5 year old given rifle as gift, kills 2 year old sister
- Thread starter Candlelight
- Start date
Of course cars are dubious transport vehicles. Moving yourself via moving a ton of other stuff at the same time can hardly be the most efficient piece of transportation technology. But there is nothing better yet and just because there are many traffic accidents doesn't mean that a world without combustion engines would be better. A world without the mobility created by them would be much poorer.
If you ban guns the world won't collapse. If you banned cars it actually would.
Guns give people the illusion that folks control their own lives. Before Pres. Obama said it, Libertarian talk host Neil Boortz talked about people clinging to guns and religion.
These folks don't understand that the people robbing them aren't going to sneak into their homes late at night, but their scuzzball employers not paying them enough.
Like direct democracy, Guns and Abortion are about the politics of personal control.
Like the NRA, the NOW get's called a killer of children and babes, the bloody flag is raised, and people demonize each other.
The libertarians--always the voice of the serpent--say we wont tell you what kind of gun this, or what kind of proceedure that, as long as you don't impose regulations on big business the other.
No deal.
Bloomberg--he went after guns, drink sizes, hiding cigarettes--and worse, wants to force women away from formula--and wants to deny pain med in the emergency room? Yet his buds on Wall Street? He didn't touch them.
What we need is the anti-Bloomberg. The morning-after pill going over the counter and 3D printed guns make those other issues moot. The libertarians say he who governs least governs best.
I agree--much easier to watch over the 1% instead of extensive regs on everyone else that just ends up in polorized screaming matches.
Better jobs means less violence and lower unplanned pregnancies--that needs to be the focus. Keep up the Bloomberg anti-gun thing--and its red meat for talk radio types who want to gut any kind of regulation at all.
For the nerxt 20 years, the DNC should focus on one thing only--wages. That is what kept pro-Gun Dem Jon Testor in DC. Stay on that message--no distractions on prohibitions against inanimate objects or substances.
Frankly, the only real time the GOP will support gun control is if the next massacre is in Wall Street. Occupy types were pretty weak compared to these guys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County,_USA
when the strike breakers and others hired by the company show up early in the film — the strikers call them "gun thugs" — the company people try to keep their guns hidden from the camera...
Later in the movie, the strikers block a road/rail crossing with high powered rifles and the goons backed down.
I think this will happen, with folks pushing the mask wearing anonymous types out of the way--going by such names as John Doe, saying "this isn't Littleton, or Columbine or Sandy Hook...this is Harper's Ferry, and I'm John Brown."
When it is the New York stock exchange that gets shot up to the cheers of the masses--that will be when the GOP supports gun control. Kids apparently don't count. We saw that when head start and meals on wheels got the axe but the suits on first class jets didn't.
These folks don't understand that the people robbing them aren't going to sneak into their homes late at night, but their scuzzball employers not paying them enough.
Like direct democracy, Guns and Abortion are about the politics of personal control.
Like the NRA, the NOW get's called a killer of children and babes, the bloody flag is raised, and people demonize each other.
The libertarians--always the voice of the serpent--say we wont tell you what kind of gun this, or what kind of proceedure that, as long as you don't impose regulations on big business the other.
No deal.
Bloomberg--he went after guns, drink sizes, hiding cigarettes--and worse, wants to force women away from formula--and wants to deny pain med in the emergency room? Yet his buds on Wall Street? He didn't touch them.
What we need is the anti-Bloomberg. The morning-after pill going over the counter and 3D printed guns make those other issues moot. The libertarians say he who governs least governs best.
I agree--much easier to watch over the 1% instead of extensive regs on everyone else that just ends up in polorized screaming matches.
Better jobs means less violence and lower unplanned pregnancies--that needs to be the focus. Keep up the Bloomberg anti-gun thing--and its red meat for talk radio types who want to gut any kind of regulation at all.
For the nerxt 20 years, the DNC should focus on one thing only--wages. That is what kept pro-Gun Dem Jon Testor in DC. Stay on that message--no distractions on prohibitions against inanimate objects or substances.
Frankly, the only real time the GOP will support gun control is if the next massacre is in Wall Street. Occupy types were pretty weak compared to these guys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County,_USA
when the strike breakers and others hired by the company show up early in the film — the strikers call them "gun thugs" — the company people try to keep their guns hidden from the camera...
