Authorities in southern Kentucky say a 2-year-old girl has been accidentally shot and killed by her 5-year-old brother, who was playing with a .22-caliber rifle he received as a gift.
I’ve written before that one of the fixtures of growing up in a rural state was regular newspaper stories about some kid who killed another kid or himself in a gun accident. And nobody wrote about the many other close calls. For example, I remember that a brother of a high-school friend accidentally blew a hole in his parents’ car roof with a shotgun, from the inside, an event that was literally inches from becoming yet another bloody newspaper story. (It was tragedy enough that he was able to procreate – his parents didn’t need make it worse by handing him a shotgun. But I digress.)
If it didn’t involve the death of children, it would be almost comical to hear gun owners rush to explain away this event with “no true Scotsman” logic (no responsible gun owner would do that, why are you picking on us?) The reason that we want gun safety legislation isn’t because we want to fuck with “responsible gun owners”, it’s because any shithead can get a gun, and a lot of those irresponsible shitheads do stupid things with them. Maybe if “responsible gun owners” had decided to put their pride in their pockets and realize that a lot of law is designed to rein in the shitheads that surround us, and that it isn’t personal, we might have fewer kids blowing each others’ brains out in backyards all over our fair country.
An Isolated Incident Caused by an Irresponsible Gun OwnerPost + Comments (250)