Just another day...

in gun-stupid America.


Yes.  Gun stupid.   Because how else could one describe a culture that thinks it's cute to allow children as young as 8 years to have fun with an Uzi?

Our culture is so saturated in guns and in the belief in an unrestrained, unrestricted 2nd Amendment that we've come to accept as normal children, CHILDREN, having access to submachine guns as a wholesome and fun thing to do. 

I have yet to hear one reason from a rational person on why we allow this colossal stupidity, yet the only reaction to this gross idiocy will be to shake our heads then wait for the next stomach-turning tragedy involving children and firearms to happen again.  And, dammit, we know it will as sure as we know the NRA's thug leadership will bully our congressional leaders into doing nothing.

And speaking of the criminal leadership of the NRA, it reacted as we all knew it would with a flippant tweet just after the 9-year old girl accidentally shot and killed her instructor.  But can we actually label this sort of criminal negligence an accident?  The instructor was ex-military. He would have known the perils of a kick-back when a 60 pound child pulls the trigger on an automatic weapon such as an Uzi. We'll never know what he was thinking, because his life is over, and the poor child who shot him dead has to live with the horror of that day for the rest of her life.   I call that child abuse.


The shooting range owner and her parents, and everyone else who does not see this as insane, need to have some deep psychological counseling to help them find out why their normal human instinct to protect innocent and vulnerable children failed them.  They need to find out why their love of automatic weapons overrode what most humans would consider common sense:  i.e., not letting children near submachine guns as a form of play!

Just another day in gun-stupid America!

From Mother Jones:

How hard is it to handle one of these guns? 

Quartz's Gwynn Guilford did the math: With the average American nine-year-old girl weighing about 60 pounds, and the average Uzi weighing seven to nine pounds, "That would be roughly equal to a 40-year-old man firing a 25-pound gun like, say, the Hotchkiss M1909 used in trench warfare in World Wars I and II—a weapon so heavy it sat on a tripod." (Ironically, the Uzi is designed to be relatively light in the hands of an adult, which can also make handling its powerful recoil more tricky.)

The shooting range's manager said that the girl's parents had signed waivers and understood the range's rules. Still, he told the Associated Press, "I have regret we let this child shoot, and I have regret that [Vacca] was killed in the incident."

Has anything like this happened before and what might it mean for the national gun debate? 

Sadly, this tragedy is not the first of its kind. An eight-year-old Massachusetts boy died at a gun show in 2008, when an Uzi he was firing at pumpkins kicked back and he shot himself in the head. The former police chief who organized the show and provided the child with the weapon was acquitted of involuntary manslaughter. That incident did have one positive outcome, in Cutilletta's view: It inspired neighboring Connecticut to pass a law banning anyone under 16 from using a machine gun at a shooting range.

Demented Gun Culture