When I was a teen, some of the girls in my school read Teen Vogue because it had fashion articles or interviews with their celebrity crushes, etc. That's what the magazine catered to and that's what the people who bought it wanted to read.

For those that wanted to dip their toes into politics of the time, there were plenty of other publications for them to read as well.

Unfortunately for those teen girls who want to get away from politics in this day and age of hyperpartisanship, Teen Vogue ain't the place to go. Instead of what they used to run, they keep trying to discuss politics.

And if this latest effort is what they produce, they really need to have an interview with someone like Timothy Chalamet instead.

It starts with a headline that reads, "Kamala Harris Has a Gun in Her Home—But Guns Don't Make Us Safer" and it goes downhill from there.

The vice president is one of many Americans who own a gun for self-defense. According to Pew, 7 in 10 gun owners in America cite “protection” as the main reason they own a gun. But the idea that guns make us safer is a myth.

Decades of research make it clear that carrying and owning guns increases a person’s risk of death and injury. At the household level, the risk of suicide dramatically increases for both children and adults in gun-owning homes. Having a gun at home also doubles a person’s risk of dying by homicide. Communities with more guns have more gun violence, not less.

This is a particularly common refrain from anti-gun voices, regardless of publication and age.

First, those "decades of research" are all terribly flawed because they don't differentiate between lawful gun ownership and the illegal possession of a firearm. Most of those who end up being shot while having a gun in the home are involved in criminal activity. They're not shot because they have a gun in the home, they have a gun because they're into sketchy stuff that might result in them being shot.

Suicides are a stupid tact to take on the issue because if you remove guns entirely, you'll still have suicides. Just look at Japan for a moment. They have a much, much higher suicide rate than we do and some of the tightest gun control laws on the planet. They even have an entire forest known for the number of people to take their own life there.

Finally, we have the communities with more guns thing. First, I read that link and I'll get to that in a moment. Before then,  though, I have to ask if this is a chicken and the egg situation. Do they have more violence because they have more guns, or do they have more gun ownership because they're violent? The study cited doesn't say.

Then again, it doesn't say a lot. It notes that most violent crime takes place in urban settings. Those are the places most likely to have some of the strictest gun control laws available. It doesn't, however, say anything about pro-gun communities having more violent crime.

So here we are, just a few paragraphs in, and Teen Vogue's writer has managed to botch just about everything. Not a great start.

It doesn't get better.

For Gen Z, this isn’t a distant threat. It’s something that’s impacted many of our lives deeply. According to a survey conducted by Project Unloaded, about 30% of young people have experienced gun violence firsthand. The crisis is particularly traumatizing for Black and Latino young people. Sixty percent of us have survived gun violence or know someone who has. Worrying about being shot or losing a loved one to gun violence is an everyday experience for many American teens.

I don’t question the vice president’s commitment to addressing this crisis. While the Trump campaign has dismissed school shootings as a “fact of life” and suggested that stronger doors are one of our best bets to stop them, the Harris-Walz campaign is centering gun-violence survivors and advocating for solutions such as funding for community violence intervention work that would undoubtedly make people safer.

You'll forgive me if I dismiss a survey that says nearly a third of all people in a given generation have "experienced gun violence firsthand" from an anti-gun group that polled 1,000 people in the same generation that somehow thinks they've been traumatized by pretty much everything.

Further, Vance actually said school shootings were an "unfortunate fact of life" right before he started talking about ways to try to address the problem. This hoax is on part with the whole "very fine people" thing folks keep trying to saddle Trump with. It's not what was said when you understand the context. Stronger doors, where killers can't get access to people to kill, would actually be a good thing, while the Harris-Walz campaign is tripping over itself trying to pretend to be pro-gun while also being anti-gun.

See, this is amateur hour stuff, and Teen Vogue's decision to try and get into politics isn't serving anyone very well, though it does let them pat themselves on the back and pretend they're serious journalists.

Spoiler: They're not. They're not even particularly good at understanding the debates they're trying to jump into.