Don’t forget the pink guns for little girls!
Why hide them? Teach the kids proper gun safety and handling. Remove the mystery from the guns and they will have no inclination to play with them as toys.
I got my first firearm from my parents when I was nine. It was a .22 rifle. Two years later, I got a .22 pistol. The rifle was stored in my closet, the pistol lived on the bookshelf above my bed. I went out to the range every 3-6 months with either my parents, my older brother, or my best friend’s parents (he had .22s as well). I cleaned the weapons monthly.
Amazingly enough, those weapons never snuck out of the house and shot anyone. Nor did I amuse myself by leaning out my bedroom window and taking potshots at cars or the neighbor’s cat.
Education is the solution.
Wait, you didn’t have them secured or anything? What would’ve happened if a burglar got in and no-one was home?
Bike helmets, potty training advice, puberty advice, gating stairs and other childproofing advice (which, locking up your guns seems to be right in line with gating your stairs and having outlet covers)…
The law says he can’t have them. No problem there.
: old roll-eyes :
So I gather that the point of your charming anecdote is “I had guns as a kid and I lived to tell about it”. It’s right up there with equally charming anecdotes about drunk drivers who make it home OK, which most of them do, especially if they are experienced drivers and experienced alcoholics. But quite a few of them don’t, with disastrous consequences, and that’s why it’s an incredibly stupid thing to do and that fact is backed up by a considerable body of statistics.
There’s a reason that American children are nine times more likely to die in gun accidents than children anywhere else in the developed world (as noted previously) and it’s not all due to lack of “education”. There are also the unpreventable vagaries of random chance, the principle that says that if you play with fire you have a good chance of getting burnt. Like the recent story about the kid who fatally shot himself with the gun that his father, a sheriff who presumably had some “education” about guns, was proudly showing off to a friend. But I suspect that many gun nuts at some level are actually aware of these things even if they’re not aware of the exact statistics, but are happy to endure the risks because … hey, because guns!
The real education – that having guns around is associated with gun-related deaths – is cheerfully dismissed. The cognitive dissonance that says “this stuff only happens to other people (who aren’t as smart and skillful as I am)” is actually remarkably similar to the rationalizations of drunk drivers. It was also, I think it’s safe to assume, the rationalization of the upscale, educated, and apparently caring mother of the Sandy Hook shooter.
This is the same reason that – to pick a random year I have at hand – gun homicides killed 19 people in Japan, 54 in England and Wales, 57 in Australia, and 11,789 in the US. Feel free to adjust for population. Feel free as well to ignore the conclusion. I know you will.
I find it unconscionable that anyone could give a gun to a nine-year-old and not be charged with reckless child endangerment, which would be the case almost everywhere in the world.
Which court case made you think it was not an individual right? Is your statement false if I can show a couple of supreme court cases where the court addresses the second amendment right as an individual right?
How is that different from other controversial issues like abortion?
But he did say it, right? Was he lying? Was he trying to trick us?
Are you under the impression that guns are not regulated? Of course not! What you are saying is that they are not as regulated as YOU want them to be.
I am also concerned about the partisan character that the NRA has been adopting. Guns and Israel are starting to adopt partisan overtones and it is not good for either issue.
No, because that particular use of “individual right” is misleading. Militias are made up of “individuals” and the historical meaning and expectation was that individuals armed and ready to protect the nation were essential to its national security. Heller was historic in that it marked the first time that the “individual right” was completely decoupled from the “militias” condition in the first part of the Amendment, which was essentially dismissed as mere decoration.
Good article here. Also this (emphasis mine):
In his most significant decision for the court’s majority, District of Columbia v. Heller, in 2008, Scalia transformed the understanding of the Second Amendment. Reversing a century of interpretation of the right to bear arms, he announced that individuals have a constitutional right to possess handguns for personal protection. The Heller decision was so influential that even President Obama, whose politics differ deeply from Scalia’s, has embraced the view that the Second Amendment gives individuals a constitutional right to bear arms.
Because attitudes to abortion have not swung wildly with changing circumstances or undergone wild reversals. Attitudes to gun control have.
Read what I wrote. Also read the quote above. Obama is on one hand a politician navigating middle ground, and a relatively conservative one at that, and on the other hand is also very deeply concerned about the lack of meaningful gun regulation and consequent rampant gun violence in the US, and the ironclad control that the NRA has over Congress. He has spoken of it often enough. His anger about it is palpable.
How many children do you think die from gun accidents every year?
