Out of the guns of babes
by digby
This piece by Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig at Salon about the “normalizing” of guns for children truly stunned me. But it shouldn’t. After all, the whole point of Open Carry and the larger NRA agenda is the proliferation of guns and the legalization of killing with them (whether through accident or “self-defense.”) It’s inexplicable why this nation is putting up with this sort of insanity but it seems to be working.
She quotes this post from the Motherlode blog at the New York Times:
“This summer, three of my four children learned to shoot a .22. I relearned, too. I hadn’t fired a gun in years. To be honest, it was fun; like the many visitors who reviewed Bullets and Burgers on TripAdvisor before this tragedy, we enjoyed having a safe opportunity to do something my children had seen only on television or in video games[…]No matter how you feel about firearms and gun laws, we live in the country we live in. My neighbors have guns. Your neighbors have guns. Your guns may be locked up; the babysitter’s boyfriend may keep his on the seat of his car. At some point, some child is going to take my child or yours by the hand, open Mom’s closet or the trunk of Dad’s car, and say, “Look!” At that point, I don’t want my children to say, “Wow, let me see that.” I want them to shrug and say, “Whatever” and “Let’s go do something else.” (I actually want them to say: “Suzi, get away from there! That’s dangerous! We have to go tell your mom and mine right now!” But I’m realistic.)”
I spent a good part of my youth in Alaska. There are guns there, lots of them. But to my recollection nobody ever casually left one on the seat of his car, nobody carried one in her waistband, nobody ostentatiously took them into public buildings. And everyone I knew who had guns treated them like the deadly weapons they were and kept them away from children. Many of these were people who hunted for food and actually lived in fear of dangerous wild animals. And somehow they were able to get through life without teaching their kids that guns were just a lot of fun for their own sake and that casually leaving them around was perfectly normal. It was not, not even among the most dedicated hunters and gun enthusiasts.
The piece points out that this nonsensical view that kids will get bored with guns if they are exposed to them is like saying they’ll get bored with amusement parks and ice cream. Sure it will, just like allowing kids to watch TV and play video games might lead them to be more likely to read books or clean their rooms. It’s always possible, of course, except that in the event that doesn’t happen, video games and TV aren’t going to kill them or someone else if they happen to drop the remote or get over-excited.
Honestly, this is the sickest thing I’ve read about guns in a long time. If the response to that horror of the 9 year old girl accidentally killing her instructor with an Uzi at “Bullets and Burgers” leads one to the conclusion that more kids should be handling guns, we are screwed. You’ve got to give the NRA credit — they are the most insane lobby in the country and yet they are massively successful.
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