Sometimes A Tragedy Is Simply A Tragedy

My sympathies go out to the family of the cinematographer who was accidentally shot on the set of the movie “Rust.” My sympathies also go out to Alec Baldwin. He fired the gun trusting that the special effects people had done their jobs correctly. As someone who had a well-known brother-in-law in special effects, I know how critical safety is to that profession.

Why my husband and I moved to North Carolina from Massachusetts, one of the first things I did was take a gun safety course. The gun culture of North Carolina was unfamiliar to me, and I felt that I needed to learn about gun safety. I learned some very basic rules about gun handling:

1. Treat every gun as if it were loaded.

2. Always be sure of your target and what’s behind it.

3. Visually and manually check to make sure the gun is not loaded–never assume anything.

4. Never aim at anything that you don’t intend to shoot.

I realize that some of those principles may not apply on a movie set, but had the special effects people followed these principles, I doubt the accident would have happened. What happened on the movie set of “Rust” was tragic, but steps can be taken to prevent future tragedies. The obvious first step would be to outlaw any live ammunition on movie sets.

My sympathies go out to the people impacted by this accident. I hope that everyone impacted can learn from the incident and be more aware of safety issues in the future.

This Really Shouldn’t Be A Surprise

A few years ago, I moved from Massachusetts to North Carolina. There was some culture shock. One part of that shock was the gun culture of some of the South. I grew up in a house where no one hunted, so the whole gun thing was very foreign to me. One of the first things I did was to take a gun safety course to education myself. I learned a lot and began to understand why the Second Amendment is so important to our freedom. Unfortunately the leaders in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts have not yet gotten that message.

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted the following headline, “Boston Mayor’s Office to Force Doctors to Identify and Document Patients Who Own Guns.” Wow. What is the Mayor’s office doing collecting information from doctors?

The article reports:

Here are three of the top goals for health care legislation outlined by his office:

Involving doctors in gun safety: This act would require medical professionals to ask patients about guns in the home, and bring up the topics of gun safety. The goal, Boston Police Commissioner William Gross said, is to identify those at risk for domestic violence, suicide or child access to guns in order to guide people to mental health counseling, resources or other help. “We’re just asking them to help identify ways to save lives,” Gross said.

The fact that a patient owns guns would not be put in their medical record, and is not intended to have physicians help solve crimes.

Chief of Health and Human Services Marty Martinez said that while the program is already common practice at many of the city’s community health centers, legislation would broaden the program statewide.

Does anyone actually believe that gun ownership would not be made part of a patient’s medical record? If the measure is supposed to save lives, what action are the doctors supposed to take after they have determined that a person has guns in the house?

I may be paranoid, but this seems like a back door approach to finding out who has guns so that the guns might be taken away later.

Over The Top On Gun Control

A California newspaper called the Mercury News posted a story on Thursday about a toy gun exchange in a local elementary school.

The article reports:

At Saturday’s event, called Strobridge Elementary Safety Day, a Hayward police officer will demonstrate bicycle and gun safety, and the Alameda County Fire Department is sending a rig and crew to talk about fire safety.

Fingerprinting and photographing of children will be offered, with the information put on CDs for parents to use, if needed, in a missing child case. All youngsters attending will be given a ticket to exchange for a book, Hill said.

Every child who brings a toy gun will get a raffle ticket to win one of four bicycles, Hill said.

Hill said he got the idea for the toy gun exchange from a photographer, Horace Gibson, who takes students’ school pictures and who expressed concern about the spate of shootings of young people by police in Oakland.

Hill said police are rightfully fearful of being shot when they encounter so many armed suspects, and there have been cases nationwide where police mistook a toy gun for a real one.

Sometimes it’s hard just to know where to start. Why are you demonstrating gun safety while you are taking toy guns away from children?

Elementary Principal Charles Hill stated, “If we want older kids to not think guns are cool, we need to start early.” Sir, I realize you are much better educated than I and have had a lot of experience with children, but you have missed some very obvious points. If younger children are taught respect for themselves and for other people (generally speaking, respect for life), and if they are taught morals and values, they are quite likely to conclude that guns used for immoral purposes are not cool without your having to brainwash them. The problem is not the guns–it is the values we are teaching our children. We have taken the Ten Commandments off of the walls of our schools. Regardless of how you feel about the Bible or about religion, those Ten Commandments were a visual reminder to all students that at some point in their lives they were going to have to answer to an authority higher than themselves. You would get better results from having the children recite the Ten Commandments every morning than you would from confiscating a million toy guns.

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