Kids and Guns by the Numbers

What are your personal thoughts about guns?

We have a hand gun. We keep in locked up in a safe and only take it out when we go camping. We live in a very safe neighborhood and we have two loud and protective dogs so I don't really worry about having a problem that would require having a readily accessible gun.

I grew up in gun country -- everyone (but us) had guns. Almost everyone was familiar enough with guns that no one ever got hurt.

The only two people I ever known who died from guns killed themselves with them.

One of my greatest fears is that Mo gets shot by some idiot showing off a gun. I worry that kids that have never been exposed to guns are more likely to show off.

I have very mixed feelings on this topic.

I wouldn't trust anyone who did not have mixed feelings, regardless of their position.

That’s my greatest fear, the parents that are irresponsible whom own guns but don’t keep them safely locked away.

When I was twelve years old two friends of mine who were twin brothers ditched school with another friend of theirs. The other kids parents were at work so they went to his house where they found his fathers 22 unlocked and loaded.

I don’t remember the whole story but one of the twins had the gun and it went off and nicked his friends head but ricocheted and hit his twin brother in the chest, killing him.

That's my nightmare.

What I don't know is whether familiarity with guns or unfamiliarity with guns makes such things more common.

My gut feeling is that the more common something is, the less likely you are to have an accident with it. Taboo things are very attractive and prone to misuse.

But I really don't know. I struggle with this.

don't bet on that morgan.

Oh I don't, he only goes to a few friends houses, usually when he's been invited for dinner. Marco calls me an overbearing parent but I don't care, better safe then sorry.

I do too because of all the nightmare stories you read and hear about.

Quite a few years ago, I watched a documentary about kids and guns. In one segment they took children individually to a room, where an unloaded gun lay in the open, and left them alone. They all had been instructed that if they saw any guns lying around, to leave them alone and report it to an adult. The kids who had been taught gun safety, at least in this instance, were the ones that began playing with the gun. The other kids avoided it. Whether that proves much or not, I don't know. Likely, most kids would eventually play with one.

Oh! That's interesting.

I will have to DVR this show, waiting on a taxi to take us to din din, we're having Martini's with our meal

I was talking to a mother last week who was upset that there was a live snake display for children at our local library. One hundred percent of the snakes in our state are poisonous and she didn't think kids should be taught to be too cosy with them. But the whole of Australia only has about 2 snake bite deaths per year. Glad to be talking about snakes not guns.

You are very wise to take a taxi, Morgan.
I have wondered many times when successful, wealthy entertainers
get into a lot of legal trouble with drunken driving, Y thay are too stingy
and cheap to have a chauffeur. Thanks for the tip on the TV show.
I 'll make it a point to watch it.

When I was 8 in Arizona, I acquired my first gun
from one of the other kids in the area.
Thay were ubiquitous in the naborhood.
At home alone sometimes, I had felt mildly insecure,
regardless of the fact that we lived in a good, quiet naborhood.
We kids got a lot of good safety training from many directions.
I took my revolver everywhere and I felt a lot safer.

As it turned out, I did not actually need to defend myself with it
until a few decades later and 1OOOs of miles away, but u never know.





David

I enjoyed the show. I thought that it was reasonably balanced.
Thanx again for calling our attention to it.
I had not been aware of it.





David

I still have it recorded but haven't had a chance to watch it, maybe tonight since we're staying in and having dinner at home.

Good. I hope that thay will not be offended by my saying this,
but I believe that Henry and Harry are still too young to work out
with the fully automatic rifles (M-16s) shown. I hope thay don t get mad at me.





David

There are four basic reasons for the second ammendment in the United States.

Every one of the founding fathers is on record to the effect that private ownership of firearms, the 2'nd amendment, is there as a final bulwark against the possibility of government going out of control. That is the most major reason for it.

At the time of the revolution and for years afterwards, there were private armies, private ownership of cannons and warships. . . The term "letters of marque, and reprisal" which you read in the constitution indicates the notion of the government issuing a sort of a hunting license to the owner of a private warship to take English or other foreign national ships on the high seas, i.e. to either capture or sink them. The idea of you or me owning a Vepr or FAL rifle with a 30-round magazine is not likely to have bothered any of those people.

The problem with drug-dealers owning AKs is a drug problem and not a gun problem. Fix the drug-problem, i.e. get rid of the insane war on drugs and pass a rational set of drug laws, and both problems will simply go away. A rational set of drug laws would:

1. Legalize marijuana and all its derivatives and anything else demonstrably no more harmful than booze on the same basis as booze.

2. Declare that heroine, crack cocaine, and other highly addictive substances would never be legally sold on the streets, but that those addicted could shoot up at government centers for the fifty-cent cost of producing the stuff, i.e. take every dime out of that business for criminals.

3. Clamp a permanent legal lid down on top of anybody peddling LSD, PCP, and/or other Jeckyl/Hyde formulas.

4. Same for anybody selling any kind of drugs to kids.

Do all of that, and the drug problem, the gun problem, and 70% of all urban crime will vanish within two years.

But I digress. The 2'nd ammendment is there as a final bulwark against our own government going out of control. It is also there as a bulwark against any foreign invasion which our own military might not be able to stop.

Admiral Yamamoto, when asked by the Japanese general staff about the possibility of invading the American homeland, replied that there were fifty million lunatics in this country who owned military style weaponry, and that there would be "a rifle behind every blade of grass". This apparently bothered him a great deal more than the 200,000 or so guys in uniform prior to the war.

A third obvious reason for private ownership of firearms is to protect yourself and your family from criminals and wild animals. In fact, the second amendment is basically an idea whose time has come all over the world. Why on Earth should people in India tolerate having 80,000 of their number killed every year by snakes? That could simply not happen in a nation whose people were armed.

And there's a fourth reason for the 2'nd ammendment, which is to provide the people with food during bad economic times. When you listen to people from New York and from Texas talk about the depression of the 30's, you hear two totally different stories. The people in New York will tell you about people starving and eating garbage, and running around naked. The Texans (and others from more rural areas and places in which laws and customs had remained closer to those which the founding fathers envisioned) will tell you that while money was scarce, they always had 22 and 30 calibre ammunition, and that they always had something to eat, even if it was just some jackrabbit.

Eating is habit forming. In any sort of a down economic situation, that fourth rationale for the second amendment quickly becomes the most important.

Belsen-Bergen, 1945 (what happens when governments own weapons but citizens are not allowed to). I maintain this is not good for children:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Mass_Grave_3_at_Bergen-Belsen_concentration_camp.jpg/489px-Mass_Grave_3_at_Bergen-Belsen_concentration_camp.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Bergen_Belsen_Liberation_03.jpg/606px-Bergen_Belsen_Liberation_03.jpg

Edit [Moderator]: Graphic image converted to links

The biggest problem I see is kids who've never been allowed to touch a real gun or have any sort of a realistic idea of what it does, and yet who spend hours blasting away at space aliens and whatever else on video screens with no consequences. The disconnect itself is dangerous.

AGREED!
Thay NEED to have the realities of gunfire explained to them in detail,
preferably with demonstrated, hands-on experience.





David