NRA Child Development
You may remember my mentioning a two-year-old killing his mother with the gun she had in her purse. Well, at three years a child is ready for trick shots.
From the BBC: US boy, three, shoots both parents in New Mexico
A three-year-old American boy has shot his mother and father with the same bullet after pulling a gun from her handbag, police say.
The incident took place in a motel room on Saturday afternoon in Albuquerque in the state of New Mexico.
The toddler was apparently reaching for an iPod.
The single shot hit dad in the butt and then struck mom in the arm. Again, a small caliber auto loader that was cocked and ready to fire with the safety off and dumped in a purse – that is not a sane way of carrying a firearm. This wasn’t an accident, it was a foreseeable, even probable result of reckless behavior.
13 comments
“The toddler was apparently reaching for an iPod.”
Ah. That speaks volumes! 😈
To this day, I still remember, in my single-digit childhood years, arriving at my mother’s parents’ farmhouse; Mom and I remained for a few minutes in the car while Dad went in and politely browbeat Mom’s father into locking all the firearms in the gun cabinet… there were always some sitting out around the house, or so Dad told me; it’s a miracle my mother and two of her three brothers survived to adulthood.
If they are long guns [rifles or shotguns] and unloaded the only danger is that of any heavy stick. It is the fact that these cases involve small handguns, toy-sized, that are cocked with the safety off. A child has the hand strength to pull the trigger when the weapons are cocked. There is so much stuff in most purses that you risk an accident when you put one in there. You could fire it with the keys or sunglasses just by dropping it in. It is a brain dead move.
I had heard about this shooting, but when I read on your post that the gun was cocked with the safety off, I had to read it a couple of times because I thought I couldn’t possibly be seeing what I was reading.
To what purpose would anyone leave a gun in that state other than getting ready to put it to immediate use? But in a handbag? What’s was the point there?
All I know is if anyone sees me with a gun cocked and the safety off (which is an almost unheard of occurence, by the way), it would be a good idea to clear out because the odds are that something is going to be shot shortly thereafter. I’m not going to be dragging it around in my handbag (which actually I never carry one anyway – handbag or gun) waiting for something to shoot at.
And I’ve driven all over this wide country, by myself, staying in hotels and motels and never really felt the need to carry a gun. Common sense about where you stay, driving a well-maintained car, and being alert are the most important weapons a woman can carry. Weird, weird story.
People who carry guns out of fear don’t really think things through. When you load a round into the chamber, the hammer is cocked. In these weapons there is no way of lowering the hammer, so the safety must be used or there will be an accident sooner or later. The safety is simple to manipulate with your thumb as you are drawing the weapon, so not using it is stupid.
Getting a marriage license really shouldn’t be easier than getting a driver’s license, and anyone can become a parent with no testing at all. The world has strange priorities.
I was required to carry a weapon for years, and it is a real PITA. Once it was no longer required, I stopped doing it.
Glocks don’t have a safety, unlike the .45 ACP that you’re probably familiar with (said .45 having *three* safeties if you include the trigger pawl safety because the War Department in 1911 didn’t trust their officers to not shoot their feet off otherwise). And for some reason Glocks and various clones that similarly have no safety are insanely popular. But really, the only possible use for a Glock is for law enforcement officers who are open carrying the thing and need to be able to point and click ASAP without fumbling with safeties or etc., i.e., when they need it, they’re a) carrying it safely in a holster with a trigger guard, and b) need it *now* as soon as they get that trigger guard unsnapped.
The vast majority of civilian scenarios, the amount of time needed to flick the safety off is irrelevant. Civilians spend far more time on target identification than they spend drawing and shooting the weapon, because they’re not trained in how to identify and acquire targets. Not unless the targets helpfully have round “bullseye” circles on them, anyhow!
The Glock has a grip safety that is quite effective against accidents, but not much good for stupid owner tricks.
The 1911 was a real pain, and I hated the half-cock to engage the safety with a round loaded. I owned Walther’s, a P-38 and PPK, which have an excellent safety arrangement and are double action.
I had a .25 auto ‘last chance’ weapon, but never carried it with a round chambered. I could chamber a round with one hand if I needed it, and didn’t need to worry about shooting myself in the butt.
Correct Bryan. 🙂
I had a Glock 17A which was standard issue for SF personnel. It was my favorite sidearm for many reasons. But I definitely would not recommend one for an amateur (though, I would for a moron in the hope they shoot themselves). *shrug* I also liked the PPK. On some missions, it was either my primary or backup, being more easily concealed than a Glock 17A (which had a long barrel). We did have access to some *trick* holster/pistol combinations (such as a small .25 in a quick release forearm holster. Yes, most of that JB style stuff was real). I never used them, few did. They were more trouble than they were worth. Though I did occasionally carry a couple throwing blades in a forearm holder. 😉 LOL
Bryan, I have never encountered a Glock with a grip safety. But just in case I wasn’t encountering a representative sample of Glocks, I decided to go check Glock’s web site. Nope, no external safety, just a two-step trigger pull (the first step disengages the internal safety, the second step actually fires the weapon).
