my daughter is 7 years old she cant rack the slide on my glock how does a 3 yrold load what turned out to be a ruger p98 ...parents should be liable not the company..I ownder if anyone ask the local DA this question..most people dont relise that it is difficult for small children to rack a slide on a pistol and if theres a fullyloaded mag in the well its harder because the top of the round is rubbing on the slide???

any opinions

I know I had to pull really damned hard when I was 7 to rack a slide. I sure as hell couldn't do it at 3. But, it is possible that he may have used some kind of leverage. For example, push against an immovable object.

It happened a lot when I lived near Detroit.
The boy friend and woman's kid would be home alone while mom was working.
The kid would find the shotgun (kids would be anywhere from 3-6 years old)
Would get it out of the locked closet or box under bed, load it, put the end of the barrel uder their chin or against their head and pull the trigger.
Sometimes a sub 2 year old would hold it and shoot the older kid in the torso.
It seemed to happen about every six months. The media and pols would call for bans and gun lock laws and safety locks.
I had some doubts myself, but the media would have pointed out anything suspious in the accidents, wouldn't they?

Maybe what they meant to say was.....

"...when 3-year-old Jordan Garris snuck into the garage, polished some left over mil spec brass, trimmed the shells, took his father's Dillion press, hand loaded a few 9mm +P+ rounds with hand cast cop killer bullets, loaded them in the mag, racked the slide, and was running across the backyard to get into his Sherman Tank, when the gun accidently discharged."

I know 24 year olds that have a hard time racking that slide.  There is NO FVCKING WAY a 3 year old can do it.  NONE.  Either he left a round chambered, or the media goofed and is making up stuff to dazzle the story a bit.  Either way, its the fault of the gun owner.

I saw this too. This should/could be easy to defend in court.

Bring into court a whole daycare outfit. Pass the gun around to the 3 year olds and ask them to load it (with dummy ammo, of course. That way it is only harmful to the dummies present.)

They can't figure it out? Show them. Then see if they can do it. Of course not, they won't be strong enough.

Ask them to fire the thing. They won't be able to in double action. And probably can't figure out how to pull the hammer back for single action.

Therefore, the father left the pistol cocked and unlocked under the mattress or someone else shot the kid and is blaming it on an "accedent."

Media + Gun = Misinformation at its best....


I wonder if the local media screwed this up or can the investigator of the shoot be this clueless? I vote media is wrong but im not always right.

The stupidest thing is that Ruger shipped the gun in a case with a padlock.  Because the father chose not to use it does not make it the fault of the gun company.

"It's 'Self-Loading', right?" [whacko]

What this quote is referring to is product liability law.  A product must be "defective" and also "unreasonably dangerous" for a manufacturer to be strictly liable.  I think the court was trying to make was that, whatever happened, it was clearly not the gun makers fault that the child died.  In other words,  the gun functioned exactly as designed and thus was not defective.  I don't know that the court was really trying to say anything more than that because even if the father had left the gun loaded it would not have changed the outcome of the product liability suit.

Could the slide have possibly been locked back while it was under the bed?  If the gun was stored with a loaded clip next to it and the slide locked back, I think a child might have loaded it.  After all, all the child had to do is bump it to engage the slide release lever.

There os no way a 3 year old could rack the slide on my 1911, just no way. Might be able to on my seimi 22.

I got my first very own 12ga when I was four. Of course I was used to being around guns at an early age anyways. I started reloading on my Dillon 550 when I was two and a half. [;)]

No, MRW.  that's not safe cause someone could bash someone else in the head with it.

"Safe" to the anti's means one of two things;
a)Non-existent w/no bad people around
b)not in YOUR hands but in theirs. It's OK if they have them but not us.  that's what safe means.