since kids aren’t usually allowed to train with guns… were they all training with their parents before? or is it not that hard, so can any person with no expirience technically just pick up a gun and start shooting people?
(asking not 4 myself obvs, just out of curiosity)
I knew how to operate a hunting rifle by the time I was 12, and I’m not even American.
And if you can operate a hunting rifle, you can operate an assault rifle to a reasonable degree. Not much training needed.
And the principle is easy to figure out. When I was in the army, while I was a recruit, this guy in my platoon had never touched a weapon before, and he was pretty nervous the first day on the shooting range because he was on a different training course the day we got introduced to the basics. But he figured it out by intuition; get the cartridge into the chamber, and get the hammer to hit the firing pin.
There are only so many mechanical things one can do with a rifle, and if you try a few things you’re likely to figure it out.
Consider, too, that the military needs every sack of meat to be able to shoot straight, load mags, clear malfunctions, clean and maintain. By extension, the light arms they use are designed to be as dead simple as possible.
As someone on reddit once pointed at, the AR-15 platform is designed such that the dumbest 18-yo recruit can use it.