Are you frightened by it? I’m not. I’ve seen no evidence that the Netherlands is having a child rape epidemic, nor are the other countries with low ages of consent (14 in Canada, Mexico, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, China…). It seems much more likely to me that (1) lawmakers in the U.S. underestimate teenagers’ ability to decide what they want to do, and (2) if American teenagers really are less able to decide, it’s caused by their lack of education and a society that expects them to act like children.
Interesting that you’d bring that up… in many countries, an unsupervised 25 year old can’t play with guns either. There’s nothing in their genes that makes them less capable of handling guns safely; they just don’t have the societal belief that any average joe can safely handle a gun with the right training.
Similarly, we in the U.S. don’t have the societal belief that any average teenager can safely handle sex with the right education. But if you look at the countries where they do believe that, where they actually have safe sex education, you’ll see that they don’t have the problems you might expect.