This is one of those things that fall under personal responsibility. Just as when you get behind the wheel of a car, owning and using a gun comes with great responsibility. Parents wouldn’t hand their eight-year-old the keys to the family car, and they should never allow their children to access their guns. I know of no state that allows children to be endangered, so as with the “more laws” idea, there seems to be sufficient legal coverage already, making so-called “safe storage” laws redundant. Further, there are many options available to home/gun owners that will allow for quick access to their firearms while keeping them secure, such as a quick access safe that can be opened in total darkness in under a second by either tapping in a special code or placing one’s finger on a fingerprint reader. With the falling price of electronics, the cost of such high-tech safes isn’t usually a barrier for most people anymore.
The fact is that the majority of responsible gun owners already do such things. Statistics show that accidents involving guns and kids are few and far between, regardless of what the number of cautionary advertisements might make you think. There has been some confusion on this point due to the definition of “children” used in some reports, sometimes deceptively. For instance, when you say “children,” the mind’s eye usually pictures kids from infants to 12, 13 or 14 years old, yet some studies include adolescents on up to everyone under age 21! In the former group, death by gunfire is extremely rare. When you add teenagers and young adults, an age group more prone to risky behavior, being involved in gangs and drugs (both buying and selling), not to mention that this is also the time where suicide rates tend to spike, the number is greatly inflated. Activists and political groups “spin” this to their advantage. A good example: the Peace Alliance, who states that 12 children die each day from gun violence, which includes “children” up to 24 years of age! So the overall truth is that, yes, parents need to do everything they can to keep their guns away from their kids, and all gun owners need to take reasonable precautions against theft, but new laws are unnecessary and the reality doesn’t merit the hype.
Continuing down the list, in the wake of the election of Barack Obama and a Democratic majority in Congress, it wasn’t long before some groups began clamoring for the renewal of the “Assault Weapons ban” that was enacted during the Clinton administration and expired in 2004. When I expressed my disgust at the idea, my wife of 23 years said, “Well, this may be one area where we part company. I don’t see why anyone needs an assault weapon.” It suddenly dawned on me that this was one more conversation we didn’t have!
So I expanded our dialogue by asking her if she knew what an assault weapon is. Just like most people, she thought it was a machine gun, or select fire weapon like those in use by our soldiers in Iraq. She was pretty surprised that the ban didn’t cover any of those! In fact, the term “assault weapon” didn’t exist within the law until the ban legislation was being crafted. The term is a variation of “assault rifle,” used by the military and has been attributed to gun control activist Josh Sugarman, who said, “The weapon’s menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons – anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to BE a machine gun – can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.” This is the political angle I mentioned earlier: tricks used to confuse rather than to shed light, hoping to gain public support and circumvent the losses handed to them in the courts.
Bringing some true light to the subject, I explained to my wife how my own one-and-only rifle, which I won at a chili cook-off and is a familiar sight around our home, was considered an “assault weapon” by some simply due to its cosmetic features. It is a semi-automatic version of an AK-47, a favorite boogeyman of the gun ban crowd and a design familiar to anyone watching coverage of the Iraq war. Yet it was actually “sporterized” during the Clinton years, complying with the law of the time. It’s not even considered powerful enough to hunt deer with by my friends who hunt!
Similarly, all of the banned weapons were actually no more deadly, accurate or powerful than the legal versions. Larger (harder to hide) and often more expensive than cheap handguns, they’re also rarely ever used to commit crimes. In order to get the ban passed through Congress, the “sunset” provision was built in. The Clinton administration also commissioned a study by the DOJ to document the effectiveness of the ban, so that when it came up for reauthorization, Congress would have some hard data for guidance. The ban was allowed to sunset, due in no small part to the study’s summation that there was “no clear effect” on crime.
True machine guns have been illegal for the average person to own since the 1930s, so the whole issue was obviously a ploy by gun ban groups intent on getting one step closer to their goal. It wasn’t about crime at all.
“Okay, Stu,” you might be saying at this point, “You’ve told us what doesn’t work against violent crime, but what does?”
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