"It's for the children" has become something of a trite saying uttered by people such as anti-gunners when they are trying to push their agenda. It's so trite that we mock it, much like how anti-gunners mock "thoughts and prayers." We hear it so much, and on so many different issues, that it's hard not to roll our eyes at it.

But I'm not rolling my eyes anymore. Instead, I'm pissed.

See, the people who say this expect us to believe they care about the safety of children, that the idea of protecting kids is so important that it should trump literally everything else. They cite studies that claim "gun violence" is killing kids more than anything else to try and leverage our innate desire to protect children as a way to push us to accept their premise, that gun control is a worthy goal.

Yet over the last couple of days, I've seen way too much to just shrug that nonsense off anymore.

Let's start with something I wrote about over at our sister site, Townhall. Buffalo Police Department SVU Detective Richard Hy, known to many of you on YouTube as Angry Cops, unveiled a systemic problem in the Buffalo Public Schools. It seems they're actively hiding cases of sexual assault against students. Some of those appear to be student-on-student assaults, which one might imagine the schools are trying to hide to protect themselves, but they're also failing to report parent-on-student abuse.

I report on two examples at Townhall.

The Buffalo area went for Kamala Harris in 2024, which suggests a strong anti-gun lean in the city, which fits in a community that was ravaged by a terrible mass murder conducted by a racist piece of filth in 2022. 

Plenty of people, including many teachers and administrators, think we should restrict our right to keep and bear arms in order to protect children, are actively putting kids at risk by not reporting cases of assault.

Since I wrote about it, I've been alerted to numerous people claiming this is also happening in their communities. The schools are refusing to report abuse, either because they're afraid it will make them look bad or because they're actively seeking to protect predators.

Yet I also remember the nationwide school walkout right after Parkland, where teachers were vocal supporters of both the walkout and gun control in general, and it seems at least some of them are party to this?

That's far from the totality of the problems I'm upset about.

Kira Davis used to be an editor for our sister site, RedState. She's a big part of how I ended up at Bearing Arms. Now, she's on her own with her own Substack, which I subscribe to--and you should too, by the way--and this dropped in my inbox yesterday. 

This week, Public Safety Committee in the Assembly took up a bill for consideration that would impose automatic felony charges for the purchasing of children for sex.

Ok. So far so good. Who could be mad about that?

Amazingly, the bill ignited an internal war among the supermajority Democrats on the committee. Some representatives wanted to exclude sixteen and seventeen year-olds from the legislation.

You read that right. California Democrats are perfectly fine with the rape and prostitution of sixteen and seventeen year-old Californians. According to Democrats, some children don’t deserve to be covered by the strongest letter of the law.

The fight lasted exactly a day. Committee Chairman Nick Schultz told reporters the provision will be stripped from the bill before it moves on. Older teenagers will not receive the same protections as other children against sex traffickers and abusers.

Now, I don't think I need to tell you where your average California Democrat stands on gun control. I don't think you need to really think long and hard about what percentage of them will tell you that gun control is, in part, about protecting children.

16- and 17-year-olds are children. How the hell can you include 18- and 19-year-old adults as children when it comes to counting them as child victims of so-called gun violence, using that to call for gun control to protect children, then refuse to protect actual children from being exploited?

And this is without getting into some people's flirtations with trying to normalize pedophilia and renaming these people as "minor attracted persons" instead, and even talking about plopping them under the LGBT+ umbrella, or the issue of trying to transition children into another gender without the parents being part of the decision or, in some cases, stripping parental custody because the parent isn't fully supportive of the transition, thus potentially damaging a child for life.

Don't tell me you're interested in protecting children when this is the other stuff you back.

I want to protect children by putting as many good people with guns between them and danger. I want law-abiding adults to have firearms on hand to put down the bad guys before they can hurt the kids. I'm all about protecting the children, and I recognize our right to keep and bear arms is how we do it.

But don't tell me you're about protecting children when your deeds don't match your words.