Dog's killing solved nothing

Much happened this past week that would enrage an old liberal – Muslim extremists murdered a dozen people in a Paris magazine office because the magazine dared to mock Islam; some pinheaded bigot tried to blow up the NAACP office in Colorado Springs, evoking gut-wrenching images of the Sixties; a Denver couple left their three-year-old sleeping with candles burning in a trailer house while they went down the street to drink and drug, and the child died when the house burned.

But the story that broke my heart this week was the story about Sydney, the good friend and constant companion of a Colorado Springs woman; Sydney was shot to death in a park last week for absolutely no reason.

Details are sparse; the so-far unidentified woman was playing ball with Sydney, an Australian Shepherd, in a park a week ago today. Sydney was off the leash, which isn’t allowed in that particular park. She spotted a so-far unidentified man walking on a sidewalk and, ball still in her mouth, bounded up to greet him. There is no indication Sydney did anything remotely threatening. Anyone who has ever owned a dog knows what Sydney wanted; she wanted the man to throw the ball so she could chase it again.

Instead, the man did what he probably figured any red-blooded American man with a gun in his pocket would do – he exercised his Second Amendment right until Sydney was dead.

And then the sonofabitch walked away.

While the wanton, cold-blooded killing of a helpless creature is bad enough, that’s not what really made my blood boil. Well, okay, it did, but my head nearly exploded when I read the possible consequences of the crime. According to a report on the KKTV News website, if police catch the guy, “the suspect could face reckless endangerment charges for illegally firing a gun within city limits.”

As the kids say nowadays: “What the fuck!?”

Reckless endangerment? He didn’t “recklessly endanger” the dog, he killed it! He didn’t just fire the gun up in the air to scare the dog off, he fired bullets into the dog. Several of them.

I understand it’s not the murder of a child but that doesn’t ease the grief Sydney’s owner feels now. Reckless endangerment? What about cruelty to an animal? How about illegally carrying a concealed weapon (because no properly-licensed concealed carry permitee would use his handgun so irresponsibly. No, I’m serious here – he’d have too much to lose.) Good Lord in Heaven, at least tell me they can charge him with destruction of private property!

This kind of thing is what I mean when I talk about the “culture of the gun.” It’s a culture in which a gun is seen as the solution to any number of problems.

I’m going to wildly speculate the worst case here; that the shooter has been carrying around a handgun for some time just waiting for a chance to use it. Maybe he got mugged recently, maybe he’s very angry with his ex-wife’s lawyer, maybe he’s just fed up with a lifetime of being screwed over and figured nobody would mess with a man with a gun. Maybe I’m reading too much into his simple actions.

One thing is for sure, though: This guy’s gun didn’t solve his problem. If anything, it just made his problems worse.

Concealed carry is a lethal decision

Chances are pretty good that when 29-year-old Veronica Rutledge dropped her handgun into her purse last Tuesday morning, she thought she was just a little bit safer.

She was not. Not long after Veronica armed herself, while she was shopping with family members in a Wal-Mart in Idaho, her two-year-old son stuck his hand in that purse and pulled out that gun and killed Veronica.

Veronica Rutledge was not a stupid person. She was a chemical engineer who worked in a nuclear physics laboratory. She was, by all accounts, well-schooled in the handling and use of a handgun. But she died because she had a concealed carry permit. Yes, yes, people who like to carry guns around will squawk that it’s not that simple but, in the end, it really is. If she hadn't had the permit, she wouldn’t have had the gun in that special purse her husband gave her for Christmas, and then her two-year-old child wouldn’t have gotten his hands on it, and it wouldn’t have gone off and killed her. It is the very definition of irony that Rutledge armed herself in order to be safer and ended up dead for it.

We want to place blame, but on whom? Not the two-year-old; he didn’t know any better. Not on the victim; she believed the gun was safe in the special zippered compartment of her purse. Not on her husband, who gave her the purse for Christmas and, no doubt, tutored her on how to use the gun. In the end, officials investigating her death are calling it a “very tragic accident.”

Are we, then, to simply accept the death of a young mother as a condition of our times, as if she’d been killed in an auto accident? With the mushrooming number of people carrying guns on their persons for whatever reason they can think up, are we now to chalk up “accidental” gun deaths to the price of living in this society?

That’s not a price we should have to pay. What if the child had pointed the gun at someone other than his mother? It will come to that, as surely as you are reading these words. It truly frightens me that my wife and I might be shopping in Wal-Mart one day and a gun will go off, quite unintentionally, and one of us will be the victim of a “tragic accident.”

Fans of concealed carry are fond of comparing gun death accidents with other kinds of accidents, yet they know that such comparisons are disingenuous. Guns are not like automobiles, or anything else, for that matter. Guns are designed and built to kill people and animals. Having been raised by a gunsmith, I know well the history of firearms, and they were invented as weapons of war. Their purpose is lethal and they cannot be compared with anything else in life except, perhaps, sabers and poleaxes and other weapons designed to kill people. And yet we treat them as accoutrements to life in an age of unfounded fear. 

If Veronica Rutledge had left her handgun at home that day instead of taking it with her in her new purse made just for a concealed weapon, she wouldn’t have enjoyed the false feeling of safety that came from being armed. She might have denied herself the pleasure of using her new Christmas gift. She may have even disappointed her husband. But she would still be alive.

She should have left the gun at home. We all should leave our guns at home.