Source: Father: ‘My kid made a mistake’ in school – USATODAY.com.

Authorities say the boy brought a .45-caliber handgun he got from his mother’s house to an elementary school in Bremerton on Wednesday, and the weapon discharged from inside his backpack just before classes let out, critically injuring Amina Kocer-Bowman.

Have we come to the point in our gun laden country where we are now charging nine year olds with gun crimes.  The pitiful thing about this story is that there is no mention of holding any adults responsible for the nine year old having the weapon in his back pack! I looked into this some and discovered that there are about twenty States that say you can’t hold the gun owner responsible in cases like these. Of course Florida which has had so much attention lately is one of those States.

The NRA (National Rifle Association) is perhaps the most powerful lobby in the U.S.  They have managed to keep us from instituting any controls on gun purchases or use in this country. If they label a congressman or senator to be “anti-gun” then they will do almost everything in their power to see that he is defeated in the next election.  I knew a person in the Lutheran church I once was a member of who was a avid supporter of the NRA.  His FaceBook page is constantly filled with crude in-your-face rhetoric against those who support gun control in this country.  I imagine he is pretty typical of an NRA member.

Of course the NRA and all their supporters, and it seems also the radical right fringe now in the Supreme Court, cite the second amendment as the protection against gun control. That amendment goes like this:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

To a rational person the first part of this amendment is the reason for the second part. That is guns were necessary for a regulated militia. But what State in the Union today requires, like they did two hundred years ago when this amendment was written , that the militia man own his own gun. The closest thing we would have to a “well regulated militia” today would be the National Guard units in each of the States.  I’m pretty sure none of our national guard units requires its member to provide their own guns. So, it seems that the purpose of the second amendment has been antiquated by time. We no longer require personal gun ownership in order to provide security.

Getting back to the article above it seems insanity to not hold the gun owner responsible when his weapon kills or injures some due to his keeping it unsecured. Why can’t the NRA at least be agreeable to that??

But what do I know….