Good (/s) to know that Kristi Noem is preparing her granddaughter for kindergarten by teaching her the four R’s: reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic, and rifles. 
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I got a misdirected letter yesterday, for a place just down the street from me. If it were in Chicago, I would just walk it down and put it in their mail slot or in the interior lobby or whatever I could access that was inside from the elements. But it’s rural Indiana. I don’t dare drop it off at their front door, or even put it in their mailbox on the street. Too many guns, too many recent examples.
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It wasn’t too long ago that knocking on someone’s door was a pedestrian activity.
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Related: in the USA you can enlist in the military 3 (?) years before you can legally buy alcohol. Mature enough to be handed a M16 and told to point it at The Enemy, not mature enough to consume fermented sugar.
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I don’t think you’re going to win that argument by the numbers. When the US increased the legal drinking age to 21, drunk driving deaths plummeted, especially among teenagers. The topic was revisited in 2008 to see if the drinking age should be adjusted and the study found, even with rampant binge drinking on college campuses, the drinking age should not be adjusted.
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Don’t think that was the idea-perhaps raise the minimum age to enlist?
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That wasn’t clear. Besides, the “go overseas and shoot people” part of the modern military is a tiny tiny minority. Most people who join the military are doing support roles that actually do a pretty good job of training them to do productive work outside of the military.
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That may well be true, but I suspect the issue was the disconnect between age of being allowed to drink and the age of being trained to be a soldier. And everyone still goes through Basic, including weapons usage.
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Some responsible gun owners in my state tried to prevent the state from keeping them response but they failed.
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21 used to be the minimum age for voting in the USA, too. There was a lot of discussion around this during the 1960s; 18-year-olds were being drafted, but weren’t allowed to participate in the process of selecting the people who would represent them in the government. Eventually, the voting age was reduced to 18.
Barry McGuire’s 1965 ‘Eve of Destruction’ referred to this pretty directly: “You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’/You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’?”.
The drinking age was 18 through all of this; it wasn’t raised to 21 until the (early?) 1980s, if I remember correctly.
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It was spotty depending on which state you were in: Wisconsin and NY were still 18 while Illinois became 21 in the late 1970’s. And yes, there was a huge problem with drunk teenagers driving back across the border from southern Wisconsin to northern Illinois.
According to this, it went national in 1984:
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The legal age was definitely still 18 in New Orleans in 1995 (although some bars would serve 14 year-olds in the early '90s). Also local bars had an unofficial grandfather clause so 18 year olds in 1995 that could once drink legally were still served when 19 and 20, so the age limit wasn’t really 21 until 1998. Oddly enough the city enforced the 21 limit much more strictly than 18 had been.
On topic, I’ve never heard of anyone in Louisiana being charged with having a gun too young, though
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In Michigan is was 1978, I was 14, didn’t make a damn bit of a difference. I started drinking at 15, hard core alcoholic by 17.
We had no trouble getting booze at just about any store, a couple stores would even sell us kegs.
It was absurd.
Teenagers should have never been allowed to drink or go to war.
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It was 18 in my days in NY. And I went to bars at 14. Tiny dives with no other customers but my friends. But bars.
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Another wrinkle-- sex differentiated ages of majority
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