Following last week’s fatal shooting of a two-year-old girl by her five-year-old brother in Kentucky, the gun lobby has walked into fresh controversy with Rob Pincus, a firearms safety expert, telling a seminar at the NRA convention that parents should store guns in a safe in their child's bedroom.
The logic of what seems an odd assertion is as follows: a parent hearing a noise in the night has to make a choice of whether to grab their gun or go to protect the child. If they’re both in the same room, that choice is removed.
"If that alarm goes off and the glass breaks and the dog starts barking, what’s the instinct that most people are going to have, in regards to, 'Am I going to run across the house to get the gun, or am I going to run over here to help the screaming kid?'" said Pincus in a video of the 'safety' seminar obtained by Think Progress. "And if I’m going to go to the kid anyway, and I have an extra gun and an extra safe, why not put it in their closet?"
On the video, the 'home safety expert's' suggestion seems to receive a mixed reaction from those in attendance.
On Saturday NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre stoked similar controversy by suggesting Bostonians would have wanted guns in the wake of the marathon bombings two weeks ago.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, the National Rifle Association (NRA) have become increasingly outspoken in their defence of the multi-billion dollar industry they are paid to protect.
Whereas the killing of 26 people in a school may have caused some lobby groups to adopt a lower profile, the Association and its spokespeople have taken the killings as an opportunity to do exactly the opposite, promoting gun ownership in the U.S. as a way of protecting against such massacres.
Reforms designed to improve background checks on gun buyers failed after Republicans and Democrats in congress bowed to pressure from the the NRA to block a bipartisan Senate amendment.