{"id":6336,"date":"2014-08-28T02:54:23","date_gmt":"2014-08-28T02:54:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/highplainsblogger.wordpress.com\/?p=6336"},"modified":"2014-08-28T02:54:23","modified_gmt":"2014-08-28T02:54:23","slug":"yes-guns-do-kill-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=6336","title":{"rendered":"Yes, guns do kill people"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A 9-year-old Arizona girl has become the poster child for gun-safety reform.<\/p>\n

This isn’t a pretty story and it speaks to adult stupidity and carelessness as much as it does to anything else.<\/p>\n

The girl was firing an Uzi automatic assault rifle<\/em> on a firing range when it the instructor told her to pull the trigger\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2014\/08\/27\/opinion\/robbins-why-was-child-firing-uzi\/index.html?hpt=hp_t1<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

What on God’s planet Earth have we come to?<\/p>\n

The debate is going rage on. Should we make such laws? Absolutely, we should.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

What happened to the man is tragic beyond measure.<\/p>\n

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”?<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In the process, the NRA very well could demonstrate — yet again — how out of touch with American public opinion it has become.<\/p>\n

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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 … Continue reading Yes, guns do kill people<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[85,489,2033,3342,4954],"class_list":["post-6336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-news","category-political-news","tag-2nd-amendment","tag-assault-weapons","tag-gun-ownership","tag-nra","tag-u-s-constitution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6336\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}