Normally, I'd post a "Maidens of Virtue" or "Single Income Sons" review today, but the baby is down with his first real respiratory virus and I'm indulging my urge to watch him like a hawk. He's really absolutely fine; he just wants to cuddle on my lap all day so we're watching movies that CP adherents would find deeply disturbing like "Moana" and "Mulan". We'll probably wrap up with something the Maxwell Family would find abhorrent: an entire movie of talking animals doing crazy things known as "Madagascar". Jack giggles every time he sees the lion - which makes me giggle.
I've been saving this post from "In A Shoe" by Kim C. for years based on the question:
I have a question for Kim C: Do you always carry a gun? What safety measures do you take, surrounded all day by young children? My husband and I are thinking more about getting a handgun. We don’t own one now, and the thought of it makes me very nervous, as children are curious and accidents happen.
Personally, I don't own a gun. My husband has a licensed .44 handgun that he keeps unloaded in a locked case in his truck with the ammo stored in a different locked case either in the truck or in the office of the farm he's on. He uses it solely for the rare situation where he needs to euthanize a cow quickly due to a broken leg. (Our vets are great - but best-case time from when we call the vet to arrival on the farm is 30 minutes and can be over an hour if the weather is bad or the on-call vet is already at a different farm. A broken leg is painful and uniformly fatal on an adult cow so it's best to end her suffering quickly.) The gun never comes in the house.
I don't see the point of carrying a handgun for self-defense. I'm firmly in favor of de-escalating a situation wherever possible and whipping a gun out does not do that. With a personal history of depression and anxiety, having a gun around greatly increases my risk of committing suicide - and I don't want to do that either.
Kim C. disagrees with me.
I carry almost any time I leave the house, and often around the house as well. I wear a bellyband, with my gun in the back securely against my body. This lets me nurse a baby, use the bathroom, carry a toddler on my hip, even change clothes without ever removing it. I never take it off and set it down anywhere, because I know that there is a chance I might someday forget to pick it up again. I never carry in my purse, where it could easily be snatched or set down unattended. I either wear it or put it away.
I'm starting to think I gave birth to a octopus instead of a human baby. During the last 24 hours, my son has fished a key out of my pocket, attempted to snag a bra strap from under my shirt and gotten a hold of my ponytail holder while I was holding him on my lap or hip. (This doesn't include his two life goals right now of "Get Daddy's glasses" and "Capture Mamma's Fitbit".) I don't trust my ability to intercept my son's little hands before he got a hold of a gun I had in a back carry.
I can't visualize how she successfully draws out of a bellyband either. Small of the back draws are tricky enough out of a clip or holster - but a bellyband isn't built for carrying a dense, small object like a gun.
I am also very clumsy and I would be worried about falling hard against a gun. I'm assuming she keeps the gun with the safety on and no chambered bullet so there's less chance of an accidental misfire - but falling onto a dense piece of metal located in the middle of the lumbar is a back injury waiting to happen. The injury could be much worse if she's carrying substantial weight when she falls like one of her toddlers or babies.
I appreciate and applaud her choices to not leave the gun lying around or in a purse.
That is one side of gun safety. The other side is making sure your children are educated. Even our very young ones know not to touch a gun, though I know even the best-behaved child will sometimes disobey, which is why I take such precautions with my own gun. Everyone down to the 2yo has fired a gun (with appropriate levels of help and oversight), because we want them to understand the amount of power these objects possess. We want them to have a healthy amount of respect and even fear, much like they should have for a big scary kitchen knife. Having fired a real gun makes it far less likely that a child will think of a gun as a toy – especially if you’re using something with a lot of noise and recoil.
I don't trust gun safety lessons for kids under age 7-9 years - just as I wouldn't trust them around knives, hot objects or chemicals alone. It's not a reflection on the kid per se as it is on the level of cognitive development and the ability to accurately judge risks of using certain objects. Even as I'm writing this I realized that the relative dangers in knives, stoves / fires or household chemicals aren't the same as a gun. Kids can do serious damage with a knife or campfire - but a loaded gun can kill someone instantly in less than a second. I think it's safer to assume that your children DO think of guns as a toy and will use the inappropriately if left unattended. That places the onus of responsible storage firmly on the adults in the family where it should be.Sorry again for the short post. Hopefully I'll be back on track by Friday!
Just a quick note to say that I appreciate reading your thought process on this question. Since we had two boys in a very small house as well as a history of depression on both sides of the family, no gun in the house was a super easy choice for us...(not to mention, the many neighborhood kids and cousins who roamed freely through the house....)
ReplyDeleteAlso, Get Daddy's (or Mommy's in my case) Glasses is the most fun game EVER! (Try to think of it as building hand/eye coordination)
Every year we have someone in our metropolitan area who dies as a result of an accidental shooting. That gets media coverage - so I wonder how many more people die from suicides that we don't hear about.
