4 Popular Activities That Should Be illegal For Kids

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4 Popular Activities That Should Be illegal For Kids

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Thu Nov 06, 2014 7:27 pm

http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-popular-activities-that-should-be-illegal-kids/

What part of "kids aren't just mini adults" is so hard to understand? And just why the hell is America so desperate to sexualize kids in the first place?
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Re: 4 Popular Activities That Should Be illegal For Kids

Postby sunglasses » Thu Nov 06, 2014 8:55 pm

Ericthebearjew wrote:http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-popular-activities-that-should-be-illegal-kids/

What part of "kids aren't just mini adults" is so hard to understand? And just why the hell is America so desperate to sexualize kids in the first place?


*whistles*
I have some light reading on that topic for you. Enjoy.

http://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/7001 ... tml?pg=all

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-jim-ta ... 48451.html

http://books.google.com/books?id=eE7zV6 ... en&f=false

As for the gun thing, I used to target shoot rifles with my dad but I didn't own one. I have less of an issue with rifles than I do pistols or shotguns but that's just me.
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Last edited by sunglasses on Thu Nov 06, 2014 10:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 4 Popular Activities That Should Be illegal For Kids

Postby DashaBlade » Thu Nov 06, 2014 9:59 pm

My niece got a BB gun for her sixth birthday.

Now, I'm not sayin' I'm anti-gun (because I love the hell out of guns), and hell, I live in Texas where guns are more common than insults ending in "bless yer heart" but I really think six is a little young to have any kind of gun. Sure, teach kids gun safety as early as you can, even maybe teach them how to handle guns at a young age. But I'd think you should at least wait until they're, I dunno, twelve maybe, to buy them their own firearms of any kind.

Unless you live out in the wilds, anyway (and my niece doesn't). Even then, don't get your kid a BB gun, it'll just piss off anything bigger than a blue jay.
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Re: 4 Popular Activities That Should Be illegal For Kids

Postby Jack Road » Fri Nov 07, 2014 3:50 pm

The flaw in teaching "gun safety" to kids at an early age by teaching them how to use guns, is that knowing how to use guns doesn't teach anyone about gun safety. Otherwise nobody would ever get shot, accidentally or on purpose.

You know what teaches gun safety? Teaching that guns are things that only exist to kill other living things, and that life is precious. This works two-fold. The primary being that people who teach their kids that guns are only for killing and lives are precious usually don't own guns. And most gun violence among children come from children finding their parent's gun and being stupid with it, because kids are stupid.

Not stupid as compared to kids, but stupid as compared to adults.
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Re: 4 Popular Activities That Should Be illegal For Kids

Postby JamishT » Sat Nov 08, 2014 2:26 am

Jack Road wrote:The flaw in teaching "gun safety" to kids at an early age by teaching them how to use guns, is that knowing how to use guns doesn't teach anyone about gun safety.


I don't believe that's really accurate. I think that at a young age, the power of a gun is more of a fearsome thing, rather than a cool thing.
anecdotal evidence illustrating what I mean
When I first shot a gun, it was a one pump BB gun that could barely be considered dangerous, To the less than ten year old me (I don't remember the exact age), however, it was immediately obvious that it was dangerous. I felt the kick, and I saw the BB pierce the plastic bottle I was aiming at. My older brothers who were supervising made sure to tell me not to point it at anyone ever too. That worked pretty well, and was soon cemented into place when I was allowed to shoot the .22 rifle. The combination of feeling the raw power of the gun in your hands, seeing the damage to the target, and the warnings of siblings and parents taught me gun safety and use as a child.
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Re: 4 Popular Activities That Should Be illegal For Kids

Postby Andropov4 » Sat Nov 08, 2014 2:45 am

It is my opinion that children should never be comfortable around firearms. Children who are comfortable with firearms are much more likely to hold them and know how to use them, and I've met children. They're stupid. Anything they're comfortable using and holding, there is a high likelihood of them doing something stupid with them. Children simply cannot be expected to be responsible gun users or owners, and as such should be neither.
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Re: 4 Popular Activities That Should Be illegal For Kids

Postby Jack Road » Sat Nov 08, 2014 8:25 am

I would not be opposed to taking my kid to a gun range. I also would not be opposed to owning a gun with children around, because I would also own a gun safe.

