But we can, and do. You can be stopped and ticketed by police for not wearing a seat belt, and if they happen to notice something else while they’ve got you stopped (guns, drugs, no car seat for the baby, etc.) they can get you for those offenses too.
I agree with you about the fact that there are ample ways to make guns safe in a home…for those who care to. My family does everything the right way, for example. But the majority of homes do not take proper precautions.
That father is responsible for all of that. Of course, there is no recourse, considering he lives in a trailer home in Tennessee. I hope he sees the inside of a jail before his 11 year old does. And hefty fines to be paid to the family of the victim, fines that can’t be removed by a bankruptcy.
Australia did a gun buy back recently and gun deaths dropped 50%. Time to stand up to the NRA.
I’m from the UK, so I find everything you have just said very odd.
You might react to this by pulling up links and whatnot telling me how dangerous it is really here with gun and knife crime, except… I live here and it simply isn’t.
I suppose there is a chance it may have happened, but I doubt I have met anyone in my life, and they have not met anyone in their life, who has seen, let alone owned or handled a gun. Well, not quite for me, I have some Devon farmer relatives who have shotguns.
To me it is like wanting some sort of cartoon radioactive lump of something in the house. Yes, it looks cool and shines brightly. But you need to keep it in a lead lined box, away from people and for god’s sack don’t touch it. It has no actual use in the house, beyond being shiny, and if you are very lucky, very careful, with yourself, family and visitors you will not get into a situation where it kills you off.
That’s what I don’t get. I wouldn’t want that near my house, I wouldn’t want it in anyone else’s house and I wouldn’t associate with or visit anyone who had such an item.
If you want something shiny, get a lamp.
I’ll agree on two things: that (a) certainly this would not have happened if there were no shotguns around, and (b) maybe calling a kid a psychopath is premature.
But I’ve worked with a team of 11-12 year old boys for a couple of years now, and would vouch that they do in fact have a fairly decent understanding of consequences. I’m certain none of them – and there are a couple of “problem” kids who are rash and prone to fly off the handle etc. – would ever pick up a gun and shoot someone.
My sample size is arguably small. Who knows, maybe average 11 years olds outside of my town of Lake Woebegone would actually do that.
Obviously makes a difference if it was intentional, although as others have mentioned, there are good reasons why children shouldn’t be held as responsible for the consequences of their actions as adults should be; they’re simply not competent yet. But your larger point still stands. Farther down the intentional scale, a young schoolmate was accidentally killed by a 12-year-old Adlai Stevenson, the guy who grew up to eventually become Governor of Illinois, run for President against Eisenhower, and was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during the Cuban missile crisis (his memorable confrontation with the Soviet representative when showing the aerial photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba made for a pretty stirring moment in the movie Thirteen Days).
From the New York Times, December 31, 1912:
From Stevenson’s Wikipedia entry:
On December 30, 1912, at the age of twelve, Stevenson accidentally killed Ruth Merwin, a 16-year-old friend, while demonstrating drill technique with a rifle, inadvertently left loaded, during a party at the Stevenson home. Stevenson was devastated by the accident and rarely referred to it as an adult. However, in 1955 Stevenson heard about a woman whose son had experienced a similar tragedy. He wrote to her that she should tell her son that “he must live for two”, which Stevenson’s friends took to be a reference to the shooting incident.
I couldn’t resist. This was just such an epic typo. I’m using this in as many future conversations as possible.
ETA: Not trying to diminish your point. That little nugget just made me chuckle.
Many such accidents could be avoided by instilling the habit that a gun considered empty is pointed in safe direction and the trigger pulled.
What leads you to think that? With 100-80 million gun owners, there are only ~800 accidental deaths a year. Not all of those are in the home. Not all of those involve kids. Some of them are actually suicides labeled as accidents. Everyone I know who owns guns are very vigilant to keep things locked up and secure. Many of them have high end safes that would take a burglar a few hours to get into.
