Let's make sure they have a place at the table when we sit down to discuss firearms regulations:
Threatened by long-term declining participation in shooting sports, the firearms industry has poured millions of dollars into a broad campaign to ensure its future by getting guns into the hands of more, and younger, children.The industry’s strategies include giving firearms, ammunition and cash to youth groups; weakening state restrictions on hunting by young children; marketing an affordable military-style rifle for “junior shooters” and sponsoring semiautomatic-handgun competitions for youths; and developing a target-shooting video game that promotes brand-name weapons, with links to the Web sites of their makers.
The pages of Junior Shooters, an industry-supported magazine that seeks to get children involved in the recreational use of firearms, once featured a smiling 15-year-old girl clutching a semiautomatic rifle. At the end of an accompanying article that extolled target shooting with a Bushmaster AR-15---an advertisement elsewhere in the magazine directed readers to a coupon for buying one---the author encouraged youngsters to share the article with a parent.
“Who knows?” it said. “Maybe you’ll find a Bushmaster AR-15 under your tree some frosty Christmas morning!”
Okay, the good news here is that fewer and fewer people are relying on guns as sources of recreation each year. The bad news is that a vocal and well-networked minority of our fellow citizens is becoming increasingly weaponized with military-grade firepower. While it's one thing to show junior how to shoot a BB gun (promotes hand-eye coordination, after all, and teaches him how to hunt his own food in the event of a zombie apocalypse), one would hope that our policymakers would question the social utility of providing mil-spec firearms training to thousands of primary-school students:
Stephan Carlson, a University of Minnesota environmental science professor whose research on the positive effects of learning hunting and outdoor skills in 4-H classes has been cited by the gun industry, said he “wouldn’t necessarily go along” with introducing children to more powerful firearms that added nothing useful to their experience.“I see why the industry would be pushing it, but I don’t see the value in it,” Mr. Carlson said. “I guess it goes back to the skill base we’re trying to instill in the kids. What are we preparing them for?”
Indeed. Whatever it is, I doubt it bodes well for the future of the Republic.
But let's keep an open seat at the negotiating table for them.
---Baron V
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