I just watched an episode of “The Mentalist” which featured yet another deranged gun owner willing to commit mass murder to satisfy his dark inner demons that led him to obtain guns in the first place.<\/p>\n
It featured all the usual cliches.\u00a0 There was the scene at the firing range out in the boonies somewhere, where lots of crazy people were all lined up shooting TVs, bottles, old computers, various other defunct appliances, watermelons, and so on, using shotguns, rifles and handguns, and even one belt fed machine gun (which led all the other folks at the informal range to cheer and applaud).<\/p>\n
Here’s the thing:\u00a0 I’ve been at many different firing ranges, both regulated (with a range master) and unregulated (with no range master, and everyone simply applying common sense).\u00a0 I have pretty much never seen a bunch of people all side by side firing such a mixed array of firearms at such a mixed array of targets.\u00a0 Nearly everyone shoots rifles and handguns at paper targets in firing ranges, even unregulated ones.\u00a0 That’s because they want to know how accurately they are shooting, and you really can’t tell any other way.\u00a0 Generally, there is a section for handguns, a section for rifles, and a section for shotguns.\u00a0 This is because handgunners are shooting at different ranges than rifle shooters, and because shotgunners are often shooting at clay targets.\u00a0 People practicing with self-defense shotguns are usually using paper targets as well, typically at handgun ranges.<\/p>\n
I have never seen a machine gun at an unregulated range.\u00a0 I have seen them ONLY at special shows where people line up to pay for a short period of shooting time under highly supervised conditions.\u00a0 If someone opened up with a machine gun in any other situation, especially without warning, the rest of the shooters would not applaud.\u00a0 Some might call the cops.\u00a0 Nearly all would be likely to back off, pack up, and leave.\u00a0 No one wants to be associated with a nut-case, or be around one…\u00a0 and only a nut case would do that, even if he owned one legally.\u00a0 (For the record, machine guns are so highly regulated that legal owners of them are just about the most trustworthy people you’ll ever meet, and the LEAST likely to do such a thing.)\u00a0 So that means someone who did such a thing would be highly suspect in the eyes of the shooting community.<\/p>\n
Finally, the bad guy in this story had a concealed carry weapons permit in California, apparently in the Bay Area, if I understand how the show is based.\u00a0 This is truly unlikely.\u00a0 The Bay Area is just about the hardest spot in a difficult state to get such a permit.\u00a0 They go to famous movie stars, millionaires, former police chiefs, and so on….\u00a0 only people with pull in the system.\u00a0 Normal people can’t get them (we can talk about the unconstitutionality of such discrimination later).\u00a0 Certainly, out of work people down on their financial luck (the case in the story) are not going to have one.<\/p>\n
The incidence of criminal behavior on the part of concealed carry weapons permit holders in ANY state is very, very low, and it’s even lower in California, where it is so difficult to get such a permit in most places.<\/p>\n
So, let’s just say that this episode of The Mentalist was written by someone who is mentally challenged….\u00a0 and obviously knows nothing about guns and gun owners…..\u00a0 and who has an axe to grind.<\/p>\n
How do I know the script writer knows nothing about guns, as well as being ignorant about gun owners?\u00a0\u00a0 As a ploy, the police are supposed to have snuck into the bad guy’s house and replaced all his ammo with blanks.\u00a0 Furthermore, these had to be blanks that would cause a fully automatic weapon to operate properly, so they could catch him in the act of trying to mow people down with a weapon filled with blanks, and then arrest him.<\/p>\n
Since they didn’t know WHICH of his weapons he’d be using, they would have to have replaced ALL his ammo for ALL his weapons with blanks.\u00a0 Outside of the unlikelihood that he wouldn’t notice the replaced ammo, and the impossibility of being certain they’d FOUND all his ammo to replace it, self-loading semi-automatic and automatic weapons mostly won’t operate with blanks.\u00a0 But this guy is shown emptying an entire magazine of them with narry a malfunction.\u00a0 This gives thin plot devices a whole new meaning.<\/p>\n
Does anybody think the California Bureau of Investigation has thousands of rounds of blanks in all calibers just sitting around in case they need to fool some criminal gun owner?\u00a0 Linked up in belt-fed form for machine guns?\u00a0 Since, in the story, they couldn’t have known which weapon he would use, they would have to have planned for that one, too.\u00a0\u00a0 I can just see some flatfoot sitting at a desk laboriously building chains of linked blanks.\u00a0 Maybe he’d get done in a week or two.<\/p>\n
I’m still laughing.\u00a0 Hollywood is indeed fantasy land, filled with dupes and dufuses.\u00a0 What morons.<\/p>\n