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we need for people to be safer with guns for us to maintain our current level of gun freedom .....
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NO, We DON"T!
The level of actual
accidents is at an all time low (except for really stupid people carrying GLocks without holsters
).
Once upon a time, around a half century ago, gun safety was taught in many schools. Some schools had rifle teams. The rifles (.22s) were kept on school grounds, usually in the school building. Secured often only by a locked door. They weren't stolen, they weren't used in shooting rampages. Today you can't have a gun within so many hundred feet of a school, unless its inside your house, or you are just driving past.
Mandatory training seems to be a good answer, until you look at reality. And the reality is that in locations that have anti-gun individuals in positions of authority, they use mandatory training requirements to refuse fun ownership/carry permits, by reducing/making difficult/expensive training opportunities. Look at what happened to the push for allowing commercial airline pilots to be armed!
Licensed, tested, medically cleared pilots, already trusted daily with the safety of hundreds of lives, were forced to pass even stricter "psychological" testing, had to attend "training" on their own time, at a single remote location, and on top of all that rules requiring the firearm to be "secured" in a complicated mechanism, and yet handled frequently for "safety checks" were enough to make most people simply give up on the idea. And that was the whole point behind the regulations in the first place.
Mandatory training,
run by the govt, is a
BAD IDEA!
Using accurate statistics (not Handgun Control's version of everyone under 25 being a "child", etc. ) shows that backyard pools, bathtubs and even doctors are more dangerous to children than actual
accidental shootings. However, thanks to the news media, actual accidents are repeated almost endlessly in the news (and Internet), making it seem like that they are much more common than they actually are.
There is one form of "training" that is overlooked way too often, and it is bad training. The "training" we get 24/7 on TV and movie screens. Not only is it almost always bad gun handling, the very fact that our entertainment is full of guns and people getting shot (only to appear next week, next day, or next hour in a different show, completely unharmed) has to have a subconscious effect.
Add to that the changes in law that have made the real (as opposed to the statutory)penalties for robbery/assault/fighting, etc. the same as those for shooting someone, or nearly so, might also have something to do with the willingness of criminals to shoot victims (and even police) that wasn't as common decades ago.
Sure, there lots more to it, like the general lack of respect for individual rights and property, the decline in education, inner city crowding, poverty, hopelessness, selfishness, etc.... pick any and all that seem to fit, I can't say you are any more wrong than I am right. But it isn't accidents that give the public the fear of people owning guns, no matter what they might say in front of a camera when asked. Its something else.
We don't need laws to make us safer, we are plenty safe enough, and there is no need nor good reason for laws which punish the innocent.
It is the deliberate use and misuse of firearms that is the problem, both in reality and in public perception. And no amount of mere laws will change that!