A 9-year-old Arizona girl has become the poster child for gun-safety reform.
This isn’t a pretty story and it speaks to adult stupidity and carelessness as much as it does to anything else.
The girl was firing an Uzi automatic assault rifle on a firing range when it the instructor told her to pull the trigger to fire a several-round burst. The recoil of the Uzi pulled the weapon upward and the instructor was shot in the head. He later died.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/27/opinion/robbins-why-was-child-firing-uzi/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
And so here we are debating whether the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is so damn sacred that it prevents government from enacting laws that keep these weapons out of the hands of little children.
What on God’s planet Earth have we come to?
The debate is going rage on. Should we make such laws? Absolutely, we should.
Mel Robbins, a firearms expert, writes for CNN.com about the tragedy. She notes that the incident isn’t really the little girl’s fault. The instructor was standing in the wrong place. What’s more, the instructor told the girl to put the weapon in fully automatic mode.
What happened to the man is tragic beyond measure.
But what in the world are we doing allowing little children to handle these kinds of deadly weapons in the first place, even in what’s supposed to be a “controlled environment”?
As Robbins notes in her CNN.com essay: “Kids can’t drive until they’re 16, vote, chew tobacco or smoke until they’re 18, or drink until they’re 21. No child should have access to firing a fully automatic weapon until the age of 18. And gun ranges should know better than to hand one to a novice shooter passing through on vacation, let alone one as young as 9.”
The National Rifle Association so far has been quiet on this incident. Don’t expect the nation’s premier gun-owner rights group to remain silent. The NRA brass can be expected to come up with some kind of rationale for preventing the enactment of laws that keep guns out of little children’s hands.
In the process, the NRA very well could demonstrate — yet again — how out of touch with American public opinion it has become.
“A 9-year-old Arizona girl has become the poster child for gun-safety reform.”
This involved a fully legal and registered fully automatic submachine gun. The chances of any kid getting close to one of those is beyond miniscule.
This is the kind of accident that happens once in a century. You scratch your head and wonder how an “instructor” could be so stupid, but that is all there was to it.
It says nothing about needing reform.
lwk
Agreed. Stupidity is the cause. We’ll disagree, though, on ways to prevent stupid people from doing stupid things. One way is to make it illegal to put that Uzi in the hands of someone who isn’t strong enough to handle it.
“One way is to make it illegal to put that Uzi in the hands of someone who isn’t strong enough to handle it.”
Saw a story yesterday about another 9 year old girl in Washington state. Somehow swallowed in a hole in the sand on the beach and suffocated before could be rescued. Maybe we ought to make beaches illegal too? I mean, if it just saves one life (the typical b.s.. justification).
A grown up could have done the same thing with a fully automatic Uzi. It wasn’t the 9 year old girl was too small to shoot such a gun safely. She just hadn’t been trained to do so safely.
Penalizing other 9 year old kids from learning to shoot weapons that are likely to have, a hunting rifle or whatever has damn little to do with one in a million kid getting their hands on a fully auto machine gun (registered and licensed since 1934 with only two crimes ever committed with one since 1934).
The fact is that people like you were just looking for an excuse to call for more laws to punish people you think are not responsible. As they say it is not about gun control, it is about _control_.
lwk