Open carry is available in some states. At what age do kids get to open carry too? Grade school, junior high, middle school ,high? Why?

Thank you for your reply m2c. Very helpful. But parents go hunting with 12-year-old kids who have guns and are shooting too right? At what age does daddy dearest but a firearm in the hands of a child and trains the child how to handle it and shoot? Whatever he feels like right? Sad that.

Proper training is not sad. It is responsible. 

Why I  asked is that some crackpot pol said that ten-year-old girls would be very sad if they couldn't get rifles for Christmas.WHAT? Yep. Sad because no rifles for Christmas. I just thought my gosh if that is what 10-year-old girls lust after we're doomed. I dunno where we go from there since we  are already here at nowhere. At some level the gun folks are CRAZY about their guns and communicate that to their children. If papa goes hunting does his 12 year kid go too with a loaded gun to kill? Thank you for your reply! Sad place this is. Always was. Getting way worse. This post was edited by RosieG at August 19, 2019 12:46 PM MDT

Very smart of you Durdle. I guess everywhere we go we are tracked so it's best to stay away from evil which is what the NRA is. Didn't used to be that way. Decades ago it was non-political and harmless. Then I guess the greedy money-hundred hoors figgered they could make a killing by politicizing it, covering it with wackadoodle conspiracy theories and making it be about a second amendment right when all it was really about was making money and becoming powerful enough to DICTATE to  politicians what to do. That made it an evil enterprise. It isn't all the members who are evil. But evil has infiltrated it and the power structure is mad have no respect for anything but making money and making suckers out of the people whom they have brainwashed and flimflammed. Sheesh. Thank you for your thoughtful reply! :)

There must have been a definite reason for it - apart from the obvious that people living in very remote countryside at the time probably had to hunt wild animals to supplement their diet.

What was that reason? Was it to allow raising militias before the fledgling nation could establish a properly-equipped and trained, professional Army?

It was also in the days of crude pistols and muskets of modest accuracy and low range; not high-power hand-guns and long-range, magazine-fed, assault-pattern rifles. 

It sort of echoes a Mediaeval English law, from well before fire-arms, that required all able-bodied men to be able to use long-bows. The primary difference is that once the need for such private armaments faded away in Britain as more regular armies and guns started to develop, the law too eventually disappeared. As far as I know it was not transferred to gun ownership, and though originally an obligation but later simply tolerated, owing any weapon of war never became some sort of automatic "right" even before legal controls were introduced, let alone an allegedly-unassailable "right" with a bizarre romantic sheen.

That is the key Durdle. It was in the time of simple weapons not the arsenal of assault weapons we have today. You bring that up to the gun people and they simply ignore it and tell you that whatever murderous weapons we can come up with are covered by The Constitution and the Second Amendment. They want access to AK 47's and flamethowers and cannons and whatever the he** they can get their hands on including sadly the newest and scariest thing imaginable....missiles POWERED BY NUCLEAR REACTORS. That is apparently allegedly what caused the nuclear explosion in a Russia a few days ago. Why not "arm" everyone with a dozen of them? I'm gonna ask. My two cents m'dear! :)