Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/22/dummy-who-attempted-to-euthanize-dog-with-handgun-almost-euthanized-a-human.html
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I’m sure glad my neighbor has the right to buy a gun.
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SUNDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2012
Guns Kill People
A couple of years after I left college, there was a deadly incident in my fraternity house (yes I was in a fraternity, yes it was a mostly good experience for me personally, yes Greek systems are probably generally bad). I didn’t really know either of the people involved. Basically drunk guy comes home. Expects to find leftover sandwich in fridge. Sandwich not there. Pissed off, he pulls out a gun (guns and drunk frat boys are an excellent combination) and fires it at a target on the wall. Bullet goes through wall into bathroom, through next wall into next bedroom, into abdomen of guy in next room. Upon realizing he’d hit someone, the shooter promptly aimed gun at himself and committed suicide. Guy he shot ended up being ok (after major medical attention, of course).
Nobody would have been hurt or dead if not for the presence of a gun.
by Atrios at 16:30
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Something something responsible gun owners.
29 long guns and nine handguns
Funny how the people who absolutely shouldn’t have guns at all end up having large collections of them.
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Not sure why, but that reminded me of a former student. Many years ago I was teaching an intro bio lab for non-science majors. The students covered a very wide range. One of them who was particularly dim, decided to brag to me one day in lab about the new AK-47 he just bought to protect his small one-bedroom apartment in a densely packed student apartment complex. He was genuinely stunned when I didn’t think that was the best, coolest idea ever.
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And this is Canada, where you have to work 10x harder to get those numbers of guns. My dad owns two hand guns (one modern, one historical) and it was a lot of training, paperwork, and permits to get them. He’s also limited in how he can store them and move them. In short, you really have to want to own them. Long guns are easy to buy because they aren’t generally useful in violent crime (talking bolt-action here, of course, because duh). Everything else is only useful for killing people, so they are tightly regulated, as is the civilized thing to do.
If this guy was in the US, he’d have 500 guns and his own militia by now.
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I just want to point out that Canada has very stringent gun laws and an exceptionally long licensing process that includes training, background checks - even requiring friend and family recommendations, a restricted gun list, and handgun registration. The license has to be renewed every 5 years.
If that isn’t the proper legislation to ensure they are “responsible gun owners”, I am curious what more people think is needed.
And yet despite all that this guy either was legal and made a stupid, dangerous mistake - or he owned them illegally. Yet he’s used to disparage the 2.2 million gun owners in Canada who, by most accounts, are “responsible gun owners”.
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I think probably the handguns were all illegal otherwise there wouldn’t be “multiple firearms charges”. Charged for dangerous use yes but if the guns were legal shouldn’t have resulted in charges…might have been storage issues, though. Need to be locked up with ammunition stored elsewhere also locked.
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I’d hate to say it but thank God he wasn’t an American.
It’s way too easy for just about anyone to get one here in the states.
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Oh Cananda…
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Its kinda like Catch 22 or something. Almost by definition, the people who actually WANT to own guns, are pretty much the people that SHOULDN’T own guns. We should set up a gun licensing system where you are totally allowed to own a gun,if you have permit, until you actually apply for a permit, thereby proving your ineligibility to own a gun.
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That feels like a somewhat disingenuous question because the obvious answer is: they can do a whole lot more. Even with Canada’s restrictions, it’s still not as onerous as what’s needed to drive a car. (Which, frankly, could easily be more regulated than it is.) This goes all the way up to, you know, not allowing private gun ownership at all. I know that’s unthinkable for Americans, but it’s certainly a thing that is possible to be done. If this guy was truly an example of a legal gun owner in a system with serious restrictions, it’s an argument for that position, but that’s begging the question.
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Well, that wasn’t very polite.
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It’s almost as if there is a pattern of bad decision-making…
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Many years ago, I had a friend in Vancouver whose hobbies included handgun ownership. He described the paperwork and laws surrounding them - exactly as onerous as you describe.
One night, he awoke to a burglar in his house. He leapt out of bed, grabbed a baseball bat, and chased the burglar out. At the time, it never entered his head that the handguns were a weapon he could use. Later, he was very happy it went down that way.
It was one of the best illustrations of the difference in gun culture between Canada and the US. The notion that “guns are for civilians to protect themselves from other people” just isn’t broadly there.
The degree to which this guy in the article is a nut, by Canadian standards, can’t be overstated.
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Knowing a bit about the paperwork that goes into being legally allowed to have one handgun in a Canadian house, I just assume that if he has nine of them, they must be illegal. Anyone impulsive enough to pull this stunt is very unlikely to have the patience for the paperwork for nine handguns.
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We had a couple handguns inherited from a relative…one of them a functioning replica of a percussion cap revolver that he built from a kit, the other a .22 revolver. The trouble we would have had to go to if we wanted to retain them! We thought about having the firing pin removed (at least with the one he made, although with a percussion cap that might be a bit ambiguous ) but was also not really worth it. Would have had to send them to another province to find a gunsmith licensed to do it, and how do you ship restricted weapons? We could have registered them but no one had any interest in shooting them so we just turned them over to the police.
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When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
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It’s hardly a panacea, but requiring gun liability insurance to be carried by gun owners seems like a pretty reasonable measure. For long guns it might be a simple as attaching it to a hunting license. For handguns in the city, it’d be tougher.
Basically, it strikes me as unfair that right wingers are constantly complaining about “freeloaders” being a drag on society, but see no problem with carrying around these deadly liabilities in their own lives. Gun owners are getting a free ride that car owners are not getting, and that needs to change.
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But consistent with their “I should be allowed to spread covid everywhere” and “I should be allowed to discriminate and impose my religious beliefs on others (but not the other way around).”
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