[commanderkai]

desertdude desertdude:

commanderkai commanderkai:

but I generally try to not tarnish whole groups based on a few dipshits.

Oh, the irony !

I'm sorry, what's so ironic about that?

Seriously, I'm curious. Do tell what you're talking about.

[CanadianJeff]

Ok I was willing to let this one go until I went to the homepage of the company (Keystone sporting arms) that makes these damn things.

The company has since taken down the page this morning after I went to go look for it again but I found a new outlet that had saved the page.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/05 ... eting-kids

Look at how old those kids are! This is just disgusting. Why no earth are we giving real guns to kids that young!

America's gun culture is just sick.

[Thanos]

The best way to keep a five-year old from shooting a two-year old is to not give the five-year old a gun in the first place. These things are really not all that difficult to understand when one takes the time to think about it.

[CanadianJeff]

Yeah but what does it say when almost all Americans can agree it's a bad idea to give a gun to a people with mental instability but doesn't show the wisdom to stop a manufacturer from selling deadly weapons to children.

[ShepherdsDog]

give them a cap gun, nerf gun or a water gun(fun at any age if you have a cat) at that age

[DrCaleb]

CanadianJeff CanadianJeff:

Yeah but what does it say when almost all Americans can agree it's a bad idea to give a gun to a people with mental instability but doesn't show the wisdom to stop a manufacturer from selling deadly weapons to children.

Have you seen the marketing machine geared toward children? Breakfast cereal to toys to music to even freaking plastic surgery!?! It's all perfectly acceptable today, even if is is pretty scummy.

Many people with mental health issues and children do not have the social capacity to know the difference between need and want. In the case of a child, it's the parents responsibility to make that distinction. Society does it for people with mental health issues who are over the age of majority.

[BartSimpson]

Unsound Unsound:

bart, you're starting to sound like a lawyer

Which is fine. I'm, obviously, no constitutional scholar so i'll assume that you're atleast in the neighbourhood of right. No doubt there are other ways to interpret it, but that's up to the courts to figure out I suppose.

The more interesting thing, to me atleast, is your own attitude. The constitution can be changed if enough people are convinced so I'm curious about what kind of restrictions or regulations, if any, you would be willing to support? Would you support amending the constitution(if that's neccesary) to allow for competency testing for a firearms license? Do you have safe storage laws there? Would you support them? Anything I'm missing that you could get behind?

Your thoughts are of interest to me as well, Dan.

I would not support an Amendment to revoke the 2nd Amendment. Not at all. However, I would have a lot more respect for the gun control crowd if they were honest enough to propose such an Amendment as opposed to trying to subvert the 2nd Amendment by other means.

Regarding the details in your post:

I'm fundamentally opposed to licensing of firearms because licensing lists are readily turned into confiscation lists as we've seen repeatedly in the USA where so-called 'assault weapons' have been registered, licensed, and then confiscated with New York and Connecticut being the most recent examples and California and Illinois being examples since the late 1980's.

'Safe storage' laws are asinine, plain and simple. While the majority of my own firearms are locked away in a safe I've also got a few of them around the house that are loaded and immediately available. If someone kicks in my door then it's absolutely not a 'safe storage' strategy that requires me to have to f*ck around with one safe to retrieve my weapon and then have to f*ck around with yet another safe to retrieve my ammunition.

That's typically what 'safe storage' means. In the UK 'safe storage' means you store your firearms at an approved gun range and most people are not allowed to keep them in their homes. That's a patent absurdity that leaves law abiding people vulnerable to criminal acts like the riots that took place a couple years back where the police absolutely abandoned whole neighborhoods to the criminals so don't tell me that their gun laws are reasonable. They're not.

Now as to what I do support? I support using instant background checks as several states use. In that system a potential firearms purchaser has their state ID run for any reasons why they should not own a firearm. If no negatives are noted then the purchase is approved and the person buys their firearm and walks out the door with it.

Waiting periods are ridiculous and arguably unConstitutional as a prohibited act of prior restraint that assumes that every person purchasing a firearm is a criminal of some sort. There are no logical arguments for waiting periods and waiting periods are only favored by people who just use them as an incremental approach to stricter gun laws.

If a person passes a background check then there's no reason why they should be delayed in their purchase.

