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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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Parents who buy their children guns at all need to all be evaluated. There is seriously something wrong with giving children something whos intended purpose is delivering lethal force.
I don’t find it weird for hunting, but giving a child unrestricted access to firearms is insane to me given children are not able to assess risk the same way adults do.
A lot of "adults" don't seem to assess the risks either.
Oh, I don't mean temporary custody under controlled and hopefully educated circumstances, but those who hand it over completely. A kid simply does not need that power nor have the responsibility for full time custody.
Hell, the government wants people 18+ before they'll hand someone a gun and let them go die for something...
Smoking and drinking age is 21. Maybe gun ownership age should be bumped up too.
No, I'm pretty sure that was some ancient Christian pro-lifers who came up with that rule. Government would take people younger if they could.
"... if they could."
Yea that's kinda' EXACTLY the point... they CAN make it that way, but haven't. The entire point is that modern Republicans are far more despicable than most any kind of politician from history. Yes, that includes slavers.
It takes an entire additional level of evil to step BACK IN TO social problems, and that's 100% of the modern GOP platform: bring back problems that were already solved.
Before he passed away, my kids' grandfather bought all his grandkids their first 22 rifle. Some of the cousins were still infants but he wanted to buy them something. He was a prolific hunter and marksman. My kids guns all lived in the safe until they were old enough to shoot them, and now they live in the safe when not in use. You can give guns to kids all day long, that's not the problem and the gun is not the problem.
The problem is not appropriately assessing whether the child in question she be allowed the gun. Are they responsible, are they going to use it for valid purposes. This holds true for, well, everyone always. A lack of reasonable regulation is the actual problem. I am glad you have responsibly managed the distribution and use of firearms for your children. We should do that for everyone.
"A lot of "adults" don't seem to assess the risks either."
Your frontal lobe on average fully develops at 25 and for some when they're older.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3129331/
That is when your brain stops really growing and developing, it's not some threshold of social or intellectual maturity.
If anything, people become less adaptable, less open-minded, and less cooperative after that. It's not something we get to lord over young people, it's a mark against us olds for being less capable of growth.
Decision Making and Reward in Frontal Cortex
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3129331/
Your frontal lobe contains brain areas that manage who you are — especially your personality — and how you behave. Your ability to think, solve problems and build social relationships, sense of ethics and right vs. wrong all rely on parts of your frontal lobe.
Experts know this because of a railroad foreman named Phineas Gage. In 1848, an accidental explosion at a railroad construction site propelled an iron rod through Gage’s head, destroying the left side of his frontal lobe. Before the accident, Gage was a calm, respected leader among his coworkers. Gage survived, but after the accident, his personality changed. He would lose his temper, act disrespectfully and constantly use profanity.
However, Gage’s personality changes weren’t permanent. Four years after his accident, Gage moved to Chile in South America and became a stagecoach driver. Somewhere in late 1858 or early 1859, a doctor who examined Gage said he was physically healthy and showed “no impairment whatever of his mental faculties.”
While Gage mostly recovered from the accident, he died from seizures in San Francisco in 1860. The seizures were very likely the result of damage from the accident. However, his case remains one of the most useful in modern medicine’s understanding of what the frontal lobe does, especially when it comes to your personality.
The Pre-Frontal Cortex
One of the biggest differences researchers have found between adults and adolescents is the pre-frontal cortex. This part of the brain is still developing in teens and doesn't complete its growth until approximately early to mid 20's. The prefrontal cortex performs reasoning, planning, judgment, and impulse control, necessities for being an adult. Without the fully development prefrontal cortex, a teen might make poor decisions and lack the inability to discern whether a situation is safe. Teens tend to experiment with risky behavior and don’t fully recognize the consequences of their choices.
I know you're not referring to hunting rifles, but it is very common to give those as gifts to teenagers when they are old enough to get a hunting license. In some places that's 12 years old.
My parents also made me take a course on gun safety tho....
And they wouldn't let me use it unless it was with them....
So this lady definitely still deserves her sentence. Also, no kid needs and AR or a pistol.
Some of that stuff you mentioned needs to be mandatory IMO. I'm talking about gun safety lessons for all firearm owners.
It's the pro-gun community that insists they shouldn't be. They'll literally send you death threats for trying.
My dad is a gun collector, so I was around them my entire life, but gun safety was also part of my entire life. We understood what they were and what they could do. So if my friends ever said "can we see your dad's guns?" It was always "no."
That's good, and I can relate to your experience growing up respecting firearms, but children should simply not be trusted to have access.
There have been many experiments in which children find a weapon and the parents who claimed their children knew better were horrified to see them handle the staged weapon.
Children simply don't have the logical portion of the brain developed. Even in teenagers, their amygdala (emotionality, anger, fear response) is nearly fully developed, yet their prefrontal cortext (executive control, rational thinking, emotional regulation, thinking of future consequences) is still severely underdeveloped. [1]
In fact, the prefrontal cortext isn't fully developed until our mid 20s, and possibly a few years longer for those of us with ADHD. [2] This is why teenagers display heightened risk-taking, are bad at controlling their emotions, restraining themselves, and thinking about the consequences of their actions.
Under supervision is one thing, but unsupervised access to a firearm is a patently bad idea. With that said, I did have access to a firearm (.22) and I acted responsibly as a minor (only used it for target practice). But I absolutely should not have had access to it.
Whyyy? Hunting is a dangerous sport that is 100% not required that utilizes lethal weaponry. If a parent wants to take their kids hunting, they should be 100% responsible for them including having the license and owning the firearms. 16 seems like the bare minimum to allow children to engage with weaponry, but probably older to own.
There's a huge difference between giving a child unrestricted access to a firearm, and taking them sport shooting in a controlled environment. I've helped with beginner shooting courses for kids in scouts. There is an adult with each kid, one round loaded at a time, etc. You can similarly control the environment hunting by using blinds, etc, where you oversee the use of the firearm, loading of round etc.
I'm not big into shooting, but from a safety perspective there are ways to hunt and sport shoot with kids in a very controlled way.
Keep in mind, a person earlier in this convo said some kids get one gifted when they get a hunting license, which can be as early as 12, so you're basically attempting to change the entire claim being made... Clearly, in many situations, kids ARE ending up with a firearm under their sole ownership.
Having a .22 under the Christmas tree and having unsupervised access to it are two very different things. I know plenty of people who got rifles for their younger children but keep them in a safe with their own guns until the kids are older.
Being gifted a gun is not being given unrestricted access to that weapon. I was gifted a shotgun at 15 and I never saw it unless my dad was present. It stayed in his safe until we went shooting together. When I moved out and showed him my own safe was ready, I got it from him and that was that.
I gave my kid a BB gun, but it stays in a safe. I also gave my son a pocket knife for camping that stays in my night stand unless we are camping.
You can give something to a kid without letting them have unsupervised access. I gave my kids steam decks, but limit their screen time.
I agree the original comment lacked specificity. You could gift a gun in a responsible or irresponsible way, and I've seen both.
Edit: and the comment about gifting a rifle also mentioned that in their personal situation they had to have a parent to use it.
Outside of America, buying a gun at all is rather grounds for evaluation. Inside America, it's still mental but #theConstitution.
For families who participate in hunting and shooting sports, I can see giving the child their own gun, make it their responsibility to clean and maintain it, choose what optics or other accessories they put on it, etc.
I don't support letting them have unrestricted access to it as a minor though. It should be locked up whenever it's not in use under adult supervision.
I have a casual interest in guns, don't currently own any but may someday when my budget allows (it's pretty low on my priority list.) I do have a lot of friends who own guns though, many of them have had their "own" gun since childhood. All of their parents though were very strict about gun safety, none of them had free access to any guns or ammo until they were adults, and sometimes not even really until they moved out and took their guns with them because even as adults living at home with their parents some of them didn't have the key/combo to the gun safe, so in a sense they still kind of had to ask for their parents' permission if they wanted to take their guns out to go hunting or shooting into their 20s.