In Other News, Larry Craig: Still Not Gay

Racist Star, as always, no links to ephemera:

Prison teacher says he forgot about gun

By MAX SHOWALTER
Posted: February 26, 2009

Authorities in northern Indiana said a gun was confiscated Tuesday from a West Lafayette man who teaches classes at the Westville Correctional Facility.

No charges have been filed, but an investigation is continuing into the actions of Jeffrey Grupp, who serves as a limited term lecturer at the Purdue University North Central campus in Westville and teaches classes at the prison.

Grupp was stopped from entering the prison shortly after noon Tuesday when an X-ray screening of a milk crate of books he brought with him showed a gun in a hollowed-out book.

"I'm a gun owner. It's one of my two big hobbies in life. I have a permit and I carry (the gun) with me all the time," said Grupp, who explained that he had been running a number of errands Tuesday morning and made an expensive car repair payment before heading to the prison for the class.

"I was very stressed out. I have to keep the gun concealed. What I do is keep it inside a book.

"I usually remember to separate it and I forgot. I came home and ran inside, got my lunch, got some of my books and forgot it was in there. They questioned me for about four hours. The gun was bought legally. I have no criminal record."

O-KEE, so one could argue, if one were feeling charitable, that he would have known the books would be x-rayed. And the syntactically beneficent may attribute his confabulating like a five-year-old caught exposing himself at Recess to that "stressed out" business.

Me? I own two guns, as it happens, though it's not a big hobby, nor a hobby of any size; I can't discourse on ammo, I've never shot at anything but a target, bullseye- not man-shaped, and I don't own or carry either of them for "protection", not even when braving the highwaymen-infested by-roads of Indiana's glacier-flattened Badlands. And if I did they wouldn't be hidden in a hollowed-out Volume 12 (Paricutin to Quicksand) of The Golden Book Encyclopedia ("My wallet and car keys? Sure, just gimme a sec to look something up.").

Haven't touched either one of 'em since the last time I cleaned 'em, which was probably too long ago.

But, y'know what? I fucking know where they are.

Look, after forty years of the NRA telling us we "have enough gun laws on the books", and after the "Supreme" Court has ruled that there never was any controversy over the Second Amendment, can't we at least find a way to make "Armed While Stupid" something more than just an invitation to appear on a reality program?