Guns should not be manufactured and marketed for children, period. Period.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

122. Therein lies the problem.

Gun enthusiasts make so much effort to compare guns to other seemingly innocuous instruments which *could* be deadly (most often cars). The thought process is to make guns seem like just any other object. Problem is, they're not. Even in the context of legitimate recreational activities (hunting and target shooting) they're still not your ordinary household object. Far from it.

Listen, I'm not here to bash the sport of hunting or the rural outdoors culture. I know some people have strong objections to hunting; I personally don't, with the caveat that it should be considered a sport where one can win or lose. (Hence why I am baffled when people insist they need a high powered semi-automatic rifle like the AR-15 to hunt.)

I've got no problems with hunters taking their kids along with them hunting. If that's the way they want to bond with their children, power to them. But for gun manufacturers to actually make and market a gun for a child's own use just crosses the line. It's one thing for father and son to sit up in a duck blind with the father having a shotgun and the son watching. It's another thing altogether for an elementary aged child to have a gun of his very own.

If you're too old to properly grasp and hold a full size hunting shotgun, you're too old for a gun. It's really as simple as that.

Go ahead and excuse it away as a "cultural thing", but there's no logical reason why a 4 year old should be given an actual gun with real bullets. None. Not even if it's the parent's intention to keep it locked up at most times, it's just way too ridiculously young.