In an ideal world, everyone who handles a firearm is a responsible person who handles it correctly. They secure them when not in use, maintain control of them when they are, and there's never anything to be worried about.
But a situation in Minnesota highlights the fact that the standards we might hold ourselves and our fellow lawful gun owners to aren't similar to what criminals hold themselves to.
They'll dump a gun in a heartbeat, and this (alleged) Minnesota crook did just that.
Walter Deangelo Green, 26, of Minneapolis, faces charges of second-degree drug possession with a firearm and felon in possession in Ramsey County. He was previously convicted of a third-degree controlled substance offense in 2023, making him ineligible to possess firearms or ammunition.
...
Green was in the driver's seat with another man. As officers moved squad cars into position with emergency lights activated, both men fled on foot.
Officers chased Green west on Arlington Avenue and watched him throw a firearm into the air, the court documents say. The gun landed in the grass on the south side of the street. Officers recovered the Glock 27 .40-caliber handgun with a round in the chamber and a loaded magazine. The other man was caught and taken into custody on his own outstanding warrants.
He took a loaded firearm and just flung it, all so the police would hopefully not find a firearm on his person. He just did it when the cops could see him do it, so they recovered the gun.
This time.
Criminals toss weapons all the time. They don't want to get caught with guns. Drugs? Yeah, they don't seem to mind, but guns? No, they get rid of those.
And when the police don't recover them, what happens? Sometimes, they just sit there and rot, but other times, they're found by someone in the community. If it's an adult, all is probably fine and good. They call the police, the gun is taken, and if too much time hasn't passed, they may connect it with their bad guy. If not, well, they still take it and try to see if it is a gun they're looking for.
When kids find it, though, that's different.
I'd love to believe that most kids know better than to pick up a gun found in the bushes or in an alley, but as a one-time kid and a current parent, I know better than to just assume that to be the case. I don't know that I'd have told my father, the cop, if I found a gun laying around somewhere. I know some of the people I hung around with wouldn't have thought about it, and this is the South at a time when most people still grew up shooting.
In other regions of the country, it's entirely possible that a kid who only knows about guns from TV and movies will pick it up and start playing around with it. They don't know anything except what Hollywood has fed them, and so they figure that since they're the heroes of their own stories, they'll be fine.
We need gun safety education in classrooms not because we're trying to indoctrinate kids one way or the other on guns and gun rights--a civics class should do that all on its own, if we're being honest, which is probably why they're so rare these days--but because kids need to know how to be safe in a world that isn't as safe as we'd like it to be.
Green is accused of tossing a loaded gun. He was a felon in possession of a firearm and was wanted on a machine gun possession charge. He's not just proof that gun control fails, but proof that criminals don't care about other people. It's all about them, and that's why they'll toss guns where kids might find them. If a kid gets killed, it's not the criminal's responsibility. No, in their mind, the fault always lies with someone else.
Always.
Let's do more to keep our children safe.
