It’s easy to understand why the huffingtonpost.com can’t abide the idea of children shooting guns. It’s dangerous! (Or not so much.) More to the point, if children didn’t grow up shooting guns there’s less chance they’d become gun owners. Fewer Americans would own guns. Everyone would be safer. Staying with this mindset, anything or anyone that promotes children shooting guns is EVIL. Hence This Is What Happens When The Gun Industry Sees Kids As Customers. Spoiler alert! Manufacturers build guns for kids and promote them. Kids shoot [these and other] guns. They grow up to be gun owners. And? Besides, as long as an adult provides supervision and gun safety is observed, what’s wrong with kids shooting guns? As MKS Prez Charles Brown reminded TTAG, “It’s not illegal to go and have fun with your kids.” Yet. Strangely, the HuffPo’s post contains no mention of videogames . . .
Don’t expect them to stop doing this; this is a tactic they’ve used effectively to con fence-sitters.
“But accidents happen to”
I love this line, like em or hate em, nutnfancy did a vid on dangerous things that was pretty spot on. Accidents can and do happen with a plethora of things that children have access to… sigh.
What ever happened to shooting arcades…? They typically used .22 weapons, as I dimly recall.
As an aside, that is the happiest girl I’ve seen in quite a while. Nice shootin’, li’l miss!
NOT WEAPONS!
Firearms
(never use your political enemy’s vocabulary)
What is interesting is that while the article cites one example of a 5 year old shooting his sister with a .22 that his parents had given him, then goes on to drone about other kid shooting statistics, they don’t really make clear how many of the kids involved in shootings had been taught gun safety by their parents or someone else. Methinks that the incidence of kid-related gun accidents is much smaller when you look at the population of kids who use guns and who have been properly trained.
and let’s face it, leaving a .22 within reach of a 5 year old is just asking for trouble.
that’s nothing more than a rah rah rah we hate corporations rant, and it just so happens the industry is guns….
The desire to make life safe is necessary when acted upon in moderation, but when safety becomes the only goal, we give up what makes us human. Choice is risky.
+1
You can’t legislate a solution to accidents caused by neglect any more than you could legislate a solution to stupid.
They’ll try anyway, and the mechanism will be consumer protection, however that mechanism is intended to protect the consumer against products which dangerously malfunction… i.e. unintended function of the product outside of the user’s control. Kids shooting each other with unlocked guns is not a product flaw, it is a parenting flaw.
Sounds like MA’s consumer protection BS. You can only buy approved handguns from what the AG deems safe. Its a racket and stupid.
Their stats also include the 18-19 year old gang banger in “children”
Shelter your kids from guns and sit them in front of a TV to play violent video games and they will become curious about the real thing, while being dangerously ignorant of how they work.
+10
We really need to get of the video games. it makes our side look just as willing to search for an irrelevant scapegoat as the anti gun folk are.
It IS an irrelevant scapegoat that both sides are always quick to point fingers at.. It’s obnoxious, and I’m surprised Leghorn hasn’t done an article about it, being a gamer himself.
I would love to see an article in that vein. How about it Nick?
Judging by HuffBlo headlines such as “Selena Gomez’s Tour Rider Includes Pickles, Ramen Noodles” and “American Girls OBSESS Over Prince Harry,” I’d say that HuffBlo and gun manufacturers are competing for the same demographic.
I think…i got my first BB gun when I was about 5 or 6…lol. First 22 rifle and single barrel shotgun around 10 or 12. Learned to shoot a handgun when I was 15, and had one “on loan” from my dad. Been shooting ever since, still alive and well.
Rinse and repeat with my kids. BB guns were around 8 or 10 though, and graduated to the 22/SBSG around 12 or 14. They both know how to shoot handguns and long guns now (they are 15 and 18). Still alive and well…
HuffBlo makes me sick…
“Rinse and repeat with my kids. BB guns were around 8 or 10 though, and graduated to the 22/SBSG around 12 or 14. ”
My boys were shooting airsoft (does that count as a “BB gun”?) at 7 and 9. The oldest started with my Marlin No. 29 at age 9… first attempt: hit a 4″ target at 20 yards 5 out of 6 shots.
They don’t compare with the neighbor kid, though. At 12: just took his first deer and was #3 overall in the state 4-H skeet scoring (#1 on the #1 county team).
