Not Entertainment

[kandrathe]

Nor is allowing everyone to have guns. Why is a drug addict allowed to own a gun? Recipe for disaster if you ask me.

The reports don't say who the gun was registered to. Given all that we do know, it is quite likely that it was purchased illegally. Nevertheless if the adults were drilled as kids in gun safety, they wouldn't leave a loaded handgun sitting in plain sight with children playing nearby. Then again, they are stupid enough to get mixed up with cocaine so maybe they would.

If you want drugs, you can find drugs. If you want illegal weapons (machine guns, hand grenades, land mines), you can find them on the black market as well. As you've seen on the news... It's pretty easy to smuggle whatever you want across our southern border. They probably don't have that problem in the Netherlands, although, I'm sure even there, it is still easy enough for the criminal element to get whatever weapons they want. The difference is that people in the Netherlands accept the premise that they are the disarmed victims of crimes against their persons and property, and that gun ownership is merely for sport or hunting, not for killing people.

The philosophy of the 2nd amendment has always been to reasonably eliminate the differential in power between those that are armed, versus those who are unarmed. We give people the equal right to defend their lives, their property, and their families lives from anyone who would use illegal force to take that away from them (including a tyrannical government). Unfortunately, there is no intelligence test for reproduction, and stupid people will do stupid things with drugs, and guns, whether or not they are illegal. I would guess that she had the gun available to defend herself, which is ok. But, she endangered her child by leaving loaded weapons around, which is not ok. They might just have easily died by od'ing on her drugs laying around.

We've evolved into a culture which is loath to assign responsibility for negative outcomes to people's poor decisions. It's societies fault for permitting people to own guns, not her fault for choosing to own one, and leave it loaded where her kids can get to it.