So here’s Adaisha Miller, a vivacious, law-abiding 24 year-old woman, lying on the patio by the barbecue, bleeding out from a massive bullet wound in her chest. Who shot her? Well, a cop … sort of. But she kind of shot herself, too.
See, Adaisha was a guest at a neighbourhood fish fry at the home of the cop (an off-duty officer). The shooting occurred when she, the cop and several others were dancing to recorded music. Adaisha, who was behind the cop, touched — touched — the holstered automatic the policeman was wearing on his belt. The holster leather was so soft that the gun it held discharged from Adaisha merely brushing the holster with her fingers.
The question you’re probably asking yourself is ‘Why is anybody — even an off-duty police officer — wearing a holstered, cocked semi- automatic handgun at his own house party?
You only ask that question because you’re Canadian. This homicide didn’t happen in Canada; it happened in Detroit. Detroit is an American city.
And when it comes to handguns, America is crazy.
Consider the National Republican Convention which will unfold in all its multiple weirdness’s at the end of the month in Tampa. Naturally, personal security of everyone attending is a major concern for officials. That’s why glass bottles and any kind of sticks or poles have been pre-emptively banned. Even little kids carrying squirt guns will be asked to check their playthings at the door.
But concealed, loaded handguns? No problem. Bring ‘em on in.
According to Florida Governor Rick Scott banning handguns from a convention in downtown Tampa, “would surely violate the Second Amendment.”
The state of Florida is particularly loony on the subject of gun control. They should switch their motto from The Sunshine State to the Moonshine State. Legislators must have been glassy-eyed drunk to pass a law that banned state doctors from even discussing firearms with their patients. That law was recently overturned by a federal court, but the infamous ‘Stand Your Ground’ law — the one that allowed self-appointed neighbourhood watchman George Zimmerman to gun down an unarmed 17-year-old kid — that one’s still on the books.
It’s not just Florida. Martin Luther King was shot in Tennessee; Bobby Kennedy was blown away in California — both in 1968. Since then, more than one million — that’s right 1,000,000 — Americans have been killed by guns.
Last year alone, more than 30,000 Americans lost their lives to bullets.
Those statistics would flabbergast the countrymen of any democratic state — hell, they’d raise the eyebrows of an African warlord — but Americans are blind on the subject of guns.
Or blinkered, thanks to the consummately evil machinations of the National Rifle Association whose lobbyists, year after year and administration after administration, see to it that the right pockets are padded and votes bought to ensure that, well, for instance, every American has the right to own, carry and discharge an M-16 or AK-47 assault rifle. The AK-47 can fire 775 rounds a minute; the M-16 can fire 940 rounds a minute.
Neither weapon would be effective for rabbit or grouse hunting — or indeed any hunting at all. But in the field of battle they can lay down a wall of lead that would give the enemy pause. That’s all they were ever intended for. But each weekend, at gun shows from Okefenokee to Oregon, AK-47s, M-16s and a Satanic smorgasbord of other absurdly overpowered lethal weapons are snapped up by conspiracy theorists, ubernationalists, neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, KKK cultists and other assorted right- and left wing fruitcakes.
‘Guns don’t kill people; people kill people’ goes the moronic mantra of American gun nutters.
Tell it to Adaisha Miller.