Another gun proliferation activist dies in an accidental shooting
by digby
From Brad Reed at Raw Story:
M.D. Harmon, a conservative columnist who frequently wrote in favor of gun ownership rights for the Portland Press Herald, died this week after being accidentally shot by a teenage boy.
As the Press Herald itself reports, the 71-year-old Harmon was showing off one of his guns to a 16-year-old boy in his home in Sanford, Maine, on Wednesday. Harmon apparently let the teenager handle the weapon, which went off while the boy was holding it.
Both the teenager and his father were visiting Harmon for undisclosed reasons, and Harmon’s wife has called the shooting an “accidental tragedy.”
Harmon was a dedicated defender of gun ownership rights and would regularly rail against attempts to regulate firearms or even make the use of firearms safer.
In a 2013 column, for instance, Harmon attacked proposed legislation in Maine that would have required gun owners to take a firearm safety course — in fact, he referred to this section of the legislation as “the worst part of the bill.”
“So much for ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” he wrote. “It’s one thing to have the government create limited groups of people not entitled to own firearms for good reasons — felons, the insane, children, etc. — and quite another to have the government think it can require that a free people get official permits to exercise their rights!”
He also criticized President Obama for issuing gun control “fatwas” that tried to mandate background checks at gun shows, as well as a ballot initiative that would have required gun sales to be processed through a federally licensed dealer.
This man chose to take this chance so in some ways he died for his own cause. But that 16 year old kid will have to live with what happened for the rest of his life. And there are thousands of other dead people, including babies and little toddlers, from gunshot wounds because of people who think unfettered gun ownership for fun is some kind of God-given right. In fact, they believe this over the idea that their victims should have health care when they are accidentally shot.
One of the saddest consequences of the Triumph of the Trump is that gun safety has now fallen to the bottom of the pile of issues again. The NRA was instrumental in Trump's win and they won't let him forget it. Not that he wants to. He's all for letting cops and vigilantes alike shoot first and ask questions later.
But the issue will not go away. This country is going to have to deal with this some time. It's just not going to be during the Trump era.
Happy Hollandaise everyone.
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