Thanks, I’ll post a guard immediately. :rolleyes:
I did enlist and then I bought a gun. Is that ok with you?
SSG Schwartz
I’m not knocking gun owners across the board,I’m knocking the total idiots who shouldn’t be in charge of a vacum cleaner let alone a lethal weapon.
There was a time once when there was a reasonable belief that a child would not go rooting through a house trying to find a gun (or anything interesting or worth stealing) or handle a gun if found. I think that time was the 1950’s, perhaps slightly earlier.
At an absolutely enormous Halloween party last night, as I sat at a table dressed as Lady Una o’ the Renn Faire and sipping beers, I noticed that every child between the ages of 2 and 12 was going absolutely apeshit, for hours on end. These people had opened up their entire house to the party, and children were being allowed to run wild, bouncing off the furniture and walls, knocking over items, opening every single drawer or cabinet that could be opened, stealing things, even outright breaking them and dancing in glee like crazed Wagnerian dwarves. At one point two screaming 4 to 6-year-olds were “swordfighting” with butter knives, to the amusement of their fucking parents, who were urging “Captain Jack Sparrow” to “keel haul” (WTF? Keel haul with a knife?) the other one. And not one fucking “parent” bothered to intervene over the hours of destruction, other than a few vague threats of “time outs” when the kids got home. :rolleyes:
Yes, I know it will get you Pitted on the often bizarro-world SDMB if you dare to suggest that an alarming number of parents have relinquished all hope of control over their children, and that time-outs and other new-age punishments just don’t work, but the point is, and even despite the tendency to turn kids into walking pharmacopoeias of behviour control medication, kids really are out of control today. I have no doubt that in a typical house where a gun exists that is capable of being fired, and ammunition exists that is capable of being loaded, that at some point it’s likely the twain shall meet. The parents may never know about it, simply because sometimes no tragedy happens. But I wouldn’t doubt that the finding and handling happens quite a bit. Even growing up in the 80’s I can remember many incidents where someone took a loaded gun from their house that they “found” and went target shooting with it - and the parents were none the wiser. Even cases where a kid could take an entire 12-gauge out the back door with the parents in the front, and they never noticed. I can also recall two incidents where a gun was taken from home and brought to school - loaded.
The practice of having loaded, unsecured weapons is incompatible with a modern parenting style that pretty much relinquishes any hope of control of the children for their own good.
Something did change beginning in the early 1950s: state funded safety programs began focusing on preventable injuries. They started with injuries to children, as these were more likely to be politically successful. For the next twenty years or so, safety programs were “human factor” oriented – they aimed to control accidental injuries by getting people to be more careful.
This did not work especially well, which led to a focus on product factor control starting roughly in the mid-sixties. Which is more or less where we are now, since making products safer does reduce the number of unintentional injuries and death. Which is socially a plus.
With respect to guns, a number of things have changed, including the uses and perception of them as well as the role of children within the family. There are still families wherein children regularly hunt for the purpose of feeding the family, but they are mostly limited to rural and mountain areas IME. I have known kids as young as seven who regularly hunt rabbit, for instance, usually with a relative. But in that scenario, the child is a contributing member of a household and a gun is a tool to that end. It’s a very different mind set than that of a person who has an extensive collection of weaponry or for whom ownership (and storage, apparently) of weapons is a matter of principle rather than practicality.
However, I doubt that there was ever a time that unsupervised three year olds ever did anything other than wander about and get into things, it’s what toddlers do. Now, I do think that the very notion of a sleepover with “friends” for a child not yet four years old is relatively new – traditionally a child of three was not exactly considered to have friends. That would have fallen into the category of babysitting. So there certainly are different social forces at play now than in generations past.
Gosh, I’m not saying it’s at ALL okay for a kid of ANY age to snoop around in people’s houses. I don’t like them even getting into MY night stand, those things are mine, damnit, keep your hands off.
But it takes about 2,865 repetitions before “NO!” truly sinks in. Every couple of months they seem to go through a period of recidivism. It’s like they have to do a reality check every time they cross another developmental milestone. I don’t think that has anything to do with lax parenting, or strict parenting, or any kind of parenting; mine are very aware of rules (you should’ve seen them confronting the 12-yr-old at McD’s PlayLand this morning, they practically demanded ID to make sure he hadn’t aged out).
It’s just that they get temporary amnesia.
Plus sometimes their curiosity simply overtakes them.
At any rate, I’m not sure we’ll be doing sleepovers anytime soon. But it does get chaotic over there when all the kids are playing and the baby’s crying and the phone’s ringing. It’s not like someone’s always standing guard over the gun cabinet in the family room.
All I really wanted to know is, WHERE is the lock mechanism? Is it on the face of the doors or at the top or what?
I’d still like to know more about your “special forces” career; especially since you used your expertise gathered there to speak ex cathedra on gun ownership. See the thing about “special forces” vets is that there are about 10 liars on the internet for every 1 genuine special forces veteran.
It seems from your profile that you apparently live in England? Perfidious Albion? I don’t know about there, but here there’re veterans organizations with no other purpose than to publicly expose poseurs, liars, and wanna-be’s. It’s pretty humiliating for such losers when they are outed.
