“During a [Rob Pincus] seminar on ‘home defense concepts’ at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Louisville, an instructor encouraged gun owners to store firearms in their children’s bedrooms,” thinkprogress.com. “‘Why would you consider staging a firearm inside a child’s room?’ he told the few hundred NRA members in attendance. ‘It’s the first place I’m going to go! As I’ve said…many times, if your kid is going to break into the safe just because it’s in their room, you have a parenting issue, not a home defense issue. Why would you consider staging a firearm inside a child’s room? It’s the first place I’m going to go!'” Let’s think about this . . .
Pincus [not shown] is right, of course. When you’re defending your home from an invader you either have to go on offense (i.e. find the bad guy and eliminate the threat) or assume a defensive position.
For obvious reasons, going out and “clearing your house” is the worse of the two options. When you’re waiting for the cops in a defensive position, and generally speaking, you want your children behind you. So go to their room(s), gather the friendlies, stake out a defensive position and wait for the cavalry.
The question: why not keep your gun with you and then go to your kids’ room? There are a lot of possible answers.
A long gun is your best defense. Securing and running from room-to-room with a long gun isn’t easy — and you want to be protecting your children as soon as possible. You should but you might not home carry. If you have a gun secured in your child’s room, that saves you a lot of go-get-it-first time in a life-or-death situation.
Secured. Yes, there is that. But not as much in the Pincus canon to please ThinkProgress.
A woman toward the front raised her hand and discussed her duty to “ensure” that unauthorized people don’t get their hands on her firearms. Pincus immediately toned down her response.
“Ensure is a strong word,” he said. “So I’m going to say we have an obligation to try to prevent unauthorized access.” He added that hidden, instead of locked or secured, is a perfectly appropriate way to secure a gun.
Did he? Suspecting the writer of guilt of omission, at the least, I asked Mr. Pincus for clarification:
“If everyone in the house is authorized and trained to have access to the firearm in the case of an emergency, and your home’s perimeter is secure, then having a firearm in clandestine storage device, out of sight and hidden, is perfectly acceptable,” Mr. Pincus told TTAG.
“The advice to consider keeping a gun in a child’s room goes along with advice to keep the firearm in a secured container, just as you would if the firearm were stored anywhere else in a home with young children or other unauthorized people.”
Anyway, that was more than enough for ThinkProgress’ ironically named Kira Learner to pull the trigger on the usual bloody shirt waving (child size edition) and trot-out the ever-popular “a gun in your home is more likely to kill you dead than save your *ss” meme. And turn to the doyenne of disarmament for a killer quote (so to speak).
“If the NRA is really are a gun safety organization, they should be lobbying for stronger laws that will protect children,” Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, told ThinkProgress. “Instead, they are trying to promote and sell guns in a way that actually puts them in danger.”
The rest of the TP hit piece focuses on the “promotion” of guns to kids at the NRA convention, while harping on about unsecured weapons. Suffice it to say, the forces of civilian disarmament believe disarmament begins in the home. In some senses, they’re right. Which is why it will never happen.