DeleteMy husband's favorite bit of "Get Daddy's Glasses" is the level of enthusiasm my son shows every time he sees his dad. Jack wants to BE with Daddy! Thankfully, my husband can see just fine without his glasses - he developed a mild astigmatism in one eye right after we were married so the glasses are more a method of headache prevention than anything else.
There are hundreds of 'accidental' shootings each year across the U.S. I put accidental in quotes because I don't personally consider it an accident when someone is 'playing' with a gun and another person gets shot. That is felony negligence in my book (although rarely or almost never charged as such). It is also not an accident when a child or toddler gets their hands on a gun: it is instead, negligence and child neglect and should be charged. Unfortunately, the attitude of law enforcement is that this the family of the dead child has suffered enough and thus shouldn't be charged.
DeleteMy own view is that a few well-publicized cases where the law comes down on this and people would suddenly start locking up their weapons....
If you are interested in statistics, Daily Kos runs an occasional report titled Gun Fail https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/14/1658351/--The-new-National-Pastime-GunFAIL-CCXLIV
The author tries to gather info on all 'accidental' shootings in the U.S. in a week or so. The reports are horrifying to read and very eye-opening.
I've seen that report - it's terrifying. Slate did something similar but eventually gave up after the Newtown shooting.
DeleteI truly don't understand wearing a gun on your person in your home. I just don't. I also don't understand wearing a gun for a trip to 7-11 for gas if you're living in a non-warzone.
ReplyDeleteTo me wearing a gun means at any moment you're prepared to kill someone. That's just how I think about it. I have never in my life been prepared to kill someone, and I hope I never am.
Thanks Kim C. for making it clear that I haven't missed my calling to be a QF/CP adherent, if this is what it's like.
I feel the same way. I tried mentally to prepare myself during hostile intruder drills at school while I was a teacher to be ready to attack an intruder if they made it into my room - but I still needed to assume that I would merely maim and not kill them. That's the type of situation it would take for me to kill someone - an immediate threat to other unarmed people. (And even then, I prefer blunt weapons over a gun.)
DeleteReading this made me feel sick. We live in Canada where gun laws are much stricter - you can't just buy a handgun to carry around with you wherever - and the people I know who do own guns own them for hunting and only use them when out hunting or practicing at the range. A lot of Canadians own guns, but the culture surrounding them is much different. My husband learned how to shoot when he was a kid because they lived up north and it's normal to hunt there; he says he never wants to own a gun and have that in the house. If you own a gun, you're much more likely to end up using it on yourself than on anyone else. In a house full of kids, I'd be concerned about having easily accessible guns, even with teaching gun safety. All you'd need is one depressed impulsive teenager or a curious toddler for someone to wind up getting killed.
ReplyDeleteAnd in the US, plenty of children including toddlers die from accidental shootings each year. It's heartbreaking and completely pointless.
DeleteLots of people in the US support sensible gun usage - like mandatory waiting periods, making concealed carry permits really hard to get with scads of training required, and not selling military style guns to random people. The larger problem is that the NRA is treated as the voice of the average US gun owner (which it was in the 1950's) instead of the lobbying arm of gun manufacturers which it has been since the 1980's. The NRA's demands seem even more craven when seen through the lens of "We want to earn more profits!" instead of "Live free or die!".
Ugh. I think most people who own guns own them unnecessarily, and guns are the cause of a large number of extremely preventable tragedies in the US.
ReplyDeleteIn an ideal world, only law enforcement would own guns(+ a small number of people for whom they are otherwise occupationally necessary, I think farmers count)
However, at this point, we can't "recall" all the guns. The best we can do is place stringent controls on people who want to buy new guns (& hopefully gradually reduce their number), but even that is sadly politically infeasible.
Realistically, the best we can do is to encourage people who choose to own guns to take the kind of safety measures this person is taking, since it seems like it would be very difficult for someone other than her to access the gun. Even if we can't remove all guns from our culture, at least we could reduce preventable tragedies.
I'm glad she's taking some precautions - but she's still playing with fire. She never mentions having a trigger lock or any extra precautions added to the gun that she carries with her. Honestly, she's never mentioned keeping it with the safety on and without a chambered bullet - that's my assumption. She might be walking around with a loaded, chambered bullet in the gun with the safety off - and that's a terrible idea.
DeleteA gun is a potentially lethal weapon and so I have no problem requiring people to demonstrate that they know how to store a gun safely so that the chances of misuse are greatly minimized prior to purchase.
I had a friend once who was completely unconvinced he needed to get a safe or lock box for his gun once he had kids. He thought he could just teach his kids not to play with guns. I'm like have you met a toddler? He was convinced that his wife could supervise the toddler every second of the day apparently.
ReplyDeleteYikes. That's terrifying. Toddlers are scary - but a lot of accidental shootings are among school-aged kids. They don't really get how death works - or that objects around the house can cause death. Hell, we've got teenagers who are putting caustic chemicals in their mouths because Tide Pods look cute.
Delete