Our USA Today rebuttal on kid's safety

My brother Chris and I are occasionally asked to offer up a counterpoint to an editorial in USA Today when the paper decides to talk about guns and gun laws. When they decided to offer up an editorial railing about negligent access to guns by children, they invited us to give the gun-owner perspective. These op-eds are always a challenge because we never know exactly what we’re arguing against, and our space is always very limited. The editorial board gives us the topic and a general idea of the position they plan to take, and we are given 340 words to present our opposing view.

As expected, the editors took around 600 words to trot out a parade of horror stories of children getting hold of guns and shooting themselves or others, offered up some misleading statistics, and then called for some proven-ineffective measures. Among them:

• “Safe storage” laws – that don’t work and make no sense to enforce against grieving parents;
• “Stigmatizing” unsafe storage and gun handling – no problem with that so long as the person doing the scolding knows something about guns and gun safety;
• Enlisting doctors to talk about gun safety – again, no problem, so long as the doctor isn’t collecting personal information and just spouting anti-rights propaganda, and perhaps even knows something about the topic;
• And, of course, “smart guns” – the less you know about guns, the better the idea sounds.

Here is an expanded version of our view.

Gun owners devote enormous resources to preventing unintentional firearm injuries, and our efforts have been effective at making unintentional firearm injuries relatively rare events. We don’t call a gun going off unintentionally an “accident.” That word suggests fate – an uncontrollable event where no one is at fault. Instead we call it “negligence,” placing responsibility on the negligent party. We teach our children, and any children that may come into our homes, that guns are not toys. Gun safety is part of our culture. For those of us who grew up in gun-owning households, it was drilled into us from the time we were old enough to understand speech.

“Stop! Don’t Touch! Get Away! Tell A Grownup!”

We teach that mantra to every kid in our lives. Guns are not childproof – and we would not believe claims of such a thing. We strive for gunproof children, while also managing our guns responsibly. This layered approach has proven to be the most effective approach at reducing tragedies.

Despite USA Today’s sensationalizing, there has been no recent trend of children getting access to guns and hurting themselves and others. In fact, the opposite is true. Unintentional firearms injuries have been cut in half over the past 20 years – along with “gun crime,” by the way – while guns and gun ownership have grown dramatically. That’s an important story that news coverage has missed. Unintentional shootings that don’t happen don’t get news coverage. The relatively few tragedies make the headlines.

Better a sane, thoughtful approach that has a proven record than a panic reaction to a manufactured crisis.

The reality is that guns barely make it into the top 10 of hazards to children, falling far behind automobiles, swimming pools and poisoning. No question the number needs to drop further, but let’s put efforts where they have proven to have a good effect – educating children and gun owners – not attacks on gun ownership.

The campaign encouraging parents to question the parents of playmates about guns before allowing children to visit seems well-intentioned but smacks of shaming, unless we also encourage questions about safe storage of cleaning supplies and medications, pool fencing and car safety practices. All of those hazards kill far more kids than guns.

“Smart gun” technology sounds most promising to those who know least about guns. Current digital technology is not reliable. Electronics do not function well to the harsh mechanical environment of a gun, especially for a defensive gun, which may need to be used under the worst conditions. Not to mention the problem of retrofitting the hundreds of millions of guns already in circulation. New Jersey’s law requiring all guns sold in the state to be “smart guns” once a single model of such a gun reaches the market, amounts to a de facto gun ban.

Public service announcements that encourage gun safety can be effective – if they are not just anti-rights propaganda. Too often “gun safety” PSA’s come from dedicated anti-rights, political organizations, and paint gun ownership as stupid and irresponsible rather than encouraging safe practices. Those spots are designed to discourage gun ownership, not make it safer, and gun owners are not likely to learn anything from them.

The problem with doctors dispensing gun advice is that they too often get their advice from the same anti-rights, political organizations. There is also a serious privacy issue at stake. A patient’s gun ownership is not a doctor’s business and has no place in anyone’s medical files. Just as doctors offer advice on safer sex practices without asking patients about their current sex practices, doctors offering advice from actual firearm safety experts, without gathering personal information about gun ownership, would not be objectionable.

Gun owners have a double stake in the gun safety issue. First, the whole discussion is about our houses, our guns and our kids. If we aren’t smart enough to take care of our own, there is a fair chance that professor Darwin’s theory could come into play. But we owe it to ourselves to make sure that every gun owner has the resources they need to be safe. Every negligent discharge, every child getting unsupervised access to a gun, every horror story puts our Second Amendment rights at risk. The anti-gun forces are more than happy to dance in the blood resulting from a few ignorant gun owners and their children to advance their agenda. Our mandate is to reduce those opportunities – for our rights, and for the children.

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