Follow up becaus sometimes I'm obsessive.

Here's the Ohio Revised Code charge of Possession of Criminal Tools:
Note, the implication of use in a felony moves the possession charge from being the lowest level misdemeanor to the lowest level felony.

The charge would have to be held under rule (3), but that would make me wonder if a camera/camera phone has been estabished through prior rulings as "commonly used for criminal purposes" or if they're trying something new here.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Not really, and I do understand the application of the law. It's just that the phrase "use of criminal tools" is one that's badly worded, and I don't know who coined that.
If they say "criminal use of tools" it would make much more sense, and still leave a distinction for a deadly tool, or something built to be a weapon, like a gun, or cannon, or B52 or something.

I agree there. But; I wonder if there is a much larger story of a history of behavior or some parenting problem, or more strange detail in the first place. Then, maybe it's necessary.
But; if shes being used as an example...then that's <bleep>.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

My best friend is a fire-fighter in licking county. They often work the H.S. football games and such, and it's a very rural area, so they often know a little about what's going on. I'll have to ask him if he's heard of the case, and knows anything about those involved. He probably doesn't know anything about it, but we'll see.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Okay, so not bad parenting in the general sense of the thread, but a tad on the irresponsible side looking back at it.

I work in a hotel, as the graveyard desk clerk. Tonight about 2:45 AM, I see movement on the second floor and spot a 5 year old kid peeking at me from the edge of the section I can see. I go up to find him sitting in front of a room, knocking on the door and crying.

I'm assuming that he had to use the bathroom, and picked the wrong door, got locked out, then explored for a bit and got lost.

It took an hour to track down the right room. He was 5, and I think he said he was disabled. He had sort of a Down's Syndrome look about him, but not to the point I'd have thought that if he didn't say something first. His last name wasn't the same as his mother's, and the room was rented for them by someone else, so the guest list was useless.

We finally got it figured out by asking about the things in the room, and the fact that they checked out towels for the pool.

The whole thing could easily have been avoided by flipping the little catch on the door though. Those things would never stop someone from breaking in, but they are really good for keeping kids in the room.

Also, the woman in the room the kid was knocking on said, "Is that who's been knocking my door?" when I called to see if that was his room. At 2:30 in the morning, if I hear a knock at my hotel door, and hear a kid sobbing, I'm either going to open the door or call the front desk to check it out. I'm not sure how just waiting for it to stop was really expected to work.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

Boy Dies After Accidentally Shooting Self

I doubt there are a lot of adults who have the strength to handle one of those.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

If it's actually an Uzi, it's pretty large and 9mm. The press has a habit of calling every SMG an Uzi at some point. Sort of like all facial tissues are "Kleenex".

Anyway, they are too big t be fired with one hand, and the two hand grip is with one on the grip and the other on the fore end. Even that is assuming the retractable stock was removed or not extended.

The only way I can even see this happening is if he were firing from the hip. If he were aiming, the muzzle should have climbed back over his shoulder, well above his head.

Around the same age (8-11) my dad knew a guy who had a Class III dealer's permit. That meant he could not only sell standard guns, he could sell fully automatic ones. I had a chance to fire four different SMG's around that age. One was a MAC-11 in .380 auto.* another was a MAC-10 in .45 ACP**. Neither were really controllable if you "sprayed". I shot the 11 in a bowling pin match and once the guy that ran the range was sure that I understood how to shoot it, he didn't have a problem with me doing it. 3 to 5 round bursts at each target. Pause, move to the next target, repeat.

Based on the story, I'm putting every bit of the blame on the "supervision" on this one. If the kid was so poorly prepared for it, there is no way he should have been allowed to fire it.

* .380 is a 9x17mm, while a 9mm is a 9x19mm. The case is only 2mm shorter in a 380, and while this does make for a drop of about 20% in velocity, the average 380 kicks harder than the average 9mm. The one I fired had a longer barrel and a canvass loop to use to keep the front end down. I probably could have kept control of it during a spray, but I wouldn't have really hit anything I was trying to.

** .45 ACP is 11.43x23mm They don't go as fast as a 9mm, but it's a much bigger (nearly double the mass) bullet. Because they are bigger, they kick harder, but the guns tend to be bigger and heavier as well. Most people think a .45 kicks a little more than a 9mm.

I never even came close to shooting myself with any full auto I've ever fired. I did blow the end of my shoelace off with a .22 once though.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

What about spinning up and around if he lost control on his non-trigger hand.
I've never fired something like that, and I have had kickback force me up and above my head, so I can understand your explaination. But; I really don't know.

Is that a setting or a trigger control (like popping the clutch in reverse)?

Anyway, I found a longer story...
Eight-year-old boy killed firing Uzi at gun show
Every story I found said "uzi". So, It's either the AP saying it, or it really was one.
It sounds like this was a walk-up, "see what it's like to fire a gun" booth rather than an instruction gone awry.
And; for all the detail in the story, there's no mention about the parent's or child's previous experiences.

I wonder how the supervising instructor made the determination it was safe, and how it may have affected the certification.

So; it may have been legal, but poorly executed.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

If he was holding it right, up to where he could actually aim it, then it would recoil very similarly to a large handgun if he lost the front grip. The grip is centered under the chamber, with the bolt working entirely behind the hand. Basically the force would have been applied about 2 inched above the point of rotation on his wrist, and that's only if he kept his arm fixed. To get it to spin all the way around, I think you'd almost have to move your hand down and forward while it was going off.

One other thing. Uzi's have very big grips. I've got my big boy hands now, and I can still barely touch my thumb and ring finger around the grip. Real ones also have a grip safety that has to be pressed with the webbing of the firing hand to get it to go off. This is so it can't fire if dropped. That's a handful for the average 8 year old.


