Samuel Benally Jr., 26, of Phoenix, Arizona wanted to show how dangerous it is to keep loaded guns in the house. He succeeded too well. Benally, who thought that his own gun was unloaded, put a 9mm to his head and pulled the trigger — killing himself in front of the two neighbors.
Such tragedies have befallen officers who mistakenly believe that guns at home are either unloaded or have a safety on, here.
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My brother did not kill himself. It was a freak accident.
my uncle isnt smeone who’d commit sucide so
i dont know what you’re talking about.
Anonymously:
I am not a paranoid Waco(!) but the dilemma is more serious on citizen’s side…it is hard to tell who is a good cop or importantly, a honest prosecutor. We have had too many problematic cases recently and I for one fear the asymmetry of power, now that those pesky things like the Bill of Rights, habeas corpus etc. have been largely done away with.
Is this another good reason not to bother owning a gun? I dont know the answer. As JT tells us, our system was set up to be run by “devils” and still protect individuals. Now we are dependant on the good graces or mood of the few in power. Just a general worry for the future our children would have to grow up in…. Sorry, that was kind of long.
Nathan,
Most good cops will tell you it is hard to sometimes figure out who the real criminals are.
8 years of Bush-2/Cheney has made us a national security police state, with the Patriot Act and Homeland Security Depts (minus habeas corpus!). It makes me wonder if the real threat is not a random armed criminal but an “officer of the law” who gets trigger happy or prosecution happy. No gun will be enough because the State will always outgun you…pun intented.
JW,
I’m sorry, but did you actually read my comment? I never said there was no regulation, nor did I call you twitchy and fearful. Also, we WERE talking about laws until you brought Costco into it. From your earlier comment, “The only people who obey the no gun zone laws are people inclined to follow laws in the first place, i.e. the ones least likely to cause problems.”
I got the fire\car analogy, I was just taking your imagery and running with it.
As for the no gun zones, do you have anything factual to back up your guarantee? You’re making a pretty strong claim so your evidence should be pretty strong.
Gyges-
If a rule is practically *guaranteed* to affect no change in criminal behavior and it is practically *guaranteed* that the only person who will follow it is someone who wouldn’t have been targeted by the rule’s intent in the first place, does that rules make any sense? That’s the case with no gun zones. And we were talking about a private rule, not a law.
You also seem to be under the impression that there are no gun regulations. And to repeat, I support the right of private property owners to ban guns from their establishments. You also missed the point of why cars and fire keep coming up. Gun owners keep being portrayed as fearful, twitchy psychos that skulk around terrified of imminent attack everywhere they go. That is as silly a stereotype as conservatives thinking of progressives as pot-smoking, commie, hippies. We see our guns as a tool that we don’t think and certainly don’t hope we’ll ever have to use, the same as our seatbelts and our fire extinguishers. I don’t stand over the oven with the fire extinguisher when my wife is cooking and I sure as Hell don’t walk through life with my hand poised over my holster waiting for a bad guy to jump from the shadows.
CCD-
The scenario you paint is irrelevant in my case. I have no children so the gun is in it’s case, ready to go when I’m not carrying it. If we have company, I secure both the firearm and the ammunition. As for the horrifying incidents involving despondent fathers, I can only say that they represent a tiny subset of a tiny fraction of a tiny percentage point of gun crime (thankfully). Given the odds in general, it is extremely unlikely that any particular person will commit such an act, and given my history, even less so.
JW,
I don’t see how your objections to a PRIVATE company banning guns on it’s property strengthens the “only criminals will have guns” argument.
By the very definition of “illegal” once you make something illegal, only people that break the law will have/do it. To use that as a reason not to make something illegal is a way of saying “I think this should be legal because that’s what I think.”
Now I’m all for the idea that the default setting should be “legal.” However, in the case of hand guns (and fire-arms in general) there are very pressing reasons why they should be regulated. They’re dangerous. The comparisons of cars and fire seems to keep coming up. Both are dangerous, and both are regulated. Both are also things that are have way more every day utility than a firearm.
I’m just asking for a little more intellectual honest discussion of how much regulations we should have.