I’m a proponent of proper firearm storage. I think that a gun safe needs to be on everyone’s purchase list and up near the top of it. At a minimum, people should use a gun lock for when a firearm isn’t in use.
What I’ll never support are laws that tell anyone they have to keep a gun locked up.
No one has the authority to dictate such a thing, and when the government does it, they often fail to account for individual situations.
But a news article out of Maine makes some claims about mandatory storage I’d like to talk about.
Storing firearms safely at home is a critical step in preventing accidental shootings, suicides and unauthorized access, especially by children and those prohibited from possessing guns.
Research by various groups consistently shows secure firearm storage reduces the risk of accidental injuries and deaths specifically among children and teens. Households that keep firearms under lock and key experience significantly lower rates of self-inflicted and accidental firearm injuries among youth.
Joseph McHugh, spokesperson for the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, says the issue needs to be framed positively.
“Many times the narrative we see focuses on the punishment for parents who improperly store their firearms, but we should be focusing on the benefits of securely storing firearms,” he said. “Storing guns locked and unloaded means thieves, children and other untrained hands will not have access to dangerous weapons.”
The problem here is that when a gun is locked up and unloaded, it’s also not accessible to anyone who needs it.
Also, there’s a broad assumption here that children are untrained, which isn’t necessarily accurate. I know kids who have been shooting their entire lives and can run a three-gun course faster than most adults, who understand firearm safety intimately, and who are absolutely trained better than some schmuck who bought a gun and a lock box yesterday and thinks he’s good to go.
The adult can get access to the gun while the well-trained kid is prohibited by mandatory storage laws.
However, there’s something that these studies making these claims always ignore. They ignore any balance on the costs of such laws.
How many people have lost their lives because they couldn’t access their guns? Is it more or less than the lives supposedly saved?
That’s without getting into the wonky ways they estimate how many lives are saved in the first place.
But hey, at least they’re not trying to ban guns, right?
Maybe not, but what they are doing is trying to make self-defense impossible. Look at these suggestions for safely storing your firearm.
Safe storage means storing firearms unloaded, locked and separate from ammunition, according to the Maine Coalition for Gun Safety’s Firearm Safety Practices:
• Never keep loaded guns in your home.
• Always store your gun with a trigger lock and in a locked cabinet.
• Lock and store bullets in a separate location from guns.
• Keep guns out of sight and reach of children.
• Make sure cabinet/gun lock keys are inaccessible to children.
• Ask if there are unlocked guns in play-date homes before your children go to play.
• Educate your children to treat all firearms as loaded and dangerous.
• Tell kids that when they see a gun, they should stop, don’t touch, leave the area quickly and calmly, and tell an adult right away.
• If your child or anyone in your home is known to be suicidal, remove all guns from your home.
Now, the last three aren’t an issue. I actually agree with all of those.
But look at the first few.
If your gun is unloaded, it’s not ready should you need it. I’ve woken up to gunshots in the night and done so more than once, unfortunately. Even a loaded gun easily at hand takes precious seconds that, should the shots be directed at you and yours, you might not have.
Storing it unloaded, locked with a trigger lock, and in a locked cabinet with the ammo stored somewhere else adds not just seconds but minutes to a tense situation. Fine motor skills erode under stress, which means it may take even longer to access the weapon, load it, rack the slide (assuming it’s a semi-auto, of course), and then meet the threat.
By then, you or someone you love may already be dead.
This is what anti-gunners think is safe storage. This is what they want to mandate in many places.
No matter what they say about self-defense, understand that they don’t believe in it.
Now, between 2015 and 2021, 713 children died due to unintentional shootings. Many of those were, yes, with unsecured guns, but again, no one looks at how many people die because they can’t access their firearm. There are no statistics for that and likely never will be. No one tracks it because it might be inconvenient to the narrative.
Then there’s the fact that at least some of those 100 kids or so per year are killed as the result of guns they found in places where guns shouldn’t be, like in a public park or on the side of the road, and suddenly you can see just how complicated all of this actually gets.
But that doesn’t make it into these news reports, now does it?
Read the full article here
