Gun Fun: Our Responsible Gun Owners Have Been Busy Bees!

Good golly, there's a whole lot of shootin' going on! America's Responsible Gun Owners have been keeping the peace all on their lonesome, some with deadlier results than others. Let's dig through the shell casings and see what's out there!

Our first Second Amendment Hero is Dr. Peter Steinmetz, a brain scientist at Barrow Neurological Institute who was arrested Friday when he took his AR-15 with him to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks. But wait, you may say, isn't that the very airport where some guy took his son last November so they could walk around with their semi-auto Freedom Makers, just two days after the shootings at LAX? And didn't that story end with the police saying, hey, Arizona's an open carry state, and you can parade around humping your gun as much as you want, right up to the TSA checkpoint but not beyond? It was! And it is! And in fact, it turns out that Dr. Steinmetz is the VERY SAME Second Amendment lover who was marching around with son and gun last November, although his name wasn't released at the time. So why is he in trouble this time when he wasn't before?

Turns out that it wasn't the fact that he had a gun that was a problem. Arizona LOVES guns!! But after he got his overpriced burnt coffee, he "inadvertently" pointed the barrel of the loaded weapon at a couple of women in the terminal, who were a couple of whiny sissies about it. Instead of drawing their own weapons and telling him to stand down or die, they went and complained to police that they felt "threatened" just because a loaded semi-automatic rifle was pointed at them. Police arrested Steinmetz and booked him on "two felony counts of disorderly conduct with a weapon." Steinmetz explained to police that his sole reason for going to the airport was to get a cup of coffee, which, considering how far away Sky Harbor is from just about anything else you're likely to be doing in Phoenix, means that he either just really really loves the Starbucks at the airport, or maybe can't find anything to match the buzz of walking around Sky Harbor with his AR-15 so he'll be there to take down any bad guys. Pro-tip: There are usually convenience stores near any freeway exit! It's not exactly brain surgery, now is it?

Incidentally, according to wingnut "media watchdog" Newsbusters, we are NOT ALLOWED to mention this story without also giving exactly the same amount of space to the story of Dr. Lee Silverman, who

heroically stopped a shooter at a Pennsylvania hospital last Thursday. Friday's Today offered a mere 33-second news brief on that story.

You see, the question isn't "why are so many disturbed people able to get guns?" The only proper question is, "Why doesn't everyone else have a gun so they can shoot deranged people with guns?" Remember, kids, Guns Save Lives, except when they don't.

In Chicago, an armed citizen with a concealed carry permit was just trying to do his part to Bring Great Justice when he pretty much fucked up completely, but remember, he meant well. The would-be hero saw an AT&T Store being robbed, and saw the suspect run out the back door. So our hero rushed after the bad guy, who was also being chased by a cop who had been flagged down by some other witnesses to the robbery. According to the Chicago Tribune, here's what unfolded next:

The officer spotted someone running from the rear of the building with a large duffel bag and a gun in his hand, police said.

As the officer began chasing the suspect, the man with the concealed carry permit saw the suspect and fired two shots, police said.

"Since the officer did not know where the shots were fired from, he was forced to terminate his foot pursuit and take cover for his own safety," police said in the statement.

Whoops! The robber was eventually caught by police, who apparently were in plenty of time, rather than by the armed good guy who scared the bejeezus out of the first cop by firing wildly. The suspect was uninjured, and so was everyone else.

In California last week, another valiant case of successful home defense: an 80-year-old man in Long Beach shot and killed a woman who had been robbing his home. Tom Greer came home and found his house being robbed by a man and a woman; the pair knocked him down, but he got up and grabbed his .22-caliber revolver. As soon as they saw the gun, the couple ran away, so Greer ran after them and shot the woman twice in the back, just like John Wayne would have. She gets no mercy for claiming to be pregnant, because burglary is a capital crime in Mr. Greer's head:

“The lady, she couldn’t run as fast as the man, so I shot her in the back twice,” Greer explained. “She’s dead, but he got away.”

“She says, ‘Don’t shoot me, I’m pregnant! I’m going to have a baby!’ And I shot her anyway,” Greer said.

A coroner's report said that the woman, Andrea Miller, was not actually pregnant, so not only was she a thief and a mugger, she was also a liar, which makes shooting her in the back even more OK.

It turns out that under California's completely irrational laws, you aren't actually "defending yourself" if your assailant is no longer assaulting or robbing you, but is in fact running away. What fun is that? Police have not yet determined whether Greer will be charged, or if the killing was justified.

And finally in Gun Fun, a Bemidji, Minnesota man was charged with attempted first-degree murder after shooting a 17-year-old girl multiple times, but he had a very good reason: she was telling him not to ride his lawnmower through her yard. The girl, who survived gunshot wounds to the chest, right thigh, and left ankle, told police that on July 21, she had told neighbor Chad Pickering to stop riding his mower across her family's lawn, and that he routinely carried a pistol in a holster. He denied trespassing. Later that night, the girl was shot when she went outside to tie up her barking dog, when

she saw the shadow of someone crouching in the yard. She said she heard three gunshots and felt bullets striking her. The teen said she fell on the deck and had to pull herself into the house, because she could not walk, to call 911.

Investigators said they found three spent .45-caliber shells in the grass near the deck. Authorities also found an area about 75 to 100 feet south of the home where someone apparently had been lying in the grass beneath a pine tree.

In a search of Pickering's home, police found a .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol hidden in an air vent; at first he claimed that he hadn't seen the pistol in a week, but eventually explained his very good reason for shooting the girl:

Pickering said he had taken his children for a ride with the mower and that after he returned home a girl came to the front door and confronted him about trespassing, the complaint said. Pickering told investigators he went to her house, knelt by a pine tree and shot her twice after she came out the front door, according to the complaint

The Minneapolis City Pages notes that Pickering was an Iraq vet who, before his Facebook page was deleted, complained of difficulties with the VA (possibly related to PTSD, but that's a reporter's speculation, not a diagnosis), posted photos of himself posing shirtless with a gun, and complained that gun control efforts are pointless, the equivalent of trying to address rampant speeding by lowering the speed limit. Huh. Maybe if there's rampant speeding, some people should have their driving privileges revoked? Gosh, what would the analogy for that be when it came to guns?

We can all agree that this is not an example of how reasonable people should behave. Unarmed seventeen-year-olds should never confront someone who they know is carrying; instead, the proper thing would have been for her to buy a much bigger gun, perhaps a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum or a Desert Eagle, and had it with her when she spoke to Pickering. This almost certainly would have resulted in an amicable resolution, because an armed society is a polite society.

[ Phoenix New Times / NewsBusters / Chicago Tribune via Gawker / RawStory / LA Times / SFGate.com / CityPages ]

 Follow Doktor Zoom on Twitter. He somehow manages to be polite even when no one is pointing a gun at him, perhaps because he's already read Flannery O'Connor.