(Illustration found here).

This country is in a shotgun-wedding to strange disaster.
From Reuters: A victim of last week’s Arizona shooting rampage was arrested on Saturday and ordered to undergo a mental evaluation after threatening a Tea Party leader during the taping of a television show, police said…Fuller stood, turned and snapped a picture of Humphries, said Pima County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Jason Ogan.
“Then he yelled at him and said, ‘You’re dead,'” Ogan said.

And the New York Times blog: Mr. Humphries left the taping first, Mr. Waldman said. Mr. Fuller was escorted out through a side door as he yelled to the audience, “What’s the matter with you — whores!”

This mental-lapsed episode came Saturday night during the taping of  an ABC News special: Several victims, medical personnel and others who were involved in last Saturday’s Safeway shooting were gathered for a forum at St. Odilia Catholic Church in Tucson — J. Eric Fuller, 63, was shot in the left knee and back in the incident, which left six dead and 13 wounded.
Fuller was addressing Trent Humphries at the forum — Humphries is a co-founder of the Tucson Tea Party — and the same clown who whined like a turd last week claiming Gabby Giffords is to blame for getting herself shot in the head: “It’s political gamesmanship. The real case is that she [Giffords] had no security whatsoever at this event. So if she lived under a constant fear of being targeted, if she lived under this constant fear of this rhetoric and hatred that was seething, why would she attend an event in full view of the public with no security whatsoever?” he said.
Giffords in the summer of 2009 hosted a “town hall” meeting in Douglas, Ariz.,, to discuss the Democrats’ health care reform proposal and amid shouting, screaming, and chanting ignorant Teabaggers a gun-nut’s pistol fell out of its holster; the weapon was found on the floor after the event.
Police were notified, but no charges were filed as the gun nut was legal (Arizona, remember).
And in a horrific example of irony, Humphries accused Giffords of lying about the gun, then said this: “Nobody is threatening Gabby,” he says. “But she does need to get in front of her constituents and answer to her constituents.”
But she needs to beef-up that security to get in front of her constituents, I guess, or get shot in the head.

Anyway, at the forum Saturday night, Fuller went ballistic after Humphries stood and suggested that discussion about gun legislation be postponed until after the funerals — for some dumb-ass reason, the subject of gun control had been brought up at the event with a few people making comment, especially on a bill pending in the Arizona legislature that would allow faculty members on college campuses with concealed weapons permits to carry guns.
In an interview with the New York Times last week, Fuller jumped on the Tea Party:

He said that he had had trouble sleeping after he was wounded and that he calmed himself the first night by writing down the Declaration of Independence, which he had memorized three decades earlier.
In the first days after the attack, his anger seemed especially strong.
In the interview, he repeatedly denounced the “Tea Party crime syndicate,” and said he placed some of the blame for the shooting on Sarah Palin and other Republican leaders, saying he believed they had contributed to a toxic atmosphere.
…
Speaking of Jared L. Loughner, who is accused of being the gunman, he said, “Saying anything about him would be a waste of breath. Recognizing his existence is a waste. I don’t like his face.”

Later in the week, Fuller reportedly visited the Loughner home to apologize to the parents for calling their son names, according to reporters at the scene, although he didn’t get to see them.
Fuller obviously has some problems and was involuntarily committed for a 72-hour mental health evaluation after the incident — an Arizona mental health services officer said: “I hope that he’ll get the help that he needs to get through this very difficult time.”
And it could get more difficult as Arizona budget cuts have scaled back mental-health care — Giffords’ own Pima County has seen more than 45 percent of its mental health services recipients forced off the public rolls.
What a mess.

And guns and guns and more guns — the argument that ‘guns don’t kill, people do‘ is twisted bullshit.
Take a Glock, place it in a desk drawer. The thing will stay there, never leaving, never getting up and going to Safeway to shoot someone.
The gun will remain there in that drawer until some peoples take it out.
And use it for whatever purpose.
In an interesting NYT piece on the sales-surge history of the Glock this telling graph: Glock has also benefited from changes in the American gun market. As the number of hunters has declined, so have sales of guns traditionally used for hunting. Sales of military-style rifles have increased and so have sales of handguns, in part, some gun experts say, because more states have passed concealed-weapons laws. The Glock 33, for instance, is a subcompact pistol marketed as a “pocket rocket.”
No wonder Fuller flipped.

And how strange the Glock company.
And how Glock himself is a tough sonofabitch.
Via the Times article, a a 2003 Forbes magazine article on the inventor Glock begins thusly:

He is the man behind the gun.
You don’t mess with Gaston Glock. His most trusted associate tried.
Lured into a dimly lit garage in Luxembourg by his colleague Charles Ewert, the Austrian Glock stopped to look at a sports car at Ewert’s suggestion.
Suddenly, a massive masked man leaped from behind and smashed a rubber mallet into Glock’s skull.
Ewert fled to the stairwell. “I am a coward,” he later told.
With Glock off balance, the attacker landed another crushing blow.
“I was fighting for my life,” recalls Glock, 73, during a rare interview with the press.

Springing up on legs toned by miles of daily swimming, Glock thrust his enormous fist into his assailant’s eye socket.
As the would-be assassin staggered, Glock pounded again, knocking out a few of the man’s teeth.
The bloodied attacker staggered, then collapsed on top of Glock “with his arms outstretched like Jesus,” according to John Paul Frising, Luxembourg’s deputy attorney general, who brought attempted murder charges against the attacker, the French-born Jacques (Spartacus) Pêcheur, 67.
This was how the police found the two men at 9:30 a.m. on July 27, 1999.

Ewert the assistant and Spartacus the assailant were both later found guilty of attempted murder.