this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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You can't be with your kid at all times in all places, and you can't always control their environment. Teaching them to be responsible around firearms in a place where they may come across them is important.
Simply telling them they're bad is no different than abstainance-only sex education.
Wtf is this comparison with sex this is the second time I see it in this thread sex doesn't kill you and I am not sure I want to know how you expose safely your kids to both firearms and...sex?!?
Maybe compare it with something else that is dangerous and you don't need to keep in your home. People might keep in their homes but as a parent you should try to be aware and make sure it doesn't happen. I don't know maybe hard drugs? So what do you do to prepare your kids to that, is simply telling them they are bad not enough? Do you make sure they are prepared and familiar to be around hard drugs?
It's like sex because it's something that they'll come across when they aren't with you. But unlike guns, sex isn't instantly deadly if done wrong. So teaching about sex can be more conceptual and when the time comes they can stumble their way through it until they figure it out.
With guns, they shouldn't go in blind because they'll kill themselves or someone else. So they should be taught how to safely handle and disarm a weapon.
So not like sex at all, and you don't handle it like sex at all either? Great comparison.
Now how about you look after your kids so they don't "stumble" upon a fucking gun, the same way you'd do with a crack pipe:
Please go ahead and teach kids about sex btw
The point is you can't control every environment a kid is exposed to. No gun will ever be accessible to a child in my house. Growing up, my Dad had guns, but he kept them secured and until I was an adult he didn't have ammunition in the house. He just bought it on the way to the range or the hunt.
But he didn't know what was at other houses. He also didn't always know where I was at. So he taught me about guns early and instilled responsibility around firearms as being paramount.
Simply teaching kids that guns are bad and nothing else has been proven to be ineffective in the same way that abstinence-only sex education and DARE are bad at preventing STDs and drug use. It's a failed approach because it doesn't remove the attraction brought on by the mystery.
And even though firearms in my family are kept in safes, if someone were to ask me if I had guns my answer would be "no." Public knowledge that I have guns in my house is a great way to attract a burglar.
Mate I think you just described the US' problem with guns, it's unwillingness to accept it has a problem, and it's stubbornness around you know how to handle it anyway.
Carry on, keep guns in your house, teach to your kids it's normal to have deadly weapons where someone lives and normalise the concept, accept they might stumble upon some and don't take responsibility for where your kids are or what they do.
The rest of the world has resolved this problem a long time ago but what would we know?
You can be 100% anti-gun and tell your kids to never touch a gun and ban them from visiting people who you know own guns, and they'll still be exposed to them.
There's more than 100 guns per square mile in the US. They're everywhere. If all firearms were made 100 percent illegal and the knowledge of how to make them was magically erased from the world there would still be tens of millions of them floating about centuries from now.
In that context, it's important to know about them regardless of how evil you, me, society, or anything else considers them to be.
If you live on a lake, you don't just tell kids they will drown if they go near the water. You teach them to fucking swim.
Make them illegal and centuries, CENTURIES! from now it would all be the same. Meanwhile Australia begs to differ, go and read about the port Arthur shooting. And yes the us has more guns per capita than Australia had, who cares start doing something about it.
If you live on an malaria infested swamp in 2023 you should consider moving somewhere else or petition you local politicians and talk with your mates about draining it. Teaching your kid to drink their own piss will only take them so far.
Australia really was amazing, I'll give you that.
Between 1990 and 2015 their homicide rate dropped by 50 percent.
And let's not forget England banning guns. Their homicide rate dropped by 20% in the same period.
Canada too - they put out some gun restrictions and theirs dropped by 29%.
How about Germany? Also 29%.
Meanwhile, the barbaric US's homicide rate... also halved.
The 90s were just relatively violent everywhere, and the drop in homicide rates isn't actually really correlated with firearm restrictions. There are people who will say that guns reduce homicides, but that doesn't really play out statistically either. In college I did an epidemiological analysis of homicides and other violent crime (US only data) and firearm legislation didn't have a statistically-significant impact in either direction from state to state looking at numbers between 1980 and 2015.
I found that anti-gun people and pro-gin people were both mad at me for "being on the other side" because it's become so fucking politicized that nobody wants to even look at data that doesn't jibe with the echo chamber.
There is a correlation between handguns and suicides -largely due to the effectiveness of the first attempt. Though oddly enough not in Australia, where taking the guns away just made people kill themselves in other ways: