Loser Control

A pathetic excuse for a human being named Kimbeer Vill shot 20 people at Dawson College in Montreal, Canada yesterday. One of those people later died as a result of her wounds, and six other remain in critical condition, two of them are barely clinging to life. I pray that the injured pull through and are able to get on with their lives with a minimum of physical pain and psychological trauma.

As for Gill, I hope he doesn't mind the smell of roasting meat in a fire that burns, but does not consume. I guess I'm not that compassionate a conservative.

Gill seems cut from the same cloth as his apparent idols, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the psychopathic killers of Columbine that were also into the gothic vampire loser fantasy world of real and imagined death that some people retreat into when they can't cope with reality.

Predictably, the debate about gun control is heating up in Canada, and I'm certain calls will ripple down across our northern border as well.

But this isn't an issue of gun control. This is an issue of loser control.

This is Kimbeer Vill. He is a caricature in many ways, the stereotypical Goth-loving, vampire wannabe with no friends and an anti-social attitude. He is, was, quite simply a loser, and he shot 20 people to prove just how much of a loser he could be.

The gun he carries in the photo above is the Beretta CX4 Storm. Ironically, the CX4 and similar designs were developed largely with the law enforcement community in mind, being developed as longer-ranged companions to police sidearms that still used the officer's pistol ammunition and magazines.

While I cannot claim to have a knowledge of Canadian firearms laws and will leave the details to those more familiar with their provisions, I do know that in the United States, gun dealers do have available to them a certain amount of "loser control" built into firearms laws. I know this firsthand, because one of the many hats I wear is as a part-time gun dealer working behind the gun counter of a sporting goods store.

Even if a potential firearms purchaser has all the appropriate documentation and is cleared by the BATF background check, I still have the right as the seller to deny a suspect purchaser a sale for any reason, or no reason at all.

Most reasons are concrete, but a lot of it is intuition and nuance that boil down to the fact that the dealer doesn't like the way a customer looks or acts or answers a question. It is de facto loser control, a latitude given to dealers to use their experience and judgement to weed out potentially dangerous people who we feel should not be armed.

There is or course no way to know if Kimbeer Vill displayed the kind of behavior that might have caused a dealer to have second thoughts, but as Vill had a penchant from dressing "Goth," in going for the vampire look, and according to what his blog reveals, for reveling in thoughts of death and dying, he seems like he would have been easy enough to red flag. Another dealer I know recently turned down a perspective purchaser based upon very similar reasons.

Gun control as policy very rarely if ever works, but loser control can be surprisingly effective.

It's too bad it was not more effective here.