Kids, Guns, and a Shooting Range

By Douglas V. Gibbs

To drive home a point in a conversation with me about guns, someone showed me a video where Penn Jillette of the famous "Penn and Teller Magic Team," in an attempt to show you that violent video games don't cause violence, or do not make kids violent, brought the reality of the firearm to a young man at a shooting range.  The kid, who is an efficient violent killer on a video game system, had the chance to fire a rifle with all of the big scary cosmetics added to it that make gun control addicts scream and yell that it's an assault rifle, when they wouldn't know what an assault rifle is if ever they saw one.  The instructor spent a lot of time preparing the child for his single shot, a police officer was present for safety reasons and to ensure all safety protocols were followed, and the kid let off one shot at an image of Ron Jeremy with a gun at the head of Macaulay Culkin, apparently a scene from one of those Home Alone movies I never got the opportunity to sleep through.  The firearm was anchored, and after the kid squeezed off the shot, Penn pointed out that reality and fantasy was something the kid was able to separate in his mind.  Like all kids playing video games, or watching violent cartoons, this young man, according to Penn, knows that his gaming is make-believe, and that what he just did by firing that rifle was real life.

For the most part, I agree, though I don't think a rush of animated game violence for hours on end is good for a young person.  Does it create monsters?  I don't know.  In the end, as individuals, we can make our own decisions, and I think psychology places too much emphasis on how our environment influences us.  However, this is not to say that our environment plays no role, or that a constant regimen of shooting and killing other people in a game system in a pretend-world of gaming where the graphics are getting better and better and more realistic, doesn't play a part in creating some kind of aggression in the mind of the kid playing the game.

When it comes to gaming, I am not one to buy into the idea that the games make kids aggressive as much as I am into the idea that gaming makes the players dumb.  They are detached from the world, could care less about world events, and are so unconcerned about the political realm that they could be arrested and thrown into a concentration camp, and they wouldn't care as long as they could still play their games, and had munchies available.

In the Penn Jillette video, the magician holds his final point hostage until the very last moment of the episode, revealing the aftermath of the kid having the chance to fire a weapon.  The camera fires one single shot of the child crying in the arms of his mother, absolutely horrified by the big bad gun he just had the opportunity to fire, red-faced and tear-stained, sobbing uncontrollably.  Penn makes some comment about the psychological damage they may have caused the child, blaming the gun for the kid's forlorn moment.  For all I know the kid could be crying because Penn had just laid on the child a guilt-trip about the ferocity of the gun in some eloquent speech off-camera, and how that shot could have killed another human being.  But, if we take the video at its word, the young man was a jelly bowl of tears because the opportunity of firing the rifle was traumatic and terrifying to him.

Another anti-gun loon has been born.

I don't know Penn's opinion on firearms, and I am going to guess that as an atheist libertarian (which seems like an oxymoron in its own right) he is conflicted because he probably wants all of the scary guns off the streets, but secretly feels deep inside that individual Americans should be able to have the freedom to own one and protect themselves.

I wonder if he has armed guards follow him around for his own safety?

After watching the video it brought to mind a recent tragedy on a shooting range where firearms instructor Charles Vacca died with a shot to the head during a firearms exercise with a young nine-year-old student from New Jersey, while in Arizona.  The girl, after receiving all of the instructions regarding the task she was about to endeavor, pulled the trigger, and the recoil brought the muzzle of the firearm upward, firing one of the rounds into the instructor.  Upon viewing the video, I wondered if instructors normally stand so close to a live firearm while someone was getting ready to fire, and if the instructor had fully informed the child with the gun about the potential recoil.

Accidents happen, and that is simply a fact of life.  But, since this was a gun accident, the media was all over it hoping this would send yet another message to the public about how dangerous the mean ol' guns are.  Errors were apparently made, and after the situation is fully investigated and debated new safety protocols will probably emerge.

