Sebastian Swartz, 9-Year-Old Boy, Dead After Shooting Himself With Father's Gun In Ohio

[AtheistCrusader]

87. Let me stop you right there.

I don't follow or listen to the NRA. I was a member years ago because it was a requirement to access the closest range to my house, and I wanted to use it. I have canceled both memberships years back. I was then subjected to harassment-levels of begging to re-join and send money. Anything that I get from them is eaten by the junk filter in e-mail, or goes directly into the wood stove. I do not listen to them. I am not a member. They can fuck right off for all I care. So don't try and smear me with that guilt by association shit.

Now that we have that out of the way.

"Let's review. Sex is a biological imperative. Guns are a hobby, like fly fishing or building ships in bottles. I know you want to think that guns are not a hobby, but unless you are a cop or a soldier, they are. Being against gun safety classes in school is not like calling for abstinence only sex-ed, just as being against fly-fishing classes in school is not like calling for abstinence only sex-ed. There is no comparison."

I would be amenable to this argument IF the safety education in question was about USING firearms safely. It is not. It is 'LEAVE IT ALONE AND GET AN ADULT'. Training that I received in elementary school more than 20 years ago, delivered as part and parcel of a larger safety lecture by 'Officer Friendly'. Remember that program?

"If responsible gun owners are worried about their fellow gun owners not being responsible, then they need to get squarely behind legislation that requires all gun owners to be responsible - or pay a steep price if they are not. Yet, they are not doing this. Instead they are hiding behind an extremist group that lobbies for more and more gun sales, and refuses to take any responsibility for the effects of the glut of guns."

In the real world, this is total BS. Police officers, in the course of their jobs, highly trained and competent, have lost firearms in public places children might come into contact with them. You could institute the death penalty for such negligence, and it would still happen. HOWEVER, that is not to say there shouldn't be both, or that there isn't value in both. Absolutely careless gun owners should be held to account when a firearm is negligently left where a child can access it. There is ALSO value in teaching kids that guns are not toys, and should not be touched or played with. That doesn't mean a kid won't try, but as I am often told, if it saves one kid...

"If pro gun people are so concerned about the effects of their hobby, they need to show it, and take steps themselves to mitigate that problem. What they don't need to do is require that everyone else take the responsibility for the effects of their hobby. "

What a delectable strawman you've constructed there.

Let's replace 'pro gun' with 'pro driving a car' and see if that holds up, when the question is teaching a kid how to safely cross a street? Fails miserably doesn't it? There are more firearms than cars in this country. Your argument is predicated on the idea that it is POSSIBLE to child-proof access to every gun in this country. A laudable goal, but so unimaginably laughable, it's barely worth discussing with you, because you cannot ensure at minimum that a fucking bank robber is going to care that he threw his gun in the bushes by an elementary school as he fled the scene. Same for people who have stolen firearms. Same for people who carry them regularly. Same for people who carry them as part of their professional employment. Accidents happen, negligence happens, malicious behavior happens. You can address those with penalties, but none of it puts a child's brains back in his or her skull AFTER the fuckup.