Is Pushing Your Gun Control Views on Kids & Teens Exploitative?

“Teens Lead the Fight on Gun Reform”. Translation: “Teens Lead the Fight on Gun Control”.

In a way, it makes sense. The gun control argument is based totally on emotion.

By definition, it cannot be based on reason, facts, or logic. If it were, it would immediately collide not only with the Second Amendment, but with the self-evident reality that outlawing guns for peaceful people will not do a thing to prevent ownership of guns for unlawful and violent people.

Children and young adults are not yet capable of forming the conclusions they will later hold in their 20s, 50s or 80s. It doesn’t mean they will change their minds on gun control. Many will, and many will not. But certainly as children, and probably as teens, they don’t yet have the cognitive capacity to think everything out. This is precisely what gun control advocates seek to exploit.

Gun control is based on the argument from emotion, intimidation and fear. We’re supposed to look at children carrying signs that read, “Protect Children, Not Guns” and feel, “Oh, no. If I don’t support gun control right now, it means I hate children.” Or – perhaps worse – “Others will THINK I hate children.”

It’s not rational, of course. Personally, I feel great compassion for children and teens. But my compassion plays out in a different way. I think things like, “How can we herd thousands of young adults – many of whom don’t want to learn, some of whom are even violent – into these federally and state-run equivalents of prison and indoctrination camps?”

Because that’s really what government-run public schools are. They’re not optional. We don’t have a free market for education, so most cannot afford private school. If you cannot afford private school, then you must go to a government-run school. The content taught is determined by the government, not by authentic educators – by the economic and ideological needs of teachers’ unions, not by love of learning. The people writing the content are overwhelmingly leftist in their intellectual, political and social orientation. About half the country is not. How democratic is that?

To me, the ultimate end point of herding children into federally mandated educational prison camps – horrible enough for their minds, brains and souls – is to physically endanger them by continuing to force them (and their parents) into keeping them there, despite the inability and perhaps even unwillingness (note the cowardly FL Sheriffs) to protect them.

These poor, lost kids. They’re afraid and rightfully so. Yet they’re afraid of the wrong things. The greatest thing for them to fear is not guns. A gun in the right hands, after all, could save them, and undoubtedly did save many hundreds the day of the shooting. The thing they should fear are the ideas, attitudes and policies that prevent liberty and freedom in one of the most important realms of all: education.

Is it exploitative to push your gun control views on kids? With young children, absolutely. With adolescents it’s debatable, because it depends on the level of reasoning and thinking of the individual young adult.

One thing is not debatable. If kids and teens were enlisted to advance the cause of tax cuts, deregulation of business, free market capitalism or ending the public school monopoly, the outraged shrieks of “exploitation” would be everywhere. That’s the real irrationality and injustice of today’s society.

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