Modnote: OK, drop the Pools, The Fires and everything else off topic.
Now to all and especially the Op, if you don’t want the hijacks, please don’t respond to them, just flag them.
Frankly, I don’t think letting the parent escape prosecution is a good idea, because that will do little to nothing to inspire other parents to do a better job securing weapons. “My children would never do such a thing because I trained them properly!” is something I have heard personally, and read over and over again(several times on this very board, in fact}. To be willing to change how they safeguard their weapons, they would have to admit they were improperly safeguarded to begin with and/or they didn’t do a very good job training their kids. There has to be a tangible penalty that is impressive enough to influence other parents, in my opinion.
Okay, time to clean some muddled waters, because I think the conversation has evolved to having two main points. If I read @Czarcasm correctly, both in his most recent post and the OP, we were initially looking at Gun owner’s liability when it came to USE (my additional emphasis) of a firearm by their child - specifically legal/criminal consequences for said owner which are often not prosecuted.
The second, and certainly related point, is that due to the first issue existing, should we prosecute more in an effort to make said parental owners (including those who have not yet had an issue) procure and use appropriate devices to secure their firearms.
Hopefully I’ve correctly paraphrased Czarcasm, and assuming I have, my opinions are on the record, so not going to write another book. Regarding the second point, I’m of two minds - I already explained that I’m not sure that a jail sentence is always the right answer in that it may deprive surviving family of emotional and financial support when most needed, and indicated I felt this is where the judicial branch comes in for sentencing, but yes, should be prosecuted so that judgement can be made and appropriate legal steps taken in preventing future tragedies.
Sadly, I doubt that this will provide a strong deterrent regarding appropriate gun security, since most people across the nation have a strong ‘well, it can never happen to me/here/etc’ attitude. Yes, a few will look at stronger laws and be scared straight, and that in and of itself is a worthwhile consequence of additional prosecution.
I’m not sure. Mass, NY, & NJ have some of the toughest gun laws in the US and these 3 states have the lowest gun death rate of any states. At least according to the CDC.
So it does look like tougher gun laws do reduce the death rate. So they would probably reduce the number of guns left accessible to children and teens.
At the very least, regardless of other punishment that may be levied, is taking away their right to have a gun an appropriate response?
Maybe the fear of losing a child isn’t enough to get gun owners to keep their guns out of their child’s hands, but maybe fear of losing their gun is.
It is absolutely grounds to have their firearms forcibly liquidated or otherwise removed from their possession, which I did make clear in my initial post (#11), but I didn’t want to copy the whole wad of text over again. I was using the Pennsylvania statues first brought up by @engineer_comp_geek for the sake of coherence as we have so many different jurisdictions with differing laws, in which we were looking at a felony of the second degree - preventing the offending parent from having the right to purchase firearms again as well as losing any currently owned.
But no, other than a few, I don’t (IMHO) think it will get gun owners who weren’t otherwise responsible and using such security options to keep guns out of kid’s hands, for the ‘not gonna happen to me’ reason I mentioned earlier. Some will, and it’s a non-zero gain, so power too it, but as with vaccination, some people are gonna cling to ‘freedum,’ contrariness, or out and out laziness. Sometimes I hate humans.
4 posts were split to a new topic: Side issues to Gun Owner Liability threads
Modhat on: I’m sorry to say I have to tell you that you’re banned from this thread. You are determined to derail this very specific debate with side issues.
I guess I will spin off your posts to their own thread.
@DrDeth Do not ignore this.
Saint Maries by some really strange improbable chance?
Nothing magical about kids. My point was that my redneck firearm safety instructors in the 1960’s and 1970’s would not have cottoned any kind of BS about an improperly stored firearm being an “accident.” To them, there were zero accidents involving firearms. Compare and contrast to the modern special second amendment snowflakes that think the right to bear arms trumps any kind of personal responsibility, and a dead child is simply a tragic accident.
Worse-Spirit Lake.
As of my last carry class in the late aughts, there still wouldn’t be any sympathy. Especially about “accidents” because you decided to carry but couldn’t be bothered to keep it on your body, or let it out of your sight. There wasn’t any screaming, but the emphatic scorn was telling. Of course, since this came from a guy who was a part-time firefighter who came in to teach the class after 36 straight hours at a local forest fire, his ‘give-a-bleep’ o-meter was already reading empty about any BS.
So, sidestory over. Back to the topic at hand. I mentioned this in a prior thread (since closed), but when it comes to young children in the household, I personally would not be comfortable having a firearm in the house. Even though I have a “vault” style safe for long arms and a biometric safe for the handguns, few systems are proof against anyone with sufficient determination. If my wife and I had children, I would probably have returned all the firearms to my FIL until the child was at least 12-14.
