8-year-old's Uzi death at gun show

[anthony87]

You realize there HAVE been VERY YOUNG people who have gotten helicopter licenses.
Like, far younger than you or I.

WOW...good God. I realize I'm argueing with a wall, so I'm just going to go ahead and cut out of this conversation and not waste my time any further.

Just remember, when you have kids make sure to give them loaded firearms to play with! It's totally safe! In fact go ahead and buy them acetylene torches for their 2nd birthday! They'll have a blast, and remember more people die from lighting strikes then acetylene torches, so they're perfectly safe for a 2 year old to use!

I'm pretty sure Ururu117 isn't human. He is one of those supercomputers designed to debate no matter the argument.

She.

I'm pretty sure Ururu117 isn't human. She is one of those supercomputers designed to debate no matter the argument.

Fixed, now go get a soul please ^^.

Souls don't exist.
Neither does god.

Mathematically disproven years ago.
Drop your bronze age myths and become one with the metal

I MEAN....cake.
I love cake.

Delicious.

True, souls don't exist;
True, god doesn't exist;
True, cake is delicious and kudos on the Portal reference but I just refuse to believe that you find no sense of tragedy, or whatever you want to call it, in the fact that an 8 year old kid shot himself in the head.

Not a single iota of sympathy, tragedy, nor anything but sheer amusement.

Well then I can't help but pity you.

Pity me for having a different opinion and viewpoint than yourself?
My my, aren't you a little arrogant?

Oh I'm horribly arrogant, no question but...

I'm not edgy or different, nor shallow.
Simply my opinion on the matter.

And, considering I am a scientist and one of the few dedicating their lives in the selfless pursuit of the most valuable thing to society (knowledge), I'd really say I'm nothing of a parasite.

So are you.

That isn't arrogance, though we're getting very very far off topic very fast, so here is the cliff notes: a single invention, made by a single person, known as the HEBA process, feeds 2 billion people a year. Knowledge is indeed the most valuable thing to society, and without it, we go back to the stone age and almost everyone starves.

Declaring myself not a parasite because I contribute more than I consume is not arrogant, though it is a bit self serving.

Your pity, however, is sheer arrogance, implying your way and your thoughts are better than my cold metallic ones.

But....they are. And I feel no shame at all in admitting that I think that.

Again, if you have no objective measurement of fitness, then you cannot "admit" it. You simply are speculating. I do have an objective measure of fitness, known as utilitarianism and simple efficiency.

By basic mathematical definition of axiomization, I'd win.

So I'm "speculating" that I think my ways of thinking are better than yours? Could you please try and elaborate on that?

 

[DragonNOR]

I... I.... WHAT?!

Ok, to be fair I did see a video once of a 11 year old gamer shoot an assault rifle, but that was to a) show that gamers aren't trained into military weaponry by violent videogames (he was infact very upset after shooting, and the producers apologised to the child), and b) was being supervised by a police officer, medical personel and a fully trained former-US army serviceman.

But this... an unreliable Uzi at a gun show??? that does seem incredibly stupid.

The gun wasn't unreliable.
All guns jam.

True, but if a gun jams, its because of a faulty weapon or faulty ammo.
A faulty weapon would either mean that its not been maintained thoroughly enough, or that the weapon has faulty components.
Ammunitionrelated problems usually consists of using clips with faulty mechanisms or the bullets being too low powered for the gun to eject them successfully.

Just stating that all guns jam is kinda insufficient. All guns jam when they're not properly taken care of or used correctly.

 

[mechanixis]

I'm not edgy or different, nor shallow.
Simply my opinion on the matter.

^^ Does this make sense to anyone here? Does having an opinion somehow make one immune to adjectives?

Yes. That is exactly what I implied. It certainly wasn't two marginally related but relatively independent points that happened to be typed close together.

How about I analyze them entirely.

Edgy: nervous, apprehensive; : creatively challenging; cutting edge; leading edge; : on the edge between acceptable and offensive; pushing the boundaries of good taste; dodgy

Ok, we can strike off a few of these, such as nervous and apprehensive and dodgy, along with cutting edge and leading edge.

I assume you mean "on the edge between acceptable and offensive", in which case, my opinion isn't edgy for, say, 9/10ths of the world living in abject poverty where people die every few minutes from lead poisoning of some form or another (this means bullets, for the dim witted in the audience).

Basically, what the edge is changes based on the culture and upbringing; what is edgy to you is not to me. Therefore, the term is subjective and not objective, and we strike it from the list.

Different, I certainly am, from mainstream American or Western Europe culture, but again, not from a large chunk of the world, and therefore, strike it away.

As for shallow, this one is just clearly offensive; I have thought long and hard, and used a deep logical basis known as set theory to render my arguments relatively coherent and stable. How I can be shallow with such a basis is relatively strange, considering I refuse to look at the "shallow" characteristics of a gun (such as the killing bit) and look deeper (at the tool bit). It would seem I am strangely deep, not shallow.

Better?

No, not better. Why in your initial comment did you deny you're different, then? I don't see an explanation for that here. Are you saying you AREN'T different? That we agree about this issue? Or did your much touted logic just falter for a second?

