To wonder what kind of idiot teaches a 9-year-old to use an Uzi

[BadLad]

m.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-28948946

A 9-year-old kills her shooting instructor when she loses control of the Uzi he is teaching her to use.

Apparently many (that's right, many) firing ranges have strict rules when teaching children.

Oh well, that's all right then, what was I worried about?

ArgyMargy "How is the size (land area) of California relevant here? What did I miss?"

I apologise. Stupidly, I took your earlier question literally. Of course, I now realise you were referring to population.

No worries, Gruntfuttock!

I have, I think Michael Moore tends to play fast and loose with facts, it's propaganda as much as the NRA.

So, Columbine didn't happen then?

I think it wsa a tragic accident. As far as I can make out the gun was on a "one shot" setting, which would enable her to control the recoil. Somehow, tragically, it came off that setting and into machine gun mode - which she obviously was ill equipt to handle.

I don't like guns at all. I can see no reason for the population at large to have access to them. And yet - my children have been to air pistol ranges, have taken part in archery, and fencing. As sports there is not much difference.

How can anyone support US gun laws? The colossal US homicide figures and the number of firearms deaths are a direct result of these gun laws. Anyone who supports them is in favour of regular murders, as far as I am concerned. There are many fine things about the USA, but their gun laws are loathsome.

And yet - my children have been to air pistol ranges, have taken part in archery, and fencing. As sports there is not much difference.

With respect Oakmaiden, that's nonsense. The child in question was being given the opportunity to let off a few rounds of bullets for the hell of it. She wasn't being given tuition in hand/eye co ordination, concentration, breathing, discipline and target practice.

"Somehow, tragically, it came off that setting and into machine gun mode - which she obviously was ill equipt to handle."

The instructor is heard telling her it is now on automatic. It wasn't accidental.

With hindsight, everyone is saying that a young girl simply isn't strong enough to handle a sub machine gun safely, particularly a jumpy one like a mini UZI with no stock. What we shall never know is why the instructor let her proceed. For he paid with his life for that decision.

The nearest I have ever come to hitting anybody was an idiot American who was very loudly going on and on about more guns making the world safer. This was days after the Whitehaven shootings, and when he came out with "if that had been America, someone would have gunned him down" I may have lost it slightly. Pointing out that in th USA it would likely have been semi automatics, not a shotgun and a rifle, and a hell of a lot more dead didn't go down well. Wtf is it with (some) Americans and guns?

merrymouse is right that the national laws and culture can override local feelings about guns

I lived in DC for a long time, it's a very liberal city where most people were happy with our handgun ban. Then a small group of gun nuts, supported by outsiders, launched a whole legal process to overturn the ban, which was ultimately successful when the Supreme Court overturned it on the basis of the 2nd amendment

When Bloomberg was mayor of New York he was often stymied in his gun control efforts by out of state interests

It almost wouldn't be so bad if you could just divide the country into pro-gun and anti-gun places but the pro gun people won't let that happen. Even if everyone where you live wants to ban guns, it can't happen.

bloody hell what a desperately sad scenario, that poor poor little girl

how many highschool massacres, shootings by children of their siblings, shootings of children by their own parents who whip the gun out from under the bed in the night and shoot the child entering their room will it take for guns to be better controlled and people to be less blasé about them.

they are lethal weapons FFS
are not

How can anyone support US gun laws? The colossal US homicide figures and the number of firearms deaths are a direct result of these gun laws. Anyone who supports them is in favour of regular murders, as far as I am concerned. There are many fine things about the USA, but their gun laws are loathsome.

Right, because no one ever gets a hold of meth or any other drug, since it's illegal... I can tell you don't understand how our gun culture works. It's not a bad thing, and as someone in the UK I don't expect you to.

The advantage you guys have is you're an island, a relatively small island. The entire UK is smaller than some of just one of our states. The only way to smuggle in guns is by boat, and you have a pretty competent navy to stop firearms from getting in and out of control.

America is not like that. We are surrounded by countries, and are bordered on Mexico which has a serious drug cartel problem. We have drugs, weapons, and human trafficking coming in at overwhelming numbers. There is no stopping guns getting into hands of people. There never will be. There's too many in circulation, the best we can do is manage an infected sore.

