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(courtesy 9gag.com)

“To regard Gilt’s shooting as a black comedy of just deserts would be a mistake,” The Trace opines. Subtle, eh? [Image above from a different source.] To earn Google’s approval as a listed news provider (a financially valuable honor denied TTAG), the Bloomberg-financed Trace is supposed to be neutral on guns. In fact, When Kids Shoot Their Parents: An American Tradition is just another bloody shirt-waving exercise designed to promote gun control. Like this . . .

A day after the shooting, Jamie Gilt was reportedly in stable condition. Her country is not so lucky.

As we predicted, gun control advocates are using Jamie Gilt’s guilt to further the cause of civilian disarmament. As all gun control advocates are wont to do with all firearms-related deaths involving children.

Not seeing it? How about the sub-head: Shots fired at mothers and fathers by sons and daughters are as much a part of the history of gun ownership as Davy Crockett or the Minutemen.

While TTAG laments negligent discharges — and doesn’t hesitate to write about them as a warning to others — it’s important to note the fact that these tragedies are both rare and entirely preventable (by observing The Four Rules of Gun Safety). Well it is for us, anyway.

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64 COMMENTS

  1. Still waiting to hear if she made a mistake or some other irresponsible adult left the loaded handgun where anybody could grab it.

  2. The text on the picture would indicate a success story would it not? Doesn’t say responsibly.

    Still she went from 200 FB likes to over 1000 (post Aeration) so she has that going for her.

    I’m obviously late to the party but was she actually a known entity before this?

  3. I love math.

    With 100,000,000 gun owners in this country (rounded to make the math easy), if a negligent discharge involving injury happened once, EVERY SINGLE DAY, it would take about 2,740 YEARS to get to 1% of gun owners.

    • I love the same math. Your sister gets dead today due to someone’s negligence, tomorrow it’s your brother, the next day your son. Yep, 1%….good argument.

  4. This is a serious question: How would one go about proving the bias on the part of The Trace and get them booted from Google news? As if that “just desserts” comment isn’t enough…

  5. I like how they confuse responsible/safely handling a firearm with using a firearm.

    Teaching a four year old the Eddie the Eagle rules is NOT teaching a four year old how to use a gun.

    Meh…. double standards allow them to at least have standards.

  6. One News Woman asked a legitimate question, she said “I have a 4 year old, how could such a small child even be able to manipulate a gun to get it to go off?” I would have answered her that if the Jamie Gilt was using a striker fired pistol with no manual safety it would have been easy for a child to trip the trigger and set it off.

    One Media report also stated the child was not strapped into a child car seat either (also against the law) although there was one in the car at the time. Two mistakes too many, in other words a child not restrained in his seat and a handgun (whatever model it was) was within his reach. What gun she actually was using I do not know but I find it hard to believe that a gun like a 1911 even if locked and cocked or a traditional double action only auto could have been tripped off that fast and easy by a 4 year old. My hunch is it was a striker fired pistol with no manual safety.

    Charges are pending after her recovery and in my opinion well deserved as the child could have been the victim just as easily. A black eye for concealed or unconcealed carry and more ammo for the anti-gun crowd who in this instance sure have a good case to make when we have irresponsible adults putting themselves and their children at risk.

    • Most likely it was her new Kimber 1911 custom, the “toy”. Why she didn’t secure it or the child is beyond me. The other scenario is that the child was old enough to release himself from his car seat and knowledgeable enough to load and fire that weapon. Don’t piss off a 4 year old when driving!

    • my truck gun (a comm block makarov) would be impossible for my 4 year to chamber a round in. On the other hand, it’s never left anywhere he could get, so moot point.

    • “Charges are pending after her recovery and in my opinion well deserved as the child could have been the victim just as easily”

      Or an unrelated person if the child had shot through a window instead of into the driver’s seat.

      Would it violate the 2nd amendment to require people to go through training courses, and equip guns with safety mechanisms, before owning guns?

      • “Would it violate the 2nd amendment to require people to go through training courses, and equip guns with safety mechanisms, before owning guns?”

        Sounds like infringement to me, as well as the beginning arguments which have set us on this slippery slope where there’s even one elected public servant who would dare publicly mention confiscation in any circumstance or measure.

        • Is it infringement if they aren’t required to *pass* said training? One could hope that social pressure would be enough to keep most people paying attention during such training.

          A recent hobbyhorse of mine is to strengthen the enforcement of the second amendment by inducting those bearing “fire”arms into the unorganized militia (10 U.S. Code § 311), and requiring them to, once or twice a year, train with the local police force/national guard unit/whatever (equivalent to jury duty). With sanctions for missing the training (and regulations for announcing training dates and places sufficiently in advance).

