Today’s Moron is a hunter from British Columbia’s Quadra Island who shot a sick child’s puppy.
This doesn’t sound like a hunting accident. It appears to have been a monumental act of stupidity and nastiness.
Quadra Island is a scenic, rural place where people tend to know each other pretty well. The tragedy happened when a guy named Nick R. and his sons were outside, as was the Jack Russell puppy, named Seymour, which had been given to son Max to mark the end of three years of cancer treatments.
Seymour bounced out onto the road to greet two hunters walking by, and got a bullet in the head.
A guy named Cody W. has been arrested and charged with shooting the pup (careless use of a firearm and endangering an anima)l. He says it was an accident, which to me sounds like he’s admitting a role, but he hasn’t been convicted, and I will just leave it at that.
So let’s consider Cody’s excuse. There are really only two ways a person with a hunting rifle can accidentally shoot a little puppy in a rural, yet still residential, area:
- The hunter mistakes the puppy for something else, like a deer or a bear
- The hunter’s gun goes off by mistake
So let’s see: Someone may have mistaken Seymour for something one would hunt in a forest. You should probably take a look at a photo of Seymour:
So if Cody goes that route with his defense, he might have a hard time explaining just what he thought Seymour was. “Well, you know, I just got a quick glimpse of it and I thought it was one of them albino pygmy grizzly bears, so I thought I better giv’r.”
If he goes the other route, he’s just a dick. You carry a gun around, especially in a place where people live and kids play, you better know what you’re doing. “Well, I figured, if my rifle goes off, what’re the odds of hitting something so small as a puppydog head?”
(I’m not sure why, but when I’m thinking up stupid things for Cody to say, he speaks with an Alabama accent.)
If it was an accident, he’s a moron. If it wasn’t, he’s a moron, and evil, too.
A lot of non-morons came forward after this happened last weekend and now Max has a new puppy, which was delivered to him by a TV news helicopter. Cody, however, is walking around free. Even if he’s convicted, it’s a fairly minor crime, so it isn’t like he’s going to go to prison or anything.
There has been, however, talk of vigilante justice on Quadra Island. I will keep you posted.
: It’s Star Trek: The Complete Comic Book Collection, all on DVD. Seriously. It’s so hot. Some monster geeks at some company sat down and scanned every single Star Trek comic book – going back to the Gold Key classics of the 1960s, the ones I started off on – and kept scanning right up to the modern stuff I haven’t read. The Marvel runs are in there, as is the absolutely spot-on Peter David stuff DC put out in the ’80s – the series that told the story of what happened between Star Trek III and Star Trek IV, when Kirk commanded the Excelsior and … sorry, it’s complicated. Page by page, ads included, the scanner folks painstakingly created this monster DVD. Each comic is its own PDF. You pop the disc in your computer and you’re reading Star Trek comics onscreen. It’s a beautiful thing 