I support removing firearms rights from people who have stood in front of a jury to be tried for a crime or have had a jury find them to be incompetent. I do not support removing rights from people just because a bureaucrat says so.

I also support open carry and concealed carry for anyone who is not otherwise prohibited from owning a firearm. Vermont has always been this way and their crime rate is the envy of the neighboring states who have strict gun controls. Arizona is now just like Vermont and their violent crime rate is reportedly dropping...granted that might have more to do with the state's aggressive anti-illegal immigrant polices than anything else.

Another thing I support are the firearms manufacturers who refuse to sell firearms to law enforcement and politicians of states that have banned those weapons for their citizens. If it isn't legal for a citizen to own a certain model firearm in, say, California, then no one else should have it either.

See, if the argument is that 'no one needs an AR-15 with a 20 round magazine' then the police can live without it, too. If they need it then so do their employers, the citizens of their state.

The bottom line for this issue is that the people in government seem to be in dire need of a reminder of the fact that they work for us and not the other way around.

And it's for occasions like when these people get the bright idea that they rule over everyone else is why our forefathers enshrined access to arms as a right protected from government interference. It is the right to defend ourselves from that same government if it gets out of control.

[BartSimpson]

CanadianJeff CanadianJeff:

Yeah but what does it say when almost all Americans can agree it's a bad idea to give a gun to a people with mental instability but doesn't show the wisdom to stop a manufacturer from selling deadly weapons to children.

It's crap like this that's a patent falsehood that makes me want this site to have a 'Hyperbole' medal.

[BeaverFever]

$1:

‘My first rifle’ gunmaker tries to scrub away web presence after 5-year-old shoots and kills sister

Three days after a 5-year-old boy allegedly shot and killed his 2-year-old sister with a rifle he was given as a gift, the company behind the gun touted as “my first rifle” has scrubbed the almost all traces of the product from the web.

On Friday, the webpage for the Crickett Rifle had been completely stripped bare, showing only a default server page.

Additionally, the rifle facebook page, showing dozens of young children using the rifle is also gone.

You can, however, still buy the rifles from Walmart.com, and the Crickett YouTube channel is still live.

On Tuesday, as Stephanie Sparks cleaned the kitchen, her 5-year-old son, Kristian, began playing with a rifle he was given last year. She stepped out onto the front porch, poured grease out of a frying pan for the dogs and “heard the gun go off,” a Kentucky coroner said.

Authorities said the boy had fatally shot his 2-year-old sister, Caroline, in the chest.

In rural southern Kentucky, far removed from the national debate over gun control, where some children get their first guns even before they start first grade, the accident stunned the community.

Kristian’s rifle was kept in a corner of the mobile home, and the family didn’t realize a bullet had been left in it, Cumberland County Coroner Gary White said.

“Down in Kentucky where we’re from, you know, guns are passed down from generation to generation,” White said. “You start at a young age with guns for hunting and everything.”

What is more unusual than a child having a gun, he said, is “that a kid would get shot with it.”

In this case, the rifle was made by a company that sells guns specifically for children — “My first rifle” is the slogan – in colors ranging from plain brown to hot pink to royal blue to multi-color swirls.

“It’s a normal way of life, and it’s not just rural Kentucky, it’s rural America – hunting and shooting and sport fishing. It starts at an early age,” Cumberland County Judge Executive John Phelps said. “There’s probably not a household in this county that doesn’t have a gun.”

In Cumberland County, as elsewhere in Kentucky, local newspapers feature photos of children proudly displaying their kills, including turkey and deer. Even one of the latest reality shows on CMT, “Guntucky,” features a family-owned gun range in Kentucky. The range, Knob Creek, says on its website that it is as a safe place for youngsters to learn about firearms and offers family memberships.

Ruby Wright, who teaches hunter safety classes in Burkesville, said children younger than 9 can sit in, but they can’t get certification. She also coaches 4-H shooting sports, requiring those children to be 9 as well.

Phelps, who is much like a mayor in these parts, said it had been four or five years since there had been a shooting death in the county, which lies along the Cumberland River near the Tennessee state line.

“The whole town is heartbroken,” Phelps said of Burkesville, a farming community of 1,800 about 90 miles northeast of Nashville, Tenn. “This was a total shock. This was totally unexpected.”

