Wednesday, March 09, 2016

Bearing Arms, Badly

One of the things about the Second Amendment crowd that kind of irks the shit out of me is how bad they are at this "keep and bear arms" stuff. Today's case-in-point of an Armed But Stupid Fucking Citizenry is Ms. Jamie Gilt of Jacksonville, Florida:
"Jamie Gilt, 31, who posts about firearms on her social media accounts was driving through Putnam County, Jacksonville, Florida, on Tuesday in her truck when she was wounded after the toddler picked up the weapon and shot her in the back. Her four-year-old son picked up a loaded .45 semi-automatic handgun from the back seat, pointed it towards his mother and pulled the trigger. The powerful round went through the front seat and passed through Gilt's body. Gilt and her son had been traveling to pick up a horse from a relative when the accident happened."
The weapon used by young deadeye when he put one through mommy's eight-ring was a "Kimber" M1911 knock-off, and that in itself makes me really pretty pissed off.

Because the M1911 and its variants may be the most mechanically safe handguns ever constructed.
Unlike most semiauto pistols that have no more than a single pushbutton or trigger safety the M1911 has three: a thumb safety (which is the equivalent of most modern semiauto's pushbotton/trigger safety), a half-cock safety (a very old-school sort of mechanism that was really a 19th Century military firearm hangover) and a grip safety, which requires a firm stock-weld with the firing hand to allow the hammer to fall.

The M1911 is a damn safe weapon, is what I'm saying. Even moreso if you follow Rule 1 of Handgun Safety; Never Chamber a Round Until You Are Ready To Fire.

It's really that simple, and the fraction of a second it takes to work the slide is not going to make half a nickel's worth of difference in "defending yourself". If the person threatening you has the drop on you to the extent that you can't chamber a round? You're pretty much fucked, anyway. But no more fucked than you are walking around with a live round under the hammer, as Mommy Gilt found out when little Chuckles picked up her hogleg and ventilated her ass.

In order to enable her spawn to put a live joe through her Mommy Dumbass must have, at the very least, had a live round in the chamber. The rest of the sequence is hard to figure out. Assuming the the hammer was uncocked little Nemo must have cocked it, which seems unlikely, so strike two against the Stupid Mother of the Year; she must have cocked it.

The other thing that the kid had to do was somehow grip the stock hard enough to engage the grip safety, which seems hard to believe for a four-year-old. Had Mommy gimmicked the grip safety somehow? If so, strike three, Mommy, and you're out with a bullet through the back.
So it's not their guns I fear. It's them. These fucking people. They're like an avalanche of Stupid, and they're Armed.

Did you think of that, Mister Madison? I sure as hell wish you had.

Update 3/23: So even in Florida you can be too goddamn stupid to carry a firearm. Turns out that the Mother of the Year is going to be charged under some kind of child-endangerment statute (I think...). But the new explanation - that Mombo had her hogleg lying around on one of the front seats, it slid under the seat (or possibly through the seat between the back and the cushion) into the back footwell where little Bubbles had unbuckled his carseat belt - still begs the question. Dumbass still had to have had a round under the hammer. I can't imagine that the little bastard knew to thumb the hammer back so the hammer must have BEEN back and the thumb safety off. And how the heck the kid managed to engage the grip safety I still don't know. The whole thing stinks, frankly, and just reminds me that this woman has NO business within the same grid square as a firearm.

8 comments:

Dane900 said...

I have to say, both of my brothers are members of the SSAA (Sporting Shooters Association of Australia), and I can't imagine this happening among that crowd. I did a quick Google search for "accidental firearm discharge Australia," and the first hit was an Australian soldier who was wounded after accidentally firing his weapon... in Iraq. I genuinely can't imagine this sort of thing happening over here.

Podunk Paul said...

In my opinion, the punctured woman is an example the consumerist mindset that things you buy must be benign. Otherwise, shopping would be perilous. A friend rides bicycles, and to point out – with photos and documentation – that plastic front forks invite reconstructive facial surgery – is interpreted as an affront to his value as a person. They wouldn’t sell composite bike parts with air bubbles and God is just. So it is with Model 1911 Colt pistols and the whole inventory of death tools. These weapons are loyal servants, harmless to the comfortably affluent who purchased them.

Paul Harris said...

I was going to make a sane comment, but why bother? There'll be another incident within 2 weeks that's even dumber than this one.

Here's my idea: since we're obviously never going to do anything to fix this insanity, let's at least turn a profit on it. It's Amurica, after all, and if you can shake down a rube you've found a noble calling. So let's invite multimillionaires from overseas to come to the U.S., buy as many guns as they like, and then murder as many people as they can. Toddlers, grannies, the handicapped, whoever they want. The license would be extremely expensive and, of course, members of higher socio-economic classes would be off limits.

This would provide employment for outfitters and guides, license fees would go to the treasury, potential targets would spend on their own guns and body armor, and non-licensed murder could be considered poaching and heavily fined.

I mean, what the hell, we're already the better part of the way there anyway.

FDChief said...

Paul: I see what you did there...

http://fiction.eserver.org/short/the_most_dangerous_game.html

Nice.

FDChief said...

Paul: I'm not sure that it's pure consumerism with them or with this woman. I think a big part of it is the intent to impress on themselves and others that their firearms are "just things", part of the fabric of daily life, no more scary or dangerous than a hammer or a handbag. So they get careless about simple firearms safety and - bang! - their kid shoots them in the back.

One thing we at least do correctly in the Army is impress on Joe and Molly that the damn things are deadly dangerous, and force them to use them with caution and the respect they deserve.

Leon said...

Well in her defense, I'm sure such incidents happened even in the early days of the Republic but weren't captured for posterity. Surely there must have been happenstances where young bellicose Nathaniel managed to find Prudence's flintlock pistol under the seat of her 2-horse buggy. Then the young tyke managed to secure a ball and powder, load the weapon, primed it, and then mistakenly shot his gluteus maximus eius matris.

Surely we've all been there?

FDChief said...

Leon: One of my favorite Lewis & Clark stories is the one where CPT Lewis gets shot in the ass:

"On the morning of this day in 1806, Lewis spotted some elk on a bar in the river thickly overgrown with willows. He put to shore and set out to hunt accompanied by Private Cruzatte. Spotting an elk, Lewis was just about to fire his rifle when he was hit in the buttocks by a bullet. The blow spun him around and slashed a three-inch gash in his hip. Knowing that Cruzatte was blind in one eye and nearsighted in the other, Lewis immediately assumed the private had mistaken him for an elk. “Damn you,” Lewis cried. “You have shot me.”

For the rest of his days, Cruzatte insisted he had not shot his captain. Lewis, however, had the offending bullet: A .54 caliber slug from a modern U.S. Army rifle. Lewis was shot by a gun identical to the one carried by Cruzatte, and one unlikely to be in the hands of any Indian. The near-sighted Cruzatte probably mistook the leather-clad Lewis for an elk, though it is unlikely the private’s guilt will ever be proven with absolute certainty."


Again, the first thing smart soldiers realized about firearms is that the deadliest weapon was the one closest to you, and that was either yours or the guy in the rank behind you. Pretty much all weapons drill is designed to ensure that the joes have positive control of their weapons and to minimize blue-on-blues. It seems like this simple fact has yet to penetrate the foot-thick skulls of these ammosexuals

FDChief said...

And here we fucking go: http://www.tulsaworld.com/homepagelatest/oklahoma-house-votes-to-eliminate-license-training-requirements-for-openly/article_e34c8be0-4adf-56ca-8424-3726304d6187.html?_dc=759746913798.1534