Toddler Dies After Mistaking Gun For Realistic Wii Controller

[rwguinn]

OEJ. do you carry a weapon for personal defense, a weapon that's ideally loaded and ready to fire at a seconds notice? Do you keep a loaded home defense weapon at the ready and if so, how did you deal with your son having possible access to that/those weapons before he could properly understand firearms training..like when he was three ?

Or are your guns only for sporting use?

Non Sequitur
It makes no difference what they are for--Unless you are going ad hominem on us.

 

[Magyar]

A few points:
1) Us "NRA gun nuts" wouldn't argue that the child should be armed. Rather, we argue that young children should be educated to respect guns and not to treat them like toys. Dad's toolbox isn't full of toys and neither is his gun safe. This tragedy occurred, in part, because this child didn't learn that lesson.

This is a priceless gun idiot quote and why most people including the poster shouldn't be allowed to own one because they OBVIOUSLY missed the reality train.


Are we TRULLY supposed to believe that a a 3 year old - a vast majority of whom haven't mastered potty training yet - is supposed to have "learned the lesson" that guns aren't toys in a house hold where an "adult" who is supposed to know better treats a gun EXACTLY like a toy? Which is typical of just about EVERYONE I've even met who owns a gun.

 

[rwguinn]

This is a priceless gun idiot quote and why most people including the poster shouldn't be allowed to own one because they OBVIOUSLY missed the reality train.


Are we TRULLY supposed to believe that a a 3 year old - a vast majority of whom haven't mastered potty training yet - is supposed to have "learned the lesson" that guns aren't toys in a house hold where an "adult" who is supposed to know better treats a gun EXACTLY like a toy? Which is typical of just about EVERYONE I've even met who owns a gun.

Evidence?
All that speaks to is the quality of people you associate with.
Anecdotes is NOT the plural of Datum...
ETA: The odds are that there are a large number of gun owners in your circle of acquaintances, but you would never know they are such. They are responsible gun owners. They don't flaunt it.

 

[Stout]

Non Sequitur
It makes no difference what they are for--Unless you are going ad hominem on us.

Good grief...who are you, Ted Nugent ?

Of course it makes a difference, a home defense weapon doesn't reside in a gun safe. Suppose a rapist with a rusty knife bursts into your home. What are you going to do, ask him to wait while you go get your gun from the safe and load it?

HECK NO ! you want that 12 gauge loaded and handy.

But if you only go occasionally and blast clay pigeons and birds, then the gun serves an entirely different purpose....right?

 

[Andrew Wiggin]

Good grief...who are you, Ted Nugent ?

Of course it makes a difference, a home defense weapon doesn't reside in a gun safe. Suppose a rapist with a rusty knife bursts into your home. What are you going to do, ask him to wait while you go get your gun from the safe and load it?

HECK NO ! you want that 12 gauge loaded and handy.

But if you only go occasionally and blast clay pigeons and birds, then the gun serves an entirely different purpose....right?

I consider myself a responsible gun owner, and I have a home defense plan. I think rather than just point out misconceptions, I'll be proactive and share what I do.

I live in a rough neighborhood of a rough town, and I have a profession that implies to the more ignorant that I have access to street drugs and pharmaceuticals. (I don't, but there's no arguing with ignorance) I've had to balance the need for the ability to protect my family against the risk involved in having ready weapons. My first line of defense is anonymity. I keep an unlisted number so my name and address aren't in the phone book. I don't tell very many people my address, and only if there's a good reason or if I'm asking them to visit. I keep ground level windows shaded. I have lights on timers so that people can't tell if the house is unoccupied by watching it.

