<p>
</p>
<p>My daughter might have her heart set on riding California Chrome or using a circular saw, but that doesn’t mean it’s happening.</p>
<p>Part of me wants to blame the instructor only. The problem is that we are acculturated to trusting authorities and believing experts. So if you had already decided to check out the gun range, and an instructor said, “Sure! We do that!” you might go along with it.</p>
<p>If there is a big lesson here, it is that sometimes your own good sense must trump the expert’s. (Of course, that assumes you have good sense to begin with – and apparently this family did not. They should never have gone to the range with this crazy idea.)</p>
<p>Gosh I feel sorry for that little girl!</p>
<p>The only other place I’ve heard of people encouraging their children to use assault weapons is ISIS training camps.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No kidding! We have to give our kids everything they ask if “their heart is set on it”?!</p>
<p>NRA tweets “7 ways kids can have fun at a shooting range” two days after this tragedy. </p>
<p><a href=“NRA: 'Children Can Have Fun At The Shooting Range' | HuffPost Latest News”>HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost;
<p>Classy as always. </p>
<p>
I blame the parents for their poor judgement in selecting a totally inappropriate birthday party theme for a 9 yr old; it’s akin to hiring a stripper for a kiddie party, but I blame the shooting facility more. By regularly hosting these kinds of parties for children & bachelorettes, they diminish the seriousness of safety concerns for people who don’t grow up with guns. </p>
<p>Does this ad make you think you might accidentally kill your instructor?
<a href=“http://bulletsandburgers.com/bachelor-bachelorette-parties”>http://bulletsandburgers.com/bachelor-bachelorette-parties</a></p>
<p>I think the parents, the instructor, and the facility all share equally in the blame department. </p>
<p>I blame the parents, kids would love to do a lot of things because they see something and think it is cool,but aren’t ready for it. By the age of 9 I was a gear head, working on cars,would have died to be able to really drive a car, but I don’t think my parents would let me do it. There is actually an analogy here, I couldn’t drive a car, but I was old enough to drive certain types of go karts, and was able to occasionally. A 9 year old shouldn’t be firing an Uzi, while I have no problems with firearm safety training, a 9 year old should be shooting a pellet gun or a .22, they are single shot relatively low kickback and you can learn to target shoot. Nope, not as ‘glamorous’ as an Uzi, but it teaches how to target shoot and such. </p>
<p>The one link I read was a classic piece of crappy journalism, I am not even certain what she shot. Uzi’s like most military style weapons come in two flavors, fully automatic mode and semi automatic mode, and the article kept referring to the one she shot as a machine gun or sub machine gun, which would imply it was fully automatic. There is a myth out there that fully automatic weapons are illegal, they aren’t, gun ranges often have a federal gun license, which allows them to own fully automatic weapons. I need to do more research, but if it was a fully automatic version that is even worse, with a semi automatic you have to hit the trigger for each shot, with a fully automatic, you hold it and it keeps shooting…among other things, machine guns fire at a higher rate (obviously), and that can add to the kickback, it is going to be stronger than firing one at a time. </p>
<p>Whatever it was, it was the classic case of parents trying to be a kid’s best friend rather than a parent, kids desires don’t have to be needs, and either the parents were totally clueless about what those kind of guns can do, or blindly assumed that the guy at the range would know what to do (and I agree with the comments in the article, the guy should have been behind her and to the side; if you stood next to someone at a military firing range like that, the instructor would likely rip you a new one and you would be doing bathroom cleanup for a week as well as many pushups, I promise you). </p>
<p>@miami, no one was talking about banning guns here, or gun control, so please don’t give us the knee jerk crap. We are talking the appropriateness of a 9 year old firing a major piece of military hardware, not about guns in general (this besides the fact that your analogy is way off the mark; automobiles and the other things have a safety record given the number of people driving and the number of miles that is better than guns; and to be brutally honest, in many places a car is a necessity, whereas with a gun most people don’t need guns to survive, other than maybe those who hunt or who live in rural areas where animals are a big threat, but that is meaningless here). Letting a 9 year old shoot an Uzi would turn the stomach of a lot of sportsmen and gun owners, I have friends of mine who are NRA members, several teach gun safety courses, their kids learned to shoot on .22’s at that age, and they would be horrified. </p>
