https://youtu.be/AHYtKrWK7Fw

This may seem like a stupid question, but there’s a whole lot of stupid out there. In absolute terms I mean. Percentage-wise, not so much. The vast majority of American gun owners are entirely responsible with firearms, both storage and use. But there are thousands who aren’t, injury and death resulting. Leading to headlines like this [via usatoday.com]: Chronicle of agony: Gun accidents kill at least 1 kid every other day. 

desantis-blue-logo-no-back-4-smallThe tragic anecdotes in the story indicate, well, stupidity. “The children decided to go inside, into a room where several adult acquaintances of their parents had been smoking marijuana. A gun was sitting out, and Ka’Darius thought the chrome-and-black .40-caliber pistol was a toy.” You can guess the rest. The antis reckon safe storage laws are the answer to this kind of irresponsibility. The NRA and other put their faith in firearms education. I figure you can’t fix stupid. You?

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54 COMMENTS

  3. People in video would probably be Darwin Award material if they lived in a country that allowed them to own firearms. (Assuming they still live in the UK)

  4. No. And I will give a non gun example. An idiot in my shop was putting tape on the floor. He decided it would be a brilliant idea to lay on a creaper underneath an automatic overhead door. Said door opened, he laid down, door closed on his head.

    Moral of the story is, stupid will find a way.

    • I agree, but they appear to be irresponsible in general, so they would probably be irresponsible with a real firearm.

  5. In the example above, I’m going to guess that the firearm in question was illegally owned to begin with.

    • In the example given above…

      What are the odds that a group of “adults” getting high with children on the premises, would even consider “safe storage” for their firearms before they got wasted?

      Just another example of passing laws that only people who would not normally break laws will follow. (Maybe)

  8. From Calvin Coolidge: Unless bureaucracy is constantly resisted it breaks down representative government and overwhelms democracy. It…sets up the pretense of having authority over everybody and being responsible to nobody…

    Government, democrats in particular, wants us to sacrifice our liberties, to be responsible for stupid people, while legislators get a pass.

    no thanks

  11. We all do stupid things…

    Some people just do them more frequently and with greater orders of magnitude.

  12. Two from The Duke , ” If you’re gonna be stupid , ya’ gotta be tough.”

    ” Tomorrow hopes we learned something from yesterday. “

  14. NO. You can kill it,imprison it or shoot it. We were just in the local Wallyworld and were leaving the store. A ghetto gal ahead of us took offense at the(also brown)guard asking to see a receipt. Practically got violent too. We were waved through(also 3/4 brown). But not stupid…and it’s not a function of IQ. Lots of lawyer/doctor types are stupid and lack any semblance of sense.

    • I need to start specifying the color of every person detailed in my daily TTAG stories/narratives. Oh, that’s right, I forgot, I don’t lay my life bare on the Internets.

      • But you do lay your soul bare on the web, grayman/coffee/matt. Every comment you make shows a twisted looney crying out for help. You’re a walking/talking example of what happens when there’s only a “babydaddy” in yo mama’s life and no positive male role models.

        And you think you’re anonymous. Pathetic.

      • You do reveal yourself graygay. You reveal what a racist sissy you are. YOU can’t be fixed boy…

    • Eh. I’d get offended if they asked to see my receipt too. Unless they have articulable probable cause to think I stole something, and tell me what it is, I’m not stopping. Get in my way and they will have a lawsuit on their hands – physical self-defense must remain proportional to the threat and only begin when they lay hands on.

        • They can tell whether or not a single item in one of my closed bags is a non-grocery item?

          I think not. Try again.

        • At a glance. A TV or microwave or clothes is pretty EZ to spot. It’s called stop-loss. Again…DUH.

        • It’s called security theater. It rarely gets any results, it’s main purpose is to deter most would be shoplifters by making them think that the guard may find that $30 dollar shirt that was wrapped in a couple of $2 tank tops.

        • Ask all you want. It’s mine and I have no obligation to prove anything to you. If you want to stop me, again, you better have proof that I’m taking it.

          Please note, this does not apply to membership stores, where I have contractually agreed to examination of my recipes as a condition of membership and purchase.

  15. Considering they probably lied on a 4473 if the gun was not acquired in violation of the law I will go with no.

    By the logic there may be jail time it would likely keep them out of the gene pool yes.

  17. No way to cure stupid.
    De Gaulle said something like that eliminating stupid people was a “vaste programme”.
    I have a lot to do with safety on complicated industrial machines, and the current laws, but more than this internal regulations of quite a few big companies, go to unbelievable extremes with safety devices on such equipment, often making them practically unusable or so expensive they will withdraw from the purchase.
    I always tell them that survival is not a right, is an achievement. That there are limits beyond which an accident may even be a positive thing (Ironically. I’m talking about extemes). Many consultants agree, but still, nowadays stupid is a protected species and considered worth letting thrive………
    It’s a lost battle.

    • I remember reading, quite a few years ago, that safety advocates, despairing of changing human behavior, had switched their emphasis to forcing manufacturers to idiot-proof their products. Of course, we know that the result is even worse idiots. We are seeing this in automobiles with features like lane departure control and automatic braking to compensate for inattention. A couple of years ago, a mother was distracted by the antics of her toddler in the back seat and drifted into a head on collision with an oncoming car. She survived but her child didn’t. I was roundly criticized for saying that she should have been convicted of motor vehicle homicide. Apparently, negligence is excusable if done for socially acceptable reasons.

      • As Albert Einstein once put it, the most dangerous people on earth ain’t the evil ones, but the stupid ones, because they never rest.
        I keep that always in mind!

