children and guns
since the death of an 8 year old at a gun club this week, there has been much discussion in the media about the appropriateness of the actions of the father and the club.
i am a gun owner. i have never shot a mini-uzi. i have an almost 7 year old son. he has not fired a gun yet, but he has been allowed to handle unloaded guns under adult supervision to start learning gun safety. the first rule we taught him about guns is that if he finds a gun LEAVE THE AREA and TELL AN ADULT.
i think it's a horrible tragedy that an 8 year old died in what should have been a well-supervised activity. but i'm very disturbed at the calls for new laws.
i'm not a lawyer, but i'm pretty sure both the club and father can possibly be held liable for negligent homicide. it seems pretty stupid to put a loaded, fully automatic weapon in an 8 year old's hands without a trained adult keeping their hands on the weapon. i see a good argument for that being criminally negligent. so we already have laws in place to deal with the outcome of this particular situation.
would a law have prevented the child from having the loaded gun? probably. but do we need a law to prevent a situation that happened once? should we be trying to legislate common sense? it seems that once there are rules about what common sense guidelines are, people immediately start looking for the loopholes resulting in more and more laws for the edge cases when we already have procedures in place (like negligent homicide rules) to deal with these edge cases. it seems like the more rules we have to replace our own common sense (because, apparently, some people just don't have any), the more we don't listen to our own common sense.
it is a horrible tragedy that this child died and my heart goes out to the people involved eventhough i think they should have known better. i can't say i haven't made stupid mistakes; i've just been lucky enough that they haven't hurt anyone.
i am a gun owner. i have never shot a mini-uzi. i have an almost 7 year old son. he has not fired a gun yet, but he has been allowed to handle unloaded guns under adult supervision to start learning gun safety. the first rule we taught him about guns is that if he finds a gun LEAVE THE AREA and TELL AN ADULT.
i think it's a horrible tragedy that an 8 year old died in what should have been a well-supervised activity. but i'm very disturbed at the calls for new laws.
i'm not a lawyer, but i'm pretty sure both the club and father can possibly be held liable for negligent homicide. it seems pretty stupid to put a loaded, fully automatic weapon in an 8 year old's hands without a trained adult keeping their hands on the weapon. i see a good argument for that being criminally negligent. so we already have laws in place to deal with the outcome of this particular situation.
would a law have prevented the child from having the loaded gun? probably. but do we need a law to prevent a situation that happened once? should we be trying to legislate common sense? it seems that once there are rules about what common sense guidelines are, people immediately start looking for the loopholes resulting in more and more laws for the edge cases when we already have procedures in place (like negligent homicide rules) to deal with these edge cases. it seems like the more rules we have to replace our own common sense (because, apparently, some people just don't have any), the more we don't listen to our own common sense.
it is a horrible tragedy that this child died and my heart goes out to the people involved eventhough i think they should have known better. i can't say i haven't made stupid mistakes; i've just been lucky enough that they haven't hurt anyone.
posted by -s at
9:12 AM
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