Is Discrimination Based On Age Really Discrimination In Any Traditional Sense?

In our everyday lives, Americans have become used to speaking of discrimination based on race, religion, ethnicity, skin color or sex as being a bad thing that should be avoided, but we’re not in agreement that keeping young people from doing certain things that we think only older people should do is to be called “discrimination“. We have, instead. thought of those limitations on youth from the perspective of a parent and as a way of protecting our children until their bodies, minds and emotions could mature to a point where they could make “adult” decisions and accept the risks accompanying those decisions.

The young man who bought and used the rifle that killed 17 students at the Parkland high school was 19 years old when he did the shooting, and younger than that when he bought the rifle. Understanding the immaturity and tendency to act and react emotionally at such a young age, is it really “discrimination” to prohibit a person under 21 years of age from buying a rifle, just as it is currently illegal to sell a pistol to someone under that age?

After all, everyone outgrows youth as they age, and outgrowing youth causes one to mature in ways that young people will not understand until they have gone through that aging process. In the mean time, we accept that certain limitations on young people should be imposed.

It’s without doubt that such an age restriction will not stop school shootings, but it can prevent some crazed high school student from buying a rifle and hiding it in the trunk of his car or in his bedroom until he decides to use it on his classmates, as was done in Florida. If pistols are too dangerous for people under the age of 21 to own, then rifles should be, too.

On the other hand, any young person could still be allowed to go hunting if their parents consider them mature enough to loan their rifles to them in order to engage in that activity.

Or maybe, keeping in mind the illogical, illegal, and unconstitutional things that liberal Democrats, seemingly daily, want to impose on the nation (examples would include, but not be limited to: open borders; letting men self-identify as women so they can enter a women‘s restroom; rejecting the appointment of a fully qualified legal scholar to a federal judgeship because his skin color is white; celebrating the Black Lives Matters appeal to assassinate police officers by inviting them to the White House for a pat on the back for doing a good job; unconstitutionally taking all healthcare from Americans and imposing on them, under penalty of law, a governmentally required socialist healthcare plan that costs more than their previous plan and provides worse coverage), and calling these ridiculous, non-traditional leftist suggestions and proposed laws, to be an indicator of the Democrat left’s immaturity and weak intellect, maybe we should just prohibit liberals from being able to own guns; that would have saved Steve Scalise and several of his Republican House membership from severe and life-threatening injuries and suffering as they were shot by a radical, leftist Bernie Sanders supporter while attending baseball practice in a Washington DC suburb.