That said, the majority of our guns deaths are NOT from people who purchase guns legally. The people that purchase guns legally are collectors and they collect guns for the same reason that little girls collect barbie and all her accessories. It's fun, they like to do it. They have to pass criminal and psychiatric background checks. Occasionally you get a few who purchase for self defense, since you can shoot faster than police arrive. But if you have children, this is a non-option as the guns are locked up and bullets kept separate (if you're smart). The point is, gun owners are not one unified group. Everyone has a different reason for owning a gun.

Every once in a while, yes you get someone like James Holmes (Batman shooting), who slips under the radar. But it's not the norm. Guns are not as lethal as the media makes them out to be. You have an 80-95% survival rate if you get shot (unless it's to the head or heart). You're more likely to die from a heart attack than a bullet wound. They're not the be all end all you think they are. It's important to look at facts about guns instead of listening to fear mongering from the media.

Just to put things into perspective, yes we have gun problems. But we've never had an issues with Glasgow smiles, which really is much more brutal than a small bullet wound.

I don't even know where to start.

America is not surrounded by countries -- it has a long peaceful border with Canada and a very problematic border with Mexico, that's it. The US gun problem predates the Mexican drug war. Most of the guns used in the Mexican drug war come from the US, not the other way around.

There's lots of drugs and gangs in the UK too by the way. There's not a huge number of guns because of gun control. Drugs and crime don't automatically mean huge numbers of guns.

Guns are not like barbie dolls. I'll just leave that one there.

The number one reason for buying guns in recent polls has been self-defence, more than for hunting or collecting. Clearly not everyone does keep their guns locked up, given the thousands of children killed by guns every year, either to accidents or suicides.

And no, not everyone gets a background check before using a gun. There's the gun show loophole for a start, and not everyone acquires a gun legally.

I fully admit everything about guns in the media is biased but you are painting a picture that is not really accurate either.

To me, it doesn't matter how much of an aberration Sandy Hook was. Twenty little children shot to death, that's a fucking atrocity. When that happened in the UK they clamped down on guns because that's a reasonable response. In the US we just say, oh but that's so unusual, and just wait until it happens again a few months later. It's ridiculous.

That poor child. I can't imagine that she nor her parents are ever going to be able to recover from that.

I do find the juxtaposition of this thread with the 'I don't want my child to have a toy gun thread' interesting. While of course I don't compare handing a semi automatic to a 9yo with playing with a toy it does rather high level that guns are not toys.

If a 9 year old killed somebody doing dune car racing then I'm sure questions would be had about the decision to give 9 year olds cars and sending them dune car racing.

Guns are not like barbie dolls. I'll just leave that one there.

You certainly went out of your way to deliberately miss the point on that didn't you?

not everyone acquires a gun legally

Yep, already said the majority of criminals have not gotten guns legally.

The feds do crack down on guns sold illegally at gun shows, but more importantly, the majority of criminals don't get guns from gun shows. For starters you still have to register. It's not like these guns are going off the grid when they get sold. The majority of criminals get their guns from the black market, not gun shows.

When that happened in the UK they clamped down on guns because that's a reasonable response.

Except... We can't just stop guns. They're already here. The gun laws people try to make are just stupid and ineffective. They look good in headlines, but in practice they just create more problems than they fix.

I'm not saying guns are harmless or that we should hand out guns as cereal box prizes. But they're not the terrifying thing everyone thinks they are either. They're an instrument and how they're used is dependent on the person using them.

Yes, people need to use them responsibly. But aside from sensationalist headlines, we don't have a huge problem with them. Our crime is the lowest it's been in decades. Good Read.

Thruaglassdarkly That incident with the 8yr old is awful! The parents wants/wanted to sue the organisers, yet don't see that they were partly responsible for letting their shot a powerful gun!

As far as I can make out the gun was on a "one shot" setting, which would enable her to control the recoil. Somehow, tragically, it came off that setting and into machine gun mode

The instructor put it on full auto, in the video I saw you heard him say 'full auto' as she started firing & then the gun went flat against her chest, pointing in his direction & she squealed.

my children have been to air pistol ranges, have taken part in archery, and fencing And that is the same as giving a 9yr old a gun that is set to fully auto 'for fun' is it?

