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07/02/2003 Archived Entry: "Basketball players shooting basketball players"

BAYLOR UNIVERSITY BASKETBALL PLAYER MYSTERIOUSLY DISAPPEARS. You can't have missed the latest tabloid tale. Carlton Dotson, star athlete, is suspected of having shot his roommate and teammate, Patrick Dennehy, to death. The story is that the two of them were out plinking when somebody got mad at somebody and the target became something other than aluminum cans or old stumps.

In one of the zillions of articles on the case, a relative of Dotson's laments, "What are you going to do to keep `em [guns] away from those children? And that's what I call `em, children."

Maybe the fact that so many people think of 21-year-old men as children -- too immature to learn the four simple rules of safe gun handling, too bratty to control their tempers, too uneducated to understand that actions have consequences -- is exactly the problem. I've known five-year-old girls, daughters of dedicated shooters, who knew better than those grown "children" apparently did.

(Speaking of people having difficulty knowing the four basic rules of gun safety, though ... when you plug the words "four rules safe gun handling" into Google, the very first site that pops up has the rules wrong! Instead of "all guns are always loaded," they've invented a dumb, dangerous rule, "ALWAYS keep the gun unloaded until ready to use it." Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. The meth-crazed weirdo who breaks into your house in the middle of the night will LOVE you for following that "safety rule." It's also a braindead habit to get into thinking a firearm's default state is empty. Sheesh. Check it out. Tell these people they're goo-goo heads.)

Posted by Claire @ 12:08 AM CST
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