      • I do agree with your reply. No I do not think it would be against the 2nd Amendment to require a safety course as you are not preventing a person from getting or owning a gun. As far as a safety. I have always recommended a gun with a manual safety as it has saved me and others from tragedy. And of course if you are a moron you can just choose not to engage the safety so again you violate no ones rights.

  7. Well the rest of the story is that she was busted for stealing $500.00 worth of clothes from the store she was parked at.

    My guess is she stashed her gat before her theft to avoid a gun charge.

    • The kid still had at least six more .45 rounds and was out of his car seat moving around back there. That’s the real operator here.

  8. This is an accident.
    One with a fortunate ending.
    Nobody is perfect, stand with this gal.
    She’s paying for her mistake the hard way…..45 to the back? Ouch!
    Strong kid to hold on after recoil….lets be thankful the kid didnt bump fire into his or her own head!

    • she needs to pay for her crimes in public court. no-one should soil responsible gun owner with the veracity that Ms. Gilt did. Her transgression has set us back years, and proved she was a fake, a poser, a gun whore.

      Seems anyone with boobs gets a rise out of gun fans everywhere. But the harder they fall, the harder they fall.

      Stay away from the fakes. You can tell because they are all talk and Facebook.

      • “she needs to pay for her crimes in public court. no-one should soil responsible gun owner with the veracity that Ms. Gilt did. Her transgression has set us back years, and proved she was a fake, a poser, a gun whore.”

        Good God!

        Should I heave a plush Victorian-style couch behind you while you faint clutching onto your pearls?

        Get a grip.

        • Thank you HellChild. That comment made me laugh so hard my wife asked me what the hell i was reading. I needed that one.

    • Accidents happen to everyone.
      The fact that this sort of thing NEVER happens to the overwhelming majority of gun owners means it was MUCH MORE THAN AN ACCIDENT. It was a reckless and indefensible disregard for her child’s safety and her own.

  9. Sorry, but The Trace got it exactly right on this one. Morons who fail to secure their firearms and who, by their actions, endanger others, particularly children, are beyond contempt.

    • But it has no bearing on whether their “country is not so lucky” or not.

      Some people do dumb stuff sometimes. Sucks to be them, and those who for one reason or another don’t avoid them.

      Not even the remotest excuse for any kind of government intervention.

  10. Recalling my earlier post…didn’t have the entire story…damn.
    Sounded like an accident not a criminal gone dumb

  11. Our country has more than 300,000,000 guns, about 100,000 schools, and millions of gun owners. There will be mistakes. There will be school shootings. Both are incredibly rare, yet the news media loves to trumpet them to “prove” that gun owners are idiots, and that only government agents are responsible enough to own guns.

  12. Gilt seems like a grandiose attention seeker. Such people are kryptonite for the causes they join/attempt-to-feed-on. Oh well, every subculture has em.

  13. Always consider how your actions will be seen by others. Especially the anti-gun crowd. We cannot give them any proverbial ammunition to be used against us. We are judged by our actions. And don’t forget almost everything is recorded.

    And leave the “Rule Of Cool” for the movies.

  14. The trace being neutral and Google enforcing that are jokes at best. Google hates guns as much as any other prog wedbsite. Hence, the trace is one of those news thingys and TTAG ain’t.

  15. “…it’s important to note the fact that these tragedies are both rare and entirely preventable (by observing The Four Rules of Gun Safety).” The four rules prevent NDs when you’re in possession of the gun. That you’d need a 5th rule not to leave guns unattended with a toddler would seem unnecessary, but I guess not.

      • Yeah, Google’s old ‘Don’t be evil’ slogan didn’t just break the irony meter, it flat wrapped it around the stop-peg considering the fattest pipe currently going into the NSA’s data center is very likely Google’s…

      • Google started off as the “underdog” antiestablishment choice, at least compared to Microsoft. Now they ARE the establishment.

  16. Teaching children to use guns has nothing to do with getting shot in the back by one. IN FACT, a child trained in the use of firearms probably is the kind that you could trust NOT to shoot you in the back if they came across a real firearm.

    Although I doubt she supports teaching literally four year-olds to shoot guns. At that age, one needs to keep the guns out of the hands of the children. She made a mistake there.

  17. “A day after the shooting, Jamie Gilt was reportedly in stable condition. Her country is not so lucky”

    Ya, we’re suffering from historic lows in murder rates, oh the horror of it all!!

  18. A better story would be one of bloomberg’s (or zuckerburg’s) dozen full time armed guards having an NG and hitting him.

  19. Shots fired at mothers and fathers by sons and daughters are as much a part of the history of gun ownership as Davy Crockett or the Minutemen.
    Yeah, when I was a kid, my parents would give me the .22lr rifle and run around in the sheep pasture and encourage me to shoot at them. Good family values times for gun ownership.
    Both of the above phrases have the same degree of credibility.

