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ABC: Scaring Parents About Kid’s Friend’s Gun Owning Parents

-By Warner Todd Huston

Wait a minute Mom. Don’t let little Johnny go to his buddy Tommy’s house. Tommy’s parents are psychos that own — **gasp** — GUNS! This is the message that ABC is telling parents in an April 10 piece headlined, “Before Arranging Playdates, Ask About Guns.”

Here ABC attempts to make every gun owner seem like a lunatic just ready to blow and encourages parents to be deathly afraid of anyone that owns a gun. It encourages parents to pry into the lives of family members of their kid’s friends and bases it all on the lies passed off as scary gun violence statistics.

Naturally, ABC’s back up for this anti-gun screed is by a supposedly “non partisan” anti-gun group called PAX USA, an organization with board and advisory councils filled with left-wing Hollywood actors such as Richard Belzer, Tim Robbins, and Rob Reiner among many others.

ABC gives us the startled tale of some “unnamed” parents who were shaken that the father of their child’s friend owned a gun.

But after months of visits, it did come as a surprise to Stephen’s mom, Carol, that Robbie’s dad, Jan, kept handguns in his home for protection. The families asked that their last names not be used to protect their privacy.

This very sentence seems to scream urbanite, maybe even suburbanite. Apparently ABC looked for and found some inexperienced, white bread, city folk that have never met anyone in their lives that owns a gun. Obviously these city slickers are unfamiliar with anyone living in the farm belt or “the country.” Just as obvious, ABC itself identifies with such naive folks because their astonished and silly overreaction proves that they have never been to a rural area in their lives much less have become aware that many kids in this country grow up with guns all around them and that parents wouldn’t be surprised at all that their children’s friends might have them in their homes. This report shows the wide divide between the pampered city folk that ABC seems to think represent the average American and the rest of the country.

ABC then introduces us to this PAX USA organization, the aforementioned “non-partisan” group that seems to serve as a left-wing Hollywood actor’s resume plumper. And this group unleashes some obviously false statistics about guns.

The ABC screed quotes PAX USA co-founder Daniel Gross.

“Nearly 1.7 million children live in homes with firearms that are loaded and unlocked, and every day eight children die from guns.”

Um, no. That would be what the boys at the FBI call a lie. According to the Center for Disease Control, in 2005 652 kids between ages 1 and 15 were killed by gunfire. These are the ages that most people consider “children.” After 15 we are beginning to get past calling them children and into the “young adult” phase. So, if we stick with what most people think of as children we do not get the nearly 3,000 deaths that Gross claims is occurring.

Now, between the ages of 15 and 18 there were 1,554 gun related deaths in 2005. And why so many between the ages of 15 and 18? The long and short answer is gangs. Unless most parents are sending their middle and late teenaged kids into gang infested areas to “play,” it doesn’t seem that they have much to worry about statistically

But, logic and sense aren’t ABC’s goal, here. Alarmism and anti-Second Amendment rights is.

Naturally, every parent should know what sort of family they are sending their own children to play among. That is only good parenting. But to use fake statistics and anti-gun scare tactics like this is merely a mask for a political agenda.

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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston

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