Photo

One of the many problems with the growing normalization of gun ownership is that a growing number of idiots will want to buy and keep guns for no particularly good reason, and a subset of those idiots will go on to kill people.

Witness the latest horror story, in which an 11-year-old Pennsylvania boy, Hunter Pederson, was shot dead by his uncle, Chad Olm.

Mr. Olm said Hunter and Mr. Olm’s son asked to see his collection of firearms. So he obligingly whipped out three guns, including a Glock 27 .40-caliber pistol with a laser sight. (Why Mr. Olm felt he needed such a weapon, or such an attachment, has not been explained, probably because there is no satisfying answer.)



After showing his 11-year-old nephew a deadly weapon with a laser sight, he turned on the sight, putting a red dot on the boy’s forehead. For laughs, or something. Mr. Olm said Hunter reached for the gun, and it went off, hitting him above the eye.

Mr. Olm said he keeps his guns unloaded (obviously not), but that he had not checked to make sure before he aimed one at a small boy’s head.

Mr. Olm was arrested and is facing charges of criminal homicide, recklessly endangering another person, and endangering the welfare of children.

Anyone with the slightest shred of sense knows that you check weapons for chambered rounds before you put them away — not when you’re showing them off — and that you should never point a gun at anyone unless you think you might need to shoot.

(My wife comes from a gun-owning family. When she was growing up her father would become enraged if any of his kids pointed so much as a plastic toy pistol at someone.)

Before the comments start piling up from the anti-gun control crowd, I am not saying that all guns should be outlawed or that a better background-check system would necessarily have prevented this senseless death.

But the killing of Hunter is a sign of how out-of-control the gun-owning fetish has become, and how little it has to do with anything the writers of the Constitution envisioned.