01 May 2014

Hayley, age 6, with her gun


A report at The Guardian features some of America's children with their guns.
What I found was that there are loads of children out there in America with their own guns, but not that many parents who are happy to have their kids' portraits taken with those guns."

"What I came away with was the sense that there was a lot of fear and paranoia among the adults, and that fear was handed down to the children along with the guns. The children have childlike imaginations and the usual childhood fears – zombies, monsters and wild beasts. They are not born with these adult fears; they are infected with them."..

On her journey, Kesteleyn encountered "mostly ordinary families who loved their kids and trained them to use the guns safely and responsibly". Nevertheless, she remained bemused and disturbed. "The adults talked about protection all the time. They believe that you have to have guns to protect yourself from the other bad people out there with guns who want to do you harm."
NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre delineated (and stoked) those fears in his recent speech at the organization's annual convention:
"We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and knock-out gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping-mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all."
Quod erat demonstrandum.