Today's Eternal Sadness

Charlie Pierce gets it.

So, tout le monde — as we say around the still in the holler — is talking about the very tragic events down in old Kaintuck', where you can kilt you a b'ar when you is only three.

A five-year-old boy in the southern US state of Kentucky has accidentally shot dead his two-year-old sister at the family home. He had received the rifle, specially made for children, as a gift last year.

A rifle, specially made for children. Think about it. Some sales rep at a gun manufacturer pipes up at a sales meeting, "Hey, maybe there's a market for kiddie guns! No, I mean real guns. With bullets!" Everybody cheers and the guy gets a raise, and nobody stops for a second and says, "You know, we don't trust our five-year olds with matches. Maybe guns should wait until, I dunno, middle school." Anyway, roll that one around in your head for a second as we continue into our regular feature, This Week In Responsible Gun Ownership:

Reports say the weapon had been kept in a corner and the family had not realised it still contained a bullet.

And from a commenter:

Yeah, well, we don’t know the whole story, do we? Maybe his sister was threatening him with her gun. In that case, then the gun may well have saved his life. You know what they say, the only thing that stops a bad three year old with a gun is a good three year old with a gun.

And BTW - when is it not a good time to talk about what we can do together about trying some small thing to make things just the tiniest bit better for ourselves?  I can't be the only one who sees "let's not politicize this tragedy; it's too soon to talk about gun control; we should respect the family's grief" as the perfect dodge.  Cuz guess what - we can absolutely count on the simple fact that another kid will be killed with a gun before somebody decides it's OK to start talking about gun control, and so the clock is constantly being reset to zero, and nothing will ever get done.

If you think it's OK for little kids to have guns; if your ideology or your party loyalty requires you to close yourself off and "stand firm with your 2nd Amendment Rights" in spite of knowing that tens of thousands of American families are forever broken every year because you're just too fucking stoopid to learn anything new about the US Constitution in particular or the world in general - then please raise your hand and I'll be happy to come over and slap Wayne LaPierre's dick outa your mouth for you.