Toy Guns - Desensitizing Children

Lori Lancaster | June 27, 2012
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Mike Eberhart | June 27, 2012
I would all say it's up to the parents to train their kids about the toys. I don't have a problem with my kids playing with toy guns, but I have explained to them that they are never to point them at people. If you train them properly from the beginning then they will be alright. Once my kids reach the age of 16 I will be training them on how to shoot properly with a real gun.

Erik Bates | June 27, 2012
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Tony Peters | June 27, 2012
My mother and father grew up with Guns, I spent 20 years in the Navy around guns (including a year carrying one daily) These days we both shoot air-pistols for entertainment, skill maintenance and in his case to keep the treerat population down. My brother never dealt with guns, his wife is anti gun and has instilled their twins with a (unhealthy IMO) fear of guns. He brought his kids to my parents house while my dad and I were plinking one evening and the girls had gun nightmares that night....I got a talking to from his wife to which responded "don't blame me for the backfiring of your brainwashing, teach them respect and they will be much better off" I think i'll be on her shit list for a while

Samir Mehta | June 27, 2012
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Tony Peters | June 28, 2012
Samir that is part of the reason I only own an "air pistol" now, my year of being a Navy cop profoundly changed my outlook towards firearms that I sold my pistols as soon as finished my tour. Mind you I loved shooting and what's more I am pretty good at it but after thinking about why I would need to use a gun every day for a year I can't imagine shooting at a person.

Scott Hardie | June 29, 2012
From Lori's link: Children have been desensitized to violence and gun violence, because ofthe glamorization of violence in the media, and the possession and useof dangerous playthings (including toy guns/weapons, video games, etc.).

Right about the media. Guns pervade our whole culture. Our wild-west past continues to influence our mindset today. Can anyone look at the gun violence statistics in this country (see the first five, ahem, bullet points in the article) and not think that there's something just a little bit sick in our collective head?

Wrong about the the use of dangerous playthings. Some kids are naturally violent and make up their own pretend weapons with sticks if not given toy replicas. Others have toy weapons all around and don't want anything to do with them. Claims of a correlation on this have always rung false to me.

I'm not sure what to think of the statistic "In America, in just two days, more people die by handgun than in one year in Canada, Great Britain, Sweden, Australia and Japan combined." That's an ok comparison solely by the numbers, as those combined nations have about 80% of our population. But Japan is notoriously anti-gun. So is the UK, where even the police aren't armed. Sweden is among the most progressive nations on Earth. Does this statistic seem a little unfair or is it just me? I would like to see the same numbers proportionate to the entire rest of the world, not just those five countries.

Hey, at least we're not Colombia.

Erik Bates | June 29, 2012
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Tony Peters | June 29, 2012
Am I reading that correctly??? 5% of the population dies every year of gun violence?

Eric I doubt it unlike a gun which is nearly a remote control killer Sword and most other medieval weapons were much more intimate requiring a person be part of the killing they are doing

Scott Hardie | July 22, 2012
Our wild-west past continues to influence our mindset today. Can anyone look at the gun violence statistics in this country ... and not think that there's something just a little bit sick in our collective head?

This has been on my mind a lot since the mass shooting in Colorado on Friday. I'm really, deeply sickened by our gun culture in this country, a culture that shrugs and says "what can you do?" when homicidal assholes like James Holmes routinely commit mass murder with freely available weapons of destruction.

Where is the outrage? Where is the sense that this cannot possibly be an acceptable event in a civilized society? Are we barbarians now? People are mad at Holmes, but nobody seems angry in the least about his freedom to casually stock up on assault rifles, shotguns, implements of explosive devices, bullet-proof armor..... This is insane. Our country is fucking insane.

"If someone in the theater had a handgun, Holmes could have been stopped." Sure. Someone could have shot him with a pistol, through theater darkness, clouds of smoke, heavy return fire, and head-to-toe body armor, including even a throat protector. That argument is ludicrous, even more so than it is whenever it's trotted out after massacres like this. In what bizarro, upside-world does it make sense to reduce gun violence by having every free citizen carry around a firearm and shoot each other if they sense trouble?

I don't expect the situation to change. The NRA is too well-funded (they have fifty times the operating budget of the Brady Center), guns are too celebrated as symbols of freedom, and our national psychosis is too deep. I just wish more people would admit that we have a serious cultural problem in our attitude towards limitless access to guns, especially in light of how frequently they keep being used to murder crowds of innocent victims at will. We are sick, sick, sick.

Samir Mehta | July 22, 2012
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Mike Eberhart | July 23, 2012
As usual, an event like this happens and everyone starts screaming "Gun Control". Say there was gun control. Guess what, he's a criminal, he would have still found a way to get the guns, and everything he needed. That's not going to change no matter how many gun laws you put into effect. What failed, as usual, is the government not suspecting all the explosive items and other things being delivered to this guy. No flags went up. You can't call the whole country sick when you have these lone wolf's out there that will get what they need no matter what laws you have in effect. I have guns, and I won't surrender them. I don't consider myself sick, nor will I ever.

Samir Mehta | July 23, 2012
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Steve Dunn | July 23, 2012
Samir, isn't the second amendment a major impediment to your proposal of local control? I don't see how a state or municipality could "vote against guns" any more than they could decide to vote against freedom of speech.

Samir Mehta | July 23, 2012
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Scott Hardie | July 24, 2012
I don't think individual gun owners are sick. I think a culture that produces so many mass shootings is sick, especially a society that accepts that mass shootings just happen and we shouldn't do anything more to stop them than we already do.

I would like to see a better compromise between freedom and security than we have now. Many other countries have demonstrated how well gun control works to reduce this kind of bloodshed. It doesn't stop every case (ask Anders Breivik), but it reduces the overall firearm death rate.

But to be clear, my anger isn't really about the law. It's about the psyche of the American people. I'm worried that we welcome such killing by refusing to infringe on someone's "right" to purchase assault rifles and shotguns... but much more so, I'm worried that we spawn such murderers so often. We seem to be a nation of homicidal maniacs, spraying bullets into crowds with abandon. What is the matter with us? How disturbed must we be to produce so many monsters?