at each step, such as if you have children in the house.

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117

"It is a sad, sad situation,” said [sheriff] McCoig. “We hope this don’t ever happen again.”

HAHAHAHAHAH!

Hah.

Hah hah.

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118

My SO keeps saying he wants to get a gun “for protection” and I keep telling him “fuck no.” Which I then follow up by pointing out that all the reports of break-ins in our neighborhood are daylight break-ins. There will be no Dirty Harry heroic deterrent moments against home invaders if we’re targeted by thieves, but if there’s a gun in the house, bet good money it will get stolen. You can put it in one of those gun safe boxes, but they’ll just steal the box and chop it off later with the angle grinder they’re going to steal from our garage.

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119

Which one is it? Can you be sure about any direction being safe?

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120

That’s somewhat the way I was taught… even if you know it’s unloaded - even if you personally unloaded it and checked it - the rules about handling it while loaded still apply. Always in a safe direction, never finger on the trigger, etc.

If nothing else, it makes the people around you who didn’t do the unloading feel a lot safer.

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121

I just don’t understand the fascination with guns.
Honestly. They’re pretty simple machines- from a mechanical perspective. There aren’t that many moving parts in there, and there’s no mystery to be had (in the way some people feel about, say, a car motor…).
They do one thing. They have very little margin for error- that is to say, when you pull the trigger, there’s no pop-up dialog box that asks “Are you sure you wanted to discharge this firearm?”
Just- why? I mean, for what?
Don’t say home protection. There are no possessions in my house I wouldn’t be happy with someone taking if that meant nobody (including the thief) was hurt. That’s what insurance is for.
Don’t say hunting. That’s (in nearly all cases) killing animals and passing it off as “sport” while stacking the odds so thoroughly against the animal as to make it a joke.
What else? I literally don’t understand.
If you’re going to shoot clay pigeons, can’t the gun be stored at the range?
If you’re going to shoot targets (I guess?) can’t you do the same?
Why would you ever bring something so wildly dangerous into your house willingly?
I just don’t get it, and I think I’m ok with that.

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