So now, tell me about your special forces service where you learned so much about guns.
I’m sure my father would be appalled today to know how often his mature, good-grades, head-on-his-shoulders son went home after school and played with the old .22 revolver in the dresser.
I loved adjusting the holster and practicing my quick draw. And when I was depressed, I loved holding it and thinking about suicide.
Without meaning insult to your parenting or your relationship with your children, I humbly suggest that it would be safest to assume you don’t know the inner workings of your kids’ minds or their friends’.
There are probably 100 different types of these things, plus those built by woodworkers in their shop. I’ve never seen one that didn’t lock somehow, even the occasional homemade variety. Seems to me I recall one that had the lock hidden down in the lower compartment, but that might have been the one my uncle built.
Most have a keyhole about halfway up the door, right there with the handle.
Lust4Life, when the SAS releases to the American market their easily concealable, lightweight, heavy, short, 26" barreled, sub MOA over 500 meters, close range weapon that can be used on 80 pound pronghorn, 800 pound wapiti, rabbits and birds, that not only combines the classic styling of a Farquharson style falling block single shot with the convenience of a removable magazine semi-auto, open sight, telescoped, that is multiple competition acceptable, I know that I won’t hesitate to take your advice to heart.
Of course, I have to assume your ex weapons training was focused on killing people and destroying their stuff, while mine is primarily about safety, emergency self defense, and precision shooting on a measured range during a timed contest.
[QUOTE=Scumpup since you used your expertise gathered there to speak ex cathedra on gun ownership. See the thing about “special forces” vets is that there are about 10 liars on the internet for every 1 genuine special forces veteran.
It seems from your profile that you apparently live in England? Perfidious Albion? I don’t know about there, but here there’re veterans organizations with no other purpose than to publicly expose poseurs, liars, and wanna-be’s. It’s pretty humiliating for such losers when they are outed.
[/QUOTE]
Actually there are probably a hundred phonies for every genuine SF ex or current soldiers and thats IRL as well as on the net .
I’ve met plenty myself so I can understand and appreciate your scepticism.
The U.K. is a much smaller country then the U.S. and has likewise smaller armed forces .
As a result whatever unit you have served in you will at least know someone who knows someone who was or is in that unit .
This applies even more so for S.F.
Apart from that I’m a member of my Regimental association.
I’m afraid that I’m not going to satisfy your curiousity about my service history and you are welcome to make whatever interpretation of that you like.
It seems to be that weapons buffs on this board think that their owning weapons is nobodys business but their own.
This is not the case, if an incompetent gun owner has an N.D.sitting in his own home then the round fired has the capability of killing someone passing by in the street or even someone sitting in their own home on the other side of the road.
This danger is exacerbated if the incompetent weapon owner carries a weapon for self defence or goes hunting.
I dont know how many people die annually from amateurs mishandling weapons but even one would be too many but I’ll wager its quite a few more then that.
I have no beef with responsible and well trained civilian gun owners but unfortunately there are so many who are convinced that they’re weapon experts
when they are in fact border line dangerous.(A phenomonen I have noticed quite often with peoples opinions of their own driving ability as well)
People who dont take weaponry seriously are a danger to the public at large and even more dangerous to their families, friends,neighbours and colleagues.
I personally dont want to be shot by some poorly trained incompetent who thinks he’s some sort of John Wayne while I go about my every day life.
I say again I have no beef with responsible trained civilian gun owners.
I hear what you are saying, but given your comments, I have a hard time believing it. Not that it matters of course.
I always thought that the general rule is that SF guys don’t advertise the fact. They don’t need to.
I grew up around guns. My father taught me to shoot a pistol, a rifle and a shotgun, all of which we had around the house, usually loaded. My dad wasn’t a hunter or a gun nut, but this was the South. Everybody has guns. None of my experience or his lessons prevented me from nearly killing my younger brother during an fight when we were both teenagers. I didn’t get it out to kill him, but to scare him. Nonetheless we wound up with a bullet hole in the window about two feet from his head.
I’m sure you will think that I’m atypical and that it would never occur to your kids to grab a gun simply because they are feeling somehow frustrated, enraged or powerless. I hope you’re right.
I think there is a fairly huge cultural gap between some of us Yanks and Lust4Life. There’s an estimate of somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 million gun owners in the US with between 200 and 300 million civilian owned firearms. ISTR that the population of GB is 60 million or so.
Although the number is higher than one might wish, 63 children (14 and under) died in firearms related accidents in 2004 (latest year available, cite, population size 60.8 million). Less than half (28) of them were under 10.
65,000,000 people with 200,000,000+ guns, 63 deaths. Most of them, I suspect, were preventable but I’d hazard a guess that a few were more sinister than a child finding and playing with an unlocked gun, since I don’t know how the CDC compiles its data that’d be pure speculation. Even if we accept that all 63 were negligent owners leaving them out, that is a fantastically small number for a population that has that much firepower sitting around.