  18. Tune to the pimple popping channel to see how those two yahoos dealt with the resulting staph infections.

  21. If you could fix stupid the shops would be open 24/7 trying to keep up with the overflow of business. And how much of a FixStupid shop’s business would be repeat customers? At least 75%?

    You would have to open a MacDonalds style FastFixStupid with a 24/7 drive thru window.

  22. My thoughts on this are you should never keep a loaded firearm unlocked around small kids that have not been trained to not touch it. When booze is around, I put my firearm away unless it’s my pocket carry.

    The corollary to this is that when I start resting my hand on my firearm when I’m sober and there’s no threat, it means I haven’t been to the range recently and I’m getting antsy to shoot.

  23. GB is finally coming to realize that admitting the refuse from her former 3rd world colonies MIGHT not have been that damn smart.

    Next from the Darwin bros – a new lawn game where you throw oversized pointy missiles at a hoop/target. Need a dame for this new game.

  25. You might not be able to fix stupid.

    You can, however, “fix” it, but eugenics are generally frowned upon in today’s world.

  26. If you honestly believe you can’t fix stupid that must mean you’ve never done anything stupid right? I know I have, and have a great deal of hope and trust that I can improve those things. You can only fix stupid that is willing, though, which is not always the case. And it takes work, so that disqualifies many as well. :p

  28. “there’s a whole lot of stupid out there. In absolute terms I mean. Percentage-wise, not so much.”

    Contemporary election results say you’re wrong about that last part.

  29. Some stupid is fixed by learning from mistakes, other stupid can only be fixed by earning a Darwin Award.
    Regarding an earlier post about machines and safety, to a point things like guards to keep from being snagged and having to use both hands to operate a press make sense. Having a gate to keep the operator from sticking his head in the press is too far.

  30. Eventually, stupid usually fixes itself. The results of stupid actions do not improve the chances of spreading their genes to another generation. Whether stupid kills you, or maims you, or just makes it harder to find a mate that will put up with your stupidity.

  31. Completely impossible to fix or upgrade stupidity! Nor can you fix certain company’s that take 3 months to respond to warranty issues, the only fix is warning others of mass ignorance and avoidance is the only cure.

  32. The reality of this one insident is that illegal drug users would be or are prohibited persons. Not allowed to possess firearms. Missing some important information here. Prosecution of the owner of this weapon so carelessly handled. Negligent manslaughter at least. Making false statements on purchase forms is a federal offense. “Stupid is as stupid does”. This is not that this was a crime several actually.

  33. The truth is painful. You can’t fix stupid or prevent it from owning firearms, driving a car or having kids. Maybe enforce stiff mandatory penalties if an unsecured gun gets into the hands of a minor?

  34. You can pick your friends,
    You can pick your nose,
    But you can’t pick your friend’s nose.

    It’s the same with stupid:

    You can fix your own stupid,
    But you can’t fix other people’s stupid.

    The rewards of willful stupidly are always expensive.
    Sometimes paid by the stupid,
    Often paid by innocent bystanders,
    The willfully stupid deserve punishment, but punishment will not fix them.

  35. From an actual psychological perspective, there are 3 different issues being conflated here. To simplify a bit:
    1) “Stupid” means having reduced cognitive capacity, which imparts an inability/reduced ability to learn or to reason clearly (it originally referred to individuals with relatively low IQs in what is now called the low Borderline range),
    2) “Ignorant” meaning unaware of information on a topic; however, being ignorant does not imply any inability to reason effectively or to acquire and incorporate new information (as “stupid” does),
    3) “Irresponsible” meaning not using reasonable caution or behaving in an overly impulsive or unusually careless or uninhibited manner.

    If someone is “Stupid,” the problem is not really fixable, although some improvement can be made, usually through intensive, repetitive practice.
    If the person is simply “Ignorant,” whether willfully or not, improvement in their knowledge is entirely possible. However, if the person doesn’t WANT to consider or accept, new information on the topic on which they are ignorant, they will remain ignorant of it, and their behavior, even when supported by logical reasoning, will be ineffective. A good example, is those who believe more guns in society will increase crime and violence, which, while logically reasonable, is verifiably untrue. Thus, a merely ignorant person may behave “stupidly” because (s)he came to a false conclusion because of inaccurate (or missing) knowledge.
    A person who is “Irresponsible,” that is, one who is overly impulsive (ie, can’t resist urges to act), or who doesn’t care, or just doesn’t take the trouble, to control his own behavior, is likely to act in self-defeating ways that create perfectly predictable negative consequences of his actions. This is usually why unsupervised younger children are unsafe with firearms. They don’t inhibit their urges well enough, so they do “stupid” things because they simply don’t have sufficiently well developed brains yet to think before they act. Even with older youngsters, those who have an attention disorder (like ADHD) are at risk for similarly unsafe behavior. They have an impulse control disorder that makes it unusually difficult for them to consider the likely consequences of their urge to do something before acting on the urge.
    So, in essence, a “Stupid” person probably CAN’T be taught to keep his finger off the trigger until he’s ready to fire, an “Ignorant” one HASN’T been taught yet, and an “Irresponsible” one knows better, but just doesn’t bother to follow the rule. While any of these conditions may result in unsafe behavior with firearms, the behavior occurs for very different reasons, some treatable (ADHD), some correctable (ignorance of facts or techniques), and some intractable (cognitive or intellectual disorders). Because of these differences, it is important to use the terms (or at least to think of individuals in terms of them) accurately. For example, to call someone on this blog “stupid,” is not only impolite, but almost always incorrect, because those with low IQs and significant cognitive disabilities rarely, if ever, comment here (it’s too complicated). Ignorance, on the other hand, both willful and inadvertent, is not at all uncommon .

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