Later in the movie, the strikers block a road/rail crossing with high powered rifles and the goons backed down.
I think this will happen, with folks pushing the mask wearing anonymous types out of the way--going by such names as John Doe, saying "this isn't Littleton, or Columbine or Sandy Hook...this is Harper's Ferry, and I'm John Brown."
When it is the New York stock exchange that gets shot up to the cheers of the masses--that will be when the GOP supports gun control. Kids apparently don't count. We saw that when head start and meals on wheels got the axe but the suits on first class jets didn't.
Well, this native Pennsylvania fired a .22 rifle at exactly the same age. I did it under supervision in a controlled setting.
This is what you wrote:Yep, that's right.
A 5-year old kid shoots his sister because his gun nuts parents gave him a fucking functional rifle as a birthday present, and the problem is parents who don't have guns.
Right.
That's not what I said; please don't put words in my mouth. If you bothered to read my first post it the thread you would find that I put the blame solely at the feet of the parents in this situation.
So, by your own words, the main problem is not that there are 9 guns every 10 people in the US (including toddlers), or that it is considered somehow normal to give 5-year old kids a functional rifle. The problem is parents who don't own gun (or, as you so deftly put it "are scared of guns" and "cower in fears" of weapons) because they won't train their kids like they are some kind of baby militia. And again, this
is the only proper answer to that.Especially in light on this gem:
No, now that I think of it, this
is a better answer to that.
To be fair, a guy I know did hunt down and shoot three chickens in his town for a large Christmas dinner he was planning. And then the Safeway employees explained to him that the chickens were already dead, and to stay the hell away from their store, forever.
And we are are guilty of it at one time or another.
May that little one R.I.P. for ever an ANGEL.
What about putting a 5-year old in a car with a drunk driver? That happens all the time, killing over 200 children below the age of 14 every year.
About every three weeks a child is killed by a television, ironically a device often used by children to watch a coyote try to kill a roadrunner by dropping something on him. Does a big screen television serve any useful purpose?
Then the kids go out to the playground instead of rabbit hunting, and every year 200,000 of them end up going from the playground to the ER at a cost of $1.2 billion a year, and one dies from such playground injuries every few weeks.
On an average day two children drown, yet parents still expose their children to the hazards of water, even teaching some of them to swim in it. (Those parents should be prosecuted for gross negligence in willfully exposing their children to such a dangerous environment.)
Two children also die daily from poisoning, yet we still keep dangerous chemicals and drugs in our homes, knowing that for every child who dies from poisoning, 150 are saved at the hospital.
Two children die daily from burns, usually scalding because we insist on boiling water to cook things even though prepackaged meals make such ridiculously dangerous methods of food preparation unnecessary. Any parent with a stove should go to jail.
2.6 million children end up in the ER for sports injuries, yet kicking a ball serves no useful purpose. We need to stop that.
Taking in all the other hazards found in the environments where we willfully expose our kids, it's not surprising that about 9,000 of them die annually from injuries. That's more than all the US forces killed in Iraq from 2003 until the withdrawal, and this is happening every year to our young children.
Anyway, in a strange twist, American parents' substitution of televisions for guns has created children who psychologists rank as the slowest in the world to realize that animals are not little furry people. That might go a way in explaining why 800,000 ER visits a year are from dog bites, which kill over a dozen children every year.
Your brain is the beneficiary of millions of years of evolution, millenniums of human history, and the proverbial village that raised you, and you see fit to expend that gift on "arguments" such as this?
I know you'd rather there not be any guns in children's possession but frankly that isn't going to happen. One could go into the argument about how millions of other kids have received one of these or like and haven't used it in-correctly; but I will simply say you have only really 2 choices. Either kids are given real guns that they could hurt-kill themselves with or you have guns made for children which are safer on average. I know that its not much a choice and you find it disturbing but what is another POSSIBLE solution?
So is childish action figures but its okay for adults to use them still.
I can easily think of a few but one comes to mind the most: hunting. Not everyone wants to buy from stores whether it be high prices, things put in the food, and diseases. (how many times have reports come out just in these last few months of food contamination and recalls) Just because you can't think of a use for a certain tool doesn't mean its useless. An ax maybe useless to you because you can simply turn the natural gas on and heat your home; doesn't mean someone else doesn't need it.