<p>I’m also pretty anti-gun, but I also note that shooting guns at an early age is pretty common in many parts of the country (Boy Scouts start doing it when they are about 11). But this isn’t the same thing at all. I fault the instructor the most–this was unsafe. (I wonder, just in passing, whether the reaction to this story would have been subtly different if it had been a boy, rather than a girl, who wanted to shoot the Uzi.)</p>
<p>No child of any age needs to learn to shoot a Uzi. In fact, nobody needs a Uzi in the first place. These guns are designed to kill people. This is not akin to youth learning to target shoot on a riflery range or hunting. I can’t imagine any parent allowing this or even the range allowing this. As others have said, there are lots of other things that kids are not allowed to do that are even less dangerous than shooting a machine aimed at killing people. This is really insane.</p>
<p>Bullets and Burgers is not exactly the picture child that the NRA always pushes about responsible gun ownership and training. Where are the NRA’s talking heads about legal automatic weapons being ok in the hands of the general public? I don’t want to ban guns for sport or hunting, but how do you account for stupidity? What a tragic accident.</p>
<p>“I blame the parents for their poor judgement in selecting a totally inappropriate birthday party theme for a 9 yr old; it’s akin to hiring a stripper for a kiddie party, but I blame the shooting facility more. By regularly hosting these kinds of parties for children & bachelorettes, they diminish the seriousness of safety concerns for people who don’t grow up with guns.”</p>
<p>I agree. And I’m someone whose kids did shoot rifles at around age 11 or so – at camp, where riflery was a sport akin to archery - just about hitting a target, not being (as Bill Maher so nicely puts it) “ammosexual.”</p>
<p>“Gun experts contacted by CNN on Wednesday said young children should be taught to shoot with single-shot firearms rather than submachine guns.”</p>
<p>I’ve never read anything more stupid than this.</p>
<p>My daughter started horseback riding around age 9, which is an activity with some danger and risk. At age 9 did she start riding a 2-yr old thoroughbred racehorse right off the race track? No, she started out riding a calm, mature pony whose biggest concern appeared to be if the kid riding him would feed him a treat at the end of the ride. </p>
<p>A 9-yr old shooting an Uzi is a lot more dangerous than a 9-yr riding a racehorse. </p>
<p>I don’t have a problem with parents choosing to have their kids get some sort of age-appropriate gun safety education and well supervised target practice, although it isn’t a choice that I made for my own kids. But I do have a problem with reckless endangerment of children through such risky activity as shooting an Uzi. </p>
<p>This facility should change its policies regarding children shooting Uzis immediately. And it might make sense for there to be laws restricting the ages at which kids can use certain types of guns. We already have laws that restrict when a kid can drive a car, smoke, drink alcohol, etc. Why is this different?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It’s a bad idea to have 9 year olds driving. Do you think it isn’t?</p>
<p>yeah, I’m surprised that there are no laws requiring age limits for semi-automatic/automatic weapons. But I guess NRA would object.</p>
<p>Years ago, working in software development, I would jokingly refer to giving the user control over the software that I thought was inappropriate as “handing an Uzi to a toddler.” I know that a 9-year old isn’t a toddler, but what has the country come to that my example of insane behavior, selected precisely because I could never imagine someone doing it, has come to pass? </p>
<p>At least two families will never be whole again because of this treatment of a killing instrument as an item of recreation. For the record, I am not knee-jerk anti-gun or anti-hunting. </p>
<p>Our S was thrilled to be able to drive a tractor on private land when he was a pre-teen. It was a very short distance, with the driver right beside him and only up and down one field. That was the only opportunity any of our kids had to “drive” outside of an arcade until they were 16+ with driving permits.</p>
<p>If someone’s 9 yo daughter dreams of shooting an uzi, they have bigger fish to fry. This is troublesome on many levels.</p>
<p>"“Gun experts contacted by CNN on Wednesday said young children should be taught to shoot with single-shot firearms rather than submachine guns.”"</p>
<p>Why do you think this is stupid? You think a 9 yr old if fully capable of handling a semi-automatic weapon - really?</p>