An Idiot with a gun
We’ve covered this ground before, but three separate incidents this week came together in my mind to solidify one point. Essentially, the pro gun crowd loves to separate people into a good guy with a gun as opposed to a bad guy with a gun. Supposedly, the good guy with the gun will negate the bad guy with the gun.
Well, I was perusing through HEB the other day and minding my own business (a personal favorite phrase of mine) when I strolled down the periodicals aisle. I noticed eight different magazines dedicated to guns and ammo. That was more than fashion magazines. It was more than the football, basketball, and baseball magazines. It was more than the bridal magazines. It was more than the Texas themed magazines or magazines about food. Apparently, guns are more popular than just about anything else.
While it wasn’t immediately related, I thought to our experience this past weekend an earlier in the week. My wife’s cousin came down to vacation in Galveston. We are only 30 miles away, so we decided to join them for a “quick” dinner. We left the house with plenty of time to spare. An hour and a half later we had travelled three miles.
The same thing happened when we took our daughter to a summer camp. The same thing happened on a different highway when we returned. The delays weren’t as heinous, but the fact that they were occurring on three different highways and different points of the highway was telling.
The coup de grace came when her cousin (we will call him Eugene) announced at dinner that he had built his own AR-15. Eugene is what you might call a computer geek. He has always been socially awkward. He also bragged that he had not connected with one target since he had gone out target shooting with his work friends. Yup, he’s the guy I want having an AR-15.
This isn’t to say I would perform any better. It never occurred to me to try. We’ve discussed abortion in the salon. We’ve discussed voting rights in the salon. We have also discussed guns in the salon. It took my wife’s cousin Eugene to crystallize the slogan we need moving forward. Yes, there are bad people with guns. Yes, there are good people with guns. Unfortunately, there are also idiots with guns.
Eugene is not an idiot in the literal sense. He is somewhat educated and has a professional job. He’s an idiot because he has no idea how to use a gun or how dangerous they can be. His reasoning for doing it is also idiotic. It’s not about protection, sport, or even hobby collection. He wants to belong. He wants other men to see him as manly. The sad thing is that possessing that AR-15 doesn’t change anyone’s opinion. It just makes him seem more pathetic.
In a similar way, posturing about guns, walls, bathroom bills, and voter suppression laws don’t make Greg Abbott seem like a stronger leader. Fixing our roads, schools, and energy grid would do that. Yet, here we are in crumbling schools, inadequate roads, with promises of a useless border wall. It isn’t even so much that he wants all these stupid things. It is that he wants them before fixing the stuff actually broken. We might freeze to death next winter but at least Eugene will have his AR-15 to keep him warm at night.
Just like Biden was talking about Facebook and idiots with computers…
1That is the problem with guns. The idiots. I own several guns-all inherited-they’ve been sitting in the closet since I got them. I know how to handle them as well as an M16-learned from 69-73.
2I feel absolutely no need to parade around with one, and have no use for the fools that do. Some of my friends have lots of guns and not a one of them feels the need to parade around in public carrying one or more of them at a time.
Carrying a gun all the time does not make you feel safer, in fact it probably will make you do something stupid sooner or later.
Does anybody remember Steve Martin’s movie L.A. Story?
3There’s a freeway scene that’s hilarious.
In the movie.
https://youtu.be/yoU39Rpp4FI
When it happens around you in real life?
Notsamuch.
Our tax dollars ( not Mexico) paid for the wall that Trump had built.
42.5 billion was taken from the military for that.
So Texans will have paid for the wall twice?
Do they even know how much it will cost them?
You should be a little worried Nick.
Sometimes, not always, obtaining AR-15 parts and personally assembling them at home is done for two nefarious reasons.
First, to avoid that evile gubmint background check.
Second, and very worrisome, if one orders the ‘-right’- parts, one assembles an illegal FULLY-automatic selective fire weapon. Which is equivalent to a military M-16/M4, not the common civvie semi-auto [which is practically harmless… /s/s/s].
At best, good ol’ Eugene is simply suffering from the US of A’s endemic PDCS [penile deficiency compensatory syndrome]. At worst, well….
[BTW, I’ve usually carried a semi-auto around for ~60 years, even aboard commercial aircraft. Ain’t hardly ever had to seriously consider using it, but I used to work and travel on deep nights a lot]
5BTW, WTF do the Houston area highway travel delays have to do with the main “gunz” topic?
Worked TDY for cumulative years in and around Houston, and traffic not moving much has been normal SNAFU for 5 or 6 decades at least.