You're right. They're analogous situations. Thankfully, we condemn both.
I'm sure if the same number of kids who went to the playground instead got loaded firearms, the numbers would be quite bad for that too. All you're pointing out here is that parents who do stupid things like these parents did are thankfully not commonplace.
I skipped the rest because they could be responded to with that paragraph.
^ Hunting tends to be done vewy quietly and you have to move slowly, so there's little risk of injury, other than frostbite or pneumonia from sitting in a duck blind all day.
Most kids used to hunt. There wasn't much else to do and it put food on the table. It involves walking around outside in a careful manner instead of seeing how high you can go on a swing set, spinning the merry-go-round until other kids start getting flung off, or trying to ride your bicycle off the roof. It's especially safer than letting kids ride ATVS, which are still killing about 100 kids a year, or bicycles, which result in about 200 child deaths a year (the vast majority male).
If you focus on injuries, hunting might as well not exist. The National Safety Council says it is among the safest recreational activities there is, with only 10 injuries per 100,000 participants. In contrast, children on bicycles sustain about a quarter million injuries requiring emergency room treatment per year, and cycling is the sport that is the leading cause of traumatic brain injury in children 5 through 9, and skates, skateboards, and scooters cause about two-thirds as many injuries as bicycles.
Most kids used to hunt. There wasn't much else to do and it put food on the table. It involves walking around outside in a careful manner instead of seeing how high you can go on a swing set, spinning the merry-go-round until other kids start getting flung off, or trying to ride your bicycle off the roof. It's especially safer than letting kids ride ATVS, which are still killing about 100 kids a year, or bicycles, which result in about 200 child deaths a year (the vast majority male).
If you focus on injuries, hunting might as well not exist. The National Safety Council says it is among the safest recreational activities there is, with only 10 injuries per 100,000 participants. In contrast, children on bicycles sustain about a quarter million injuries requiring emergency room treatment per year, and cycling is the sport that is the leading cause of traumatic brain injury in children 5 through 9, and skates, skateboards, and scooters cause about two-thirds as many injuries as bicycles.
What does this case have to do with hunting?
I've shot thousands of rounds, every single one of them for recreation. Many in my family and my wife's family have shot much more than I have, almost all for recreation. There are a few who hunt, and perhaps 0.1% of the rounds they shoot is for hunting, but the rest are all recreation.
Every single person I know who has a gun has it for either recreation, self/home defense, or both, mostly for recreation. So yeah, recreation is their primary purpose. That's not to say they can't be used for other things, but that is their primary purpose now. It wasn't always so, but it is now.
Um, no, you still aren't understanding what I said so I'll spell it out for you. If my kid finds a gun somewhere, I don't have to worry that they'll pick it up and accidentally shoot someone. They know how to handle it safely. More importantly, because they've shot guns before, it's not some magic talisman to them and they're much more likely to obey my instructions to leave it alone and find an adult than pick it up to explore. I'm more worried that one of their friends who come from a household where guns are scary evil things will pick it up because they're more curious about it having no experience with it. If they do pick it up, the chance of an accident is much higher than if my kid does so because the other kid has no idea how to handle it safely. I hope that's clear enough for you, because if not I'm not sure I can make it much clearer.This is what you wrote:Yep, that's right.
A 5-year old kid shoots his sister because his gun nuts parents gave him a fucking functional rifle as a birthday present, and the problem is parents who don't have guns.
Right.
That's not what I said; please don't put words in my mouth. If you bothered to read my first post it the thread you would find that I put the blame solely at the feet of the parents in this situation.
So, by your own words, the main problem is not that there are 9 guns every 10 people in the US (including toddlers), or that it is considered somehow normal to give 5-year old kids a functional rifle. The problem is parents who don't own gun (or, as you so deftly put it "are scared of guns" and "cower in fears" of weapons) because they won't train their kids like they are some kind of baby militia. And again, this
As you can see, this statement has absolutely no direct bearing on the story that started the thread. Taking what I said and twisting it to say that I'm blaming this accident on other parents is either disingenuous or just stupid.
For the record, and since you missed it, here's what I said earlier about this particular case:
