Toddlers & Guns Continues

The media has been going on a good bit to try to drive Hillary and the Brady Campaign’s toddler’s and guns narrative. Never mind that they seem to have padded their stats with adults, there’s an election to win!

The linked article is but one example of the genre. First, as I often feel the need to do, let’s tear down the straw man: no one argues that toddlers should have access to firearms, or that gun owners should be careless in the storage of their firearms. The problem is our opponents are approaching the issue as if the policy debate is simple, because to them it is. When you approach the issue at hand from the point of view of “you shouldn’t own a gun in the first place,” anything that makes it harder to do that is fine by them, and our concerns be damned.

The District of Columbia solved this problem by banning handguns, and beyond that demanding any gun stored in the district be rendered inoperable for purposes of self-defense. We, and the Supreme Court argued that was and ought to be a violation of Second Amendment rights. Hillary Clinton disagrees that’s the case. Hillary Clinton believes DC ought to be able to ban guns and force them rendered useless for self-defense, for the children. That’s not a mainstream belief, by a long shot. Yet the media is perfectly willing to obscure the difficulty of the issue for her.

Trigger locks! Except trigger locks are dangerous if not used properly. Could we force gun owners to lock their firearms in safes, as San Jose is proposing? The affordable models are often not worth spit, and may even be actively dangerous. They won’t stop thieves worth a damn. I don’t have children in the home, so why should I be part of this one-size-fits-all-and-fuck-you solution? And why is my locked home not considered secured enough? Do we require everyone to have a real-deal secure $2000 gun safe? Won’t that mean that the poor effectively have no Second Amendment rights? Do we have a government program to help the poor afford gun safes? Why not? Libraries helped the poor access their First Amendment rights for decades before books were cheap enough for anyone to afford.

One thing I’ve learned immersing myself in this stuff for so many years: nothing is ever as easy as zealots want to convince you it is. If someone tells you there’s a simple solution to something, they are either ignorant, or know better and are hoping you’re ignorant enough to buy it. Gun ownership is no magic bullet against bad things happening, and gun control isn’t either. That’s why I’m not about grand solutions, and tend to believe people should be left free to fix their own problems and make their own choices. I oppose gun control because the movement is philosophically centered around denying individuals the right to make their own decisions about their own lives, security, and happiness.