  20. Well… first and foremost I’m definitely in favor of people having good, safe gun handling and storage practices ESPECIALLY if there are children present. However with that said- nah. In fact just no. I’m saying this with all sincerity to all of the left-leaning people who make up about 98% of my friends list, and who I count as political contemporaries on most subjects. I’m sick to death of people who don’t like guns celebrating when something bad happens to people who do.

    Go to the comments of any gun-related article from a left-leaning news source and you see a rather shocking number of people expressing their sincere desire to see gun owners either killed with their own guns, or killed by some government force because they refuse to give up their guns. For as much as people who don’t like guns say they want changes made so less people get hurt, they’re somehow the only people who publicly express pleasure when things like this happen. It’s gross, it’s tacky, and it’s unbelievably self-centered to take pleasure in the harm of an innocent stranger as a form of political expression. I lost some acquaintances from the pro-gun side of this particular fence when I called them out for similar behavior after news first broke about the shooting of a kid in Florida named Travon.

    Anti-gun people still love to pursue the flawed comparison of car licensing and gun licensing, which is interesting in this context because bad things do often happen when people leave their children in cars. The car doesn’t even have to be running for an unexpected tragedy to occur. We’ve all read or heard some incident when a kid manages to disengage the emergency brake or put a parked car into gear. And you know what we never get from those stories? People posting a link to an article where they get to celebrate the harm done to others. In fact, I can safely say that I’ve never seen one of these “b*tch had it coming” posts when an unattended child unintentionally harms someone with a car.

    I do want to thank these people though, for helping me realize the real reason I take exception to casually derisive terms like “ammosexual.” I always thought it was because the guns = compensation pop psychology is such a lazy, hackneyed crutch for people who have little actual understanding of either guns or psychology. But today I realized whenever I read or hear somebody throw out a term like “ammosexual” it’s because it’s said with the exact flavor of pointless spite that middle and high school kids exude when they call someone who likes sci-fi a geek, dork, or whatever. It’s conversational shorthand for “I’m not going to bother to learn about what you’re into, I’m just going to try to make you feel like a lesser person for it.” The popularity of terms like that and the unfortunately common contempt with which they’re employed are one of the big reasons that it’s so hard for the two sides of this issue to have a real conversation about guns.

    As a fairly liberal gun owner, this news story has cropped up on my feed a few times, and I think it’s important to call out the kind of behavior we’re actually seeing. Posting things like this with a celebratory air is really no better than posting “I think people who like guns should all be shot.” If people on my friends list did start writing things like that I’d be a pretty disappointed in their problem-solving skills and secret authoritarian leanings, but at least in contrast to celebrating articles like this I’d respect their honesty.

  21. Toddlers kille more people than terrorists. That’s not politicking, it’s simple maths. This is the price you pay for this attitude to guns. I wish those who are so quick to make apologies for these kinds of incidents would actually admit that this is the price to be paid, but the cognitive dissonance precludes that. I don’t know why – it’s a price that’s worth paying, isn’t it?

    • Your “price worth paying” shtick wears thin.

      First of all, your premise that anyone here is making apologies is pure nonsense. Take a moment to actually read the comments. Incidents like this earn a heap ton of overt hatred from gun owners.

      Second, the “price worth paying” nonsense is a straw man. No one says that except anti-gun logically challenged ding bats that try to make gun owners sound like heartless monsters.

      The fact of the matter is that this was an act of negligence. Such negligence, gun related or not, happens every day. Toddlers get hurt, parents get hurt, non-parents get hurt. It’s a fact of life.

      Your focus on the “gun” as causative illustrates a complete disconnect with basic reality. The gun did not cause this. Irresponsibility on the part of this gun owner caused this. Irresponsible behaviors cause injury and death every day, but for some reason the illogical, intellectually dishonest anti-gun crowd chooses to sweep everything except when a gun is involved under the rug.

      So, if the question you are asking is “is the price of irresponsible behavior worth paying,” our answer is “No.” We don’t condone it in regard to gun handling or anything else. The commentary above (and that which accompanies every such story) bears this out.

      The question we’d ask you is “Why is every other irresponsible behavior the price YOU are willing to pay?” Mean…check out how many children die in swimming pools compared to those that die from firearms sometime.

      Do you go to swimming related web sites and condemn swimmers because having a pool is a “price worth paying” for drownings?

  22. I’m disgusted whenver I hear or see this referred to as “an accident” or worse, “just an accident”. I’m gratified to see this article refer to it as “negligence”, because that’s exactly what it was.

    I’m also gratified to see meccastreisand comment with: “Her car, her gun, her kid, her control, her mistake, her injury. Care, custody and control of the vehicle was hers as was responsibility for everything in it.”

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