Gun safety?

[Gob]

US woman accidentally shot dead by boy, two, in Idaho Wal-Mart


A woman in the US state of Idaho has been killed after a two-year-old boy accidentally shot her with a gun he found when reaching into her handbag.

The woman was shot in a Wal-Mart in Hayden, a town in Idaho's northern panhandle 40 miles (64 km) north-east of Spokane, Washington.

Kootenai County sheriff's spokesman Stu Miller told reporters the woman had a concealed weapons permit. Her identity has not been released.

The Wal-Mart closed after the shooting.

[Joe Guy]

It's the U.S.A. Nothing unusual...

Attention Maintenance: Cleanup on aisle 2. Bring a large bag with you.

Attention Walmart shoppers: We're having a special right now on motherless two year old boys. Only one in stock! If you buy today, we'll throw in a free handgun.

[rubato]

Only a good 2 year old with a gun can stop a bad 2 year old with a gun.


yrs,
rubato

[Lord Jim]

I blame Ronald Reagan...

[oldr_n_wsr]

I don't know what kind of gun it was but at the very least the gun should not be cocked and the safety should be on.

[wesw]

what older said....

it s just survival of the fittest in action.

it s the same as if you leave a two year old in a running car and he shifts it into gear or if you leave the carving knife or drain cleaner in easy reach.

[Big RR]

I think there are a lot of handguns that do not have safetys--most revolvers as I recall and many (semi) automatics. Usually you can always avoid problems with autos by not chambering a round, and I would think you could do the same with revolvers. My guess is this was probably an automatic with a chambered round as I doubt a 2 year old would have the strength or dexterity to pull a trigger on a revolver (I recall when I was very young I had to use my thumb to pull the trigger on even a toy gun, which would result in shooting myself based on the way I held the gun).

A safety course should be mandated for any gun owner, especially one getting a concealed carry permit, but if this woman had one, it did not appear to be all that good as none of the advice apparently sunk in.

[Guinevere]

Our legal and regulatory priorities are so misplaced. Yet the gun nuts don't give a damn about human life, that's clear.

[BoSoxGal]

This would be a Darwin award winner, except she already leaked her genes into the pool. Poor kid, I hope nobody ever tells him/her.

[rubato]

Wayne LaPierre was too busy blocking the Surgeon General confirmation to effectively teach gun owners that leaving a loaded gun within reach of a child is dangerous.

Great sense of priorities there, Wayne.

You know if we had a list of gun owners we could require them to have some more effective periodic instruction in gun safety than the NRA has ever managed.


yrs,
rubato

[wesw]

guin, the same argument could me made against car drivers. cars kill people every day. they pollute our world. car drivers don t care about human life or the earth?

pick anything. tigers kill people often. therefore people who wish to preserve tigers don t care for human life.

I support the 2nd amendment, but don t think I m a gun nut.

once the 2nd amendment is gone, the rest of our rights are easy pickings....

[Gob]

Wesw, this was a woman, out shopping, with a small child.

Why was there any need for her to be armed?

[wesw]

gob. the same reasons people have always armed themselves. some people want the power to attack, some want the power to defend. guns are tools. we are human. humans use tools. rocks, sticks, knives, guns..., it doesn t matter. we will use them.

[Gob]

Ever heard of civilisation Wes? Quite popular in some places.

[Gob]

Veronica Rutledge and her husband loved everything about guns.



They practiced at shooting ranges. They hunted. And both of them, relatives and friends say, had permits to carry concealed firearms. Veronica typically left her Blackfoot, Idaho, home with her gun nestled at her side. So on Christmas morning last week, her husband gave her a present he hoped would make her life more comfortable: a purse with a special pocket for a concealed weapon.

The day after Christmas, she took her new gift with her on a trip with her husband and her two-year-old son. They headed hundreds of miles north to the end of a country road where Terry Rutledge, her husband's father, lived. The father-in-law learned of the new purse.

