Why Should a Teenager Have an AR-15? | A Response to the Apalachee High School Shooting

there was another school shooting here in the United States this past week this one was in Winder Georgia at appalache high school this past Wednesday a 14-year-old student at appalache high school entered the school with an AR style rifle killed two students and two teachers and shot and wounded seven other people six students and a teacher and reports also indicate that two other students were injured in other ways besides being shot this was the 45th school shooting in the United States in the year 2024 and the deadliest school shooting in the United States so far in the year 2024 and according to the gun violence archive which defines a mass shooting as an event where four or more people are shot this was the 385th mass shooting in the United States so far this year these things happen so often and I've made videos about school shootings and mass shootings and the gun violence and gun death problem in the United States so many times over the years that every time I sit down and get ready to do another one I have to ask myself what am I going to say this time what am I going to talk about this time that I haven't said dozens of times before and I thought that this time what I would do at least to get into this is to tell you a story from my own life now it's nothing all that lurid I have never been involved in a school shooting or a mass shooting I am not a Survivor or a witness to any event like that thankfully I'm grateful for that but I come from a family that has a lot of guns my father has a lot of guns and had a lot of guns when I was growing up and his father had a lot of guns when he was you know throughout his life really I'm in my grandfather's house right now a lot of you who watch my videos especially you know the ones that I've made over the last four years or so you occasionally you'll comment oh your house it looks like a grandma's house and that's because it was my grandma's house and my grandfather's house I called them Pap and Granny my paternal grandparents they lived here they raised my father here Pap died over 20 years ago granny died four years ago in January of 2020 and around four years ago in starting around September of 2020 I moved here because my my wife and I split up eventually got divorced and I moved from where we live together to here and that's where I've been ever since and I've redecorated a little bit I've got my movies back there and my you know various things that are mine pictures on the wall and stuff but a lot of the house Remains the way it looked when Pap and Granny were alive and when they lived here my bedroom is the room where my Pap slept that was his room and in that room there's a gun cabinet and that gun cabinet is empty now it would almost certainly be empty now regardless of whether or not the story I'm about to tell you ever happened because I am not a gun person I don't like guns I don't want guns in my house so even if there had been guns in that cabinet when I came here to live they would not be here now but it just so happens that by the time I moved in that gun cabinet had been empty for many many many years in the last few years of his life my grandfather Pap developed empyema and he had been a smoker he smoked for 30 years he did eventually quit but by the time he quit it was too late I mean he he had already done the damage to his lungs and eventually he developed empyema and it became quite serious in his final years he needed to be on oxygen and eventually he lost his Mobility that was not fun for him because in his retirement up until his health became too deteriorated to do this after he retired he and Granny loved to travel they would travel all across the United States and they love taking trips they love going out to places they were very active in their retirement and then as Pap's Health got worse and worse they couldn't do that anymore and as it became clear to him that this was going to be his life for the final stage of it he would get depressed and Granny began to worry about having guns in the house so she asked my father to come and get the guns which he did without questioning it without arguing in fact my father who is a very proun guy also believed that it was for the best to take the guns out of the house to remove any possibility that my grandfather in his depression in his despair over the light dimming in his life and his world getting smaller and smaller that that he would do something drastic that he would choose to end his own life using one of those guns they took those guns out they removed the risk of that because they understood whether they ever thought of it in this way or expressed it in this way they understood that to have a gun in your house is to place yourself and everyone else who lives in that house or comes to that house at risk and I know a lot of people rationalize owning guns and say I have a gun for my protection I have a gun in my house to protect myself and to protect my family and protect my home but statistically speaking the truth is if you have a gun in your house it is most likely to harm someone in your house it does doesn't make you safer it puts you at a greater risk and my father and my grandmother understood this in my Pap's case and they took those guns out of there the shooter of the appalache high school Mass shooting this 14-year-old kid who committed this crime the gun he used was purchased for him by his father as a Christmas present this past year a 14-year-old kid with an AR style rifle what the hell does a 14-year-old kid need with an assault weapon what possible justification could there be for a teenager for a child to