Are Children Out To Kill Us All?

As the bumper stickers like to say, children are our future. Our terrifying future. Whether they’re doing incredibly dumb things, or just figuring out how to pick us off one by one, children rival zombies, robots, and zombie robot children as the most dangerous threat to our way of life. Two stories today prove both the child menace and how to defeat it, here at Uproxx News.

OK, we’re joking, we don’t seriously think children are a danger to ourselves or others, even if they are here to ultimately grow up, force us out of our jobs, and put us in retirement homes. On the other hand, it’s a little harder to argue that when you hear about Allen and Alecia Jones.

Allen Jones, a resident of Bay Minette, Alabama, was coming home when he realized he’d accidentally left a .40mm Glock pistol in his truck’s glove compartment. Jones, being a responsible person, took it out of his truck and was walking towards the house when he tripped and the gun flew free, landing and discharging a round into his leg.

Fortunately, Alecia was there bathing their son, and immediately ran out to help Allen, with her son in tow. Actually, running ahead of her, because he picked up the gun and started playing with it. Alecia, not unreasonably, freaked when faced with her pride and joy playing with a loaded firearm and tried to take it away, whereupon she was promptly, and accidentally, shot in the neck.

The Joneses are both USA Medical Center in Mobile, in stable conditions and healing from their wounds. Their son, meanwhile, is probably going to never live down shooting his mom, especially during high school. There’s just nothing that can top “You shot me!” as a guilt trip.

Meanwhile, in the “Parent of the Year” category, we’ve got an unnamed parent in Conyers, Georgia, who dropped off her toddler with her grandmother, who works at a bank, and apparently neither her nor the staff noticed that a toddler had wandered into their vault until they’d already closed it and initiated the time lock. You’d think somebody would notice a toddler missing, but apparently not.

The tot, fortunately, is completely safe: a master safecracker was escorted to the bank by police, where he drilled the lock open and freed the toddler to her mother, who soon will no doubt be dodging Child Protective Services.

So, the moral of the story is, when a toddler gets a firearm, lock them in a bank vault, for your safety.

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  • First Daddy shoots himself, then you shoot Mommy and collect the life insurance money. In candy! (MSNBC)
  • Toddlers betray their secret weakness: enormous steel cubes with time locks and limited air (KPLC-7 News)

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  • In technology news, tomorrow heralds the iPad 2, the second iteration of one of the single most successful consumer electronics devices of all time. Shockingly, the tech blogs think that the iPad 2 will be thinner and lighter, but with better technology; in other words, like every sequel to every Apple product ever. They also think it’ll include a camera and stereo speakers. Most entertaining and ridiculous rumor: that it’ll have an SD card slot. An Apple product? Using a common format? Pshaw! That might make the iPad more useful to the common man, and thus hackable! We can’t have that! (PCWorld)
  • Meanwhile, Amazon, in a Hail Mary play to keep the Kindle remotely relevant when tablets are hitting the market left and right, is offering it through a major mobile provider, and even eating the fees that said provider would normally reap. That’s the good news. The bad news? The provider in question is AT&T. The Kindle becomes available in AT&T stores Sunday, with service complaints going live Monday. (Yahoo!)

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  • There are, right now, 75 million children in the United States. And most of them don’t have jobs, unlike the good old days, when you could make a seven-year-old do something vile and dangerous for a pittance. (ChildStats.gov)
  • There are also over 200 million guns in the United States. You realize what this means? There’s almost three guns for every child! Hide your rifles, hide your pistols! (BBC)

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