America, Where A Five-year-old Can Own A Rifle And Accidentally Shoot and Kill His Baby Sister

First off, let me get this queer: a mother and father decided that the best gift they could give their five-year-0old son was a gun. You know, not a bicycle or a game, or a ball and glove, but a weapon, for a five-year-old.

So, naturally, you know where this story is headed. The five-year-old’s mother stepped outside their home for just a couple of minutes, but it was long enough for that young boy to shoot and kill his two-year-old sister with his birthday present.

In Kentucky, the shooting death of Caroline Sparks has been ruled an accident, according to Kentucky State Police Trooper Billy Gregory, who also said: "It's just one of those nightmares. A quick thing that happens when you turn your back."

On a five-year-old with a loaded rifle. But, you know, that’s okay, I guess, because, again according to Gregory, "In this part of the country, it's not uncommon for a 5-year-old to have a gun or for a parent to pass one down to their kid."

But a five-year-old. I mean, we don’t let parents give their five-year-olds cars because, well, that would be stupid, but it’s just A-OK to give a kid and gun and then step outside for a minute.

Now, the family did say that they kept the Crickett rifle—Yes, that’s the name of the gun because it’s marketed to children—in what they considered to be a safe spot, but then the young boy got his gun, began playing with it and now his sister’s dead.

The Crickett website features three .22-caliber rifle models for kids, with shoulder stock colors ranging from pink to red, white and blue swirls. "My first rifle" is the company's slogan.

“My first rifle that I got hold of and accidentally killed my sister.”

But, what galls me more than parents buying guns for five-year-olds and then leaving them unattended, and what galls me more than gun makers marketing weapons to children, is that the grandmother of that poor dead girl had the nerve to say, "He just picked (the gun) up before he realized it."

Just picked it up? From where? Where it was safely stored?

The grandmother—whose name I won’t mention because her 'Oh well' attitude disgusts me—then has the balls to say that, while she’s devastated, she is comforted knowing that her granddaughter is in a better place: "It was God's will. It was her time to go, I guess. I just know she's in heaven right now and I know she's in good hands with the Lord."

So, God wanted a two-year-old dead and he wanted her five-year-0old brother to be the one who killed her? Is that the God that these morons believe in? I’d prefer to believe in a God who’d come a’calling at their house the day they bought a child a gun and tell them that they might want to rethink their purchase. Maybe then we wouldn’t be mourning the death of a child, and mourning the lost innocence of her brother. Maybe then, rather than talk about these children, we can talk about the parents, and question their motives, and question their need to arm a child.

But, you know, the NRA will find someone to blame for this—probably Obama—and this will get shoved in a drawer alongside Newtown and Aurora and countless other places where guns shouldn’t have been, in hands they shouldn’t have been, taking the lives of people they shouldn’t have been taking.

So, again, let me get this queer: this young boy couldn’t drive a car because he wasn’t sixteen; and he couldn’t join the military because he’s not eighteen; and he can’t drink because he’s not twenty-one. But he was allowed to own a rifle at age five?

We have got this so backwards in this country, and we keep letting this happen and letting this happen and then mourning the deaths of the innocent, and the death of innocence, while our elected officials either sit on their hands doing nothing, or hold their hands out to the NRA asking for money to keep them in office.

When is it going to be enough?

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