I don't recall precisely when I first fired a .22LR rifle, but the recoil on such firearms is negligible. The main issue is one of supervision and proper gun safety, if anything. Indeed. Such people aren't going around killing people with their firearms. The Second Amendment is in fact one of the weakest arguments one can make regarding firearm ownership, given how the Constitution has changed. It mainly has its place as a supplemental argument in a courtroom. I prefer to predicate my arguments in favor of gun ownership on logic and on the facts. This chicanery is hardly persuasive. By this logic, one can easily classify bows and arrows as "killing machines". One can also classify the swords and axes some people like to collect as "killing machines" as well. Just because someone can use something to kill someone doesn't mean that someone is going to kill someone with it. Furthermore, the opposition to gun ownership is not predicated on logical consistency! For instance, The World Heath Organization has found that alcohol is involved in more deaths worldwide than AIDS, Tuberculosis, or violence. Of course, alcohol has no utilitarian value, and in spite of it being involved in more deaths than firearms (and violence in general), one will not hear anti-gun advocates utter a word in favor of its prohibition. Surely if logical consistency were their preferred method, they would be spending more time and effort on trying to ban alcohol. I have already exposed the hollow chicanery that depicts firearms as "killing machines". Furthermore, the death of that child's sister is in fact due to lax supervision by the parents. This, of course, brings us once again to the logical inconsistency of the anti-gun advocates: when a young child drowns (who certainly has no concept of swimming or drowning) in the family's swimming pool or a lake on the family's property, one will not see the anti-gun advocates blaming the swimming pool or the lake - they will blame the parents for not supervising the child. However, when a young child lacking parental supervision manages to kill someone with a firearm, somehow the firearm is to blame.
Nice straw man. I never said or implied anything about recoil. I was talking about the difference in killing power between a BB gun and .22LR gun. To let a kid use the latter is one of the most absolutely ridiculous things I've ever heard.
I'll toss in my two cents and agree wholeheartedly with Spiderman. Wow, didn't think I'd be saying those words today. Anyway. There's a huge difference between a BB gun and the rifle this kid was given. I'd liken this entirely to a rather well known analogy: You have to learn to walk before you can run. There's a lot going on in this situation, so let's just toss out the unnecessary details at this point to better understand where it all went wrong. It doesn't matter what guns were made for, the kid could have died by a variety of means. It doesn't matter where the gun was, the child obviously didn't know how to use it properly to begin with. This boils it all down to a two specific things, the gun itself and the parents. As I said before, you have to learn to walk before you can run, so there's a distinct issue here. The child should absolutely not have been given a lethal weapon from the get go. At the very least they should have been given a replica or a less than harmful pellet gun. I'll stand firm that a 5 year old should not be given a BB gun because through misuse it can still bring about blinding, death of housepets, and in very rare cases the death of a person. The most you can do to physically harm somebody with a pellet gun is either chip a tooth, lose your sight for a day or so, or use the blunt end of the handle to club someone to death, but that can be done with any household object and I doubt a 5 year old can gather the strength necessary. I'm rambling. Anyway, there's a learning slope that should have been followed to some degree at that early of an age, and I think it can be fair to say that it was ignored. I think this is in part due to the label the gun itself has, it's called a "youth gun", which is very vague honestly. I'm sure the box itself has something on it saying "Only children age __ and up should use this rifle", but I can't find anything on google regarding that, so I'll take the word of the gun enthusiast and assume it's meant for teenagers. Again, the parents here screwed the pooch with ignorance. I guess to simplify it, we'd have to look at it from a different view; let's replace the guns with something else: A child is being taught to swim, and is tossed into the pool without floaties. The child drowns. A child is being taught survival skills, and is given a knife and told to trim bark off of a log without proper instruction. He cuts his finger off. A child is given his first bike, without training wheels or a helmet. He falls off and cracks his head against the pavement. What do these have in common? They're given too much expectations way too fast, and this falls entirely on the supervisor's fault. Water wings and/or supervision in the pool is essential to learning to swim, and even to swimming regularly in the case of supervision. Using a knife requires proper instruction, the first thing anybody will tell you is to never cut towards yourself, ever. Riding a bike is a transitional process and often involves training wheels at some point. Let's assume those were skipped, a helmet should still be mandatory for a child's first bike ride. Do you see what I'm getting at? If the parent's taught the child properly how to use a gun beforehand or gave him a much less lethal replica, or supervised him properly, then there would have likely been a much different outcome. Tl;Dr: Learning anything is a transitional process, you can't just hand somebody a dangerous object without proper instruction or supervision and expect it to end well. This isn't the fault of the object but the parents due to poor supervision and improper teaching of gun safety, however the term "youth rifle" should take part of the blame due to the lack of clarity surrounding the ages required for it. Note: If anybody could find the proper ages for a youth rifle, I'll gladly change my argument around a bit.
I still don't like the idea of a kid being allowed to use a gun especially if they don't have adult supervision
Actually, I pointed out that it isn't difficult for a child to handle a .22LR rifle, as opposed to a .30-06 (there is a reason why youth rifles are chambered in such a caliber as opposed to a larger one) The fact remains that this incident is entirely the fault of the parents; the methods of strict supervision and firearm safety don't produce tragic results whether we are dealing with a pellet gun, a rifle chambered in .22LR, or a rifle chambered in 7.62X54R (the recoil of the latter is what would make it unwieldy for a younger shooter). And this fact is conveniently ignored in countless anti-gun arguments. For every tragedy like the one mentioned in this thread, there are countless other youth shooters who, thanks to proper supervision and teaching of firearm safety, don't go on to harm anyone with whatever they are shooting, whether they are shooting BB's or .22LR cartridges. Firearms should be kept entirely out of reach of children when they aren't actually on the firing line at a shooting range or a plot of land.
Plastic pellets Mike, not metal. I should have clarified on that. Yeah, you can WRECK somebody with a metal pellet gun. Plastic pellets though? I've taken a plastic pellet in the eye on more than one occasion and use them to have firefights with my little cousins, they're harmless.
One of the most difficult problems faced by parents trying to teach gun safety is the overabundance of "toy" guns on the market. It is hard to teach a child that guns are dangerous, and should never be pointed at anybody, when they watch their friends shooting each other with realistic Airsoft guns. Furthermore, high-powered Airsoft guns CAN kill small animals, so it is not unreasonable to assume that a child with an Airsoft could, hypothetically, kill his infant brother.
I didn't even understand the logic of providing legitimate weapons to children when I had read the article for the first time. If a five-year-old does not have the understanding of drinking alcoholic beverages responsibly, or driving a car responsibly, then how are they going to have the understanding of using a gun responsibly? They're going to see those guns as toys, not tools for self defense.
Again, the purpose of a youth rifle is to TEACH children to shoot responsibly, under the supervision of an adult.
I really don't have any allies in this argument, do I? Things are different when you grow up in a rural farm community. In Montana, teaching children to shoot is commonplace, and accidents are almost unheard of. Oh, well. I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree.
But I need my bear arms. They hang above my fireplace. Anyways... I don't get why you all have to be so angry about this. Guns aren't bad. Most of the time it's the people wielding them.
I have no problem with people owning, shooting or whatever else safe things they do with them. In the hands of the responsible a gun is fine. A gun is only an issue when an idiot or a killer has it in their hands. There are 6 guns in my house. They have caused no problems. I can't only assume its because my grandfather is a responsible gun owner. I could be wrong though, maybe they sneak out at night and kill.
