Ladies and Gentlemen, they ALWAYS look in the shoebox in the closet. If you're taking the time to hide the gun then you acknowledge that someone out there wants to steal it. If you think someone will steal it then you need to secure it.
Ahh, now you see why I hide my good shoes in a gun safe and wrap trigger locks around the shoes. I don't want anyone stealing those shoes.
Back to Earth for a few moments.
The thinking behind the original post demonstrates the effectiveness of gun control. It has shaped everyone's thinking, including the thinking of gun owners. Gun owners have gone far, far over the edge without realizing it.
Firearms have
always been potentially dangerous. That realization is not original to Sarah Brady and other advocates of gun control. Even my rather stupid generation knew it, and I'd bet that it didn't take the first person to fire a gun too long to figure it out either.
What is original to Mrs. Brady and to you is a fixation on trigger locks, gun safes, and other ways to neutralize firearms by making them as useless as possible. In reality trigger locks are easily defeated and most of the gun safes bought by gun owners can be peeled open within a very few minutes. The smaller gun safes are easier: instead of opening the safe, a thief with even half a mind will take it with him and the guns inside too.
The only way to have an absolutely safe gun is to not have a gun. The only way to be absolutely, positively, undoubtedly sure that your kids and the neighbors' can't possibly be harmed by a gun is to keep the kids away from all guns forever. And the only sure way to prevent thieves from stealing your guns is to not own guns at all. The Bradys of the world will applaud you for coming around to their thinking. Then you can go after kids who draw pictures of guns or say the word "gun" and we all will live happily ever after.
That's what Sarah Brady and her friends want and that's the direction which many gun owners pursue. They think they're being prudent and play a strange game of oneupmanship with a Holier Than Thou attitude. "I've put three trigger locks on every gun," says one. "That's not really safe. I've disassembled all my guns, put the parts in different safes, and have attack dogs guarding them," says another. "Neither of you really cares about your kids or meets your responsibilities. What I do is strip the guns, separate the parts, fill the barrels with lead, and ship them to friends all over the world," says the third.
I, and I think everyone in my generation, never even heard of trigger locks. Nobody I knew owned a gun safe. I'm not sure they even existed. My kids were raised with guns in the house. The guns did not have trigger locks and we did not own a gun safe. Our guns were in closets and drawers. We did not childproof the world. We worldproofed the children. It worked for us. It also worked for our parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and all the way back in time.
I admit that all parents before today's crop were awful, uncaring, unenlightened, ill educated, and bone stupid in comparison with parents today. Fortunately all our our kids were even stupider than we were. They grew to be successful, competent, happy adults with no noticeable twitches or personality disorders, and not one of them looks down the barrel of a gun and pulls the trigger to see whether it's loaded. None of our kids shot up a school or church or mall, stuck up a bank or convenience store, sold dope, kidnapped anyone at all, or tried to murder us. From time to time, especially around age 15, they did try to drive us nuts but that didn't have anything to do with guns. It was mostly sex, I think, and I wish someone had told me about trigger locks then.
As for security, keep in mind the utter stupidity of every generation before yours. What we did was to take reasonable measures to secure our homes and their contents. We did nutty things like have good doors, windows, locks, and lighting, and we locked the doors and windows when we left the house, went to sleep, or were away from home. Some of us even put good alarm systems on our homes. Our rather odd thinking was that we wanted to make it hard for burglars to enter but that we couldn't turn our homes into prisons with us as the inmates. And we didn't want to do that anyway. We also did not think that we owned the only guns in the world or even in the city. And we certainly did not think that
we were responsible if a criminal broke into our homes despite our reasonable precautions. We never considered the possibility of setting attack dogs to roam our property and consume bad guys or putting barbed wire around our homes. These are new ideas from a much more enlightened generation committed to living responsible lives.
We were irresponsible idiots. You're much smarter and more conscientious. You know what never occurred to us: that it was
your fault if a criminal broke into your home and stole your goods. If so, the original poster might have the right idea. If you become the victim of a crime, perhaps it's right that you should be arrested and tried for that crime. The principle, I suppose, is that you were at fault for not taking adequate measures to prevent the crime. Since the criminal was able to victimize you, his success is compelling evidence that you just didn't do enough.
Someone smarter than I will have to figure out how to incarcerate your body if the crime you didn't prevent was your own murder. I don't suppose that there would be much trouble in jailing women who didn't prevent their own rapes, so that's probably not worth considering.