I’ve known a number of people who have had to deal with some ugly custody hearings in their time. I’ve seen shady things done by parents of both sexes, and I’ve seen kids traumatized by the back and forth.
But I’ve also seen cases where the battle was important for the safety of the kids. It’s a shame that anyone wouldn’t do everything they could to give their children the best life possible while also trying to make them good people, but it’s a thing.
And, in the wake of several parents being prosecuted because their kids took a gun and shot someone, it looks like there might just be a new wrinkle thrown into the child custody scrum.
If you don’t store your guns properly, you might lose your kid.
But even if the Crumbley and Gray convictions do not portend the beginning of parental convictions for a new and wide-ranging category of parental actions, they do suggest a growing belief that parents who allow their children easy access to guns are dangerous and unfit.
As a family law scholar, I think this changing view about parental gun ownership may have significant ramifications for parents in other legal contexts, most notably custody determinations.
Guns and best interests
Child custody decisions in the U.S. are based on a court’s determination regarding the “best interest of the child.” Irresponsible gun ownership can be a factor in such conclusions, but historically such considerations have been rare.
This absence is shocking given the well-documented dangers that unsecured firearms pose. Since 2020, firearms have been the leading cause of death for children between the ages of 1 and 19. The statistic includes accidental shootings as well as homicides and suicides. The vast majority of child gun deaths occur at home. And more than 4.6 million children live in a home with at least one unlocked and loaded firearm.
The failure to routinely consider parental gun practices, including gun storage and children’s access, in custody determinations is notable – not just because unsecured guns pose a significant danger to children, but because other less substantial risks regularly factor into custody decisions.
Look, I’m not sure how I feel about this one, if we’re being honest.
Custody cases aren’t criminal cases, so the rules have always been different. Someone who doesn’t store firearms properly is creating more risk for their children than they should. If someone drove their kid without a child safety seat on a regular basis, we wouldn’t blink at them losing custody for endangering the child, so I get that argument.
We all know we should keep guns secure, after all, and refusal to do so is a problem.
On the same token, we also know that not everyone understands what “secured” actually means, and so the question becomes what will the standard actually be? If the judge thinks unloaded, locked in separate gun safes, and disabled in some way is the only safe standard, could you lose your kid for keeping guns in your one gun safe and not storing the ammo on the other side of the house?
Will keeping a gun in the nightstand at night, rather than locked up, be too much?
Where will the line be drawn?
Will a line be drawn?
I mean, will this morph from “irresponsible gun ownership” into gun ownership itself somehow being a sign of irresponsibility? It’s not like we haven’t seen similar moves in the past, and that’s the thing I can’t just let go.
Irresponsible parenting, as a thing, is a problem, and people should lose custody for it. Not raising your kids and not doing right by them is disqualifying, in my book. The problem is that too many people have too many thoughts on gun ownership and what responsibility actually looks like, but who know nothing at all about guns, why people have them, or literally anything but what the mainstream media has fed them for decades.
It’s just not something we can afford to ignore here.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment.
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