Sharpening our wits on the grindstone of Life: Guns don't kill people, drunk teenagers with guns do... .comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

Sharpening our wits on the grindstone of Life

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Guns don't kill people, drunk teenagers with guns do...

Teen dies after being shot at party

Another senseless death from a firearm. No one meant any harm. No one was attempting to hurt or kill another human being. Just a situation out of control, and a handgun happened to be there, and now a teenager is dead.

A teenager. Someone whose life was just beginning to bloom. Possibly a future leader - someone who could have done some good. Sure, he was at a teenage party where drinking was involved. But I'm sure there were plenty of similar situations in our current president's adolescence (and well into his adult years as well).

The difference here is that a firearm was involved. The news reports say that the kids found the gun. If that's the case, it was there because someone felt it was necessary to have a gun handy. For protection. In rural southeast Texas where, apparently, roving bands of hoodlums prowl for innocent victims to rob, pillage, rape and loot.

This was most likely a case of a firm believer in the second ammendment, where someone felt unsafe and used his god-given right to brandish a weapon against ne'er-do-wells and protect his property against godless minorities who have infiltrated his sanctuary from modern society. He just happened to leave it laying around where kids could find it.

Let's face it - teenage drinking parties have been around for decades. But the ones I remember may have included a few fistfights and some dissing of the less-than-popular, but they never included handguns. Even the the rural ones. Now it seems that the paranoid feel that guns are a necessary part of life, both urban and rural, and the stakes have been raised.

Now those who have been dissed have access to a more equitable equalizer than just the typical ambushing of their antagonists. This is the root of the school massacres that have plagued us in the past few decades. No longer do they need to face their antagonists with untrained fists. Now they can even the playing field with artillery, thanks to the right-to-bear-arms wingnuts who insist that it's everyone's right to as much firepower as they can afford.

The sportsmen say that they need automatic weapons for hunting, but if you need twenty rounds per second to kill a deer, I say you need to find another hobby. Homeowners say you need an automatic handgun for security, but if that's the case, you need to move to a different neighborhood.

This particular death would not have happened had not the firearm been available.

Someone may have ended up with a black eye, instead of his life being snuffed out.

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