There’s a lot not to like in physicians Angelica Zen and Alice Kuo’s opinion piece in The Washington Post entitled “Do you own a gun? Why your kid’s doctor needs to know.” It was published on April 1, but I’ll avoid playing on the obvious joke there. In the story, the doctors discuss the risks of having guns unsecured in a home with children and the need for doctors to talk about the subject with patients. They spend several thousand words justifying such an intrusion into my business, but, short version, I’ll take my own counsel instead of theirs, since I’m the guy who handles guns all day and they don’t. Did I take precautions when my kids were growing up to ensure they couldn’t get their hands on test guns? Well, sure. That doesn’t make me special. 99.9% of all gun owners do the same, and they’re successful at it, based on the absurdly low gun-accident rates we see these days.
Perfect gun hygiene isn’t really that hard: Don’t put guns and ammunition where kids can get at them. I took the additional step that, when I was handling firearms in my home office (measurements, photos, and the like), I didn’t have any ammunition for those firearms on site. Could the 15-year-old version of Darling Daughter have bought 45 ACP at school and brought it home? Yeah. Very unlikely. And the guns were in a safe if I wasn’t home. So, there were better chances of being hit by a smoking meteor of death than her getting in my guns. Now, she’s the skeet coordinator for the National Skeet Shooting Association in San Antonio. Must be a coincidence. Number-One Son has a creative side business he calls Young Guns Media, and he’s acquiring quite the collection of firearms as his budget allows. He’s obviously traumatized by growing up around guns all the danged time.
They saw guns, held guns, looked at guns, photographed guns, shot guns, disassembled guns, and yadda yadda. Guns weren’t mysterious totems of death that killed all children who beheld any firearm, because guns are bad, bad, bad. Guns were things to be handled carefully — like knives and cars — and no doctor had to tell them that.
So, regarding Physicians Zen and Kuo wanting doctors to lecture me on gun safety, how about you give me my shot and I’ll be on my way?
Elsewhere, I watch California’s ongoing legislative efforts to strip the state’s citizens of effective gun rights, and it sickens me. One guy, Eric Linder (R-Corona), wants DOJ to validate local carry permits. DOJ can’t even keep track of guns it helped flow into Mexico. AB 2459, authored by Asm. Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento), will ban all home FFL dealers and force all remaining gun dealers to video-record all areas of their store wherever firearms or ammunition are stored. And they would have to get unobtainable insurance that covers the criminal acts of second, third, and fourth parties using a firearm or ammunition from the store in question, even if the retailer is in fact the victim of the crime. I truly feel sorry for gunowners in the formerly Golden State.
