QUOTE (hermit @ Apr 16 2008, 02:52 AM)
Hunh. And since you don't store your firerms in some sort of safe to be able to access them quickly, your kids can find them and shoot themselves while playing with an item they see their father handling like it was some sort of applicance and don't really understand how dangerous it is. Brilliant way to protect your family.
1) No kids have arrived yet, thanks. It's me, and my wife (a Texan), and a couple dogs (no thumbs). As such, my Glock is loaded and chambered at all times, and is either on my hip or on the nightstand next to a flashlight. OMG, my gun hasn't got an external safety
and it's not in a safe
and I keep it loaded
and I keep a round in the chamber! Any day now it will fly around on its own and murder my wife, convince me to use it to kill myself, or zip out the window to a local convenience store to commit a crime all by itself! It's a miracle I've made it as long as I have, since I have a loaded AK, here in the house, too!
2) Rather than locking guns up and making them magical boom-sticks that children will invariably find, and then will have no idea how to handle safely (since they've only ever seen them handled in action flicks, thanks to irresponsible parents trying to keep them ignorant), I think you'll find most responsible gun owners
teach their kids about guns just like most responsible parents
teach their kids about everything else. I was four when I first handled a firearm. My grandfather and my father taught me where to hold it to carry it somewhere, which end not to point at anything I didn't want to die, what to do if I found one, what
not to do if I found one, etc, etc, and I got my very first BB gun for Christmas. My dad kept a loaded .38 special in the nightstand right next to the bed, and a loaded shotgun in his bedroom closet -- when I found them, a couple years later, I carefully looked over, under, and around them for the GI Joes I was expecting for my birthday, then went back to searching other nooks and crannies. You'll find an awful lot of similar stories in the childhoods of like-minded, responsible, gun owners.
Just like an awful lot else in this life, you don't actually protect children by sticking their heads in the sand and pretending like dangerous things don't exist. To do so does them a disservice, leaves them ignorant and vulnerable, shows how little faith and trust you have in them, and sets up whatever taboo item you're ignoring -- be it sex, drugs, guns, knives, matches, whatever -- as something magical and wondrous and easy for them to then make horrible, tragic, mistakes with.
Just because
some families don't teach their children about firearms, don't assume
no families do. If you take two kids, one brought up to respect and understand guns, and one who doesn't, and then have both of them stumble across a loaded firearm -- which kid do you think is likely to be safe about it, and which do you think will twirl it around his finger like a cowboy and kill himself?
I'm not some punk that walks around with a gat in his waistband and has a half dozen kids from a half dozen baby's mamas crawling around a shitty apartment, with loaded guns wedged into couch cushions and an illegal sawed-off behind the door, all so I can protect my meth lab in the bathroom. I -- and millions of other people that
don't make the news every day -- am responsible and mature with my firearm ownership, safe in how I handle them, and serious about why I own them. Those are all traits I'll be doing my best to pass on to my children when we
do have them.