Hell the 1001 things some people buy when they have a baby, from Angel Care monitors to outlet plugs, they certainly they are thinking about the big dangers such as stairs and poisons as well as locking up knives and fire arms. Still, there are people who don’t do any of that, and those kids end up poking knives into outlets or missing front teeth from falls.
Are there people who don’t take precautions? Yes. And one is too many. I am all for education and safe handling. There should be consequences for negligent storage if someone gets hurt.
There isn’t a safe direction to point, in many cases.
And testing if a firearm is loaded by firing it is…well, poor thinking.
If your finger fits in the chamber, then there can’t be a cartridge in it. That’s why if you go to a gun shop and ask to see one, the clerk will almost always work the action, look in the chamber, stick a finger in it, and then hand the firearm to you with the action open.
We have many fewer deaths on the road than the number of people driving drunk, stoned, exhausted, using a phone, or otherwise distracted or impaired would suggest. Just because proper safety precautions aren’t taken doesn’t mean that every family will have a tragedy (thankfully).
This example isn’t even an accidental death, since the boy had prior exposure to using guns and purposely chose to get the shotgun.
I don’t propose it for testing but for making sure the test did not fail. People can get careless, routine, see things that they believe they should see, or misremember they did the test and they did not.
Yes, firing the thing is dangerous. Not a good thing to do. But less, way way less, bad than handling the gun while thinking it is empty and it is not.
A good test. The fire-empty-gun-to-be-sure I propose only as a supplementary measure that works even with unfamiliar guns and acts as another level of redundancy.
No. I’m sorry, but I just can’t with this. It’s idiotic. NEVER EVER BUT NEVER fire a gun if you’re not sure if it’s loaded. NEVER. NEVER EVER. DON’T EVER DO IT. EVER. IT IS NEVER OKAY. It’s literally the very first thing I was taught during riflery in scouting, followed immediately by “don’t ever point a gun at anything you aren’t okay with being dead in a hurry”. If you’re not sure a gun is loaded, you treat it as loaded.
Jesus. If this is what passes for “responsible gun ownership” advice these days, get me the hell out of this country.
That is the very point. Always click the empty gun in a safe direction. Never do it with one you are not sure it is empty.
You may be tired. You may make a mistake and miss a step in the checklist and believe you did the check. Then this one more “wrong” step can save you from bigger problems.
Never be sure about being sure.
Same with test-touching wires you believe are disconnected. Same with hard-shorting capacitors you believe they are discharged (the caps problematics is more rich due to the dielectric behavior but anyway). And so on.
Most modern guns should handle being dry fired ok. Rimfires can wear themselves down if they get dry fired a lot. If you are handed a gun to look at, slide the slide open and look in there. See if there’s one in the chamber. Pop the clip out. See if there’s anything in the clip. If you’re sure it’s clear, dry fire away from people, pets, cars, thin walls with people on the other side, etc., and point down. You shouldn’t be dry firing guns that you don’t know if they are loaded or not, and if you think you’re going to handle guns a lot, get used to the different types of slides and configurations of safeties and releases. Every gun has a slightly different “OS” so it’s good to have a standard procedure to clear it and verify that it’s clear when you are handed one and want to try it out. That’s the procedure.
That’s pretty much exactly what I meant.
That’s true, my point is that if a “majority” of people didn’t secure their guns we would probably have more accidental deaths.
This of course is a homicide, but for sure one that is atypical of your average murder.
How many trigger locks are in use in the U.S.?
How many gun safes are used every day?
How many weapons are stored in one safe with ammunition stored separately, every time?
No one knows the answer to these questions. You’re assuming the answers are “a majority”. Even within my own extended family, the numbers do not conform to your belief.
More anecdata…
Most everyone I know stores their weapons safely. Of the dozens I know, I think maybe two don’t have safes, but they use trigger locks. I don’t know where they store ammunition.
One friend who is a scary exception regularly “loses” handguns in his truck. I guess he keeps the truck locked when he’s not around, and there’s never been an incident. But that’s no way to keep firearms, and he really does know better.
Scouting taught me the same. I thought maybe I out of touch. Glad it’s not just me
