Only in America? Really?

Kudos to The Columbus Dispatch for a rather fair and balanced look at this past weekend’s Southern Ohio Machine Gun Shoot in Minford, Ohio, an event where shooters of all ages could lock and load with some serious firepower. Obviously these events need to be carefully organized and safety should be first and foremost. Firearms, especially fully automatic machine guns, are not toys and should never be treated as such.

But the article’s kicker was a tad too clever:

“Tim Dawson smiled and shook his head. ‘Only in America’“

Only in America do we enjoy the freedom to have such events. And the article begins with mentioning how Dawson’s 14-year son was firing “a machine gun capable of killing a person from 2 miles away.” So OK, maybe the article was a little biased against guns. But this reporters problem is that the author of the article doesn’t fail to mention that it might seem odd for a 14-year to fire a machine gun for fun, but never brings up that many of the pirates in Somali or the “soldiers” throughout Africa are just slightly older than Wyatt Dawson.

It does take maturity to handle a gun, not years.