Open Carry advocate kills husband and stepdaughter. Then drives herself to a mental hospital.

Veronica Dunnachie supporting Open Carry in Tarrant County

Courtesy of The Dallas Morning News:

An Arlington woman faces a charge of capital murder Wednesday after two people were discovered dead in her home, police said. 

Officials said they were treating the slayings as a domestic homicide. Veronica Dunnachie, 35, is being held in the Arlington City Jail, said Sgt. Jeffrey Houston, a police spokesman. Bail had not yet been set. 

The victims had not been identified and the cause of death had not been released.

Since this article the bodies were identified as her estranged husband Russ Dunnachie and his adult daughter.

After the slayings the suspect drove herself to Millwood Hospital, a mental health facility, where she was taken into custody. She was uninjured.

Separations, divorces,  child custody battles, happen everyday in this country. Usually there are harsh words, recriminations, and lawyer fees.

But when you see the world as a dangerous place, and carry a gun on your person for protection, a verbal confrontation can escalate into something far more dangerous than simply hurtful words.

Despite what the NRA might want all of us to believe, in this case at least the presence of a gun is directly responsible for the taking of life, not the protection of life.

The equation is simple; no gun = no death.

The ugly argument over Open Carry has become significantly uglier.

Courtesy of Salon:  

Moms Demand Action, a group formed after the Sandy Hook shooting to crack down on gun violence, began pressuring the Kroger supermarket chain to prohibit “open carry” in its stores after gun extremists used Kroger stores to demonstrate their “rights.” Gun laws are lax in many states, and it can be legal to openly carry a firearm with no training, and, in some cases, no background checks. The Kroger campaign is the most recent in a string of corporate responsibility efforts in which mothers, flanked by other gun violence prevention advocates, have asked companies to tighten gun policies, arguing that the businesses have an obligation to keep their customers safe. 

Of course, gun extremists did not respond kindly to the Kroger campaign. What follows is a recounting of their disturbing tactics, from the shocking intimidation and harassment of unsuspecting commenters on Kroger’s Facebook page to right-wing media propaganda that disingenuously portrayed Kroger as being allies of the gun extremists. 

Secret Facebook groups such as “People Who Were Blocked by Moms Demand Action Demand Action Now” — which has well over a thousand members — disseminated gun rights propaganda and helped orchestrate attacks on individuals commenting on Kroger’s page. Some gun nuts combed the profile pages of people commenting in support of gun reform, harvested personal photos of them and Photoshopped them to include obscene or humiliating comments, before reposting the photos on Kroger’s page, or on other social media sites. Because Kroger frequently bans users who post that kind of content, the gun extremists created disposable fake accounts — sometimes using the name and profile photo of an opponent— to quickly dump posts without being held accountable. 

In one case, they found a photo of a woman’s preschool-age child and wrote on it, “My mom sucks more cock than Richard Simmons” and circulated it online. In another case, they grabbed a photo of a mother and her child and wrote “Big retard, little retard” on it before reposting it. One woman posted to Kroger a photograph of a receipt showing money she spent elsewhere, and gun extremists swarmed her post, with hundreds of responses, including comments like “what you could do is shut your god damned whore mouth,” “calm your tits,” and “fuck her right in the pussy,” which Kroger’s Facebook admin allowed to stand over a day later.

The article goes on to say that the approach of these extremists seems to be to attack protesters en masse and intimidate them into walking away from the debate. And that is some cases that is working.

There really is no way to have a reasonable disagreement with people like this, and since they literally view gun rights as something bestowed upon them by their creator they see all attempts to apply oversight to gun sales as an attack on their deeply held faith.

I think the first thing that anybody who wants to work toward creating responsible gun policies in this country needs to do is to develop a thick skin, and to recognize that the more hate and vitriol they attract the better they are doing their jobs.

Besides if we even prevent one more unnecessary death, isn't that worth being called a few ugly names on Facebook?

Possibly the best description of the Open Carry advocates that I have ever read.

Eric Liu founder of Citizen University and a former speechwriter for President Clinton, has written a rather compelling article on CNN concerning the 2nd Amendment, school shootings, and Open Carry advocates.

Here are some of the highlights: 

A child was killed Friday because that child went to school. 

The shooting Friday at a high school in Marysville, Washington -- just miles from my home in Seattle -- is a tragedy on two levels. First, most profoundly, two people are dead, four others wounded, and the parents, relatives, friends, teachers and classmates of the shooter and his victims have had their lives grievously changed. 

But this is not the first school shooting in America this year. It is the 50th. It is the 87th since Sandy Hook, according to data compiled by the gun reform group Everytown For Safety. The other tragedy, then, is that gun violence -- in schools, in workplaces and across our communities -- has become virtually normal in America. 

It should not be. It cannot be. It is not normal, in a civilized nation, to have over 30,000 gun deaths a year. It is not normal, in a civilized nation, to expect educators and parents and first responders to have plans at the ready for a shooting at their school. It is not normal, in a civilized nation, to assert that the best solution to gun violence is for more people to have more access to more guns.

Liu goes on to discuss the epidemic of gun violence in this country and how simple laws such as mandatory background checks could have a significant impact on the number of people killed each year and that a growing number of Americans are starting to see that.

However it was his description of the Open Carry advocates that really caught my eye:  

When middle-aged "open-carry" activists walk into Kroger with semi-automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, they aren't exercising their rights with an ethic of responsibility. They're trying to intimidate their way to respect and esteem. They're acting out, demanding attention and rejecting curbs on their desires. That's not being a citizen. It's being a toddler. 

We the people get to decide whether that's normal. Whether it's acceptable or laughable to brandish firearms in the produce aisle. Whether it's tolerable or disgraceful that we average more than one school shooting a week now. Laws like background checks can help set a tone for what's OK. But ultimately, with our family and friends and neighbors, each one of us must decide what kind of civilization we expect in the United States.

In my opinion that is not only well written but it is also spot on in identifying the fact that Americans now accept as normal behaviors, and policies, that are in fact teetering on the edge of lunacy.

The idea that we should all be armed, and that the solution to dangerous people having guns is to make sure that supposedly non-dangerous people have guns as well, is madness.

And yet thanks to the NRA and Ammosexuals that has now become a normal, and widely accepted, way to view life in America.

This has to stop, and it has to stop now.