Man shoots himself in the head during NRA 500 at Texas

[Redfairen]

A medical examiner says a man who died in the infield during the NRA 500 at Texas Motor Speedway shot himself in the head.

The Tarrant County (Texas) medical examiner's office on Sunday said the death of 42-year-old Kirk Franklin of Saginaw, Texas, was a suicide.

Fort Worth police have said a man who was camping in the infield died of a "self-inflicted injury" after getting into an argument with other campers. The incident happened late in the Sprint Cup race.

Police spokeswoman Cpl. Tracey Knight has said alcohol may have been a factor. Knight said several people witnessed the incident, but nobody was in danger.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nascar/2013/04/14/fan-death-investigation-texas-motor-speedway/2081395/

[onehandle]

1. A gun's primary purpose achieved. nt

[Newest Reality]

2. Sadly,

that made a powerful metaphorical statement concerning the gun control debate and the NRA.

[truebrit71]

3. Actually i think it makes more of a statement about texass and fucktards with guns..

..i thought this was from The Onion at first...

[Newest Reality]

4. Well, some of us here are fine about guns in themselves.

Remember that there are two poles in the usual, divisive and polarizing approach to the current emotional rhetoric being deployed. There is very little room for anything like the "excluded middle" that should tell us something important, in fact.

On one hand, there is playing the Devil's advocate. If you were a person who found guns to be a tool for sport, a means of self-defense, or an incentive against tyranny, then you might hold strong views on one side of the debate. I, for instance, was a city liberal who moved to the country and, being as flexible and adaptable as I could, went from a place where, when guns went off, somebody was being killed, to a place where, when I thought about it, a gun was useful if you had a skunk in the yard with distemper and you needed to put it out of its misery. You also realized that, worse comes to worse, if your family was in danger, the cops could take a long time to get there. So, not being paranoid or an extremist, I changed my views on gun ownership, though I did not become an aficionado or advocate per se.

On the other hand, you have people who feel that gun control would pose some sort of significant deterrent to violent crimes, deaths, and the costs and impact of gun use as a weapon. In one way, that is an important discussion we should have as a culture, especially if it is a reasonable debate about weapons, (and I mean across-the-board) in general and their impact on our people and in other countries. We don't need emotional reactions to realize that something is wrong in both our domestic interactions and the health of our culture, as well as our impact, in a military sense, on other countries and their children and people in general. Weapons and guns are an issue we need to contend with in a very broad sense.

What matters most to me is that we avoid the context and fixate on particulars. We have violent acts by individuals, but are told to avoid considering how are society, at large, is involved in and creates the circumstances that foment these problems. That's telling. That's where we should really want to go now.

How different are our domestic gun violence problems from our military deployment and use of weapons in the rest of the world? How naive about these things are we supposed to be while we grapple with horrific incidents that are, no matter how isolated, a product of who we are right now? We do have many double standards and perhaps that is the place to look when it comes to our predicament with weapons and violence.