have that kind of a weapon it was purchased for him by his father and that by itself if those were just the facts of the story that by itself would be bad enough because there's no excuse for that there is no excuse to purchase that kind of a weapon or any kind of firearm for a 14-year-old child when I went hunting with my father when I was 14 I handled guns I was taught the safe proper way to handle guns my father made very sure that I respected and had a an appropriate level of fear of the gun and that I only pointed it at something I was planning on shooting I did not own a gun the guns that I used when I went hunting with my father were my father's guns or my grandfather's guns in some cases I did not own a gun it never came up my father never said would you like your own gun my father knew that 14 years old is too young to have your own gun the guns were his because he was the adult I was the kid and I used them with his supervision so a father buying an AR or an AR style rifle for his 14-year-old son is bad enough if that was the only issue what makes it worse is that this 14-year-old kid who carried out this shooting who murdered four people had previously been investigated by the FBI for making threats online about wanting to carry out a school shooting about wanting to shoot up a middle school his father knew this his father knew that his son had been questioned about threatening to carry out a school shooting his father knew that his son had made these threats and was having these thoughts and after that after he knew that his son had threatened to carry out of school shooting and had been questioned by law enforcement as a result of those threats after that he got him an AR style rifle for a Christmas present and as a result of that the father of this 14-year-old shooter has also been arrested and charged with crimes related to this school shooting we have a lot of people in this country who think of themselves as respons ible gun owners and you will never convince me that there is any such thing there are more responsible gun owners I would like to think of my father as one of those there are people who do take precautions who do keep their guns in a locked safe as my father does if you noticed my grandfather didn't keep his guns in a locked safe they were in a cabinet with a turnkey that was was Child's Play to get into my father keeps his guns in a locked safe you need to have the combination to get in if he's not using them for something that's where they are I would like to think that gun owners like that gun owners that store their weapons safely gun owners that abide by the laws gun owners that submit to background checks and registration gun owners that use trigger locks and other safety devices they are safer gun owners and I'm I'm grateful for them given the circumstances given how many guns there are in private hands in this country I'm grateful for safer gun owners but the truth is there's no such thing as a safe gun owner because having a gun in your house is an inherently unsafe thing and that is the problem there are more guns in private possession in the United States than there are people we don't actually know precisely how many guns there are in private possession in the United States because the gun lobby has successfully made it incredibly difficult to find that out the gun lobby has successfully poisoned the minds of so many gun owners in this country with anti-government paranoia that they have convinced them that any kind of National Database to register who owns what guns and where the guns are is an intolerable imposition on their Liberty because that's just the first step to confiscation that's just the government making a list of who has the guns so when they finally decide to come and take the guns they'll know who to come and take the guns from so it's really difficult to reckon exactly how many guns there are out there and that never made sense to me because part of the rationale for allowing people to own so many guns is that it keeps the government from bossing everybody around right you need to have the gun to protect yourself not just from criminals but from from government tyranny that's that's the idea in the in the minds of a lot of people especially right-wingers and and honestly some left wiers too I I am embarrassed to admit you know you have the guns to protect yourself from the government So if guns are an effective protection from the government and an effective deterrent from the government coming in and messing with you why would you be afraid of the government having a database of who owns what guns wouldn't that just be a list of people that the government would know not to mess with if that's the way that worked but anyway the fact remains there are more guns than people in the United States but we don't know exactly how many there are and that is the problem a lot of times the rhetoric around gun control gun regulation focuses on keeping guns out of the wrong hands and I would love to see more action on that I would love to see laws and policies and programs that are much more rigorous and much stronger and much more active and much more effective in keeping guns out of the wrong hands I think that would be a great Improvement on our situation but that will not solve the underlying problem the underlying problem is the guns not just the guns that find their way to the wrong hands but the existence of this massive private Arsenal in the United States and the only way to solve that problem is for the people who have those guns to part with those guns and a lot of people would say but hey I'm a responsible gun owner I would never use my gun for something like that I would never