There was a time when the term “minding your own business” was the unofficial law of the land. It was one thing to get involved in some manner when a crime was taking place, of course, or when someone was so blasted loud it was impossible to mind your own affairs, but for the most part, people didn’t sweat what others did.
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Those days aren’t completely gone, but they’re fading into the ether.
See, these days, everyone thinks you should be prying into everyone else’s affairs, unless it’s the affairs they don’t want you to pry into, of course. Yes, it’s very confusing, but don’t worry, the media will tell you who you should be looking at and who you’re forbidden to ask questions of.
Unfortunately for them, it seems a lot of parents aren’t doing that.
Most parents haven’t considered the potential risk of an unlocked, poorly stored firearm in a house their child is visiting, a new study shows.
More than 60% of Illinois parents have never asked another parent about an unlocked gun in their home before allowing their child to visit for a playdate, researchers found.
Most said they never asked because it didn’t occur to them to do so.
“Parents need to approach the topic of firearm safety in the homes their child visits in the same way they would ask other parents about supervision during playdates or similar questions related to their child’s safety,” said lead researcher Dr. Samaa Kemal, an emergency medicine physician at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
Except those questions aren’t remotely the same.
Asking about supervision during play dates simply asks if someone will keep and eye on their kids. Asking about firearm safety crosses a completely different line.
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Granted, it seems most just don’t think to ask, and let’s be real here, it’s not an issue the vast majority of the time. The article goes on to note that 20 percent of unintentional firearm deaths among kids happen at other people’s houses, but what they don’t note is that this is still ridiculously rare.
A study looked at unintentional firearm deaths between 2003 and 2021 for kids ages 0-17. What they found were a total of 1,262 such deaths over that entire period of time. That works out to a little over 70 per year, which means about 14 happen at someone else’s home.
In a nation of 330 million.
There’s a reason parents aren’t asking that question.
More importantly, though, there’s a reason why they’re raising this issue despite the small numbers.
See, my own belief is that this isn’t so much about saving those 14 kids as something far darker. Sure, they might want to save those lives, but that’s not all they hope to accomplish.
They want people to be uncomfortable about guns. They want parents to freak out about them and they want gun owners to be uncomfortable about even admitting they have them. They overblown the problem in order to facilitate a freakout.
We know that’s the case because look at the way they describe the “issue.” They don’t acknowledge that it’s still pretty rare. They could do that but still point out that it happens far too often for anyone’s comfort, which I’d agree with. No, they make it look like there’s some kind of epidemic of unintentional gun deaths.
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And there’s not.
I think a lot of parents understand that there isn’t a real thing going on here and most know their kids’ friends’ parents to some degree and are trusting. They’re not asking the question because they figure they don’t have to.
Let’s be real here, unless the kids are plundering where they shouldn’t be, it’s not really an issue anyway and most parents are at least going to keep the kids from going through the drawers in their bedroom or wherever they keep an unsecured gun.
Don’t get me wrong, people should keep their guns secured when they’re not in use.
But people minding their own business isn’t creating some kind of epidemic, either.
