Depends on if the exploding is part of toasting the bread.
As somebody outside of the USA it boggles my mind how you guys think. The right to bear arms results in terrible tragedies yet still its impossible to have a rational debate over gun control. How many dead school children is it going to take?
Truthfully its not about dead children but an unhealthy mindset around having guns resulting in more perceived personal power. The rights of the individual screwing over the rights of a society.
What use are laws? Criminals just ignore them!
If the police superintendent of Chicago thinks they have some lax gun laws, then he has never been to Arizona. I mean really, if lax gun laws were the root of the problem in Chicago, Arizona should be a war zone 24/7, 365 days of the year… but it isn’t.
No, but squeezing almost twice as much population as the State of Arizona into an area ~1/20th the size of Arizona might have something to do with it…let’s take a look at how those Arizona gun laws do when taken on a per capita level:
Surprise, surprise -
From murders to suicides, Arizona is consistently among the most deadly states in the nation for gun violence, federal records show.
Over a nine-year span, the state’s rate of gun deaths of all types ranked seventh in the United States and sixth for gun-involved slayings, according to an Arizona Republic analysis of death reports compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The rankings are based on data from 1999 to 2007, the most recent statistics available from the CDC.
Overall, violent-crime rates in Arizona are not far from rates for the U.S. as a whole, but the rate of deaths specifically tied to guns surprises national experts.
Houngan
3591
Hilariously inept piece by Rolling Stone: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/pictures/the-5-most-dangerous-guns-in-america-20140714
And what are the 5 you ask? Apparently, Pistols, Revolvers, Rifles, Shotguns, and Derringers. The comments are having a good time:
Top 5 Most dangerous Bears to watch out for this Summer
1.) Bears with teeth
2.) Bears with claws
3.) Large bears
4.) Small bears
5.) Medium sized bears
Wow, that was an absolutely terrible piece of whatever. She could have saved some face by saying that yes, revolvers and derringers are also pistols but for whatever reason the ATF chose to present the list in that way. But instead of saying that, she just seems to string together a bunch of non-sequiturs.
Some grenade launchers, shotguns, and rifles also have rotating barrels, but the term “revolver” is generally used to describe handguns.
Well, thanks. If someone is perforating me with a Gatling gun, at least I’ll know that the ATF won’t classify it as a “revolver-related” death.
The start of her next list (on school shootings) doesn’t start out much better:
There’s no such this as a minor school shooting.
That is a truly astoundingly bad article. Particularly since there really is something to be said on the subject, namely that the focus should be on handguns, even if assault rifles grab the headlines. Drilling down to specific types would also be informative - didn’t someone in this thread point out it was primarily cheap revolvers?
There’s no such this as a minor school shooting
I had to look that up to see if that was real.
To be fair, I wouldn’t slam someone on a typo like that. My fingers frequently substitute words like that when I’m typing, and all too often I discover the error after I’ve submitted the post. “Every” for “ever,” “length” when I meant to type “lengthy,” “sight” for “site” or vice versa, and other random errors. Odds are there’s one in this post that I won’t notice until tomorrow.
It does say something about the proofreading or lack thereof on the Rolling Stone site.
It was the flipping first paragraph. You’d think that ANY level of QA would have caught that.
I’m assuming her awful articles only appear on the web, and it’s likely there’s no proofreading at all.
I mean really. How many people would let “pistol” followed by “revolver” pass? Her, obviously, but who else?
Not actually pro or anti-gun, but a clever video encouraging you to lock up your guns.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKHeXC7L85s
Who gives a 9-year old a loaded, fully automatic machine gun??
I think the video cuts off just before the incident.
Mohave County Sheriff Jim McCabe described a video taken of the accident as “ghastly.” His office released a short video of the girl taking her first few shots.
He said the girl safely and successfully fired the 9 mm weapon several times when it was set in the “single-shot” mode.
He said the weapon was put into the “fully-automatic” mode before the girl fired again with the instructor standing off to her left. The weapon recoiled and drifted left as the girl squeezed off an undetermined number of rounds as she maintained possession but lost control of the Uzi as it raised up above her head.
There was a similar incident a few years ago.
Lynch
3599
“Let ‘em Rip!”
R.I.P. indeed.
You know, I can’t get too worked up over this. The child was in a controlled environment being tended by a professional. Everyone involved (well, maybe not the 9-year-old) knew and accepted the risks with their eyes open. It doesn’t even really look to me (as a layman) like he was cutting any corners, safety-wise. I feel bad for the little girl though.
You can debate what age is too young to participate in a dangerous activity like this, but in my mind this is no different from an instructor getting killed by an errant go-kart or falling off a bridge while setting up a bunji-cord or whatever. It’s not really a gun-control issue.
That said, a BBC article about this story interviewed the owner of the shooting range, who said that 9 years of age was well within their acceptable range for (supervised) use of fully-automatic weapons, and that they allow children as young as 5 (!) to fire 22s. That seems a little young.
Lynch
3602
Efuckingxactly! Look at those thousands of go-kart instructors killed each year or the massive security issues we’re facing with fatal bungee incidents these days.
THIS IS NOT A GUN CONTROL ISSUE!
THIS IS NO A GUN ISSUE!
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people!
I do think there’s reason to question whether teaching nine-year olds to fire fully-automatic weapons is all that wise. I can see basic gun safety training and getting the started with, say, target rifles and stuff early on, but an Uzi seems at best gauche and ostentatious and at worse irresponsible.
Thesper
3604
Exactly. Who puts a nine year old in a position where if they make a mistake they can kill someone? They can’t consent to that level of risk at that age, and they can’t fully imagine the consequences of a mistake. If you’re going to let someone that young fire a gun, it should be under the same conditions you’d let them drive a car - that if they tried as hard as they possibly could to kill someone, you could still stop them.
I think the question that some people have is whether there should be anything legislated regarding the situation. It makes me think about keeping a kid in the car while you go grocery shopping. There’s a certain logic to not doing it: if they’re too young, they may die from heat in the summer, they’re always susceptible to kidnapping, etc., but at what point is it criminal neglect vs. just being stupid?
edit - just to clarify, I think the laws on the books are likely enough to handle situations like this, but others may feel differently (and IANAL)
I know that hyperventilating and all is hard work, but if you look at the actual situation here, you’ll actually see that gun control is, in actual fact, not an issue in this particular case… unless you want to use it as an example of an unintended consequence of successful gun control.
Here’s the deal: it is vastly difficult to get a license to privately own a fully-automatic weapon in the US. Like, close to impossible. Because those types of firearms are, you know, tightly controlled. Fully-automatic firearms that were legally purchased and owned have been the cause of death of three people this year… wait, I think I’ve got the time-frame wrong, it’s three in the last decade. Oh, sorry, I’m bad at math… this instructor was in fact the third person to be killed in the US by a privately-owned fully-automatic weapon in the last 80 years.
The place where this incident occurred was basically a gun theme-park. These guys have a license to own and operate fully-automatic weapons (including a big vehicle-mounted machine gun, apparently) and they allow people to fire them on this remote range under supervision. It’s a place where people go to fire weapons that they are not legally allowed to own. In other words, this place exists primarily because a certain class of weapon is (rightfully) effectively controlled.
