Yep..
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1367536722.jpg

This is only about the parents now. How did the gun get loaded? Most 5 year olds can't even tie their shoes. You could teach a monkey to shoot a 22 at a target, but gun safety is another story.

Really? I have a lever action Marlin 30-30 and I couldn't imagine an 11 year old firing one. It has quite the kick. Not saying you shouldn't or anything like that, just that's a big gun for an 11 year old.

I think 5 or 6 is a little young for guns with kids. Not enough focus of what they have in their hands. 10 to 12, sure. Hell, the first time I took my sister to the range she was like 45 and I was getting pissed at her with her disregard for range protocol. Then again, she is a lawyer.

Hugh, I would disagree. I think it's common knowledge that kids are sponges at that age, and there should be no difference in the material you feed them, whether it's gun safety or math. I say the earlier, the better, as long as the parent is in control.

My FIL gave our son a 22 for his first b'day. Never a problem. He received instruction and was under observation until he could get his own hunting license. Never a problem.

This.

Sorry but I don't agree.

IMHO they are an appropriate target for gun marketing because you can teach them gun safety and supervise them accordingly. Get them trained young and those lessons will be with them for life.
A child raised like this will be a responsible gun owner when they're adults.


If you're going to have guns available to civilians in a society then those same civilians must know about gun safety. That is absolutely mandatory.

The problem is that so many gun owners don't seem to have any common sense.
Like... If you don't plan to shoot something then don't point the gun at that "something".

ZOA, to each his own. I'm not against it at younger ages. I first took my son shooting at about 11 or 12. We had a J.C. Penny 410 that I had bought probably 40 years ago. He closed the barrel (breech) and it blew a hole in the fence in front of us. I asked if he had his finger on the trigger and he said "No!". I reloaded again and it did the same thing. A broken firing pin. He had paid attention to pointing it down range not near his foot. Those little details make a lot of difference.

I can remember like it was yesterday. Thanksgiving day at my grandfathers back when I was 9 (and believe me, I was a SCRAWNY little thing)...going out in the field with my dad and shooting his 12 ga shotgun for the first time...at eleven, it was the gun I hunted with :p

ps: I do agree with ya though....30-30 packs a pretty decent recoil for a child, but not that unreasonable.

Sounds like he was well taught. I would say each parent should be able to assess when their child is ready to learn.

I still have my patch & card..
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1367545514.jpg

Had to take & pass when I got my 20 gauge..
Respect & Discipline are key to safe fire arm ownership....
:D

The problem becomes when does society (often with laws) step in because children occasionally need to be protected from parents, and society needs to be protected from poor decisions by those parents. We have, as a society, decided that a 5-year-old driving a car isn't appropriate, not only can the child hurt himself, but that child can injure others (a car makes a darn good weapon). When you market guns to children, how many others are put into danger by a poor decision made by a parent. The parent looks at the advertising, assumes the gun is appropriate for their child - the ad says so. And does a 5-year-old child really understand the difference between pointing a real gun (which looks and is the same size as a toy gun) and toy gun towards his baby sister. Whether that parent purchased the gun for a child that was in no way prepared mentally or physically to handle a gun, or whether that parent was lax and allowed the firearm to be accessible to an unsupervised child, that parent has not only put their family into a potentially dangerous situation, but has endangered the lives of others. Advertising that guns are appropriate for all children is irresponsible because it endangers children and others outside of a family unit.

I would hope that the parents get charged with child endangerment.

Ok, relax Francis and all of you PC nimrods....... gun culture is all about parneting. My whole family was tought to respect guns at a young age, heck killed my first deer at 8. Matter of fact we had a gun club and a motor cycle enduro club in elementary school, growing up in Northern Michigan was great.
Those that have never owned guns are the first to say how not to handle them......

What happened in this case was a tragedy but all you PC jackasses who are ranting because the gun was a gift to a kid or was pink need to get a grip.

People die every day...... in a car wreck, did you blame the car when the driver ran over the bicyclist, how about the tire manufacture, the cell phone company that they were using while they were texting.........

GMAFB!!!!!!

Well, you can thank mindless idiots who are stupid enough to aren't smart enough to raise kids, and a big thanks to liberal & public schools for dumbing down America to the point that someone would even think of the crap in quotes..http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1367548087.jpg

No. Kids in preschool, kindergarten and first and second grades are not appropriate targets for marketing.

