Monday, August 10, 2015

A Carolinian in Australia comments on this bloody weekend past ...


The Fuller boys. 2nd Amendmented to death by their father, an open carry advocate.
This Sunday's news stories from the tar heel state would give any caring person pause.
  • A Statesboro father guns down his two preschool sons and tries, but fails, to gun down himself.
  • A teenager in Raleigh is randomly and inexplicably gunned down
  • A retired law officer in Gastonia is gunned down, another Gastonia resident wounded, and other law officers and an innocent bystander are subsequently wounded in a gun battle.
  • A Winston-Salem man is gunned down and another man is wounded at a party.
During this awful, gory, bloody weekend, the state of North Carolina with its population of 9.9 million people--and its millions of guns--murdered more people with those guns than the nation of Australia with its population of 23.1 million people murders with guns, knives, hands, pipes, pills, and whatever in a typical week (source).
 The Statesboro man who shot his boys after a night of drinking was an open carry advocate who put garbage like the below on his facebook profile:

This is a warning sign.
Look, I'm not saying everybody who proudly displays images like that is a dangerous lunatic ...

But ...

It's a warning sign. Guys like that need help. They don't need guns. Someone close to them, who cares about them, needs to be telling them the hard truth that they are showing signs of exactly the sort of mental state that leads to acts of violence that end in terrible tragedy.

The article in his local paper says there was "no way to know" what tragedy lay ahead. Wrong. The signs were there. Anyone who carries a firearm into a shopping mall to make an open carry political statement is exactly the sort of person we should be getting counseling to, and taking access to firearms away from, because that is a troubled person. A troubled person with a gun.

Glad to see you blogging at Applied Rationality again, Dave. Sorry it was a surplus of tragedy that brought you back.


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