So going for the old Wikipedia post on the "age of majority". Good choice I love Wikipedia for a quick knowledge refresher. That being said go look up age of criminality, age of consent, and age of license as the traditional and not to mention legal ages of adulthood while you are at it.

Applying the age of majority as a catch all for the definition of adulthood is a lazy and not to mention legally ignorant argument. So it would be really nice if people would step back and realize they loose the audience when the spout off about things they know nothing about.

You can go to prison as young as 10 for murder in the US.
You can declare your independence from your parents and quit school at 16 without a legal battle. You can do it even younger if you have the means to support yourself.
You can drive at 14-16 depending on which State you are in.
You can join the US military at 17.
You can have sex and get married at 16 in most of the country.
The only thing 18 gets you is the right to enter contracts, vote, and buy firearms.
The funny thing that 18 is just to buy, you can own and possess guns (this includes handguns) at a much younger age. In some states that goes all the way down below the age of 10. In more than half a 12 year old can hunt anything, with just about anything and get this....do...it...by...themselves.

Yes that means if little Timmy wants to go hunting for bear with a very large caliber rifle. He can. No problem. As long as he can pass the safety class and is strong enough to carry the rifle he is good to go.

I'd have a second think about what the "age of majority" really means, and blow your highly uniformed opinion out your ass..

So we spend all of these billions on preventing children from dying, and what do we get? Not a whole lot it seems.

As far as the family member's murdering the child using a gun. The answer was zero. The firearms death category did not double count those deaths.

Its a lot harder to kill yourself (or another person that is actively resisting) with a knife than with a gun. Having been in barroom brawls where knifes came out I can tell you that with certainty.

FBI crime statistics would disagree with you on the "killing of other people". Knives are number 2 for all weapons types (handguns #1) used in murder.

You are correct for suicides knives are only 1.5%. Then again most people who kill themselves are men and they tend to use guns/hanging which tends to be more lethal. Women on the other hand tend to do self harm for attention which tends to involve knives and drugs in a less than lethal way.

Go look at the suicide rate in Japan, where guns are illegal. It is 10x higher than the US, and yes lot's of knives, and jumping from things is common.

Sorry but quoting the legal age of adult hood for the 50 US States is hardly considered a straw man argument.
The legal age of a "child" falls into two categories: Criminality or Consent.

Depending on which State you are talking about that falls between 11 and 16 years of age. 11-13 for criminality and somewhere around 16 for consent.

I'm going to report BS on your underreporting of children being shot, because what is little Timmy going to tell his teacher, "oh yeah I fell off my bike Ms Cranberry and landed on .45 ACP slug"?

If anything the amount of children being reported as "shot" is over reported, because they count all the people killed/injured as children regardless of how and why they got shot. A 16 year old thug who has already killed 3 people (is NOT a child) and has been arrested 25 times, who is then gunned down by the cops during a felony stop, is reported just the same as little 12 year old Timmy who accidently shoots himself with the .22 he got for Christmas, and the same as the manic depressive 15 year old Emo kid that kills himself with a shotgun because "no one understands".

We have a lot of irresponsible shit-heads leaving loaded unlocked weapons sitting around like they are toys, and this is the result.

You want to talk about giant argument fallacies. There are NOT a lot of irresponsible shit-heads leaving loaded weapons lying about. You'd have to get rid more than a dozen other causes, including being murdered by a parent or family member, before you even got to firearms deaths for children under 10 as leading causes of death.

Go look at the mortality tables at CDC.gov and the FBI.gov if you don't believe me.

At the end of the day the grand bulk of people in the US killed by firearms are suicides and the grand bulk of people "murdered" with firearms are either criminals killed by other criminals (not murder in my book, let them kill each other as long as they leave the rest of us out of it) or by the police or armed citizens in justified shootings.

So that brings me to how I feel about people that would use guns to harm themselves and others. Neither the protection of criminals nor the suicidal is justification for "reasonable" restrictions on anyone's rights. It's not that life isn't precious, but why should we protect those who do not value it at all?

I get it that you were not calling for out right bans just people being held responsible, but the problem is that the supporters of this are gun haters whose end goal is not a reasonable nor responsible world where people can own guns, but a future where all weapons are illegal. This is why the pro-gun crowd is so venomous towards any restrictions. We are not stupid. We know our history of the "reasonable" crowd. They are anything but reasonable.

Ugh my sentence structure is atrocious. That's what I get for responding at 3am after taking the dog out who was puking on the floor.

"In the US when they police can show up and go through your home without a warrant we call that Fascism. So is having a license in order to exercise a right that is yours by simply being alive. Unlike the rest of the sheep, we for some odd reason do not like that."

Awww the National Socialists moded me a troll. Sorry but calling Nazis, Nazis is not being a troll. Sorry if the truth hurts.

In the US when they police can show up and go through your home without a warrant we call that Fascism. So is having a license in order to exercise a right that is yours by simply being alive.

Unlike the rest of the sheep, we for some odd reason do not like that.

However every single day there is at least one innocent child in this county who is shot as a direct result of an irresponsible owner.

