CCW Story Part 8: Firearms Arrogance

We broke for lunch. My wife and I went to the local Salsa bar. Sitting under an umbrella at the front curb of the restaurant, my wife asked, "So what do you think so far"?

"Well". I replied. "The only thing that is really driving me nuts is Bruce's mispronunciation of Ha-Weapon".

She hadn’t noticed.

Our orders from Bruce were to bring our ha-weapons up to the classroom after lunch. "Do not – I repeat Do NOT bring any ammunition into the classroom". Bruce said.

So what do I see when I re-enter the classroom with a belly full of beans and salsa? The Frat-boy-Glock twins sitting at a table covered with loaded magazines and ammo boxes, toying with little piled pyramids of bullets, smiling away and happily dry firing their Glocks at the floor.

"What the hell"? I asked myself, and then it dawned on me. The majority of people cannot follow simple rules, and consider themselves to be a valid exception. Gun people always say that the problem is not the guns, but the people who don't follow the rules with guns. So far four of the ten people in the classroom had either broken rules about guns in the past, were breaking them now, or had hinted at a deep rooted desire to break them in the future. I was sitting in a classroom full of the very people that my gun friends said were the problem.

I have a female friend who had a concealed carry permit. She ascribes to the "They need to enforce the rules they have on guns, not take guns away" policy. We once went together to a restaurant that serves alcohol and I asked her if she was going to leave her pistol in the car.

"Hell no", she said, "What if some nut comes in here with a gun, what good is mine going to do me in my car"?

"It's against the law to carry in this restaurant, don't you need to obey the law that we already have, a law you said they should be enforcing"? I asked.

"It's a stupid law" she said, "So I am not going to follow it".

I have a term for this, "Firearms Arrogance", a combination of Ignorance and Carelessness that would never be acknowledged by the gun owner. It's the reverse of NIMBY, OIMBY: Only In My Backyard. OIMBY is the mindset of "I am capable of handling my guns, even if most people aren’t, therefore I can do what I want with them, regardless of the law". Many insiders consider all firearms accidents to be related to either ignorance or carelessness, I believe that many firearms incidents can also be directly linked to firearms arrogance, or the direct denial of firearms ignorance and carelessness when related to an individual's actions.

It is interesting to look at the drowning accidents involving children in the US, which are also arguably caused by ignorance and or carelessness. In cold numbers the loss of children's lives per annum via accidental drowning (1,081 per annum since 1999 via the CDC) in the US and then the same age group in firearms accidents (115 per annum since 1999 via the CDC) shows a nine fold discrepancy. Unfortunately, those accidental drowning deaths never make the national news, unless the victim is the child of a celebrity. Why not? What is the difference between a child who can't swim left unsupervised at a swimming pool and a child left unsupervised with a gun? Comments?