About 131. Half of those occur between the ages of 14 and 19 and there is some notion that these may be suicides disguised as accidents.
How many children do you think die from mass shootings every year? Does likelihood of a risk factor into how much we are willing to do to prevent those events? Mass shooting deaths account for less than 1% of all gun murders every year. Much less in most years.
America has higher homicide rates than Japan, England and Australia even if you assume that gun homicides would not be replaced even in part by homicide by other means. 2/3rds of all homicides are committed using firearms and no one… NO ONE… thinks that we would reduce our homicide rate by 66% of we magically got rid of all guns. So perhaps the comparison isn’t as simple as you think.
I fired a gun in the boy Scouts at age 10/11. Many of the boys at camp with me had fired a gun long before they got to camp. Granted they didn’t GIVE me the gun but I was firing a gun at a range at 10 and several boys I was with had been firing guns for a few years.
How old were you when you fired your first gun?
OK so then there has ALWAYS been an individual second amendment right but it was based on something new this time. Specifically the individual right to self defense rather than an individual right that is derived from the ability to function as a militiaman.
Heller was certainly transformative but it did not “reverse a century of interpretation” It certainly broke new ground but it did not destroy what came before it AFAICT.
You’re right a 20 point swing is a much wilder variance than 10 points. I know you were just pointing this out and an interesting tidbit but do you think this sort of fluctuation is significant in some way?
If there is no meaningful regulation, then would you be OK with just getting rid of the meaningless regulation we have in place right now?
Obama is a well intentioned politician who is concerned about gun violence and is too ignorant about guns to come up with a sensible policy on guns. For all his anger he keep proposing really stupid and ineffective gun control measures. I don’t know about other pro-gun people her but the INSTANT someone starts talking about an assault weapons ban I just assume the speaker is ignorant and I just smile and nod while they wallow in their ignorant rage. Obama immediately loses credibility when he starts talking about banning weapons of war in reference to a subset of magazine fed semi-automatic rifles with certain cosmetic features that are indistinguishable from other semiautomatic magazine fed rifles that don’t have those cosmetic features.
The NRA has no more ironclad control over congress than NARAL does. If people didn’t vote on the gun issue the NRA might as well be PETA. The NRA as an organization does not have any power that is not derived from the voting power of people who support gun rights.
The money they directly contribute to politicians is almost meaninglessly small. They spend a SHIT TON more money running ads against anti-gun politicians and the content of their ads is entirely based on that politician’s opposition to gun rights.
How is that different than NARAL influencing politicians by running ads against politicians that are anti-choice?
The fact that they kick your ass up and down the street day in and day out isn’t really a symptom of some illegitimate accumulation and use of political power. They kick your ass up and down the street day in and day out because they represent a lot of voters that can swing elections in swing districts and swing states.
Just about every swing state in America can be lost on the gun issue. Tis is why you will se Hillary holding a hunting rifle at some point between now and election day. I don’t know if she will be skeet shooting or duck hunting but we will see a photo of her with a gun.
I seem to remember that you’ve said multiple times how much of a simpleton your son is/was. He doesn’t sound like such a simpleton in this case.
The point of my story apparently sailed right over your head. Either that or you just ignored it.
What happens if you tell a kid “Don’t play with the gun”? He’ll immediately find a way to play with the gun. What happens if you educate a kid about guns and allow him/her to go shoot whenever they want? There is no mystique about the guns and the kids won’t treat them as toys.
Your last sentence shows that you live in a liberal fantasy world of rainbow-farting unicorns. I live in the real world. You should try it sometime.
That’s the same exact thing I did with my kids and heroin! If I told them “Don’t shoot up heroin!” they would just immediately find a way to shoot up heroin. So I educated my kids about heroin and allowed them to go shoot whenever they wanted. Worked out great!
Very analogous comparison. Organizations with overwhelming political power control swing votes on an issue where the general public isn’t especially invested in the issue. The Israel lobby was 2/2 on that score during the 1960s-1990s. The NRA was 1/2 (others cared somewhat about guns) but still remained overwhelming because they controlled the swing. Anyway, if the NRA insists that all Dems are demon sheep it will jizz up their base, but hurt their agenda.
(My hypothetical rationalistic gun enthusiast organization would be a 401 c(3) nonprofit to begin with, so this factor would apply less to them. Orthogonal.)
