Just keep repeating that to yourself as you read this story: “Guns don’t kill people, assholes do.”

As his father raised his camera, an 8-year-old boy aimed an Uzi at a pumpkin set up at a shooting event. Before his father could focus, the third-grader from Connecticut squeezed the trigger, and the high-powered weapon recoiled and fatally shot the boy in the head.

The death of Christopher Bizilj at the Westfield Sportsman’s Club Sunday has raised questions about how someone so young could be allowed to shoot an automatic weapon, which can fire hundreds of rounds in a minute.
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In a telephone interview yesterday, the boy’s father, Dr. Charles Bizilj, said he stood 10 feet behind his son as a professional trained in using the 9-mm Micro Uzi machine gun stood beside the boy on Sunday afternoon. He said he doesn’t think the shooting instructor was holding the weapon as his son pressed the trigger, as guides did with other children firing the weapon.

“This accident was truly a mystery to me,” he said. “This is a horrible event, a horrible travesty, and I really don’t know why it happened. I don’t think it’s relevant that [the instructor] wasn’t holding the weapon.”

He said his son, who loved to hike and bike near his home in Ashford, had fired handguns and rifles for three years. But he said this was the first time he had fired an automatic weapon.

Predictably, legislators are responding to the death with vows to draft new legislation. (Predictably, the NRA will fight the new legislation to the death.)

State Representative Michael Costello, the Newburyport Democrat who co-chairs the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security, said yesterday that he plans to draft a bill that would ban anyone younger than age 21 from firing an automatic weapon.

“This isn’t a knee-jerk reaction; it’s a common sense reaction,” he said. “We should take swift action to provide some reasonable restrictions on this type of unreasonable practice. It’s almost indescribable that within a year of leaving a booster seat, an 8-year-old can be holding a submachine gun.”

How about firing rifles from booster seats, Mr. Costello? You’re willing to live with that?