‘My First Rifle’: Selling guns to children

A mother in Burkesville, Ky., was feeding her dogs on the porch last week when she heard a gun go off inside the house, said Mary Sanchez in The Kansas City Star. There she discovered a horror she will “live with forever”—her 2-year-old daughter, fatally shot in the chest by her 5-year-old son with his very own .22-caliber rifle. The gun had been a birthday present, a single-shot “Crickett” sold under the marketing slogan “My First Rifle.” A local coroner called the toddler’s death “just one of those crazy accidents.” “No, it wasn’t,” said the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger in an editorial. This tragedy was “entirely predictable and preventable”—the inevitable result of a “fringe gun culture” that blocks any laws that would make gun owners, manufacturers, and sellers legally accountable for their actions. In 2010, 62 children aged 14 or under were killed in gun accidents, and about 15,500 children and teens were injured. Yet the firearms industry continues to sell deadly weapons “as if they were toys.”

“As a father, this breaks my heart,” said Matt Lewis in DailyCaller.com. But as someone whose father gave him a gun early in life, I feel I should defend “what has come to be known as ‘gun culture.’” No one would condone leaving a 5-year-old alone with a loaded weapon. But for much of the country, “responsible gun ownership” and “gradually introducing appropriately aged kids to shooting” are a way of life. It’s unfair to judge everyone who teaches their kid to shoot or hunt on the basis of one episode of careless parenting—and even worse to “politicize the tragedy in order to push more gun control.”

This isn’t just one episode, said Michael Paul Williams in the Richmond, Va., Times-Dispatch. Last month alone, four kids accidentally fired guns at a sibling or parent, including a 4-year-old boy who killed his mother. “You can hold the Second Amendment in the utmost reverence and still concede that something is out of whack here.” And yet Keystone Sporting Arms, which makes Cricketts, will keep on selling firearms specifically designed to appeal to kids, “in colors such as hot pink or in multicolor swirls.” People who view firearms as “a cultural touchstone and a source of comfort” tell themselves that an accident—or homicide or suicide—could never happen in their homes. But as the statistics show, some of those people will be tragically wrong.

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