The second line of defense is delay. There are a couple of exits to the house, and I primarily use only one. The infrequently used door has a kick bar installed; it can be easily opened from the inside but would have to be completely destroyed to get through it from the outside. The main door has a reinforced strike, and the window is too narrow to crawl through and far enough away from the inner lockset to make it hard to open the door that way. The garage door has a locking bar I made that can hold it shut even if the regular lock is broken. All this means that if someone is breaking in, and I'm home, I've got time to prepare, make a phone call, and get ready to meet them. If someone breaks in while I'm not at home, they'll leave enough trace that I'll know it, and can call the police rather than entering alone and possibly confronting an intruder already present.

The third and least important line of defense is weaponry. I keep a handgun for home defense, and I keep it unloaded and in a safe. There are safes that can be opened quickly, made just for the purpose of home defense. I've timed it; I can, from anywhere in the house (not a tiny place-three bedrooms, basement, attached garage) have the gun in my hand and loaded in an average of 13 seconds. If I'm out in the garage, it takes a bit more, and obviously the closer I am to the safe, the quicker. I don't keep the ammunition in the safe. It's in clips velcroed to the back of the shelf the safe is bolted to. Just in case the situation doesn't call for putting holes in people, there's a full sized can of police pepper spray right there too, and an assortment of batons and pokey bits. My wife and I have both trained with firearms and various eastern and western martial arts, and can defend ourselves with either handgun or baton.

A few details: I bolted the safe to a high shelf so that little fingers couldn't reach it, and little eyes couldn't even see it without jumping. I used to keep the safe bolted to a nightstand, but the nightstand was portable, and the safe implies something valuable within it. A sufficiently motivated thief could just steal the entire nightstand, but you'd need time and heavy carpentry work to get the shelf out of the wall and out of the closet.

A few extra thoughts: It's good to teach kids how to use guns. If they know how much damage a gun can do, they're less likely to see it as a toy. If they're exposed to it in a non-mysterious way, they're less likely to see it as something attractive. I was shooting guns at three, with pretty intense supervision. Literally, their hands were on mine at first. I had the first gun I could call my own at 11. Again, if I wanted to use it, there was supervision involved. Less than when I was 3, but if I wanted to use it, I had to tell my parents what I was doing, where I was going, who I was with, etc. When I came back, I had to prove I'd properly unloaded and cleared it before bringing it in the house. If I hadn't been taught that the gun should be respected, or if no supervision had been given it would have been negligent of my parents. By the time I was 11, some of the responsibility was mine, but only because they taught me properly. By having game controllers that looked like real guns the parents in this tragic story were unintentionally teaching their kids the opposite of the message I got. It's just a toy, the effects aren't real, just a game, acceptable to just pick up and use, etc. Sorry they lost their kid, (mostly sorry for the kid, who deserved better, and still had a life to live) but it's on them for how they handled this.

A

 

[One Eyed Jack]

OEJ. do you carry a weapon for personal defense, a weapon that's ideally loaded and ready to fire at a seconds notice? Do you keep a loaded home defense weapon at the ready and if so, how did you deal with your son having possible access to that/those weapons before he could properly understand firearms training..like when he was three ?

Or are your guns only for sporting use?

My guns are for sporting use. I don't have them for home defense.

My point is that whatever the reason for owning a gun, it is the responsibility of the owner to use it and store it safely. The parent is the problem here, not the gun.

 

[roger]

Of course it makes a difference, a home defense weapon doesn't reside in a gun safe.

Uh, yes it does.

If you are concerned about break ins during the day, you conceal carry or open carry. Gun safe is in the bedroom, readily accessible at night. Around 70-80% of breakins and gun use for self defense occurs at night (I don't have the percentage at hand, but it is in that range).

This is what is advocated over and over in the gun mags, in self defense classes, by the police, by CCW advocates, by the NRA, etc.

 

[Stout]

Excellent post there Andrew and I've got to say it sounds like you represent the epitome of responsible gun ownership.
I live in Canada, so this whole idea of personal defense weapons and hone defense is a rather alien concept and the whole "gun control" issue is really only something I'm exposed to in forums like this one.

I actually switched sides, so to speak. I went from pro gun ownership ( from an academic perspective, since it doesn't affect me ) to thinking that the general public shouldn't;t be trusted with guns based on anecdotes from gun owners that I came across during my research.

