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JonA
Trad climber
Flagstaff, AZ
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Technically it's the bullets.
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apogee
climber
Technically expert, safe belayer, can lead if easy
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Gun regulation?
Why?
Anyone has the right to own and shoot any kind of armament in this fine country of ours.
Right?
Anyway....here's a question for you unrestricted Gun Nutz: if you were the range instructor, and your boss had told you to go instruct a 9 year old in shooting an Uzi, would you have done it?
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JonA
Trad climber
Flagstaff, AZ
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I like to start the 9 year olds off with a few surface-to-airs first...as a warm up
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clinker
Trad climber
Santa Cruz, California
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I am a mostly happy gun owner. Lately I have been hearing voices. Prob'ly only my gun talking.
No worries.
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apogee
climber
Technically expert, safe belayer, can lead if easy
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Since when has repetition stopped some of the ST trolls? Even though it's rong, they just don't seem to give a shite.
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dindolino32
climber
san francisco
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 2, 2014 - 02:42pm PT
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Moose, it's original because the person who shot the bullets blamed it on the gun yet usually gun fanatics like to say that "Guns don't kill people, people do."
Not the whole gun topic. I am aware that one has been and always will be beaten to death.
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Bad Climber
climber
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The story is tragic and so avoidable. Technically, IF the girl had been able to control the weapon, no problem. Since it was HER lack of control, not the gun itself, which was operating correctly according to its design, SHE killed the range worker. It was HER finger on the trigger. So, yeah, sadly, it's the people not the weapon, even in this case. Nice try, though.
And no, I'd never allow a 9-yr-old anywhere near such a weapon. I started out with single shot .22's under my father's very strict supervision.
BAd
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Chaz
Trad climber
greater Boss Angeles area
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You'd never allow a 9-yr-old anywhere near such a weapon?
Then I guess it is the person, not the weapon. The person who allowed a 9-year-old near one.
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apogee
climber
Technically expert, safe belayer, can lead if easy
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Fact. And they did it because they thought it was appropriate to do, and there was $$ to be made off the parents.
The instructor's family gets my condolences, but the guy made a really bad choice. Of course, that little girl's life has been changed forever.
Because some parents & an instructor had really bad judgement.
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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What could possibly go wrong with a 9 year old and an Uzi?
Now the instructor gets the posthumous Darwin Award.
I have zero sympathy for the girl's parents.
The girl however has been tragically let down by all the involved adults.
Not one of them said "What just a friggin minute???"
The parents should be jailed for psychological abuse of a child.
They are manifestly unfit to be parents.
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dave729
Trad climber
Western America
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Hey OP! Nothing happens until a 'finger' pulls that trigger.
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dave729
Trad climber
Western America
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Remember the bb guns at the carnivals? They were tied down so you could not
swivel them to shoot your stupid cousin up on the ferris wheel?
If that Uzi had been leashed in such a way...
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stunewberry
Trad climber
Spokane, WA
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Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald has it right (http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/08/30/4317169/leonard-pitts-jr.html);:
Sometimes you read a sentence and you think to yourself: only here, only us. Here’s one such sentence.
“A 9-year-old girl from New Jersey accidentally shot and killed her instructor with an Uzi submachine gun while he stood to her left side, trying to guide her.”
That’s from a New York Times account of the death of 39-year-old Charles Vacca, who worked for the Last Stop shooting range in White Hills, Arizona. He died Monday when his preteen student lost control of the Uzi. Apparently, the gun was in “repeat fire” mode, the recoil lifted the muzzle, the little girl couldn’t master it and Vacca was struck in the head.
The child and her family, who have not been identified, were vacationing last week in nearby Las Vegas and had signed up for a package deal offered by the gun range. It included a tour of Hoover Dam, a hamburger lunch, an optional helicopter flight over the Grand Canyon and the chance to fire a range of powerful weapons, including sniper rifles, grenade launchers and machine guns. Everything was going fine until, as the Times put it, the “adventure went horribly wrong.”
