I started this tradition last year, with a year-end wrap-up of the best GunFAIL stories from across the state. This year’s report has been much different from last year’s; last year we had sheer gun stupidity (the woman who hid a loaded gun in her vagina, the man who tried to fix his broken lawnmower by shooting at it, etc.)
This year it’s just sheer tragedy: children shot by parents, by other children, by unknown assailants. What was once funny is now just very, very sad. I get no pleasure from this, but it’s important we all take a long, hard look at the way free access to firearms is destroying our culture. We’ve gone from silliness to just plain mean-spiritedness in a matter of 12 months. Pure evil is just around the corner.
Without further ado, the best of the Tennessee Gun Report:
10- In December, 2014 a Nashville man pulled a gun on a McDonald’s drive-through worker because his McDouble cheeseburger was missing from his order.
9- Frontier Firearms in Kingston decided to offer a discount to Christians, after still-unsubstantiated reports that the Umpqua Community College shooter targeted the faithful “went viral” and our Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey told “serious” Christians to get carry permits.
Let me repeat: there has been no substantiation of the single claim that the UCC shooter asked a victim if she was a Christian before murdering her. Zero. But the story circulated through the perpetually-persecuted RWNJ contingency faster than clap through a whorehouse. And hey, it’s not real fearmongering if you can’t profit from it!
8- A 63-year-old woman attending an estate auction in Greene County was accidentally shot in the face when the auctioneer handed a nearby man a .22. Oops. She survived, but her teeth didn’t.
7- In May, one of our safest, most responsible citizens evah (i.e., a CCW holder) dropped his fanny pack at a Murfreesboro Walmart, accidentally firing the gun inside. Walmart, fanny pack, gun … the jokes just write themselves, folks.
6- The Maryville restaurant which made national news in 2014 for posting a “guns welcome” sign, causing much excitement among wingnuts and gun humpers, was forced to close in March. Apparently competition from the nearby Bojangle’s was too much. Karma!
5- In November, 67-year-old Sherry McLain was so terrified of a black man who asked her for a light that she pulled a gun on him. Why yes it happened in the Walmart parking lot, why do you ask?
4- Massive discourse FAIL: in July, following the tragic shooting on Chattanooga-area military stations, volunteer 2nd Amendment Heroes decided to “protect” recruiting stations located in shopping malls. Completely overlooked by the gun-humpers was the fact that not one but two military personnel at the shooting site were armed, both fired on the shooter, and both missed.
It’s almost as if the gun loons just hear what they want to hear, you know? Meanwhile, a Navy recruiter in guns-everywhere Georgia brought his gun to work and promptly shot himself in the leg with it, while a volunteer in Ohio accidentally fired his rifle at the shopping center recruiting station he was “protecting.”
3- In October, an 11-year-old boy shot and killed his 8-year-old neighbor after she refused to show him her new puppy. He used his dad’s 12-guage.
2- After two people were shot by “celebratory” stray bullets during Nashville’s downtown July Fourth celebration, a Democratic lawmaker suggested that maybe there oughta be a law against shooting your gun in the air. The Tennessee Firearms Assn., always the voice of reason, disagreed:
“It’s perfectly acceptable conduct,” said John Harris, executive director of the Tennessee Firearms Association.
[…]
“Because it’s their right to do it if they want to,” said Harris.
Harris says if someone wants to celebrate that way, the government shouldn’t stop them.
And this, boys and girls, is why we can’t have nice things. Because our state government is under the spell of a crazy person.
1- And our top story from the past year: that time in April when the NRA brought its national convention to Nashville, literally blanketing our city with propaganda, like these banners gloating about how they overturned a ban on cop-killer bullets:
