Disarming the Elderly

David Codrea has written an excellent article on the elderly and firearms in his Examiner Gun Rights column. The article was in reaction to a New York Times "health" article entitled "Guns in Frail Hands".

Codrea speculates that with an aging population in the United States this may be next front for gun control advocates.

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."

It really does get down to taking responsibility for our elderly relatives and making the hard decisions. I know of what I speak. I buried my Mom two years ago after a four year stay in a nursing home with advanced dementia. There were hard decisions that needed to be made including the very first one about getting her into a nursing home - a place she didn't want to be but she needed to be.

Codrea sums it up by saying:

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.

He is absolutely correct. We need to have this conversation and we don't need a one-size fits all sort of law imposed by our "betters" from on high.