My university sends out security bulletins alerting the campus whenever anything occurs that might pose a danger to people or property. Since we are in a city, they also report on things that happen off campus but in its vicinity. Most of the time this involves petty crimes. But yesterday came a more serious series of bulletins in the middle of the night, first calling for a lockdown of the campus because of reports of a shot being fired and then soon after giving an all clear.
Later they sent out a fuller report.
CWRU Alert: The incident that prompted security alerts early Saturday morning took place off campus and did not involve any individuals affiliated with Case Western Reserve.
The university issued the alerts as a precautionary measure until the actual details of what had happened became clear. As soon as officials determined the circumstances and absence of potential threat, the university issued an all-clear notice.
The specifics of the situation are as follows: University police responded to an accidental shooting on Wade Park Avenue east of East 118th Street, just before 1 a.m. Saturday. A university officer was the first to arrive on the scene, and most of the juveniles involved scattered as the patrol car approached. The officer stayed with the injured youth until Cleveland EMS arrived and transported him to University Hospitals Case Medical Center. University Circle police also arrived quickly. Cleveland police now are investigating the case.
Preliminary information indicates that a group of juveniles had been gathered on Wade Park Avenue when they saw four other youths walking in the vicinity. One of the juveniles had a handgun and shot it in the air, apparently as a threat to the other youths. In the process of returning the weapon to his waistband, the juvenile inadvertently shot one of his colleagues in the thigh No other individual was injured. [My italics-MS].
The university will provide the campus community additional details as they become available.
So we have a juvenile wandering around in the middle of the night with a gun. It is very likely that he had had absolutely no training in the proper use of a gun and that all he knew came from watching TV and films. He is just lucky that he didn’t accidentally kill his friend.
I suspect that many of the people who carry guns around have some kind of vigilante fantasy where they are the hero of a situation that required them to use the gun. The problem is that such people then start looking for situations to use them and overreact.
One of the key elements of good martial arts training is learning self-control, to be slow to anger and to not use violence except as a last resort and as self-defense. Such training becomes much more necessary before people are given access to a lethal weapon. But in the US, almost anyone can get a gun quite easily. What surprises me is that we don’t have even more of the senseless killings than we do now.
I have a friend who used to be a prosecutor in a rural county. He said, “You’d be surprised how many barroom arguments end up with two guys standing in a parking lot pointing guns at each other.”
He is just lucky that he didn’t accidentally kill his friend.
This miscreant is also fortunate that he didn’t shoot himself while attempting to return the gun to his waistband.
He’s also lucky the shot he fired into the air didn’t kill anyone. Where do people get the idea that bullets fired into the air magically disappear?
I’m not sure how you’d get this juvenile “trained”, since it was already illegal for him to be carrying the gun.
In my state, not long ago a college inside the city line went on lockdown for shots fired on campus. The good news is that it wasn’t some crazed assassin. The bad news is that the shooter was a gunloon who thought that going huntin’ fer deer on a packed college campus inside city limits was a fine and dandy idea.
A couple of years ago, a pair of gunloons shot out the picture window in a pre-school (located in a busy strip-mall with a supermarket, a dentist, and a veterinarian plus a couple of restaurants) bordered by two highways). When caught, they asserted their right to hunt deer. ‘Cause, you know, shooting rifles toward areas where innocent people are known to be (preschools, strip malls, highways), is perfectly A-OK because reasons.
If there would be a knee-jerk anti gun control argument made, it would be that this kid wasn’t legally supposed to have the gun, but at the same time, exactly how did he get his hands on it? It’s not that hard to get a gun and there are few obligations to actually keep track of it. Parents of kids routinely leave guns around unlocked and then act horribly shocked when some teenager takes the gun. Apparently, the fact that the NRA “Eddy Eagle” program tells kids that if they see a gun they should tell an adult means that teenagers will never see a gun and decide not to do that so they could show off to friends.
I’m not really up for it in terms of time, but I’ve been thinking that it might be a good idea for an organization to be started which fights for the rights of us non gun owning USians.
A fundamental reason that kids want to get their hands on guns is because they think they’re “cool”, start forcing people to sit through boring training seminars given by overweight elderly fat guys and any cool factor disappears pretty damned quickly.
In European countries with high gun ownership and low murder rates (most of them, but particularly the Scandinavian countries along with France, Germany, Austria & Italy -- Switzerland is an anomaly since they still have mandatory military service) the one constant is that there’s endless amounts of training and qualification before you’re allowed to own a firearm.
It’s difficult to make that a prerequisite here, because it’s very hard to put those kinds of restrictions on a constitutionally protected right, however, I can’t see any reason why these training courses couldn’t be made mandatory for everyone, regardless of whether they owned a firearm or not. If the second amendment protects your right to own a firearm to serve in the militia, then it’s your civil duty to learn how to handle firearms so that you may be useful to the militia.
If gun ownership became a tedious burden like jury duty, you’d see the cool factor disappear overnight.
I would say “another reason why you should have a much more restrictive gun law”. But then again, I’m from Europe, where we of course have many more gun-related incidents than the US. 😉
Careful, Rik van. Most USA right-wingers don’t do sarcasm well. You could end up quoted on Fox News as “proof” that the NRA is right!
😉