Will Disarming Elderly Be Next 'Gun Control' Push?
Written by Site Blog on July 20, 2010, 06:47 PM
Share/Save/Bookmark David Codrea

 
"With the 85-and-older population growing faster than any group in the country, gun ownership among the very old is increasingly a concern of adult children, who worry that elderly parents will commit suicide or shoot someone they mistake for an intruder," Dale Russakoff writes in The New York Times' "The New Old Age" blog.

Which leads us to a ripe-for-exploiting "loophole" (that's what the anti's call anything impeding total control, don't they?) of sorts:
Families find little help in the law when trying to pry guns away from impaired family members.
Except there really is no gap in law. It's just that:
The federal Brady Act bars gun sales to anyone adjudicated mentally “defective,” a legal process few children want to put parents through.
Which leads us to this:
Even if they did, most older people bought their guns years ago, and Dennis Henigan, a vice president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said there is no “systematic way for the authorities to find out if they have guns.”
We all know what Dennis would like to do about that, don't we?

"Many home health agencies," we are told, "have stepped into this vacuum, requiring elderly people to remove guns from their homes as a condition of sending aides to assist them."

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That is their right. And it's our right to find out which ones approach the problem rationally, and on an individual basis, instead of with a blanket, knee-jerk refusal. And ditto for exclusionary retirement communities.

I've always and consistently maintained anyone who can't be trusted with a gun can't be trusted without a custodian. But even then, we need to ascertain the ability of the custodians to provide security care in addition to everything else.

We have an aging population. Many of us still have parents, others of us are starting to realize we ourselves aren't getting any younger. The decisions we are or will be faced with aren't easy ones. That means there is no one-size-fits all solution where we can just pass another "gun control" law and consider the problem solved.

We need to have this discussion in the gun community, to develop tools and resources to help us help ourselves and our loved ones.

Or we could just let government take over and make the best decisions for us.

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