I can’t wrap my mind around parents bringing their eight-year-old kid to fire an Uzi. When I was eight, for excitement my parents took us up the Statue of Liberty as far up as one could climb. It was great. We went to the Bronx Zoo, the Catskill Game Farm, and so on. All great, exciting times. I still have vivid memories of watching money being made at the U.S. mint in Washington. That was great too.

Want to know how I learned about guns? My father was a WW2 veteran and he had a genuine Japanese military rifle from the war. When we kids were little but old enough to comprehend, he took us into the cellar, stabilized the gun, and fired a bullet into the cinderblock wall while we kids hid behind a big chimney. Then he showed us how deeply the bullet penetrated into the cinderblock. I didn’t need to fire the gun myself to understand the human implications of what I witnessed. The physics of death. And now I’m a veteran too, and it was a wise lesson we were taught.

What if your eight-year-old kid wants to use a flame thrower, or a bazooka, or a claymore mine?“Sure son, whatever you want.” To me, that’s negligent parenting, but it’s not always easy to predict what judges will say when these kinds of cases get to court.