This guy was a father, are you happy to tell his kids that firing off such a weapon is not different to archery?

I saw that tv prog recently where the Dad gave his 3 YEAR OLD a pink gun for Christmas and was nagging her when she wanted to play with other thinks and wasn't sufficiently excited.

I felt sick, tbh.

"How can anyone support US gun laws? The colossal US homicide figures and the number of firearms deaths are a direct result of these gun laws."

Less law, more culture. Switzerland has an enormously high gun/capita rating, but very low crime. And the highest rates of murder in the US are in areas like Chicago and LA, which have the tightest gun laws in the US - total bans on handguns, etc in some counties.

The other problem with talking about "American Gun Laws" is there are no such things. There are a few federal laws, and then state/county laws, and this is the right thing. Grouping New Mexico, California and New York in one breath as "America" is as broad as grouping the UK, Spain and Romania as "the same" because we're all Europe. If you live in a leafy suburb of the Hampshires, you're unlikely to need a gun for self defence. If you're a rancher in New Mexico near the border with DEA and drug runners fighting running gun battles across your ranch, actually it's a genuinely hazardous place to live.

Interestingly, if you remove the three worst cities from the stats (LA, Chicago and I think Detroit), the rest of the US actually comes down to European levels of firearms deaths. And that's not an unfair thing to do - it still includes big urban areas like NYC, Seattle, Houston and SF. What it indicates is those three have very specific problems, and actually, in the rest of the US firearm laws don't really pose a huge problem. Federal laws would be overkill to deal with the individual issues of specific cities and for the same reason probably wouldn't actually do a very good job.
Also, there's a limit to how far the feds can actually exert jurisdiction. For instance, if a gun is manufactured, sold and owned within Texas, then local law could overrule a draconian Federal law and say "What goes in Texas stays in Texas, none of your business."

I'm not by any means suggesting there isn't a lot of room for improvement, but even if the Federal government decided to take dramatic action, individual states could cripple the legislation with respect to firearms manufactured and sold in-state.

The other thing worth bearing in mind is a tad over 50% of firearm deaths are suicides. I heard someone on the radio churning out the 30k firearms deaths/yr figure again today.
Well, 15k of those are suicides. Even if you somehow banned all guns across America and made it stick at a state level, you're not going to get rid of the suicides. That needs for America to sort out their abysmal public mental health provision. Focussing on the gun is treating the symptom, not the root problem. Of the other 15k, a fair number will be legitimate Police or self-defence shootings, then "accidents" (negligent handling), and then murders and homicides.

Of the latter group, it would be interesting to split out murders from legal and illegal guns. Legislation doesn't touch illegal guns - they're already black market. The only way to address them is enforcement. Making them more illegal doesn't work!

In the UK in 1997 gun crime was on the up. Less than 1% of firearms crimes were committed with firearms that had ever been registered. Dunblane was an horrific aberration, but even following the ban, gun crime just carried on rising because the ban on handguns didn't touch 99% of firearms crime! It didn't peak out until 2003-2005 when Operations Trafalgar and Trident started to hit home taking smuggled guns out of circulation.

Point is, the argument is now hopelessly polarised.
People calling "Ban Guns" are as bad as people calling "Moar Guns".
Banning all guns wouldn't address either suicides or organised crime, and they make up the vast and overwhelming majority of firearm deaths. By all means go after the shootings with legally held guns, but you're already onto a diminishing return as it's a relatively small part of the overall picture.

That doesn't mean do nothing, but I'm yet to see anyone make an attempt to come up with sensible suggestions that systematically address the root problems.

With most predators now not a concern, stupid people have to be removed from the gene pool in some manner.

Happily they often make their own arrangements.

I feel sorry for the little girl, not for the fucking moron who handed her the gun.

I have been an archery instructor (not professional) and tbh it wouldn't be appropriate to teach a 9yo to shoot one of our bows. Even if something did go wrong it would be unlikely to be life-threatening, but the equipment is too heavy for the average child to hold steady without shaking it all over the place, they probably wouldn't be able to hold it off the floor due to their height or draw the bow comfortably without letting go before they intended to. Teaching a 9yo to shoot a bow designed for a child, no problem.

