Handing guns to children is the limit of gun tolerance

My little brother turned 9 a few weeks ago. For his birthday, my parents and I planned a surprise trip for him to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and he was ecstatic. We bought him a stuffed hammerhead shark from the gift shop, and at home, it sits in a place of honor on his bed.

It would have never occurred to us to take a family trip to a shooting range, then hand him an Uzi submachine gun and turn it on full automatic.

On Aug. 24, a vacationing New Jersey family went to the Bullets and Burgers shooting range in White Hills, Ariz. The parents filmed a cell phone video of their daughter learning to shoot the Uzi that her instructor had given her. In the video, she fires a shot. A little puff of smoke appears on the target in the distance, and then the instructor says, “All right.” He flips the gun to fully automatic, and then, as the gun starts firing at 600 rounds a minute, the girl loses control of the gun’s aim.

The instructor, Charles Vacca, 39, was fatally shot in the head. He was married and had kids. He had a family who depended on him. A 9-year-old girl is scarred for life, and a community is shaken to its roots.

Here in the USA, we have a booming gun tourism industry. A family vacation can be a trip to a shooting range. We can legally hand children of any age a firearm and teach them how to shoot, without too many eyebrows being raised. Is this not problematic?

The 9-year-old New Jersey girl’s case isn’t alone. An 8-year-old Connecticut boy accidentally shot himself in the head in 2008 at a gun expo, unable to handle the recoil of another Uzi submachine gun on automatic. His parents, too, were filming on their phones.

A recent analysis by the New York Times found 259 children, age 14 and under, who had been killed in gun accidents since 1999. The overwhelming majority of the victims had been killed by other children who had had easy access to a gun and parents who supported gun usage. The youngest was just 9 months old, shot at point-blank in his crib by his 2-year-old brother.

Why would anyone living in America hand a kid a gun, or put a gun within reach of a child? To teach them to defend themselves? From what?

The paranoia of being attacked means the existence of organizations like the NRA and the ownership of about nine guns for every 10 Americans. That’s nearly twice the number of guns in Yemen, an active war zone dealing with political unrest, extremist groups and the aftershocks of a civil war. America is not. There is no reason for us to own firearms like assault rifles in what is ostensibly a peaceful country.

Thanks to pro-gun organizations and a deeply entrenched culture of gun usage, gun control is a hot issue with a graveyard mentality. Nothing changes until somebody dies, and the problem with implementing gun control is that Americans are becoming numb to gun violence, even when that violence claims children in tragic, preventable accidents.

We are not defending ourselves from terrorists or foreign soldiers. We’re defending ourselves from our fellow citizens, because you never know what “crazy people” might do. But these crimes we are so afraid of — robberies,

kidnappings, threats — become harder to commit without a gun.

That means reduced crime rates and less crazy things to defend ourselves from. That means no repeats of any mass shootings, it means no more handing irresponsible people weapons they don’t actually feel responsibility for, it means no more owning assault rifles and putting submachine guns into the hands of elementary schoolers who aren’t even tall enough to handle the gun in the first place, much less the recoil.

That 9-year-old girl is traumatized and an involuntary murderer. That 8-year-old boy is dead. Handing machine guns to children is irresponsible, but so is American gun culture, in which any psycho with an agenda can get an assault rifle and go on a killing spree, and any child, no matter how old, may be taught to shoot a gun.