OPINION:
Piers Morgan is leading the liberal media and Hollywood in another ignorant attack of the National Rifle Association (NRA).
The CNN host tweeted Sunday: “Just when you thought the @NRA couldn’t get any dumber or more dangerous” and linked to a story in Huffington Post titled “NRA Convention Speaker Rob Pincus Advises Keeping Gun Safes In Kids’ Bedrooms For Home Defense.” The story shows a video secretly taken by liberal blog Think Progress of one of the nation’s leading self-defense experts explaining why that can be a good idea.
The left was quick to jump all over the home-protection advice to insinuate the gun-rights organization was promoting risky behavior with children and firearms. They linked the comments to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting because Adam Lanza had access to weapons in the gun safe in his bedroom. According to search warrants, the 20-year-old did not break into the safe.
Actress Bette Midler tweeted: “@NRA Speaker Rob Pincus Says to Keep Gun Safes In Kids’ Bedrooms. NRA Speaker Pincus is an idiot. NRA stands for No Reasoning Allowed.” The liberal media went into overdrive. MSNBC blasted: “NRA speaker advocates keeping guns in kids’ bedrooms.” The New York Daily News headline was: “YOU’RE KIDDING! NRA pushes guns on kids as young as Newtown victims in sick ’Youth Da.’”
Mr. Pincus does not work for the NRA. He was one of many speakers at seminars taught at the annual meeting in Houston over the weekend. The video was from Mr. Pincus’s course “Home Defense Concepts.”
I talked to Mr. Pincus Monday about the outrage over his advice. He trained me and other female journalists who cover firearms issues at a seminar hosted by the Winchester Ammunition last August.
“I was explaining about the choices that people have when it comes to where to stage and store your home-defense handgun,” he explained. “When something goes wrong in the home, it is a natural parental response to run to check on the kids. If you know that is the case, and you have multiple firearm safes — specifically ‘quick-access safes’ for defensive guns — it might be worth thinking about staging one in your kid’s room.”
Mr. Pincus added that, “The idea is that if you are already in your kids’ room and they are safe at that moment, there is no reason you should take the kids or yourself from that room to get to your defensive firearm or ’barricade’ point. Instead, you simply lock that bedroom door, get the gun out, get on the phone with police and wait — which is much safer than moving through the house if there was an intruder.”
In the seminar, he taught that families should have a “barricade” spot in the home with a reinforced door, cell phone and charger and a secured firearm. Mr. Pincus pointed out that keeping a gun in that spot — if that is a child ’s bedroom — lessens the likelihood of making a mistake while moving through the home with a gun in a crisis situation.
Mr. Morgan and his cohorts know nothing about home defense since they are protected by doormen, security guards, gates and staff. He should not be judging families who don’t have access to these elite safety measures and make the personal decision to keep a locked gun safe in a child’s room for self defense.
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