It’s come up a lot lately, especially on social media, where there are criticisms of parents who start training their kids to use firearms under ten years old. There have been some cases of kids just over five years old on social media actually drawing pistols from their holsters and shooting, then reloading with a clip that has the more timid-minded of our society exasperated with horror at such a sight. Which, of course, demands some ground rule understanding. I have known a lot of kids, especially growing up in southern Ohio, who worked on farms and started using firearms at a very young age, and they have grown up to be some of the best people in society. And when I see videos of these kids who have liberals so horrified, I see children who will grow up and become very useful as adults. They’ll become good spouses; they’ll be good parents themselves. They’ll be good members of their community. They’ll make great workers. They likely won’t grow up with many dumb problems that many people these days are experiencing through stress management and depression. Learning to use firearms and to manage danger as early as possible is great for young people, and the earlier they learn, the better off generally for them later in life. Out of all the people I know and have known who handle firearms and did so as kids, I’d have to think hard if any of them grew up into some kind of psychological disaster. I can’t think of any. Instead, they usually hold doors open for women; they are polite to adults when speaking to them. And they likely will attend church willingly at some point in their life and have some fundamental beliefs that make them trustworthy people to their friends and neighbors. And their exposure to firearms made them better people, not worse.
I saw an advertisement for anxiety medicine the other day, and it reminded me of how often I hear about that problem in young people these days. When my kids were growing up, it was Hyper Active Disorder which was why medical firms prescribed Retaline to kids if they were identified as being too hyper in school. I always saw all hyperactive disorders as the latest scam of the medical field, where experts, just as they did with Covid, stuck their noses into people’s businesses in ways they had no right to do. What we have seen coming out of medical professionals with their alignments with the government and Big Pharma has been an experiment that has failed miserably. As the government tried to use public schools to remove parents from children’s lives, the expert class hoped that the drug industry could replace wisdom, experience, and love with some kind of chemical substitute. Of course, that has been a devastating failure. We have watched a steady decline in people generally over the last few generations; the more good parenting was replaced with substitutes. And the substitutes have turned out to be no substitute at all. Rather, they made known problems worse and created problems in people who would be expected not to have them otherwise. The failures of experts extend well beyond the damage they did with a massive global power move regarding Covid in 2020, which has been steadily rejected by many populations ever since, but those failures had been going on for many decades prior, as governments turned to the drug industry to satisfy the psychological void of an overly managed society with too much central planning, and a lack of fundamental love coming from family interactions.
I think I’ve said it twenty times this past week where some kid, someone younger than 40 as far as I’m concerned, has been said to have some kind of mental disorder, such as anxiety. My response has been that people have always had problems, but recently we turned to drugs to treat them. For anxiety and stress management, the primary cause is that there aren’t enough fathers teaching their kids to shoot guns and build fires anymore. If a kid did learn things at ages 5 through 10 like building fires and shooting guns, we would find that there would be a lot more adults arriving to maturity who could handle problems much better than what we are seeing now, where people are just collapsing over small things. We have had an overly coddled society where the government and media have insinuated that danger could be managed out of existence, which then has left entire groups of people unable to manage the stress that danger poses. Most of those problems could have been solved if an adult had given a kid aged six a pocketknife and taught them how not to cut themselves. I knew many years ago when the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were coming under attack by leftist radicals, that we were going to have this problem where people were going to grow up under liberal guidelines, tossing out the teaching of managing danger to just turning to government to eliminate the danger. Now because so many people have listened to them and so many children have grown up under their influence, we have a mass society of drug users and victims of a panic attack every time lightning streaks across the sky. And that problem happened when the government told lazy people that everything would be taken care of. If you don’t have enough money, just get on welfare; the government will pay you not to work, and if you are stressed about anything, just take some drugs. With that position, it’s no wonder why the government has been pushing to legalize pot—more drugs and more dead minds, which make people easier to control for an out-of-control government.
Whenever I see young people working with firearms, I don’t see abuse but self-reliance. Teaching children to handle danger at a young age, and to manage it properly, with poise and persistence, is the key to a successful adulthood, and those who criticize such methods are part of the problem. Listening to those types of people who think guns are too dangerous for children to handle at all has led our society to the problems it has now, which is an unmitigated disaster. I would rather have a 6-year-old learning to shoot guns with their parents and showing proficiency around them even in their maintenance than some crazy adult flipped out with hypertension because they never learned how to manage stress and do things for themselves. The secret fear that all these anxiety victims have is the loss of a safety net where the safety blanket of an all-powerful government won’t be there to relieve them of stress, that the drugs might stop working, or that the money might suddenly disappear. People who learn to live without that security are much better able to do for themselves, so when tough times come, they don’t panic; they just solve the problem. And that’s what’s missing these days. There aren’t enough young people being taught how to handle guns, and they are growing up to be liberal disasters of panic and anxiety. And as a result, everything that is stressful comes out as anxiety as if that were an excuse for not performing. And that’s why we have the problems these days that we do. Government and Pharma tampered with something that worked great before they came along and messed with the basics of human needs with their own misaligned philosophy that has been so destructive and ruined so many lives.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 