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PaperclipPerfector
19hr ago
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Notes -
I'm more referring to incidents where some gun is left out and a curious infant goes and shoot himself or something else. I wonder how often that happened with bladed weapons. What are the statistics on accidental fatal sword swallowing?
In hindsight, maybe you should condition them to not leave dangerous things out on tables...
Even a 5-pound trigger pull (the average full-size handgun, compacts are generally worse) requires some significant finger strength to actually fire, and you're at a mechanical disadvantage if you're trying to shoot yourself (that's really not how guns naturally point- you can only really pick it up one way, where the dangerous end faces away from you). We know that 6 year olds can do this because they've been in the news for shooting teachers before, but before then, maybe not so much.
Revolvers and guns with exposed hammers are more dangerous because the hammer on the back, when cocked, makes the trigger pull light enough for any infant to use- so if you're investigating the device like a very small child might and are properly fuzz-testing the controls, a 3 year old could easily fire it.
The most dangerous age is the one where the kid recognizes what the device is, points it at another kid, and pulls the trigger- for all media with a gun in it that a child is likely to see, and all of the [toy] guns they may themselves possess... well, that's how guns are used, right?
It's not like the other kid is likely going to do that characteristic side-step that gun people do if you point a gun at them; they don't fully understand the implications of "loaded gun is pointed at you" either. They might understand it means "danger", but it's in the abstract, or kid with the gun does that so quickly you don't actually have time to react. (Kind of like how deer will just wander out into the middle of gun ranges.)
And this is indeed unique to guns; injuries caused by play-fighting with knives tend both to be self-limiting (it hurts before you are fatally injured, whereas with the gun it only hurts afterwards), rely on the physical strength of the user to work (not a limitation with a gun due to its nature as a self-powered tool), and the danger is obvious to any child who has ever cut themselves.
It's perhaps more accurate to say that the exercise of political power is automated by guns, in the exact same ways (and with the exact same effects) that conventional warfare is automated by nuclear weapons [so the outcome is generally "don't even try"].
When each man is his own nuclear-armed nation-state, MAD doctrine applies and thus limits the scale and scope of conventional war. The Khmer Rouge or the Hutu don't rack up that kind of body count if every man, woman, and child can simply shoot them. (Genocide doesn't discriminate by age, and under those conditions, you probably can't kill them all. But in the dawn of the decade, in a particular Western country, a nationwide Kristallnacht-style movement was killed in 3 rounds. Even a revolver holds more than that, and if everyone has one...)
(The typical "but does 2A cover nuclear weapons" question is far closer to the mark than I think either side realizes. It's just a matter of degrees. One notes the same question will apply to AI usage in the long run.)
To what is this referring?
Other than that confusion--good post.
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I think you might be right about that, and I hadn't considered it. Seems like the vast majority of those incidents involving children of those ages involve a DA/SA pistol or an SAO pistol. I really am only thinking of this because I own a few guns and having a future offspring shoot themselves with one is terrifying to me, but I also don't want to leave them all completely inaccessible.
My own father kept loaded guns around the house, but I don't recall any safety scares whatsoever... The two semi-auto rifles I can remember were both suspended higher than a toddler could feasibly reach, I think the pistol was stored in disguised Bible case in a drawer. You generally don't keep a round in the chamber on rifles anyway, though. I remember being told not to touch any of them because they were dangerous, but that would have probably been around when I was 6 or so, on account of my being able to remember it at all.
This is the thing I can't properly parse yet- where being able to obey "don't touch, that's dangerous" doesn't necessarily imply "now that you, without questioning or arguing, accept "it's dangerous", you may now know why it's dangerous" (and move on to that stage where you blow up a bunch of soda jugs and watermelons). Then again, I don't have kids yet.
You do a lot of staring down the metaphorical barrel with this stuff and it's odd nobody ever fully acknowledges that. Because yes, them being motivated enough to get to the gun and using it is always a risk. Doubly so because it is a technological terror of a mechanism not found in nature; we don't do that calculus with knives or rope since they're everyday items yet have to consciously do it with guns (I believe hanging ends more kids with a death wish than guns do even when they are available, but I honestly don't feel like verifying that).
It just occurs to me that maybe accidents were more common when the physically smaller guns were the standard home-defense fare simply because they were guns perfectly sized for a kid to use in the first place (and hence more closely resembled the size and weight of their toys at the time). Yeah, revolver triggers are really heavy in DA, and a shrouded-hammer DAO design might be safer because of that, but if my hands are that size I can see me getting enough of a grip on the gun to be able to yank the trigger hard enough to fire it. (With an exposed hammer, I could use my entire hand or some other object to push the hammer down if it's too stiff for my thumb.)
That said, those exact firearms are arguably ideal for actually teaching a kid to shoot. I'd rather give them a pawn shop .32 than a full-size handgun or even a .22 rifle simply because it's not this boat anchor of a thing... which inevitably lends itself to said kid (who is indeed paying attention) getting dope-slapped unnecessarily because they're using so much of their strength to hold the damn thing up in the first place that they can't pull the charging handle back without the gun tracking off to the side. The adult does not know they probably should have told the kid to do this because they're inherently strong/tall enough to never have needed to do that.
Of course I think the real correct choice for this application is a vz. 61 Skorpion (with the shoulder stock) simply because it's harder for that to point the wrong way and easier to actually use, provided you also put one of the really big charging handles on it. But that's also an order of magnitude more expensive than "coincidentally child-sized old revolver" and it's not as simple a manual of arms as "finger off trigger, break it open, loose rounds in, double check finger off trigger, grab cylinder area and close it up, left hand back on grip, [cock hammer and] shoot", so...
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I would imagine that most young children who accidentally shoot themselves do so with a gun that was carelessly left accessible and loaded by a moronic parent. Not to be too harsh, but that just seems like stupid genes weeding themselves out of society.
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Oh, that's potentially more one-sided. Not for infants or toddlers, since gun triggers typically require multiple pounds of force to pull, but for older kids. Unintentional gun deaths kill dozens of kids a year in the US, so the only remaining question would be whether your proposed re-conditioning wouldn't have negative consequences when you needed responsible gun users as adults.
Or maybe we're both just not taking the thought experiment far enough? As an American citizen I'm fairly conscious of how the democratization of military power preceded and helped instigate the democratization of political power, and from that perspective I worry that we're running on hysteresis already and shouldn't risk making it even worse. As a World Controller I would presumably also be fairly concerned with the democratization of political power, but mostly from the perspective of how to stop it from ever happening again, and from that perspective the solution to child firearm accidents is easy: only our cadres of devoutly loyal childless soldiers shall be allowed anywhere near the trigger of a gun, and so we don't need to condition anyone against guns, just against disloyalty.
Obviously, as a real world controller, the world would inevitably end up in the state that the book is in. There simply isn't any reason to not pull a Grand Inquisitor and induce societal heat death, as long as we're talking about stopping coups from ever happening. However, I think that the methods used would probably have to vary a lot more and we'd have to have a lot better industrial capabilities and maybe a better understanding of biology. Sleep hypnosis can't work, we obviously can't grow kids in jars and it might not be possible at all, and I think you'd have to take more extreme measures to eliminate things like hate and jealousy and greed. Like "nerve stapling" like in Alpha Centauri. And people don't like nerve stapling.
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Seems to happen approximately 100 times per year for kids up to 5.
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