Anti-gunners have long infringed on gun rights by spouting off about the need to constrain magazine capacity, to limit how much ammunition you can buy, and to define what kind of gun you can’t own with those every-changing and meaningless definitions of so-called “assault weapons.”
Now, they are putting the squeeze on by trying to limit the age of gun ownership at both ends of the age spectrum. Their mantra seems to be, “Well, if you can’t ban the product, find a way to bar people from exercising their rights another way.”
Look at these headlines:“Few laws to address growing issue of elderly gun owners with dementia” — “High rates of gun ownership and dementia risk among baby boomers”.
The battle intensified after the tragic school shooting in Parkland, Fla., after which we saw retailers and various jurisdictions arbitrarily determine that young adults—people who are old enough to vote and to put their lives on the line for this country—can’t possibly be responsible enough to own a rifle.
On the other flank, the gun grabbers contend more and more that the elderly can’t be trusted with firearms.
They start by asserting that many elderly gun owners don’t keep their firearms stored safely.
Read this recent mainstream media article: “Many older U.S. gun owners don’t store firearms safely.”
And, they build upon that by saying age-related mental conditions make them prime candidates for misusing their firearms. One report mentioned an 87-year-old who sleeps with a loaded handgun next to his bed.
While anti-gun activists using any excuse to limit gun ownership isn’t new, what is new is that more outlets are focusing on the serious matter of dementia and are attempting to use it as a justification for broad age-based gun bans.
But what they are failing to consider is this: criminals often consider the elderly soft targets because the younger and stronger perpetrators generally figure they can easily overpower a senior citizen.
And by telling gun owners that they must unload and lock their guns in the house, the lawmakers are depriving the citizenry of the ability to defend themselves. Really, how many burglars or assailants do you know who would stop if you said, “Hold on a minute, I’ve got a gun but I have to unlock the safe and load it?”
It all comes down what NRA-ILA terms the “Goldilocks” approach to gun control. Anti-gunners have often been thwarted in broad-based attacks to our Second Amendment, so they start devising random “this is too big,” “this is too small,” “this person is too young,” or “this person is too old” parameters to cut into the number of what they consider eligible gun owners.
While they’re making their case out of one side of their mouth to further curtail the number of people who can own guns, they say out of the other side that they don’t want to ban guns! No, no, no. They can’t say that because they’d be run out of office in a heartbeat.
But by whittling down the number of people who are qualified to own a firearm—and by deciding what few select models one can own—they are essentially achieving their objective, just in a roundabout way.
They simply think that by making it sound like there are health issues at play, they can make their limitations on our freedoms more palatable.
And the scary thing is, it’s working.
At least with respect to the fact that they have mainstream media outlets waiting with bated breath to propagate more disinformation so they can claim they’re changing the world for the better. The media outlets have cast aside all sense of fairness, opting instead to simply spout off using the anti-gun terminology and reporting their assertions unchallenged.
While dementia can be debilitating, linking it to a widespread problem of gun ownership by the elderly is a stretch.
The number of illegal shootings by the elderly is scant, and, as discussed, seniors are more likely to need a firearm to be able defend themselves from a criminal. Of course, that side of the story is rarely—if ever—mentioned in the articles sounding the alarm about the risk of the elderly owning guns.
Like most anti-gun proposals, gun control activists won’t let a lack of evidence get in the way of their campaign to disarm all law-abiding gun owners.