This is more about addition for me, not omission. Teach your kids how to shoot. Also kill something with a gun right in front of them. Or if you haven't the nerve, show them a video. I'm not talking five year olds of course. If your kid is not old enough to watch and understand that gun's are for killing, then they are not old enough to use guns, let alone own one.

I have seen many many people that own guns and have never killed anything, never seen anything die by the hands of someone with a gun, and have no real awareness that killing is the chief end of gun. I must have had a different copy of Westminster growing up. Oh, I see what it is now, I had a copy of Smith & Westminster.

Edit: Road does not actually propose showing kids death. Please avoid doing that.
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Re: 4 Popular Activities That Should Be illegal For Kids

Postby Jeckel » Sun Nov 09, 2014 8:16 am

I think a lot of people treat this as some kind of fringe behavior, like there are a few kids in places that are taught how to properly use guns at a young age. It is not a minor phenomenon, generations of children all across the country have learned how to properly handle, use, and respect firearms since they were old enough to walk. Go to any southern or western state, outside of major cities, and you can be sure that at least 9 out of 10 kids you see know how to use a gun and have been taught how dangerous they are.

If two kids find a gun, the kid who has only seen them in the movies is not going to truly know how powerful a tool it is, but the kid who has been taught the rules of gun safety and has seen the effects of a gun shot at the range or while hunting will know not to mess around with it in any way.

Having grown up in a very pro-gun, pro-hunting family I've seen many children introduced to the gun world and not once have I witnessed a child see their first jug or deer shot without fully comprehending the significance of what a firearm can do. It is instinctual, you replace the deer or jug with yourself and realize how powerful that much damage is and you know it needs to be handled with care.

Given the option, I'd trust a ten year old that has been around guns their entire life before I would put a weapon in the hand of any grown person that hasn't even seen a gun fired. Children are obviously young and inexperienced, but they aren't stupid or helpless. If they are taught, they will learn and that doesn't change because the topic being taught is how to properly handle a firearm.
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Re: 4 Popular Activities That Should Be illegal For Kids

Postby Tesseracts » Sun Nov 09, 2014 3:00 pm

I don't think the issue with kids and guns is that kids don't understand how dangerous guns are. It's that kids are not really mature enough to understand the concept of danger in the first place.

When I was a teenager, I went into my backyard while it was snowing heavily with a real bow and arrow I inherited from my uncle. I shot it randomly into the yard and one of the arrows ended up in my neighbor's yard. It was snowing so I had a hard time finding it. After that my parents gave the bow and arrow to my cousin instead of me. It's not that I was too stupid to know things could go wrong, it's that I wasn't afraid enough of what might happen. Now that I'm 26 I would never do something like that, but at that age I didn't take the consequences of my actions seriously.

Also, there is the problem of emotionally disturbed kids who want to hurt people. No amount of safety lessons is going to solve that.
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Re: 4 Popular Activities That Should Be illegal For Kids

Postby EvilerDictator » Mon Nov 10, 2014 10:31 am

We don't have this kind of discussion about guns here because it's the UK. When I was a kid I couldn't be trusted to ride a scooter without riding it head on into walls. I'm so glad we don't do guns here unless one is a farmer or a ... mobster.

My grandpa had a shotgun though but he used it to shoot rabbits. Unlike Elmer Fudd he was pretty good at it despite it practically being held together with the ancestral family string.
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Re: 4 Popular Activities That Should Be illegal For Kids

Postby JamishT » Tue Nov 11, 2014 1:55 am

Tesseracts wrote:I don't think the issue with kids and guns is that kids don't understand how dangerous guns are. It's that kids are not really mature enough to understand the concept of danger in the first place.


This is where I disagree. I think children can understand danger well enough. I think that protecting children from all danger is in fact dangerous. I'm not saying that letting them run wild and jump into fires or something is the best idea, but there needs to be a balance between "free range" (I just made that title up) parenting and helicopter parenting. In most things, children learn best by experience. Again, I'm not condoning letting kids jump into fire, I condone supervising them playing with fire.

Tesseracts wrote:Also, there is the problem of emotionally disturbed kids who want to hurt people. No amount of safety lessons is going to solve that.


