GunFAIL III

First, we'll take care of some old business from prior to this week. Often, reports of shooting incidents that qualify for GunFAIL don't come out right away, but turn up a week or so later. Earlier in this series, I was keeping things strictly in chronological order, and adding updates to earlier posts when I found late-breaking reports. But slipping those reports into lists that have already been read by 90+% of the people who read them tends to understate their impact. If you're interested in these incidents and the number of them that are found, you should see every one of them as I find them. So although I'll still present each installment in the series in chronological order, I won't be updating old posts with new finds.

Second, I'm going to separate out the suicides and murder-suicides from the rest of these incidents. Although they do in many cases represent that sub-category of GunFAIL I sometimes tag on Twitter as #protectingthefamily'that is, the idea that guns bought to protect the family often end up killing the family'these incidents are hard to classify based on little more than the news reports, which are often sketchy.

Third, I'm not entirely sure what to do with domestic situations that involve guns, but don't involve suicides. What about straight-up assaults or murders? What should I do with incidents where a domestic partner might have purchased a gun for protecting the home, only to end up using it to kill his or her partner? Isn't that a mission failure of some kind? If so, where does it belong?

All of which brings me to another point. The more of these stories I collect, the more I realize how difficult it sometimes can be to categorize them. What do I do with a suicide committed with a gun not owned by the victim? That doesn't fit in the category of family deaths caused by a gun purchased to protect them. And what if a murder-suicide is committed between terminally ill, elderly spouses? Does it fit the category? It hardly seems sensitive to include them, of course. But it also might not really be very telling about the way guns get used. Or maybe it is. But one thing is for sure, it has made me more acutely aware of the difficulties gun rights advocates point out with things like defining "assault weapons," or listing "legitimate" reasons to have certain types of guns, or certain modes of employing them. If there are ways of killing yourself or your family with guns that confound the notion of #GunFAIL, then surely there are things I haven't thought of in terms of justifiable uses, reasons for ownership, etc.

With that thought out of the way, let's begin with the GunFAIL report, below the fold.