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[quote=Anonymous]Because this is anonymous, I'll share an anecdote that underlies the need for caution about guns in the home.

I grew up with a military retiree who was a lifelong NRA member. He kept a small arsenal of long rifles, shotguns and handguns in our home. He kept them locked in a gun cabinet with ammunition kept separately. The cabinet was a bit of a joke because it had a glass door - clearly very easy to break into. But more importantly, by the time we were pre-teens my brother and I knew where the key was kept so the locked cabinet was no deterrent to us.

We were introduced to gun safety and operation of firearms very early on and had both been target shooting by the time we were in the late single and early double digits. We knew to never point a gun at anything you didn't intend to shoot, etc.

One day after school I was getting my newspapers together for delivery on the paper route I had. My house was the drop off location for the area, and a couple of other kids who had routes came to my house to get their papers. They were boys and I was a girl, and they bullied me mercilessly. They called me names and physically assaulted me on a regular basis but I never said anything because I wanted my paper route and my parents were not really sympathetic to such issues being bullies themselves.

This one particular day those boys were being truly awful to me and I was losing it emotionally - I was 12 years old and very hormonal and like all kids that age, sometimes feelings would override reason. I went into the house, fetched the key, opened the gun cabinet, grabbed a shotgun and went outside and pointed it at those boys and told them I'd shoot them if they didn't stop bullying and pushing me around. They both grabbed their papers and took off, and they never said anything to anyone apparently because nothing ever got back to me. However, my neighbor did see it happen and he confronted me later. He knew I was a good kid because I regularly babysat his toddler. He also knew if he told my dad I would probably be physically harmed, because he'd heard the abuse going on in our house being the next door neighbor. He made me promise to never do anything like it again and the secret stayed between us.

My point being, don't rely on normal measures of security if you're going to have firearms in a house with children. Even if they are conscientious and you teach them everything about firearms safety, and you lock the guns up, it is no guarantee they won't get access to the guns and act on terrible impulse as young developing minds are wont to do. A gun safe with a combo or key lock accessible only to adults is the only way to do it right. The key should never be in the house with the safe and the kids, because kids find everything in your home there are no real secrets from kids.

That's my advice. By the way, I grew up to be a very much more than okay adult, earned a number of degrees, worked in education and the law, have a better than average character. My point being that really good kids can do really stupid things and the mistakes that can be made with firearms are generally irreversible and life altering.[/quote]

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