Today's award goes to a parent in Atlanta.
Police say a boy found a gun in a dressing room at an Atlanta mall and it fired when the mother pulled the trigger to see if it was real.
News outlets report the mother and son were inside a dressing room at the Adidas store in Lenox Square on Wednesday when the 10-year-old boy found what he thought was a toy gun under a bench. Atlanta police spokeswoman Stephanie Brown says the mother took the gun from the boy and pulled the trigger "to see if it was real." A single shot was fired.
There's more at the link.
Verily, the mind doth boggle . . . Surely the logical way to find out whether or not a gun is real, is to ask someone who knows about such things? Instead, she pulled the trigger - and found out the hard way that yes, it was real. By the grace of God, no-one was hurt, but what if it had been aimed at someone?
They say some people are simply too stupid to be allowed to own firearms. Sadly, stories (and people) like this are grist to the mill of the gun-banners.
Peter
9 comments:
The boy acted correctly, finding a firearm he notified a responsible adult, or so he thought.
A very common mantra from the anti gun crowd has always been "it's for the children."
Were this true we would have age appropriate firearms safety and handling instruction at every grade in public schools. Such course material already exists, the NRA's Eddie Eagle program being a prime example. And I guarantee there would be highly qualified volunteers eager to teach such courses, probably pro bono.
The numbers do not lie. There are estimated to be well over 300 million firearms in private hands in the US. A responsible parent can either attempt to ensure that their child will never encounter a single one of these weapons, or with a bit of common sense instruction guarantee that junior is trained to be safe no matter what he might stumble upon. Seems like this makes better sense than the current push for deviant sexual techniques in grade school, but I'm obviously a cranky old fart who just doesn't get it.
+1 on Uncle Lar... sigh
Honorable mention must go to whoever left a loaded firearm in a dressing room.
Doofus of the Day? Doofus is much, much too weak for such as this. Wackadoodle is to. Sometimes it's just not possible to adequately describe such an idiot on a family friendly website. I guess manure for brains is about the best that can be done here.
50-50 chance it was the mother's firearm...
In a unique experiment, firearm aficionado and macabré artist H.R. Giger distributed a number of handguns to his class of art students. All were unloaded, of course, but he noted that the first thing most of the students did was point their gun at someone. All knew what guns were; none had received any training.
My guess is that the little 10 year old miscreant pointed the gun at his mother, who promptly took it away from him. Then, for reasons that no one but the shooter will ever understand or know for sure, mom torches one off into the wall. I'm guessing it was an AD of sorts, maybe to prove the gun wasn't loaded, maybe to find out if it was loaded or not.
The argument that some people are too stupid to own firearms holds a lot of water. Want proof? Just spend an hour driving any expressway in medium to heavy traffic and watch the behavior of the drivers around you. If you want more proof, just talk to any police officer about accidents that he's seen.
Due to the common depictions of firearms in media (often made by the same people who want to take guns off everyone else because they're "too dangerous") I suspect most people without firearms training/experience have internalised that firearms are basically harmless toys that won't hit someone (most of the time) even if used by a skilled operator.
Which of they of course don't realise means that if you're not shooting at anyone, hitting someone does count as a miss (as in, "you missed what you were aiming at, ").
The anti-gunners own that one, wholly and without any argument otherwise. And they almost got exactly the results they wanted out of it, but mom didn't shoot herself or her son, nor did her son shoot himself or his mom. So, too bad, so sad, no victim's blood to dance in this time around. Maybe next time.
In the meantime, they'll vilify gun owners and blame loose legislation and call for more bans on guns, and fight against any sensible changes that would do any real good (like Eddie Eagle programs, or mandatory gun safety courses in schools, etc) to prevent this kind of dangerous ignorance about firearms. That way, the next time a kid finds a gun in a dressing room, and mom is ignorant enough to pull the trigger to see if it is real, maybe, just maybe, they'll get the result they want.
And then they can blame us as though it was our fault.
A North American Arms .22 LR pocket pistol does look like a "toy gun" to the uninitiated ...
So do a lot of "pimp guns", BTW.
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