Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Gun Ownership

The Washington Post reports today that a state senator in Virginia introduced a bill in the state legislature that would have made it a misdemeanor to allow a child younger than 4 years old to use a gun. (Presumably, the adult who allowed the child to use the weapon, and not the child him/herself, would be punished.)

The National Rifle Association (NRA) countered that the bill “would impose an arbitrary minimum age at which a person would be allowed to receive firearms training”. (Emphasis mine.) The bill failed.

And to think that some people in America are so passionate about gun ownership - and so fundamentalist and absolutist in their constitutional right to possess guns - that there are lobby groups (e.g. Gun Owners of America) to the right of the NRA in our political spectrum, whose members find the NRA too weak and compromising (and to whom the NRA is afraid of losing its own members)!