Is This Really Someone Gun Advocates Want On Their Side?

There is an amusing, crowd-sourced website called fark.com. I go there a lot. In fact, so do many of the writers for The Daily Show. I don't doubt that if the Python's were still a going concern that Palin, Chapman, Cleese, and the whole lot of them would be spending most of their days there. It's that sort of place. If it had a subtitle it would be, "New for the Sick and Twisted."

On this site there are about a dozen different "tags" which they use to identify the category of the news article attached. These range all the way from "News" to "Interesting." They even have a tag, "Asinine," for those really special stories. But one tag stands out -- "Florida." That is it, just "Florida." This is apparently a few orders of magnitude beyond both "Stupid" and "Asinine." And they use this just for one thing -- really, seriously, gob-smackingly wrong stories, all of which come out of Florida. They may need a new tag, "Florida Shooting."

Yep, we are in that space again. The AP does a decent job in their first graf:

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) — A 47-year-old software developer was convicted Saturday of attempted murder for shooting into a carful of teenagers after an argument about their loud music, but jurors couldn't agree on the most serious charge of first-degree murder.

Which brings me right back to where I have been before, the same spot that brought in 3,000 hate mails and 18 death threats to myself and my family over the past two plus months: We have too many damned guns in the United States, and far too many of them are carried by morons like Michael Dunn, the aforementioned-in-the-ling 47 year-old Floridian software developer.

Can somebody explain to me why you have to take about 20 hours of classroom instruction and 20 hours of practical instruction, by certified teachers, then pass both an extensive written exam and a practical (road) test to be allowed to drive a car or a motorcycle, but you can legally buy a gun without so much as a single second of instruction? On what planet does that actually make sense?

Here is this guy's police interview.

Listen to this, and decide. Gun advocates, you listen too. Is this somebody you want to claim as your own? After all, as you can hear in his confession, his highest level of training is that he "knows people in the military." Apparently that is all that it takes.

I mean seriously, in all that pile of NRA-generated hate mail and death threats I got following my first post, nobody could explain to me why this made sense. Quite a lot of them started off with the line, "Well, why don't you try to outlaw cars? There are many more Americans killed by cars…" but then, when I pointed out the various state laws requiring training, practical education, then identification, taxation, and licensing of cars and drivers, every single one of them went silent. Never heard from any of those AMERICAN PATRIOTS again.

So now we have a guy who, at a convenience store, decides to initiate an interaction with some kids who are sitting in their own car. He does not like their music (describing it to his fiancée as, "thug"), and he does not like the volume. So he does something about it -- he kills.

Did I mention, they are in a parking lot at a convenience store? A place where, pretty much by definition, you are spending only 60 to 600 seconds? A place where, well, you plan to leave? But the AMERICAN PATRIOT Mr. Brian Dunn decided to confront the kids about the volume of their music. These are kids who were sitting inside their own car, and it is he who initiates the interaction. When he got backtalk from them (wow, who knew, teenagers talk back), Mr Dunn pulled out his concealed carry qualified pistol and fired 10 rounds, nine of which hit the car and the kids. Listen to his interview. It is gruesomely fascinating as an illustration of the morons that are allowed to have guns in America. He even shot at them as they were, unarmed, driving away.

I will tell you now, this shall not stand.

The opinions here are not those of the DoD, the Army, or any unit the author is assigned to at this time. But think about this, the fact that I have to deny affiliation with the Army, because I am opposed to demonstrable morons having guns…that is pretty wrong too, is it not? I can be reached at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.