My hot take that I’m sure I’ll get buried for is that in the US, proper firearm safety and training should be a mandatory middle school class. There’s just too many guns. Even if you don’t keep them in your house, your kid’s friend might. Even if some kid joins a gang and has a shootout with another gang, at least they won’t just spray and pray and kill an innocent bystander. I see no downsides except that progressives get apopleptic whenever anyone mentions guns.
I hate making something like that mandatory, but another benefit would be to reduce the stigma of guns in general.
It always surprises me how frequently I hear from otherwise pretty open minded people some version of, “I don’t own guns and I’ve never needed a gun. Therefore nobody anywhere needs one or should have one for any reason and I’d fully support completely banning them, and if that violates the constitution, so what, it’s what I want.”
Further, gun education would reduce the ideas and legislation to restrict guns based on nonsense. There’s a lot of fear of “scary guns” based on little more than superficial appearance, and I even see a lot of ideas from people claiming to want compromise, but it usually comes down to one of a few things: some arbitrary delineation between guns they’re okay with because they don’t look scary, something that would do little more than make criminals out of otherwise law abiding people, or depriving law abiding citizens of constitutionally guaranteed rights without due process.
My hot take that I’m sure I’ll get buried for is that in the US, proper firearm safety and training should be a mandatory middle school class. There’s just too many guns. Even if you don’t keep them in your house, your kid’s friend might. Even if some kid joins a gang and has a shootout with another gang, at least they won’t just spray and pray and kill an innocent bystander. I see no downsides except that progressives get apopleptic whenever anyone mentions guns.
I hate making something like that mandatory, but another benefit would be to reduce the stigma of guns in general.
It always surprises me how frequently I hear from otherwise pretty open minded people some version of, “I don’t own guns and I’ve never needed a gun. Therefore nobody anywhere needs one or should have one for any reason and I’d fully support completely banning them, and if that violates the constitution, so what, it’s what I want.”
Further, gun education would reduce the ideas and legislation to restrict guns based on nonsense. There’s a lot of fear of “scary guns” based on little more than superficial appearance, and I even see a lot of ideas from people claiming to want compromise, but it usually comes down to one of a few things: some arbitrary delineation between guns they’re okay with because they don’t look scary, something that would do little more than make criminals out of otherwise law abiding people, or depriving law abiding citizens of constitutionally guaranteed rights without due process.
Agreed. We learn CPR when though we don’t plan on heart attacks. People should be taught basic firearm safety.
Stop, drop, and roll caused me to seriously overestimate the number of times I would be on fire in my life.