Strollerderby

What exactly does this have to do with the NRA? Any more than a kid being killed by a pit bull has to do with the AKC?

Accidents happen.  One kid getting killed does not an epidemic make.  Should we ban 8 year olds from using bicycles? Playing in pools? Riding in cars? Should we ban parents from owning dogs?

Why is a bizarre, isolated is instantly turned into a political issue?  Most kids I grew up with had handled guns by age 8 or 10. The instructor screwed up somehow, but I'm sure we can find a case of a swim coach that screwed up and let a kid drown.

This father wasn't doing anything that isn't done _all the time_ in rural America.  Why should he have known better?  As far as I can tell from my Googling, this has _never happened before_.  

Dragging his name through the mud after he lost his son in a tragic accident seems pretty despicable.  Shame on you.

My feeling is sort of that, at gun fairs and the like, the families are accepting the risk of losing a child.  So this doesn't bother me.  I don't care about regulation of gun fairs.  But I do care about regulation of gun ownership and use outside things like this - because then it affects my kids, and that's a risk I don't want to accept. If you want to take your kids to a place where they might blow their heads off in the company of like-minded folks - I'm okay with that. Just don't force me to participate!

I agree with Patrick that there is no point in blaming the kid's father. From his perspective, he wasn't allowing his child to do anything that was unusual. I think the problem lies more with the whole culture of allowing children to handle and shoot guns.

The difference between cycling or swimming accidents and a gun accident is that guns are specifically designed to kill something. In this case, the child was also using a semi-automatic weapon. It just seems like common sense that children should be excluded from machine gun use.

I read an of an incident in which a 6 year old boy accidently killed his mother with gun, although he had been shooting guns for two years:

www.saferchild.org/guns&.htm

Do you think parents who let their kids play baseball should know better too? Because apparently Baseball has the highest fatality rate among sports for children and adolescents ages five to 14, with three to four persons dying from baseball injuries each year.

I think Amy's point was that the father, as an emergency room doctor, knows the damage that guns IN GENERAL are capable of causing.  It doesn't matter whether it is a child or adult handling the gun...they are destructive weapons.  

I hate guns and hate the idea of them anywhere near children however our laws are what they are (for now).  BUT a machine gun should only be handled by someone with the upper body strength to control it and I don't think an 8 year old qualifies.

I was shooting guns at that age, though only under my dad's direct supervision, and nothing high-powered or automatic. Allowing children to gratuitously fire machine guns is a far cry from responsibly teaching gun safety.

Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's safe or right.

Just because some people will sacrifice their children in the name of the Second Amendment doesn't justify amending or limiting those rights for the rest of us.

No, 8-year-olds should definitely not be playing with guns. What kind of parent takes their kid to a gun show? If you need your gun fix that bad then get a babysitter! This is sick. When did playing with explosives become a human right?  This story is so sad, and the saddest part is that it's all so unnecessary!