He pointed the gun, he pulled the trigger, but he ‘didn’t mean to kill’?

The Las Vegas teen fatally shot in a local garage Sunday night was killed with his own gun, the Review-Journal reported Tuesday.

(Actually, the story as published read "killed BY his own gun," but I doubt the two pounds of steel crawled down off the couch and stalked the young man of its own volition.)

Michael Drebitko, 16, and several friends had gathered about 6 p.m. at a friend's garage on the 300 block of Brookside Lane, near U.S. Highway 95 and Rainbow Boulevard, to hang out and smoke marijuana, according to a police report.

Drebitko set a small semi-automatic handgun on a table, and 19-year-old Brian Robinson picked it up, the report said. He pointed the gun at Drebitko and fired, hitting him in the stomach, police said.

Drebitko fell onto a couch and said, "You shot me, I don't want to die," the report said.

Robinson fled while the friends dialed for help. Drebitko died at the scene.

Police arrested Robinson about three hours later. He showed police where he dumped the gun and admitted to pulling the trigger, but said he did not mean to kill Drebitko, the report said.

Let's pause right there. Can someone explain to me, once again, why we no longer have hands-on firearms training for 12- and 13-year-olds in our government-run schools? A sometimes reliable old-timer tells me one of the oldest high schools in Las Vegas still has a shooting range in the basement, locked up, unused, largely forgotten.

Don't we intend that our young men should grow up to be responsible adults? Doesn't that process need to start before they turn 19? During which century of the past 6,000 years was it not necessary for the men of any and every human culture to know how to safely use the best available weapons to defend their land, their families, and their freedom?

When I went away to boarding school at the age of 12 in the state of Massachusetts -- let me say it again, "Massachusetts" -- I took my turnbolt .22-caliber rifle. It was stored in a locker down at the gym. We were taught to shoot, prone, on the shooting range in the basement. This was not some wacky "survivalist" summer camp in Idaho or Arizona. Lots of Eaglebrook graduates go on to pursue predictably liberal and elitist careers at Yale and Harvard. I don't remember anyone even suggesting that we sneak down and get the rifles and use them for any other purpose. Putting five rounds in the ring was just a standard you had to meet, like doing your pushups and conjugating your verbs in French or Latin.

Yes, our practice was with long guns, not handguns. But I don't see that it made any difference. From the time I and other kids of my generation were 12 -- actually, my grandfather made sure I could shoot considerably before that -- it would have been unthinkable for any of us to pick up a firearm without holding it in a safe direction while checking to make sure it was unloaded (or at the very least, out of battery), and even more unthinkable for any of us to point it at any person or thing, pull the trigger, and then assert we "didn't mean to" destroy whatever the weapon was pointed at.

And no, I don't consider marijuana smoke a significant extenuating factor. I attended high school from 1964 to 1968. Remember the "Smokin' in the Boys Room" scene from "Rock 'n Roll High School"? Been there. Marijuana does not create an overpowering urge to recklessly handle dangerous machinery, nor does it cause anyone to forget basic safety protocols, providing they've ever been learned.

Robinson was booked into the Clark County Detention Center on one count of murder with a deadly weapon.

Yes, lots of laws were broken, here. What was a 16-year-old doing, carrying around a loaded handgun without adult supervision? Who places a handgun in the reach of others without clearing both magazine and chamber -- especially in a room where people are consuming recreational drugs of any kind (and thus breaking more laws)? But these are merely further proofs that the more laws you pass, the more laughably impossible it becomes to enforce them all.

"The law" protected no one on Sunday evening. Some common sense, and some basic safety training -- the kind that it's the duty of any father to provide for his sons -- might have.