There is some evidence that risk behaviors vary with the gun owner. Again, taking a gun safety course tends to be associated with less risky alcohol related behaviors, relative to gun owners that don’t take gun safety courses. (Those taking gun safety courses resemble the general population in that regard).
But the matter hasn’t been sufficiently studied. As I noted earlier, heterogeneity within the gun owning populace hasn’t been explicitly studied anywhere, so basically we’re left with empty assertions, YT excepted (the study I alluded to didn’t ID the heterogeneity problem explicitly IIRC). The perspective of a scientifically oriented gun enthusiast would be helpful.
The assault weapons ban was watered down and not particularly effective. But the pro-gunners have a few holes in their argument. Firstly, the ban covered high capacity cartridges, and there is some indirect evidence that this aspect may have helped somewhat. Secondly, pro-gunners typically don’t make clear the very real differences in performance of various weaponry in the context of a mass shooting. This video shows the fire rate of various weapons. You don’t need to click it, as you probably have a decent idea of it. But it gives some background for interested civilians. (1:46, by vox.com): “How fast 4 different guns can shoot and reload” http://www.downvids.net/how-fast-4-different-guns-can-shoot-and-reload-832646.html
The big point is that when you make definitive pronouncements while leaving some key issues unaddressed, you weaken your credibility. Even if you are working off of a reasonably strong argument.
Disclaimer: I don’t see the NRA’s emerging external political ineffectiveness as a bad thing. (Their ability to draw in funds for their leaders is unmatched.) So I’m not claiming concern: I merely observe it.
How many dead children is too many? Just how much are gun nuts willing to sacrifice in pursuit of their obsession?
Here’s one answer. In 1988, the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned sharp-tipped lawn darts after (I believe) three (3) children were killed by them over the course of many years. Nine years later they re-issued a reminder about the ban when one (1) child was seriously injured.
So the CPSC regards one injured child as one too many. But, hey, lawn darts are not religious fetishes like guns, right? So one or two hundred child deaths a year, no problem, as long as it’s done with guns, right?
And “some notion that these may be suicides disguised as accidents” is as desperate an argument as it is absurd, as if children playing with guns cannot possibly lead to gun accidents and it’s more likely that this is all due to childhood existential angst leading to juvenile suicide. :rolleyes:
I’d also add that when children play with guns, another statistic to consider is not just the extent to which they kill each other, but the completely different statistic of the extent to which they kill others, too.
You’re digressing from the argument. The point I was making with the reference to the Sandy Hook mother was about the dangerous rationalization that gun violence is only something that happens to others, and that you and I are smart enough that it will never happen to us no matter how many guns we own and how often we play with them, and the delusions we’re sometimes under, not just about our own alleged smartness and invulnerability, but about how well we understand our own psyches or those of our loved ones.
Deaths from mass shootings are indeed a small percentage of the roughly 30,000+ gun deaths in the US each year, of which a little less than half are homicides. Yet mass shootings are far, far more common in the US than in any other developed country in the world. Both of those facts – mass shootings and the huge number of everyday gun deaths – reflect numbers so extraordinarily high that they should be deeply concerning to anyone who isn’t insane.
The ironic thing about Internet gun debates is that if they become protracted enough, they will eventually be interrupted by news of yet another mass shooting, almost invariably in the US. They’re that bloody common. I call this phenomenon “Wolfpup’s Law”. The corollary to it is that gun nuts will quickly jump in to explain how this had nothing to do with guns, and others will jump in to explain how the thing could have been prevented if all the victims had been armed.
Nor does anyone think that homicide rates would remain exactly the same if all guns disappeared, do they? Where there are more guns there are generally more gun deaths, and no sane person believes that every one of them would be replaced by a different means of homicide in the absence of guns, or anywhere even close. But the imperfect nature of the correlations and the difficulty of sourcing accurate data (in large part because of information suppression efforts by gun-nut organizations) has become the gun nut’s argument of choice to suggest that guns have nothing to do with deaths, despite that being their sole purpose.
In fact one can even make a similar observation about rates of successful suicide, though I suspect with weaker causality. The gun nut will argue that having a gun in the home doesn’t drive a person to suicide who isn’t already so inclined. True, but guns offer a convenient readily available method that is almost always fatal, so you’ve not only got what a despondent person will find to be an inviting means of instantaneous death, but you’re not going to get many of those pesky “failed suicide attempts” for which a person can be treated. The gun nut will also argue that some countries have higher rates of suicide than the US, which is true, but it doesn’t change the above facts about the effect of the gun in an “all else being equal” situation.
