As most of you know, this past weekend an 8 year old boy shot himself in the head with an Uzi at a machine gun shoot. This was a tragic accident that, like most accidents, could have been avoided, however humans don't always make the best judgements and thus life can be cruel.
The boy was supervised and had an instructor behind him. Unfortunately this was not enough to keep the muzzle from jumping upwards. It's easy to look back now and say that the instructor should have held on or done this or that, but that's hindsight. Unfortunately, the accident took the child's life, and that is going to haunt that instructor for the rest of his.
As sad as this event is, it's just as troubling that I have to take the unemotional point of view about this as an accident. The reason I have to do so is because there are already calls to "regulate" these kinds of events due to an inordinately rare occasion. I guarantee you, out of the dozens of machine gun shoots each year in each state, they will self-regulate to ensure this never happens again, or to limit the possibility to the best of their abilities. It won't require new laws or regulations because the utter horror of this event is enough for most people to not want to repeat it.
Back to the cold, calculating methodology - You don't make laws based on rare happenings and accidental deaths via firearms for children is very, very, very rare. When you make laws over such rare events, that is the very definition of knee-jerk reaction.
Let's look at some real numbers. From the CDC itself, we look at unintentional deaths, firearms as the method, and ages 0-14 for the year of 2005.
75 deaths total. Each one tragic in and of itself, but from a population of 60 million children, not statistically worrisome. Let's compare this to other, common methods of fatalities for the same age group
Drowning - 810Vehicular - 2,210Falling - 82Poisoning - 92Suffocation - 977
Again, it actually makes me sad to look at all these numbers because I am a father of two children myself. However, to be a good parent, I have to do my best to protect my children from what is more likely rather than wasting energy on trying to stop something that has such a low chance of happening. When people try to ban guns based on such low numbers, they are effectively wasting energy on something when that energy could be better put to use increasing vehicular and pool safety since those would see a much greater return.
No, those who are calling for restrictions do not do it For The Children™, they do it because they can manipulate the emotional responses from people to gain more support, however illogical, for their attempt to ban guns. As cold as it sounds, when you look at the actual numbers, you'll see that what happened was truly nothing more than a tragic accident.