This is a tragedy, absolutely a tragedy. An 8-year-old boy accidentally shot in the head and killed at a gun show. When I first read the headline, I assumed the kid was playing with a gun that he wasn’t supposed to be playing with but then I read the article. His father was standing right there along with a gun instructor. They put the gun in his hand and told him to shoot it a pumpkin. He aimed it in the right direction and squeezed the trigger. So how did he shoot himself in the head and die? Because the gun in question was not a BB gun, not a .22 rifle… it was a mother-frakking UZI. They gave a fucking Uzi to an 8-year-old kid and they’re surprised he’s dead.
From the father:
“This accident was truly a mystery to me. This is a horrible event, a horrible travesty, and I really don’t know
why it happened.”
Really sir? You don’t know why this happened? How about the fact that you didn’t respect the deadly power that you were playing around with? How about the fact that you gave your 8-year-old child a lethal military weapon to play with? I agree with you that it’s a horrible event but my god, what do you expect? Guns are SUPPOSED to kill people, especially Uzi’s. That’s why they were invented. They are not intended to be given to children to shoot pumpkins! That’s what BB guns are for you criminally negligent idiot! You killed your kid. You did. You killed him. How can you not know why this happened? It happened because you gave your child a deadly military weapon. He fired it, lost control of it, and shot himself in the head. This is why 8-year-olds aren’t supposed to fire fucking Uzi’s and anybody with half a functioning brain cell should be able to figure that out.
Would you hand an 8-year-old kid a grenade and say, “just pull the pin and throw it over that wall, it’ll be fun, I’ll get the camera”? Would you put your kid behind the wheel of a top fuel dragster and tell him to just push on that pedal to go and that one to pull the chute once you hit 300 MPH? Would you strap a parachute on an 8-year-old and toss him out of a plane? Would you give an 8-year-old a bottle of Vodka? No? Then why would you hand him a military weapon designed to kill every last motherfucker in the room to shoot a pumpkin? The sheer idiocy and pointlessness of this child’s death is shocking to me on so many levels that I can’t even begin to fathom it.
As you may or may not know, I was raised with guns. I gave up hunting as a barbaric and pointless past-time when I was 16 but guns I know. I have shot lots of guns in my life. Shotguns: double-barreled (over-and-under or side-by-side), semi-automatic, pump, 20-gauge, 12-gauge, .410, you name it. Rifles: .306, .22, single-shot, semi-automatic, whatever. Pistols and air-guns too. I first shot a gun when I was so young I don’t even remember it. My father made a few rules for us kids where all these guns were concerned. First, he taught us to always treat every gun as if it could and would kill you. Even the Daisy BB gun that was so old and decrepit that sometimes the BB’s would roll out of the barrel. We were never ever allowed to point any gun, even an empty one, even as a joke, anywhere near the direction of another human being. Second, we were never allowed to play with toy guns. He didn’t want us to even consider the possibility that a gun could be a toy. There were guns and there were toys and the two were completely separate. He wasn’t even comfortable with squirt guns. Third, he taught us about gun-safety and usage from a very young age with age-appropriate guns. My brothers and I used a pellet gun and a BB gun and treated them like Dirty Harry’s Magnum until we were old enough and experienced enough to graduate to a single-shot .22 or a single-shot 20-gauge shotgun. If we ever had even the smallest accident, made the smallest mistake, when our dad took us hunting our gun was taken away. One day I hadn’t put the safety on my rifle. I was walking through the woods behind my dad with my gun pointed in the air and my finger on the trigger. I stumbled a bit and accidentally pulled the trigger firing a shot into the air. I spent the next three hours walking through the woods with my dad carrying an empty rifle and hearing about how important the safety is. He would have taken it away from me but he didn’t want to carry two guns.
Guns are not a joke, not toys, and not something you should take lightly. If you’re not trained to use a particular gun, if you’re not absolutely paranoid about how you use it, if you act like they’re “just good fun”, people get killed. Kids get killed. And this father should have known that. Now he does but this didn’t need to happen.
I hope that, if nothing else, somebody makes it illegal to give an automatic assault weapon to a child. I mean, this isn’t some sort of slippery slope “take the guns” away situation. I don’t have a problem with guns even if I do not care for the culture surrounding them or the uses to which they are put. But my god… this is just the same sort of common sense that keeps 8-year-olds away from using other potentially deadly things that they’re not equipped to handle (like race cars, fork lifts, grenades, jack hammers, high-voltage electrical wires, etc). This father would never have handed his son the keys to his car and I can’t imagine what would make him hand the kid an Uzi.
More From Ryan Sutter
- God As I Knew Him – Part 4
- God As I Knew Him – Part 3
- an actual personal entry…
- God As I Knew Him – Part 1
- Certified Apostate