The education of owners over the past 30 years with the big stink about trigger locks had to have helped (1981 - 598 deaths among 51.2 million kids)
Remember, also, Bobo, that it counts all firearms accidents that resulted in the death of a child, whether the firearm was lawfully owned or not.
I doubt John Q. Drug Dealer is anywhere near as careful in storing his firearms inside the crack house as those of us who legally own are.
Bobo, how did you get that number? I went to your link and typed in what I thought were the same criteria for the data, and I got 358 deaths for children 0-14 years of age in the US in 2004.
I think it should also be noted that AFAICT, non-fatal injuries to children from firearms annually fall in the 1000-2000 range: and those are only the ones that are treated at emergency rooms. More minor injuries that don’t require professional medical care are generally not reported at all; nor are incidents like the one that XaMcQ just described. But all such events represent a more-or-less near miss of a more serious tragedy.
We shouldn’t forget that a few dozen, or few hundred, juvenile deaths from firearms annually is the tip of a much larger iceberg of firearms accidents (injury-causing and otherwise) involving children. Which children actually end up dead in such incidents and which don’t is to some extent a matter of luck.
I posted almost the same query on a messageboard with 800 members. The very first reply, within an hour, was from someone whose teenaged brother was killed by a friend when they were playing with their father’s gun. They thought it was unloaded because they took the clip out. They forgot to check the chamber.
The 200 deaths/yr number came from a pro-gun site (it was in the context of arguing against trigger locks, IIRC). I didn’t post any stats on non-fatal injuries to children.
Nor did I research situations where a child accidentally shoots someone who’s not a minor. “Damn it, Mommy, I wan peanut butwer sanwish NOW” BLAM!
(sorry) 
I don’t mean this as a personal attack, but it simply defies all reason for you to believe you can inerrantly predict another human being’s behaviour, especially a child. Even if it’s yours. You can’t. You are claiming a level of knowledge that is flatly impossible for you to possess.
Kids deceive their parents from time to time. To a limit, it’s a normal part of becoming an independent human being. That doesn’t mean there’s a lack of trust, but trust has its limits. All people are imperfect and their judgment will fail them, and your kids are no different.
A question for crafter_man and anyone else who feels like answering - even if you trust your kids implicitly, and they would never, ever touch a gun without permission, why not lock up the guns anyway? Proper gunsafes are best, of course, but even chucking all the guns in a closet and slapping a $5 lock on that closet would probably be better than nothing. What harm comes from locking up the guns?
What good is an unloaded gun with a lock on it? If your intent is to use it as a weapon of defense, all you have done is purchased an expensive, unwieldy and ineffective club. There are very few things more useless than an unloaded firearm.
The question, then, becomes thus: how do you balance safety with security? You can argue until you’re blue in the face, and you can huff and puff and get all worked up into outrage and name-calling, but it really comes down to personal choice, instruction, and trust. All the rest is posturing.
358 children were killed by firearms total that year. Since this thread is specifically addressing accidental shootings I selected out suicide, homicide and “legal intervention” (which I think is CDC-speak for “shot by cop”, but was 0 for that year anyway).
226 homicide
63 unintentional
59 suicide (all age 11 and up)
10 undetermined
- I don’t own guns as a deterrent for criminals. I don’t believe they have any deterrent value (for me, individually, they may societally but I don’t think that’s a question we can answer here.) I have one weapon for self defense that I keep in a convenient area in my home, the rest of my weapons are for sport purposes.
They’re essentially akin to my bowling ball and bowling shoes, except they need to be cared for in a more reasonable and thorough manner. I’m not saying guns are toys, what I am saying is that I’ve discharged my personal home firearms a grand total of zero times in my entire life in self defense or in an attempt to stop a criminal. So in practical usage the only time I use my weapons is to sight them in or for sporting purposes (hunting.)
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If any children were ever “exposed” to the risk I’ve decided to take, it would not be me doing the exposing, it would be the parents of the child in question.
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I don’t know your children, here is what I do know, though:
-I’m quite certain YOUR children could find the pistol in my bed room. It isn’t hidden from anyone in particular and is placed somewhere to be intentionally easy to access.
-I’m furthermore quite certain YOUR children would never be in my bedroom, nor would the children of any of my friend’s.
-I say this with certainty because, while I think it is entirely possible your children don’t know the meaning of the word know, I do know that any children in my house will quickly learn the meaning of the word no or they will quickly find themselves leaving my home.
I say this from personal experience. One year I was having a bunch of my friends over for some beers, snacks et cetera to watch Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS. Unfortunately, one of my friends was required by his wife to bring his two small children over. I wasn’t thrilled with this, but I told him it would be okay as long as he was aware of the fact that his children were not going to have free run of the house. They would be within my view at all times, they would not be playing with my things, they wouldn’t be touching my things, they would be sitting quietly and doing something entertaining to them without being a disruption. I informed him if he couldn’t keep his kids under control, I’d have no hesitation in verbally chastising them (whether or not it hurt their delicate little sensibilities) and if they didn’t behave or he had a problem with me chastising his kids he would be welcome to take them and himself home.