Florida Makes It Even Easier To Live Out Your Family-Friendly Gun-Humping Fantasies
Orlando has long been a destination for theme-park enthusiasts, so if you're planning to bring the kids to see Mickey and Minnie, be sure to swing by Machine Gun America, a brand-spankin'-new theme park that opens Saturday, Dec. 20. If you have to ask what kinds of fun things you can do at Machine Gun America, try saying the name out loud. Are you getting it yet? WTSP explains more.
The 13,000-square-foot facility sits directly across from Kissimmee's Old Town attraction which is a nostalgic tourist mecca aimed at family fun. But instead of roller coasters and go carts, Machine Gun America offers live ammunition automatic weapons, including high-powered machine guns.
The weapons are available to adults and children as young as 13 with the parent's permission. All, must be accompanied by a trained instructor called a range safety officer.
In the Jewish tradition, 13 is the age at which a boy becomes a man by having a bar mitzvah. In the Florida tradition, 13 is the age at which a boy becomes a man by firing a BAR . Same difference, really.
Machine Gun America insists that they'll avoid any repeats of that thoroughly distasteful incident in Arizona a few months back, on account of they do this stuff all the time!
"I've had a lot of children fire with me before, and I'm always prepared because I am the one the whole time who is holding the firearm," said Natasha Schweitzer, one of the [range safety officers].
[...] "No guest is ever left by themselves," said [General Manager Bruce] Nierenberg, "No one ever shoots by themselves, and no guest is ever in control of the weapon without a range safety officer next to them and participating with them."
What could possibly go wrong? Well, if you stay tuned to Yr Wonket, we'll probably be able to tell you what could go wrong sooner rather than later.
Obviously, the freedom-hating tyrants at Mom's Demand Action aren't pleased about this. They're all like, "How is this going to end well?" and also, "Jesus burst-firin' Christ on a Picatinny rail, I give up." Machine Gun America has an answer to that first question: this will end well because freedom, and also historical revisionism.
Machine Gun America makes no apologies.
"It's romanticizing our freedom and our history," said Nierenberg. "I mean, it's part of American life. That's how we gained our freedom."
Excellent point, Revolutionary War scholar Bruce Nierenberg! The old story was that the French navy's triumph at the Battle of the Chesapeake sealed the Continental Army's victory at Yorktown, but recent scholarship has firmly established that Cornwallis surrendered because of George Washington's bitchin' machine guns. It's a fact, libruls, look it up.
Machine Gun America will offer "high-tech simulators with seems [sic] like an old west shootout, special ops, even zombies," but there's no word yet on whether visitors will be able to shoot Skittles-carrying teenagers. Then again, do you really need to go to a theme park to do that if you're already in Florida?
[ WTSP ]
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With all them ringin' bells and the yelling at the Brits.
As a normal, sentient human being I have a huge problem with the rampant gun fetishization that has developed in this country over the past three decades, but this is hardly the worst manifestation of that. The devil is in the details of course, but in general I don't have any objection with the use of firearms in a closed range with 1:1 supervision by experienced safety officers and with all of the other necessary and appropriate safety measures in place. Hey, I might even like to give that a try sometime, and I am someone who has never had an itch to own a gun in his life. The big problem here is permitting the use of automatic weapons, even with all of those safety measures in place, by minors as young as 13 years old. That's simply too young. I would set the minimum age at 18. I would also feel better about it if the guns were locked into fixed mounts and not held by the shooters. But things like this aren't where the biggest problems with our country's approach to firearms lie; they have much more to do with way too easy access to firearms, especially high capacity, high-powered firearms, by civilians out in the community and way too few restrictions on their use. Presumably the automatic weapons that are to be used at this range are the appropriately licensed property of the range and they never leave the premises. I don't think that it is legal anywhere for individual civilians to own such guns.