Good Guy with a Gun #74: Qulin, MO

Original incident: January 13, 2024. Your friends thinking you're a great guy isn't enough to keep you from being a threat to others. And threats don't always get handled in gentle ways.

These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. If you bought or received a calendar, contact me for a complementary subscription. Today’s post is significantly updated from the calendar version.

This story is pieced together from a single news report and some Facebook comments. I’ll try to indicate what comes from where.

Darren Venneman was, according to his friends, a decent guy with some demons. One says that his mom died of an oxycontin overdose when he was in the 8th grade. (His obituary confirms that his mom predeceased him.) Another friend said that “his whole family” was killed by a drunk driver — though one has to wonder whether he told this friend a tall tale, since his obituary says he was survived by three sons and a daughter.

Based on accounts from his defenders and detractors alike, he struggled with addiction and had had run-ins with the law before, for drugs and theft at least.

He was from Chanute, Kansas, but on the night in question, he was visiting friends or family in Qulin, Missouri. (No, we hadn’t heard of Qulin either, probably because its population is only about 460. It’s about seven miles north of the Arkansas border. But we digress.)

According a Facebook commenter, he had been released from prison nine months before. And he was out in some cold weather at 3 AM. Why? Hard to tell. The stories are a little inconsistent, or at least not-quite-coherent.

The same person who mentioned the jail time — a defender, by the way — says, “That night he made a series of bad choices that led to him being kick out of the house he was at onto the street, blackout drunk, on a night with -20⁰F windchill. It was cold. He was an idiot, not a monster.”

Someone else said, “He wasn’t breaking in to any place. He thought he was at his friends house and he was trying to get in because it was -14° out and he was freezing to death.”

A third person said, “he wasn’t trying to rob no one and u can’t breaking a unlocked door ......it was 27° out side and he was trying to find my house.....the man literally had a bottle a phone and 20 dollers we gave him 30 min before he was shot.”

None of those statements change the fact that Venneman entered a home defended by someone with two young children, one of them two months old and the other less than two years.

And remember, it was three o’clock in the morning.

The homeowner did what most reasonable people would have done: He shot Venneman. Five times, in fact.

Deputies responded, and Venneman was airlifted to a hospital in Memphis, about a 100 miles way, but he died from his injuries three days later.

Sources

The single news source with this story is KFVS 12.

We have an unusual amount of commentary about the criminal in this case, mostly stemming from a Facebook post. It paints a picture of someone who might not have been a fundamentally wicked person, but who had gone wrong in his life. I’ve discussed his addiction and criminal record above; rather than cherry-pick more comments, I’ll just give you the link to that public Facebook post.

Note that the post is from KWOC, who therefore must have covered the story — but I can’t find the original coverage on their website.

There’s a post on r/dgu on Reddit about this incident, with the comment about what Venneman was doing being more interesting than the post itself.

Venneman’s obituary is available.

There also appears to be evidence of Venneman’s checkered past here (though I can’t swear it’s not another Darren Venneman from that area — don’t call lawyers on me, please).

Finally, in 2A specialized coverage, we have Brandon Curtis giving a report at Concealed Nation.