People throughout this country enjoy their constitutional right to bear arms, armed with an arsenal of reasons why they aren’t to be blamed when someone gets shot and killed. I would not deny anyone their right to have a gun if that’s what makes them feel safe or manly or free or whatever the hell guns do for some people’s psyches. But please. If you need to have guns in your house, find a better hiding place. There are guys who hide their non-lethal pornography better than they do their weapons.
So today, we have yet another sad story about a two-year-old who managed to find her father’s gun in a place no one would expect a two-year-old to peek — under the couch.
Joyce would not comment on where the toddler shot herself but said, “A child that small, they don’t have the strength to pull a trigger with their index finger, but they are strong enough to use pressure from their two thumbs. Typically, they’ll be looking at the weapon when these things happen.”
Typically is not a word one wants to find in a story about a dead toddler, but “ain’t that America.”
Then we have yet another middle school shooting, this one in Nevada and in a town where I actually attended elementary school. (Sparks has the unfortunate tourist tagline of, “It’s happening here!”)
“He was really a nice kid,” schoolmate Amaya Newton said. “He would make you smile when you were having bad day.”
But for whatever reason, the boy, whom authorities have not identified, took his parents’ handgun to school, a federal law enforcement source said.
At this point it seems that he shot two other students and then shot and killed a teacher who was trying to intervene, after which the boy shot and killed himself.
Now there are four families whose lives have been damaged or destroyed because one unhappy boy found the gun his parents probably kept to protect themselves. The gun advocates are right though. It isn’t guns that kill people — it’s access to guns.