Similarly I don't think it's necessarily inappropriate to teach a child to shoot a gun in safe, controlled circumstances, although I wouldn't let mine do it. But FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, think about the suitability of the equipment for the person using it and whether someone with less height and strength than an adult will be able to control it properly - that's just basic safety.

If you taught a young child archery using an adult bow, likely the worst consequences would be a bruised arm and a dent in the ceiling. Possibly a horrific hand injury if you were for some reason using carbon arrows that you hadn't checked for integrity first (which would be serious negligence anyway). With a submachine gun the potential consequences are much worse even than what's happened here - complete madness.

It is perfectly reasonable to believe that in typical usage a bicycle is more dangerous than a gun on a shooting range

No. It is reasonable to believe that in typical usage, the rider of a bicycle is more at risk from the actions of others than someone using a gun on a shooting range. The bicycle is not inherently dangerous. The gun is.

If everyone became normalised to thinking that bicycles were the best mode of transport available, the death toll on the roads would plummet.

If everyone became normalised to thinking guns were the most fun you could have on holiday, the death toll would rise.

Do you really not see the difference?

'It is perfectly reasonable to believe that in typical usage a bicycle is more dangerous than a gun on a shooting range'

To return to a point made by AgaPanthers earlier and also to address this ^^ -- yes people die doing all sorts of wacko things. But generally they do not kill someone else, using an item that is designed only to kill or maim some other living thing. The point where the fun element stops and the insanity begins is the point where the experience of using a weapon designed to kill as many people as possible in conditions of warfare is touted as a means liven up your vacation.

The child will have to live with the incident for the rest of her days. She will go back to school and sit with other nine year olds who have never killed anyone and will never have the memory of the sight of someone dying from Uzi bullet wounds right in front of her.

To a certain extent I agree with Hunton1 about the culture being the problem here. The Swiss example is an important one.

The US cities with the highest rates of murder are cities with specific problems, and even in those cities the problems are subject to a certain amount of ebbing and flowing. The main issue is the enormous profits to be made from drugs; the murders and shootings are overwhelmingly related to the narcotics trade. There is no real 'gun culture' in those cities of the sort you find in the rural midwest or south or other places where country music is the only thing on the radio, mainly because the undeniable drawbacks are so obvious. The vast majority of people in Chicago supported the gun ban (now overturned thanks to a Supreme Court ruling incidentally) and for the most part wished the police could get a handle on the gun problem and the gang problem and the drugs, and still do.

The points about federal vs state -- this isn't really how it works, especially if the Supreme Court has been involved, as in the case of the overturning of the Chicago gun ban and that of the state of Illinois.

Nor do I agree with the points about suicide. Most suicides using a gun are committed by people who have legal access to a gun. Many people commit suicide using other means. We have no way of knowing whether these people would have found another way of killing themselves if they didn't have a gun. But when a gun is available and someone wants to make sure they won't wake up in a hospital, there is nothing to beat it. One of exH's uncles blew his brains out, literally. He had tried to end his life a few years before with an OD.

The fact that he could legally get his hands on a gun even with a history of mental illness and one failed suicide attempt under his belt really was the problem the gun itself as well as the hold it has on the popular imagination is the problem. It is far harder to control large areas of turf in a city using knives or knuckle dusters or baseball bats as weapons than it is with a few guns and mobile foot soldiers in cars doing driveby shootings. It is the gun itself that gives the criminal the edge just as the gun gave Europeans the edge when America was first conquered the sub-machine gun gives the same technical edge the Gatling gun gave the Union forces in the Civil War. Think of the brave Polish cavalry being mowed down by the Panzer tanks and you will understand the importance of the actual hardware-in-the-hand.

Off to read the thread in a minute, some really interesting points. Just wanted to add that I have a 9 year old and I live in Texas. I have fired Uzis and the recoil is terrifyingly aggressive, even for an adult, even on manual. I have had firearms training and fire 9mm hand guns at my local range but would never dream of putting any firearm in the hands of a child. The art of firing a weapon is making your body absorb energy from recoil. This takes strength, skill and experience, none of which that poor child could be expected to have.