Inspired by the thread on THR...
I grew up in a household where there were guns for defense of the home, rifles, pistols, and shotguns alike. From the time I was a baby onwards, there were guns in the house.
My parents taught me to coexist with the guns as far back as I can remember, just like they told me to go find a police officer if I ever got lost. I knew guns were not toys and that they were very dangerous. I knew that if I saw a gun that was unsupervised, I wasn't to touch it. I was to leave the area and tell an adult. The guns were kept in locking containers that no child could reasonably be expected to open.
I was taken out a time or two and allowed, nay encouraged, to shoot the guns as a small child, the biggest guns I was physically capable of firing. My curiosity was sated, honestly. I had no reason to try to go fiddle with dad's guns because I knew darn well exactly what would happen if I pulled the trigger. I knew it was loud and went bang and fired a projectile. I knew it was an effective weapon, and I knew it wasn't to be flaunted or played with.
My siblings got the same treatment. And you know what? Not a one of us ever had a close call with a gun. We weren't lucky. We weren't even well trained, honestly, we just had a wee bit of sense. My parents were way, way more worried when I started driving than they were when I started owning my own gun.
See when I was ten, I was given stewardship of my very own Marlin model 60. I was allowed the privilege of keeping it in my own room and had constant access to it. At any time, I could have physically loaded and fired it at anything and everything in sight. But I didn't, I knew that if I abused that privilege, I'd lose it, plus my parents would be really dissappointed in me and I'd probably wind up hurting somebody very badly to boot. I was scared to death of actually hurting somebody.
Now I got to still shoot other guns, but this one was mine to keep.
When I turned 14 the privilege extended to a Mossberg 500. So I had access to a "real", robust weapon at this point, one that any sane person would consider a viable and effective personal arm in many confrontations.
On top of that, as a teenager, when we made extended family trips, I was entrusted with a .357 revolver, for just in case.
Today I hear constant references to people who are horrified at the thought of children having firearms or even operating them and quite frankly it confounds me. For the record, I grew up in the 80s and 90s not the 50s and 60s. Even in my home state of Texas it's illegal for a minor to have access to a firearm, a law which my family broke for several years apparently.
That's just madness. Parents should decide when kids have access to firearms and under what conditions, not some damn government. You couldn't pay me to have kids, but if I did I'd start them on guns even earlier.
Honestly, is this weird that I had such access?