Things like having, and leaving in, a dedicated under the seat car gun coupled with a "not my problem" attitude if that gun gets stolen by some teenager breaking into the car. Or the idea of "kit guns", where there's a dedicated firearm in something like a tackle box. Or guns in every room of the house "just in case".

I'm liking your precautions against securing the gun against theft should someone break into your house while you're absent. A buddy of mine owns a hunting rifle and he was so concerned about it getting stolen from his apartment in the city that he actually relocated it to his uncle's place out in the woods where there's less chance of that happening and it's closer to the place he'll actually be using it.

OEJ..I agree, the parent, not the gun is the problem and had the parent had the responsible outlook that Andrew does, this event wouldn't have happened. I have no way of knowing just what percentage of guns owners aer properly responsible. I suspect they might be a majority but the idiots get all the press.

 

[Stout]

Uh, yes it does.

If you are concerned about break ins during the day, you conceal carry or open carry. Gun safe is in the bedroom, readily accessible at night. Around 70-80% of breakins and gun use for self defense occurs at night (I don't have the percentage at hand, but it is in that range).

This is what is advocated over and over in the gun mags, in self defense classes, by the police, by CCW advocates, by the NRA, etc.

Does this reflect reality though ?

 

[Schrodinger's Cat]

Evidence?
All that speaks to is the quality of people you associate with.
Anecdotes is NOT the plural of Datum...
ETA: The odds are that there are a large number of gun owners in your circle of acquaintances, but you would never know they are such. They are responsible gun owners. They don't flaunt it.

I agree rw. many people will say 'all people i know in group x act this way' but typically all that means is that you are making a judgement not based on people as a group, but by the members who are most obviously part of said group.

let's take pot smokers. many people will say that all pot smokers are stoner losers. But that's just because those are the types of people who most obviously smoke pot and who are most likely to be open about the fact that they use it.

in reality, I work in a state where it is a decriminalized. most people i know smoke pot. and most of of them are successful, responsible people who use pot responsibly. but they are also much more likely to be discreet about it, so they don't get added into the narrative of what a pot smoker is supposed to be like.

 

[rwguinn]

Does this reflect reality though ?

Yes

 

[ponderingturtle]

I haven't seen gun supporters absolving the father of responsibility. I have seen them reacting to the "guns are the problem" attitudes of some posters.

Roger compared it to leaving a child alone for a second in a bath. That I took at the time as defending the fathers irresponsible behavior.

 

[jayh]

I knew from the title this would be another religious war.

this strikes me as no different than all sorts of deadly things that could be left around the house. It's the adult's job to take precautions.

The first thing that popped into my head is antifreeze. Looks like a soft drink, supposedly tastes good, results deadly (every year to both children and pets). Doesn't justify banning possession of antifreeze. Does justify responsibility

 

[jayh]

My nephew learned about guns at age 3. father is a police officer; he knew that guns were not safe. When asked about any type of gun (toy or real), he simply stated : "Only for papa".
....

Which proves, anecdotally, that police officers should not be allowed to have guns.

The irony, I think is that the gun control crowd seems to have no problem with cops carrying guns, yet cops are not any better than the rest of us.. If a cop can save lives by carrying a gun, why cannot a (similarly vetted) citizen?

I encountered this bizarre dichotomy a while back while shopping for child car seats in a Babies-R-Us store. There was a cop there to give advice on child seats (I'm not sure what makes him more expert than safety engineers) but there he was in a room full of young children, gun at his side. And I wondered how much people would be SCREAMING if anyone without the uniform was doing EXACTLY the same thing. I'm sure the argument would go "I don't care how 'good' you are, guns are too dangerous to keep around young children ... etc".

But there he was. People wandering around and no one saying a damn thing. Hypocrites.

