This is one way in which a large portion of America is culturally distinct from Britain in a way which many people do not appreciate white people being capable of being culturally distinct. In much of America, use and possession of firearms is a strong cultural marker, like ear piercing or playing football or driving cars. Perhaps it is not obvious at the BBC, where this looks like "Crikey, that's the only way to make guns MORE dangerous," but for people who are in that culture, it reads more like "Blind man triumphs over adversity to claim his rightful place in the civic life of his community."
To be fair, use and possession of firearms in Britain is also a very strong marker of a distinct rural culture. To some extent this relates to class politics as well because the upper class has traditionally been rural and derived power and wealth from agriculture, it still sees itself that way even if that's not where many people make money any more.
See also the debate over fox-hunting which was seen as both a culture war between urban and rural as well as between the urban upper-middle class and the rural upper class.
One of the reasons for the different class associations of hunting between the UK and the US has to do with land availability. There is and always has been loads of sparsely populated land in the US (publicly or otherwise owned) on which it is possible to hunt inexpensively or for free. That is not true in the UK and many upper-class landowners have historically rented out their land to farmers but retained the hunting, fishing, and shooting rights for themselves.
How's it insane? I think it's a pretty cool triumph of will over adversity. And it takes away every excuse I have for my poor shooting if a blind man can be a good wing shot.
But while the test was meant to measure a skill, he beat the test without having the skill. He used the sound of the targets on the range to aim which, while impressive, is also completely unavailable in situations for which concealed carry permits are intended. Range marksmanship can translate to real-world scenarios for sighted shooters, but it doesn't seem like it would for blind shooters.
I can understand how my statement would git a raw nerve, but i cant imagine giving a ranged weapon to a person who cannot see at range, makes any sense.
Yes the target ahooting part was interesting, but people who intend to do bad do not wear coloured circles.
The thing that makes guns dangerous is the willingness to use them to kill other people. In that regard, being blind or not shouldn't make any difference at all to whether or not someone should be allowed to carry one. If a sighted person can be trusted to carry one then so can a blind person. The idea of carrying a gun is that you should never need to use it, so the skills required to use it safely are rendered moot.
(I'm not entirely sure even I agree with the point I'm making here, but it's fun to think about both sides of an argument.)
(the number of firearm accidents is comparatively small; slightly above 500 deaths.)
for comparison:
Motor vehicle traffic deaths: Number of deaths: 33,783
Note, my position on gun control also isn't entirely decided. But I do think that these statistics support my view that the right to die on your own terms is, in a very real way, a major part of why people want to own a gun, and this is not a part of the public debate, while the number of suicides is included in 'gun deaths' in the public debate. I think that is an inconsistency in how most people look at and talk about the issue.
"The thing that makes guns dangerous is the willingness to use them to kill other people. In that regard, being blind or not shouldn't make any difference at all to whether or not someone should be allowed to carry one."
That is just one factor. Another is possession of the ability and skill to use the weapon appropriately. This is why, for example, young children cannot carry weapons in public. And in that respect its very hard to make a case for blind people being able to carry lethal weapons in public places, or indeed on private property. If they can't see what they are shooting at then their use of the weapon would be inappropriate because they can't use it safely.
"The idea of carrying a gun is that you should never need to use it, so the skills required to use it safely are rendered moot."
You're using an obviously incorrect premise to justify a conclusion that is therefore flawed. The practical justifications for concealed carrying of firearms in the US are [1] personal protection and crime prevention. Both require a willingness on the part of the carrier to use the weapon, even if they hope that they never have to do so.
[1] I live in a country where carrying weapons is (thankfully) highly illegal, so its kind of hard for me to understand the idea of "concealed carry". I hope I haven't significantly misunderstood. Also, I do appreciate that there is a constitutional justification in the US for possessing a weapon, that exists irrespective of the practical ones that I have listed.
You've not misunderstood anything, with the quibble that "young children cannot carry weapons in public" unsupervised. A responsible adult is of course required in the situations where that makes sense (hunting and target shooting).
One thing this BBC article clearly is confounding, based on the first anecdote, is the difference between being legally blind and what I'll call 100% blind. Hitting a half size target at 7 yards, equivalent to a real human at 14 yards or 13 meters, means he's not "100% blind". There are quite a few people who in the same test would have trouble keeping all their shots in the black.
Now, assuming he doesn't have a near vision problem, and that the average distance between combatants in a gun fight is 7 and a half feet (2.3 meters), it's plausible he could be a responsible and safe concealed carrier. He at least convinced the skeptics who in due course issued him the license.
Your points about being able to use a gun you're carrying are of course correct. If you're not willing to use it, you shouldn't own it, let alone carry it, guns are not magical talismans, no matter how much they're portrayed as being more than inanimate hunks of metal, plastic and/or wood.
Actually, it sounds like complete sanity to me - if these people can meet the objective criteria for carrying weapons then why not let them do it?
[NB I'm not in the US and I'm rather glad my country does not have the cultural interest in guns that the US has - I have little interest in them personally.]