That statement is about worthless until you define what a "child" is. For a long time the gun haters like to quote statistics that defined a child as someone under 21 and as high as 24, and in their numbers. The also included "children" who were criminals that were shot by either the police or citizens defending themselves.

As it is far fewer actual children, as in those under the age of 14. A child as someone that cannot be put in prison as an adult.

So if defining a child as someone from 0 to 14 years of age
Firearm homicide (murder) of those under 14 was around 230
Firearm accidents barely made it onto the chart I was looking at with 22 unintentional firearm deaths for the 10-14 year old category. It was the only place it was in the top ten causes of death for any age group all the way up to the 65+ category.
vs.
1170 for being run over by cars
708 for drowning
1182 unintentional suffocation
408 being murdered by a parent/family member
58 dying from exposure (cold)
228 from burning to death
69 accidental death from beatings
116 bicycle accidents
Source 2012 statistics form the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. in 2012.

Firearm deaths are hardly the "low hanging" fruit on things killing children in the US, and it hardly happens "every single day" Hence why most "gun nuts" get more than a little agitated when it is used as a reason to take away their rights.

Firearm deaths and suicides do not start kicking in as a large result of death until the ages 15-24, but cars and alcohol/drug over dose kill more people by a factor of 3-5 times as many of all adults.

Pilots don't "fly" the plane at the same time. Even during take off and landing only 1 pilot is flying, the other is backing up the pilot in command.

During the long cruising legs of the flight, it's no different than being on a road trip. One pilot is flying, the other pilot is taking a nap, staring out the window, watching a movie, reading a book, working on a checklist, checking the navigation plot (maybe), talking on the phone, playing some candy crush, etc, etc, etc. The scary part is sometimes both pilots are doing that. Sure they are supposed to both be monitoring the flight, but the reality is a bit different.

As far as flying the wrong way for hours at a time that's even easier than crashing the plane. At night it's impossible to tell which way you are going unless you are paying very close attention and are familiar with the night sky. Most pilots have zero clue about celestial navigation. During the day it is easier to noitce (the position of the sun), but the ocean looks just like the ocean pretty much everywhere regardless of the aircraft altitude, and if the other guy is not paying attention it's pretty easy to miss..

To answer your specific question about transponders and radio checks. The transponder is just a simple code box. You reach over and turn it off, no more transponder code, or change the numbers to the wrong code, or you just walk over to the circuit breaker panel and pull the circuit breaker for the transponder. Easy peasy. If you want to get real fancy go to the equipment cabinet and reach in and undo the connector to the transponder.

As far as the radio checks what "required radio checks" are you talking about? The only time there is a requirement to radio in is when you enter in someone's controlled airspace and another when you leave it. Those spheres of control out in the ocean are huge, so it could be hours before you'd need to talk to someone on land. If there is some requirement to check in, I am not a trans-Atlantic/Pacific pilot so wouldn't know for sure, fooling the other pilot is as easy as the following:

Pilot 2 goes to the bathroom and then comes back, and then Pilot 1 says "Hey I already called in on the radio". Rinse and repeat.

Again the only way to make aircraft "safe" from pilot shenanigans is to automate everything and get rid of the pilots.

There are so many simpler ways to commit suicide.

When I worked in the retail industry and occasional during high stress seasons, daydream thoughts of ending my misery crept into my head. They never just involved just ending my misery, but ending the misery of all the people causing my misery as well, (read all the jerks in the mall at Christmas time).

Now take a crazy person, one that does not just simply fantasize about ending their tormentors, but actually does it, I can see why they didn't want a "simple" way to commit suicide, but one that takes as many of those in the "problem" category with them.

As a pilot and an aircraft mechanic, I can tell you it is insanely easy to put an aircraft in an unrecoverable flight condition if one chooses to do so, regardless of how the other pilot feels about it. Nothing shy of fully automating the cockpit and firing all the pilots will change that.

Crazy people be crazy and in this situation they crashed a plane. We've already wasted too much time on this incident and now we are wasting even more.

How is this still a thing? Terrorist or not, pilots are suicidal just like everyone...the end.

I was thinking the same thing.

Marketer who read an article on the 128,000th high school student who discovered peltier chips in 2014 who went on to "invent" some sort of AC/heater/generator

"Wait I have a brilliant idea we can use waste heat to generate electricity and make cars more efficient, but where would the greatest source of heat be on a car. Don't tell me it'll come to me...hmmm this is kind of hard.....yeah the tires that's it the tires!"

See the answer above about using "more gun"

The progressives in this country are hot and heavy to get rid of all of the US's nukes. A NK disposal solution, also known as a two-fer, would take care of things.

I highly doubt NK could detect a Cessna, much less ICBMs warheads before it was too late.

Why haven't we "smuggled" a 2,000lb JDAM into North Korea to where ol' Kimmy boy sleeps at night? That would end most of this stupidity in the time it takes for it to be delivered from 40,000ft.

And before you say "Well his smarter generals will just take over"

I will counter with a quote from The Engineer "how am I go to stop some big mean mother hubbard from tearing me a structurally superfluous new behind.....the answer use a gun...and if that don't work, use more gun."

If one doesn't work, apply a second, third, fourth...twentieth. Don't worry, we can always make more.