Not on an Uzi. There is a slider on the left side of the grip. Back is safe, middle is one round, forward files as long as the trigger is down. On full auto, You pull 'til you feel it go off, then let off to get a burst. They fire about 30 a second, so 3 to 5 is about the shortest you can really hope to get. Any more than that is just alley sweeping anyway.

It might very well be. It's just one of those things I've noticed in the news from time to time. "police recovered a collection of uzi's in the raid" will be accompanied by a shot of about 8 different types of SMG, none of which is an Uzi. There are also two major versions of full sized Uzi, as well as the MiniUzi and MicroUzi. Now the micro... I could see pivoting in the shooting hand enough to come back at the shooter. There is no forward grip and they're short.

Agreed on all counts. It sounds like the firearm equivalent of a star party. Some stuff for the public to play with that they might never have the chance to.

The thing is, there really was no reason for this to have happened. The kid comes up, the instructor asks if he's ever fired a gun before. If the kid says no, then he gets the magazine with 1 round in it, to be sure he doesn't drop it. For full auto, he gets three to see if he can control it. Only after that does he get to really open up.

When I teach someone to shoot, the first part is always done on a single action revolver. The odds of it accidentally going off second time are practically zero, as it take two different actions to make t happen. I'd never give a novice a full magazine and set to "stutter".

Also, if i'm right that he was shooting from the hip, the instructor should have stopped him them and there. If the goal was to teach people like it says in the longer article, then take that extra step and teach them right.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

It was funny watching the head of our academy fire a MP5. He was a big guy. Not tall big, but big around the equator. On full auto, he had a hard time keeping the end down. And an MP5 is longer (I think) than an Uzi, and should probably handle the recoil easier.

To be shot in the head, I'd have to agree that the gun was probably not up in the firing position. Either he was shooting from the hip, or he was holding it down in a non-firing position and accidently squeezed the trigger. If you're not ready for it, it wouldn't take long for the gun to bounce around and could end up pointed almost anywhere. Unfortunately, it sounds like it ended up pointed up and inward.

It does seem awful at first (and it certianly is awfully tragic) but depending on the kid's experience, it might not have been ludacris to let the kid fire the gun. One instructer's 13 year old son fired the MP5, along with a few of the handguns. Sadly (or expectedly, because of his experience with them) he shot better than most of us cadets. That includes myself, and I'm not a half-bad shot.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

I'm just flashing on the image of two kiddie hands trying to press the grip safety along with trigger with a very poor grip on the actual gun and no idea about what the recoil will be.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

My image was Dr. Calvin in "I Robot" shooting with her eyes closed.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

Here's a YouTube Vid (24 seconds) that shows a young kid firing one on full-auto, but doing it right. Shoulder stock out, short bursts. You can see how big the thing is in his hands.

After one burst, the muzzle drops quite a bit below the aim point. This is a good indication that he's pulling it in hard with his left hand, and pulling down with his right to keep it from climbing.

After seeing this, I'm wondering just how this could have possibly happened under the supervision of a trained range officer.

Fazor, Like I've said, when I was a kid, I got to play with a lot of stuff like this. I was raised around guns. I was reloading my own rounds for competitions when I was 7. My dad set everything up and left me to it. My dad was okay with leaving me alone at the truck while they did a "push" on a rabbit hunt. If he heard a shot from the truck, there wasn't a concern that I'd just done something stupid. WHen I used that MAC in the bowling pin shoot, there were a total of three people that I recall voicing a concern. The range owner. The FBI agent there to compete. And the guy I was shooting against (For some reason he always choked when he shot against me.) The other 30 or so people had seen me shotting for quite a while, and knew my dad. They knew that there was no way he'd give me something I couldn't handle.

But I also know that that was not typical for a 9-10 year old. There is no reason that this should have happened to this kid. If he wasn't capable of handing the gun, then he should have had help from the range people, or steps should hve been taken to minimize the risk. I'm not seeing how this was any more of a "tragic accident" than when some grown up gets killed riding a tebuchet into a lake.

There was an obvious risk and some pretty well defined variables. It shouldn't have been that hard to plan aroud them.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

There is no reason that this should have happened to this kid. If he wasn't capable of handing the gun, then he should have had help from the range people, or steps should hve been taken to minimize the risk. I'm not seeing how this was any more of a "tragic accident" than when some grown up gets killed riding a tebuchet into a lake.
Well, it's tragic because a kid was killed. That's always tragic. It's an accident because it wasn't done on purpose. That doesn't mean it wasn't an avoidable accident. But basically the point of my post was the same as what your post above was; People shouldn't get overly emotional about the age without knowing more about the circumstance. He may have been an eight year old that had experience and should have been able to handle it, and just made a mistake. Or he could have been a kid who had no business with that kind of weapon.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Absolutely; but there is a media angle here. I've seen a tendency for the media to minimize blame on a victim as much as possible. So; if this kid had experience, I would think the media would point that out.

I was half-expecting the phrase "even though he was skilled with a firearm..."

So; nothing definitive, but there is some leaning.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

That came off overly harsh on my part. I'm not saying that I object to the tragedy part. I object to the accident part. I know of several skilled shooters that did something stupid and shot themselves, though none were fatal. I'm just saying that from what has been presented so far, it seems very strongly to me that there is grown up who should be held accountable in some way for it. Somewhere in this chain of events is a person that should have known better,

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

I want to know more about riding trebuchets into lakes. Sounds a bit like bungee jumping without the bungee.

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Bring back Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

The story got reported in one of our newspapers, specifying the SMG as a 9mm Micro Uzi and a full auto+full mag as the first time the kid tried shooting one.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.