A 4-year old boy goes into the house, brings out a rifle, and proceeds to shoot his friend in the head as the parents stand nearby.
This is I’m freaked out about guns. Many self-proclaimed “safe and responsible” gun owners say that they follow the rules, they lock up your guns, etc. Which is awesome. That’s great. They’re doin’ it right.
But then a gun owner like this leaves his or her loaded rifle in an area where a 6-year old can get his hands on it, and there you go.
I’m sure someone will be along shortly with an anecdotal youtube video and a shaky grasp of statistics to prove you wrong…
It would have been fine if the backyard was staffed by an armed guard. He could have gunned down the 4 year old before he opened fire.
He could have just as easily killed the other child with a baseball bat, a bicycle, a swimming pool or an alcohol.
<Monty Python> What about pointed sticks? </MP>
Fresh fruit, bicycles and alcohols not good enough for you, eh?
The only thing that will stop a 4-year-old with a gun is a 6-year-old with a gun.
Young kids are very clever. Nothing less than a gun safe will prevent them from finding a way to access your guns. Leaving them unsecured is very negligent.
I had two boys, 14 months apart in age. At the time they reached a couple years old my only firearm was a .22 Ruger target pistol and I didn’t have a safe. I was concerned that no matter where I hid it, it could be found. I was even uncomfortable with disassembly and hiding it , because they were damn cleaver.
I sold it.
Many years later, after they were adults and I had bought them rifles of their own, as gifts, they presented me with a brand new replacement Ruger target pistol.
It turns out that I may have mentioned having to get rid of my pistol a few times, probably a few.
Did I mention to you that I got rid of my favorite piston when you were young?
Having unsecured weapons in a home with young children is unconscionable. They are more clever than you can imagine and will find a way.
I’d love to see the stats of how many 4-year-olds beat to death a 6-year-old with a bat each year.
(Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that I’ve been wooshed?)
What else do you think they could use, given that they generally can’t get access to firearms due to overprotective parents?
Why, indeed?
I could post a youtube video where someone quotes statistics that says it’s in the thousands.
So there ya go.
You gun grabbers are hurting my feelings.
If the parents of the six year old had armed him, this never would have happened.
In any case, what if a horde of minority monsters from under the bed or in the closet had swarmed out and attacked the unarmed four year old? You’d feel pretty bad then, wouldn’t you?
My wife made up a term for that. Kidzian motion - similar to Brownian motion for molecules, only with kids. As they would randomly roam through the house, they’d get into everything.
We locked poison kitchen chemicals (drain cleaner, bleach, etc.) up and pretty much were prescription drug free so there wasn’t much for them to get into.
But
They did find hidden Christmas presents once. After which, for a couple of years, we asked a neighbor to keep presents for us or locked them in the trunk of my car. They also got into their mother’s lipstick one time. I got a couple of cute photos out of that.
Yes, kids can and will get into nearly everything. This is why it’s not a bad idea for pediatricians to review household dangers, including guns, with a parent.
Edit:
Guns don’t kill kids, kids kill kids.
I wonder when YogSosoth will roll through to celebrate the kid’s death. He’s well known for thinking it’s wonderful when children of gun owners are killed.
There’s another very recent story of a 4-year-old shooting the wife of a sheriff’s deputy, when the gun was set down on a bed for just a few seconds before the kid picked it up.
And a two-year-old shooting his mom in the gut as she slept. The article has her claiming that her SO typically locks up his gun each day rather than leaving it under the pillow for the toddler to find and shoot mommy with; not sure if she’s truthful and just very unlucky or what:
And so they felt the need to reciprocate?
The story said the deputy keeps the guns in a safe, and had only just gotten them out. But if he’s telling the truth, apparently he’d put the gun away loaded.
At any rate, this sorta thing is a pretty good refutation to the “we need more people with guns to keep us safe” argument. If something like this can happen to a presumably trained deputy sheriff, then if we put armed people in every school to protect our kids, they too will have their moments of carelessness. Even if it prevented another Newtown, we’d be trading that for a bunch of instances like this.
Yep. My father had a .32 that hey kept loaded and hidden. I never went actively looking for it, but I did eventually find it (in a false/dropped ceiling.) To be fair, he did eventually find my porn stash, too, that I thought he’d never find. (Well, not much of a stash. I think it was just one magazine that I randomly found in a convenience store dumpster. It was like finding gold for a pubescent teen. No internet back then.) Or I assume he did, as it just disappeared one day.