Gun fetishists declared yesterday Gun Appreciation Day, and, well, this was embarrassing:
Officials said the Dixie Gun and Knife Show will continue Sunday without private gun sales after three people, including a retired sheriff's deputy, were injured Saturday when a gun brought in by a patron who planned to sell it accidentally discharged.As were these incidents:
Two similar incidents occurred at entirely separate gun shows in the Midwest, one in the Cleveland suburb of Medina, Ohio and the other at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana. In Ohio, the local ABC affiliate reports that one individual was brought to a hospital by EMS, and in Indiana Channel 8 WISH says that an individual shot himself in the hand while trying to reload his gun in the show parking lot.William "Flavorful Mustard Is Elitist" Jacobson poo-poohs all this by noting three rock shows at which harm has come to attendees. (For decades, literally thousands of rock concerts and club gigs have taken place every night of the week all over the world, nearly all of them without incident. But never mind.) And a winger blogger who calls himself Soopermexican declares that Gun Appreciation Day was safer than a typical day in Chicago, so there! (Soopermexican comes to this conclusion by dividing the nember of injuries at Gun Appreciation Day by the total of number of people in America, conveniently overlooking the fact that every resident of the United States did not attend a Gun Appreciation Day event. But again, never mind.)
Here's the real problem with this analysis: The injuries at Gun Appreciation Day events literally should not have happened. We know this because the gun community tells us so. Surely the events at which the injuries took place were full of "good people with guns." Surely guns were as plentiful at those events as the gun absolutists would like them to be everywhere in America. Under those circumstances, according to gun propaganda, nothing bad involving a gun can possibly happen. As long as guns are in the hands of enough good people, guns are 100% beneficial to society. They're like God -- purely good, incapable of evil.
So what happened? In the hands of good, patriotic, God-fearing people, how could the holy Gun -- the greatest invention in the history of humanity -- ever do anyone any harm?
