Face Reveal 2
I know some of you want to see what her face looks like completely, but I tried that in a single panel, and it didn’t seem to have the impact I wanted. This worked better.
So this shit is the newest media fear craze. HOW DO WE KEEP CHILDREN FROM KILLIN’ PEOPLE WITH GUNS?
Well, I dunno. My family’s method seems to work.
I remember my first time shooting very well. For my 5th birthday, my family had a BBQ out in the Mojave. My uncle brought a family heirloom, a bolt-action .22 Remington rifle his father had purchased ages before. He taught me a quick and dirty version of the 4 holy rules, and we set up aluminum cans full of dirt, about 15 yards out. He very carefully showed me how to hold the rifle, guiding my aim. He showed me proper sight picture. And he taught me to knock over every can.
I am the eldest of 4 kids. All of us were taught guns early. We were not allowed to have toy guns, even though those were extremely popular. We were taught that guns are not a toy. They are a tool, a weapon, and they do damage to the target. We were taught that they were no more dangerous than a pocketknife, as long as you kept very, very safe, by following the rules of guns.
4 kids, often left home unsupervised, in a time period when gun safes and trigger locks were considered, by our family and others, unnecessary. A loaded rifle in the hallway closet.
0 instances of playing with the rifle. 0 gun accidents. 0 injuries or deaths.
I have taught my own daughter the same. She’s had “her own” Crickett rifle since she was 6 years old. Yes, I closely supervised her while she shot it, and it’s been a few years since she fired it – she’s graduated to bigger calibers, now being a teenager. But my daughter knows gun safety to the point that she schools some of my adult friends at the range.
Yes, we have a safe. Yes, the guns stay in it. But I trust my daughter with firearms. I only stopped hovering on her once I was damned sure she knew trigger discipline, muzzle discipline, to treat all firearms as either loaded or disabled, and to know what’s behind her target. And especially, I taught her that Hollywood is full of shit. TV is full of shit. Guns are not magical devices that solve all problems. They are only to be used in very specific scenarios. Although they are fun to shoot, and you can gun geek out all you like when you see/fire a “cool” new firearm, there is nothing glamorous about guns.
This is the best bet, in my opinion, on keeping children safe with guns.
And now, a killer video.
Beautiful.
Scars tell the story of our lives, inscribed upon our skin. I’d not remove mine for the world.
Great comic. Great social commentary. … This is a good start to the week indeed! Thanks!
One working eye and can still shoot like a boss!
I wonder how well she’d do off the range having to judge her own distances…
I believe that the “one eye, no depth perception” issue fixes itself over time. Your brain accomodates, somehow. This is based on my one eyed friend who has no trouble judging distance and is actually better at it than I am.
At any distance (meaning, any distance meaningful to rifle shooting) the brain judges distance by relative size, not binocular vision.
So having only one eye has no effect at all on your ability to determine range.
Handled much better than Mass Effect’s Tali’Zorah.
“Police missclassify at least half…” Really? So if the actual numbers aren’t high enough to support your claim all you have to do is say”no really my number is correct, at least half of those gang related homicides are “accidents”. And the drive by shootings that kill bystanders, those are ‘accidents’ too.” F moms demand.
1. Great comic today.
2. I really wonder about the intelligence of many of the people who scream about various dangers to children. Something that has been in US households since before the USA (firearms) suddenly becomes a danger to our children by its very presence. If we just educate our children (I know that is something that is horrifying to many parents), most of the danger goes away. The very public accident we saw recently was caused by bad supervision and training. This article just proves my point that any time someone screams “Think of the children,”They are not to be trusted.
1. Agreed. It’s beautiful.
2. No kidding! My husband’s first .22 is tucked away in the safe, ready for my 3-year-old daughter when she’s big enough. In the meantime, she gets the Eddie Eagle coloring book read to her as a bedtime story.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; Proper firearm handling should be covered in highschool. You want kids to stop shooting themselves by being jackasses with guns? Teach them to respect it before it is too late.
In a few Southern states, they still do this.
You sir have had great parents and are a great parent yourself, and I want to model my parenting – if I do ever have kids – on the way you were taught and thus the one you taught.
Outstanding comic and excellent advice regarding kids and guns. It was how I was brought up as well.
Do have an issue with your business acumen however. Ordered a t-Shirt 2 months ago and am not pleased with no response to the multiple requests via email and Facebook for the status of the order going unanswered.
On it. You will be emailed today.
While on that topic, do you ship TL merch to Switzerland? Been trying to get an answer to that for ages…
I can now confirm that we ship globally, but the shipping may be more than normal.
Sweet! Living in Die Schweiz, I’m used to everywhere charging extra for shipping.