'Edgy' changes from culture to culture, yes, but we're not talking about different cultures here, we're talking about a forum on the Escapist. And here, 'edgy' is laughing at a kid shooting himself in the head. In the sample group your interacting with, you're defending an extreme minority opinion, and you're obviously having a time and a half of it. You're not being 'logical', you're just arbitrarily recontextualizing the issue to whatever helps you win the argument.

And you are shallow, because for all your glorification of your own supposed logic, you're a lot more egotistical than you are logical.

 

[CrysisMcGee]

It is relatively easy to determine when a gun has no ammunition in it. Most of the time, people hand guns to each other with the chamber open, so they can see it is unloaded.

Personally, I blame the 15 year old for not ensuring there was no ammunition in the gun. The only reason would be to let the kid fire it, but you don't let a kid handle an automatic weapon.

 

[anthony87]

So I'm "speculating" that I think my ways of thinking are better than yours? Could you please try and elaborate on that?

If you can't actually prove your ways of thinking are better than mine, what are you doing but speculating?

I have a quantifiable and testable metric, in a logical framework, for proving my thinking is consistent and relevant. Do you?

No, no I do not.

 

[Bigeyez]

So I'm "speculating" that I think my ways of thinking are better than yours? Could you please try and elaborate on that?

If you can't actually prove your ways of thinking are better than mine, what are you doing but speculating?

I have a quantifiable and testable metric, in a logical framework, for proving my thinking is consistent and relevant. Do you?

Yes anthony87 concede defeat already. Her logical framework is so solid she doesn't even need facts or evidence to support any of her claims! Can you not see how wrong we both were anthony?

Please accept my deepest apologies Ururu117. I will personally buy all your children Uzi's for their first birthdays and will implore you, your spouse, and your children to all get together and play with these perfectly safe tools in the comfort of your home...no really I do...you'd be helping out mankind as a whole if you did...

Edit: Haha I have to say, this has been a pretty entertaining thread. Laughs all around. Ururu you need to post more often.

 

[_zuul]

did anyone wonder how the kid shot himself?

one guy covered that an 8 yr old wouldn't be strong enough to handle the gun in the first place,


but what if the kid was dumb enough to look down the barrel and wonder why the gun may or may not have been jammed?


but this is pointless, it only reinforces what has already been said.

 

[anthony87]

So I'm "speculating" that I think my ways of thinking are better than yours? Could you please try and elaborate on that?

If you can't actually prove your ways of thinking are better than mine, what are you doing but speculating?

I have a quantifiable and testable metric, in a logical framework, for proving my thinking is consistent and relevant. Do you?

No, no I do not.

Q.E.D.

Ooooh Latin....fancy.

I can't help but wonder right now if ALL scientists are this devoid of humanity.

 

[megalomania]

Hahhaha, hilarious! Doubly hilarious with some of the commentary here!

Why not go to a gun show?
How is an art exhibit any more or less wrong for an 8 year old, considering guns kill far less children then the bus he had to take every day of his life?

This was a hilarious tragedy which is made even more hilarious because it will provoke people who don't think logically to say "well gosh, if only he hadn't been allowed near guns"!

Yes, guns are terrible instruments of life and death, but when we live in a world where the car is far more of a blood god than anything actually designed for destruction, the rules may just be a bit different from what your intuition tells you.

tl;dr: this wasn't sad or tragic at all.

I know I'm a little late to the game here and that you have already received a fair amount of stick, but I need to point something out about your argument:

It is based on a Faulty Syllogism. You say cars kill more people than guns, thats true, but what is not true is that they are more dangerous.

Let say that Dangerousness = Deaths caused (per Year) / Total No. occurances (per Year)

Dangerousness(Car) = Many accidents / billions of car rides

Dangerousness(Gun) = Not as many fatal shootings / not nearly as many car rides

Car is less dangerous than Gun. Sorry I dont have any numbers to back this up, but I cant be bothered to look up the statistics on fatal shooting and fatal car accidents or to make a series of approximations to guess at the total number of car journeys or gun discharges.

That isn't true at all. You are arguing for a relative measure verses an absolute one. Fair enough. You want to argue that the amount of deaths per unit car ride is less than the amount of deaths per unit shooting.

The problem is, if we take this out to its actual logical extreme, and not simply use a strawman, we'd see that a HUGE number of bullets are fired simply for practice, for fun, and for hunting, totally dwarfing the amount used to actively harm human beings.

While I as well cannot throw out numbers, your relative measure seems to show the same thing as my absolute one; cars are far more dangerous than guns.

If you think a large number of bullets aren't being thrown out for practice fire, I invite you to look at the vulcan minigun, which is mounted on a large number of helicopters and must be fired to completion at least once a year to show it is still in working order.

You didn't take it to a logical extreme, you attempted Reductio Ad Absurdam. I think it would be apparent that we should be talking about non military small arms fire, given the nature of the news story. Including the number of bullets fired by the military wouldn't be especially relevant in an argument about civilian gun controls would it? You can be a pedant as much as you want, I don't have the patience to water tight my argument just because you are up against the wall.

If you are going to be as arbitary I may aswell include remote control cars in my total number of car journeys (not that it would put a dent on the number, but you know where I am going with this.)