North Dakota Man a Case Study in How Not to be a Gun Owner

It’s important that we call people out who own guns but manage to do everything wrong. While it’s good to be supportive of your fellow gun owners, you’re not doing anyone any favors by pretending that stupidity is acceptable.

In fact, you’d probably make things a lot worse.

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of stupidity carried out with firearms, and not all of them involving shooting one’s junk off because you’re mentally disabled.

But this guy from North Dakota is just next-level stupid.

A North Dakota man sent a threatening email to a federal official alluding to the assassination of Minnesota state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband — and still tried to collect his confiscated firearm afterwards, authorities said Wednesday.

Charles Dalzell, 46, allegedly sent an email Sunday to the U.S. District Attorney’s Office in North Dakota implying that he or another person may repeat the Minnesota assassinations if officials, law enforcement and a judge continued to ignore him.

“I don’t want this situation to end up like Minnesota over the weekend,” Dalzell wrote, according to the criminal complaint. 

…

Dalzell owned a gun, but the Pembina County Sheriff’s Office had seized it in connection with a separate case.

He wanted it back. He went to the sheriff’s office to retrieve it, but evidently walked away empty-handed. When he was arrested soon after, investigators recovered methamphetamine and a machete at his property, the North Dakota Mirror reported.

Dalzell’s criminal history includes other convictions for disorderly conduct, as well as criminal mischief and domestic violence, according to court records. He claimed his gun was taken as part of an ongoing disorderly conduct case where he swore at a group of minors, but swore he never brandished the firearm.

Now, Dalzell claims he never intended to threaten anyone, but the truth of the matter is that it sure as hell looks like a threat to me.

Absent that, though, he looks like he’s got enough of a rap sheet that it’s a miracle he wasn’t already a prohibited person. Now, it seems likely he will be.

But the balls on this dude to just waltz into the sheriff’s office and try to get a confiscated gun back is kind of impressive. The dude clearly isn’t lacking in guts, that’s for sure.

Brains? Oh, he’s definitely lacking in that, but he’s got guts.

I’m trying to figure out how he got a domestic violence conviction and still has a gun lawfully.

Look, I’m going to lay it out plainly for you: What happened in Minnesota is terrible. It’s not how we should do things in this country. We have elections that work, at least most of the time, so that’s what you use to deal with bad lawmakers. You don’t shoot them.

Also, you don’t even suggest to someone that they could end up like those people if they don’t do what you want them to do, but especially if you want anyone to believe that you weren’t threatening them.

Then, after demanding your gun back from the cops after having threatened federal officials, you should probably not have meth on your property, because that’s not a good thing at all.

The truth is that while he’s bound to be a felon fairly soon, I can see a valid case being made that Dalzell could be “adjudicated as mentally defective” based on what we’ve seen.