A peculiarly American tragedy.

America is a strange place, I think. It is a place where eight year olds get to play with guns - even if it kills them.

A peculiarly American tragedy occurred on Sunday afternoon at the Machine Gun Shoot and Firearms Expo at the Westfield Sportsman's Club, co-sponsored by C.O.P. Firearms & Training.

At this odd event (odd for me, because it would seem surreal for such a thing to even be held in the countries of my youth - the UK and Ireland - or my present country of residence, Singapore), a boy of just 8 years old was given his first machine gun to hold. It was an Uzi 9 mm micro machine gun. His father said it was selected because it was "small with little recoil". The boy duly pointed it at a pumpkin, and pulled the trigger. Well, it turns out that the recoil wasn't so little after all - the gun jerked back and up and he managed to shoot himself in the head. He died.

Where was the boy's father throughout all this? Well, he was about 10 feet behind him, fumbling for a camera to capture this proud moment of seeing his little boy handle his first machine gun. He got to witness something rather different.

The boy's father is director of emergency medicine at a local hospital in Stafford, Connecticut. I am sure he has seen enough gun wounds in his time, to know that guns are dangerous - but he doesn't seem to have learned much from his emergency room experience. He said: "This accident was truly a mystery to me. This is a horrible event, a horrible travesty, and I really don't know why it happened."

I think the poor father is not facing up to his own responsibility in this situation. There is no mystery as to how this happened. A little boy fired a gun rather too big for him to handle. That is all. That it was an exceptionally dangerous thing to do should have been obvious to all - especially to his emergency medicine trained Dad.

It is incidents like this that make me think that America is a truly mad place. It seems, to an outsider, to have social rules planned by a lunatic. Who, on Earth, could allow little boys to fire machine guns? What social madness leads people to believe that this is even a reasonable thing to allow? Yet it is done up and down the American land: kids fire guns, adults play with guns - and people die. It never seems to occur to them that if America were an unarmed society that they would have a murder rate similar to other unarmed societies - that is, approaching zero. It is much harder to kill someone when you have to do it up close and the most readily available weapon is your bare hands. Hence, murder rates in unarmed countries tend to be pretty low.

I have watched the American Tragedy (for America is a tragedy in many ways), for many years, wondering just when the American people are going to wake up and realize that guns are not the answer. I have wondered just how long it is going to be before they realize that if no-one had guns, that everyone would be a lot safer. There are those that object that if guns were taken away from law-abiding citizens that the criminals would have no-one to oppose them. That is easily answered: you just bring in a severe penalty for gun ownership - such as a mandatory death penalty (Singapore has the death penalty for use of a weapon: it works. Almost no-one ever uses a weapon: I have seen one case of weapon use in EIGHT YEARS. They caught him - and hung him, within a few weeks. Note he wasn't on "death row" for decades.) If this were done, America would not have to suffer tragedies like this little boy's pointless death. His name by the way was Christopher Bizilj. All his family have now, of him, are photos, memories and that name. I bet they wish guns were not part of American culture, now - but did it really have to take this lesson to teach them that?

The reaction of the authorities is particularly stupid. They are interested in whether people had the proper licenses for the gun use. They are interested in whether a crime had been committed (that is, not having the proper license). It never occurs to them that there shouldn't be such weapons in America in the first place. It never occurs to them that the whole idea of an armed citizenry is itself unwise. They are just worried about whether the proper PAPERWORK had been filed. It is bonkers, completely and utterly bonkers.

I wonder if I will ever see the day that America becomes an unarmed - and safe - nation? I rather doubt it. I have the feeling that not even my grandchildren will see that. There is too much inertia on the issue in America. There, there is the "right to bear arms"...well that leads to the risk of tragedies like Christopher Bizilj's. They will continue to happen as long as Americans have anything more dangerous than their fists to play with.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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