Phelps said he knew the family well. He said the father, Chris Sparks, works as a logger at a mill and also shoes horses.

The family lives in a gray mobile home on a long, winding road, surrounded by rolling hills and farmland that’s been in the family since the 1930s. Toys, including a small truck and a basketball goal, were on the front porch, but no one was home Wednesday.

There’s a house across the street, but the next-closest neighbor lives over a hill.

Family friend Logan Wells said he received a frantic call telling him that the little girl was in an accident and to come quickly.

When he got to the hospital, Caroline was already dead. “She passed just when I got there,” Wells said.

White said the shooting had been ruled accidental, though a police spokesman said it was unclear whether any charges will be filed.

“I think it’s too early to say whether there will or won’t be,” Trooper Billy Gregory said.

White said the boy received the .22-caliber rifle as a gift, but it wasn’t clear who gave him the gun, which is known as a Crickett.

“It’s a little rifle for a kid. … The little boy’s used to shooting the little gun,” White said.

The company that makes the rifle, Milton, Pa.-based Keystone Sporting Arms, has a “Kids Corner” on its website with pictures of young boys and girls at shooting ranges and on bird and deer hunts. It says the company produced 60,000 Crickett and Chipmunk rifles for kids in 2008. The smaller rifles are sold with a mount to use at a shooting range.

Keystone also makes guns for adults, but most of its products are geared toward children, including books, hats and bright orange vests.

“The goal of KSA is to instill gun safety in the minds of youth shooters and encourage them to gain the knowledge and respect that hunting and shooting activities require and deserve,” the website said.

No one at the company answered the phone Wednesday.

According to the website, company founders Bill McNeal and his son Steve McNeal decided to make guns for young shooters in the mid-1990s and opened Keystone in 1996 with just four employees, producing 4,000 rifles that year. It now employs about 70 people.

It also has a long list of testimonials from parents who talk about how grateful they are to be able to go shooting with their children. All of the guns have safety locks, and some even have ones that require a key.

Police did not release the model of the rifle Kristian had.

Sharon Rengers, a longtime child advocate at Kosair Children’s Hospital in Louisville, said making and marketing weapons specifically for children was “mind-boggling.”

“It’s like, oh, my God,” she said, “we’re having a big national debate whether we want to check somebody’s background, but we’re going to offer a 4-year-old a gun and expect something good from that?”

State Rep. Robert R. Damron, a Democrat and an outspoken gun rights advocate in Kentucky, said the problem is not guns, but the parents who do not teach gun safety and responsibility.

“Why single out firearms? Why not talk about all the other things that endanger children, too?” he said. “The Second Amendment doesn’t give anybody carte blanche freedom to put children and juveniles at risk.”

Associated Press writer Janet Cappiello in Louisville, Ky., contributed to this report

[BartSimpson]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

Sharon Rengers, a panty-waisted child advocate at Kosair Children’s Hospital in Louisville, said making and marketing weapons specifically for children was “mind-boggling.”

Up until the 1970's it was commonplace. Lots of boys typically got a single-shot .22 for their 12th birthday and they quite frequently took them to school to use on their school's rifle range.

The compnay in question here is not marketing their rifle to five-year-old kids and anyone accusing them of doing so should be sued for slander and/or libel.

[BeaverFever]

Is calling a woman a panty-waist an insult?

[Lemmy]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

The compnay in question here is not marketing their rifle to five-year-old kids and anyone accusing them of doing so should be sued for slander and/or libel.

I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure a company can't be a victim of defamation.

[andyt]

Lemmy Lemmy:

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

The compnay in question here is not marketing their rifle to five-year-old kids and anyone accusing them of doing so should be sued for slander and/or libel.

I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure a company can't be a victim of defamation.

Hey, corporations are people too. They have feelings, just like the rest of us, and don't like their good names besmirched.

[Lemmy]

Fuck Bell Canada. Fuck Rogers Telecom. Fuck Caterpillar. Fuck US Steel. Fuck MPAC. Fuck Citibank. And fuck the gun companies. They're all a bunch of xxxxx. I hope they try to sue me.

[BartSimpson]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

Is calling a woman a panty-waist an insult?

These days calling a liberal anything is an insult so I'm going to go with yes.