You and I know that when a person fires his or her gun, they’re responsible for it. They did something to cause the gun to discharge. Guns don’t just “go off” by themselves, no matter what kind of bull$hit you may read in the press or hear from those who are responsible.
With a few notable exceptions involving design or manufacturing problems, modern guns are safer than they’ve ever been. You can hit them, drop them, kick them, throw them, and otherwise abuse and misuse the hell out of them in a range of very inadvisable ways and they still won’t discharge.
Unless, of course, you pull the trigger…or cause it to be pulled somehow. That’s no doubt exactly what happened when some of Louisville’s finest responded to a report of a group of kids in a vacant garage on Monday.
All of which brings us to this delightfully bogus headline from the Associated Press: Kentucky officer’s gun discharges, wounding 2 teens . . .
When officers arrived Monday evening, they drew their weapons “due to multiple unknown threats” and a short time later, the garage door opened and several teens ran out, according to a news release from Louisville Police interim Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel.
“As one officer tried to detain the suspects, his service weapon discharged one bullet,” the release says. “The discharge is believed to have been unintentional.”
Yes, we’re sure it was unintentional. The cop no doubt didn’t intend to fire his duty gun. But that doesn’t mean the discharge wasn’t the result of his piss-poor gun-handling and therefore negligence on the part.
It wasn’t clear that anyone was injured until about an hour later when Norton Children’s Hospital informed officers that a teenage boy had arrived with a gunshot wound, police said. As officers responded there, the department was told another teenage boy had arrived at a different downtown hospital with a gunshot wound.
The boys gave conflicting statements about their wounds and both denied being at the garage earlier, but police said they connected them by reviewing body-camera footage and other evidence.
While Mayor Craig Greenberg assured Louisvillians that he’s absolutely committed to openness and transparency in all things, the name of the cop who wounded to civilians hasn’t been released yet (though he’s been placed on administrative leave).
Jernalizmists like those who toil away at outlets like the AP know less about guns than Joe Biden does about particle physics. But at the same time, they’re not stupid. They know full well that the Louisville cop’s gun didn’t just launch that bullet on its own. Something — or more precisely, someone — made it go bang.
But by wording the way they did, by reporting that “the gun discharged,” that keeps the focus on the gun rather than the person who was holding it at the time.
Guns R Bad™ as we all know and have been reliably assured by our betters in the media, politics and the gun control industry. It’s harder to rally public opinion to Do Something® about guns if people are distracted by what people do with them rather than staying focused on the objects themselves.
If they’re not careful, Joe and Jane Sixpack might get the crazy idea that guns don’t kill people, that it’s actually people who are doing the killing and using guns as tools. And we sure as hell can’t have that, can we?