Michigan Man Shoots Himself by Accident - No Charges

Local news reports

Nicholas Kegley, 32, of Iron River, was cleaning a .22 caliber pistol while waiting in his vehicle for a friend.

Kegley and friends had been camping and hunting together in northern Bates Township. Kegley told the deputies that the slide had been sticking on the pistol and he used the time waiting to clean the gun.

While cleaning the pistol Kegley unintentionally chambered a live cartridge and discharged the firearm. The bullet struck Kegley in the upper left leg then lodged in the driver door of his vehicle.

Kegley was taken by his friend to the Northstar Hospital in Iron River where he was treated for the gunshot wound then released.

Deputies found the incident to be accidental and the investigation has been closed.

A guy who is stupid enough to do something as negligent as that should never be allowed to own a gun for the rest of his life.

This was probably not his very first act of negligence, and thanks to the lax laws and nonchalant attitudes towards gun safety, it probably won't be his last.

By disarming the unfit gun owners when they come to the attention of the authorities, we'd make the world a safer place.

Stu Bykofsky, Daily News Columnist, Has a Gun Control Plan

Philly dot com

After years of writing about gun issues, I developed a plan to reduce the risk of gun violence. Neither side will love it all.

* Mandatory instant background check for everyone, for every gun sold.
* One gun purchase a month. This is aimed at slowing the multiple straw purchaser.
* Increase prison time to 10 years for straw purchasers (who buy a gun to pass along to someone who can't pass a background check).
* Lost or stolen guns must be reported, to thwart straw purchasers who may claim the guns they sold illegally were lost or stolen.
* No "assault weapon" ban. It was tried for a decade to little effect, and the Washington Navy Yard maniac used a shotgun. In 2011, the FBI reports, shotgun homicides (356) outnumbered rifle homicides (323). Both were dwarfed by handguns (6,220), the biggest problem.
* Make carrying a gun in a crime a federal offense, 10-year mandatory, added to the sentence for the original crime.
* No clips with more than 15 rounds. If you can't hit a target with 15 chances, you shouldn't be packing. (Limiting ammo negates a "need" to ban "assault rifles.")
* States must report people with mental illnesses to a federal database, as they are required to do. Most lag behind. * Hollywood should reduce violence - in films, recordings, video games.
* No more "gun-free" zones. They don't stop gunmen; they provide defenseless targets.

 Will my plan end all gun crime? Of course not. Will it stop some? You make that call.

Michigan Gun Club Unveils Plans to Prevent Stray Bullets

Get a load of this guy. He's got all the honesty of some of our favorite commenters.  First he says, "accidents will happen."  That's one of the favorite pro-gun excuses for negligent and unsafe behavior.  Then when asked if steps should have been taken earlier to prevent the stray bullets from escaping, he says what any good pro-gun liar would: "no."

The defensive prevarication of the gun-rights fanatics is very telling. If they were really in the "right," they'd be able to play it straight.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

Alabama Man Suffers Self-Inflicted Gun Shot Wound from Dropped Gun Incident

Local news reports

Police say a man who was accidentally shot by his own gun at a Winn Dixie in Tuscaloosa will undergo surgery to remove the bullet. 

Tuscaloosa County Metro Homicide Unit Sgt. Dale Phillips says the man's .25-caliber gun fell from his hip and fired a shot into his leg while he was grocery shopping on Saturday night. 

Authorities say the gun was being carried in a holster at the time. Phillips says the bullet traveled up the victim's leg and lodged itself in his hip.

Gun Violence’s No. 1 Target: Black Children

Miami Herald

In the weeks since the Washington Navy Yard shooting, the city of New Orleans reached a tragic milestone.

All told, 108 people have been murdered in the Crescent City so far this year. In September two black girls, one 11 years old and the other age 2, were shot and killed. And earlier this year a national organization advocating for stricter gun control told the story of a black 10-year-old New Orleans boy who has been shot and seriously injured twice in his short life.