I don’t know what that could possibly have to do with anything, but I’ll give you the answer and you can make of it what you will. I was probably about 16 or 17, visiting a farm where the folks had a kid about my own age. The father decided to take us both out to plink at some targets with a .22 rifle, under his supervision. The interesting thing was that this was not just the first time I had fired a gun, but it was also the last. No particular reason – plinking at targets was a frivolous bit of fun – there was just no reason to ever have contact with a gun again. I have not been even near a gun since, and I don’t think it’s made me a lesser person, or a less safe one. I don’t own a howitzer or a pneumatic jackhammer, either, though I’m sure both are fine tools for the appropriate tasks. I recycle my beer cans instead of vaporizing them with rifle fire, and I have no desire to kill anyone, so it’s unclear what owning a firearm would do for me except open up statistical odds of either a firearm injury or, in my country, serious legal trouble in case of any kind of alleged misuse or mishandling.
That’s not a small distinction. The Heller ruling was absolutely fundamental, which was my point. It contradicts what most scholars have argued (and previous rulings have implicitly recognized) was the original intent of the framers, and dismisses the essential militia preamble as mere decorative filler.
I lumped those two comments together because I think they’re related.
The first fact indicates that public opinion on gun control is widely variable and seems to be shaped by perceptions, circumstances, and propaganda. The second fact reflects the insidious political influence of the NRA and other organizations like it on shaping that public opinion, an organization that has actually suppressed government research on gun violence because they don’t like the conclusions, and which viciously attacks any politician who even hints at gun control. This is certainly not an organization that has any interest in the truth, in gun safety, or in a safer society. Essentially the kind of gun control that is a done deal in all other countries – and became so with little or no controversy – is considered a kind of religious heresy in the US. And so people keep dying.
And no, it has nothing to do with the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment doesn’t say that every idiot including the mentally deranged must be allowed to be armed to the teeth for personal protection against imaginary threats and/or for personal aggression, or must be allowed to walk into Starbucks festooned with semi-automatic assault rifles to prove that he has an enormous dick, or that he is one. The Second Amendment was a statement about preserving newly-won American independence in the 18th century against the Redcoats and their ilk, which don’t exist any more and have not been a threat for more than two hundred years, and certainly no such threat exists today. There are many modern threats to national security, though. The NRA is one of them. And people keep dying.
No, you don’t. You live in Texas. Where nine-year-olds get guns for their birthday.
Yeah; you can’t blame the marketers for trying (though the law appropriately recognizes that kids are vulnerable and places restrictions on marketers’ schemes).
“Not much else” probably nails it.
It’s a big country. We can afford to support a subculture of unskilled right-wing ideologues, I guess.
I honestly think there’s something to this. One complication is that you need to keep the guns away from the 3-6 year olds. The other complication is that the responsible 10 year old probably has some dopey friends who aren’t familiar with guns. Josh Marshall:
[INDENT][INDENT]I also have a random and kind of scary experience from childhood. I’m probably or 4 or maybe 5 years old. We’re visiting someone’s house in St. Louis where we lived at the time. I’m off in some part of the house away from the parents playing with the little girl my age in the family. And I see a gun. Looks like a rifle or shotgun (I was too young to know which.) I pick it up, aim at the little girl and jokingly go ‘pow!’. And when I say ‘go pow!’ I mean I said ‘pow!’
But that’s when things got weird. Basically all the blood ran out of this little girl’s face at once, which was totally weird to me. And she said in something like shock, that’s a real gun.
Now, this is just an artefact of my memory. I can’t remember precisely what she said – particularly whether the gun was loaded or whether she thought it was. But her reaction made it very clear that it could have been.
The point, though, is that it was totally outside of my experience that a gun I might find in someone’s house might be a real – possibly loaded – firearm as opposed to a toy. The fact that I didn’t pull the trigger when I said ‘pow!’ was just dumb luck. [/INDENT][/INDENT] Ok, ok you need to consider the age of the visitor - but also their familiarity with firearms. I’m guessing a locking device would be sensible and necessary, if certain friends or cousins are visiting.
What exactly is a “responsible 10 year old” in this context? It certainly wasn’t this one. Or this one. Or this one, either. You would apply the label “responsible” to someone who may still believe in Santa Claus and will have to mature another 15 years before being considered responsible enough to rent a car? Someone who throws temper tantrums and declares that he hates hates hates hates his parents for not letting him keep that stray dog? This child should have a gun?