According to the Hartford Courant on Feb. 23rd: MANCHESTER – — Two men armed with handguns, apparently hallucinating after a drug binge, opened fire on imaginary attackers early Monday, and police say it’s a miracle no one was hurt. The drama began to unfold about 12:20 a.m. when Manchester police received a 911 call from [...]
Thom Mannard, Executive Director of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence wrote the following letter to the editor to the Springfield State Journal Register on Feb. 21st. Letter to the Editor The recent unintentional shooting of an 8-year-old Niles girl by her 13-year-old brother only reinforces one of the inherent dangers of having a handgun [...]
From “Ohh Shoot” on Feb. 12th — a blog that tracks unintentional shootings and grossly irresponsible behavior by gun owners. Luckily her Blackberry was in the right place….. An Ohio man was putting on his jacket, getting ready to leave a Fricker’s restaurant when the .32-caliber handgun in his coat pocket discharged. The bullet struck [...]
A tragedy in Florida resulted in the death of a 62-year-old man’s fiance the day before their wedding and shows the insanity of America’s gun culture. A “law abiding” gun owner fired his gun all because he heard strange noises in his own house without having any clue what, or whom, he was firing at. [...]
How does the gun lobby and industry say it? Guns don’t kill or injure people… people do? Oh, right. Except when dangerous products (guns) are designed and manufactured without even the most basic consumer product safety standards. Then the whole argument that guns are safe except for the “unsafe people” using them has no merit. [...]
According to a Springville, Utah’s FOX 13th on Sept. 27th — watch video below: A woman dies after being shot Sunday afternoon in the parking lot of a 7-11 in Springville. Police said the gun fell out of her car and discharged. Lt. Dave Caron of Springville Police said, “When they stopped at a 7-11, [...]
According to a news brief from the Everyday People Examiner on Feb. 11th: According to a report on MSNBC, a middle scool boy in Zebulon, North Carolina was shot in the leg with a .22-caliber handgun. It was reported that a friend found a gun at his house and was taking it to school in [...]
Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central used NY Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress, who unintentionally shot himself in a night club with a Glock handgun, as the subject for Stephen’s famous segment, “Tonight’s Word.” Most impressive is Stephen Colbert’s prescient satire on gun owners, who cling to, and indeed love their guns. This video, which originally [...]
In Vermont, the State Supreme Court sought to demand some accountability on hunters who, all too frequently, recklessly fire weapons without really knowing what it is they are shooting at. According to the Associated Press on Dec. 1st: MONTPELIER, Vt. –The Vermont Supreme Court has ruled that a hunter who shoots and injures someone because [...]
Talk about luck — the random kind that saves your life. According to the Associated Press on Nov. 21st: COVINGTON, La. – A man says his cell phone saved his life. A stray .45-caliber bullet hit R.J. Richard’s chest while he was mowing the lawn — hitting so hard he thought it was a stone [...]
The Boston Globe reported on November 8th that state lawmakers in Massachusetts are looking into new and tougher regulations surrounding children firing machine guns and powerful weapons at “machine gun shoots.” Lawmakers are responding to the tragic death of 8-year-old Christopher Bizilj, who shot himself in the head with an Uzi machine gun. The micro [...]
A truly horrific story was reported on Nov. 8th by the Associated Press where an 8-year-old boy used a .22 caliber rifle to allegedly murder his own father and another man. Unfortunately, the AP story did not give any details about the rifle itself, who owned it, what make and model, and more importantly, how [...]
An article from the Dallas Morning News on Nov. 5th, reported on the remarkable power, distance, and military capability from .50 caliber BMG ammunition. While target shooting with a military-style .50 caliber sniper rifle, designed to destroy armored personnel carriers, radar installations, chemical refineries, and shoot down civilian aircraft during takeoff and landing, a 49-year-old [...]
The Salt Lake Tribune reported on Oct. 29th, an unintentional shooting by an 11-year-old girl that may have paralyzed her 14-year-old brother as he is listed in critical condition. When will parents who own guns learn that what they were told by the gun industry — that firearms would make their lives safer — is [...]
(Photo by David Molnar / The Republican. As his father, Sean Connery snaps a photograph, left, Devin Connery of Lunenburg, fires a Heckler & Koch Universal Machine-Pistol at the Machine Gun Shoot and Firearms Expo sponsored by the Westfield Sportsman Club and C.O.P. Firearms and Training on Sunday. Later in the day, an 8-year-old boy, [...]
