Considering what people were and are doing under pretense of God’s will, it’s a perfectly fine phrase.
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Heck, I wonder how many gun owners never go to the range. (Or have any kind of safety training, etc.) Some Pew survey I saw suggested that most don’t. (Only a minority said they “sometimes” went to a shooting range.) Not that unsafe behavior necessarily gets displayed, policed or corrected there, either.
It occurs to me that “responsible gun owner” is a lot like “law-abiding citizen.” First of all, there ain’t no such thing. People may want to be responsible/law-abiding, but it depends on education - being able to recognize when one has crossed the line (which isn’t obvious, given Americans routinely violate the law without knowing it, for instance) - and maintaining the mental equilibrium required to retain and make good on that intention (e.g. being insecure, upset, angry, drunk, mentally ill, etc. are factors that frequently cause people to cross the line into irresponsible or illegal behavior).
But more than that, it’s a statement of (dangerously false) binary certainties - people are either of the safe, “good” variety, or they’re dangerous monsters from whom the law is intended to protect the “good” people. One is in the “safe” category until one is ejected from it (because one got caught being irresponsible/criminal) - neither intention nor education come into it. “No true Scotsman” fallacies can run wild, as well as prejudices (one of the NRA’s own lawyers of recent decades explicitly making arguments about how black people shouldn’t have access to guns, whereas “responsible” white people such as himself should - despite the string of serious gun crimes he had committed as a youth, including murder).
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I had a friend who visited a small college campus in Louisiana. In the center of campus was a very small pond, barely an easy stone’s throw across in all directions. One each of the four sides of the pond was a large sign that read “Please don’t shoot the ducks”. At first it was funny, but as he thought about it, he realized that the signs wouldn’t be there if it hadn’t happened. In fact, knowing how college bureaucrats work, it had probably happened many times to merit buying a single sign, let alone four. He decided to not visit that campus any more.
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I think they’re cosplaying Matthew 19:12.
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“[We] are sick and tired of being demonized as gun owners, and looped together with the alt-right just for owning guns,” an admin of Loaded Guns Pointed at [B]enis told Motherboard in a Facebook message. “We are sick of republicans (think NRA) telling us what to do with our property, and we are sick of being told that just because we like guns It means we have to be anti woman, pro life and pro trump.”
I get the feeling that the SRA, John Brown Gun Club, Huey P Newton Gun Club, Liberal Gun Club and Pink Pistols want nothing to do with these gentlemen.
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As a motorcyclist, we definitely have subcultures of people like this. There’s the whole helmet law debate, ATGATT-vs-TeaShartandFlipflops arguments. There are bikers who rip through dense traffic at ill advised speeds. And so on.
Everyone I know who rides likes the feeling of freedom you get on a bike. I like the thrill of it. My main motorcycle is a powerful sport bike, and I like what happens when I crack the throttle open.
But helmet and gear usage affects more than just me. It affects insurance rates, and there is a big social and human cost. First responders, medical staff and everyone encountering an accident scene has to deal with the worse outcome for the rider. It makes both the mechanical and emotional portion of their jobs much worse.
And this is the same thing. A stupid, preventable accident made by an idiot who doesn’t think about anyone around him. Freedom means being allowed to take risks, but responsibility means taking measures to minimize those risks and their impacts on others.
Edit to add: I don’t think this group is as fringe as the NRA would want you to think. Given the size of anti helmet types, there are plenty of them.
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Well, fewer nuts than there used to be.
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Also… I’m laughing so hard at this dumbfuck and his dumbfuck friends. Sadly, he probably doesn’t have to suffer from hormone imbalances thanks to HRT. Still, net positive for humanity that transgender people have access to it.
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I can’t speak to the question of how many gun owners think it is hilarious to point loaded guns at their own junk, but clearly there are some.
What I can speak to, as someone who grew up hunting with gun safety being the #1 rule constantly emphasized by my father and his friends, is the prevalence of dangerous behavior among gun owners.
It is common among gun owners to hunt in groups while drinking. Not too smart, or safe.
It is common for gun owners who like to flaunt their weapons in public (see any recent demonstration) to exhibit unsafe behavior. Take a look at any picture to see how many of them have a finger through the trigger guard, even of the gun is pointed down. Not too smart, or safe.
It is common for many gun owners to leave a loaded weapon around unsecured in their home. For evidence look to the many cases of children accidentally shooting other children. Clearly not safe or smart.
