Good Guy with a Gun #45: Bismarck, ND
Original incident: December 15, 2023. I'm sorry, but who the hell thinks that someone he's "hanging out with" will stab him in the stomach?
The incident
While a few people were hanging out at an apartment at around 2 AM, Keanu Bird, 21, stabbed a 23-year-old man “multiple times in the abdomen.”
The victim shot Bird and somehow made it to the hospital. He was expected to fully recover from his wounds.
The police arrived at the apartment and found Bird with a gunshot wound to the chest. He was airlifted to a hospital in Minnesota and was expected to make a full recovery. He was charged with attempted murder would have been arrested upon release, but he died of complications about two weeks later.
Discussion
The setup sounds sounds really weird. The police report literally says, “Interviews of witnesses indicated that the 23-year-old was stabbed multiple times in the abdomen while hanging out at the apartment.” Hanging out with someone who might stab you?
If you’re like me, your mind leaps to an intuition that this must be a poor neighborhood — one with a culture of drug use, violence, and despair.
Lots of people would think that we should be careful about giving “these people” guns.
On the contrary, they need open access to firearms more than I do. I live in a low-crime area in New York, have “good” friends, and hang out with generally moral people. It’s not so easy to get in the People’s Republic of New York, but the people in my area without permits probably aren’t carrying, and aren’t likely to stab me. I don’t need to be a Good Guy with a Gun because there aren’t so many Bad Guys with Guns around here.
I have a dream that if I become a kajillionaire — have I mentioned that you should buy my calendar? — I would create a foundation that would help people of all races and both sexes in poor and violent neighborhoods legally get the handguns and training they need to protect themselves from the violent elements that would otherwise exploit them or draw them in.
Because the rhetorical question anti-gunners ask:
“Why do you feel like you have to carry a concealed weapon all the time? What are you afraid of?”
...sometimes has the answer that you’re afraid that the person you’re hanging out with might punch a steel blade into your gut. And that deserves more than a rhetorical answer.
Sources
There were a lot of sources on this one, but they all seem to just be recapitulations of the police report. Also, most of them seem to have been written, or perhaps updated, after Bird died.
Bismarck government blog post and Bismarck PD report (link in PDF).
News / talk radio covered this pretty well
WZFG Radio, “The Flag,” AM 1100 and FM 92.3
KFGO, AM 740 and 107.3 FM
WDAY, AM 970 and 93.1 FM
KNOX, AM 1310, 107.9 FM, and 103.3 FM
KFYR TV had an initial story and a follow-up.
Other outlets included Minot Daily News, KXNET, Sdotvenom on Medium, and Dakota News Network.
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