According to a few articles I read on this, the shooting range has had pre-teen kids on the range firing higher caliber firearms before, with no mishaps, "not even a band-aid," one report said.  Meanwhile, the leftists are clamoring about why a child was even allowed to fire a gun?  As one person told me on this, a person who is on the fence about gun control, when I said I plan to take his son shooting someday, "Not until he's 18.  There should be a law that no kid can come near a gun until he's, like, 25, or something."

Because big, bad, scary guns can't be trusted, I suppose.

Perhaps giving a child a higher caliber firearm to shoot was not so wise.  I would have kept it down to a .22, if it were me, but that's not the point of this article.

The "we shouldn't allow children to fire guns" argument actually stands in opposition of its intent.  Of course parents let their kids fire guns.  That is how you prepare a child for the reality of firearms, teach them to respect firearms, and get them familiar enough with guns that they don't do stupid things like play with one when they find one in some back room of the house and then blow their heads off or shoot a sibling.  I shot my dad's rifle in Arkansas when I was just a wee guy.  I was not tainted for life, I am not a serial killer, and aside from a couple tree trunks, nobody, and no thing, was affected.  It was only a couple times, and my chance to spend much time around a firearm did not truly materialize until I was in the military, but yes, I got to shoot a gun as a kid, and it worked out fine.  It usually does.  Kids are pretty good about following instructions when it comes to the more serious things in life.

Well, I mean regarding hardware like guns, not life decisions about what to do next in life.

Accidents happen, and the media was all over this "nine-year-old girl shoots instructor" story not because of the rarity of these kinds of accidents, or because they were concerned about the tragic death of a human being.  As usual, the massive news coverage regarding any story involving guns could truly care less about the loss of life because they had a political agenda.  The "freak" accident during a training session regarding a very popular activity was in the news so that the liberal left media could point fingers and say, "See?  Those guns are dangerous."

Yes, they are dangerous, just like a hammer is dangerous, and a nail-gun is dangerous.  But in all three cases, they are tools.  If used properly, tools can be very helpful in life.  I can't count how many times I have hit my thumb with a hammer.  Was the hammer at fault?  No, I stupidly missed the nail and connected with my thumb.  Accidents happen.  It is an unfortunate reality in our lives.  Heck, I tripped over a slight step up in somebody's house the other day.  Should a law requiring no steps, only ramps, throughout everyone's house be passed?  Should we disallow kids from walking through houses with steps in them because they could be potentially dangerous to the child?

The accident at the gun range in Arizona where the nine-year-old girl shot and killed her instructor was a sad thing.  I am horrified it happened.  Somehow, somewhere, safety protocols were missed, the gun was not anchored, the girl didn't understand the kind of recoil she was going to experience and did not put the proper force in her muscles against the recoil, or perhaps it was indeed just one of those things.  An accident.  But not to the liberal left, ant-gun, gun control radicals that believe taking away the legal right to own a gun will do away with gun violence in America.

We are still waiting for the war on drugs to work using that same theory.  Take drugs off the streets people will stop using them, we were told.

Drug dealers and drug cartels apparently didn't get the memo.

The news story for the press about the gun range death in Arizona was an opportunity for the liberal left to attack gun ownership.  It was yet another chance for them to try to convince the people to be willing to give away the ownership of their right to keep and bear arms.  They say to us that they aren't asking for much.  Just give away another little freedom in the name of a little bit of security.  "It's no big deal," they tell us.  "Losing freedoms for security will keep you safe."

The bad guys, of course, would still figure out a way to get their hands on some guns.

In Britain, and Australia, after they passed severe gun control laws, and confiscated all of the guns from legal gun owners, the incidents of violent crime, and home invasions, increased dramatically in those countries.  One more instructor may be alive in the world if his job turned out not to be at a gun range because guns were banned in America, but how many hundreds of fathers, mothers, and children would be dead because they were attacked by the criminal element and had no firearm to protect themselves with?

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary