by Kevin Donovan

Created on: June 19, 2009   Last Updated: June 25, 2009

My initial response to this question is a resounding, 'yes.' A 5 year-old should be permitted to handle a firearm, but only long enough to kill the adult who gave it to them, thus removing from the gene pool at least one of the idiots who would give a 5 year-old a gun.

As you can see, I find it difficult to address a question like this seriously without addressing the more serious agenda from which it sprang, so let's get to it, shall we?

For the average NRA devotee, guns are a dichotomous issue. You are either for guns or against them, and the "for" side sees any limitation to them as a slippery slope to the forced confiscation of their beloved weaponry by the jack-booted thugs of an oppressive government. In truth, the gun lover doesn't care about the 5 year-old, he cares about his gun.

In its extreme, the bond between devotee and firearms is visceral and fetishstic. It is grounded in the denial of statistics, logic and anything that might resemble societal progression toward civilized coexistence. This is a perspective that believes society is not to be trusted and that self-preservation is everyone's overriding individual responsibility. Those who do not take such beliefs to heart, will not survive the coming (insert one of the following) Armageddon, race war, Muslim takeover, mass starvation, Democratic election.

This largely unspoken belief system is often combined with a thin veneer of "spoken" rationales of social acceptability, that when analyzed intelligently, border on the insane. You might hear something like: "No, I would NEVER give a 5 year-old a firearm unless they were properly trained." And somehow that makes it all seem logical. Or "If for some reason my arms had just been severed by a chainsaw and burglars were invading my house, you damn well better believe I would want my 5 year-old to know how to use that 44 magnum", to which the only intelligent response is, "Gee, I never thought of that." That's when they know they have you cornered!

At the heart of the anti-gun control belief system is a single involuntary emotion with which we have all become intimately familiar over the last decade; fear. Fear carries with it powers of denial that exceed that of any other emotion and so consequently, you can't negotiate with fear.

And so the logic is as follows: If you start taking guns away from 5 year-olds, next, you'll want to take them from 10 year-olds, then 15 year-olds (etc.), and then you'll come for MY gun. That is unacceptable, and so, the only Constitutional solution is that you will never get my gun until you tear it from the cold dead hands . . . of the 5 year old I just gave it to.

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