Parents can teach gun safety at any age without having "kiddie guns." Marketing a downsized gun that looks like a toy has nothing to do with gun safety training. Two separate issues.

Sure, we all know there are some low-information parents who are going to get the idea they ought to get their toddler a gun because of an ad. And we all know they're not the ones with upper-quintile intellectual capability. And yeah, we all think, oh well, not a big hit on the quality of the gene pool... but it's the neighbor's kid who is often the recipient of the bullet.

There is a trend for children to have huge influence on family purchases that did not exist when (some of us) were growing up in the 50s. The fast food companies have cashed in on this and are doing very very well. Intellectually lazy parents are creating kids with a sense of control and entitlement that may not exist among the highly enlightened here, but go to the mall and see it for yourself. These families are easy to spot. They're often overweight and the kids are headed for a lifetime of medical problems. And everybody is carrying shopping bags full of stuff.

Anyway, My first gun is not a big threat, and I don't mean to imply it is. As a marketing guy, I just don't like the use of children to sell this particular product -- one I consider an adult product; one I consider worthy of some respect and care.

Seriously?

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Racer - playing the blame game isn't the route to take here. We put real age limits on driver's licenses, because we expect that the child be able to make some decisions when dealing with a potentially lethal item (the car) when the parents aren't around. Just like we do with liquor and cigarettes, we expect the individual to make some responsible decisions when life and death items are involved. Therefore, we have decided as a society that we don't allow companies to market those lethal items to children. A gun is a life and death item. We don't expect a 4-year-old to make responsible decisions when it comes to gun safety, yet, if their parents are making bad decisions regarding guns and their children, not only will the family be affected, but others outside the family unit will likely be affected.

I suspect that virtually everyone posting on this thread has been a lifelong gun owner too and I've never given a rat's behind about being PC about anything :D
I also have an issue with pink guns and some of the other gun hype/marketing that seems to be prevalent today...will you GMAFB too? Jackass...why yes I am :p

Wait, you have to start sex education at age 4 now?

Sounds like we don't really need parents, as long as we have the government...

Is there ANYTHING that you would not legislate, Fox?

Even if those pink guns had existed when I was a kid, I'd have never been able to even look at it without my dad getting it out of the gun cabinet for me, clearing it, handing it to me and expecting me to clear it again. What difference does it make whether it's marketed for kids? Only adults can buy and possess them. I got my first .22 when I was 12, but I had been shooting rifles and pistols since I was about five. I knew how to field strip a 1911 before I was strong enough to pull the slide back on my own. This is ALL about parenting and has nothing to do with guns.

Parents are far more important than government - parental responsibility is paramount, and sadly a big problem in this country.

Because we have very poor parents, absent parents, addict parents, we have generations of children that pay the price. It isn't the kids fault that their parents are irresponsible, but they pay the price. We as a society have decided that occasionally we will step in and protect those children, help negate some of that extremely high price.

I want to know how a 4 year old is buying the guns & where they are getting the money..

As to the blame game, B**l S**t, if the parents are so weak that they do what ever a child tells them too, then what will stop them from buying the kids smokes, booze, drugs ect, and if the parents are so stupid & weak minded that they believe any advertisement they see (well, the last election was proof of that) then this country is doomed, because certain people don't take or are held responsible for their actions. Of course, the fact that public schools teach kids that the 2nd Amendment is evil, and keep trying to dumb down kids more each year:mad:

To give you an idea of the stupidity in public schools, a Music teacher was just punished for showing the Bugs Bunny cartoon below to the class.

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So I guess that's a "no", there isn't anything you wouldn't legislate...

Is there anything that you just accept as part of life, and there's nothing you'll ever be able to do about it? Many of your posts include the phrase "We, as a society have decided...", which leads me to believe that your answer for every problem we have lies in legislation, and the fact that the majority of the people (who are inevitably affected by the legislation) are not usually involved in the problem just doesn't matter to you.

Oh heck, there is plenty of stuff I wouldn't even come close to legislating - I am a liberal to the core zoa. It just the stuff that you would love to legislate.

You might be surprised.

Lots of stuff is just life - we have lots of problems that will never be solved by legislation.