Now, I am absolutely willing to grant that I don’t come from a family with a history of hunting. My interests were reasonable home protection and target shooting for fun, since I’d been shooting .22 bolts since I was around 13-14 for fun at summer camp. And for many gun owners, there is a substantial feeling of continuity in training a child for deer hunting, as their own parent had done before, and possibly for generations more. This causes the discussion of liability and responsibility to become entangled in emotion and tradition. And (taking a well intended swipe at the ‘gun grabber’ side) many people who have never owned guns just don’t get/acknowledge that fact.
But securing a firearm properly in the house should not in any way be an infringement of your ownership, or a challenge to tradition. The only times it can feel that way is if the requirements were to become unreasonably burdensome financially. I spent @ $90 on a biometric safe for handguns. It was pricey, but I was NOT happy with the security of the $30 model on Amazon, and was willing to pay more.
But the 'vault style safe for longuns was @ $500 - an outlay I wasn’t willing to go with, if my FIL wasn’t paying for it. And he was paying for it to get the guns out of his own, overfull safe [ he had inherited his guns from his father, as well as 2 brothers, and was/is a collector of black powder guns ]. Sure you can buy some cheap ones for @ $100 - but I wouldn’t recommend it unless the other choice was no safe. And frankly, I see nothing wrong with trigger guards, but still think a firearm in the house, kids or no, should be better secured, from theft if nothing else.
So (and this sort of attitude gets me yelled at by some of my fellow gun owners) I feel strongly that we’d all be better off if we had some federal guidelines that provided direction towards gun safety. No, it doesn’t have to be onerous or expensive, but some continuity in standards would go a long way to providing security across the board. But I would want those standards to be made in consultation with police or security professionals, rather than the current trend where politicians pick rules based on cosmetic, cinematic (oh I saw that in a movie and it looked scary) or otherwise arbitrary methods. I’m a dreamer though.
Some Second Amendment folks think that any and everything is about gun grabbing and concentration camps run by a mix of jackbooted Chinese and Russian overlords.
@Jasmine put it very well, firearm owners have responsibilities. All I’m seeing from some folks in this thread is about how it isn’t their responsibility.
Not unlike expecting people in the midst of a pandemic to wear masks in public, wash their hands frequently, avoid super spreader events, avoid being a personal spreader. Yep, Wisconsin, looking at you (“you” as in those that are unwilling to take personal responsibility and precautions) as a really good example of shirking personal responsibility in a pandemic.
Firearm deaths in this country are an epidemic. It’s time to start treating it like one. Furthermore, it’s time for responsible firearm owners to step up and vote for responsibility. @elbows has a pretty decent list that any responsible firearm owner should get behind instead of whining about how they be special snowflakes since the constitution mentions “well regulated militia”.
None of this would be an issue if adults only purchased Iver Johnson brand firearms.
Seen their various other ads - always “accidental discharge impossible”. Damn you could really claim anything in an advertisement back then.
But yes, some old fashioned “no excuse” discipline on the side of the adults in the house, when it comes to weaponry, is not an unreasonable thing to expect and even mandate under penalties. And really it should not be complicated — If it’s not on you (AND safely holstered) it had better be somewhere secure. Now, sure, there is no way to truly make it “impossible” but a little due care goes a long way. Unload and clear before storing. Make the storing place inconspicuous. Use a good storage set up - children are NOT trained safecrackers/lockpickers so you should be able to store safely w/o requiring industrial-level installations but don’t get a $29.99 safe from Wish. Gonna be drinking? Put it away. Get YOURSELF properly trained in safety. And there should be an (evenly, equitably) enforceable standard.
Agreed, and I would go so far as to say that the taxpayers should help to subsidize costs involved in keeping guns properly secured.
Right after taxpayers subsidize a personal choice of mine that doesn’t involve guns. Every dollar that subsidizes guns in the home should be matched by a dollar to the ACLU or another activity of a non-gun owning taxpayer’s choice. Wildlife Conservation, animal rescue, enhanced public libraries, whatever I choose.
You can afford a gun? Then you can afford trigger locks or safes and safety training.
This is saying that only rich people can use their second amendment rights and is pretty disgusting.
I don’t like that my tax dollars are used to kill people on the other side of the world. I wouldn’t mind having those dollars and those lives back. But, I’d far rather my tax dollars go towards something that will actually work to protect people, and save lives.
The cost of such a program would be miniscule as far as the budget goes. Don’t make the mistake of insisting that all other problems are solved before we look to solving this one.
If you can afford such things, then sure.
I’m looking to increase public safety, not punish gun owners.
You want them getting a cheapo safe, or not one at all? Not get any training?
People are going to have guns. We need to accept that and work with it to try to limit the damage those guns do. If we don’t, then we just accept that there will also be people needlessly harmed by those guns.
Depending on your definition of “rich”, that’s already self-evidently true. The Second Amendment guarantees gun rights, not gun ownership: a gun is a commercially manufactured object and commercially manufactured objects cost money.
I have no objection to gun ownership in general, but I don’t think that the government or anybody else is under any obligation to ensure that guns are cheap enough that non-rich people can easily afford them. Nor is the government or anybody else obligated to ensure that cars, for example, are cheap enough that non-rich people can easily afford them.