As a parent, you can't do everything. In a day and age where so much of kids lives revolve around online content, it's not easy to hover over them and make sure they're safe. But you still need to try at least to keep an eye on what they're doing.

Unfortunately, just as in days gone by before the internet was a thing, not every parent does what they're supposed to.

So it seems a group of lawmakers are demanding YouTube do those parents' jobs for them, but only on one topic. You guessed it: Guns.

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) and more than a dozen of his Democratic colleagues are urging YouTube to do more to prevent teens from being able to watch videos about making and modifying guns – after some loopholes in the platform’s new rules still allowed young users to watch similar content.

“We hope that this will not only cause YouTube to very quickly correct any lack of enforcement, but will also be a message to other social media and digital media sites that they must enforce their own policies,” Goldman told Gothamist, after writing a letter to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan that was signed by 15 other members of Congress from around the country.

After Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg sent a letter earlier this year calling on YouTube to stop showing ghost gun making videos to children, the platform introduced a new stipulation to prevent users under 18 from being able to view firearm-related content, and banning tutorials about removing gun safety devices.

According to YouTube’s user guidelines, the platform doesn’t allow any videos that show viewers how to make guns, ammunition or install certain firearm accessories. It also automatically bans any live streams that show people holding, handling or transporting guns, per the guidelines.

But recent studies have demonstrated gaps in the enforcement of those rules.

In August, a 14-year-old using a test account successfully accessed gun-related videos that should have been blocked under the new policy, according to a recent report from the Tech Transparency Project. The test user was able to access tutorial videos on how to make semi-automatic pistols fire like machine guns.

In his letter, Goldman cited another example from the report where a “teen” test user searched for the phrase “how to put a,” and the platform suggested the completed phrase “how to put a switch on a glock.” When the same account began typing “how to 3D,” the platform suggested “how to 3D print a glock switch.”

The piece ends with a threat that YouTube will be held accountable, etc.

However, I'm not sure they can be.

First, they're a platform, not a publisher. They're protected from prosecution for what others post as a matter of law. While I'm not an attorney, I don't think there's a legal leg to stand on here.

Second, the question Goldman needs to be asking is where are the parents during all of this?

YouTube doesn't raise children. At least, it's not supposed to raise children. It's a service that hosts videos and tries to connect videos with viewers. If parents are doing their jobs, it's unlikely their 14-year-old is going to do anything beyond satisfy their curiosity about how these things work. After all, parenting involves a fair bit of keeping your kids on a leash. They can't just do whatever they want.

Yet too many children do, and rather than blame poor or absentee parenting, Goldman wants to make YouTube the culprit.

Now, understand that YouTube is far from a perfect platform. They've throttled so much content that people actually want to see in order to advance narratives many anti-gunners typically align with. They've been called out time and time again for it and they've shut down certain kinds of content and made it impossible for some channels to even continue existing.

Goldman is fine with that. What he has an issue with is YouTube not going more of it.

It's insane what YouTube has been pressured into doing, and this idea that they not doing it hard enough is somehow something for the government to address is absolutely ridiculous. Especially when parenting would solve literally all of the supposed problems, such as kids getting guns, making full-auto switches, putting them on guns, and a host of other things.

At some point, you've got to recognize that to err is human, but to really screw something up, you need the government.