I read J. Kb’s post Dumb and Dumber and I decided to go deeper into the examples given in the original article. The Mic.com article If You Can’t Drink and Drive, You Probably Shouldn’t Drink and Carry a Gun, Either. post 12 cases of alcohol and guns with bad consequences and I went ahead and went a bit deeper into each case:
1. Drunk man shoots restaurant owner (New York)
Right out of the bat, this one stinks. NYC, really? Who carries in the Big Apple? Cops, those who can afford and have the connections to get a permit and the criminal element. Sorry Mic.com, your exasperation towards legal Concealed Carriers falls flat with this example. Five gives you ten the perp is a criminal.
2. Intoxicated man shoots woman during a movie (Washington)
This one I had to do research because the linked article fails to give decent information. I had to do the research for them.
King County prosecutors on Tuesday charged a 29-year-old Newcastle man with third-degree assault, accusing him of criminal negligence for allegedly discharging a 9- mm handgun inside a Renton movie theater last week, injuring a woman seated in front of him.Dane Gallion, who had a concealed-pistol license, was ordered by a judge to surrender his firearms and not to consume alcohol or nonprescribed drugs as conditions of his bail, charging papers say.
Source: Suspect in Renton theater shooting charged with assault | The Seattle Times
So they have one incident. Let’s keep going.
3. Drunk man shoots friend… (Ohio)
This one did not take much. The original link gives a rather short story without much background, but further checking reveals the shooter is a felon and thus forbidden by law to own a firearm… not that he cared.
4. Drunk man shoots his dog… (South Dakota)
This looks like a straight idiot and deserving of charges, but no search turned out where the event happened. If he was at his home, then it was not a concealed carry under the influence event as Mic.com tries to insinuate.
5. Drunk man shoots his dog (Georgia)
This one is easy because they already provided the unintentional correction.
“Police found the dog in a trash can. According to neighbors, the man frequently got drunk and fired a gun on his property.”
If you read the article, you find out the “concealed” weapon in question was a shotgun.
6. Drunk woman mistakenly shoots her husband (Michigan)
According to Mic.com:
She reportedly thought he was an intruder and shot him in the shoulder.
Which again means she was not out having a night out with friends and carrying loaded on both senses, but at home. I checked other sources and they all say pretty much the same:
St. Joseph County Sheriff’s Department officials said Connie Tolbert, 54, was taken into custody after she allegedly shot her husband, 52-year-old Darryl Tolbert, at their residence. He is the pastor at Bethel Baptist Church in Three Rivers.
Source: Tolbert Arrested For Shooting – WLKM Radio 95.9 FM
7. Drunk man shoots his two sons… (North Carolina)
Sad case. The man shot the kids and then tried to off himself…at home. I am starting to detect a pattern from Mic.com
8. Drunk man shoots himself… (Nebraska)
This one did not happen at home but inside a car. But again Mic.com should have checked deeper as the “victim” is felon who is now in prison for having the gun in the first place.
9. Drunk man shoots himself… (Nebraska)
The article is so badly written, you can’t figure out where did the event happen or gives me enough clues to figure out who did what.
10. Drunk man shoots himself… (Connecticut)
The dumbass author did not bother to read the article he linked to his example:
Maldonado was dropped off at the emergency room and police said they responded a little after 10 a.m.Possession of a pistol without a permit, criminal possession of a firearm and unlawful discharge are the charges Maldonado–who is a convicted felon–face.
Source: Intoxicated Man Shoots Self in Hand While Buying Firearm: Police | NBC Connecticut
Apparently, scrolling down is hard work.
11. Drunk man shoots at snow plow driver… (Massachusetts)
I am going to give this one a “neutral” because it did happen outside the home (while driving) although the descriptions are in conflict in different articles. No mention if the guy actually has a permit to carry for Mass.
12. Drunk man threatens pub customers with a gun… (Connecticut)
They managed to find another case where the idjit had permit for the gun! But the link provided does not give that information, I had to find it in another source.
There you have it. On the premise of the article, the author can only find 2 examples out of 12 where people with concealed carry permits broke the law. That is a 16.66% accuracy or what passes for semi-serious journalism nowadays.
I’m just being devil’s advocate here, but the fact of the matter is that you CAN legally drink and drive. You cannot, however, be under the influence and drive. However small it may be, there is very real and consequential difference.
Every state has a limit how much alcohol you may have in your blood before you are no longer legally permitted to drive, and I don’t believe that it is zero in any of them. (Mostly .08%, I believe.)
I’m not saying that I think you should strap up and drink up. I think there are more questions than answers, really. Here’s some things I think about:
There is no constitutionally guaranteed right to drive a car, at all…and it can be argued that cars can be just as dangerous as guns. Yet we will allow people to drive if they’ve had only a little bit to drink, mostly because as a society we have deemed it too inconvenient to go full zero tolerance on folks who have consumed any alcohol at all. It wouldn’t even be a civil rights violation if we did. But can you imagine the uproar if we passed a law that said ANY detectable alcohol in your bloodstream was probable cause for a DUI arrest?
