You already heard about that incident in Michigan in which two men with concealed carry permits and handguns got into a road rage incident and managed to shoot each other to death when the guns came out. Well it turns out there’s a bit more to the story.
One of the two men involved in the shoot-out, Robert Taylor, lost his concealed carry license in 2006 after a drunken driving conviction. He was able to get his license back in 2010 after his three year suspension was over.
But he was originally charged not only with drunken driving and carried a concealed weapons while intoxicated. That would have earned him a lifetime suspension of his concealed carry license. But prosecutors decided to drop the firearms charge because the gun was, in their estimation, unrelated to Taylor’s intoxication.
Narrowly speaking they may have a point. When he was arrested for drunk driving,the handgun was tucked between the driver and passenger seats.
County Prosecutor Ron Schafer …
… said the decision to drop the weapons charge was made because, in this case, “the gun had nothing to do with the drunken driving.”
The gun, a 9 mm handgun, was tucked in between the driver and passenger seats.
“It was a guy who had too much to drink, but also had a gun in his car,” he said.
The threat to the community was the drunken driving, not the gun, Schafer said.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, this story is obviously a tragedy for each of the families involved. But it’s also the perfect illustration of the folly of current nationwide gun policy. The idea that more guns lead to less gun violence only makes sense if you believe in a world of rational actors who walk out of a econometrics theorem. People get angry. They get in fights and do stupid things. Add guns to the mix and more people get killed.
