...how stupid some people really are. And those people become parents and the rest of us fear for our lives and the lives of our grandchildren (because our children may choose some of these people's kids to have children with).

I have occasion, from time to time, to cruise other blogs and read what's going on in the world of people I know and people I don't know. The other day I was cruising a blog and I found something that scared the living daylights out of me.

A mother allowed her daughter to fire off a gun, in a desert. Doesn't sound so bad, does it? It sounds a little more innocuous when you hear it was a .22 pistol - a target practice sort of gun. Still doesn't sound that bad, right?

Well, when you realize that the daughter in question was 4, and wasn't being helped (as far as I know) but just firing away without aiming or having help to aim the gun, then it sounds a little worse right? How about that the child was allowed to continue to do this because she was having fun?

Hell, to me it sounds like it's a lot worse. What do some of these parents think when they let children *do* something like that? Let the child play with a gun as if it were a toy... Is there a temporary misplacement of the functioning cerebral cortex? That's just irresponsible parenting.

I talked with DH about this and he said that it's people like that who sue the gun companies because the guns are dangerous things to have. Sadly, I have to agree. He continued to state that these are also the sort of people who get nominated for Darwin awards. I shouldn't wonder - these are the types of people who constantly think "Oh, that will never happen to *us*".

Now, that's not to say that you shouldn't *teach* a small child about guns if you're going to have them around you. After all, I know of one enterprising young child who figured out all the pieces to a gun and handed them back in the right order because he had watched his father cleaning guns for a long time. The parents figured that they had better educate the child as to what guns can do *before something happened*. That's rather intelligent. One major responsibility of owning a gun is education - knowing how to clean them, how to store them, how to shoot them. When you add children into the equation it's even more important to be educated to and educate them.

DH and I own guns - that probably surprises a few of y'all. We're collector owners rather than user-owners, but DH and I both used to shoot (gun range and all, not hunting shooting, although I can't speak for DH to that). We've shown the kids the guns, we've explained about them, we store them unloaded in a very large Browning gun safe that's always locked. And the ammo is locked up too, and the kids understand that guns are not toys - they're serious weapons and you could get badly hurt (or die) by misusing them. Playing with guns is serious and no 4 year old should be allowed to simply aim and fire for fun...

...but, as Jeff Foxworthy says, you just might be a redneck.