However, heck, a majority of people don't do anything that we have created law to protect us. Most people aren't murders, thieves, rapists, child abusers. Yet we have lots and lots of legislation (laws) that deal with a very small segment of society. Most people don't cheat others, but the laws on the books that deal with those types of 'crime' would fill your house and most of the houses on your block. Yet, if you were screwed by a cheat - you would be fairly happy that in your neighbor's downstairs bathroom was a law that would help you for that once in a lifetime problem.

I am immediately affected by the laws that allow the state to remove children from homes where the caregivers (parents or others) are abusive. I am not involved in the problem, as you stated, but the result of the law does affect a majority of people. Is that bad legislation, by your definition it appears you would think it was.

Our state is really gun friendly. My kids and their friends (5 and 7) were playing cops and robbers shooting at the bad guys with a drinking bottle and the principal put a stop to that. I don't own guns beside an old Ruger 10-22 from way back and have not shot it for a very time. So I am on the fence with guns. You are armed to the teeth, that's great. If you don't, I m ok with that too.

It doesn't matter what color they paint the guns, parents will buy it for their little kids if they feel that's the right thing to do with or without marketing. I don't know how many 5 year old are reading Guns and Ammo and say, gotta have that pink 22? The parents are. hell, I didn't shoot a gun until I was 16.

Moses --- What if 5 yr old kids are free to drive a car w/o licence or testing for their safety skills? How many more kids would they kill?

How are you affected?

I would say that the uproar over a 5 year-old shooting his younger sibling creates precisely the kind of hysteric call for legislation that I suppose you would support, yet it would directly affect the law abiding father who wants to teach his five year old about guns, who otherwise would be free to do so, and make the world a safer place, IMO. How many infringements on our rights "for the greater good" actually create a more dangerous world?

Also, you're mixing up laws that punish bad behavior with laws that prevent lawful behavior "because something bad might happen".

Five yr. olds are no more legally free to drive cars than they are to handle guns without adult supervision. I guess it's ok to let your kid drive offroad in the middle of nowhere if you're in the passenger seat. But I couldn't reach the pedals until I was around 10. I was able to shoot long before then.

A law that restricts marketing guns to 5-year-olds affects law abiding fathers (or moms) teaching their kids about guns? How?

so who is going to decide which parents are "marginal"?

you think with some magical penstroke of some politician will make all the boo boos go away?

who is responsible for raising children anyway?

MSNBC Host Melissa Harris-Perry » All Your Kids Belong To Us - YouTube

We still have shooting teams in High School down here although the anti gun people are pushing to get it stopped.

I am disappointed. Whats with the negative attitude toward guns?! Guns are good. They are made for killing. More children should have supervised access to them. But that pink little kid-gun is just useless. It should carry a mag with at least 40 rounds so the little ones can learn how to handle an even more deadly tool.

You are just to liberal! :D

Is the problem that we've marketed guns that look like toys to children, or that we accept marketing toys that look like guns to children? Should society accept one and not the other? Should parents who condition their children to understand that gun violence is fun, through first person shooter games and access to toy guns, be treated like parents who allow access to real firearms? At what age does society allow exposure to real firearms?

I don't disagree with this at all. Heck I get disgusted when I see ads for various junk toys on tv too. But I think an earlier point made is important; kids aren't reading guns and ammo. Parents walk into a store and see an opportunity to bring their kids along in their footsteps and the marketing is most effective there.

As has been said this was a parenting issue, not a gun issue.

A lot of the mistakes I see myself and other parents making are born of the parent forgetting that kids think differently and have not yet matured.

As long as there are no consequences to being a bad parent, we will keep making more of them. We don't need restrictions, we need accountability.

You buy you 4 year old a working rifle, you should be accountable for its use and management. Simple.

I agree with the it is a parenting not gun issue - but I do also add it is a marketing issue. The Crickett has a little cartoon character they use in marketing, they make the guns appealing to children (pink stocks, multicolor stocks), if you watch their videos they have little children bugging their parents - "I want a Crickett - Johnny has one, why can't I have one?" parent gives in. Those marketing ploys aren't aimed at adults.

Just like eventually we caught on that Camel was using marketing to attract younger and younger smokers, fostering the idea that smoking 'cool' to youth (everyone here says well, 4-year-olds can't buy guns, well 9-year-olds can't buy cigarettes, but it didn't stop RJ Reynolds from marketing to them), marketing firearms to children by Keystone is just as wrong.

http://www.keystonesportingarmsllc.c...s/Crickett.gif

So are all cartoon characters with firearms bad, or just those from Keystone?