There are two stories that hit the wire last week, and each need to be discussed with an eye toward pragmatic analysis rather than hyperbole.
The first is the story of the firearms instructor who had been killed on the range by a 9-year-old girl with an Uzi submachine gun. We’re going to ignore media bias for the purposes of this discussion: how the story has been reported, and why certain words were used to describe the incident.
The bottom line is that the range instructor was negligent. He killed himself, ruined that young girl’s life, and caused irreparable damage to both his family and the girl’s. What he was thinking is something we’ll never know, though I’m reasonably sure it was a variant of, “We’ve never had a problem before.”
One thing serious shooters understand early on is that there are no such things as accidental shootings. Any time a bullet leaves the barrel in a direction it wasn’t meant to go, it means that the shooter (or in this case, the instructor) was negligent. He ignored one or more of the four basic rules of firearms handling. They are:
- All guns are always loaded.
- Never point the weapon at anything you don’t intend to destroy.
- Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target.
- Always be aware of your target and what’s around and behind it.
The next story involves a former Marine and his Air Force buddy who were beaten outside of a Waffle House in Mississippi. The Marine, Ralph Weems, had been critically injured as a result of the beating. Here’s the most important part of the story:
