Foreigner arrested for brandishing a firearm in a bar in Vietnam

For those who don't know "brandishing a firearm" simply means that the dude pulled out a gun in public in a threatening manner. This is highly illegal in most places but it is extremely illegal in Vietnam because nobody is allowed to have guns other than the military.

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Some news outlets are concealing his identity and others aren't. The rules of innocent until proven guilty doesn't really exist here.

The way the story goes is that this guy bought the gun in Cambodia many years ago and somehow got it across the border into Vietnam. I suppose this wouldn't be terribly difficult to do at a popular land crossing but it still would have taken a lot of courage. I would guess that he joined a bus tour and just left it in his stowed luggage on the bus as he went through Immigration because I can speak from experience when I say that these buses, especially tourist busses, are rarely checked at all, let alone scanned.

It still took a lot of "gusto" to do something like that since it is guaranteed lots of trouble if you get caught.

Anyway, the guy, who I have never met that I remember, apparently had a dispute with an Irish person at an Irish bar (what are the chances) and then he left to go to his house and returned with the gun. Thankfully, he never pulled the trigger.

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I don't know a great deal about guns but the news report was rather vague about what was involved. They just said a "military grade firearm" but they also included the serial number so I was able to find out that it was a Norinco CF98-9, if that means anything to anyone out there. It's a 9mm and as you probably know from movies, that's a kill ya type of gun.

This is a very concerning thing for me because we are still reeling from the recent news story about an American who robbed a jewelry store and beat up the security guard in the process. Apparently, finding this guy was just as easy thanks again to the plethora of CCTV's that exist all over Da Nang.

Sadly, the bar that this took place in is within walking distance of my house and I go there maybe once a week. I never found any trouble there, but then again, I am a peaceful dude and I am rarely out very late. Apparently this happened in the middle of the night like 3am and I know from experience that very little good ever comes from being out that late.

So far there hasn't been any sort of anti-foreigner backlash from this but I seriously wish the expats would step it down a notch as far as things like this are concerned. Vietnam is a very safe country and guns are something that you almost never even hear about. Citizens aren't allowed to own them let alone foreigners. I just fear that because of these isolated incidents happening in such close proximity to one another, that Immigration could start to be a bit harder on people trying to get into and stay in the country.

With the gun incident, which the guy was very cooperative with police about, it is a question of a man who has been living in Vietnam for 6 years with no special visa. His visas were up to date but he has the same kind of back-to-back-to-back tourist visas that a lot of the rest of us enjoy.

The Vietnamese have been very generous with not really caring about how long you stay as long as you keep your visa up to date, but my fear is that if things like this keep happening, a sort of disdain towards longer-term visitors / residents could develop. If that happens, then all the people like yours truly are going to find themselves unable to get visas anymore and honestly, I quite like not needing to worry about visas.

For now, I think that the government is doing what they normally do and that is to sweep this one under the rug. I really hope it can stay that way.