Teaching kids how to handle firearms is not going to breed violent criminals!

I'm sure that a lot of you have seen this passed around by lefties who think that this is a horrifying product and idea and have felt compelled to shame and ridicule us 2A supporters for the mere existence of such a horrifying product.

One thing to get out of the way is that this isn't being marketed to kids. This is clearly being marketed to parents.

Well, isn't it horrifying that kids would have access to a firearm? Aren't we breeding a bunch of mass shooters?

Well, welcome to life outside of your cave.

Although there have been three cases of defensive gun use per day in this country so far this year, the two highest profile cases were Eil Dicken in Indiana and Craig Cope in California. Both men, one young and one elderly, saved both their own lives and the lives of others against attackers. Both men had firearm experience from a young age. Dicken was taught to shoot by his grandfather. Cope was shooting small game with a single shot rifle since the age of ten. Namely, this insane, scary thing that you're pointing to is still common outside of your regressive leftist bubbles. It was immensely common for most of American history. In fact, although correlation is not causation, this supposed epidemic of mass shootings didn't happen until after it became less normal for children to be trained with firearms.

I didn't fire a gun until I was sixteen. Most of my family started training younger than I did. It's not that hard to talk to your parents or grandparents and realize that either they were shooting .22s as kids or that it was normal for kids their age to be doing that. This gun clearly has more safety features and parental controls than most of the guns that I've seen kids firing.

Again, correlation is not causation; but, try to find a correlation between youth firearm training and gun violence. I dare you to try.

There's little evidence, if any, that exposure to guns at a young age is going to breed a bunch of psychopaths and mass shooters. In fact, Switzerland hosts youth marksmanship competitions and she hadn't had a mass shooting in ten years and enjoys a murder rate of nearly zero. Any connection between mass shooters and availability of guns is about as thin, if not thinner, than connections between mass shooters and violent videogames or movies. Yeah, if you check a shooters archive of videogames, you're gonna find a first person shooter game just like you would find in my collection when I was a kid and you would find in the collection of any teenaged boy. Still, like I said earlier, the culture that encouraged youths to be trained with firearms had already eroded before mass shootings spiked.

So, no, there's no evidence that teaching kids how to handle firearms is breeding or going to breed violent criminals. In fact, both Dicken and Cope are men who were trained as kids who managed to take out bad guys who never bothered to learn. What's more, maybe we can apply the solid logic that we apply to other things to guns. Maybe if we don't make guns taboo or mysterious to our youth, the youths will be less fascinated by them. Maybe, if youths know gun safety, there will be fewer accidental shootings.

This doesn't scare me because, even though I've lived in politically regressively leftist bubbles, I've also lived outside of them.