{"id":3000,"date":"2014-06-19T11:16:50","date_gmt":"2014-06-19T15:16:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/?p=3000"},"modified":"2014-06-19T11:16:50","modified_gmt":"2014-06-19T15:16:50","slug":"dont-worry-about-playing-with-guns-you-cant-hurt-anyone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2014\/06\/19\/dont-worry-about-playing-with-guns-you-cant-hurt-anyone\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t worry about playing with guns. You can’t hurt anyone."},"content":{"rendered":"

Pardon me. Someone is wrong on the internet.<\/a> I must do something!<\/a><\/p>\n

Some stupid fucking dumb-ass idiot was playing with a loaded gun. He knew<\/em> it was loaded. And he grabbed it by the trigger<\/em> to pick it up. Because, you see, he knew that it’s a persnickety old gun, and the trigger usually jams, so he figured it’d be safe to grab it by the trigger. What could possibly go wrong?<\/p>\n

Naturally, it went off, and hit his next door neighbor in the head, killing him. He’d just brought his wife and newborn child home when he was killed by the spectacular stupidity of his neighbor.<\/p>\n

The police, discussing the case, said:<\/p>\n

\n“The odds, I\u2019d guess, are 1 in infinity,\u201d said BCSO Maj. Tommy Ford. \u201cThis was just tragic.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Those of us who aren’t mathematical morons know that a “1 in infinity” chance is the probability better known as 0.<\/p>\n

You might say that I’m being pedantic. You’d be right. But it’s a stupid statement that tries to minimize the incredible stupidity of what happened here. This wasn’t a crazy freakish chance. A handgun is a device which is specifically designed to be an efficient and effective means for killing people. It is not a toy. Picking up a gun by its trigger is, for all intents and purposes, no different from just randomly aiming the gun and pulling that trigger. The chances of hitting someone aren’t huge, but they aren’t tiny, either.<\/p>\n

This wasn’t a super-rare freak accident. This was stupidity and negligence by a jackass. Diminishing it, trying to pretend that it was just freakish is a way of making excuses for the
\nsub-human scumbag who killed an innocent man. Calling it one-in-infinity – that is, saying that it was impossible<\/em> even though it wasn’t even particularly unlikely – is just a way of covering up for the fact that our insanely irresponsible way of dealing with deadly weapons kills innocent people.<\/p>\n

We do a lot of that in America. Guns are downright sacred here. You can insult Jesus with less repurcussions that insulting a gun owner. A community figure like a local policeman can’t just point out that a gun was used in a horrible, stupid, irresponsible, evil way. Because that would be seen as a threat to the so-called “guns rights” shits who think that any number of innocents getting killed is an acceptable price in order to ensure that they can keep their precious penis replacements.<\/p>\n

The man who killed his neighbor in this incident should never have been able to have that gun. He was a convicted felon, prohibited from owning a gun by state law. But we can’t do something sensible like, say, check<\/em> whether someone can legally own a gun before letting them buy one. That would be an unacceptable infringement on their freedom.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, this shit is being charged with manslaughter. After all, it wasn’t murder. He was just playing with his precious, precious toy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pardon me. Someone is wrong on the internet. I must do something! Some stupid fucking dumb-ass idiot was playing with a loaded gun. He knew it was loaded. And he grabbed it by the trigger to pick it up. Because, you see, he knew that it’s a persnickety old gun, and the trigger usually jams, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-math"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-Mo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3000"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3001,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3000\/revisions\/3001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}