The big gun control grifting operations are out in force in the run-up to the holidays on social media. The big thing they want to frighten people with this time? Visiting family and friends for the holidays. Even on some of the best days of the year, these people think we should be extra afraid (and, more importantly, we should be donating money), but they’re working hard to instill some extra paranoia for the most wonderful time of the year.

In fact, they think we should be afraid of guns enough that we should start hassling the friends and family we’re visiting about their guns. Are all of their firearms in safes? Are there trigger locks on all of them? Is the ammunition stored separately? Is the safe behind a locked door, inside of a safe inside of another safe like a Russian nesting doll of safes?

After all, even one gun that isn’t rendered at least 30 separate steps from being operable is a deadly threat to The Children™. And a child, by the way, is anyone under the age of Joe Biden. Also, it’s better to be extra safe and store your ammunition on another continent.

Yes, I know that’s something of an exaggeration, but what they’re really advocating for here makes guns virtually useless for personal defense. But the bigger problem is that their approach can give parents a false sense of security. Even if you do as they say and bother everyone whose house you visit, there’s still a chance that your kids could come across an unsecured gun.

There are several ways that could still happen. The obvious one is that someone would just tell the anti-gun twatwaffle wine aunt who’s hassling them what they want to hear just to shut her up. But even honest people who genuinely want to please Aunt Karen might still have a gun laying around.

Some people have old stuff lying around not knowing what may be inside. It’s not that far-fetched. It’s even happened with live grenades. Maybe grandpa passed away a while back and grandma couldn’t bear to go through his things yet. That Luger he brought home from the Big One may still be in his closet, loaded. Or, somebody’s teenage son joined a gang without his parents knowing and is hiding a pistol under his mattress.

Bothering your relatives wouldn’t catch any of that kind of stuff.

The reason harassing your relatives, passing more gun control laws, and other such measures don’t work is that you can never really hand off your personal responsibilities to other people. As a parent, it’s my job to keep my kids safe. It’s not my parents’ job. It’s not my grandparents’ job. It’s not Aunt Karen’s job. Sure, I can try to pawn my responsibility for my kids’ safety other people, but at the end of the day the buck stops with me as a parent.

Instead of demanding that the whole world change to absolve me of my parental responsibilities, I choose to educate my kids. In the event they come across an unattended firearm, they know what to do instead of being left to do whatever comes to mind.

When my kids were really small, they were taught the Eddie Eagle way. Yes, those cartoons are pretty awful, but for small children being trained to not touch it, back away, and tell an adult about a gun…it works. It’s the age-appropriate way to get the message across so your kids know how to handle the situation.

For older kids, more training is appropriate. Every parent needs to make that call depending on their own feelings, the maturity level of the kid (which doesn’t always track with age), and other factors. But as they become teenagers, they can almost always learn the basics, including knowing how to clear a weapon and make it safe, what some of the relevant laws are, and how to contact parents or the police themselves should they come across one in a place where they might get in trouble for having it.

However you choose to approach it, training your kids in gun safety actually protects them. It doesn’t depend on anybody else doing “the right thing” in order to ensure your kids stay safe. It doesn’t depend on criminals being responsible. It doesn’t depend on anything but your kid doing the right thing at the right time and that’s something you have a reasonable amount of control over.