Michelle Obama: Kids Turn to Guns, Crime Because They're Bored

At an event at the Newseum to discuss her “Let’s Move” project on Tuesday, Michelle Obama took the liberty of sharing what she thinks is causing kids to turn to guns and crime.

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They’re bored and they don’t have adequate park and rec facilities to play at.

“Why can’t we put those things together? Why are we confused about why crime rates are going up? It’s not a complicated set of scenarios, unless people don’t really understand just what a wasteland so many kids are living in in terms of activity. Maybe that’s the case. Maybe people look at their lives and think, well, if my kids have it, then it couldn’t be that bad. It is that bad,” she said.

“We can’t be surprised with what kids do with idle time. And that’s sort of one of the things — when we look at crime rates and all that sort of stuff, it’s like, these are a bunch of bored kids that are unsupervised who don’t know how to play. If we start there — and then we give them a gun. And then you’ve got such a lethal combination.”

Interesting, because I’m sure a lot of my fellow gun owners will agree that when we were growing up, our parents taught us gun safety and basic things like, oh I don’t know: right versus wrong. So no matter how many times we were left bored and unsupervised, we didn’t fill the time with

The First Lady even took her former hometown to task. The Democrat-controlled city of Chicago, whose skyrocketing crime and murder rates continue to soar despite tough gun laws, was not exempt of her harsh criticism.

“On the South Side, now, we had parks, and some of those parks just aren’t — they haven’t been maintained. The sports fields don’t work, the swings are broken,” she said of Chicago’s parks and recreational areas.

“We are raising kids and whole communities where there is no place for them to play. There’s nothing for them to play with, nobody to play with, no supervision. And we wonder why they just go off on society.”

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I grew up on a dirt road in the country, I didn’t have a swing set or a public park within biking distance from our rural home. My stepmom worked full time and my dad went back to school while he continued working second shift. Although we had plenty of guns and ammo in the house, I never shot anyone or turned to crime because I was “bored”.

“This is essential, not to mention the whole socialization piece. I mean, look at all the things we learned just by playing. We learned problem-solving. We learned how to communicate. We learned how to resolve differences without an adult being there. We learned how to organize our time when we were bored,” the First Lady added.

So please, save your children. Install a swing set at your home today.

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