shoot an innocent person with my gun I would never carry out a school shooting with my gun that's probably true that's probably true but the thing about a lot of those guns that find their way into the wrong hands is that before they ended up in the wrong hands at some point they passed through the right hands how many guns that ended up being used in a crime or ended up being used by a person to kill themselves or to threaten somebody or to commit an active mass murder how many of those guns before they got into the hands of that killer belonged to a responsible gun owner if you consider yourself a responsible gun owner and your gun despite your best intentions and despite your best efforts to keep it safe and to make sure everybody in your home knew how to handle it and knew how to respect it how would you feel as a self-identifying responsible gun owner if despite all of that your gun was used to take someone else's life how would you feel about that would you just completely blow it off would you say well it wasn't my responsibility I did what I was supposed to do or would you have some Pang of responsibility knowing that if your gun had not been there if you had not had that gun then the crime that gun was used to commit would not have happened there are 40,000 gun rated deaths in this country every year and the Fig and it's been about that level for many many many years sometimes it's a little bit lower sometimes it's a little bit higher but it always averages out to around 40,000 gun-related deaths every year a lot of those most years approximately half are suicides people use a gun to take their own life what if you are a responsible gun owner and your child ends their own life using your gun using the gun that you kept in your house that you thought was safe that you thought they knew how to handle how would you feel about that and again you might say well that would never happen and you're probably right most people who own guns will probably never have to deal with that especially if you keep it safe and locked up and you teach your children to respect it you'll probably never have to deal with that but some people will it will happen to somebody it happens to a lot of somebody's every year and it could be you and why would you allow that risk to exist at all if there was something you could do to make your child's life that much safer wouldn't you do it especially if it wouldn't really cost you anything and you would you might say well it would cost me my gun exactly it wouldn't really cost cost you anything because as I mentioned earlier statistically speaking the people who are most likely to be shot by a gun in your house are people in your house you and your family this fantasy that a lot of people have that they use as an excuse for owning a gun this fantasy of well I'll be able to protect myself I'll be able to protect my family that almost never happens you're prepared pring for a conflict that will almost certainly never come and in doing so you are putting your family and yourself at a higher risk and why are you doing that what sense does that make it's not that difficult to find out the combination to a gun safe I'm telling you if you want to find out what the combination to the gun safe in your house is and you are say a kid in that house it's not that difficult to find out and if you happen to be a kid who has bad intentions a kid who is troubled a kid who is depressed it's not that hard to open that safe and lay your hands on one of those guns and use it to do something awful and at that point it won't matter how careful the parent was who put that gun in there it won't matter how Noble the intentions are of the person who brought that gun into the house all that will matter is something terrible is going to happen that could not have happened if that gun wasn't there and there was no reason no sane logical reason for that gun to be there at all Donald Trump's running mate JD Vance made a comment on the appalache high school shooting and he said well you know these things are just a fact of life which has become the nihilistic standard Republican talking point on this issue hey what are we going to do it's just part of living in a free Society nothing you can do about it JD Vance also said you know we need to take steps not gun control but other steps to protect our kids for when these psychos Target our kids and in the case of this shooting the psycho was one of the kids was a teenage student at the school Vance makes it sound like like there's these these marauding gangs of people that are just sweeping the nation and committing all these mass shootings no it's us it's us we are the psychos and not just because of those of us who commit these mass shootings who carry out these acts of violence but because we maintain the conditions and in many cases we jealously and vigorously and aggressively defend the conditions that allow these sorts of things to happen as frequently as they do more frequently in the United States than in any other comparable nation in the world and it's not even close and who's fault is that it's our fault as a nation it's our fault it's our fault because we allow it to happen over and over and over again and it's our fault because we never do anything about it especially the thing that we should be doing the one thing that we absolutely must do which is to choose our lives and the lives of our children and the lives of our friends and family and loved ones to choose the people of this country over the guns to let the guns go and I wonder sometimes if we'll ever do that I hope we do I really hope we do but every time something like this happens I find myself asking what it's going to take