Thursday, January 19, 2012

DEA Agent Lee Paige Loses Appeal



The Washington Post reports on the appeals case ruling about this famous video.

A federal agent who accidentally shot himself while lecturing children on gun safety lost his appeal Tuesday in a lawsuit over release of the video that subjected him to ridicule on the Internet and late-night talk shows.

Lee Paige sued his employer, the Drug Enforcement Administration, after video of the 2004 accident in Florida appeared in the news and went viral on the Internet. The video shows Paige shooting himself in the leg just as he displays his firearm and tells a gathering of about 50 youth and their parents, “I’m the only one in this room professional enough, that I know of, to carry this Glock 40.”
It certainly is an embarrassing video, there's no denying that. But most telling was what the judge said.

“The widespread circulation of the accidental discharge video demonstrates the need for every federal agency to safeguard video records with extreme diligence in this Internet age of iPhones and YouTube with their instantaneous and universal reach,” the judges wrote.
You see how that works? It's not that the DEA needs to train its people better, or that arrogant cowboy-type gun owners need to be disarmed, it's that they need to hide their negligence better. The judge gave voice to the normally unspoken agreement among gun-rights folks to conceal their dangerous and reckless behavior lest it interfere with the agenda.

The agenda, of course, is to minimize restrictions as much as possible, which in turn allows for more incidents like this.  The judge and Lee Paige himself called it an "accident," you know one of those things that can happen to anybody.  He actually said that.

The truth is "accidents" like this don't HAPPEN to people. PEOPLE do negligent things with guns.

Isn't it funny how the pro-gun guys will so often accuse us of personifying the gun, they accuse us of forgetting it's an inanimate object, but then they excuse their own negligence by calling it an accident.

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

5 comments:

  1. " The judge gave voice to the normally unspoken agreement among gun-rights folks to conceal their dangerous and reckless behavior lest it interfere with the agenda."

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!!!!!

    Who do you think exposed and circulated this video? This is not new. This has been on every gun blog and gun friendly website for half a dozen years. In fact his comment "I'm the only one professional enough to..." has led to a whole collection of news articles showing police officers making similar mistakes and committing crimes called "The Only Ones".
    No, this judge's order wasn't a great conspiracy about keeping such videos away from the anti's. You guys were late to the party on this one.

    The fact that the judge would make the statement that they need to be more careful with releasing their videos should be scary to everyone.

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  2. This man has been the subject of ridicule in discussions done by gun rights people all over the place. We see him as an example of an agent of the government who believes himself to be qualified, while seeing the rest of us as having no business owning or carrying a gun. It's the attitude that only an approved list of people get firearms that we oppose. This man is an illustration of what's wrong with that thinking.

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  3. "We see him as an example of an agent of the government who believes himself to be qualified, while seeing the rest of us as having no business owning or carrying a gun."

    Greg Camp, conflating, as usual, two different groups and ascribing, falsely, Mikeb302000's being a fan of the DEA. One does not have to love the gummint to want to see OTHER idiotz wit teh gunz having those gunz removed from their custody.

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  4. Democommie,

    I don't care what Mikeb's opinion is regarding the DEA. I said that this particular agent is an example of an attitude that we don't like. It would come as no surprise if you or other authors here hold that attitude.

    But on the other point that you tried to make, who is going to take away those guns from their owners, if not the government? So one may not love the government, but must be willing to get into bed with it from time to time?

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  5. FWM, Nobody's late to the party. I posted this video myself before. The thing that caught my attention is the stupid statement by the judge who denied his appeal, which to me revealed how deep the problem goes.

    Law enforcement and civilian gun owners suffer from inadequate training and in many cases arrogance. But the judge warned about covering that up by better control of the cell phone cameras. That's pathetic.

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