At the National Rifle Association convention in Houston, Texas this week, an NRA speaker and firearms instructor named Rob Pincus told gun owners to stash guns in their kids’ rooms as a home defense precaution.

According to ThinkProgress, Pincus pretended that it was completely safe to store guns in the same room where children play and horse around, much to the amusement of the pro-gun audience.

“If you’re worried that your kid is going to try to break into the safe that is in their bedroom with a gun in it, you have bigger problems than home defense,” Pincus said. “If you think that the kid who’s going to try to break into the safe because it’s in their room isn’t sneaking into your room to try to break into stuff, you’re naive and you have bigger problems than this. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with staging the gun where you’re most likely to barricade [yourself]. If you have to run across the house to check on the kids, there’s no reason to take them out of the bathroom and move them to some other room when the bad guy might be wandering around your house.”





Here’s the video:

Since 1979, over 116,385 children have had their lives cut tragically short by guns. Psychology Today reports:

In 2008-2009, the number of kids killed by guns was 5,740. “That’s one child or teen every three hours, eight every day, 55 every week for two years… 34,387 kids suffered guns injuries in 2008-2009—that’s one child or adolescent every 31 minutes.” This shocking information comes from the Children’s Defense Fund and the statistics are from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

5,740 kids in two years alone. That’s approximately 600 MORE killed than the number of US soldiers killed during the same two year period in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. In other words, more children die in America because of gun fire than soldiers do in wars overseas. That statistic should be absolutely unacceptable to any decent human being. Yet the NRA is actually urging gun owners to place guns in rooms where children sleep and play. To be fair, the NRA speaker advised putting the guns in a gun safe, but we know not all parents will do that. Somewhere in America, a parent who worships the NRA will improperly store a loaded handgun in their own child’s bedroom where it can be easily accessed, and then one day the child will get hold of that gun and another tragedy will be reported in the news. Don’t believe it? Incidents like this have already happened.

Last week, a gun owner left out a loaded handgun. A five-year-old boy grabbed the gun and killed his little sister with it. Another tragedy occurred in the home of a deputy sheriff. The gun was left out on the bed and the deputy’s little boy got hold of it and shot the wife. These are just two of the many other tragedies that have occurred because of the “safety practices” of “responsible gun owners.”

The NRA profits off of dead kids every day. The right-wing organization protects gun manufacturers and dealers from prosecution, regulation, and critical oversight that could save thousands of lives every year. How many more kids have to die before we say enough is enough and strip away the special treatment the Second Amendment has enjoyed above all of the other rights Americans have? We have the freedom of speech but it’s against the law to yell “fire” in a crowded theater. We have the right to assemble but we need permits to do so. If there are sensible exceptions on all of our other rights, why can’t we finally tack one or two onto the Second Amendment? Our children are our future. How many futures will be forever lost if we continue to allow the NRA to control the gun debate and the Republican Party? The time to save lives is long overdue. Are we really going to allow the NRA to prevent us from doing so?