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Monday, June 09, 2014

Two Dead Cops and Typhoid Rambo

Two good guys with guns eating lunch just got executed in a Las Vegas pizza parlor:
Sheree Burns, 48, told the Las Vegas Sun she was eating at the restaurant, seated just behind the two officers.

A man came up to one of the officers and shot him in the head, Burns said. She said she ducked under her table but peeked up and saw the other officer being shot.

She said the man took an officer's handgun and the two attackers fled.
Having guns did nothing to protect the officers. The cops' guns only served to give the killers additional firepower.

At the same time in Texas we've got all these open-carry nut jobs walking into restaurants brandishing assault rifles.

How are the cops supposed to know that the clowns in Texas carrying AK 47s into restaurants aren't going to shoot them in the back?

Having even more guys with guns doesn't help the situation: the shooters in Vegas were suicidal nut jobs. As with the recent misogynistic suicidal nut job in California, and most other suicidal nut jobs who've gone on killing sprees over the last several years, the threat of death does not deter them. They are the bad guys, and they shoot first. Plus, they want to commit suicide! Dying is the whole point!

The open-carry nut jobs in Texas are rather dense. If some mass murderer wants to open fire in a restaurant, or a dope fiend wants to rob the joint, who's he going to shoot first? The cashier or the egocentric nitwits who thought it was a good idea to scare everyone half to death by bringing guns into a restaurant?

So, at this point, if a cop just up and shot one of these open-carry idiots, who could possibly question his judgment? Two of his fellow officers were just gunned down in Vegas. Anyone with a gun is a clear and present danger, not just because they might be wacko, but because any wacko can grab that gun from them.

And it's not just about mass murder or suicide by cop. Amateurs who carelessly brandish semiautomatic rifles in public places as if they were Super Soakers endanger themselves and everyone around them. Every day you read another story about how some moron cleaning his gun killed his son, or how some woman's gun fell out of her purse and killed her husband, or how some idiot with a gun in his waistband shot himself in the groin.

It's only a matter of time before one of these swaggering, overconfident open-carry idiots forgets there's a round in the chamber and shoots a waitress. Or leaves his weapon in the can and some little boy who thinks it's a toy finds it and shoots his dad. Or thinks he's witnessing a robbery in progress and shoots innocent bystanders in the cross fire. Or gets knifed in the back by a madman who takes his weapon and kills him and 12 innocent children.

All of these are low-probability incidents. But when you have millions of guns, all those low probabilities turn into thousands of dead and wounded victims.


Guns are a communicable disease: anyone exposed to them is at risk of injury and death. As with any disease, carriers are more likely to die themselves; six out of ten firearms deaths are due to suicide. If you openly carry a gun in public you can expect people to treat you like you have a deadly infection. You're a Typhoid Rambo.

You have a right to free speech, but you don't have the right to go into restaurants and harangue the other patrons about the atrocities that J.J. Abrams has wrought upon Star Trek. Why do gun nuts think that their supposed Second Amendment right to tote their deadly toys in public trumps the rights of everyone else to not get shot?

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