Harley, thanks for your invitation to leave this thread. It makes me feel all warm and cuddly inside. But since you introduced those undocumented statistics in
this thread and keep asserting them
here, it is more appropriate to respond to that silliness in the same thread.
"No matter how you put it..." is a heck of a thing to say in a discussion. What it means is "It doesn't matter what anyone else says, I know the truth and there's no way anyone can change my mind." It's consistent with saying "I believe you should start a thread and explain your position, we will see what others will have to say." What it means is "You annoy me with an opinion that differs from mine and it's particularly troublesome because you make my opinion sound authoritarian, foolish, and untenable." Since I have more time in grade than you, though, I grant you the cordiality with which tolerant age indulges youthful inflexibility. There's no need for you to leave this thread.
When I was much younger I read Darrel Huff's interesting little book entitled
How to Lie With Statistics. That was somewhere around 1954 or 1955, about the time it was first published. You might benefit from reading it too, or at least in learning something about statistical distortions of the kind you practice here. The very first sentences in the Introduction seem curiously appropriate to your statistical insistence that "In the state of CA there have been so many accidents regarding firearms and children... It is all about safe and safes." Here is how Huff began that introduction to his book:
"There's a mighty lot of crime around here," said my father-in-law a little while after he moved from Iowa to California. And so there was -- in the newspaper he read. It is one that overlooks no crime in its own area and has been known to give more attention to an Iowa murder than was given by the principal daily in the region in which it took place.
His father-in-law's conclusion derived from statistical distortion and naivete of kinds that I pointed out in my previous reply to you in
this thread. So, I hope you don't mind overly much my disagreeing with you yet again, your conclusion that "It is all about safe and safes" seems particularly dense and dogged no matter how or how often you put it. Closeminded people are uninteresting.
The undocumented statistics you offer in stubborn support of your unwarranted conclusion were created and manipulated by the unnamed people of indeterminate qualifications to make some obviously silly points. It's
not "all about safe and safes." In another thread in this forum someone else posted photographs of an installation of a large safe for a large gun room in a house under construction. Go look for it.
If the cable snapped while holding the giant safe door while it was above a standing immediatly below, that child would have been killed--which would prove statistically that it is horribly dangerous to have a safe in a house with children. It's easy to make statistics dance to any tune one chooses to play.
I don't know what's wrong with Marine Corps. training but there's no question that it's deficient because 100% of the retired Marines in this thread assert that hardware is the solution to a software problem. Given properly functioning firearms, firearms safety "is all about" what people do and how they behave with firearms, and
never about safes, gun locks, or any other hardware they might try to use as substitutes for their brains. It shouldn't make any difference in the Marine Corps. what
kind of gun a poorly trained simpleton points at his comrades, or whether he says "Not to worry, I don't keep a round in the chamber," or whether he removed it from the giant vault in Fort Knox. The only thing that should matter--and all that does matter--is his control of it.
Only a fool, an irresponsible, or people like those denizens of a crack house I mentioned previously would leave an unattended firearm where a young child might get to it. Young kids don't know what is essential to know about firearm safety. But only a fool, an irresponsible, or someone who knows either nothing about guns or just enough to be dangerous would not slough off the duty to teach children how to handle them safely as soon as they are capable of learning. Statistics--those from Allstate, the Center for Disease Control, and every other organization with a claim to both objectivity and reliability--prove that the leading cause of death in teenagers is
not guns but so called "car accidents." My statistics trump yours.
So does my point. Parents who let children have access to family cars without providing proper supervision, training, and--most importantly--a well developed sense of individual responsibility betray their kids and the rest of us too. We should not tolerate a parent who claims that he has fulfilled his duties by having an ignition lock, door locks, and a nice safe garage for the car. And we wouldn't.
But that's exactly the approach you advocate with "It is all about safe and safes. Guns and safes. Gun locks etc..."
No matter how you put it,
it is
all about parenting and not in the least about safes and locks. The decision other people make about whether to carry a Glock with a chambered round should also not be dependent on whatever it is you've decided. Your own decision is yet another hardware approach to a software problem.
If you are not competent, responsible, and mentally capable of firearms safety only a fool would think it matters at all whether you have or haven't a round chambered while you carry your Glock or any other firearm. At some point you
might chamber a round or forget that you had chambered one and you'll be just as dangerous to yourself and everyone around you, including any children who might come within range. Stay within your own comfort zone and don't try to impose it on other people,
most especially not on people you don't know. It's unseemly.
Dismissed. Smoke 'em if you got 'em. If you don't got 'em you can't smoke 'em and can't expect me to smoke 'em for you.
FIRED on the spot. Never touch another mans gun without permission, ever
