<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>
<p>BB, I think the poster is on our side :-).
I think the stupidity the OP is referring to is the whole concept that young children “need”
to be taught how to shoot in the first place. </p>
<p>Newtown didn’t do it, and neither, unfortunately, will this. No, we can’t even begin to make a collective good faith effort toward addressing solutions to tragedies such as this one and Newtown, because what’s become abundantly obvious in the past several years, is that gun culture in this country has grown more extreme, not less. And it’s only the fringe that are passionate enough, and organized enough to lobby congress over gun legislation. Scratch the ideological surface of many people who think it makes perfect sense to put assault weapons in the hands of nine year old children, and you’ll also find an astounding level of certainty that such measures are necessary to effectively fight the “coming race war”, tyrannical government takeover, or grand scale terrorist attack. Some survivalist communities are dead certain vast arsenals of high powered weapons will need to be wielded by even it’s youngest members. There’ll be no talking to them about implementing laws that raise the age limit for the handling of high-powered weapons, or making it more difficult for the psychologically unbalanced to obtain fire arms. </p>
<p>sally305:
</p>
<p>Or, just sent them to the Fremont school district and they can get all the pictures and info in the text book. Maybe we should add it to the curriculum … field trips optional. 
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<p>
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<p>Why bother learning it from school? </p>
<p>Back when I was in elementary school in 1980’s era NYC, we got to learn all that from having older neighborhood boys take us up to Times Square during the day which was back then as far from its current Disneyfied state as you can get…</p>
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<p>Something like Newton was caused because law prohibited the protection of students and teachers there. There was no law problem here, just a group of stupid people being stupid, and it happens. This isn’t a gun control issue, the exact same thing could have happened if you allowed the kid to sky diving and they tapered with the parachute when no one was looking or if they went on a boat and no one could swim and the kid jumped into the water. How far do you want to legislate? And there’s a big difference between people who believe you should give a 9 year old a submachine gun and people who don’t believe it should be illegal, trying to imply that the two are the same won’t get you anywhere. </p>
<p>But that’ll be my last reply on that line. So feel free to disagree or whatever. </p>
<p>There is nothing wrong with being a gun owner, and nothing wrong with a child learning gun safety. We just have to stop glamorizing guns. I was shocked during my last visit to Las Vegas at the number of billboards touting the adventures of going to a shooting range. You have these giant billboards of folks holding automatic weapons, as if they are going to an amusement park.</p>
<p>There was a similar incident at a Massachusetts gun show a few years ago, except that in that case when the force of the Uzi’s recoil knocked the gun out of the 8 year old’s hands the gun pinwheeled on him, killing the child himself. </p>
<p>The gun show owner was a police chief, the father who took the child to the gun show was a doctor. The 15 year old working the gun show warned the dad that the Uzi was too powerful for his son.</p>
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<p>Emphasis is mine.</p>
<p>That incident has been referenced already in the thread a couple of times, but minus that interesting tidbit. What a tragedy. </p>
<p>Yeah, he apparently warned the dad TWICE. Poor kids–both of them.</p>
<p><a href=“Father Twice Told Uzi Too Powerful for 8-Year-old Christopher Bizilj - ABC News”>http://abcnews.go.com/US/father-christopher-bizilj-died-firing-uzi-urged-son/story?id=12565132</a></p>
<p>The crazy thing is that the gun lobby thinks silence on these cases is better than agreeing, like most sensible people do, that we need reasonable limits on who can have access to weapons–and which ones.</p>
<p>@sue-
Just goes to show you that supposedly responsible adults can act like teenagers with no sense of consequences , and a 15 year old can act like an adult. I am not anti gun, I am not a gun enthusiast, don’t own any and don’t plan to,. but have grown up around people who hunted, people who owned guns, so I understand for them what gun ownership is about. That said, glorifying guns, especially weapons that either are military or are designed to look like military weapons, troubles me. Guns are a tool, whether it is for protection, hunting, or even for sportshooting, and they are not toys. What bothers me about this glorification is it depreciates the responsibility of owning and shooting guns, it brings them down to the level of a shoot em up video game. The NRA spends a lot of time emphasizing gun safety, and when you go into the military it is literally at times beaten into you that the weapon is not a toy, and to treat it with respect. It is the casualness of all this that bothers me, that allowing a kid to shoot something, especially if the weapon in fact was in fully automatic mode, is no big deal, that bothers me. Plinking targets with a pellet gun or a .22 is a way to introduce kids to sportshooting and gun safety, allowing a kid to shoot a high powered, automatic weapon is just catering to the idea that these are toys or something to get a thrill out of. Movies and video games haven’t helped, when I see someone grabbing a military air cooled machine gun (think Rambo et all) in their hands and shooting it, I cringe, because it is total bs (besides the recoil, someone would burn their hands off grabbing it like that). I have heard of so called adults who use guns in various kinds of ‘adult play’, loaded ones, and I cringe for the same reason, it not only is needlessly dangerous,.but also trivializes what guns are. I don’t think guns are evil, I don’t think people who own guns are evil, what I do think is evil is treating them like toys…I would feel the same way if someone let a 9 year old kid play around with a plasma torch, it is inappropriate. </p>
<p>Interesting article in the NYT today, about a young man who killed his little brother.</p>
<p><a href=“Opinion | Reflections on a Shooting Range Death, From One Who Knows - The New York Times”>Opinion | Reflections on a Shooting Range Death, From One Who Knows - The New York Times;
<p>Well, I guess we now have our young person and high powered car comp.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.komonews.com/news/national/Teen-taking-Lamborghini-test-drive-dies-in-crash-273324141.html”>http://www.komonews.com/news/national/Teen-taking-Lamborghini-test-drive-dies-in-crash-273324141.html</a></p>
<p>Well, that’s at least different in that he was a legal adult and not a 9 year old. </p>