SHOOTER = MENTALLY ILL DRIVER In This Week’s Newspaper

We’re in the news business and can appreciate a copy mistake now and then. It’s a part of the process that things sometimes get overlooked. But to be this careless –or brainwashed– is pretty absurd.

The image above was taken by a reader and shows us the cover of the Traverse City Record – Eagle that hit shelves October 25th … and they made a doosie.

As you can clearly see, the editor somehow used the word SHOOTER instead of MENTALLY ILL DRIVER. Minor error.

They have since cleared the record, but not before thousands went out the door.

If you read the story, you’ll know of the horrible incident that happened over the weekend were a young drunk woman drove her vehicle into a homecoming parade and killed 4 people. Another 47 were injured.

But wait… there’s more.

Coleman said he believes she may have a mental health issue. When he met with Chambers, he said, she gave “inappropriate answers” to his questions. He also said she had a “flat affect” when reacting to his description of the car crashing into the parade.

“Her answers to my questions were inconsistent, but more importantly the look in her face. There is a very blank, almost lifeless look in her face,” Coleman told reporters.

Upon booking, Chambers said she had a history of suicide attempts. She told staff she was suicidal at the time of the incident, but not at the time of booking, according to the probable cause affidavit.

The document also said Chambers had been treated for “mental health related issues” in the past, a fact her lawyer confirmed. Coleman said mental illness runs in his client’s family.

He told reporters Sunday that “there have been warning signs coming from Ms. Chambers for quite some time, for the past few years.”

If this information proves to be true, it’ll be interesting to watch all of the gun control groups latch onto this story to start advocating for background checks before granting a drivers license and before allowing people to purchase a vehicle. They want to protect life, right? We can’t have mentally ill people driving vehicles, because they may use them as torpedoes.

Steve, who lives just outside Chicago and is an avid reader of Concealed Nation, sent us the following message about this horrible tragedy… and it goes along with what we’re trying to say here:

I don’t want to make light of the terrible loss of life at the OSU homecoming. However I find 2 analogies to Concealed Carry that I thought CN might want to address:

1) Now that a drunk driver has killed 4 people and injured many others, will there be a movement to make purchasing an automobile in Oklahoma more complex?

2) Will OSU now become a “car free zone” to prevent further tragedies?

I have often felt that there were many similarities between deaths caused by drunk drivers and firearm related deaths perpetrated by criminals, mentally unstable people, and irresponsible firearm owners.

Yet, we treat them so differently!

Here’s the takeaway from this. I believe that this headline mishap was an honest mistake, because I truly believe that the general public is conditioned to see GUN when they see a headline that tells us multiple people have died. The editor’s subconscious mind likely said… as the keyboard was being manipulated, “Ok it’s a story about 4 dead and XX injured, and a gunman is responsible.”

But here’s the honest truth: It’s people who are to blame for these deaths, and it’s nothing more or less. Whether it happens with a car or a gun, a baseball bat or a knife, it’s the unstable person behind the tool that is to blame.