It seems there are a lot of news items lately that I’ve thought to mention here and give the label “Stupidity”. Some just make me shake my head; some make me cry. In the latter category, we have this tragic story[1] about an 8-year-old boy who killed himself with an Uzi that he was shooting with his father’s permission and encouragement:
A Massachusetts police chief, two Connecticut men and a gun club were indicted Thursday in the case of an 8-year-old boy killed by a submachine gun he was firing at a gun show.The boy, Christopher K. Bizilj of Ashford, Conn., accidentally shot himself in the head while taking his turn with a 9-millimeter Micro Uzi on Oct. 26 in Westfield, Mass. He was accompanied by his father, an emergency room doctor, who, the authorities say, had chosen the Uzi for him to fire.
Let’s list at some of the details here, because one can barely believe them unless they’re laid out in front of one: The boy is 8. He wanted to shoot an Uzi at a gun show, and his father let him. This is illegal, because in Massachusetts, children are not allowed to fire machine guns even with parental permission (imagine!). The gun club let them do it anyway (wink, wink). It seems that the boy couldn’t control the kickback.
I can only imagine who else might have been killed by that out-of-control machine gun wielded by a scared child, had it not done him in first.
The club, the sponsor, and the men who provided the weapon have been charged with involuntary manslaughter. The father has not; says the District Attorney, “The father will be punished every day for the rest of his life for what happened.” I suspect that if the father had instead, say, allowed his son to take the wheel of the family Hummer, the DA would not have been as understanding.
And that’s one of my two major questions here: What sane person hands an 8-year-old a real machine gun with live ammunition? In this case, we seem to have at least four apparently sane adults, including a doctor and a police chief, who’ve done so.
The second question is this: What is anyone doing with live ammo in a machine gun at a gun show? This stuff is truly beyond imagination. There’s no reason for these sorts of weapons to be readily available, and there’s no reason to be passing them around at “gun shows”, loaded and deadly.
[1] And I mean “tragic” in the literary sense, the only way I use the word.
6 comments:
That entire article is filled with unbelievable insanity, not the least of which is that a 15-year-old was "supervising" the 8-year-old while he was firing the weapon.
This is so far out of the realm of reality that if it were not for the source (you, Barry, and the NYT), I would have to believe it was a horror story made up by extreme gun-control advocates to make a point. There simply are no words adequate to describe the utter stupidity of these gun-totin', rights-quotin' morons.
Did they have to pry the gun from his cold, dead hands?
Oh, Paul.
That's...
That's...
Euw.
Ray is right. I'm speechless. Imbeciles.
Sorry, Barry, but I find that news story to be one of the most compelling and poignant pieces of commentary on the NRA and the second ammendment I've ever seen. I think my initial comment was perfectly apt.
This story has been nagging at me ever since you posted it, and it finally occurred to me that there is a second tragedy - or perhaps travesty might be more apt - in that we all know that, as sad as this story is, it will make absolutely no difference to the gun crowd. They will either rationalise it, or lay the blame elsewhere, anything but admit even the tiniest shred of responsibility. After all, as they keep telling us, "Guns don't kill people. People kill people".
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