Although the national spotlight has remained fixed on mass shootings in Washington; Newtown, Conn.; and Aurora, Colo., as well as the gun violence coming out of Chicago, street crime and “ordinary” shootings that take one or two lives at a time are still disfiguring communities and putting black children and teens in particular peril. For black America the national gun debate is not about the shocking, but still relatively rare, mass shootings or the political gamesmanship that draws attention to the violence consuming President Barack Obama’s adopted hometown. Cities riddled with gun violence, such as New Orleans, are also located in states with some of the nation’s weakest gun laws. Those laws are costing children, particularly black children, their lives, gun control advocates say.

Across the country in 2012, gun violence was the second-leading cause of death for American children ages 7 to 19, according to a July report released by the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF). But it constituted the No. 1 cause of death for black children and teens.

Between 1963 and 2010, nearly 60,000 black children and teenagers have been killed by guns. That means more than 17 times the number of black children have been killed by guns than the total number of black Americans lynched between 1862 and 1968, according to Caroline Fichtenberg, director of research at the CDF.

A growing group of gun control advocates say that in cities and states where gun laws make guns easier to buy, legal to carry and easy to sell without a background check are places where gun violence and homicides happen more frequently. In fact, the 10 states with the weakest gun laws collectively suffer gun violence at a rate twice as high as that of the 10 states with the nation’s strongest gun laws, according to an April analysis by the left-leaning Center for American Progress in Washington.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/10/07/3675520/gun-violences-no-1-target-black.html#storylink=cpy

In 2012 Chicago’s gun violence helped produce a murder rate of 18.7 deaths per 100,000 Windy City residents, according to federal data. But other communities grew far more violent. In New Orleans, for example, the murder rate reached 53.5 per 100,000.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/10/07/3675520_p2/gun-violences-no-1-target-black.html#storylink=cpy

Michael Shermer's gun science

It was a link in the Libertarian changes his mind on gun control post, but he gets into the serious statistics about the gun violence issue in the US:

Consider a 1998 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery that found that “every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.” Pistol owners’ fantasy of blowing away home-invading bad guys or street toughs holding up liquor stores is a myth debunked by the data showing that a gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt or a homicide than it is for selfdefense. I harbored this belief for the 20 years I owned a Ruger .357 Magnum with hollow-point bullets designed to shred the body of anyone who dared to break into my home, but when I learned about these statistics, I got rid of the gun.

He seems to buy the scientific studies are correct, but isn't that the reason that federal funding has been held back because it might "advocate gun control"?

Anyway, unlike the parrots, he finds (as I do) that the pro-gun arguments just don't withstand scrutiny:

Another myth to fall to the facts is that gun-control laws disarm good people and leave the crooks with weapons. Not so, say the Johns Hopkins authors: “Strong regulation and oversight of licensed gun dealers—defined as having a state law that required state or local licensing of retail firearm sellers, mandatory record keeping by those sellers, law enforcement access to records for inspection, regular inspections of gun dealers, and mandated reporting of theft of loss of firearms—was associated with 64 percent less diversion of guns to criminals by in-state gun dealers.” Finally, before we concede civilization and arm everyone to the teeth pace the NRA, consider the primary cause of the centurieslong decline of violence as documented by Steven Pinker in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: the rule of law by states that turned over settlement of disputes to judicial courts and curtailed private self-help justice through legitimate use of force by police and military trained in the proper use of weapons.

the article can be found here.

16 Ways Europeans Are Just Better At Life than Americans

Huffington Post

10. MEASUREMENTS

Europeans:

Europe uses the metric system. If you can multiply by 10, you now have the next highest unit. Boom. Done.

Americans:

There are 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon, 16 tablespoons in a cup, 2 cups in a pint, 2 pints in a quart and 4 quarts to a gallon. There are 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard and 1,760 yards in a mile (or 5,280 feet, as is more commonly known). There are 144 square inches in a square foot and 43,560 square feet in an acre. There are 16 ounces in a pound and 2,000 pounds in a ton.

This list excludes such fun units as picas, furlongs, fathoms, nautical miles, survey townships, bushels and hogsheads. Yup. A hogshead is a unit of measurement and not a Harry Potter character. Look it up.