Yet if I go to dinner with friends and have even one beer with my burger, I’m suddenly unsafe? I’m DQ’d from the right to carry a defensive firearm? And this isn’t just a matter of being inconvenienced. That one beer costs me my civil right to keep and bear arms until the alcohol is out of my system, leaving me vulnerable to attack, even though I might not be impaired. I can drink that beer with my meal and drive home safely and legally…just not with a gun on my hip. Hmmm…
And we haven’t even addressed the question of drinking in your own home and the guns in your house. If I have one beer after work, and get home invaded while eating my dinner? Am I prohibited from using the shotgun behind the door to defend myself? Do I have to lock up all the guns in the house before I crack open that beer?
I get that there may be legal implications to getting into a shooting…even in your home…if you have alcohol in your system. But I think a blanket prohibition oversimplifies the issue while failing to address real world considerations…which are probably going to need to be addressed in more realistic terms as gun ownership and carry become increasingly common.
(For what it’s worth, I think that eventually it should probably come down to an allowable percentage of BAC, just like driving…though I think anything like that is a long way off. That, or I think we’ll need to become more consistent in our application of alcohol safety standards to pure zero tolerance when it comes to cars, guns, other dangerous equipment…and I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that, either.)
Florida makes no distinction at home or driving. BAC is set a 0.05.
Every state has a limit how much alcohol you may have in your blood before you are no longer legally permitted to drive, and I don’t believe that it is zero in any of them. (Mostly .08%, I believe.)
Not to make more of a distinction vs. difference, here, but in most states you are not permitted to drive while under the influence of alcohol. Put another way, you may not drive while intoxicated (read: “while exhibiting the effects of intoxication”) – and the only way to truly not show ANY effects is to not drink (BAC of 0.00% – not the “legal” limit, but still the safest).
How much alcohol it takes to make a person “intoxicated” (show the effects – lack of balance and coordination, slurred speech, lapses in judgment, etc.) varies greatly from person to person. Some people are “drunk” well before they hit the “legal limit” of 0.08% in most states (0.05% in FL, according to Miguel), and they can and should be charged with DUI. Some people, however, can consume much more without showing the obvious effects.
All the legal limit says is, you are legally intoxicated at this BAC, whether you are exhibiting the effects of alcohol or not. We’ve all seen or heard of the guys who can drink and drink and keep drinking without getting “drunk”. It doesn’t matter; at 0.08% BAC (0.05% in FL), they are drunk for the purposes of law enforcement.
This seems to be the standard modus operandi for anti-gunners to impugn concealed carry: list a number of incidents and conclude CC is a contributing factor, if not THE main factor. It’s irrelevant to them if the person actually has a CC permit or it was a CC incident.
Case in point: VPC’s “Concealed Carry Killers” report, circa 2013. I had a lot of time on my hands at work (could not do “real” work due to Congress’ “Sequestration” — it’s a long story), so I went through and researched each one of the 300+ incidents they listed. A number were suicides (not CC-relevant), a number were justifiable homicides (which shouldn’t count, but you know they would not admit that), a number were CC incidents where the carrier could not legally carry (either a felon and/or no CC permit) and one in particular stood out: a little girl who found her mom’s gun in a closet and accidentally killed herself. Tragic though that last one was, it certainly had nothing to do with CC. In all, there were maybe a handful of incidents where the person was a legal concealed carrier and was in the wrong.
They don’t mention his BAC for the bethel CT case, but at the time it was reported, the legal limit for carrying a loaded firearm in CT was .1%.
One reason I’d like to see a Trump presidency: under his proposed restrictions on what news outlets can and can’t print. Mic.com would be legally culpable for the falsifications, exaggerations, and outright lies printed.
Can there be any reasonable objection to saying that it should be illegal for trusted news sources to lie?
To play the Devil’s Advocate: Can there be any reasonable objection to saying that it should be illegal for trusted news sources to lie?
Yes: Who gets to decide? And how will they determine whether a published falsehood is an honest mistake vs. an intentional fabrication or slander/libel? And will the consequences be the same?
Keep in mind that “progressives” believe everything conservatives and libertarians say is a lie if it doesn’t jive with the “progressive” point of view. Just because they’re not the majority party now doesn’t mean they won’t be later.
Never create a legal tool you’re not willing to let your opposition enforce against you.
Use the same legal system which determines whether someone is guilty of any other crime. If a statement can be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt to be both untrue and deliberately falsified (such as the image in the post just before this one, claiming that a firearm could be purchased within 0 minutes — it would take only a moment to check and see that a background check generally takes ~10 minutes — or the claim that “anyone can sell” a gun online — which is, of course, a federal felony if you don’t go through an FFL dealer), then the individuals or organizations responsible for making that statement should face criminal penalties. Otherwise, they can walk free.
You would have a lot more people being a lot more careful about what they say, and you’d have a lot of commonly-believed “facts” getting debunked in a court of law.
The problem, though, is that the process is the punishment. If the prosecutor never goes after liberal-leaning sites, despite blatant lies, but will go after libertarians and conservatives again and again, even despite their abilities to demonstrate that yes, they are indeed factually correct (and even worse — you *know* that one slip-up, and the libertarian or conservative is going to have the book thrown at them!)…all those lawyer fees, time off work, and what not add up.
No, I would give the Press — and anyone who would lay claim to be the Press, be they blogger or even lowly commenter — the benefit of the doubt, for my sake, if for no other reason.
Since he seems to make a good case against drinking and little else why not just ban alcohol?
Vehicular deaths would drop as well as deaths from alcohol poisoning and related medical problems such as liver and kidney diseases. And nowhere does the Constitution mention your right to alcohol…….