Fun With Guns: Lighting Up Tennessee
So a man bought a pack of cigarettes in a grocery store and asked a woman if she had a light. Even though he never got within ten feet of her and the parking lot video showed that he did nothing that could be considered threatening, she pulled a gun on him.
And when he ran back inside the store. she let everybody know that her trigger finger was mighty itchy.
Others witnesses agreed. “Clearly this is a gunowner who doesn’t need to own a gun,” said Keeley Benoit.
Her 7-year-old son and his grandmother found themselves in McLain’s cross hairs as the man ran past them at the Walmart.
“When she looked up the gun was being pointed at the three of them and the lady says I’m going to shoot you. I’m going to kill you,” said Benoit.
Sherry McLain, 67 years old, is outraged, outraged I tell you, that she was arrested.
Endless to say, she was properly permitted to carry a gun. We do not know the whereabouts of the good guy with a gun.
Thanks to Rhea for the heads up.
Well, I suppose you could light a cigarette with a bullet. They do get really hot, don’t they?
Alternatively, perhaps it is time for this guy to give up smoking.
1Paranoia. Straight out of the DDM whatever number.
2Well, I’ve had persons like her refuse to get on elevators with me and refuse to sit next to me in doctors’ waiting rooms because they’re afraid that some of my black skin might “infect” them in some way. It never enters their minds that it won’t, or that I’m better-educated than they are. All they see is my skin color. They are some delusional tools because I have no desire to harm them or take anything they have because I have my own things that I worked for.
3When every Tom, Dick, and Sherry can get a gun …
4Not “Endless to say” but “Needless to say.” You giddy liberal you.
And what’s the problem? Guns are just the new way of expressing ourselves. Much better than Twitter.
5Alan, I corrected that but auto-correct hates me. With a purple fashion.
6Spect she be a wingnut and wingnuts make me cringe to be a person of white color.
7So let me shimmy out to the thinnest diameter of the limb and ask, was the man who asked for a light uhhhh not white?
8This is the source Daily Kos got it from:
http://www.newschannel5.com/news/local-news/woman-arrested-after-she-said-she-pulled-gun-in-self-defense
“It scared me absolutely to death,” said Sherry McLain. She was loading groceries into her car this past Saturday in the crowded Walmart parking lot on Old Fort Parkway in Murfreesboro.
That’s when a strange man approached, surprising her, and she pulled her revolver. “I have never been so afraid of anything in my whole life I don’t think,” said McLain. “This guy is the bad guy and I’m the one in handcuffs walking away.”…
“What are we supposed to do if we can’t protect ourselves. I’m 67 years old,” said McLain. She insisted she feared for her life.
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The videos aren’t working for me so I can’t tell if the poor guy was white, black, or green, but I think this woman needs to be checked for dementia if she was scared to death of an unarmed man asking her a polite question from ten feet away. She probably shouldn’t be driving either.
9Speaking of overly frightened white women, there was a case in DC last week or so when a black guy and his friend opened an ATM door for a white woman with a stroller. They were going to withdraw some cash but got a call that changed their plans, so they walked away. The woman called 911 and said she felt “threatened,” so this poor polite guy was chased down by the cops and handcuffed. At least they let him go after a while, but damn….
10So now we absolutely know that smoking can get you killed.
11Borderline personality disorder: not even once.
12Pretty obvious guns aren’t making ;murricans safer. They make ‘murricans paranoid. Who do I shoot? When do I shoot them? Will this murder on my record make me look fat? Can I shoot him after the first date or should I wait and see if he calls? Is a .600 Nitro Express gun enough to stop the paper boy from throwing my paper into the birdbath? I f I shoot my girlfriend will she still like me?
13Now those are the kinds of questions that are just as scary as that loony woman. I hope extensive mental therapy are part of her sentence. Extensive.
14Several sources are reporting that the gentleman asking for the light was indeed black, AND the incident occurred at 4:00 pm, not in the dark of night in a nearly empty parking lot.
Paranoia much, lady?
