In Wake of Arizona Uzi Killing, NRA Tweets About Kids Having Fun With Guns

[SecularMotion]

There's no shortage of grim gun news in the United States, including numerous killings involving children, but there was something particularly disturbing about an incident on Monday in which a 9-year-old girl accidentally shot her instructor to death with an Uzi. The tragedy unfolded at an Arizona gun range catering to tourists called Bullets and Burgers. How on earth was such a child allowed to fire such a powerful weapon on fully automatic, by a person who knows enough about firearms to have served in the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan? See video of the incident below via the New York Times; the clip doesn't show the actual moment of tragedy, but it's plenty chilling nonetheless.

Reactions to the news, as you might expect, have ranged from somber to mystified to angry. But with the story making the rounds on social media, only those latter two applied to a tweet posted on Wednesday afternoon by NRA Women, which is part of the National Rifle Association's Women's Programs and is sponsored by gun manufacturing giant Smith & Wesson. "7 Ways Children Can Have Fun at the Shooting Range" the tweet announced, linking to a recent story that details how kids can get bored with target practice if not properly entertained. NRA Women posted the tweet at 1:51 p.m. Pacific on Wednesday; by about 3 p.m. it had been removed, but not before I and others took a screen shot of it:

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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/nra-arizona-uzi-tweet-guns

[ileus]

2. My kids love range day.

[Eleanors38]

3. Our family couldn't afford a range, but we had acreage

we could practice shooting on. I first fired a high-power rifle here, a Marlin 336 in .35 Remington. On occasion, we would hunt small game using shotguns, or ventilate tin cans. A lot of fun, and no one had even heard of the internet or contrived jury hides.

[meathead]

4. That was a sad story. I feel for the little girl and the surviving family members.

So what ways can kids have fun at the shooting range? I bothered to check. The list was of 7 fun targets to engage kids in marksmanship training. Suggestions included using "Biodegradable clay targets." There was no mention of submachine guns generally or UZI's specifically.