Which, of course, is why there have been untold stories about butt-cheekless and ball-less wonders who’ve managed to shoot themselves with their Glocks when they used poorly fitting belt holsters that caught the trigger and… uhm… BOOM!
Indeed, Glock even touts the fact that they have no traditional safety on their guns. “The ability to fire immediately, without worrying about an external safety, is one feature Glock has stressed as an advantage when selling its guns, especially to police departments…” Tell it to all the butt-cheekless folks out there who shot their cheek off with their Glock, heh!
Badtux, I may have confused the Glock with the similar HK. My contact with auto loaders other than Walthers was confined to range club I belonged to. Guys or dealers would bring in weapons to show to the shooters. Almost none of them, the Glock, HK, Beretta, S&W 9MM auto loaders had a grip that I was comfortable with, or felt I could be accurate with. I was confident with the Walthers and the Colt 2-inch Detective Special, and only slightly less confident with the S&W Model 19 4-inch after getting custom grips. I have small hands and pay a lot of attention to the grip. I wouldn’t own anything with a grip safety because of the movement involved.
The best weapon is the one you shoot the most accurately. I have fired a lot of cap and ball pistols and rifles. I have never had an ‘accident’ because I pay attention. I have drawn weapons from shoulder holsters, ankle holsters, pocket holsters, as well as a variety of belt holsters. I didn’t draw until I was ready to shoot and had the justification to shoot. I know what it’s like to be the target rather than the shooter, so I always made the point of not being both accidentally.
I sort of remember someone saying that the Air Force selected the Beretta when the finally got rid of the S&W Model 10s because of their safety system. The Air Force has a real thing about safety. Most police agencies don’t have specific requirements and are more concerned with price. I think Glock must have had a great sales department to be as popular with law enforcement as it is.
The M60 is a nice weapon, Kryten, but the size and ammo belts make it a bit hard to carry unless you are an ‘action hero’ in a movie. Yes, the Glock, like the P-38, is a military weapon and requires military training to use safely. People who carry military weapons without the training are accidents waiting to happen.
A lot of the people who are buying guns these days are the same idiots who buy chain saws after hurricanes and end up in the emergency room after cutting off one of their limbs, rather than tree limbs. Tools can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Glocks are marketed to police agencies based on 1) magazine capacity — “get the firepower you need to lay down suppressing fire against insurgents!” , and 2) point-and-shoot. “No safeties to mess with, just point it at the bad guy and pull the trigger!”
The reality of course is that more magazine capacity doesn’t mean diddly if you can’t hit what you’re aiming at, and a Glock gets its magazine capacity by going to a dual-stack magazine that is as comfortable and easily controllable as gripping a 2×4. And more magazine capacity doesn’t help you much if you shot off your testicle because of an ill-fitting belly holster and lack of external safety either!
So anyhow, back to this story, Glocks are not popular as purse pistols because of their expense, so I suspect that it was probably a K-Tel oops Kel-Tec (heh). Which, similar to the Glock, *also* don’t have an external safety, just a long-pull dual-action trigger where the first part of the pull disengages the internal safety, and the second part of the pull actually activates the hammer. They’re also 1/3rd the price of a Glock and have a reputation as being cheap and nasty, just one step above the “Saturday Night Special” of yore. They’re exactly what I’d expect a redneck woman to be packing in her purse. With the inevitable results. SIGH!
The large magazine auto loaders are responsible for the dozens of shots made at every incident. Cops are pointing in the general direction of their intended target and just start spraying the area. They only stop to reload. If they aimed, they wouldn’t have to worry about having all of those rounds in the weapon.
I assumed that it was some cheap piece of crap weapon, which are usually as dangerous to the shooter as the target. There is a reason for the high prices on quality weapons.
Well, K-Tels have a reputation for being inaccurate and jamming easily, but they don’t blow up in their shooters’ face, so there’s that. And reality is that in the typical situation where you might need a purse pistol like that, it’s accurate enough, and if you don’t hit what you’re shooting at with the first shot, the second isn’t going to matter because the bad guy will have closed the distance and taken it away from you. So for its intended purpose it’s not a bad gun. Well, no worse than any other gun, anyhow. Which is the problem, if you have kids around…
The real issue is gun control. If you are going to carry one, you have to control it. If a toddler can access the gun, it definitely isn’t under your control.