A double tragedy in Wisconsin leaves a community stricken with grief. According to the Associated Press: Police in Elko say a distraught teenager from Wisconsin committed suicide after accidentally shooting another boy in the head with a handgun. Investigators say the 15-year-old boy was visiting with family and was at another’s boy home across the [...]
Guns are not televisions. They are not electronic games. They are not toys. They are not i-pods. Guns are dangerous. Guns can kill. It’s so simple to understand, but the cultural/political “sacredness” that we have applied to firearms defies this basic common sense understanding. So, as a result, once again we read about another tragic [...]
This tragedy is yet one more example as to why we need to re-think gun ownership, especially for parents who keep weapons at home where there are children. As we have said before, having both a gun and a child at home is a deadly combination. In the wake of a tragedy like this one, [...]
If you have a fear of flying, it probably won’t be eased by knowing that your trusty pilot is packing heat. Even though a pilot’s handgun recently was accidentally discharged while landing, the Transportation Security Administration indicates that 9,500 pilots carry guns on domestic routes. According to one article, “pilots must go through a week [...]
Sometimes we comment on one or two of the daily shootings we post on our GunGuys.com blog. Our feature, “America’s Shooting Gallery,†is a random sampling of a very large number of gun deaths and injuries in our nation that occur every day. On April 9th, one story caused us to think it was time [...]
According to a stunning report form a North Carolinian local TV station: CHARLOTTE, N.C.– A gun carried by a US Airways pilot accidentally discharged during a flight from Denver to Charlotte Saturday, according to a statement released by the airline. The statement said the discharge happened on Flight 1536, which left Denver at approximately 6:45 [...]
An op-ed in the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, FL, that was published on October 29, 2001 by Kristen Rand, the legislative director for the Violence Policy Center, stated convincingly that armed pilots is simply a horrible idea. As you’ll see below, in addition to Ms. Rand’s argument that guns in the cockpit could be taken [...]
(A fact sheet from the Violence Police Center argues that armed airline pilots would put air travelers at risk): The close quarters of an airliner make the proposal to arm airline pilots with firearms even more hazardous than arming teachers, as some urged following the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. The arguments against arming [...]
Apparently, according to an August 24th Chicago Sun-Times article, America’s greatest pastime is now a lifesaver from being accidentally killed by gunfire. That’s a testimonial by a resident of the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights. But we’ll let the Sun-Times tell the beginning of the real-life story: On any other night, this Cubs fan would [...]
What does the NRA say when another American child is accidentally killed with a gun? Usually there’s a choice “A” and a choice “B.” Choice “A” is that they say nothing, nada, zip, or simply dismiss the shooting as a rare occurrence. It’s not their problem, you see. Choice “B” is that they say people [...]
We never thought that we would be posting a story with this quotation from a police chief that a Louisiana couple “were engaged in consensual sexual behavior involving a firearm, and the firearm was discharged†resulting in the death of the male partner, Robert White. (You can also watch video by clicking link: Louisiana man [...]
Every weekday for the past few years, we have posted 10 shootings that have been reported from across the United States. Unfortunately, we don’t have to take a lot of time to find a random sampling for our GunGuys “American Shooting Gallery.†That’s because there is always an ample supply of gun shooting victims, 24/7 [...]
Here is a story from Friday, July 13th, from the Philadelphia Daily News, that continues to circulate around the internet that we wanted to share. It’s a story prompted by our Freedom States Alliance recipient group CeaseFire NJ, and its persistent executive director, Bryan Miller. Put the gun down, Elmo. That’s the war cry of [...]
This is a site about gun violence and gun laws in America, so we don’t usually cover changes in gun laws overseas– what we’re concerned with is changing things here at home. But this is a bit of news we just can’t pass up. Gun guys love to point out that in Switzerland, a country [...]
Another accident by someone trained in using firearms. A police officer was shot in the arm when a firearm she kept under her pillow went off while she was sleeping. Albany police Sgt. Kinshishi Adams, 34, was lying in bed Sunday when a .40 caliber pistol she kept under her pillow discharged and struck her [...]
From the blogosphere, we get this charming little backwards ad from 1904 about a revolver that made “accidental discharge impossible,” and thus the gun was “absolutely safe” for even children to use. Nowadays, an image like that is sickening. We’ve got children dying every single day on Americas’ streets, and it’s hard to believe anyone [...]
Gary Younge of London’s The Guardian must be reading our site– in this long but very interesting article, he does his own version of our America’s Shooting Gallery, and runs through just one day of the violence happening all over the country, researching each one to find the stories behind the headlines that we post [...]