 

[Cain]

If you ever left your kid in the bathroom for 'just a moment' to grab a towel or something you probably exposed your kid to more risk than this father did*. If you have a pool and ever mistakenly left your door unlocked, well the stats for swimming pool drowning just ain't pretty.

This could very well be true, but a parent who accidentally leaves their kid in a car seat, or forgets to close the screen door, or finds herself distracted by a phone call, has been understandably diverted. These are innocuous, inescapable routines of daily life. A person who keeps a gun lying around in the presence of a child is carrying on irresponsibly.

 

[roger]

This could very well be true, but a parent who accidentally leaves their kid in a car seat, or forgets to close the screen door, or finds herself distracted by a phone call, has been understandably diverted. These are innocuous, inescapable routines of daily life. A person who keeps a gun lying around in the presence of a child is carrying on irresponsibly.

The father did not "keep" a gun lying around. Read the link - the gun was normally kept in a secure location unreachable by the child, the guy took the gun out to investigate a possible prowler, but instead of returning it to it's proper location he had a brain fart and laid it on a table. Not unlike the brain fart you might have that would allow a toddler a minute of unsupervised time - time when they might, if the back door was forgotten to be latched, wander into the back yard and drown in your pool.

edit: I'm not making light of either case - they are both tragedies. I'm just pointing out we have a ton of unsafe stuff in our homes, and a moment's inattention can be deadly. I find it odd how guns get singled out, but then I grew up with guns, and I regard them as rather less dangerous than other activities I do, such as mountain climbing, or ride a motorcycle, or drive my car.

 

[Architect]

O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us

 

[Cain]

The father did not "keep" a gun lying around. Read the link - the gun was normally kept in a secure location unreachable by the child, the guy took the gun out to investigate a possible prowler, but instead of returning it to it's proper location he had a brain fart and laid it on a table.

That circumstance (if true) renders his actions considerably less reckless, but still not quite in the same category as leaving a door open.

edit: I'm not making light of either case - they are both tragedies. I'm just pointing out we have a ton of unsafe stuff in our homes, and a moment's inattention can be deadly. I find it odd how guns get singled out, but then I grew up with guns, and I regard them as rather less dangerous than other activities I do, such as mountain climbing, or ride a motorcycle, or drive my car.

I think this mentioned earlier, or in a different thread, but there are different exposure risks. The cornered glass table in the dining room poses a danger, but it's always present. Leave a gun on the table and it's probably a far greater threat.

 

[roger]

That circumstance (if true) renders his actions considerably less reckless, but still not quite in the same category as leaving a door open.

I did not say same category. I said that these acts expose the kids to risk. 30% of deaths of children aged 1-4 are due to drowning. People get up in arms about the dangers of guns, but say "oh, how awesome" when you tell them you have a back yard pool. The latter is probably more dangerous to own than the gun. So yes, leaving your back door unlocked or your child unattended if you have a pool is extremely dangerous.

Edit: I don't know if this link will work, as it generates a database query, but here's the leading causes of death ages 1-4, according to the CDC. Firearms are way down the list, after traffic, drowning, fire. suffocation, falling, poisioning, etc. How do you sort all of this out between a handgun left unattended vs other types of handguns, pool/baths vs drowning in a lake supervised? I got no idea. My point stands - firearms are way down there in the list of risks to children.

http://webappa.cdc.gov/cgi-bin/brok...=lcd1age&ethnicty=0&ranking=10&deathtle=Death

 

[fullflavormenthol]

How do you sort all of this out between a handgun left unattended vs other types of handguns, pool/baths vs drowning in a lake supervised? I got no idea. My point stands - firearms are way down there in the list of risks to children.

I think for some people it takes a back seat to their distain for firearms. We already had a person declare that guns are the problem, and for those people any story like this will be jumped on without question or rational thought. Swimming pools are just a matter of doing business with the luxury they aspire too. Besides...crime only happens to other people, as does death.

I mean the only people who own weapons are intellectually unsound, and not people of learning or substance.