• @Rooskie91@discuss.online
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    381 year ago

    I know you’re not referring to hunting rifles, but it is very common to give those as gifts to teenagers when they are old enough to get a hunting license. In some places that’s 12 years old.

    My parents also made me take a course on gun safety tho…

    And they wouldn’t let me use it unless it was with them…

    So this lady definitely still deserves her sentence. Also, no kid needs and AR or a pistol.

    • 520
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      321 year ago

      Some of that stuff you mentioned needs to be mandatory IMO. I’m talking about gun safety lessons for all firearm owners.

        • 520
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          21 year ago

          Ok?

          It’s absolutely moronic that we need licenses to drive but not to own and operate firearms.

      • @Narauko@lemmy.world
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        21 year ago

        Gun safety should be a mandatory class in education. Probably a multi-stage class starting with an age appropriate class in Elementary school, a more advanced class in Middle school to demystify and take some of the taboo cool factor out, and again in High school. Range time should be incorporated in High school, and maybe Middle school. We all know abstinence only education doesn’t work.

    • My dad is a gun collector, so I was around them my entire life, but gun safety was also part of my entire life. We understood what they were and what they could do. So if my friends ever said “can we see your dad’s guns?” It was always “no.”

      • @GONADS125@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        That’s good, and I can relate to your experience growing up respecting firearms, but children should simply not be trusted to have access.

        There have been many experiments in which children find a weapon and the parents who claimed their children knew better were horrified to see them handle the staged weapon.

        Children simply don’t have the logical portion of the brain developed. Even in teenagers, their amygdala (emotionality, anger, fear response) is nearly fully developed, yet their prefrontal cortext (executive control, rational thinking, emotional regulation, thinking of future consequences) is still severely underdeveloped. [1]

        In fact, the prefrontal cortext isn’t fully developed until our mid 20s, and possibly a few years longer for those of us with ADHD. [2] This is why teenagers display heightened risk-taking, are bad at controlling their emotions, restraining themselves, and thinking about the consequences of their actions.

        Under supervision is one thing, but unsupervised access to a firearm is a patently bad idea. With that said, I did have access to a firearm (.22) and I acted responsibly as a minor (only used it for target practice). But I absolutely should not have had access to it.