“[Clayton Brumby] reacted reflexively when a hot shell casing bounced inside his shirt back,” Tom Lyons [above] writes at the Sarasota, Florida herald-tribune.com. “When he quickly reached to get the hot metal out of his shirt, he did so with the hand holding the gun and accidentally pulled the trigger, firing behind him toward where his son was watching.”
Lyons go on:
No obvious safety procedure had been purposely or lackadaisically violated. It was a reflex action, a moment of fast and natural response without thinking. And reflexive action is inherently dangerous when holding a device designed to fire deadly hunks of metal.
Obviously, Mr. Brumby didn’t shoot his son “purposely” or “lackadaisically.” Nevertheless, he violated two obvious safety rules: he pointed his gun in an unsafe direction and he had his finger on the trigger when his sights were not on [a legitimate] target. Anyone even vaguely familiar with The Four Rules of Gun Safety would know this.
Anyone who bothered to ask someone who knows about guns would know this. And anyone with basic literary skills and access to Google would be instantly aware of Mr. Brumby’s fatal safety violations. (We’re talking 10,600,000 results for “gun safety rules” in 0.64 seconds.)
In short, Lyons is using weasel words to stretch the truth, to make it seem like guns are too dangerous for average folk, no matter what safety procedures they think they’ve mastered.
I see this all the time: journalists and commentators writing anti-gun screeds who get the basic facts wrong and/or ignore inconvenient truth. They provide plain old wrong or entirely misleading information which just happens to support their crusade for civilian disarmament. Not to mention the President of the United States, who recently railed against criminal access to “automatic weapons.”
Which leaves us with a question: is Mr. Lyons and his like lying, ignorant or just willfully ignorant? Are these lying liars or ignorant intellectuals covering their ears and shouting “lalalalala” whenever they write about gun control? Note: journalists are some of the laziest people I’ve ever met.
By the way: the comments sections of various publication always contain technical and statistical corrections from The People of the Gun. Which never seem to figure in subsequent news articles or editorials. I wonder why that is.