This past Thursday in Las Vegas, a 4-year-old found a loaded gun in his house and shot his 2-year-old sister in the stomach. While researching "4-year-old shooters" I found a similar event from this year where a 4-year-old shot his babysitter with a shotgun: The Columbus Dispatch reports that the boy "retrieved a shell from a drawer in a back bedroom, grabbed a 20-gauge single-shot shotgun from a closet and loaded the weapon ... returned to the living room, and in front of another 17-year-old boy and other children, shot [Nathan] Beavers."
So the moral of the story is, don't hire a boy as a babysitter for your kid, especially if your child has ready access to a 20-gauge shotgun and knows how to load it without assistance.
Kids shoot the darndest things! But from what I've seen, 4 years old is the threshold for gun violence. I have not yet read a story about a 3-year-old shooting anyone successfully, though I could have missed one. Maybe I'll be surprised in the future by the youth of America. It makes you wonder why babies are given good hand strength early on when it's not entirely necessary. Was there a period in our evolution when toddlers were often dangled off cliffs and needed a good grip and strong fingers to stay alive? Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me! What I do know is, it's their hands that are the problem. Parents are always going to have guns and be irresponsible with them no matter what the laws are, but baby hands can be neutralized.
-Binkie McFartnuggets
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