Over the years we have lowered the age at which people are considered adults.  Persons eighteen years old can vote.  They can serve in our military.  However, they are allowed to remain on their parents insurance as “children” until their mid twenties.  Which are they?

Twenty and thirty “somethings” are still living at home with their parents or moving back in.  Are they adults?  I was out of my parents house at eighteen, earning my way through school and providing for myself.  But I was not allowed to vote, or purchase cigarettes or alcoholic beverages until I was twenty-one.  That was considered the “Age of Majority”.

Winston Churchill once stated “If you are not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, but if you are not a conservative at forty you have no brain!”  Perhaps that’s why the Democrats pushed so hard to lower the voting age.  They were able to attract the young by appealing to their emotions instead of their still developing intellect.

With the dysfunctional families we frequently have today, the children have been allowed to grow up in years, but not in intellectual maturity.  Too many parents want their children to view them as “friends”, not authority figures, who have the right, and indeed the legal and moral responsibility, to guide and even discipline them when necessary.

This has partially been a result of stupid “child protection” laws which allow government social workers to remove a child from the home if they feel they have been “abused” by the parents.  Some rebellious children have used this to cow their parents into submitting to their demands.  Spanking an unruly child becomes “child abuse”.  Even creating an “unhealthy environment” by demanding proper behavior or denying privileges has been cause for the removal of a child from the home and placed in foster care.

In the case of Nikolas Cruz, the Florida school shooter, he was allowed, simply because of his age and the fact that he had no arrest record, to purchase an AR-15 rifle at the age of eighteen, without any requirement for parental permission.  As we are learning, this young man had serious mental and behavioral problems, but the same system which considered him a responsible adult wasn’t capable of properly screening his motives.  Why would an eighteen year old need to purchase such a weapon, and where did he get the money to do so.  This is no small purchase.

It seems that everyone dropped the ball in this matter.  The fact that he had been expelled from school several times because of violent and aggressive behavior, wasn’t part of the record.  The fact that he had been under psychiatric care for these conditions wasn’t either. Why?  Because he wasn’t considered an “adult” at the time?  The news is filled with stories of extremely violent and lawless youth whose history is expunged when they become adults, and then go on to commit a heinous crime, with no record.  Thus, it is considered a “first offense”, with reduced penalties frequently applied.  This is insanity of the first order.

However, ignoring all these facts, the left is once again demanding more “Gun Control” measures.  What they really want is a total gun ban, pure and simple.  If they have to lie about organizations like the National Rifle Association, so be it.  To them it is justified for “The Greater Good”.

I would propose that we consider raising the “Age of Majority” once again to twenty-one, unless an individual has earned those privileges by serving honorably in our military.  No one should put their life on the line for this nation without having the right to choose the individuals who put them in harms way.