The idea of teens carrying guns is troubling for many of us. While the Constitution doesn’t mention an age in which people can or can’t carry a firearm, most of us recognize that children aren’t mature enough to handle the responsibility of carrying a gun in this day and age. When the ink was still drying on the Second Amendment, they were, but today? Today is a different matter entirely.

For the most part, even the most ardent Second Amendment advocate understands that children should probably not be carrying guns.

But they do.

Over at Cleveland.com, they decided to talk to a few teens who carried them to get a glimpse inside their minds.

It’s an interesting story, with several teens talking about what life is like on “the streets” and how they had it ingrained in their heads to carry guns in case someone from another neighborhood decided to come in and start getting rowdy.

The writer finishes up, however, with this:

That’s bleak, yes. And it’s easy to say the streets are a choice they make, or that trying to help solve the underlying issues that make those streets so unsafe is “soft-on-crime.”

But just take a minute to listen to what they say, all of it. How much safer would we all be if we didn’t resign them, and an entire segment of the collective us, to such a hopeless fate?

Imagine the result if the beef was with each one of those barriers — the family breakdown, lack of education and opportunity and jobs, the gun culture, lack of respect for life.

Shoot at them until they are all gone.

Now, as a part of the gun culture, I resent the hell out of that.

You see, we’re not arming kids. In fact, where are these kids getting guns? It’s not from a gun store or a law-abiding gun owner selling these firearms to them. It’s not happening like that.

These are black market guns being sold to children. In these cases, they’re most likely stolen guns being sold for a fraction of their worth due to the illicit nature of how they were obtained. They’re then sold to kids who are taught that respect only comes at the end of a gun.

That’s not the gun culture that made this country great.

No, that’s a criminal culture based on settling grudges through violence, not using the legal system to deal with crimes, and an entire host of other things that all boil down to having their own set of rules and no respect for the law.

There’s a culture at blame here, but that one got missed. Blame the culture that holds criminal activity up as role model behavior. Blame the culture that teaches kids they should be armed at all times in case someone from another neighborhood invades their territory. Blame the culture that teaches kids that the police won’t work to solve the problems.

That is the culture responsible for what we see, not the gun culture.

Maybe the writer should go back and examine how these kids got their hands on guns. Maybe they should take a look at how these children were armed in the first place.

Try that and stop blaming the gun culture in this country that helps make sure we remain free from tyranny.