I'm sure the military-industrial complex, in furtherance of its endless war philosophy, is delighted by the prospect of providing weapons to small children and I expect manufacturers will shortly adapt a technique of handing them out for free at NRA/outdoor sportsmen's gatherings.
When I was in college, I took a shooting class for a Phys. Ed. requirement in college. The instructor was a USMC gunnery sergeant, assigned to the school's NROTC battalion. At one point a co-ed turned from facing her target to ask him a question, thereby pointing her loaded gun at him. Sheer terror best describes the look on his face, and rightly so.
People can teach their kids to target shoot, or even desensitize them to killing by taking them hunting, but to these kids it's a game. The bottom line is that guns were designed to kill, not to be "played with" as toys - whether the person playing is a child or an adult.
Yesterday was a glorious, late spring day in Pennsylvania. I drove by playing fields with parents and kids at little league baseball and youth soccer games. And I thought about that little 5 year old boy whose dad gave him a real gun, when he could have given him a baseball mitt or a soccer ball.
I'm a scuba diver, and that is a fantastic activity to share with friends and family members. There is heated debate as to the earliest age at which kids could get "certified" as divers. Certification is required in order to rent tanks/equipment at dive operations. The pressure is on the certification agencies & dive instructors to certify/teach kids, because this expands their market/profits. Here are some of the concerns:
Does the child have a sufficient attention span to listen to and learn from class discussions, pool and open water briefings and debriefings and other interactions with an instructor?
• Can the child learn, remember and apply multiple safety rules and principles?
• Are the child's reading skills sufficient to learn from adult-level material (allowing for extra reading time, and the child may request help)?
• Can the child feel comfortable telling an unfamiliar adult (instructor or divemaster) about any discomfort or not understanding something?
• Does the child have reasonable self control and the ability to respond to a problem by following rules and asking for help rather than by acting impulsively?
• Does the child have the ability to understand and discuss hypothetical situations and basic abstract concepts like space and time?
THESE concerns are for an activity in which the only person who could be injured is the child him or herself. The equipment they learn to use is not going to hurt, maim or kill someone else.
Even with all the pressure to market diving, the dive associations look at 10 as the earliest possible age for a child to learn to dive, given the concerns raised by the above questions, and recognize that not all 10 year olds are competent to do so. Children are not allowed to drive cars without a license and after passing a test. If you negligently OR knowingly allow a child, or any unlicensed driver to operate your motor vehicle, you are civilly and criminally responsible for any injury/damage caused by said driver. In household or hunting "accidents", local law enforcement officers & district attorneys typically choose not to prosecute - because the shooter, or the person who left a gun where a child could play with it "already feels bad enough". I say it's time to make an example of criminally negligent parents. How do you teach a mule to change it's behavior? Well first, you hit him in the side of the head to get his attention!
= new reply since forum marked as read
[/IMG]
