The false premise here is that owning a gun makes you safer. It does not. It makes you less safe, and it makes everyone around you less safe. I’m find with it making YOU less safe - because you are you, and I am me. The problem is that it makes everyone around you less safe. And that “everyone” can include my 10 year old, who happens to be attending a sleepover at your house.
Lock up your fucking guns.
Edit: not a reply to @ficuswhisperer but I’ll leave it.
yes - I reread and added the “not” later right before posting, yuck. Unintentional, not sarcastic or giving guns to babies.
No worries. I figured as much 
I remember once coming across a well known British climber teaching his daughter to climb on actual rock, in the Lake District. She was two at the time. I wanted to know where he got the tiny helmet.
Religious hegemony. >70% of the US population is christian, and a large fraction of that believe that children are owned by their parents. Consent isn’t important to them either.
It’s particularly galling when they hear you’re an atheist and they, baffled, ask you where your morality comes from. To which the correct answer is to ask how many gay people they’ve thrown rocks at. If the answer is none, then you say “my morality comes from the same place as yours. Not the bible.”
The problem isn’t unlocked guns; the problem is unsupervised toddlers. We don’t need more unenforceable gun laws; we need stricter requirements for owning toddlers–clearly, untrained and unlicensed parents are failing to adequately supervise their toddlers. Lock up your fucking toddlers!
Necessary because the Supreme Court’s ultimate paymasters want all regulation to be seen as meaningless - all that OSHA and EPA stuff gets in the way of profits. We don’t want to establish a precedent.
[quote=“LDoBe, post:65, topic:77788”]
my morality comes from
[/quote]I don’t want to branch this, but those people drive me nuts. They’re scared of going to hell so they act a certain way. I act a certain way because it’s expected as part of not being an asshole, I’m just not looking for any reward for it.
So, which one is actually more moral, someone who’s only doing it for a reward or someone who sees the good acts as their own reward?
Lock up the guns and the toddlers in our new EverSafe!
The picture of the kids with the bulletproof blankets squatting in the hall is the sorriest thing I’ve seen in some time. America all wrapped up with a very sad ribbon.
Or my way of looking at it. Life is too damn short to go through it being dicks to each other all the time.
Fuckin’ A.
Why is it that this simple concept seems lost on so many? Wait, dont answer that; I already know, and I like to refer to it as Cognitive Dissonance; Frontier Fantasy edition.
Then there’s this.
norway-defends-its-child-welfare-
The state is incompetent to determine such things, which are solely matters for the child and his gundealer, with God as an optional component.
Well it was unintentionally awesome, then. 33 posts before anyone noticed!
Gun arguments in a nutshell; lots of talking, but not a lot of listening.
It was oddly nostalgic for me… 
duck, and cover…
Freedom Ribbon ©®™ also comes in a lead-lined bulletproof variant, if that’s what you’re looking to buy.
I keep telling people: if you have children, they will shoot you. Nobody listens.
There’s a quote I like about this, I think it was Penn Jillette who said it (apologies for not wanting to end up on a list by Googling this one at work). To paraphrase, “I’ve raped and murdered as many people as I ever wanted to: zero.”
This exact point has been argued over at great length by theologians (the “god said it” bit takes it out of the scope of ethics.) I think it was perhaps best summarised by T S Eliot in Murder in the Cathedral:
“The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
I mention this merely to point out that what I would (a little snootily) describe as educated and thoughtful Christians have rejected the “I give, therefore I get” school of morality for a long time.
What has this got to do with toddlers with guns? Well, I would argue that the idea of keeping guns for “self-defense” is profoundly unChristian. Jesus is slightly ambiguous on the subject of weapons; in the Sermon on the Mount he says that you should obey lawful authority to the best of your ability, which would imply military service. But the idea of keeping weapons in the house so you can blast any unfortunate who happens to knock on your door late at night seems to be what distinguishes the US from the EU.
[edit - since @Medievalist chooses to be witty at my expense let me make the point explicitly - the US and the EU are both nominally Christian in terms of the majority or state sponsored religions. But some US States have “stand your ground” laws and a somewhat lax attitude to shootings, while EU law is very much more loaded against people using guns against other people. ]