"It was designed for that purpose - to carry a concealed firearm," Rutledge said in an interview late Tuesday night. "And you had to unzip a compartment to find the handgun."

On Tuesday morning, that was exactly what Veronica Rutledge's son did - with the most tragic of outcomes. Veronica, 29, arrived at a nearby Walmart in Hayden with her three nieces and son, her gun "zippered closed" inside her new purse, her father-in-law said. Then, in the back of the store, near the electronics section, the purse was left unattended for a moment.

"An inquisitive two-year-old boy reached into the purse, unzipped the compartment, found the gun and shot his mother in the head," Rutledge said. "It's a terrible, terrible incident."

The aftermath has been crushing, he said. His son went to the Walmart to collect his nieces and son, and no one now is sure what to say to the boy, who is not doing well.

"My son is terrible," Rutledge said. "He has a two-year-old boy right now who doesn't know where his mum is and he'll have to explain why his mum isn't coming home. And then, later on his life, as he questions it more, he'll again have to explain what happened, so we'll have to relive this several times over."

Rutledge isn't just sad - he's angry. Not at his grandson. Nor at his dead daughter-in-law, "who didn't have a malicious fibre in her body," he said. He's angry at the observers already using the accident as an excuse to grandstand on gun rights.

"They are painting Veronica as irresponsible, and that is not the case," he said. ". . . I brought my son up around guns, and he has extensive experience shooting it. And Veronica had had handgun classes; they're both licensed to carry, and this wasn't just some purse she had thrown her gun into."

The path Veronica Rutledge charted before her death, friends and family say, was one of academics and small-town, country living.

"Hunting, being outdoors and being with her son" was what made her happiest, her friend Rhonda Ellis said.

She was raised in northeast Idaho and always excelled at school, former high school classmate Kathleen Phelps said, recalling her as "extremely smart. . . . valedictorian of our class, very motivated and the smartest person I know. . . . Getting good grades was always very important to her."

She went on to graduate in 2010 from the University of Idaho with a chemistry degree, according to a commencement program. From there, she got a job at Battelle's Idaho National Laboratory and published several articles, one of which analysed a method to absorb toxic waste discharged by burning nuclear fuel.

While away from the lab, she and her husband, whom she married in 2009, spent time shooting guns.

"She was just as comfortable at a camp ground or a gun range as she was in a classroom," close friend Sheri Sandow said in an interview. On Facebook, she showed an interest in the outdoors and the National Rifle Association, and followed Guns.com, a publication that reports on gun life.

"They carried one every day of their lives, and they shot extensively," Rutledge said. "They loved it. Odd as it may sound, we are gun people."

A lot of people in Idaho are. Earlier this year, the state legislature passed a bill that allows people to carry concealed guns onto state university campuses. And more than 85,000 people - 7 percent of the population - are licensed to carry concealed weapons, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center.

So many locals didn't discern anything odd with 29-year-old woman carrying a loaded gun into a Walmart during the holiday season. Stu Miller, a spokesman for the Kootenai County Sheriff's Office, told the New York Times that it didn't strike him as anything out of the ordinary.

"It's pretty common around here," he said. "A lot of people carry loaded guns."

Sandow told The Post she often sees people with a gun cradled at their side.

"In Idaho, we don't have to worry about a lot of crime and things like that," she said. "And to see someone with a gun isn't bizarre. [Veronica] wasn't carrying a gun because she felt unsafe. She was carrying a gun because she was raised around guns. This was just a horrible accident."

