Your spouse is the safety professional, not your intestines, so you might want to consider that your gut feeling about things being “so clearly wrong in principle” is just because you’re full of shit.
It’s not my gut that tells me a 9 year old shouldn’t be given a lightweight fully automatic weapon loaded with more than one round. And if you’re thinking with your gut, instead of the organ most of us use for that function, maybe I ain’t the one overly influenced by shit.
Ifyaknowhutamean, and I think, even though you’re a moron, yadoo.
ETA: I have many years as a line supervisor in heavy industry. Before managing projects. My gut is probably smarter than your torso and limbs. Probably digits as well.
To me, a guy teaching a nine year old to fire an automatic weapon in the desert sounds less like a family vacation and more like a drone target.
[QUOTE=Measure for Measure]
Or since we’re at the SDMB… ::stern look:: it is you that made the claim that this is a small problem so it is you that have to back it up. I was just making a few innocent (very innocent… and cool headed) observations.
[/QUOTE]
You want me to back up my claim that this was a ‘tragic and bizarre incident’? Um, serious question…which part do you want me to back up? It was certainly tragic (sorry, no cite), and as for ‘bizarre’…well, using my own Google-Fu I find the number of times a non-military person was killed by gun recoil from a weapon fired on full auto by a child is…well…er…the only thing close I could find was FXMs earlier cite of a kid that shot himself in the head in 2008. To me, that qualifies as ‘bizarre’, but perhaps you have a different definition.
Did I mention anything about not supporting regulations, on or off the range? Go back and carefully read what I actually wrote because I made no such claim.
[QUOTE=Enola Gay]
Off topic, but can you explain how people will die because of legalized weed? This is an honest question, because I recently visited the Museum of Marijuana & Hemp in Amsterdam and was led to believe that there has not been a single death EVER from marijuana consumption. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
[/QUOTE]
Damned if I know…but I’m pretty confident that there will be a non-zero effect from ANY action, including legalizing MJ. It’s not health food after all. If nothing else you’ll have someone die due to lung cancer (eventually), or maybe a sever asthma attack or allergic reaction.
As to anyone claim that no one has ever died from MJ consumption…well, again, I find that incredibly hard to believe. People die from eating drinking or imbibing everything else on the planet, so I’d need some serious evidence that MJ is the one thing on earth that does zero harm.
And fucked up parents who thought it was a good idea in the first place.
9-year-old + automatic rifle = what could possibly go wrong? Now the girl is only going to be able to go hunting with Dick Cheney.
No, it is intuitively obvious to a casual observer that the girl was far to small and far too inexperienced to be handed a submachine gun and told to go full auto. A building in Chicago still bears the scars from the first attempted hit by a guy with a Tommy Gun: an arc of bullet holes over the window Spike O’Donnell was in front of. They all missed. SMGs climb, even in the hands of burly gangsters, so I find it difficult to call this event an accident. Recklessness on the part of the adults present, yes. Really fucking stupid, obviously. Something you can handwave away with a “shit happens,” sure, if you are a sociopath. Not if you are a contributing more to society than your macho posturing.
Bizarre implies unusual. The evidence (ha!) I linked to suggests that gun range incidents (for they are not accidents) are not extraordinarily rare. The OP is an example of a broader problem.
Good, then you endorse my rant. (Or bad, as I constructed a few more exaggerations which I’ll have to save up for later.) I’m saying neurotypical gun owners should push for better gun control on their terms, and that guns should be treated as any other dangerous object, rather than given a special carve out to protect the fragile egos of the loons, rubes and swallows making up the NRA membership. Standard risk management involves a layered defense not inane reliance on four magic rules which have been shown not to work.
As for swimming pools - actually they are pretty well regulated. You need fences around them for example, not a trivial expense. Not that you brought that up.
But they know the four rules and that’s all you need to know!
Oh and swimming pools!
Wait, this place was actually called Bullets and Burgers?
Maybe it’s just my non-gun-using self, but a name like that doesn’t sit right to me — like it’s trivializing the care and importance of owning and/or using a firearm.
Some US gun owners take their responsibilities seriously, but basically none of them lobbies for sane safety laws or training. Most gun safety schooling is run by NRA cultists and emphasizes the 4 rules of gun crackpottery at the expense of empirically backed research. It’s an exercise in preening and primping, not education.
And if you want to get an idea of the typical gunnut’s dimwitted tolerance of piss-poor firearm practice, the military dot com link to their Best of 2011 gun accident vid haw haw provides a primer.
Ooh, careful. I’m just a gun-shy Brit who is happy for the King to march into my house and order me about, but I know that an Uzi is not an automatic rifle, and you know what happens round here when the gun-strokers see you misname firearms.
Mea maxima culpa. I’ve never owned a gun (other than a BB gun as a kid), and don’t know much about them.
Yep, you stepped in it now. One slip of nomenclature and you’ve totally invalidated every position, statement and idea you’ve ever stated, had or will have in the future, on any subject.
Bummer.
Just to focus in to the smallest circle in the target ( har, har, har ) for a moment. No matter what the culture this little girl is being raised in, I cannot imagine how her parents can justify/ marginalize/ /rationalize this horrific accident. The girl must have turned and seen what was left of this man’s head and known she was to blame. Yes, Yes, I know she didn’t mean to do it.
But… man, nine years of age is awfully young to have the visceral imprint of someone’s death on the inside of your eyeballs and know it’s your action alone that caused it.
All snarking and joking aside ( and I just wrote a wiseassed " Oh, why won’t someone think about the ---- " here in the last few days ), I truly hope this child gets some long-term counseling. I hope someone or some ones in her life really ARE thinking about the child.
It is one thing to embrace gun culture to the point where you as parents decide it is appropriate to place an Uzi in your child’s hands. It’s another thing to figure out how to manage the aftermath to help this child deal.
I hope the kid will come to understand that responsibility for this rests 100% with the adults in the case, and as karma would have it the one who should have had the clearest professional understanding of whether a kid could control a machine pistol on full rock’n’roll was the one who ended up dead before his bungling could kill anyone else.
Which ain’t to deny that every man’s death diminishes me, and I wish he’d learned his lesson in a less final way.
Also, I’d like to have a go with an Uzi some time.
They’re fun. They jump like a motherfucker.
I know a place a couple of hours outside of Las Vegas that has one. It works quite well, too!
I dunno, maybe being able to say “I killed a man when I was nine because he was stupid,” might prove useful.
But, uh, probably not.
What?! That counseling shit is for wimps. What this girl needs is to get back to the range and learn how to handle that Uzi like a champ. Back on the horse and all that. :rolleyes: