The Washington Post reports on the appeals case ruling about this famous video.
A federal agent who accidentally shot himself while lecturing children on gun safety lost his appeal Tuesday in a lawsuit over release of the video that subjected him to ridicule on the Internet and late-night talk shows.It certainly is an embarrassing video, there's no denying that. But most telling was what the judge said.
Lee Paige sued his employer, the Drug Enforcement Administration, after video of the 2004 accident in Florida appeared in the news and went viral on the Internet. The video shows Paige shooting himself in the leg just as he displays his firearm and tells a gathering of about 50 youth and their parents, “I’m the only one in this room professional enough, that I know of, to carry this Glock 40.”
You see how that works? It's not that the DEA needs to train its people better, or that arrogant cowboy-type gun owners need to be disarmed, it's that they need to hide their negligence better. The judge gave voice to the normally unspoken agreement among gun-rights folks to conceal their dangerous and reckless behavior lest it interfere with the agenda.
“The widespread circulation of the accidental discharge video demonstrates the need for every federal agency to safeguard video records with extreme diligence in this Internet age of iPhones and YouTube with their instantaneous and universal reach,” the judges wrote.
The agenda, of course, is to minimize restrictions as much as possible, which in turn allows for more incidents like this. The judge and Lee Paige himself called it an "accident," you know one of those things that can happen to anybody. He actually said that.
The truth is "accidents" like this don't HAPPEN to people. PEOPLE do negligent things with guns.
Isn't it funny how the pro-gun guys will so often accuse us of personifying the gun, they accuse us of forgetting it's an inanimate object, but then they excuse their own negligence by calling it an accident.
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