15As I read this post, I knew what the responses would be. I was not disappointed. Dementia? Paranoia? Oh she has mental problems alright but it’s not as complicated as that. She’s a “bubble person”.
You see them all the time. They stop dead in their tracks at the bottom of an escalator wondering which way to go as everyone behind has to maneuver around them. They answer their phones in a darkened theater during the best part of the movie. They live in their own little “bubble” of me, myself and I. That’s what happened here.
She parked close to store because “B” people do that. She floated in and did her shopping oblivious to anyone around her. Finished, she floated back to her car to load her groceries not bothering to take note of her surroundings. Then, BAM! Her bubble popped when someone asked for a light.
She reacted instinctively, as “B” people often do, by shifting into defense mode. Awakened abruptly from her bubble sleep, it’s to be expected. And now she claims SHE was the victim. Now, take that kind of person (and there are many of them out there) and give them a gun.
God help us all.
16JAk, great post! My family and I refer to them as Walking Comas. And if spellcheck posts coma as comma, I just may be the one going off the rails!
17I have a zombie hunting permit (a couple bucks from Amazon) on my car. A lot of people think its funny, but I assure them it’s not a joke. If they don’t see the zombies around them, they might just be one themselves. And considering the number of repugs and other brainless conservatives, the infection is spreading fast.
18This happened in a Walmart parking lot in Murfreesboro, Rutherford County, Tennessee – the same bunch of imbeciles who have done everything they can to not allow the new mosque to operate – they’ve lost in lawsuits.
There are a bunch of EvangeliBagging bigots ‘down in the ‘Boro’, which is really crazy because it is a university town.
19Oops, I failed to mention that MTSU which is in the ‘Boro, did a gun control poll – 83% of Tennesseans want more background checks and want to keep guns away from the mentally ill….like the one above…we shall see what the General Assembly does – likely expand gun rights.
20The bright side of this is the gun-toter was arrested and the guy who asked for a light was not. Good for the Murfreesboro police. In some towns it would have been the other way around.
21There is a secondary issue here. In addition to threatening the man who asked for a light, this woman carelessly swung her gun around in a way that targeted a nearby family. Basic gun sanity says you only point a gun at something you want to shoot. Apparently she wanted to shoot whoever.
22majiir, you remind us of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, who was arrested for the ‘crime’ of entering his own Cambridge home without a key. Unholy garbage due to a local busy body who called 911. Shades of Gladys Kravitz, she was a failure as a busy body for not knowing her neighbor.
Or, the ‘good’ citizen moron who did a death by 911 on a young man in a Walmart toy department. Yeah duh, who would think it might be a toys in the toy department?
Or, Tamir Rice. Who would ever suspect that a child might be ‘armed’ with a toy. Hell, the 911 operator relayed to those cops that the child likely had a toy.
To idiot pundits and politicians who fail to comprehend #BlackLivesMatter, we seriously need to bitch slap them with the alarming statistics.
23As I may have mentioned here before, the best single blog for covering ‘Gunfail’ may be Southern Beale who has regular features on this, sad, but snarky enough to be sickly ‘entertaining.’ Particularly her ‘2nd Amendment Hero du jour’ series. She is in TN and concentrates on there, though covers stories from everywhere, and she’d got a second Murfreesboro story for today. Be sure to check it out and put her on your blogrolls.
24PKM, if my neighbor saw someone breaking into my house, I hope they’d call the police to come and check into it… but I also hope my neighbor would know what the heck I look like, and the difference between a burglar and someone who can’t get the key to work.
25Prup,
You are correct (sitting here from my perch in downtown NashVegas) Southern Beale does excellent Tennessee Gun Reports.
26Endless to say is better, as these incidents are just that, and so is the excuse that “she was properly permitted to carry a gun.”
27The problem in Gates’ situation is that all black people look alike. But surely you all know that?!
(Even more surely, you know that is sarcasm, like saying Mental Ben is a paragon of honesty.)
28Why didn’t the cops shoot her? White.
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