Child dies after accidentally being shot in the chest at a target practice area

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Child dies after accidentally being shot in the chest at a target practice area
azfamily.com
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It wasn’t a shooting range. That part of Arizona is pretty rural, and it looks like they rolled onto some land where people were doing target practice. Not uncommon for a rural community.

This is exactly how I ended up getting shot at while hiking. A bunch of drunk assholes decided to do target practice without checking what was down range, or they just didn't care that they were shooting towards a trail. Either way, bullets were hitting trees near us so we took off running back the way we came.

From what the video on the report seems to imply, it looks like the kids took their ATV on private property that their parents told them not to go on.

Still though, ATVs aren’t silent. The fact that they kept shooting wasn’t smart at all.

If you don't want to go deaf really quickly you should be wearing ear protection while shooting. If they were then I doubt they could have heard the ATV. If they weren't wearing hearing protection then they were probably too deaf to hear anything anyways.

It was an air rifle. Those are only around 70db.

Ah. The bigger air rifles aren't that common in the US (because you could just get a normal rifle almost as easily) so I was assuming it was a regular rifle. Yeah, the shooter should have definitely noticed then.

Obviously we don't have all the details but to hit the kid center of mass and kill him with an air rifle it seems hard to belive that was entirely accidental. A .22 air rifle only has an effective range of about 50 yards. There's no way the shooter didn't see the kid when they pulled the trigger let alone hear the ATV. I'm wondering if the shooter deliberately shot at the kid for trespassing thinking an air rifle wouldn't do any real damage. A lot of people don't realize how much damage air rifles can do. At the same time though .177 is the normal target shooting air rifle caliber and the most common one. The only reason you would specifically buy a .22 caliber air rifle is for hunting so the shooter should have known what it was capable of.

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Well if they had ear protection they might not have heard them, it's just a mess

People might have been wearing it, but it was an air rifle. Those have a solid bang, but they are nothing like a real fire arm.

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