Why Is There No Age Limit on Guns?

You have to be 16 years old to drive a car, 18 years old to smoke cigarettes, vote, or go to war, and 21 to buy alcohol.

So why is there no minimum age for buying an assault rifle?  

While "Federal law prohibits handgun ownership by any person under the age 18, with a handful of exceptions, there is no minimum age for long gun (i.e. rifle and shotgun) ownership."

In 1984, the National drinking age was raised to 21. This was in response to the drunk driving epidemic of the 1970s. According to the NIH, as a result, drunk-driving accidents have dropped by 50 percent since the law passed, and the greatest proportion of this decline was among 16 to 20 year olds: approximately 37 percent of traffic fatalities in this age group were alcohol related in 2013 compared to more than 75 percent in the 1970s. The law was changed, in other words, to protect our children. 

In 1987, the minimum age for smoking was raised from 16 to 18, to protect our children! Indeed, we even require a person be 18 to protect the eyes of our children from rifling through a pornographic magazine!

Yet somehow, when it comes to guns - a tool that was designed explicitly for the purpose of killing people - the NRA has been so successful in selling its religion of "fear your government," that some people are willing to accept every school shooting that has ever happened or will ever happen, as just the necessary price to pay for protecting their right to own a gun - even though requiring an age limit for an assault rifle (or better yet, maybe a license) poses no threat whatsoever to the 2nd Amendment.

Never mind that the "right of the people to keep and bear Arms" did not help anyone at Ruby Ridge or Waco, or even all the people in those states that sought to secede from the Union during the Civil War. In fact, you pretty much have to go all the way back to the Revolution to find an example in American history where a "well armed militia" opposed what it considered to be a tyrannical form of government with any degree of success, and even then only thanks to a lot of help from the French army.

Nor should anyone ever dare to suggest that the whole idea of a "well regulated militia"  may in anyway imply that a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" could ever have the power to require that someone must reach the age of maturity before buying something as lethal as an assault rifle. In simplest terms, people who oppose any age limit on buying such a rifle see it as a birthright, as if any American citizen is baptized at birth (or even conception) with a God-given right to buy some of the most lethal weapons ever created.

If men could get pregnant, in contrast, they'd be defending their "right to privacy" as much as they defend their "right to bear arms," and arguing that having a right to an abortion is not the same thing as having an abortion, in the same way that having the right to own a gun is not the same thing as having the right to play a real life version of Call of Duty or Doom at the local high school, with an AR-15 some teenager may have picked up for a bargain at the local gun show.

Instead, ardent gun advocates claim that "guns don't kill people, people kill people," and refocus any discussion about guns, away from guns themselves, and onto "mental problems." Never mind that America's opioid epidemic is the result of marketers for Big Pharma working overtime to convince everyone in the country that they are suffering from some form of "mental problem" or another, and usually more than one.  

In fact, since science has replaced religion as the primary lens through which we diagnose those who are incapable of seeing how truly right we are about everything, it has become incredibly fashionable for political pundits across the spectrum to claim that "Liberalism" or "Conservatism" are actually kinds of "mental disease."

Before this paradigm shift from spiritual to psychological, people likewise claimed that religion was not responsible for convincing Christians that people suffering from actual mental problems were simply "witches" in league with Lucifer, and therefore posed a threat to the eternal souls of everyone in a society, but those specific, poor, misguided Christians who had failed to be as "enlightened" by their God as much about the "true" nature of human mind in the 15th century as people are today; especially people who work for the pharmaceutical industry. 

In this same way, as so many Christians did at the time, people even argued that the "separation of church and state" forbade the government from intruding on their divine right to own slaves, as it was spelled out so clearly in their bible. For these people, there was nothing inherently "immoral" about the institution of slavery itself - after all, those slaves were thankful for having a job, and having a place to lay their head was well worth the lashes they received for failing to obey their "masta" - and they shouldn't loose their "right" to do so simply because of some people who had failed to treat their slaves with all the tender love and care proscribed by their holy Bible. 

Like guns, even slave owners would have opposed any idea of an age limit on owning slaves. But if the whole point of opposing literally any kind of regulations on guns or rifles by the NRA and gun enthusiasts is so people can protect themselves from a government that uses drones, and any and all school shootings will therefore require a witch hunt for those with "mental problems," then we are left to worry about who will protect America from the NRA, who is essentially calling for another "red scare" in America, a new age of McCarthyism agaisnt anyone said to be suffering from a "mental problem" (which is basically everyone), and a wholesale renewal of a "witch hunt" and the Phoenix Program relied upon in Vietnam. Oh joy!