It’s hard to argue with the former sometimes. Little kids don’t mix well with firearms unless they are under strict supervision. It’s not uncommon for children to stumble upon their parent’s weapons, and accidentally shoot themselves or others. Every year, over 2000 kids are accidentally injured with firearms in America, and among kids aged 10 and under, accidents account for 75% of all firearm injuries.
But is sheltering your kids from firearms really the best way to keep them from hurting themselves and others? It’s hard to say since, to my knowledge at least, there haven’t been any studies made on the matter. And sometimes, even when parents familiarize their children with guns, accidents still happen.
However, a recent experiment conducted by KWWL News in Iowa found that it’s probably best to familiarize your kids with firearms, even when they’re really young. Though the experiment didn’t set out to prove anything in that regard, it sure is compelling. Under the guidance of a police officer, they planted an unloaded pistol in a room full of toys to see how long it would take for several kids to find it, and play with it. If you’re short on time, you can get the gist of the video by starting at the 5 minute mark.
Though the sample size is small, the results are impossible to ignore. The only kids who didn’t play with the gun were the ones who grew in households that have guns. They’ve seen them before, and on some level they know that guns aren’t toys.
So with that in mind, it’s probably safe to say that it’s a bad idea to shelter your kids from guns, even though it can sometimes be a little nerve-racking to broach this subject with them. If you’re a gun owner with a family, show your firearms to your kids, teach them how they work and how to be safe with them. And if they’re old enough to understand, explain the lethal potential that is inherent in every firearm. Make it clear that these aren’t toys and they’re not for fun (until they’re old enough to have fun with them of course) and you should be able to stunt their curiosity.
Joshua Krause was born and raised in the Bay Area. He is a writer and researcher focused on principles of self-sufficiency and liberty at Ready Nutrition. You can follow Joshua’s work at our Facebook page or on his personal Twitter.
Joshua’s website is Strange Danger
But I can’t help myself. I feel like I’m watching a surreal version of 
I think that’s the wrong goal, and that instead the 
But our lead aid agency has itself been jeopardizing this effort, and risking all-important public support, by irresponsibly funding leftist agitprop around the world—and enlisting the help of billionaire progressive activist George Soros in the process.
Trying to persuade Colombians, Macedonians, Kenyans, and the Irish to accept violations of traditional norms that are still being debated here was surely not what Congress had in mind when it passed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and thereby created the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.
Support for wooly leftist causes around the globe, and teaming up with the vast network of Soros organizations trying to transform the world, isn’t new for USAID.
The response from a mid-level career official at the Bureau of Legislative Affairs, Executive Secretary Joseph E. Macmanus, offered a pro-forma defense of USAID with sentences like, “The Department of State’s foreign assistance programs are rigorously designed, implemented, and monitored to ensure that they are based on core American values.”
Soros supporters are naturally pleased. But was the letter reflective of the administration’s political leadership? The slow pace of political appointments at the State Department—and throughout the executive branch—has created a situation where career bureaucrats and caretakers put in place by the previous administration retain an outsized influence.
In this instance, sources tell us that the letter the senators sent Tillerson never reached him. As I explained in the New York Post last Saturday, the Macmanus letter didn’t even acknowledge the senators’ request for a probe. Telling six senators, in essence, to take a hike is not wise at the best of times.
But it is especially unwise when the senators are raising legitimate concerns that resonate with Trump voters. What core American values were served in Colombia when USAID funds a Soros-owned media portal that attacks President Donald Trump, capitalism, and “patriarchal society”?
And what American values are served when USAID and Soros’ Open Society Foundations team up to teach Macedonians Alinskyite tactics, continuing a lamentable trend here in the states to redefine civics as street mobilization and representative democracy as “participative democracy”?
And what core American values, indeed, are served when we support same-sex marriage in countries like Ireland? The Supreme Court only read this right into the Constitution two years ago, in a hotly contested 5-4 decision that is far from settled even here.
Indeed, many of these ideas continue to be hotly debated between one part of the population that wants to retain traditional norms and another that wants to transform society.
As the senators’ letter asked, what do these things have to do with our national interests?
By refusing to heed the senators’ call, the career civil servants who have taken over our agencies were doing exactly what the Open Society Foundations requested. In an op-ed in Foreign Policy magazine two weeks ago, the head of the Open Society Initiative for Europe, Goran Buldioski, wrote that “Tillerson should ignore the letter, because there’s nothing to investigate.”
Buldioski smeared the U.S. senators, saying that their letter was “littered with inaccuracies about the foundations’ work,” and he trotted out the most tired trope in the Soros arsenal, that the “senators echo Kremlin talking points.” As I have argued here and here, it is precisely our promotion of tendentious radical ideas overseas that often drive conservatives who would ordinarily side with us into the arms of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But the most important part of the piece came not in these clichés, but in the argument Buldioski made when he said that the senators were asking Tillerson “to shut down democracy promotion that is ‘disrespecting national sovereignty.’ Such an interpretation assumes that governments are sacrosanct and sovereign, not the voters who elect them.” (Emphasis added).
That is a tempting argument. The individual certainly is ultimately sovereign in that his own conscience is the ultimate arbiter.
This separation between “national sovereignty” and “individual sovereignty” is not new, however, but has been emphasized by those who argue for transnational governance.
In a speech in Stockholm in 2009 in which he expounded on the subject, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, for example: “We are now living in a true global age. We are interconnected as never before. Frontiers are increasingly irrelevant. Nation-states are increasingly powerless to act alone in the face of global forces.”
But as my friends and colleagues David Azerrad and Arthur Milikh reminded me in an email exchange on this subject, classical liberalism views countries as sovereign in the international realm.
The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another” and “We the people”—make this amply clear.
When a government stops securing the unalienable rights of people, it is their right “to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.” But individuals form a sovereign “people,” and we can remain sovereign only if we remember the common good and the social contract.
Let’s debate these things some more here at home before we spend billions trying to persuade our friends to buy into them.