Unless you meant to state that the delays were due to police actions, which seems to occur 2 or 3 times a day around San Antonio. Local media covers 5-6 shooting incidents a day around there… ho hum…
Yeah, it’s getting effing insane, every stupid sonuvabitch who gets a little aggro just whips out a weapon and starts blazing away. Anywhere anytime.
6Modern life in TGNOE, MAGA!
Guns and gun rules in this country are to stupid! If I wore a sword down the street half the people would run away screaming!! But an open carry 9mm would not blink an eye!
7With the 9mm I could easily kill 9people in 9secs, with the sword I would get exhausted chasing people down as they can run away faster than I can get them. The sword is illegal and the gun is legal for about anyone!!! And how many have you heard of robbing a store with a sword???? As a store owner I would most likely hurt myself laughing!!
Sandridge@6 My interpretation of the traffic delay examples was that Nick had impediments to legally, safely traveling from point a to b while good ole Cousin Eugene had no delays in assembling a deadly weapon that he proudly brags he can’t handle properly. Nick was illustrating that Abbott places the things that citizens truly need right now to make their lives better, i.e. fixing poor roads and the ensuing traffic delays, way below the red meat topics for the rabid base, i.e. some questionable gun rights, on his to-be-done-now list.
I agree with Nick that Abbott could be a strong leader if he actually made the effort to get needed things done. But instead Abbott consigns himself to the dustbin of history by being a mere craven politician afraid of losing his own and caving in to them.
8Thank you #8 for making my point more succinctly. Traffic and guns are only related in that they spend time “fixing” one so they never fix the other. Roads are one thing, but how about public transportation? Maybe a commuter train or light rail to downtown or one from Galveston to Houston?
9@ L.Long#7: Swords and other edged weapons are more likely to fall within the original intent of the 2nd Amendment than modern firearms. Perhaps those laws should be relaxed as well – then we can all carry so many weapons that we fall over…
Not that we’ll feel safer – it just means the police can’t stop the local street gangs for being armed to the teeth.
10” I gotta take you in son”
11“Fraid not sheriff, the dead guy drew first”
Cell phone videos are about to be exhibit A.
A lot.
#10 … Gangs can have all the edges they want I still can out run them and can’t out run their favorite…9mm!!
12yet another baby boomer @8, Well, that’s a really lame analogy then.
As I carefully stated, I’ve been traveling to and in the Houston area [for work] since Abbutt was in jr high, and the traffic has –always– been FUBAR there. So one can hardly fairly blame or associate such conditions on that MAGAoty sonuvabitch.
As far as Nick’s wish for a sane rail policy, light and heavy, I’ve been strongly for RRs ever since I was a kid hopping freights and getting locomotive tours by engineers [actually saw a few semi-working steam engines in the ’50s]. Even more so after learning how the railroads were crippled by certain political and economic groups, and we all know who the worst of them have been [the Rethugs of course].
13We damn sure should have a fantastic functional railroad infrastructure, light and 300mph bullets, freight and passenger. Much of the rest of the world does.
Yet another example of how we’re losing serious ground in many areas for ‘MAGA Freedumb’. But it all won’t mean squat when China finally grabs our lunchbox.
My late brother in law would agree that idiots should never have the ability or opportunity to lay a hand on a gun.He had bern a licensed deer hunter for years but gave it all up with a disgusted sigh. He had run into way too many people posing as genuine hunters. How could he tell? Well, everyone of them had been drinking. Stealth is a good idea if you are hunting game, but these idiots were half a hair away from blotto. They were staggering, often falling. And when they couldn’t bag the deer they were chasing, they drank some more. Invariably, a hunter would be shot by another hunter, perhaps even killed. Then there was the famous “hunter” who thought he saw a rabbit running through the brush. And he pulled the trigger. It was another idiot with a gun who was not wearing boots. He had gone hunting in tennis shoes and white socks. The shooter thought he had a white rabbit in his sights. Guess how that turned out.
14I’m not against people having guns, but just like car drivers, they need regulation. Take a test to show you know the law, unload/load a gun and fire it hitting a target with a DPS officer watching you, get a license and liability insurance. And somewhere in there, we need to be sure your not a felon or some nut. We have a well ordered militia, called altogether the Armed Services – we don’t need Gomer out in the woods playing Army and we don’t need show offs shooting randomly.
15maggie @14 I gave up deer hunting in California years ago. On my last hunt, we came across poachers on a back road before sunrise with spot lights and a guy sitting on a seat extended way out in front of the truck. Later that morning we came across a doe that looked like it had been shot with a full auto weapon. We called it a day and went to the only bar in those mountains where there were two drunk hunters from Los Angeles. When the locals asked them if they had any luck, they said only a couple of brush shots. The locals literally picked them up and threw them out of the door. That did it for me. What a day.
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