Something I've done a lot here at Bearing Arms is to advocate for people to secure their guns when not in use. Leaving guns around the house isn't a great idea, especially if you have children. While I'm also a firm believer in teaching kids how to be safe around guns, I also know that when I was a child, I was a little idiot in a lot of ways. I figure it's safer to assume that despite your best efforts, kids will continue to be little idiots.

So securing guns and talking about proper gun storage isn't a controversial thing, for the most part.

Yet an op-ed out of Tennessee seems to not get that there's a difference between advocating for people to do something and butting into people's lives

I was one of thousands of mothers who held their children extra tight the night of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

As a mother and psychologist working with kids and teens, I felt compelled to do something, but I didn’t know what. The more I learned, the more I understood that while mass shootings haunt our collective conscious, we are also ravaged by unintentional shootings and death by suicide.

The harsh reality is that firearms are now the leading cause of death for United States youth and according to Centers for Disease Control data, nearly 2,200 children die each year due to gun violence, including homicide, suicide and unintentional deaths, when children gain access to firearms and shoot themselves or someone else. 

...

The gun violence epidemic cannot be solved with a one size fits all approach, however when it comes to preventing child and teen suicide and unintentional shootings by children, Be SMART, a national, public education program designed to help parents and adults normalize conversations about gun safety and take responsible actions that can prevent child gun deaths and injuries, can help.

August 26-30, marked the first annual SMART Week, a campaign to spread the word about how secure gun storage can prevent gun violence. This is something I advocate for daily, both in my capacities as a psychologist, mother, and volunteer.

First things first: Firearms are not the leading cause of death for American kids. That particular study omitted child deaths for those under the age of one, when they're most likely to die due to any number of factors, and then included 18- and 19-year-old people. The use of the word "youth" here might be forgiven if she made it clear that she was including young adults of legal age in that category, but she's not.

She includes people who are engaged in criminal activity, are obtaining firearms through illegal means, and then using it to justify her advocacy.

She also fails to note that Be SMART, "a national, public education program designed to help parents and adults normalize conversations about gun safety and take responsible actions that can prevent child gun deaths and injuries" is funded by Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control organization that has worked to stigmatize gun ownership.

Be SMART calls for, among other things, asking people if they own guns while simultaneously treating gun owners as if they're the problem.

That's not a recipe for success there.

Advocating for the proper storage of firearms is absolutely a good thing, but not when you're also demonizing people who own guns. Everytown for Gun Safety has made it so that many Americans are genuinely concerned about losing their right to keep and bear arms. That's led to many not openly talking about their gun ownership out of concern that if people know they have them, the day may come when someone will knock on the door to take them.

That's the environment Everytown has fostered, and with this program, they're further alienating those gun owners by telling people to insert themselves in others' lives and demand answers as to whether there are guns in the house.

You don't get to claim you're just a simple advocate for responsible gun ownership while also hiding that the program you work with is directly responsible for numerous infringement attempts on the gun rights of people and not get called out for it.

Most of us on the gun rights side of things think guns should be secured. We also aren't going to appreciate someone calling us up demanding answers about our gun ownership.