This morning I heard a little blurb on the radio about a former baseball player who may loose a finger after he nearly shot it off when cleaning his gun. These stories come up from time to time: Someone put a bullet though a wall or the floor while cleaning a gun. But what I found most appalling was the way the news story made it sound like an accident. Apparently, guns can just go off! Without someone having loaded ammunition, disengaging a safety, and pulling the trigger. I never knew this could happen.
Oh wait, it can't! Just don't just go off. This was not an accident. These situations are negligence; plain and simple. An accident indicates that there is little to no fault of the person involved. Not true. Here are the series of events that had to take place for a negligent discharge (as it's called by the firearms community).
1. The gun must have had ammunition loaded into the chamber. You should not be doing this unless: a: you are in a suitable area for shooting a gun and are planning to shoot; or b: you are utilizing the weapon for a self defense purpose. Regardless of which was the case here, it was not an accidental loading.
2. The safety must be disengaged. I'll give a little leeway here since handguns have many different types of safeties or even no safety at all.
3. The trigger must have been pulled. This is the most heinous violation of the rules of firearm safety. Forgetting it was loaded, he probably needed to fall the hammer and most people just dry fire the weapon to do that. Unless you are actively engaging in dry fire drills, it's best practice to lower a hammer softly as one more layer of caution.
I won't unleash the well deserved tirade about how he should have cleared the weapon the moment he picked it up. Another best practice when receiving any firearm. Your life could be at risk if you or someone else has forgotten a round in the chamber.
The point is simply that this was not an accident. No question in my mind. And he was very lucky; as I believe his fiance was also with him. People have been shot and killed in that very same situation. I shudder to think of the guilt that would come from harming someone unintentionally like that. In addition to the likely criminal charges you would face.
The media should start to portray firearm negligence as just that. We don't say that the drunk driver accidentally ran into a telephone pole. "Accident" doesn't relieve responsibility when something happens because someone was taking risks.
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Education.
The lament of students around the world since school was invented has been: Why do I have to learn stuff that I will never use?
A fair question to be sure. Whom among us has ever busted out the Pythagorean Theorem (an overly used example)? A need to extract the theme of a good book? Perhaps you have at some point needed to know the preamble to the Constitution. Maybe citing sources according to MLA is an important part of your daily life. I thought not.
While there are many occupations that require the continual use of some of these skills or facts (teachers not included), the vast majority of the population never has to know or use them. And if they did, Google is just one finger tap away on our smart phones.
People cannot come up with a good answer to the question of why we all must learn the things we learned in school. The answers range from: "Well that's what I had to learn." to "You just need to know it." And it is these unfulfilling answers that young people do not like. Shooting back are: "What job requires the need to know the state capitals at a moments notice?" Perhaps you manage to list one or two where that would be required; and it is instantly countered with "I'm not interested in those jobs." Checkmate. A feeling of smug superiority makes anyone happy at wining an argument.
Let me lay out the reason I believe we all must learn uses facts and practice skills that we will never have the use for. The mind is a powerful thing. It must be developed and strengthened in order for a person to function at a level appropriately expected in adulthood. We do not do that by result of memorizing the periodic table or learning how to build a capsule that will allow you to safely drop an egg off a second story. The answer can be summed up in two words: critical thinking. Critical thinking is a building block of a successful person. Show me a job that does not require critical thinking and I will show you a job that is becoming obsolete. We can build machines that can perform tasks without critical thought.... and they will work 24 hours a day for no compensation, vacation, or benefits package.
What does all this have in common? When you memorize the state capitals, you have to think critically about how you are going to imprint those on your mind and recall them later. For some that may be flash cards and quizzing. For others, it may mean an mnemonic device or little ditty. For people like myself it meant taking the seat directly in front of the class globe and making sure North America happened to be facing my direction. When the teacher figured it might be a good idea to move the globe, it meant creating and memorizing a substitution alphabet and writing the names in a decipherable grid pattern on my arm to reference. It conveniently looked like something from math class and was therefore not an issue in a history test when questioned. I may have gone a little overboard on the critical thinking skills on that one. The point was not that I came out with a gleaming bit of factual knowledge; it was that I exercised my brain to solve a problem. Everything you learn in school can help you flex the brain muscle and make you a better thinker. This means that History, English, Literature, Geography, etc all had a point. Plus, you may now be one of the few people left in the world that can write a formal letter properly.