[wesw]

and it s quite unpopular in others gob.

if you can get every one to agree to be civilized you ll be the first to have been able to do so. I ll still need to be able to protect myself in case they are lying.

anyway, if guns are gone the malicious will always find a weapon. poisons diseases baseball bats , all can be deadly.

myself and many of my peers had guns when we were young. I got a .22 and a .410 for my 13th Christmas. now, we all grew up drinking and carousing and fighting, sometimes with each other, and no one I know has done anything bad with a gun. my son and his peers are all involved in hunting and generally like their guns. I doubt that any of them will ever raise their guns to another man, except in self defense. sean, my son, has killed two large does this year and has filled my freezer for me. we had some delicious tenderloin a few days ago.

as an American, I have a certain distaste for monarchy tyranny and big brother in general. as long as the citizenry is armed and able, tyranny cannot flourish. I would rather be free than be safe gob, but once the citizenry loses its freedom , it is no longer safe anyway. if it were otherwise, and the citizenry were to turn over their security and protection to others, liberty would not exist. but if you can get everyone to be civilized for, say, five years, I ll re think things, but I m pretty sure I d still be suspicious....

[Gob]

How come other countries manage Wes?

[liberty]

How come other countries manage Wes?

Well in Mexico they just submit to what ever the thug wishes to them or their children; actually there are a few Mexicans that risk years in prison by carrying a gun to protect themselves. Mexican don’t have the right of self defense unless they are wealthy and can afford to hire armed guards. Well, the peon does have the right to hire armed guards too.

[rubato]

And that's JUST LIKE IDAHO!

That's why that isn't a stupid comparison.



yrs,
rubato

[liberty]

How come other countries manage Wes?

Gob, is this true:

Murders and rapes going unreported in no-go zones for police as minority communities launch own justice
Honour killings, domestic violence, child abuse and genital mutilations are some of the offences ...dailymail.co.uk 11 months ago


The Rise of Islamic No-Go Zones
August 31, 2011 by Mark Tapson 1 Comment

Three and a half years ago, one of the Church of England’s most senior bishops, Pakistani-born Michael Nazir-Ali, warned that Islamic extremists had created “no-go”areas across Britain too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter. His politically incorrect concern sparked a firestorm of denial and criticism. The Muslim Council of Britain, for example, dismissed it as the Bishop’s “frantic scaremongering” and “intolerance,” and scoffed,
We wouldn’t allow “no-go” areas to happen. I smell extreme intolerance when people criticise multiculturalism without proper evidence of what has gone wrong.
Well, the evidence of how multiculturalism “has gone wrong” is in. This week Soeren Kern at the Hudson Institute documented the proliferation of such no-go zones throughout Europe – autonomous Islamic “microstates” under Sharia rule (having rejected their host countries’ legal systems), where non-Muslims must either conform to the cultural, legal, and religious norms of fundamentalist Islam or expect to be greeted with violence. As Daniel Pipes puts it, “a more precise name for these zones would be Dar al-Islam” – the House of Islam, or the place where Islam rules.
England, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands – in every European country with a large Muslim immigrant population, the story is the same: Islamic supremacists refuse to assimilate into the Western melting pot; instead they carve out a foothold in a neighborhood, and then, through intimidation or outright violence, push out the infidels whose failed secular values are no longer acceptable. Even public services such as police, firefighters and ambulances are often driven out of such neighborhoods with stones, bottles or bullets. Lacking the political and cultural will to assert control in areas that in some cases have become urban war zones, the authorities have simply retreated and abandoned them. As Germany’s Chief Police Commissioner Bernhard Witthaut confesses,
In these areas crimes no longer result in charges. They are left to themselves. Only in the worst cases do we in the police learn anything about it. The power of the state is completely out of the picture.
In Britain, where there are already as many as eighty-five Sharia courts in operation, an Islamist group called Muslims Against the Crusades has launched an ambitious campaign to turn twelve British cities into independent Islamic states, including Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, and what the group calls “Londonistan.” In the Tower Hamlets in East London – or as the Muslims there refer to it, “the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets” – imams known as the “Tower Hamlets Taliban” issue death threats to unveiled women, and gays are attacked by gangs of young Muslim men. The neighborhood has been littered with leaflets announcing, “You are entering a Sharia controlled zone. Islamic rules enforced.” It was in East London, remember, that the Islamist Abu Izzadeen challenged former Home Secretary John Reid by saying: “How dare you come to a Muslim area?”