I agree, no amount of safety lessons will solve that, but I just can't see that justifying banning parents from choosing to teach their children how to handle guns. A parent who cares enough to teach their child how to properly handle a gun is a parent who cares enough to either recognize dangerous emotional disturbance or prevent the emotional disturbance to happen to that level to start with.
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Re: 4 Popular Activities That Should Be illegal For Kids

Postby Jeckel » Tue Nov 11, 2014 12:12 pm

I think children are far more capable of maturity than modern society seems to want to give them credit for. If children weren't capable in that regard, then I would expect stories of children killing themselves and/or others would be a non stop occurrence during each and every hunting season.

It isn't as if this is some esoteric discussion, there are millions of children that are raised around guns, start sitting on deer stands and duck blinds when they are toddlers, and have their own guns (stored and overseen by the parents of course) by their tenth birthday. And this has been going on for decades and decades. The proof is in the pudding and the lack of continued, wide spread mayhem every time deer or turkey season opens suggests the recipe works fairly well.

Maturity isn't something that simply happens with the passage of time, it is a skill that must be taught and developed. Children are only lack the maturity to handle a firearm if we fail to teach it to them.
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Re: 4 Popular Activities That Should Be illegal For Kids

Postby Tesseracts » Tue Nov 11, 2014 3:35 pm

JamishT wrote:
Tesseracts wrote:I don't think the issue with kids and guns is that kids don't understand how dangerous guns are. It's that kids are not really mature enough to understand the concept of danger in the first place.


This is where I disagree. I think children can understand danger well enough. I think that protecting children from all danger is in fact dangerous. I'm not saying that letting them run wild and jump into fires or something is the best idea, but there needs to be a balance between "free range" (I just made that title up) parenting and helicopter parenting. In most things, children learn best by experience. Again, I'm not condoning letting kids jump into fire, I condone supervising them playing with fire.

Tesseracts wrote:Also, there is the problem of emotionally disturbed kids who want to hurt people. No amount of safety lessons is going to solve that.


I agree, no amount of safety lessons will solve that, but I just can't see that justifying banning parents from choosing to teach their children how to handle guns. A parent who cares enough to teach their child how to properly handle a gun is a parent who cares enough to either recognize dangerous emotional disturbance or prevent the emotional disturbance to happen to that level to start with.
I never said children should be forbidden from using guns, or doing other dangerous activities. I can understand the argument that kids shouldn't be prevented from doing risky things. There are of course benefits to learning how to be responsible for something serious. After all, we let 16 year olds drive, and that's probably more dangerous than gun use. However, I don't think there's any point in denying there is a risk in the first place, and that risk is inevitably greater with a 16 year old than with a 30 year old, all other things being equal. I'm just trying to make a point about how kids think. I guess the reason I'm arguing about this is, I don't want to deny that kids are kids.

And actually, you may have just made up the phrase free range parenting, but people have been using it for a while.

JamishT wrote:
Tesseracts wrote:Also, there is the problem of emotionally disturbed kids who want to hurt people. No amount of safety lessons is going to solve that.


I agree, no amount of safety lessons will solve that, but I just can't see that justifying banning parents from choosing to teach their children how to handle guns. A parent who cares enough to teach their child how to properly handle a gun is a parent who cares enough to either recognize dangerous emotional disturbance or prevent the emotional disturbance to happen to that level to start with.

Eh, I don't think this is really a matter of caring. Parents who are perfectly loving and competent can still raise suicidal or homicidal people. There's an incredibly small chance that's going to be a problem, but it's there.
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Re: 4 Popular Activities That Should Be illegal For Kids

Postby JamishT » Tue Nov 11, 2014 8:35 pm

Tesseracts wrote:I never said children should be forbidden from using guns, or doing other dangerous activities. I can understand the argument that kids shouldn't be prevented from doing risky things. There are of course benefits to learning how to be responsible for something serious. After all, we let 16 year olds drive, and that's probably more dangerous than gun use. However, I don't think there's any point in denying there is a risk in the first place, and that risk is inevitably greater with a 16 year old than with a 30 year old, all other things being equal. I'm just trying to make a point about how kids think. I guess the reason I'm arguing about this is, I don't want to deny that kids are kids.


I was disagreeing with the "kids are not really mature enough to understand the concept of danger in the first place" thing. I believe they can.

Tesseracts wrote:And actually, you may have just made up the phrase free range parenting, but people have been using it for a while.


DANG IT!
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