Plush Eben and Snooches, here I come! (Or here they come. Or whatever. The key takeaway is STUFF FOR ME!)
My parents dealt with alcohol in a similar way. I got to have a glass of wine with everyone else at holiday gatherings, but it was never made a big deal of either way. I’ve grown up to have a great scotch collection and a (mostly full) wine rack, and I imbibe occassionally, but the reason I have that collection is because I don’t drink much. And it’s there when I want to imbibe.
So, congrats on doing it right and not mystifying The Thing.
This touched my heart.
That Mick, is a good dude.
Probably takes after the man that draws him.
Nicely done.
I’d say, “mission accomplished”
Wait, are you trying to tell us that education, information and teaching kids respect for dangerous tools, works better than screaming, wetting your pants and trying to ban everything in sight that might possibly hurt someone? Why, that’s just crazy talk.
“An average of two children a week, more than 100 a year, are killed in unintentional shootings by their peers, according to a study by two gun-safety groups with an obvious agenda, Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action ”
That statistic only pans out if your definition of “children” includes adolescent gangbangers whose buddies have negligent discharges.
Same as you, started shooting a .22 at age 5 but we did have toy guns. From 5 til 12 or so we had wooden models grandpa carved out of hardwood for us. Proper size 1911’s, m1 carbines &,as we got older, M1A’s.
We didn’t know it at the time but when he bought us BB guns on my 12th birthday, it was to allow him to start teaching us small unit tactics. 🙂
We wore old ww2 tanker goggles and our heavy coats as he had us compete in 4-6 person teams against each other. Between my brothers and all the cousins, we usually had 10-20 kids of the right age there most of the time.
God, I can imagine the shit storm a bb gun fight would cause now. :))
Ultimate solution: Don’t Let Stupid People Breed. If you can’t look after a kid and teach them stuff, and you want to bonk like a fly, you should be mandatorily sterilized.
…which sounds like a great idea except for the key question: who gets to decide the definition of “stupid people”?
On what criteria is a person “stupid”?
Remember the old adage: “You’re always someone’s stupid”, and you might as well kill humanity.
Qestion. “Loaded or disabled”? I know the loaded part, got it nagged into me as well and it is a realy good rule. But disabled? Are we talking “the gun is broken and can not be trusted, therefore treat it as if it can go of any second”? I actualy never come across that disabled thing before as a safety rule so i am curious.
Disabled would imply the inability to fire under any circumstances, probably by removal of a part like the firing pin.
Unsafe or unreliable (but mostly unsafe!) Is how I would describe a weapon that could go off at any moment.
Swedish Guy, in other words, there’s no such thing as an unloaded gun – a gun is either loaded or disabled. If you take the bolt out of the gun, it’s disabled. (I do this when cleaning the barrel of my bolt-action rifles, since it’s easy on many bolt-actions.) If you can’t look at a key component of the gun lying separately on the table, the gun is loaded.
Note for those not up on gun safety: the magazine does NOT count as a key component! You can usually remove the magazine with a round in the chamber. (Which, BTW, is not a bug, but a feature.)
Aaah, so that what it was. Got that taught as “Vital part removed. Should be at all times unless you are about to use the weapon.”
And yeah, that whole “remove the magazine does not make a weapon safe” i saw with my own eyes. Only time during my conscript i was actualy glad to have that psychotic ensign around.
All guns can be rendered disabled. A state in which they cannot shoot. Locking the slide back on an auto pistol, ejecting the cylinder of a revolver, locking the bolt back on a rifle, opening the action of a shotgun, etc.
ONLY when a firearm is disabled should you treat it as “not loaded.”
Thank you, J. A million thank yous. That comic could have been handled poorly, and your own life experience made it bittersweet and beautiful. You are a gem.
As for the firearm safety – THANK YOU. Your attitude and life-long rules are something I wish EVERY family had. Bloated statistics or not, even one child dying because his/her parents were too lazy or stupid to teach firearm safety is one too many. (unlike my usual, this one is getting my real name.)
Thank God no one looks seriously at drowning! Think of the emotional trauma if anyone knew what was killing the most kids! We are better off cowering under our beds afraid of a bogey man…
Actually, in Arizona drowning is treated similar to gun incidents. Overblown and a lot of stupid people involved.
I taught myself The Rules as an adult. I agree that kids should be taught The Rules and allowed to handle and shoot guns (under adult supervision) from a very early age.
And I’m glad that Mick is not only smart enough to recognize that scars do not eliminate beauty, but empathetic enough to effectively communicate it.
This is beautiful. So much love, so much trust in four frames. You really captured humanity. This is ART