I took my son out shooting for the first time when he was 3, Basically I held the rifle at first and let him pull the trigger (which he would do as fast as he could pull the trigger! haha!) and then I would transition with having him shoot it while benched, I helped him aim and at no point did anything dangerous happen, He stayed behind the firing line and is very respectful around firearms, at 3 years old he KNOWS not to touch it and he KNOWS what they can do…He also knows the correct nomenclature for a magazine.
We also like to shoot airsoft guns in the backyard of course only under my or my wife’s supervision.
Maybe I’m crazy but I believe that early exposure to firearms help them learn to respect them and helps ensure our shooting traditions.
When I was 14 years old I shot my brother in the eye with a high powered slingshot and he spent three days in the hospital, if we would have had guns I can guarantee we wouldn’t have been shooting at each other.
The real problem is that they are selling that particular gun to kids.
It is a piece of shit and will leave the kiddies with the impression that guns are unreliable, frustrating and stupid.
The only thing that gun is good for is teaching the kids how to deal with repeated FTE and stovepipes.
Do you know any .22LR pistols that are a 100% reliable? Or even 99% reliable? I have a Sig Sauer Mosquito that has failures to feed or eject unless it’s fed primo high-velocity ammo and besides the trigger is heavy as hell in the last stage. My S&W 15-22 is quite a bit more reliable though.
think I’d rather teach my kid on something like a Ruger SR22 instead.
assuming I can ever get and ammo for it.
Start him or her with a youth rifle, bolt or break action single shot. You won’t be disappointed.
little lever action browning .22 for my and my kids (the same one, actually). Hopefully my daughters will use it to teach their kids.
Interestingly enough, just by glancing at the comments on the actual HuffPo site, I was (pleasantly) surprised to see how many people were trashing the article.
One of the first comments on the article pretty much sums it all up:
“It’s obvious there are two worlds working here. Giving guns to kids seems totally normal to some and to others it is child abuse. Doesn’t appear there is much common ground here. ”
That is why, I suspect, these people and us are never going to agree on this issue, not even a little bit.
Another rural vs. urban divide.
Another rural vs. urban divide.
No. Another sane vs. insane divide. Equating firearms training with child abuse by people who understand neither is insane.
Who cares about what’s on HuffPo? They exist because the liberal media is not liberal enough.
True, but if you don’t want to preach to the choir, it’s a better place to comment than here.
This is true. At TTAG we can only reach the middle-of-the-road or those formerly liberals-mugged-by-reality who come here looking for gun facts. If you feel its your duty to your country to speak up, then the question is where.
I’ve logged onto a few comment sections after lurking on and off for years, reading to get a sense of the mind of the left- I think we need to understand the other side, but engaging in a conversation is usually non-productive – think of falling in a cesspool. That would be Daily Kos, Huffpo, Democratic Underground, etc.
But if there was a time to make the effort, when shocked liberals might be waking up, its now, at places like CNN, WAPO, the Atlantic, maybe NPR.
Reasonableness and facts are responded to by a few … and as to the rest-
well, its good practice for ignoring the trolls, whom we seem to have driven off of TTAG, with the “repeat-the-facts and laugh-at-the-trolls” approach.
“A neo-conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality”- Irving Kristol.
I love the retro-In Your Face-style of the graphic. The Little Girl is especialy poignant as they are a target demographic for rapeists and slave traders (in America) and should learn to shoot all available FIREARMS
My iPad is very obviously a pro-gun libertarian: every time I click over to the HuffPo link it closes my web browser. Mildly irritating, but at least I know my iPad holds strong to its beliefs.
Oh yeah, and last night I spent an hour teaching my lady’s five year old daughter how guns/cartridges work, and how to handle them safely (or not handle them at all). She loved it, and as of yet has not a) turned into a complete psycho, or b) died. Funny how that works.
“Funny how that works.”
Isn’t that weird?
My kids know there are guns in the house, know I carry a gun, and have used a couple of my guns. I’ve shown them the guns and told them that if they ever want to see or touch one, ask me (think Wahlberg’s Blue Bloods scene). They’ve never touched them without my permission and nobody has been injured.
Share these stories on places like huffpo. I’ve been doing it. Like it or not, people who have no personal experience with something will react more strongly to anecdotes than to statistics. Give them some positive (and more representative of normal experience) stories to balance the a-typical tradgedies the grabbers push.
& for less than $300 little Suzy can put one right between the eyes of the rapist that kicks down her door when her dad isn’t home. One can only hope. Does biden write hufpos stuff? The logic is eerily similar, Randy
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