More bad news involving the relationship between children and firearms: the latest information says that at least two-thirds of families who own guns don’t store them safely. And yet, the gun lobby has somehow found a way to actually argue against keeping children safe from gun violence. Unbelievable. Two-thirds of gun-owning families fail to store [...]
We are just fascinated by stories like this: some idiot shot himself in the hand at a gun show, and now (hopefully) he may lose his concealed weapon license for it. A man who accidentally shot himself in the hand during the High Caliber Gun & Knife Show at the George R. Brown Convention Center [...]
Yet another story of a tragic accidental shooting. They come so often nowadays, that the details seem to run together– there’s always an unsuspecting family, and after a startling gunshot, another shocking death. Elsa Moss recalls hearing a loud pop as she walked through her Vernon Hills neighborhood holding her daughter’s hand. But when she [...]
Here’s a look at two pieces of legislation that are being affected already by what happened at Virginia Tech earlier this week. In Louisiana, legislators are moving forward on a bill that would make sure college campuses have the right to protect their students from gun violence by keeping firearms out of dorms once and [...]
There’s really no way around it– the biggest problem with firearms is the deaths they make possible. And so while it’s not easy to examine the story of a mother whose son has lost his life to a firearms accident, that’s exactly the kind of story that needs to be heard in order for change [...]
The NRA is fond of tritely saying that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” but in this strange case, there’s a pretty clear argument that a firearm, even when it’s not held by anyone, is still a threat. A Wichita man is recovering from a gunshot wound to the hand from a pistol that [...]
For all the talking we do about assault weapons and the valiant efforts in this country to remove them from our streets for good, it’s helpful at times to remember why we’re working so hard on it. Because assault weapons are legal in this country, guys like Thomas McKiernan can stockpile weapons no citizen should [...]
Here’s a tragedy in Pennsylvania that illustrates in harsh reality why a law like the NRA’s License to Murder is so extremely dangerous. A homeowner awakened early Tuesday morning by a burglar confronted the intruder and shot him, according to East Pennsboro Township police in Cumberland County. The homeowner learned later that the intruder was [...]
Finally, the NRA just won’t let a dumb idea die– they’re still trying to get guns in employee parking lots, even after state after state has thrown the bill out. Georgia lawmakers in both the House and Senate, backed by the National Rifle Association, are trying once again to pass a measure that would allow [...]
An SUV near an FBI agent’s home got broken into last weekend, and a few firearms owned by the FBI are now out on the streets where criminals can use them to commit crimes. Seven weapons, including two submachine guns, were stolen last weekend from an FBI agent’s vehicle in Southwest Washington, the agency said [...]
Robert Greenwood is an Indiana man who made a mistake. In fact, he made more than just one. After accidentally shooting himself while hunting in a field, the police found they had something else they wanted to ask him about. On Nov. 17, Robert Greenwood staggered out of a Marshall County field with a .12-gauge [...]
We haven’t talked about this much this year, but every single year around this time, police announce in quite a few towns about a growing danger on New Year’s Eve: celebratory gunfire. Every year, someone gets hurt by random gunfire fired into the air during a celebration, and yet every year it continues to happen, [...]
Out of all the people you’d think would be able to keep their firearms out of criminal hands, you’d think the Department of Homeland Security would be able to do it. But apparently even they can’t make sure their guns stay safe. The Department of Homeland Security said yesterday that it is investigating how four [...]
Tomorrow, we’ll have a feature that takes a look back at some of the craziest gun guys stories we’ve published this year. But before we do that, we’ve got one more for you. A few months ago, a sheriff’s deputy was wounded during a routine traffic stop in Tyler County, Texas. But apparently there never [...]
When the discussion comes around to concealed weapons, we constantly hear from the gun guys that legally registered concealed weapons are nothing to worry about. The people that apply for concealed weapons, say the gun guys, are not your “criminal types”– the idea is that if someone goes through the process to apply for a [...]
Finally, as much as we’re fans of dumb gun guys, we couldn’t pass up this story today: in York, Pennsylvania, a 72-year-old man saw a bear in a residential area, and got “bear fever.” A northwestern Pennsylvania hunter who said he was suffering from “bear fever” was fined more than $1,500 for firing a crossbow [...]
On this point, we agree with the gun guys: we need to enforce the few gun laws we have in place. And unfortunately, when, as happened this past weekend, the FBI experiences technical difficulties, that is pretty hard to do. An FBI computer system that quickly screens gun buyers’ backgrounds for criminal activity crashed several [...]
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