You don’t have to believe condoms are bad to believe there shouldn’t be a junior version.
You want to teach kids about marksmanship, you could make a paintball gun or BB gun. But no, everything has to be about getting deadly weapons in as many hands as possible.
Marketing lethal weapons to children; fucking GROSS.
Lost causes be lost; some people simply DGAF about anything that doesn’t negatively impact them personally; sadly, that’s one of the main problems with our species as a whole, IMO.
But their FREEDUMBS! Shouldn’t that 6 year old boy have the FREEDUMB to shoot his teacher if he wants! /s
Anyone who thinks a kid won’t figure out how to Jimmy that safety is fooling themselves.
I was going to post this same article, but not as a jokey thing. This was a potential tragedy, and was horribly mishandled by the cops. If the kid had a little more knowledge, it would have been.
What are you winning?
You are begging the question of whether marksmanship is an essential life skill that everyone will need sooner or later.
Other life skills relevant to this discussion might be dealing with PTSD, learning to use a prosthetic limb or a wheelchair, or keeping one’s colostomy bag clean.
We don’t need anymore guns geared toward kids because there are already too many guns that kids can access because adults are irresponsible with guns around kids.
That photo is evidence of that fact.
We don’t need anymore guns geared toward kids or adults especially because those adults can’t seem to keep the guns they already have out of the hands of their kids.
The photo of that toddler should be plastered everywhere to scare the living crap out of current gun owners to check, double check, and triple check that their guns are secured so no child can get a hold of it.
It will never end until the guns are gone.
It’s being marketed to PARENTS for their children to use.
Do not conflate a 6 years stealing their parent’s gun and shooting their teacher with people teaching their kids to shoot a rifle at a range.
It isn’t reductive at all. IF you’re in that camp, and there certainly many people in that camp., I have nothing to defend my position. You think all guns are bad, ok then. I acknowledge your position and bid you good day.
If you ARE NOT in that camp, then I can have a discussion and gave my reasons.
And why exactly? There is nothing wrong with teaching children to properly use firearms. It can be an extremely rewarding experience teaching kids responsibility and confidence building as they “hit the bullseye” or break a clay pigeon.
I am not advocating for unfettered access. There is nothing wrong with supervised use.
Uh - we do have age restrictions on guns. You can’t buy a gun as a minor, just like you can’t get into an R rated movie. A parent can decide to allow their child to use a firearm, just like they can take them to an R rated movie. Or back in my day, your parent could allow their kid to rent an R rated movie from the local video store with out explicit permission.
You’re absolutely right that child resistant doesn’t equal child proof. It is an excellent feature to make safe at the range and in transport. When at home you make it redundant with a second lock or safe storage.
Look - I can’t defend every comment today.
If you don’t ever go shooting the ONLY TIME you hear about guns is when bad things happen in the news. The only statistics kept and widely shared are when bad things happen. I am sure it is hard to think of guns being used for anything other than to kill people.
I am sure this is partly due to the rural/small town/suburban divide, but let me tell you that kids learning to shoot at a young age is a common thing across this nation. It is done safely and responsibly. Some of them end up taking it or leaving it, like my one nephew. And some really enjoy it and go on to join their HS trap team or go hunting like my other nephew.
And of course I am acknowledging there are irresponsible parents letting their kids handle dangerous things irresponsibly. That is bad, and they should do better (like that recent post about the cool kid on the motor bike with no helmet we were supposed to live vicariously through.) Or not controlling their own dangerous items like firearms and their kids get into it. I am all for condemning that behavior.
This tool would actually help in safely teaching kids to shoot in a supervised setting. “Make guns safer” is one of the lobbyist’s demands, and this gun arguably does that.
I’ve never heard of the AR-15 being the choice for competitive target shooting. Depending on the contest, it’s frequently pistols, sometimes bolt-action rifles, or maybe shotguns for trap or skeet shooting. I’m not sure how a junior version of a semi-automatic military platform is supposed to inspire kids to do sports or hunting marksmanship.
Whether you intended it to be or not, your post up there came off as joking, not engaging on the topic of children having weapons. It came off as incredibly flippant.
Does that mean the parent was not responsible for their 6 year old getting the gun?
OH! In that case! Just fine! /s
It’s a distinction without a fucking difference. This is still a smaller version of a weapon of war made for children’s use. Fuck that.
How do you think that kid (and the other kid who was waving a gun around an apartment bloc) LEARNED to handle weapons? Couldn’t possibly be their oh so responsible gun owners… /s
Yeah. It fucking is. The views on gun control here range from banning as many weapons as possible, to banning certain weapons, etc. We’re not a bunch of nanny-state advocates here with no understanding of these issues.
Once again - you’re being reductive. Some people here certainly hold that (perfectly acceptable moral) view. Others are okay with some guns being in private hands.
You are assuming that we’re all making that argument, when nothing is further from the truth.
Just because it’s common doesn’t mean it’s right. All sorts of terrible things and things that are terrible for children are done to them in this country and are common.
But let’s pretend that teaching a child markmanship is okay. Are there not already non-lethal tools to do this? BB guns or airsoft guns. Are there not already guns on which kids could learn how to shoot? I mean, you say it’s already common.
But here we have a gun which, even if it is actually useful for markmanship (highly suspect), is specifically marketed to children. Like a toy. Bright packaging and just like Mom and Dad’s gun. A gun that has been modified to allow even younger children to shoot it. Children otherwise too young to be able to shoot a gun. A teenager learning how to shoot is one thing. I don’t think it’s good but I can see how some parents might choose to do that if it is done safely. But this gun appears to be marketed to small children. The girl on the advert above looks to be about 8 years old. There is absolutely no reason an eight-year-old should be learning marksmanship. There’s absolutely no reason an 8-year-old should be handling a gun at all.
We do not allow children to drive cars. Why should children be allowed to shoot guns? Despite what you may believe, guns are not special. They are not sacred. They are not even useful tools for 99.9% of the population of the United States.
Marketing a gun to children is a god’s damned fucking abomination.
The fig leaf of it being aimed at the parents is just that… a fig leaf.
The main thing I have against this is the design. This isn’t a rifle for hunters. This looks like a tacticle weapon for the MOLLE everywhere crowd. I mean sure it got the single shot part right, but they are definitely going after the “guns are awesome” crowd vs the “gun safety is important” crowd with this design.
I know lots of friends and family that learned shooting at an early age. And I can see benefits when the parents are hunters (or sports shooters) and it’s critical the kids learn that guns are not toys from an early age.
Gun culture is largely messed up, but I think its important we consider it’s diversity and some subgroups are far more problematic than others. This falls squarely in the problematic territory in my opinion. There are plenty of other junior options out there that dont look “tacticool”.
(I say potentially safe as all weapons are dangerous with bad training, supervision, storage, etc… To beat a dead horse, the States could really use a gun licensing system with limitations, and proper storage laws)
Plenty of people here have gone shooting. I have. I still think that gun safety laws are woefully inadequate. And that knee jerk responses supporting unfettered access are wrong and unthinking.
From a developmental aspect, my concern with this is young kids, under 9 or 10, and some older than that, have a great deal of difficulty with the concept of permanence. They see heroes on TV and movies, and cartoon characters, get shot and get right up and keep going. The idea that real life does not work like this is just not something they are able to compute. I suspect (without examining him, of course) that the child who shot his teacher did not understand the concept of death associated with the act. That is the scary part. At least adults can understand that this instrument can kill someone, and that is a permanent thing. This is one reason most folks would hesitate to actually pull the trigger on another person. They may not care, but they can understand. Kids cannot. Putting them in a position of handling a death stick is not fair to them.
