The brave boy escaped to his bedroom after the two men, posing as
FedEx deliverymen, entered his family’s Canarsie home at 5:30 p.m. and
ordered two teens to stay in the living room while they searched the
house.
One of the men tried to reach into the boy’s bedroom with
the gun in his hand — and the quick-thinking youngster slammed the door
on him so hard, he dropped the weapon.
The boy picked up the gun and fired off a shot. The robbers then fled
The pro-gun groups are crazy about this story. I just can't figure out why--the gun-owner of this story had his firearm used against him by a child.
Yes,
I mean the criminal--this is not to say that I have many sympathies towards him. But not only was his gun easily stolen, it was easily stolen by a 10 year-old. Had he brought a knife
instead, he and his partner probably would have succeeded. He brought a gun instead and essentially lost a fight to an unarmed boy.
That's not a good look, promoters of gun-safety.
Now, the well-tread narrative from pro-gun people is always, "if you make guns
illegal, only criminals will have guns." But in this case, only
criminals DID have a guns and it all worked out rather nicely.
But what really turns me all around is that many of the same people who point to the gun as the reason
this story has a happy ending are the one who will point anywhere else when a story has an unhappy ending. The message, "guns don't kill people; people kill people" doesn't seem to apply when the gun is in the hands of an innocent victim. At the moment of reflection, I suppose we are to commend the gun for bravely leaping from the hands of the merciless thug and into those of the little boy, aiming and firing itself until the situation was safely resolved. It seems that guns (like Reagan or God) are only responsible for the good things that happen in their name.
Of course, I'm not saying this is an anti-gun story either. Acquiring
a gun did save the day. It just didn't happen in a way the pro-gun orthodoxy should jump to celebrate.