For the record, some of us would argue that “horribly wrong” began, not when the child lost control of the gun, but when “adults” first placed this powerful piece of military hardware into her small hands. That act raises questions that are as blunt and indecorous as they are necessary and unavoidable:
What kind of shooting range allows a prepubescent girl to fire an Uzi? What kind of instructor does not guard against recoil when a child is handling such a powerful weapon? What kind of parents think it’s a good idea to put a submachine gun in their 9-year-old’s hands? And what kind of idiot country does not prohibit such things by law?
It is the last question that should most concern us. There’s not much you can do about individual lack of judgment. Some people will always be idiots. Some companies will always be idiots. But a country and its laws should be an expression of a people’s collective wisdom. So for a country to be idiotic says something sweeping about national character.
And where gun laws are concerned, the United States of America is — individual dissenting voices duly noted and exempted from the following descriptive — dumber than a bag of bullets. This, after all, is the country where you can take a gun into a bar. Where you can erect a shooting range in your own backyard. Where a blind person can get a gun permit. You think it’s insane that Arizona allows a 9-year-old to shoot at a firing range? ABC News reports that one in Texas allows them to do so at age 6.
Six.
God bless America. We legislate against Sharia law in places where there are no Muslims, much less an inclination toward Sharia. We pass laws to curtail election fraud despite the fact that election fraud, as a practical matter, does not exist. Yet we endure a yearly toll of gun carnage that makes civilized people in civilized places shake their heads in wonder and our only action is inaction.
We should mourn for this little girl who will have to live the rest of her life with the memory of what she inadvertently did. But let us also mourn for a country where what she did now barely qualifies as news.
We speak often and with pride of America’s exceptionalism — by which we mean our rights, our freedoms, our values. And they are, make no mistake, among the finest in the world.
But there are days when the bullets fly and the blood flows and no one can give you a good reason why this had to happen, and it occurs to you that we are also exceptional in the sheer, stubborn stupidity of which we are all too often capable. Last week brought another such day. A man was killed by a 9-year-old wielding a submachine gun.
Only here, only us."
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/08/30/4317169/leonard-pitts-jr.html#storylink=cpy
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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Only here, only us. Americun Exceptionalism
In the case of gun ownership we are indeed exceptional.
Possibly outdone by villages in rural Afghanistan and some cities in Mexico and Colombia.
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Salamanizer
Trad climber
The land of Fruits & Nuts!
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The fault lies in pure negligence, start to finish. It always does. Everyone always wants to blame something or someone else.
They need a scape goat. It's human nature.
Nobody dares to ever blame the victim.
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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Nobody dares to ever blame the victim. which victim?
the "trainer" or whatever he called himself?
What lapse of intelligence (or original lack thereof) caused him to let this happen?
He was guilty of gross negligence. He has paid the price.
As were the poor girl's parents. They will pay the price the rest of their lives.
or the child? she's certainly the most tragic victim. What horrors will that innocent child have to live with?
I guess I'm out of line here. Doesn't every 9 year old have a Constitutional right to an Uzi to defend herself?
Don't bother that she won't be licensed to drive for another 7 years at least.
Where was the Good Guy With A Gun? He could have stopped this.............
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apogee
climber
Technically expert, safe belayer, can lead if easy
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Where are all the usual GunNutz® in this thread?
Interesting how they all go *crickets* every time there's another unbelievably tragic gun disaster that might well have been averted with some simple, reasonable gun restrictions (i.e. age requirements for using Uzis)
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rlf
Trad climber
Josh, CA
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This whole argument is nothing more than circular logic. Nobody wins, nobody loses.
It's completely pointless.
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fear
Ice climber
hartford, ct
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Not many years ago in a nearby town, a 6 year old child was sucked into a monster woodchipper while working with his father. The father was a landscaper and his kids were helping out. Kid's clothes got tangled with a branch and was pulled into the contraption headfirst.
The typical brainless comments about needing more laws governing woodchipper sales or rentals lasted a few days.
But most people saw it for what it was, a horrible tragedy brought about by poor judgment by an adult.
But nobody here every suffers from poor judgment right? Of course not.
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