Re: Responding to Pre-dawn Unannounced Ninja Raids

[Alan Horowitz <alanh@infi.net>]

I think it is a bad policy to say, "once I have kids in the house, I 
won't have guns there, period."

Kids do need carefully controlled exposure to firearms and their hazards. 
I refer to the proverbial lesson a father or grandfather gies the young 
laddy - shooting a watermelon or whatnot, so that the kiddy can see that 
water-filled bags of protoplasm, when shot - get the shit blown out of 
them.

No doubt, that guns need to be _positively_ secured in a household where
kids are running around. Many states have laws to that effect. Now, if we
could just get the unwashed masses to keep the sink-drain unclogger fluid,
the radiator-antifreeze fluid, and these various other commobn household
items - just as carefully secured....might reduce the workload on the
nation's poison control centers. 

Without these parent-mediated exposures to firearms safety lessons, the 
only exposure today's kids have to the subject is what they see and hear 
in the public schools and on Hollywood TV/movies.   The worst possible 
messengers.