While you yourself may be responsible and safe while handling guns, that does not extrapolate to far too many owners who view their weapon as a manly toy, or an own-the-libs cosplay object, and before they even pick up the weapon they are far too foolish and stupid to be handling one. The days of the NRA gun safety emphasis are long in the past. Now guns are more likely to be a fetish object, and they are far too easy to obtain.
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Having grown up immersed in the shooting community, I tend to agree with @Mister44 that this behavior is alien to anything I’ve ever experienced. Not to say the community isn’t rife with unsafe behaviors, but this is just so far beyond the pale.
A lot of modern pistols have mechanisms that visibly indicate when a round is chambered. This guy’s 1911 probably didn’t have anything like that, so he used an alternate method to demonstrate that it was loaded.
Best case scenario–when this guy showed up at the hospital for a self-inflicted gunshot to his own junk, let’s hope he was involuntarily held for observation/evaluation in the psych ward. And hopefully they decided this guy a risk to himself and others. Usually, being involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility prohibits a person from possessing firearms.
ETA: I’m not suggesting he is or isn’t suffering from mental illness; I’m just suggesting an ideal case where he would no longer be armed, since he is clearly not capable of responsible firearms ownership.
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Motor vehicle violations may be a good comparison. As someone made that comparison above etc. Mind you - you need to pass a written and practical test to get a driver’s license and still get insurance to drive. And that privilege is limited to the type of equipment you’re allowed to drive - and some with limited hours or locations and supervision etc and required retesting with advanced age and limitations on usage if you need supportive equipment.
And this license can be revoked etc.
“ Driving Citation Statistics
Average number of people per daythat receive a speeding ticket - 112,000
Total annual number of people who receive speeding tickets - 41,000,000
Total percentage of drivers that will get a speeding ticket this year - 20.6 %
Average cost of a speeding ticket (including fees) - $152
Total paid in speeding tickets per year - $6,232,000,000
Average annual speeding ticket revenue per U.S. police officer - $300,000
Percent speeding tickets that get contested in traffic court - 5 %
Total number of licensed drivers in America today - 196,000,000
This indicates that a damn lot of unsafe gun behavior is going on everyday if one adheres to the gun equals vehicle standard suggested here earlier.
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This whole stunt reminds me of the scene from the schlocky vigilante gorefest Hobo With a Shotgun in which the title character leads a sadistic murdering rapist around by duct taping the business end of his weapon to the guy’s crotch. (Spoiler: things don’t end well for the sadist.)
Apparently there are morons out there who could watch that scene and think to themselves “I want to be THAT guy!”
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Honest question: can someone explain more what the intent of this meme is? What’s the message they’re trying to send? I honestly don’t get it. I’ve maybe deduced from this thread that “own the libs” or “you can’t tell me what to do” are the reasons, I guess? But I don’t see how this meme sends those messages.
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Uh… He fixes the cable?
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That’s really it. It’s also got a bit of “you don’t need that stupid litany of tedious safety rules, common sense works just fine.” It’s another expression of anti-expertise.
I mean. It’s not a well thought out position. It ignores why those safety rules were developed.
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As a liberal, I feel slightly pwned by this incident, but I really need more evidence. I think a few hundred more handgun selfies would probably pwn me quite a lot, and a thousand or so would definitely pwn me for the foreseeable future.
So as a rough guideline, 1 self-nutting ≈ 1millipwn, and gun owners should probably co-ordinate their efforts if they want to inflict a palpable pwning.
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Don’t be fatuous, jaffrey.
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Oh, even with all things being equal, it’s got to be so much worse with guns, though. Leaving aside that people routinely operate vehicles on a daily basis, unlike guns (which on the one hand gives drivers more opportunity to screw up, but also acts as daily training and opportunities for policing of their driving), almost none of that regulation exists for guns. A significant percentage of gun owners have had zero safety training, as opposed to almost all drivers (presumably some vanishingly small percentage of drivers are illegally driving without a license or even ever having had driver’s ed). Irresponsible gun behavior is largely done in private spaces where there’s no mechanism to detect it, much less consequences for it. Only when gun handling causes a (significant) injury does anyone else get involved, for the most part, which is a pretty high bar.
I’m trying to imagine what kind of drivers we’d get if they didn’t have to have any sense of traffic safety laws (no license, did a lot of car handling on private roads with no other drivers, when cars appeared in media they were almost always depicted being driven recklessly, and drivers didn’t even necessarily have the experience of being driven around as children by adults exhibiting proper road behavior), and got let loose on the roads with almost entirely unregulated vehicles.
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