This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
What can we do collectively to reduce the risk and respect rights? A question on the short menu at the Longmont Museum’s World Café. My personal first thought is to limit access. Working in a shop where there are tools that can cause serious injury, some users have a card that lets them. Others can’t. With training, they get access.
My businesses and home have been burglarized, I tend not to advertise. Consider that talk about firearms ownership makes you a theft target. If it’s a keeper, don’t advertise and keep it in a safe. Cars are not a gun safe, so proven by recent car burglaries.
As responsible gun owners, if we want to keep our guns and reduce the risk of their loss and responsibility for the damage they may cause, we have to do it ourselves. Respect others: Maintain access control.
Our group had a focus on education, of young people. Afford the full knowledge of what a gun is and does, and how it does it. We should not shield anyone from this knowledge. A child should know what is real and fake; missing parts and inoperable; lack of ammunition. This is not a video game. Threat reduction is by knowledge and familiarity.
In scouting there were small bore rifle shooters and earned badges, leaving us armed with knowledge and skills applied elsewhere. This youth education has been only available to a small portion of the population. Much less for children now, than in 1967.
While I endorse the education as early as possible, I wonder about opposition to a gun culture. In the 1960s every kid had a cap gun. In the summers we had squirt guns resembling those in use in southeast Asia. The market overflowed with GI Joe and guns. All plastic fakes and no one was injured or killed. Before MacGyver, TV was filled with westerns and detectives, with a gun focus. By comparison, we don’t really have a gun culture; we have a lack of a gun culture. Not knowing causes fear.
Gaming represents a fantabulous unreality. It is not a replacement for firearms safety knowledge. By subscription, not everyone is a gamer. Anti-gun gamer politics moves us away from education while having minor or unknown effect. As a whole, anti-gun politics is eliminating the possibilities of real-world education. Like gaming, political ideals are subscribed to an unreality described as the future. Alternative ignorance always has a following.
In the evolving evening of self-education, we all learned from each other. Enhancing mutual ideas rather than rejecting them. Time well spent with friends and neighbors.
I do not believe there is a political solution. As a community, we educate each other. All ages. Armed with knowledge, we can be inventive. That’s what Longmont is.
