I'm probably going to take some heat for this one, but here it goes.
The only reason anybody gets upset about criminals getting their hands on a gun is because not enough people have or carry guns. Think about it. In earlier times, nobody went around wringing their hands over the idea that a criminal might get a gun. Primarily because lots and lots of people had guns. Criminals could easily get them. So what? I've got one, too. People were bothered about the criminality of the criminal, not the fact that he had a gun or any other weapon. It was just a given that a violent criminal would be armed. If everybody had guns, nobody would much care whether a criminal was able to obtain one.
Also, guns were often stored in places not inaccessible to children in times past. Over the mantle. In the closet. Etc. People taught the kids about the dangers of mishandling firearms. It was a different attitude.
So, who wrote the new attitude? And, who put them in charge of writing new attitudes? And, who double-checked to see that their new attitude was actually more helpful, rather than a bunch of hand-wringing presumptions directed at people with enough sense to want to defend themselves rather than the sheep who bleat Kumbaya?
So what if BerettaLady left a gun? OK, I wouldn't go around leaving my gun accessible to kids, either.
BUT! I wouldn't treat it as a of negligence and get worked up over it.
By entering negligence into it we necessarily enter government into it. What we've done is criminalize simple forgetfulness. We've criminalized a basic fact of human nature--that people sometimes forget. Yes, some forgetting is more tragic than others. But, come on. Criminalize a simple case of forgetting? How about we criminalize the negligence of the parent(s) who didn't teach their kids the Eddie Eagle procedure to stop, don't touch, tell an adult?
"She shouldn't forget! Its the law!" Yeah, right. The corollary to that is that if she or anybody else doesn't trust themselves not to forget from time to time, then she should forgo the right and ability to defend herself and kids. Yeah, right. Suuure. You see how this works, right. If a law-abiding citizen really couldn't trust herself to comply with the "law", and she felt the level of responsibility ingrained by the hand-wringers, her only option would be to forgo self-defense with a gun.
One that will only allow the trigger to be pulled if the shooters fingerprints match what it has stored? Not sure how realistic it is, but I'd love to have that on my carry gun.