These concepts would not be so hard to convey if the current hip culture put value on critical thinking and problem solving skills. Instead, the answer is always: "Google it"; or even worse, "I don't care." People are impressed with your excessive hashtag usage, the number of followers you have on Instagram, or your words per minute typing on your phone. Thinking is no longer cool. Why put forth the effort when someone has already thought of it? Not giving two shits about how an ant walks may be the wrench in the gears that prevents the invention of something revolutionary.
Fortunately, there are still people that value contemplative thought that goes beyond the gossip section of the highly biased political news site you happen to come across. Culture has not completely killed critical thinking just yet. Let's try to keep it that way.
A fair question to be sure. Whom among us has ever busted out the Pythagorean Theorem (an overly used example)? A need to extract the theme of a good book? Perhaps you have at some point needed to know the preamble to the Constitution. Maybe citing sources according to MLA is an important part of your daily life. I thought not.
While there are many occupations that require the continual use of some of these skills or facts (teachers not included), the vast majority of the population never has to know or use them. And if they did, Google is just one finger tap away on our smart phones.
People cannot come up with a good answer to the question of why we all must learn the things we learned in school. The answers range from: "Well that's what I had to learn." to "You just need to know it." And it is these unfulfilling answers that young people do not like. Shooting back are: "What job requires the need to know the state capitals at a moments notice?" Perhaps you manage to list one or two where that would be required; and it is instantly countered with "I'm not interested in those jobs." Checkmate. A feeling of smug superiority makes anyone happy at wining an argument.
Let me lay out the reason I believe we all must learn uses facts and practice skills that we will never have the use for. The mind is a powerful thing. It must be developed and strengthened in order for a person to function at a level appropriately expected in adulthood. We do not do that by result of memorizing the periodic table or learning how to build a capsule that will allow you to safely drop an egg off a second story. The answer can be summed up in two words: critical thinking. Critical thinking is a building block of a successful person. Show me a job that does not require critical thinking and I will show you a job that is becoming obsolete. We can build machines that can perform tasks without critical thought.... and they will work 24 hours a day for no compensation, vacation, or benefits package.
What does all this have in common? When you memorize the state capitals, you have to think critically about how you are going to imprint those on your mind and recall them later. For some that may be flash cards and quizzing. For others, it may mean an mnemonic device or little ditty. For people like myself it meant taking the seat directly in front of the class globe and making sure North America happened to be facing my direction. When the teacher figured it might be a good idea to move the globe, it meant creating and memorizing a substitution alphabet and writing the names in a decipherable grid pattern on my arm to reference. It conveniently looked like something from math class and was therefore not an issue in a history test when questioned. I may have gone a little overboard on the critical thinking skills on that one. The point was not that I came out with a gleaming bit of factual knowledge; it was that I exercised my brain to solve a problem. Everything you learn in school can help you flex the brain muscle and make you a better thinker. This means that History, English, Literature, Geography, etc all had a point. Plus, you may now be one of the few people left in the world that can write a formal letter properly.
These concepts would not be so hard to convey if the current hip culture put value on critical thinking and problem solving skills. Instead, the answer is always: "Google it"; or even worse, "I don't care." People are impressed with your excessive hashtag usage, the number of followers you have on Instagram, or your words per minute typing on your phone. Thinking is no longer cool. Why put forth the effort when someone has already thought of it? Not giving two shits about how an ant walks may be the wrench in the gears that prevents the invention of something revolutionary.
Fortunately, there are still people that value contemplative thought that goes beyond the gossip section of the highly biased political news site you happen to come across. Culture has not completely killed critical thinking just yet. Let's try to keep it that way.
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