Are people in Boston friggin' stoopid...?

On Oct 29, 11:02*pm, wrote:
On Wed, 29 Oct 2008 06:55:52 -0700 (PDT), riverman
wrote:





On Oct 29, 8:43*pm, wrote:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/reg...28_DA:_Crimina....

Lessee here - an 8-year-old boy is dead, having shot himself with an
out-of-control full-auto Uzi, and the local DA is wondering if anyone
might have been negligent...uh, ya think?

While I firmly believe that gun ownership, in general, is a
Constitutionally-protected individual right in the US, I'm pretty sure
it doesn't apply to allowing preteens to operate full-auto
close-quarters combat weapons. *What possible defense to criminal
negligence could a parent or instructor possibly have to allowing a 8 YO
child to even handle such a weapon with a loaded magazine, much less
fire the ****ing thing?

And for those that don't know (probably most readers), a Micro Uzi on
full-auto is difficult to control for an untrained adult of average
strength and weighs considerably more than the average pistol or
revolver. *I have experience with ones in all of the available calibers,
including while fitted with sub-caliber training devices (.22), and I
would say that there is no way whatsoever that a child could possibly
fire any of them safely while on full-auto. *Such a firearm is not a
target pistol nor a "plinking" firearm, it is purely and exactly what it
was designed to be: a weapon, and children have no business whatsoever
even handling such weapons, to say nothing of actually firing the thing.

A sad sheesh,
R
...and yeah, the father, the (alleged) "instructor" and anyone else
involved in allowing this tragedy deserve some jail time, with the
alleged "instructor" never being allow to so much a touch a firearm ever
again or "supervise" anyone else doing so...

It ain't just Bostonians (wait, that didn't come out right...)

Stoopid people aren't just in Boston...
http://tinyurl.com/6obk3t

This is nothing like _an adult_ firing a revolver and having the barrel
hit them in the head due to recoil. *Aside from it being an adult, the
weapon the child fired was still firing when the recoil from the first
shot caused the muzzle flip - and the potential for something like this
was made it so stupid and dangerous. *In your video link, by the time
that woman got hit with the muzzle, that bullet was _LONG_ gone. *In
this case, it is difficult for an untrained adult to fire a weapon such
as a Micro Uzi (or 9mm/,45 cal. Ingram or other such machine pistol) as
a handheld and keep the muzzle on-target/downrange. *It would be
essentially impossible for an 8 YO child to do so, so IOW, the potential
for the second and subsequent fired bullets to go "off-target" was so
high as to be a virtual certainty, whether or not anyone was killed or
injured. *To allow any untrained person to fire such a weapon is stupid
and negligent. *And considering that "grip-squeezing" the trigger would
produce a burst of several rounds (depending on the exact configuration,
it fires about 25-30 rounds a second), allowing a child to fire _this
particular weapon_ is incredibly stupid and IMO, absolutely criminally
negligent.


All your points are accepted. But I'd say that giving a 40cal handgun
to a drunk woman to fire just for laughs is still bordering on the
insanely stupid, as is videoing it to post on YouTube. I'm not going
to play 'my stupid is bigger than your stupid'...they're both
excellent examples of why 'common sense' tends to be pretty uncommon
in the best scenarios. Sometimes lethally so.

--riverman